Team Hussain is another grassroot initiative that I didn’t see being shared much around Tumblr. Like other grassroot orgs in Gaza, they’re also helping multiple displaced families at the same time.
Memory itself, the ability to describe this founding moment in the future of the ills of the house of Argos, is beginning to strain and crumble under the terrible weight of the past. The focus on silence and speech in the two stanzas we have been listening to sets up the aposiopesis that follows; as though these old men knew already that the end would have to be left out, unspeakable and unspoken. It is as though, recalling in words the terrible scene at Aulis, they are also inaugurating a meditation on the impossibility of continuing the story; as if, faced with the agonizing clarity of the tableau they are describing, they are already dimly aware that their speech will be unable to show the whole picture, that they will have to leave it fragmented, leave us with an image that will have to serve as synecdoche for the whole narrative. [Iphigenia’s] death is effaced even as it is described. […] Her silence, her nakedness, and her being transformed into the kind of visual object that can be vividly described are all part of the narrative: in this story, Iphigenia turns into an image. At the moment of her death, she is transformed, not into an animal but into a mimetic representation, a painting. […] This memory of Agamemnon’s attempt to transform his daughter into a mute sacrificial beast tells us something about the impossibility of remembering the atrocity. Iphigenia’s death begins to disappear behind a cloud of occluding language and gestures, and it is clear speech, memory itself, that is being killed. Faced with the task of uttering what we cannot, we resort to literary language. We speak in figures that, we hope, will conceal the unspeakable while leaving it legible at the same time. Thus the task of remembering and narrating the sacrifice of Iphigenia has something in common with undertaking the sacrifice: in both cases we must proceed toward the impossible, hoping that at the final moment the thing will be elided or replaced in some salvific transfiguration. Just as the old men leave off their story before the critical moment, so would Agamemnon hope that something will transform or translate Iphigenia, so that the impossible act would itself be transformed into something possible, as Isaac was replaced at the last moment beneath the blade of Abraham. Agamemnon tries to do this for himself twice, first by silencing Iphigenia, an attempt to make her mute and bestial, and second by forgetting (“setting at naught”) her former status in the house. These are attempts, in the absence of divine intervention, to make Iphigenia into something she is not, into an empty simulation of the thing that would have made her murder atrocious.
— Iphigenias at Aulis: Textual Multiplicity, Radical Philology, Sean Alexander Gurd
I’ve been thinking I really want to do something to try and help folks over in Palestine, so while I can’t donate I want to at least help link to some of the general charities for folks there:
Please donate and helps spread the word if you can! If you’re like me and can’t donate, there’s at least the daily clicks site you can bookmark and do!!!
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