Submerged memories: Memory, history, and displacement around Lake Asad, Syria

Abstract

Temporalizing frameworks promoted under Syria’s dominant Baʿth Party have significantly shaped representations of temporality and historicity of, and in, the inhabitants of northern Syria until the early twenty-first century. In particular, the construction of the Euphrates Dam, Baʿthist Syria’s showcase modernization project, between 1968 and 1973, provided a symbolically highly loaded pivotal point for a progressivist discourse about the national historical trajectory which incorporated assumptions of internal temporal heterogeneity in its very core: while it promoted the image of a progressive, modern Syrian nation, it simultaneously removed the inhabitants of this part of the country to the realm of the backward and obsolete recent past and present, thus devaluing their actual lifestyles and aspirations and legitimizing their physical displacement following the submersion of their villages and fields under the emergent lake. Before this background, this article draws on literature research and intermittent ethnographic fieldwork in Syria between 2001 and 2011 to ask how the submerged memories of these people were articulated 40 years after the flooding. By including written, oral, as well as embodied expressions, the article argues that diverse facets of remembering the past in the Euphrates valley were valued very unevenly and that the relations between them were gendered and political.