This is a photograph of a photograph of Thérèse Fatallah, my Grandmother, on her Iraqi pass papers of 1925. As I write that a hole opens up in my heart. Voices and questions sound in my head: I have no right to show her to you. It is not safe to show her to you. What am I trying to say anyway by showing her to you? What kind of cultural claims am I pretending to stake by showing her to you?
The link between her and me is thread thin. She died in 1999. She was my Grandmother. How can I validate the necessary papers in my mind to make it allowable to contemplate that she might have mattered to me? That her having existed matters still?
A photograph of a dead Iraqi.
The previous sentence rings obscene. What does the space between sentimentality and offence measure? Where is the language to find the correct questions to be asking?
Of what am I so afraid?
