ABSTRACT
The spaces of modern states are contoured and furnished as national landscapes, molded with meaning and sentiment through ideological claims, historicist ethos, and political strategies. Making citizenship national entails enabling people to have morphic affinities with national landscapes, feeling themselves emerging from the land. Death transforms presence into absence. The immediacy of death is the absence of presence among the living – the imploding black hole, sucking in being, nullifying presence in the absolute density of vacancy. In official discourse the dead soldier is referred to as a noffel, one who fell, or as a khallal. The relationship between the grounding of being in place and the motility of its horizons of memory through time is intimate. Place and memory seem to seek, select, and shape the perception of one another, so that ‘a given place will invite certain memories while discouraging others,’ while ‘memories are selected for place: they seek out particular places as their natural habitats’.
