Negotiating Memory

A note on what the listener knows

A teacher wrote to me this week. I had visited her classroom two weeks earlier, without her students knowing in advance who I was. After I left, they wrote reflections — not for a grade, not for me, but for themselves. She forwarded what they had said.

I read them slowly.

They had noticed, as young readers will, the scenes most difficult to forget. A boy whose hand was cut off for theft and who was told, as the blade came down, that he had been purified. A city where silence was not complicity but fear. A form of resistance that was not drama but concealment — hiding, being careful, surviving. One student had written that Mosul under ISIS had become a kind of spy world, where information meant life.

I sat with that phrase for a long time.

The word purified is not in my manuscript. In the book, the executor tells the boy that his hand is a gift of repentance to God. The logic is identical — the violence sanctified, the wound consecrated, the cut made holy by the grammar of its announcement — but the word is not one I wrote. Whether I spoke it aloud in her classroom, two weeks earlier, I cannot say with certainty. Speech is less careful than writing, and memory less careful than both. What I can say is this: the word the student kept is not the word I put in the book. Whether she received it from me or supplied it herself, it arrived in her notebook and not in mine.

And so, reading her reflection, something strange took place. I recognized the scene she described, because I had described it. I did not recognize the word she had kept from it. The scene she remembered was the scene I had lived, and written, and published. The word she carried forward was her own.

This is what it means to be heard.

The phrase spy world is also not in the book. I describe a city of checkpoints and informers and fearful neighbors. I describe a man who moved through different districts asking different questions and who had to make sure that pattern did not become legible as a shape. I describe the calculation of chains of knowledge: who told you, how they would have known, whether the information could be cross-checked from another direction. I describe, in many words, the world the student named in two.

She was young. She had never been to Mosul. She may never go. And she named the thing I had built without naming it.

A writer discovers, late, that the book is not only what the writer writes. It is also what the reader keeps.

There is a question I did not know I was asking until these reflections arrived. Let me state it plainly.

Whose memory is it?

The memory of a city under occupation, recorded in secret by one of its own, carried through exile, written out over months, edited, finalized, printed — that memory looks, from one angle, like property. I lived it. I recorded it. I bore, and bear, the cost of the record. The book is mine.

From another angle the memory is not mine at all. It was, from the beginning, a record of something larger than any one man. A city was being silenced. A people was being rewritten. I carried what I could. What I carried was never only my own. The archive was Mosul’s before it was mine. My brother’s death is not only my loss. The expulsions of the Christians are not only my witness. The boy whose hand was taken did not belong to me. I was the one, on that particular day, who happened to be near.

And now a young reader in a classroom I visited only once names what she heard in a word I did not write, and I understand that the memory is not staying where I put it. It is moving. It is being negotiated, in a language I did not choose, by listeners I will never meet.

This is not theft. This is the thing finally functioning.

Under ISIS, the regime wished to be the only speaker and the only hearer in Mosul at once. It wanted to produce the record and to receive it. It wanted to announce its cruelties as acts of purity and to hear that announcement repeated back in silence. The theatricality of the public executions — the crowds forced to watch, the loudspeakers, the language of sanctification — was an attempt to close the circuit. A regime that speaks and hears alone has no rival version of reality.

Mosul Eye, whatever else it was, was an attempt to insert a second listener into that closed circuit. Someone had to hear the city otherwise than the way ISIS demanded it be heard. Someone had to hold the record of what the people were actually undergoing, against the regime’s version of what was being done for them.

But Mosul Eye could not complete itself. A record without readers is not a record; it is an unsent letter. For the work to finish, someone outside the occupation had to receive what had been sent. The hearer completes the witness. Without the hearer, the witness remains inside the occupation.

This is why the students matter. Not because they praised me — they did, and I was grateful, but that is the least interesting thing they did. They matter because they received. They heard the city, through me, and kept some part of it. The phrase spy world is evidence that the city arrived. The word purified is evidence that the city arrived. These are the receipts of a successful transmission. The work of Mosul Eye is not finished inside the book. It is finished inside the listener.

Memory is not a possession. It is a negotiation.

It is negotiated between the man who lived the event and the witness who recorded it. Between the witness and the historian who comes later. Between the writer and the editor, the publisher and the reader, the teacher and the student. At each stage, something is kept and something is lost. At each stage, the memory is rebuilt with the materials available to the next hearer: their fears, their categories, their incapacities, their need to make the story make sense.

This is frightening. A memory can be flattened by this process. It can be distorted. It can be converted into something the witness did not mean. There are many versions of Mosul circulating now that I do not recognize. Some are generous. Some are lazy. Some are dangerous.

And yet: without this negotiation, there is no memory at all. Only a man in a room, speaking to himself.

So the writer must let go. Not entirely — some things must be held against the pull of distortion — but enough. The book goes out. The students read it. The words they keep are not always the words the writer chose. The city they carry is not exactly the city the writer lived in. It is the writer’s city, in their language, held against their own lives. That is the only form in which a silenced city survives the attempt to silence it.

What we find out when others hear us talk, in the end, is this. We discover where the book is thin and where it is thick. We discover which scenes we thought were minor and which have entered the listener’s permanent vocabulary. We discover the words the reader supplies, and we see, sometimes, that the reader’s words are better than our own. We discover that the thing we carried alone, for so long, is being carried now by more than one person. We discover that we were right to carry it, and we discover that we were not the only ones who would.

I wrote a book to testify. I did not expect, at the end, to be the one being taught.

For that, I am grateful to them.

This essay grew out of a classroom visit two weeks ago and a letter from the teacher that followed. My book, Mosul Eye: A Scholar’s War Against ISIS, is forthcoming from Skyhorse Publishing on July 14, 2026, with a foreword by Pope Francis and an introduction by General David H. Petraeus.