The authors analyze this story as an example of how enforced disappearance can generate identity through absence rather than erasure, not the erasure of it. By focusing on the relationships among Samarra, Hayat, and absent Aman in a political hotbed at a border, the article states that disappearance is a structuring force for creating narrative, memory and relational existence. One important piece of evidence “the way he used to fill the doorway" shows how language about space is able to create a continued presence of something that has been made absent; illustrating how absence is continuously experienced as a form of presence. “Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, the authors describe disappearance as a spectral presence, in which the thing that is absent remains present in our memories, in language and in our emotional/affective connections with others. In order to provide further context, the authors introduce the concept of "Absent-Presence Identity," which they define as a type of subjectivity that exists in relation to other people, and which is created through an ongoing emotional/mnemonic/narrative connection to the absence of someone/something (i.e., absent-presence) rather than through their actual physical presence/closure.
When Absence Becomes Identity: Rethinking Disappearance in The Shadow of the Crescent Moon
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References
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