The Lost City: The Pathos of Arab Jerusalem

Abstract

The invisible city of Calvino’s Invisible Cities is narrated with affects of loss, melancholy, and nostalgia. Marco Polo, the ostensible narrator, draws his descriptions, arguably, from a register of loss. That is, his invisible cities are those through which the Venetian traveler passed and to which he is likely never to return. For Marco Polo, the invisible city is a lost city. What is this relationship between the invisible city and the lost city? This chapter explores the lost city of Arab Jerusalem, in many ways still, in parts, the medieval city of arabesques that Marco Polo narrates, and itself now greatly afflicted with affects of loss, deterioration, destitution. Arab Jerusalem, founded in 638 CE, and since Israel’s conquests in 1948 and 1967 being rapidly transformed into a Jewish city, is an invisible city in the contemporary world. Its toponymy in Arabic, its human memories, its prestige as a site of Muslim and Christian pilgrimage, are all increasingly displaced towards a past tense that is, in a sense, “visible” only in signs and narration as it vanishes in real time. This chapter puts the lost city of Arab Jerusalem—Al-Quds, in Arabic—into conversation with Calvino’s literary city, and explores the question of what renders a city invisible in text but visible in signs.