Mobile Temporalities: Place, Ruination and the Dialectics of Time

This chapter explores the ambiguous, contradictory and often transient ways in which the past enters our lives. It sheds light on the interplay of mobility and temporality in the life-worlds of two Somalis who left Mogadishu at the outbreak of the war in the 1990s. Looking into the ways in which they actively make sense of this crucial ‘memory-place’ (Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting, 2004), a place that that has been turned into a landscape of ruins and rubble, alternative understandings of memory and temporality will emerge. Instead of producing a continuum between here and there, and now and then, the stories and photographs discussed in this chapter form dialectical images—images that refuse to be woven into a coherent picture of the past. By emphasizing the dialectical ways in which these two individuals make sense of Mogadishu’s past and present, the chapter is following Walter Benjamin’s cue to rethink deeply modern analytical categories such as history, memory and temporality by highlighting the brief, fragmented moments of their appearance in everyday life.