The author contends that the ability to recount a history shows that a community has, in fact, become a community. It is the birth of a collective memory, often retold by elders as oral history, and these collective memories include the painful recollections of struggle and loss. Similar to the telling of queer history, Moses’ retelling of the relatively grim history of 40 years of wandering is a way of showing that the Israelites have literally and metaphorically arrived.
