Memory and Trauma in Postcolonial Writing
Session Organizer: Kathleen W. Smith
Kalamazoo College
1200 Academy St., Kalamazoo, MI 49006
kwsmith@kzoo.edu

Community Identity Formation in Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness

Zakes Mda's novel The Heart of Redness is fundamentally concerned with questions of the place of memory in the ongoing cultural work of communal identity formation. Simultaneously recounting the nineteenth century traumatic decimation of the amaXhosa people in the village of Qolorha and the twentieth century controversy surrounding the villages' community development strategies, Mda's text engages in the difficulties of narrating a memory of trauma in ways that are useful to the community's future. In my paper, I propose to consider these questions in light of Slavoj Zizek's The Sublime Object of Ideology, particularly his work regarding the irreducible kernel of the Real.

Erica Still
University of Iowa
erica-still@uiowa.edu

Remembering the Future: Joginder Paul, Kamila Shamsie and the Kartographies of Pakistan

This paper—part of a larger project about memory, nationalism and narrative in South Asian literatures—considers the ways in which contemporary Pakistani writers have positioned issues of geography within texts of trauma. Broadly speaking, their works suggest that one of nationalism’s most significant interventions in South Asia has been the deliberate disruption between an individual’s memory and sense of place. The “dismemberment” of the Indian subcontinent, both during the Partition of 1947 and the 1971 secession of Bangladesh, reflected even as it precipitated the division of families and communities. At the same time, individual experiences of loss and suffering often became divorced from methods of official remembering—a collective, selective “amnesia” designed to smooth over the story of a nation’s past in order to preserve statist power for the future. A key element of this “art of forgetting,” in the case of South Asian nationalisms, has involved the reworking of geopolitical boundaries. With each new map came a new truth about “where things are,” even as it contradicted popular memory and, more distressingly, erased “where things were.”

Meenakshi Mukherjee has written about the necessity of boundaries—however new or arbitrarily formed—in the process of forming a collective’s political identity. States need territory, but need limitations on that territory just as badly, if for no other reason than to legitimate their claims of difference. By establishing and emphasizing borders, states can concentrate on what Mukherjee understands as a two-fold project of identity politics: to smooth over differences—political, religious and otherwise—within the state’s boundaries, while emphasizing the contrast between that group and the “outside world.” South Asia’s experience with post-independence nation-formation, however, complicates this dynamic, in part because the differences between “us” and “them” were more difficult to resolve and, in part, because the borders separating India from East and West Pakistan often seemed nonsensical. In many cases, entire communities would not know for months whether they were part of India or part of Pakistan; millions walking in both directions had little idea where they could technically cross over to their “new homelands.” Even before the new maps were finished, they had ruptured the relationship between people and place, between memory and identity.

The trauma of Partition had at its very root an act of geographical violence; similarly, the secession of 1971 would create, for Pakistan, a collective trauma of space and state, even as many faced additional, individual traumas in the wake of violence. Joginder Paul and Kamila Shamsie are Pakistani novelists who have placed place at the forefront of their concerns about trauma and nationalism. Paul’s Sleepwalkers concerns a group of Partition refugees who realize, by day, that they’ve walked to Pakistan but roam, at night, convinced they are still in Lucknow. Their collective traumatic response is heightened in the case of the protagonist, who has failed to recognize his migration at any point. Shamsie’s Kartography opens up critical questions about the purpose of geography in the formation of the nation; her characters must learn to reconcile new geopolitical “truths” with the memories new maps seek to submerge.

J. Edward Mallot
University of Iowa

Memory and Story: Edwidge Danticat and Relational Narrative

In the past decade, Edwidge Danticat, Haitian-American writer, has been embraced by the literary and feminist communities as a strong young voice, a passionate and inspiring storyteller, and an important post-colonial voice for the Haitian-American community. Danticat's first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), began as her childhood journal recounting her departure from Haiti at age 12 to join her parents who had left over 8 years earlier to establish a life for their family in the United States. This powerful first-person account parallels Danticat's own life in many ways, but emerges from individual memory to enter a collective memory and, through the very act of storytelling in the novel, to a relational narrative that can transform both the main character, Sophie Caco, and the reader.

In Breath, Eyes, Memory, Sophie Caco carries many stories in mind and body, as does her mother, who bore her as the result of a rape by a Haitian soldier. While these women's memories perpetuate physical and emotional trauma on some level, their shared memory, which is built only through story and relationship, can also be an avenue to healing. Sophie joins her mother, grandmother, and aunt in their struggle to reconstruct and retain memory of their strength. Through what I refer to as relational narrative, Sophie discovers that memory and story can rekindle the strength that her preserved her family and community in the past; Danticat suggests that relational narrative can forge new memories and new strength.

In her fictional and nonfictional work of the past decade, and even in her latest novel, The Dew Breaker, Danticat returns to the dominant theme that memory is essential to understanding self and others and of forging new relationships that provide healing. In this paper, I will explore Danticat's use of memory and story as both subject and narrative strategy. Storytelling, in Danticat's work and life, is a site for knowledge and understanding. The story telling moment - the call that requires response, the Krik? followed by a Krak! - engages and changes both storyteller and listener. In her writing, Danticat portrays the interaction between storyteller and listener in order to build shared memory, a relational narrative. Danticat's life and writing examine memory and story and the way the two together form a relational narrative that calls for participation and response, not just entertainment or escape.

Beth Martin Birky
Goshen College
bethmb@goshen.edu