Abstract
Tlostanova analyses coloniality of memory and considers different ways of its decolonization presented in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit, Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, Alexey German’s Khrustalyov, my Car, Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, and Jasmila Žbanić’s Grbavica. Focusing mostly on works centring on political/sexual rape, the chapter regards the coloniality of memory as an integral part of the systemic violence repressing people’s remembrances and violating their bodies and minds. Tlostanova addresses reciprocal violence and revenge, and the lack of repentance and responsibility preventing people from coping with the traumas of the colonial/totalitarian past. Gender difference plays an important part in the traumatic political rape narratives analysed in the chapter: the women’s interpretations are more life-asserting, healing, and leading to re-existence rather than despair and aggressive objectification.
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Notes
- 1.
In 1999 the film was bought by the MOMA museum in New York for its famous fourteen thousand unit cinematic department’s collection of twentieth-century art.
- 2.
This disturbing motif is developed in several parallel details revealing the basic sustenance and safety differences between the USA and Haiti. When Sofi goes jogging to lose wight while visiting in Haiti, people assume she is running away from someone. In the USA her mother first gains thirty pounds because she cannot stop eating for the future when there is no food as is the case in Haiti (Danticat 1994, p. 179) while Sofi herself develops bulimia – a mirror reflection of the same nutrition problem.
- 3.
Dangor’s novel has a direct allusion to Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden with its central metaphor of Schubert’s D Minor string quartet, opening the possibility of problematizing the so-called humanist democratic culture or ‘civilization’, in the words of the doctor-torturer in Dorfman’s play. In the hospital Lydia listens to the records brought by her husband and finds that all of them are joyless, including Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. It is not by chance that this musical piece appears in Dangor’s novel. Why then would Lydia think looking at Schubert’s disk that ‘her husband is sinister without knowing it’ (Dangor 2001, p. 122). This destabilizing of the habitual meanings is linked to the accent on the darker and repressive sides of the normative Western model, which invariably dehumanizes the rape victims, turning them into merely biological dispensable lives.
- 4.
It is not surprising that one of the unrealized ideas of Alexei German was a film about the two Russian emperors – the tyrannical Peter the Great who was forgiven for the imperial grandeur that he brought to Russia, and Alexander II, who banned serfdom, established a rather democratic and egalitarian judicial system yet remained hated and forgotten.
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Tlostanova, M. (2017). Coloniality of Memory at the Postcolonial/Postsocialist Juncture. In: Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48445-7_7
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