A Psychoanalytical Approach of Body Memory in Asian Literature

Abstract

This paper investigates the concept of body memory treated in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s <i>What the Body Remembers</i>. It deals not only with revealing the potential methods of remembering, but also how victims resort to alternative modes of memory and recovery. The late twentieth century has witnessed an increased emphasis on questions of memory as the generations which experienced the atrocities of the two world wars die out, and new or revived national movements build their demands on memories of oppression or trauma. Adopting a non-verbal source of inquiry, Shauna Singh Baldwin questions the unchallenged supremacy of the verbal testimony as a means for healing the self, emphasizing how South Asian Literary Texts themselves point toward non-textual sites of memory such as human body. Baldwin explores the dark tunnels of memory in which the revelation of the past occurs brilliantly through new generatively trans-textual intersections of memory, nationalism and narrative Scars, tattoos, post-memory, and reincarnation are among the new modes presented by this Indian author. In this vein, I claim that the text comes out to suggest new ways in which human body can preserve and displays individual and collective memory. I shall also discuss the extent to which the female body potentially facilitate the act of remembering denying the importance of the language structure.