Autofiction, Colonial Massacres and the Politics of Memory

Hywel Dix

doi:10.31178/ubr.9.1.2

Abstract

: I argue that the emerging genre of autofiction provides a number of useful techniques and methods by which postcolonial writers engage with the politics of memory in their depiction of a number of largely forgotten brutalities committed by the European imperial powers during the colonial era. More specifically, two of the elements of autofictional practice that have been of particular interest to postcolonial writers are its capacity to mediate between individual and collective forms of memory on the one hand; while also radically destabilizing notions of absolute truth and authenticity on the other. Drawing on research into the relationship between writing and forms of public commemoration, the article analyses Fred D’Aguiar’s portrayal of the killing of African slaves thrown overboard the slave ship Zong in 1781 in Feeding the Ghosts (1997); Kamila Shamsie’s depiction of the massacre of demonstrators protesting against colonial rule in India in Peshawar in 1930 in A God in Every Stone (2014); and Jackie Kay’s homage to the sinking of the SS Mendi, a ship carrying southern African non-combatant personnel to assist in the British effort in World War One in “Lament for the Mendi Men” (2011). It will suggest that even though these texts are not strictly works of autofiction, the techniques afforded by that genre are useful to those writers seeking to draw attention towards a number of neglected historical events. Colonial massacres, enslavement of people and naval disasters during the imperial period have received far less historical or cultural memorialization than other more widely recognized historical events such as VE Day or the Somme. By establishing these events as being culturally and morally important to remember, the article will argue, autofiction provides a number of tools for engaging with the politics of public memory and commemorative events in the present

Highlights

The present article is about collective traumas and how we remember or neglect to remember them
It will argue that autofiction draws attention to the fraught nature of the process of remembering and has potentially interesting things to add to the discussion of how we collectively remember traumatic events that have been neglected for decades, if not centuries
The commodification of collective cultural memory is a process that has become manifest in the huge growth over the past fifty years of mechanisms and apparatuses devoted to creating and marking anniversaries, festivals and other kinds of memorial activities in celebration of different events, people or actions in the historical past. Such anniversaries require an inaugural event, person or action to refer back to, and a cultural construction of what precisely about that event, person or action is to be celebrated rather than celebrating other people or events or different aspects of the same event. It is some years since Hayden White established that selections of this kind are implied in the writing of any historical narrative, making claims to absolute truth untenable; and Benedict Anderson argued that the collective decision to emphasize “this day, not that” was a means by which historical narratives were pressed into the service of nation building through recourse to the construction of a perceived common history during the nineteenth century (Anderson 35)

Summary

On Memory and Memorials

The present article is about collective traumas and how we remember or neglect to remember them. It is about a series of traumatic events in the colonial past, and the ripples, after effects and implications those events have for how we think about the construction of a cosmopolitan, racially sensitive and egalitarian society in the present It is about the literary and artistic representation of those events, and how such representation brings forward various means of challenging the cultural amnesia by which certain moments in history come to be lodged in the collective consciousness as objects of commemoration, even celebration, while others are left to fade into the. The commodification of collective cultural memory is a process that has become manifest in the huge growth over the past fifty years of mechanisms and apparatuses devoted to creating and marking anniversaries, festivals and other kinds of memorial activities in celebration of different events, people or actions in the historical past. There is a potential connection between the impulse to commemorate and challenges to the imbuing of history with imperial ideology – but only if a new form of memorial culture can be developed

The Zong Massacre and Feeding the Ghosts

The Peshawar Massacre in A God in Every Stone

The Construction of Memory