Re-membering Displacement: Miral al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights and the Politics of Memory

Abstract

Because communal narratives about displacement mandate, structure, or even erase individual memory, critical studies of displacement and migration need to pay particular attention to literary and other creative articulations that resist memory policing. In this article, I focus on the politics of migrant women’s remembering, arguing that displaced female rememberers actively construct their present’s spaces and communities. Women as rememberers are not only tradition keepers or storytellers; they become world builders whose narrative creations reflect diverse affective and historical experiences of place and movement. In Miral al-Tahawy’s 2011 Brooklyn Heights, the novel’s female migrants unite the disparate locations of their lives through their bodies, memories, and texts, rejecting expectations that they either assimilate completely into the new country or remain steadfastly committed to the former. I demonstrate that Brooklyn Heights relies on embodied memory, which implicates the body and geographies in the act of remembering. It then models integrated remembering, which intimately links the past and present. Finally, the embodied and integrated aspects of memory redefine communal memory in order to recognize connections between neighbors’ diverse experiences without collapsing difference. Al-Tahawy creates a collage of her characters’ migratory histories and proposes a shared community that exceeds national borders. I argue that her narrative models the way feminist approaches to displacement can balance the personal and political, the individual and communal, and the past and present.