Loose Memory in Toni Morrison's Paradise and Zoe Wicomb's David's Story

This essay compares Morrison's Paradise and Wicomb's David's Story to explore corresponding machinations of memory operating in both novels' featured communities of resistance. Tracing the ways in which women and memory figure as potential threats to stabilized order and established truth, this essay argues that the management of collective memory peculiarly resembles the containment of women in racialized societies, the United States and South Africa. This observation about what is called "loose memory" alerts us to the dangers of foundationalist regimes of Truth and Reality. It also points to alternative, "loosening" narrative strategies that Morrison's and Wicomb's novels model.