Memory and Architecture

5: Memory Work: The Reciprocal Framing of Self and Place in

chapter five Memory Work The Reciprocal Framing of Self and Place in Émigré Autobiographies SABIR KHAN Part One In exploring the relationship of memory and space through a reading of émigré autobiographies, this chapter focuses not only on what one remembers but how one remembers it. In doing so, it stresses how the bearer of memory reconstructs the relationship between memories of spaces and the spaces themselves. Even though memory appears to be tied to time, the metaphors we use to understand its operations invariably invoke the spatial and the architectural: “layers excavated, veils lifted, screens removed.”1 Whereas a distancing in time and space sponsors memories, the act of remembering itself is predicated on disjunction, on a break in the flow of the present, and a dislocation between the memory and the one doing the remembering . It is no surprise, then, that memories, consciously recalled and reformulated , figure significantly in the refashioning of émigré identity. The negotiation of self and place through the medium of memory is especially evident in émigré autobiographies. Autobiographical writing provides a framework for the émigré’s interpolations of memory, experience, and language . This effort to render memory visible incorporates many architectural| 117 and cultural references into the autobiographical account. The manner in which émigrés reconstruct and re-present the passage of their lives reveals much about the terrain they passed through as well. Reading their life-stories for the ways in which a culture is spatialized and lived underscores this proposition . In their accumulation of everyday detail, as well as in their rhetorical strategies, autobiographical accounts represent a twofold transformation of lived life: first, the figuration into memory of experiences and sensations, and then the transmutation of that memory into a coherent narrative. This chapter looks at two narratives of homecoming and leave-taking, in which memory enunciates spaces of extraordinary resonance, written by two South Asian women émigrés. Attia Hosain’s autobiographical novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column, and Sara Suleri’s memoir, Meatless Days, are interpretive and partial reconstructions of spaces that articulate with precision and nuance the domestic everyday, the space that is given over to women. Both Hosain and Suleri, in their ongoing effort to remember and rehearse their lives, approach “memory as practice,” memory not as “unmediated natural fact” but rather as the culturally mediated “memory work” that comprises our memories and the uses to which we put them.2 In their accounts we see how the “memory of the individual, precisely that which is often taken to epitomize individuality, draws upon collective idioms and mechanisms”:3 the culturally coded spaces of the zenana or the extended family, for example, or the more universal narratives of loss and migration, of letting go and putting to rest. The memory work undertaken in these autobiographical accounts both employs and reveals these culturally specific forms and norms. As women twice dispersed, from both their familial and cultural milieux, as women living between and across disparate cultures, Hosain and Suleri weave complex narratives of identity out of displacement (the routes traversed) and location (the roots that bind).4 In doing so, they enlist a range of culturally specific references to places and traditions in order to reenact the events of their lives, from the communal charpai (bedstead) on the verandah of the family home to the kitchen table in small apartments in American college towns. The domestic arrangements recounted in these texts articulate specific social and cultural milieux, the changing structure of domesticity, and the boundaries—spatial, social, and psychological—that define an individual’s sense of self and her relationship to family, community, and society. Both books are itineraries of the self that articulate their relationship to place through memory operations in order to come to terms with rerouting 118 | Sabir Khan and rerooting. Both engage the dynamics of cross-cultural transactions, working the vein of “in-between-ness” with the ambivalent (and bivalent) perspective of the émigré. And both choose to keep the focus of their works intimate and domestic, even as the force of historical and public events washes over them. Taken together, these two books make for a culturally coherent pairing: they extend each other’s stories farther back into the past and forward into different futures. In a sense, Suleri could very well be the modern Pakistani daughter of one of Hosain’s Muslim characters who emigrated from Lucknow to Pakistan via England. Certain...