October 16 - 18, 2007 

Memory’s Funhouse: Space, Scale and Remembering in Nervous Conditions and The Shadow Lines

Sonali Thakkar

Department of English and Comparative Literature,

Columbia University

In the copious literature on memory and testimony, there is a decided emphasis on the disruptions to memory engendered by the passage of time and the shock of trauma. In this paper, I examine two novels—Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines—in order to consider instead the role that space and scale play in memory-work and narratives about the past. The two novels (both, incidentally, published in 1988) look back on the narrators’s childhoods and youths in post-partition India and then-Rhodesia, respectively, and relate stories of individual, familial and national development.

Dangarembga’s and Ghosh’s narrators both demonstrate a sustained engagement with space and spatiality. They narrate the story of their development and their transformations of political and national consciousness via a careful account of the body’s changing relationship to the literal spaces of home: houses, rooms, doors, windows, and the buildings that comprise their neighborhoods. Both narrators stress the way that the shift from childhood to adulthood—with its attendant changes in the perception of scale—challenges their memory of past events and the emotional undercurrents that animate them. However, set as the two novels are in the context of Indian partition in the one instance, and UDI and struggles over land in the other, space and the apprehension of scale come to stand in for an ongoing discourse about the disorientations and distortions of national remembering, and the difficulty of capturing scale in the transmission of memory from one generation to another.

This paper tracks the relationship of memory, scale, and home across the two texts, arguing that the body’s location in and perception of space speaks eloquently to the disruptions of memory so often considered primarily in the register of time and temporality.

About Sonali Thakkar

Sonali Thakkar is a doctoral student in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a Trudeau Scholar. She is interested in transnational memorial culture and memorial aesthetics, human rights discourse, post-colonial literature, and nationalism and internationalism. Recently, she has been writing about Holocaust memorials in Berlin, forensic anthropology in human rights work, and multiculturalism in Canada. She holds previous degrees from the University of Toronto and Berkeley. She has been involved with various arts organizations and public policy and human rights initiatives, including the Education Department of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Literary Review of Canada, and the Canadian Human Rights Foundation.

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