Cultural Memory and the Postcolonial

Theo D’haen

The present text appeared as “Cultural Memory and the Postcolonial,” in Littératures, Poétiques, Mondes,
Ed. Micéala Symington, Paris: Honoré Champion, 2015, and is the English version of an article that
originally appeared as ”Memoria culturale e studi postcoloniali,” in Elena Agazzi and Vita Fortunati, ed.,
Memoria e saperi: discorsi transdisciplinari, Rome: Meltemi, 2007, pp. 625-38. When citing please refer
to a published version.

Ever since the final decades of the twentieth century, starting with volume 1, published in
1984, of Pierre Nora’s ground-breaking “lieux de mémoire” series, but then also,
although in different form, and going back to early twentieth-century work by a.o.
Maurice Halbwachs, picked up by Jan and Aleida Assman, “cultural memory” has
become one of the most important and productive areas of research in the field of literary
studies.* In a roughly parallel move, the same period also saw an immense burgeoning of
interest in postcolonial studies, starting with Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism, closely
followed by the work of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and consolidated by what is
usually seen as the first “manual” of postcolonial studies, namely The Empire Writes
Back (1989) by Bill Ashcroft, Gary Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Jean Bessière in the latter
part of his career showed a keen interest in matters postcolonial, especially as related to
francophone literature, as well as in issues of cultural memory, again primarily as related
to francophone literature. The present article aims to more generally situate the
relationship between cultural memory and postcolonialism with reference to a number of
relevant publications.

A first restriction that for my present purpose I will impose upon the “postcolonial” is
that I will take this term in the sense also given to it by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin in
The Empire Writes Back, which is to say that it refers to writing in European languages
looking at Europe’s former colonies from the (ex)-colonizeds’ point of view. Needless to
say, there are also plenty of texts that are “post-colonial” in the simple chronological
sense of having been written after decolonization, and that look at Europe’s former
colonies, or formerly colonized, from an (ex)-colonizer’s point of view, thereby simply
continuing what used to be referred to as “colonial” writing. With regard to the use of the
term “cultural memory,” I want to make it clear from the outset that in my opinion,
although for everyday uses of cultural memory Aleida Assmann’s (1999) distinction
between “archival” and “functional” memories make sense, for the postcolonial as I will
be dealing with it here Assmann’s distinction evaporates because memories that for
everyday purposes may have lapsed into the archival may, and often do, become “re-
functionalized” precisely by making them the concern of renewed attention under the
postcolonial. Or it is perhaps more fitting to say that memories of archival detail, for
instance of specific names or dates, under the postcolonial may be revived in the context
of institutions or events that continue to reverberate in the colonized’s functional
memory. More often than not, these institutions or events, especially if they persisted
over a considerable length of time, have left deep traumas in the former colony’s or
colonized’s present: slavery, the middle passage, genocide, revolts and revolutions, these
latter especially if failed.

As with most other engagements with memory, the postcolonial takes various forms.
There are the monuments erected to commemorate significant events or historical agents,
and the calendar dates celebrating or mourning the same. I will concentrate on written
forms. These again take various shapes. Some concern individual, others collective
memories. The former typically involve “life writings” such as autobiography, the
memoir, or the essay. The latter run the gamut from historiography to what the African
American Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison, in Beloved (1987), has called “re-
memorying”, i.e. the imaginative recreation of the past in the present. What unites all
these forms is that they are counter-memories, in the sense attributed to that term by
Michel Foucault (1977), that is to say: counter to “official” forms of memory such as
“History” or “Literature.” Like all uses of memory, as Kerwin Lee Klein notes (2000,
136-138), the postcolonial use of memory is “therapeutic” in the sense already implied in
Yerushalmi’s (1982) and Nora’s (1984) studies on the use of memory, in the former’s
case with regard to Jewish history and Jewish memory, and in the latter’s with specific
relation to typically “core” French “lieux de mémoire.” Specific to the postcolonial use
of memory is that it runs counter to “History” and “Literature” as promulgated by the
(ex)-colonizer. With regard to the literary realm, the five main notions and uses of
memory in literary studies that Nünning and Nünning (2007) recognize also enter into
play with postcolonial memory: 1) the memory of literature, or intertextuality, 2) genres
as repositories of cultural memory, 3) literary history and the canon as fictions of cultural
memory, 4) mimesis of memory and meta-memory in fiction, and 5) the function of
literature as a medium of individual and cultural memory.

“The colonized seems condemned to lose his memory”, Albert Memmi (1957, quoted in
Chadwick 1999) states. Shakespeare had intuited as much in The Tempest (1611). When
in this play Caliban, the native inhabitant of the isle ruled by the exiled Duke of Milan,
Prospero, tries to tell his own story, he is overruled by Prospero (and the latter’s daughter,
Miranda, but I cannot elaborate upon her here – her story, as another subject of Prospero,
belongs with feminine counter-memories). Beyond Caliban himself his story survives
only in his master’s words, and as subsidiary to the latter’s story. In the world beyond
Shakespeare’s play, writing in general has played the part Prospero plays in The Tempest.
This is first and foremost true of history. Under modernity, which with Jürgen Habermas
(1990) and Tzvetan Todorov (1984) we can roughly date as in its earliest stages emerging
around 1500, and triumphant as of the eighteenth century and Enlightenment on,
historiography is resolutely Eurocentric in its paradigmatic logic of development
radiating out from Europe, as argue historians otherwise as diverse as Immanuel
Wallerstein (1974, 1980 and 1989), Arif Dirlik (1999), and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000).
An example in case is James Mill’s 1817 The History of British India which pre-empted
the sub-continent’s own view of its past and recast it in function of British colonialism
(Majeed 1992). However, in what Benedict Anderson (1983) has called the imagined
communities of European modernity’s nation states also literature in the vernacular, and
especially in the guise of canonized works such as The Tempest, both reflects and co-
fashions domestic (majority or hegemonic – a whole argument could be developed with
regard to domestically subaltern groups or classes) collective identities. Under
colonialism, then, and especially after colonialism has turned into imperialism, canonized
literary works, literary canons, and official histories become instruments projecting a
homogenizing mother country culture also in the colonies: the (in)famous “nos ancêtres
les gaulois ….” as taught in French colonial Senegal or Guadeloupe, of English literature
as taught in British India (Viswanathan 1989). In their biased view of “Europe’s Others”
these literatures and histories thus not only bring into being differently valuated ideas of
European “Selves” and Europe’s “Others”; they also saddle Europe’s Others with a
skewed, and most often diminished, self-image.

Postcolonial counter-memory, then, one way or another sets out to “correct” the world
view conveyed by the (former) mother country’s official history and canonized literature,
especially as it relates to the (former) colonies themselves. In its most radical form, such
use of memory holds out the promise of the recovery of some form of authenticity lost
under colonialism. If, as Simon Gikandi (1992, 2) argues, “entry into the European terrain
of the modern has often demanded that the colonized peoples be denied their subjectivity,
language, and history,” postcolonial memory theoretically allows for the recovery of all of
these. Texts written in the (ex)-colonized’s language, however, effectively move beyond
the realm of what is usually thought of as the postcolonial, and enter that of the
chronologically “post-colonial.” In fact, they by-pass the colonial in order to re-establish
a cultural continuity with the pre-colonial. This is the move that Ngugi Wa Th’iongo
made when he decided to abandon writing in English in favor of a native Kenyan
language. Another form of radical authenticity consists in writing for the future nation, in
the language of that nation, thus casting writing in the (ex)-colonizer’s language as pre-
postcolonial, and implying a break with such writing. That is the case with the Creole
writings of for instance Martinican author Raphaël Confiant. More often, though, the
therapeutic use of postcolonial memory involves a protracted process of negotiation with
the legacy of European colonialism, in the language of the ex-colonizer. Moreover, it
usually also involves the consciousness of such negotiation.

In historiography proper, the negotiation just alluded to takes the form of “re-working”
Eurocentric history from the (ex)-colonizeds’ point of view. This is what Dirlik (1999)
and Chakrabarty (2000) advocate. This is also what the Indian Subaltern Studies group,
of which Chakrabarty is a prominent member, has been doing for the last quarter century.
Another prominent member of the same group is Gayatri Spivak, who is also one of the
leading theorists of postcolonialism, responsible for introducing the Derridean concept of
“supplement” into postcolonial discourse. In literature, postcolonial memory takes the
form of “supplementing” those European canonical works that support a colonial world
view. In their re-writes of colonial classics such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Daniel
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1619), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1848), or Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Aimé Césaire (Une tempête, 1969), George
Lamming (Water with Berries, 1971), Paule Marshall (Praise Song for The Widow,
1983), Gloria Naylor (Mama Day, 1988), Marina Warner (Indigo, 1992), Michel
Tournier (Vendredi, ou les limbes du pacifique, 1972), J.M. Coetzee (Foe, 1986), Jean
Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966), and V.S. Naipaul (A Bend in the River, 1979)
intertextually “supplement” the colonizer’s view with that of the colonized. At the same
time, this list of names also unveils the slipperiness of “the” postcolonial, as many of
these authors just as easily fit the heading of the “multicultural” or “ethnic,” as is the case
with Marshall and Naylor, who are both African American writers, though in Marshall’s
case not without Caribbean roots. Alternatively, they may have their postcolonial
credentials disputed, as with Tournier, who is an unequivocally “French” writer, or with
Coetzee, as a white South African, or Naipaul, who although of Caribbean-Indian descent
is often denied postcolonial relevance because his writings supposedly uphold a
Eurocentric stance, and Warner, who is of remote Caribbean descent, but for the rest
primarily mixed-European. Undeniably, though, the characters in these works all take
what Linda Hutcheon (1988) has called an “ex-centric” point of view, that is to say ex-
centric to the colonial center of power. Perhaps all this equals saying that in matters
postcolonial, at least as far as literature is concerned, geographical origins or state
citizenships count for less than the stance one adopts towards them. In fact, this is
precisely the message of Warner’s Indigo, a rewrite of The Tempest featuring a mixed-
blood Miranda, and set concurrently in the Caribbean and London, the seventeenth and
the twentieth centuries.

The “supplemental” side of the postcolonial however also resides in how European
canonical works that had hitherto not been considered as “colonial”, or only marginally
so, have been repositioned as such through postcolonial rewrites, or postcolonial
readings. The prime case here is Jane Eyre, which until fairly recently was almost
exclusively read as the tale of the emancipation of a poor but deserving English maiden,
but which after Wide Sargasso Sea, and Spivak’s reading (1985) of both texts, is now
primarily read as the tale of the dispossession of the Creole heiress Bertha Mason of her
wealth, name, and reason. In a similar way Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847),
through its rewrite by Maryse Condé as La migration des coeurs (1995), has been recast
from a cross between a romantic tale of unattainable love and a Gothic tale of demonic
possession in rural England, to a story of racial and class struggle in an imperial and
colonial context. At the same time, the complicity of the specific form these European
classics take in the world view they project has also come under scrutiny. Edward Said,
in Culture and Imperialism (1993), and Firdous Azim, in The Colonial Rise of the Novel
(1993), have pointed out how the emergence of the novel as the dominant literary genre
under Eurocentric modernity is closely linked to the spread of colonialism and the rise of
imperialism. Azim pays particular attention to the Bildungsroman in this respect. Earlier,
Martin Green, in Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (1980), had already done as
much for the novel of adventure. In this sense, then, the novel in general, and the genres
mentioned in particular, form part of the “cultural memory” of Europe in its relation to its
(ex)-colonies. To use these forms straightforward, then, from a postcolonial stance comes
down to inscribing oneself into such Eurocentric cultural memory. Here, though, Homi
Bhabha’s (1994) notion of “mimicry” offers a way out: the postcolonial use of European
forms implies imitation but with a difference. It is this difference that “supplementally”
again critiques Eurocentric forms of representation, particularly of (ex)-colonial relations.
It is this what makes V.S. Naipaul’s work, such as for instance A Way in the World
(1994), postcolonial, notwithstanding its often almost “classical” English form. But this
is also the principle at work behind Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land (1992). Both
Naipaul’s and Gosh’s texts just mentioned are “hybrid” in the sense that they mix various
genres that have been frequently used to represent Europe’s “Others” – travelogues,
diaries, autobiography, anthropology, fiction – and that they do so in what Mary Louise
Pratt, in Imperial Eyes (1992), has called an “auto-ethnographic” mode. The result is “an-
Other” view of the world, of the past, than that conventionally conveyed by European
forms and European, or at least Eurocentric, works.

Even though “mimicrally” using European forms, then, postcolonialism is also acutely
aware of the complicity of these forms in the erasure of the colonized’s history. Pierre
Nora (1984) explicitly contrasted “memory” to “history.” Klein (2000) traces how in
postcolonial theory Nora’s contrast has translated into, in Werner Sollors’ words as
quoted in Klein, a view of “memory” as “a form of counterhistory that challenges the
false generalizations in exclusionary ‘History’” (Klein 137). “History” is the province of
authority, and is cast in writing. “Memory,” in contrast, emerges from below. It is the
province of “the people without history” (Wolf 1982), and is anchored in the oral. That is
why in Warner’s Indigo the story of twentieth-century mixed-blood Caribbean-British
Miranda and her seventeenth- to twentieth-century ancestors is framed by the remarks of
Feeny, black nurse and maid to Miranda’s family. Hers is the final narrative authority,
just as it is one of her female descendants, who is also descended of Sycorax, that in the
end assumes power on the Caribbean island Miranda’s white forefather conquered in
colonial days. As such, Feeny’s narrative, which is one of lived reality and lived memory,
orally transmitted in the female line, is also opposed to that of the French priest who
wrote the official history of the island.

Indigo, then, is a good example of how the postcolonial not only writes counterhistory
but often also does so via counterforms of history, privileging the oral, and often also the
female perspective; that is to say, the perspective of those excluded by official history. A
combination of oral and female perspectives has become almost the norm rather than the
exception in Caribbean and African American literature, especially as written by women.
Such is the case, for instance, in Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba sorcière (1986) and La vie
scélérate (1987), but also with Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother
(1996), the texts already mentioned by Gloria Naylor and Paule Marshall, and not to
forget the fictions of Toni Morrison. In the latter’s Beloved (1987) African American
female forms of memory and story-telling are explicitly opposed to white male forms of
writing. Something comparable happens with Native American Louise Erdrich, whose
Tracks (1988) not only stresses woman’s importance for counterhistory, but also blends
male and female perspectives in the figure of its shaman narrator. Such blend of the oral
and the female is not limited to woman writers, though, witness Patrick Chamoiseau’s
female narrator in Texaco (1992). Erdrich’s shaman, on the other hand, is only one
instance of the other kind of privileged narrator in postcolonial fiction: the male masters
of the oral. Other instances are the conteurs of Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique
(1988), or the “djobeurs” or porters of the markets of Fort-de-France in the same author’s
Chronique de sept misères (1986). Other excluded telling their own counter(hi)stories in
counterform comprise descendants of slaves and maroons in Edouard Glissant’s fictions,
such as Le quatrième siècle (1964) and Mahagony (1987), or Derek Wallcott’s Caribbean
fishermen in Omeros (1990). In its re-writing of Homer’s Odyssey, Wallcott’s work, of
course, is also a nice instance of what I would be inclined to call “generic
countermemory” as well as intertextuality.

The oral mode these postcolonial works aspire to also readily affects the language they
use, which is often heavily creolized or dialectal. Edouard Glissant, in his Discours
antillais (1981), but also Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, in
their Eloge de la créolité (1990), have devised explicit theories of creolization as an
instrument to undermine or resist colonial, or lingering neo-colonial forms of cultural
oppression or minorization. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, in The Empire Writes Back,
likewise stress the importance of creolization. And Edward Kamau Brathwaite (1984)
advocates the use of what he calls “nation language” for writing in the Caribbean. This
language is rooted in the oral, and follows the rhythms of the calypso, rather than those of
classical English pentameter. Though hitherto I have restricted my examples mainly to
writing in English and French, this does not mean that in other (ex)-colonial languages
similar developments cannot be noted. For the Spanish Caribbean we could point to the
particular creolized use the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén makes of Spanish, and for the
Dutch and the Dutch Caribbean we could do the same with Frank Martinus Arion and
Edgar Cairo.

Still, the retrospective tales of such narrators of counterhistories need not always be
literally cast as oral. They may just as well be presented as family histories written,
usually by the latest descendant of the family in question, on the basis of family memory,
orally transmitted, and mixing family history with that of the communities, local, national
or transnational, that the family or families in question are enmeshed in. This is for
instance the case with Condé’s La vie scélérate, but also with Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), and Amitav Ghosh’s The
Glass Palace (2000). Shashi Tharoor, in The Great Indian Novel (1989) varies upon the
pattern by having the family’s founding father tell the tale. Often, though not always,
these works will employ some form of magic realism, emphasizing the difference
between the world of “white” (usually male) writing, history, and reality, and that of
“native” reality and forms of remembering. This may actually involve invoking the
authority of native traditions of history counter to Eurocentric ones, as is for instance
explicitly the case in Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel where the narrator in the very
first paragraph appeals to the Mahabharata and the Ramayana as providing more
accurate visions of Indian history than “history” so-called. The paragraph in question, by
the way, nicely backs up, even though avant-la-lettre because already dating from 1989,
Dirlik’s 1999 plea for a “postcolonial” history that should not be tributary to Eurocentric
developmental historical paradigms. Another novel doing much the same thing, although
not narrated as a family history, is Jamal Mahjoub’s The Carrier (1998), which casts
seventeenth-century Europe as a place of darkness, and the orient as enlightened.
Most famous in all these respects, of course, is Latin American magic realism, with
Gabriel García Márquez’ Cien años de soledad (1967) squarely fitting the family history
pattern just evoked. At the same time, the novel offers a counterhistory to official
Colombian history with respect to the country’s involvement with, in this case
specifically American, (neo)-colonialism. All this is not surprising if one considers that
García Márquez’ work, and Latin American magic realism (as opposed to European uses
of the same mode) in general, provided the model for many of the other works, authors,
and literatures mentioned in the present paragraph.

Turning to French-language writing, one could invoke here, as just a few of the many
possible candidates, the names of Assia Djebar, Amin Maalouf, and Colette Fellous.
Djebar mixes her own memories of an Algerian childhood with her country’s colonial
history and its war of independence, in L’amour, la fantasia (1985). Maalouf, in novels
such as Léon l’Africain (1986), Samarcande (1988), and Les Jardins de Lumières (1991),
mixes history and fiction to draw a counterhistory of the Eurocentric “Orient.” In
Origines (2004) Maalouf recounts how his family, originally from the Lebanon, over the
course of the twentieth century became dispersed over the entire globe. Collette Fellous
interlaces her own history, and that of her family, with that of her native Tunisia in
Avenue de France (2001).

Engagement with the legacy of European colonialism also implies engagement with the
instruments of erasure of the colonized’s identity as used in colonial systems of
education. The individual traumas, as different from the collective ones discussed before,
such education inflicts can be “worked through,” in the therapeutic sense referred to
above, in fictive form, as happens for instance in Beka Lamb (1988) by Zee Edgell. But
they can also be more directly addressed in life writings, and especially in memoirs and
autobiographies, and in essays. Chamoiseau has given us a series of autobiographies
detailing his childhood under the titels Une enfance créole I and II (1990 and 1994), and
more essayistic reminiscences in Ecrire en pays dominé (1993), in which he specifically
addresses the role of literature in his life, and A bout d’enfance (2005), in which in the
third person he rehearses the process of growing up mixed- blood Antillean. George
Lamming discusses his own relationship to the English language, to English literature,
and to England, as well as to his island of origin, Barbados, in The Pleasures of Exile
(1960). The relationship between autobiography and postcolonialism in the work of
Albert Memmi, Assia Djebar, and Daniel Maximin, on the Francophone side, and of
Michelle Cliff, David Dabydeen, Opal Palmer Adisa, Jamaica Kincaid, George
Lamming, and Wilson Harris on the Anglophone side, is explored in a two-volume
collection edited by Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe (1998)

Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, termed postcolonial literature a literature of

“resistance,” and the point is well taken if it is meant to refer to putting up resistance to
the danger of being forgotten by “History” if the latter is left to be an exclusively
European business, with European representations of Europe’s “Others,” and Eurocentric
forms of representing the past. As such, postcolonial memory may serve as a means of
identity-formation for those denied full participation in Eurocentric modernity. Still,
Klein (2000) warns of the danger of nostalgia involved in focusing exclusively on the
sphere of culture as site of resistance, by-passing the reality of politics, economics, and
social action. The trick, then, also with the postcolonial, is to make memory serve the
future.
*A previous, and slightly different, version of the present article first appeared in Italian
as “Memoria culturale e studi postcoloniali,” in Elena Gazzi and Vita Fortunati, eds.,
Memoria e saperi: discorsi transdisciplinari, Rome: Meltemi, 2007, pp. 625-38. The
author gratefully acknowledges permission to here re-use this material.
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