Submitted by: Submitted by BeachGirl
Views: 34
Words: 1402
Pages: 6
Category: Literature
Date Submitted: 01/22/2015 04:48 PM
Cayley Corrado
December 4, 2011
CWL 161
ID #009739767
Memory: The Act of Witnessing, Forgetting, and Remembering
The role of memory in the novels The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat and The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak is very important to the characters and communities in the way they remember themselves and certain “historical” truths. In both novels, the true historical truth of each culture have been either forgotten or covered up. In either case, the author shows memory in their stories as a uniting force for common characters and as a barrier for others. A major theme of both novels is the importance of remembering the past; in each novel, the authors emphasize the importance of storytelling and retelling to ensure members of their own historical background never forget names and faces of others who lived during difficult times in their history. In The Farming of Bones, Danticat shows the history through a first-hand fictional story about what happened in the past, to remind others of the history. In The Bastard of Istanbul, Shafak uses a later generation to show how people try to configure their past and uses small injustices made by rivaling cultures to represent larger, historical truths. Comparatively, both novels have their characters experiencing the past in one way or another to emphasize the importance of witnessing, forgetting, and remembering. This is done because there is a major fear instilled in people about forgetting the names and faces of all their loved ones who had to endure their turbulent pasts.
In both novels, an important aspect of memory emphasized by both authors is witnessing. Both authors find it necessary to witness what happened in their history to fully understand and to engrave it in their characters, and readers, memories. In The Farming of Bones, the whole story and plot are set in the time of unrest in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The novel is told through a first person perspective of a Haitian...