Memory, Identity, and Literature: Supernatural Narratives, Intersectional Identities

This paper focuses on the material and virtual afterlives of the unique inter-imperial memoryscape of Ada Kaleh (Tur. "Island Fortress"), a once-thriving island community living on a low-laying heavily fortified river island in the imperial borderlands of the Danube River. This centuries-old predominantly Muslim and Ottoman Turkish-speaking community was established by an Ottoman military garrison occupying the island's New Orșovafortress, built by an Austro-Hungarian military engineer in the 1730s. Due to an oversight in the Treaty of Berlin (1878), the island became an exclave of the Ottoman Empire, located at the meeting point of Austria-Hungary and the newly independent Kingdoms of Romania and Serbia, remaining Ottoman territory until 1923, when it was formally granted to Romania. As a bastion of Ottoman Turkish culture, its customs, music, cuisine, architecture, and other cultural traditions made it an exotic and picturesque tourist destination for European travelers in the early 20th century. While various factors contributed to Ada Kaleh's decline, the most abrupt was the construction of the Iron Gates Dam, a massive Romanian-Yugoslav joint-venture hydroelectric project initiated in 1964, which resulted in the forced displacement of the entire population of Ada Kaleh (most of whom either left for Istanbul or joined Romania's Muslim community in the Black Sea port city of Constanța) and in the entire island of Ada Kaleh being submerged by the waters of Danube.


This research paper focuses on Ada Kaleh as a dislocated memoryscape in the wake of the flooding of the island. On the one hand, this paper investigates the dislocated material culture of the island, including the ceremonial transfer of cherished community artifacts to new locations and particularly the abortive attempt to relocate the entire town, including the fortress itself, to an uninhabited island (Insula Șimian), resulting in a never-inhabited partial reconstruction of Ada Kaleh downstream from its original location. On the other hand, this research paper investigates Ada Kaleh's virtual afterlife, as the geographically dispersed former inhabitants and their descendants come together online in virtual communities, such as the Facebook group "ADAKALEM Yaşıyor..!! (ADA KALEH is alive..!)," to share photos, videos, and memories from the island, as well as information on commemorative events, news coverage, and other resources related to Ada Kaleh. In this respect, Ada Kaleh serves not only as a significant site of dislocated memory in its own right but also as a portent of things to come, providing a glimpse into digital-age community maintenance and memory work in an era in which climate change threatens to uproot and disperse communities from the lands on which they had traditionally lived.

This study aims to analyse theatrical tropes as well as the theme of memories and roots in the postcolonial context in two short stories – "Karain: a Memory" by Joseph Conrad and "Sachem" by Henryk Sienkiewicz. It is quite surprising that the two writers are rarely juxtaposed. Conrad, a Polish-born English writer, the master of colonial fiction who came to be known as one of the first (however ambivalent) critic of imperialism, lived roughly in the same time as Sienkiewicz, a winner of the Noble prize in literature, a novelist who primarily wrote historical novels monumentalising great moments in Polish history to "cheer up" Poles who themselves suffered from the lack of independence, but whose works also betray his fascination with colonial themes. They were both born and raised in a state that ceased to exit on a map as a consequence of imperialism of its neighbouring nations. The two novelists, however, showed a different attitude towards the political situation of Poland. Sienkiewicz's activism stands in stark contrast to Conrad's political disengagement, which has already been extensively discussed. Neither "Karain: a Memory" nor "Sachem" discuss the Polish case directly: the former is set in colonial Malaya and the latter in a German settlement in Texas, built upon the rubbles of the former capital of a native tribe. They both, however, deal with the question of identity performance, roots, guilt and the haunting past. The aim of this study is to analyse the two stories in reference to the tradition of Polish romantic literature, with its fascination with death and theatrical expression, and especially the concept of "uncanny Slavdom", proposed by Maria Janion (2017). Janion writes of the loss of Slavic mythology in the brutal process of Christianisation as a core wound, or a gaping hole in the Polish psyche, which was unconsciously sensed by Polish romantics exploring the realm of the dead. The comparative analysis of the two works may shed a light on the ambivalent postcolonial position of Poland.

Anthony Veasna So's short story, "Generational Differences" (2022) reverses the typical postmemorial dynamics outlined by Marianne Hirsch, where the second generation engages in structures of remembrance of traumatic memories that preceded their birth through mediated and embodied means. Instead, So's story depicts a mother and survivor of the Cambodian genocide who is in the process of reluctantly recording her experiences in the killing fields to her son who has asked that she write down and transmit her stories to him and her grandchildren, preserving "the shrapnel of the past you want stowed away for future generations" (239). Curiously, she denies the reader this history, where her narrative relaying her traumatic experiences in Cambodia seemingly precedes the start of the story. Rather than rehash this genocidal history, the mother refocuses her narrative on her son, writing "I remember with clear eyes […] the first time you encountered tragedy" (240). She then recounts that years after she fled Cambodia and resettled in Stockton California, her ten-year old son comes across a curious photograph, evidence that she also survived the 1989 Cleveland Elementary School shooting that targeted recent Southeast Asian immigrants and refugees two years before her son was born. The story thus portrays how the mother remembers the day of his discovery as she patiently allows her young son to encounter and even reenact the tragedy in her classroom, thereby appropriating her traumatic past as his own. 


As Hirsch notes, one of the inherent ethical pitfalls of postmemory is mnemonic appropriation, where the second-generation claims as their own the traumas of their parents, thereby questioning what ethical purpose the traumatic past serves for the second generation, the generation born after the traumatic event. The story thus reverses the postmemorial gaze, where the usual material and embodied structures of postmemory are experienced by the second generation, but re-mediated by the first generation, the generation that actually experienced the trauma, as the mother recounts how her son comes to understand her traumatic past in such a way as to make it his own "encounter with tragedy." Thus, the story has us question the ethical and empathetic dimensions of postmemory, how it might function as an appropriative act in postcolonial and diasporic communities, especially by a second generation seeking to understand not only the traumatic past they have inherited, but their cultural and racial identities that are often erased in liberal multicultural Western societies. Throughout the story, it is clear that the generational structures of transmission inherent in postmemory are complicated in postcolonial, diasporic, and non-Western contexts, where the quest to understand one's identity and traumatic inheritance forms a productive tension that can tell us more about where the field of memory and trauma studies is heading in a globalized literary landscape.

Analyzing the Affective Impact of Memoryscape on Personal Memory through the Central Character in Gitanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand
Gitanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand, a novel centred around the experiential impact of borders and boundaries (drawn as a result of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in the year 1947) on an individual, interweaves the personal memory of the eighty-year-old protagonist with the physical landscape to the extent that character undertakes a mnemonic journey to that site. Referring to the site of memory as a memoryscape, the paper would like to analyze the impact of the mnemonic journey (to the other side of the national border) on the autobiographical memory of the eighty-year-old woman. The protagonist's defiant act of undertaking a transnational journey to reach the site of memory highlights its importance as a repository of personal memories fraught with personal emotions rather than being limited to only a site of collective violence and historical trauma. The paper would like to explore the relationship between memory scape and personal memories and how the former endows the protagonist -in this context- with a residual sense of continuity through an autobiographical recollection of the past, negotiating with the past traumas and re-forming the present sense of self. The protagonist's autobiographical recollection -with its entanglements, deliberate silences and forgetting, placed in the specific physical setting- of an event, like Partition 1947, etched in the nation's historical memory, narrativizes history. It offers an opportunity to consider the scope of looking at the affective power of the memoryscape by articulating a microhistory which might help contest the hegemonic discourse of difference associated with the history of Partition of the Indian subcontinent. Analyzing this subjective reconstruction of the personal memory through the framework of what Ananya J. Kabir terms post amnesia, the paper would also like to put forth how the relationship between autobiographical memory and the physical memory scape might endow an individual with a sense of agency to renegotiate and confront the unresolved traumatic memories of the past. Shree's treatment of the site of memory in the last part of the novel titled, 'Back to the Front', raises pertinent questions on the framedness of national and historical memory and how autobiographical memory helps counter it. Thus, by focusing on the affective impact of the memoryscape, the paper also highlights the thematic underpinnings of forbearance and empathy that the author tries to convey.
Keywords: Affect, Autobiographical Memory, Memoryscape, Partition, Trauma

Lebanese novelist Ilyas Khuri's 2002 Arabic-language novel, Yalu (tr. 2009, Yalo), and Turkish author Sema Kaygusuz's 2009 Turkish-language novel, Yüzünde bir Yer (tr. 2019, Every Fire You Tend) address the history of the Ottoman Empire's massacres and genocides against its ethnic minorities-the Syriacs and the Kurds, respectively-during the late 19th and early 20th century. Both novels do so through narratives centered upon second- and third-generation survivor protagonists who negotiate inherited and embodied memories-memories which deeply impact their lived realities in the early 21st century. 
In this paper, I investigate the role played by spiritual and supernatural forces in both novels as a vehicle for illustrating the enduring relationship binding generations across space and time in the context of genocide's afterlives. In particular, I consider how Syriac and Kurdish religious rituals and vernacular customs, respectively, operate as forces in their own rights-specifically as non-human agents which tether diasporic populations in the region in the wake of disaster. 
Further, I suggest that the political conditions in both Lebanon and Turkey in the late 1990s and early 2000s (when these stories were written as well as published) made even more urgent for these authors the question of how to preserve links to past and living members of a culture under attack. For Ilyas Khuri, writing in a postwar Lebanon whose leaders had taken a decidedly hostile line on the matter of remembering and representing past conflict, spiritual (and even psychological) difference offered an avenue through which to explore persistence and survival in uncertain times-particularly in a country which became a new home to many of Anatolia's displaced decades earlier. Kaygusuz published her novel just a few years after Turkey's highest courts were forced to drop charges against Novel Prizewinner Orhan Pamuk for "insulting Turkishness" because he dared mention the Ottoman massacres in an interview.
Ultimately, this paper argues for the presence of enduring memory in transit across space and time, embodied by the spiritual and embedded in both human and non-human forms of life.