Reviving the Lost: Memory and Nostalgia in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Select Literary Writings

Abstract

Memory is a tool to peep into the present and the past, between time and space. It is the base of our dreams. Memory with all its subtlety nurtured and recollected the direct experience of individuals. Which causes memory to communicate experience and history, consequently the notion of memory is not personal / simple, rather it becomes extraordinarily complex. In postcolonial literature we raise the question: What is Memory? Is it a remembrance or reflection and imagination? Is it the battleground we contest in struggles for dominance - of peoples, ideas, and politics? Pierre Vidal Naquet in “Assassins of Memory Essays in the Denial of the Holocaust” addresses many of the arguments and prejudices embodied in the personal experience and the memory of those who were affected. Philosophers, critics, Literature, poets, novelists all have particular concepts of memory. Postcolonial writers revisit these experiences and form narratives of identity. The concept of Mnemosyne, or memory, was anthropomorphised by the classics (Greeks and Romans) as the mother of wisdom and the daughter of ignorance. Philippe Aries, who led the way in studying memorials, commemorates it "History deals with the horizon between the known and the unknown, It is memory that lures us to this horizon. Even the widest horizon of our knowledge is overwhelmed by the mysteries of what lies beyond" (qtd. in Hutton 168). Memory as interlinked with nostalgia creates spaces for it, As Boym (2001) calls it “Nostalgia is a sentimentality for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations, the longing for home (nostos), nostalgia is defined as the longing for a home that no longer exists”. (OED).