MÉMOIRE FANTOMATIQUE ET IDENTITÉ POSTCOLONIALE : UNE LECTURE DE LES JOURS VIENNENT ET PASSENT DE HEMLEY BOUM
GHOST MEMORY AND POSTCOLONIAL IDENTITY: A READING OF THE DAYS COME AND PASS BY HEMLEY BOOM

Summary/Abstract: In Hemley Boum’s novel, the postcolony appears as an environment of political and social violence whose causes are related to a certain construction of memory. It is about the ghost memory which presents the traumas of the past and inscribes the subject in a macabre repetition of the frustrations endured. To free oneself from these damaging abuses of memory, it is imperative to pose the evils of the past on the literary scope to make symbols of them. Choosing to put your story into a fiction is to make it a potential legacy, that is to say an experience which, although finding its origin in the past, offers new possibilities for the future. Indeed, the story, by its verisimilitude, frees the history from its fiction to communicate to it the flexibility and lightness that fiction confers. The story speaks to us about ourselves while freeing us from the straitjacket of the selfish self to project ourselves into the plurality of the other who is already there while remaining to come. Narration is thus the unconditional prerequisite for the construction of an emblematic memory which is intended to be forward-looking since it makes the dramas of the past an arable soil in which the dreams of the future take root.

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