Strategies of Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity Retrieval – the Case of Yvette Melanson’ s Looking for Lost Bird and Victoria Donda’s My Name Is Victoria
Strategies of Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity Retrieval – the Case of Yvette Melanson’ s Looking for Lost Bird and Victoria Donda’s My Name Is Victoria

Summary/Abstract: The article is focused on the autobiographical memories of two adoptees, a Native-American Lost Bird and an Argentinean Desaparecida. They are both similar and dissimilar in the way their cultural memories and cultural identities have been wiped out by the regimes of their countries. The two memoirs narrate the events leading to the discovery of their true cultural heritage and their reaction to the shocking reality of their identities. The cultural heritage that had been imposed on them through their kidnapping and subsequent adoptions had been that of Jewishness and of loyalty to the Argentinean political regime. The article proposes an analysis of the strategies used for appropriating the lost cultural heritage. At 43/45 years of age (in 1996), Melanson moved her family to the Navajo Reservation (Tolani Lake, AZ) to walk the traditional path her ancestors had walked before her, on a quest to retrieve the identity of which she had been deprived, hoping to find her twin brother. Analía Perez discovered her identity at 27/29 years of age (in 2004), and immediately embraced the name her biological parents had given her; moreover, she also followed in their footsteps both in terms of her education and her political involvement.

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