Between Amnesia and Anamnesis: Re-Membering the Fractures of Colonial History

The Greek word "anamnesis," a term used by several contributors to this section, means "remembrance," or going back (in time) through memory... This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol23/iss1/8 Between Amnesia and Anamnesis: Re-Membering the Fractures of Colonial History Anne Donadey University of Iowa The Greek word "anamnesis," a term used by several contributors to this section, means "remembrance," or going back (in time) through memory. According to the Petit Larousse illustre, the word is currently used in two contexts: medical and religious. Medically, it refers to the information gathered by a doctor about a patient through dialogue with the patient and his or her entourage. In the Catholic religion, it refers to the part of Mass after the consecration in which the faithful repeat together a brief summary of the religion's time line, their belief in Jesus' incarnation, death, resurrection, and future return at the end of times (see also Lionnet 223). A third context, not mentioned in the dictionary, is the academic and literary one. In the first case, anamnesis is the piecing together of a case history by a professional with the help and expertise of a group of people who have experienced the illness in question. In the second case, it is a collective ritual repetition of fundamental beliefs about certain foundational religious events. In both contexts, the term connotes a common reconstitution effected according to preordained rules, involving one central person's life history, and opening up onto future healing consequences. In her 1989 book, Autobiographical Voices, Lionnet extends the concept of anamnesis to the colonial context. Anamnesis becomes a particular way of "resisting amnesia" (Rich 136) on the part of colonized or formerly colonized peoples. It is a strategy especially embraced by women writers, for whom self-portraiture (the autobiographical genre) is transformed into a piecing together of a collective history. In a context in which one's history has been writ1 Donadey: Between Amnesia and Anamnesis: Re-Membering the Fractures of Colo Published by New Prairie Press 112 STCL, Volume 23, No.1 (Winter, 1999) ten by the hegemonic dominant, anamnesis becomes a way of resisting the occlusions created by official history, of recovering the traces of another, submerged history in order to create a countermemory. Because of the gaps existing in historical discourse due to the erasure of records, the dearth of archives, and the death of the witnesses, postcolonial writers often turn to fiction to reconstitute a past that will help them and the community/Nation heal in the present and move forward into the future. Anamnesis may be part of a national project (as discussed in Bensmalia's and Mudimbe-Boyi's essays), and always involves a collective effort of tracing back history. Writing the joint anamneses of the self, the female genealogy and Algeria in her dazzling novel L'Amour, la fantasia (1985), Assia Djebar uses the metaphor of spelaeology to render the writer's task of exhuming her people's history through French archives, written documents, as well as oral Algerian traces (91). For her, fiction is the only way to flesh out "la plate sobriete" 'the flat restraint' of historical documents in order to fill their gaps (15). Each of the essays in this section focuses on a specific context of de/colonization with France: Africa, Indochina, and Algeria. Panivong Norindr elucidates how a focus on colonial subjects can provide an invaluable interpretive grid to re-conceive French art and history. He takes French cinema as his point of departure to investigate what marginalized representations of colonial soldiers during World War I have to say about the contemporary after-effects of colonization. Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi's text similarly follows a double temporal focus in her examination of recent novels from the African and French contexts that take the reader back in time and underscore the difficulties of narrating a much older, partly erased history. Finally, both Reda BensmaIa's and Assia Djebar's essays reflect in very different ways on the intricate undertaking of writing history in the Algerian context. Bensmala traces the changing ways in which writers have envisioned their role in the creation of a national culture after independence, while Djebar weaves a complex tapestry of memory and silencing made of multiple (personal, genealogical, and national) threads. The rest of this introduction examines in more detail what each essay contributes to a redefinition of memory in the context of de/colonization. Norindr's project in his essay is "to exhume the `tirailleurs indigenes' as filmic traces" in Bertrand Tavernier's 1989 film La Vie et rien d'autre (Life and Nothing But). Norindr first provides a brief history of the tirailleurs in World War I and of their changing rep2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 23, Iss. 1 [1999], Art. 8 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol23/iss1/8 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1457