Memory, Re-memory and Post-memory

Abstract

For the Indian diaspora their new lives in the Imperial colonies became the present and the country left behind became memory. As the diasporics tried to recall the past, they dealt in what Toni Morrison has called the act of re-memory. Pheroze Nowrojee’s re-telling of the tale of his grandfather, who went from India to Kenya to run the trains on what was then called the Uganda Railways, is a case of re-memory, as the private memories of an earlier generation are etched into public and even national spaces of independent Kenya. There is also what Marianne Hirsch calls post-memory which can also be considered in the case of diasporic writing. While A Kenyan Journey (2014) tells the story of the author’s grandfather, it is much more than just a Parsi Zoroastrian family’s memoir. Intertwined in the grandfather’s story are the wider narratives of colonialism and old and new homelands.