The Absence of Father/Mother and Postmemory in Rawi Hage’s Carnival (2012)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1403.26Keywords:
memory transmission, second generation, absence of parents, postmemory, psychosocial development, identity formation, CarnivalAbstract
This article aims to explore the consequences of parents’ absence in transmitting the memory of homeland in Rawi Hage’s Carnival (2012). This narrative demonstrates how storytelling could reflect on the protagonist’s memory of home and origins as an Easterner. Besides, it analyzes the significance of using the transmission of memory and how it could shape the second generation’s identity. In such a diasporic literary work, the protagonist, Fly, attempts to construct their own identity even in the absence of their parents; however, traumatic memories about childhood cause a deep disparity in the mind. Hage’s Carnival identifies the circus life where the protagonist was born and raised as an old memory. Further, it identifies the flying carpet, inherited from the protagonist’s father, as a path to an imaginary space. The latter represents an escape from a miserable life. In this respect, the memory transmission of Fly is studied based on Hirsch’s conception of postmemory and Erikson's theory of psychosocial development and identity formation.
References
Abdul-Jabbar, W. K. (2019). Anglophone Arab Literature in Diaspora: Living on the Fringes of Culture. Negotiating Diasporic Identity in Arab-Canadian Students: Double Consciousness, Belonging, and Radicalization, 33-46.
Alhawamdeh, H. A. (2018). ‘Shakespeare Had the Passion of an Arab’: The Appropriation of Shakespeare in Fadia Faqir’s Willow Trees Don’t Weep. Critical Survey, 30(4), 1-21.
Anderson, L. (2007). Introduction. In L. Anderson, M. Rossington, A. Whitehead, K. Chedgzoy, P. Mukherjee, & J. Richards (Eds.), Theories of Memory: A Reader (pp. 272–275). Edinburgh University Press.
Ashcroft, B. (2001). Post-colonial transformation. Routledge.
Awajan, N.W. (2021). A New Stage for Rawi Hage’s Protagonist in Carnival (2012). International Journal of English and Education, 10(1), 188- 202.
Caruth, C. (1995). Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Johns Hopkins.
Cherry, K. (2022). Erikson’s stages of development: A closer look at the eight psychosocial stages. Available online: https://www.verywellmind.com/erik-eriksons-stages-of-psychosocial-development-2795740 Accessed Jan 28, 2024.
Culbertson, R. (1995). Embodied memory, transcendence, and telling: Recounting trauma, re-establishing the self. New Literary History, 26(1), 169-195.
Dahab, F. E. (2019). “To Roam a Borderless World”: the Poetics of Movement and Marginality in Carnival. In Beirut to Carnival City (pp. 120-132). Brill.
Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity youth and crisis. WW Norton & Company.
Erikson, E. H. (1993). Childhood and society. WW Norton & Company.
Gana, N. (2015). Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English. Edinburgh University Press.
George, R. M. (1996). The politics of home: Postcolonial relocations and twentieth-century fiction. Cambridge University Press.
Hage, R. (2012). Carnival. Penguin UK.
Hall, S. (1990). Cultural identity and diasporas. In: Rutherford J (ed.) Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 222–237.
Hirsch, M. (1989). The mother/daughter plot: Narrative, psychoanalysis, feminism. Indiana University Press.
Hirsch, M. (1997). Family frames: Photography, narrative, and postmemory. Harvard University Press.
Hirsch, M. (2001). Surviving images: Holocaust photographs and the work of postmemory. The Yale journal of criticism, 14(1), 5-37.
Hirsch, M., & Miller, N. K. (Eds.). (2011). Rites of return: Diaspora poetics and the politics of memory. Columbia University Press.
Hirsch, M., & Smith, V. (2002). Feminism and cultural memory: An introduction. Signs: Journal of women in culture and society, 28(1), 1-19.
Hout, S. (2019). Looking for Home in All the Wrong Places: The Various Lebanons of De Niro’s Game. In Beirut to Carnival City (pp. 35-55). Brill.
Husserl, E. (2013). Cartesian meditations: An introduction to phenomenology. Springer Science & Business Media.
Kerpelman, J. L., & Pittman, J. F. (2018). Erikson and the relational context of identity: Strengthening connections with attachment theory. Identity, 18(4), 306-314.
Kim, S. S. H. C. (2013). Redefining diaspora through a phenomenology of postmemory. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 16(3), 337-352.
Larkin, C. (2010). Beyond the war? The Lebanese postmemory experience. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 42(4), 615-635.
Layoun, P. (2022). Coming of Age in Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Literature: The Search for Identity in Niko and Lifted by the Great Nothing. DIASPORA, 22(2), 158-174.
Letaief, S. K., & Awad, Y. (2021). The Existential Arab Antihero in Rawi Hage’s Beirut Hellfire Society. In Forum for World Literature Studies, 13(2), 234-251.
Majer, K. (2019). Beirut to Carnival City: Reading Rawi Hage. Brill.
Maree, J. G. (2021). The psychosocial development theory of Erik Erikson: critical overview. Early Child Development and Care, 191(7-8), 1107-1121.
Marianne, H. (2012). The generation of postmemory: writing and visual culture after the Holocaust. New York, Columbia UP.
Neumann, B. (2020). Anglophone World Literatures and Transcultural Memory. Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures, 13, 133.
O'Donoghue, S. (2018). Postmemory as Trauma?: Some Theoretical Problems and Their Consequences for Contemporary Literary Criticism.
Orenstein, G. A., & Lewis, L. (2021). Eriksons stages of psychosocial development. In StatPearls [Internet]. StatPearls Publishing.
Ramon, A. (2019). The Body and the City: Race, Sexuality and Urban Space in Carnival. In Beirut to Carnival City (pp. 56-73). Brill.
Rich, A. (2021). Of woman born: Motherhood as experience and institution. WW Norton & Company.
Stuber, D. (2013). Review of Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Bryn Mawr Review of comparative literature, 10(2), 5.
Vinson, P. H. (2022). Arab American Literature. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History.
Zamanpour, A. (2019). Creatureliness and Planetary Decadence in Rawi Hage’s Carnival. Moveable Type, 11, 74-85.
