Narrating Stories of Existence

Politics of Memory and Identity in Selina Hossain’s Charcoal Portrait

Abstract

It has been established beyond doubt that one cannot be isolated from memories. One’s memories range from the sweet remembrances of childhood to the traumatic experience of pain and suffering during the course of existence. The fragments of experience are encoded in one’s memory which are later decoded and reconstructed as personal history. Circumscribed by a plethora of experiences, memories cannot be isolated from one’s self though it may acquire different dimensions in the process of filling in the gaps in one’s life. As a corollary, time plays a prominent role in reconstructing memories being grounded in the proposition that there needs to be a recreation of the past in order to have a clear understanding of the present. As Schacter rightly observes, “time and memory are inextricably woven; memory always refers to the past and after, shapes the future” (73). Taking recourse to the memory theory of Mark Freeman that our understanding the way memory works “both as lived and as told opens the way toward an enlarged understanding of self and world” (231), this research paper attempts to examine how one’s life is in a constant process of editing with transformations colouring the present and in anticipating the future with reference to Selina Hossain’s Charcoal Portrait. Following an analysis of the use of memory, the narrative follows Dulal’s search for his mother which is connected with his “attempts to recover the self who existed‘before’ ” (King 1).