<i>Writers and Memory</i>

I recently came across one of those ads you see everywhere: take a photo of your choice and have it be imprinted on a cover for your smartphone. This innovation struck me as a little bit confusing. Were we so hungry for the image of our loved ones that we couldn't wait to turn on the phone and stare at the two hundred albums we have revolving in there? Everywhere we look already has more screensavers, coffee mugs, mouse-pads, cakes and toilet covers bearing the likenesses of our loved ones, so do we really need another place? Little is left of our fallible memory banks, with which, heaven forbid, we would otherwise use to conjure up a fuzzier, softer image for ourselves.

Though I rarely use actual personal experience as fodder for my writing, I do rely heavily on memories. I like to tap into the memories of the emotional truth underlying a conversation or an event or a person. So it scares me to find this realm of our minds to be in in retreat from the onslaught of such advancement as pixilation technology. When you examine a person's photo in the daylight, he may not look as shifty-eyed as you would have been led to believe after that little chat in the dark bar. The wine enhanced moment you shared with the girl under the awning in the rain? Seen through someone's Facebook photo or video feed you are little more than a couple of giggling, wet drunks. It is easy enough to deride the notion of 'write what you know', perhaps as easy as it is to take it literally and write thinly veiled memoirs; but the adage is still not one that can be easily ignored. So it has to be asked – what do we really know, and doesn't art reside in the cracks of the imperfect human experience- where subjective truths weigh as much as the empirical facts?

For those of us, writing 'out-of-country' and 'out-of-language' as Rushdie has described diaspora writing, this conflict between memory and fact begins to war amongst themselves. I have, for example worked on a novel for years, trying to mine the subjective and emotional truths of a Bangladeshi landscape in the eighties- a place that may have existed, if even mostly in my head. But if you look at the physical evidence today (photos and video) of the city I lived in, you will see that no shred of that landscape, physical, cultural or emotional, exists any longer. No house I ever lived in exists there any longer, having made way instead for tall apartment buildings, to house people with lives as unfamiliar to me as a random apartment complex in, say, Ulan Bator, Mongolia. The streets have become a labyrinthine puzzle that I don't recall losing track of. And Bollywood, of course, has eaten up the people.  It is an intense feeling of loss, this feeling of being amongst a tribe of Mohicans, for whom the past truly is a place we have emigrated from. To fully quote Rushdie who expresses this dislocation better than many –

“Human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because of our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death.”
                               - Imaginary Homelands (1992)

But then I realize that what connects us more closely to one another than anything else, is not the uniqueness of what we might have lost, but the sheer sharedness of that fact that we have all lost, a past that is never to be reclaimed except as colonies of our minds. So perhaps this tribe of Mohicans, last of them though we may be, it seems to include many of us. Maybe all of us.
And maybe on second thought, we need to put something on our iPhones covers to remind us of that fact.

Javed Jahangir is the author of Ghost Alley, launched at Hay Festival Dhaka 2014. This article is reprinted with permission from Beyondthemargins.com.