A Clash of Voices: The Behzti Controversy

In: EUROLINGUA & EUROLITTERARIA 2009. - Liberec: Technická univerzita v Liberci, 2009. - ISBN 978-80-7372-544-0. - (2009), s. 361-365.

Simona Hevešiová

Abstract:

In 2004, the Repertory Theatre in Birmingham produced a play called Behzti (Dishonour) written by a Sikh playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti. The staging of the play resulted in massive demonstrations and violent protests of the Sikh community who considered the content of the play offensive and inappropriate and these eventually led to the play’s cancellation. The paper seeks to demonstrate how religious and ethnic sensibilities clash with the freedom of speech and how our postmodern, multicultural world manifests its readiness to celebrate cultural diversity. Moreover, it provides a glimpse of an ethnically and religiously unburdened interpretation.

The notoriously known hysterical reception of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, manifested (apart from other things) by the burning of the book, the issuance of fatwa that forced Rushdie into hiding and the death of its Japanese translator, exposed the sensibilities of literary representation. These disquieting protests and perturbations only confirmed that imaginative literature is not free from political, religious or ethnic tensions and is far from being viewed as a space for creative expression of the artist. In words of James Procter: The emphatic rejection of The Satanic Verses, by the very communities it appeared to represent, highlighted the crisis of representation which has been a recurring feature of the reception of black and British Asian fiction since 1980s (Procter, p. 102). Hanif Kureishi, a British-born writer of Pakistani origin, has been, for example, frequently criticized by members of the Asian community for their negative portrayals in his fiction. His texts often defied the stereotypical representations, being full of drugs, sex, homosexuality and other atypical or inappropriate behavior; but Kureishi vehemently refused to be forced into the role of a spokesperson.

Similarly, Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane inspired comparable reactions within the Bangladeshi minority living in Britain when the book was about to be adapted into a film version in 2006. There were protests and threats of blocking the filming because the Bangladeshi community felt their depiction in the book is unjust and negativistic. The director Peter Florence commented that [i]t's not remotely comparable with the reaction to The Satanic Verses, but there is the same feeling of people who haven't read the book insisting that it does not say what they believe should be said, or that it does say what they regard as unspeakable (Kennedy, 2006). Again, the way and the form of literary representation of an ethnic minority were questioned since they were in sharp contrast with its conceptions. The most problematic parts of the book were probably Ali’s references to verbal and physical attacks between local (i.e. Bangladeshi) political camps which resulted in an absurd hate politics igniting xenophobic passions.

Tumults over a fictitious work were flared also in December 2004 when the second play by a British-born Sikh playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti called Behzti (Dishonour) has been produced by the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. This time, however, riots and physical violence came into play and the situation escalated to such an extent that further performances of the play had to be canceled and the writer went into hiding (hence the obvious parallel with Rushdie’s case which lead to the label Behzti affair). The Sikhs marked the play as offensive to their religion and faith since it situated insulting actions and abominable behavior to a sacred place, i.e. to a Gurdwara (Sikh temple). Talks between the theatre and local Sikh representatives were initiated; yet apart from the fact that no results were achieved, even the very meaning of the attempted dialogue was misunderstood by the parties involved. While the Sikhs referred to the meetings as to negotiations that were supposed to lead to changes in the offensive content, the theatre preferred the words consultations or conversations (Grillo, 2007, p. 18). So what exactly made the play so debatable?

The play opens with a prologue that displays a rather complicated mother-daughter relationship. The eccentric Balbir Kaur, a physically disabled widow in her late fifties, is exposed in full vulnerability in front of her 33-year-old daughter Min who takes care of her. The exchange, spiced up by coarse language and rude remarks, makes it clear that they are getting ready to attend some religious ceremony in a Sikh temple. While Min is looking forward to participate in the religious celebrations that she had not attended since she was a little girl, she does not seem to know at first that her mother, who is in her own words not bothered with the holy things written in the book (Bhatti, 2004, p. 30), has other plans with her. Balbir wants Min to speak to Mr. Sandhu, the Chairman of the Gurdwara’s Renovation Committee and a person of authority, who is believed to possess a list of the most respectable Sikh men, i.e. potential husbands for Min. Min is tied to her mother who is not able to take care of herself and thus neglects her personal life. Balbir’s decision to find a husband for her is, as she herself proclaims in the play, intended to show her daughter life outside their house and secure her future.

The remaining parts of the play are then situated in Gurdwara, a sacred place for the Sikhs where celebrations of the birthday of Guru Nanak are taking place. Balbir and Min are accompanied by Elvis, Balbir’s non-Sikh home carer, so the text also contains some instructive passages introducing basic aspects of the religion as Min is relating them to him. Nevertheless, it is obvious right from the opening scene in Gurdwara that not all Sikhs come to the temple to pray and find comfort in god. We are introduced to Balbir’s old friends Polly and Teetee who steal shoes from the shoe rack in the temple and call other people hypocrites while both of them pretend not to know anything about the terrible deeds that happen in Mr. Sandhu’s office; later on Polly attempts to seduce Elvis who is in love with Min.

Balbir informs them that Min is going to talk to Mr. Sandhu in order to find a husband; Teetee’s question if she is sure that that is what she wants for her daughter foreshadows the dishonest practices of Mr. Sandhu, yet Balbir is totally ignorant of them (as is the reader/spectator at this point). When Min is thrown into his office, the existence of the famous list of potential husbands is denied since it functions only as a lure for young women to visit Mr. Sandhu’s office without him being suspected of doing anything amoral. Min discovers, as Mr. Sandhu (emotionally struck by her resemblance to her dead father) admits it to her, that her father Tej had a homosexual affair with him. The accidental discovery by little Min many years ago distressed her father to such an extent that he jumped out of a train and ended his life. For this reason, Mr. Sandhu blames Min for Tej’s death. The scene then ends with Mr. Sandhu raping Min whose screams merge with music from the worship area (another detail that the Sikh representatives objected to).

As it turns out Mr. Sandhu’s practices are a public secret; no one, however, dares to protest since he is a powerful and rich man, able to influence other people’s lives – both in a positive and negative way. As Mr. Sandhu himself remarked: Whatever things look like, there is always another story, always the truth underneath the show. After a while we get used to the disappointment (Bhatti, 2004, p. 108). It is Teetee who tells Balbir the truth in the end. Unable to grasp the grim consequences of her fatal decision, Balbir murders Mr. Sandhu in an act of desperation and thus completes the long list of detestable acts committed in the Gurdwara.

In fact, the play might have astonished even a non-Sikh readership since the scope of disgraceful, inappropriate or shocking subject matters (or whatever we call them) was rather wide (if not too wide) – ranging from stealing, drug addiction, homosexuality, hypocrisy, violence, verbal abuse to rape, suicide and murder. To some people the play may appear as overloaded with negative images and behavior which are de facto all attributed to the Sikh community and that was precisely the stumbling block. Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti explains this strategy in the foreword to the play:

I find myself drawn to that which is beneath the surface of triumph. All that is anonymous and quiet, raging, despairing, human, inhumane, absurd and comical… I believe it is necessary for any community to keep evaluating its progress, to connect with its pain and to its past (Bhatti, 2004, p. 17, emphasis added).

As Ralph D. Grillo remarks Sikh representatives were prepared to accept much of the play’s content, provided that changes were made to the setting and use of symbols (2007, p. 22). As for the setting, a suggestion was made to situate the events of the play to a community center instead of a temple; the severest objection was raised to the inappropriate juxtaposition of terrible deeds and sacred symbols (ibid., p. 7). In this context, Samuel Beckett’ s short story First Love may come to one’ s mind as a comparable example. Beckett’s story which succeeded to violate several aspects of the Western cultural code depicts fragments from a nameless man’s life who is coping with what is perceived as his first love. There is a scene in the story where the man, sitting on the toilet, struggles with constipation. At the same time, he is looking at an almanac with the picture of Jesus:

At such times I never read, any more than at other times, never gave way to revery or meditation, just gazed dully at the almanac hanging from a nail before my eyes, with its chromo of a bearded stipling in the midst of sheep, Jesus no doubt, parted the cheeks with both hands and strained, heave! ho! heave! ho! (Beckett, 1974, p. 15).

Clearly, by referring to these disparate images in one sentence and placing Jesus into a rather unusual context (to use a milder term) Beckett desecrated the sacred. James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses also contains similar juxtapositions, the sacred and the secular being confronted in a very direct way which was perceived by some recipients as offending. Bhatti’s explanation for the provocative content of her play is as follows:

I believe that drama should be provocative and relevant. I wrote Behzti because I passionately oppose injustice and hypocrisy. And because writing drama allows me to create characters, stories, a world in which I, as an artist, can play and entertain and generate debate (Bhatti, 2004, p. 18).

Yes, Behzti definitely did generate debate. The debate was, however, somewhat misdirected from the author’s intention and the message of the text which were veiled by the passionate talks about the external events rather than the play itself. The discussion was more or less reduced to questions of incommensurability and incompatibility of religious and secular values in a multiethnic, multicultural, multi-faith society and to the rights and limits of freedom of speech and the protection of religious sensibilities (Grillo, 2007, p. 6). Unavoidably, the interpretation of the text having been influenced by all these issues drifted away from a disinterested reading (if that is possible at all). A solely literary examination of the play’s events may, however, uncover a story with a very straightforward message.

Apart from or rather beyond the religious and cultural context, Behzti tells a simple story anyone can relate to. If Gurpreet Bhatti were not regarded as a spokesperson for the Sikh community (which she is not), another, more human dimension of the play would emerge. Behzti discusses questions of authority and abuse of power, hypocrisy, injustice and pretence – notions which are not attributed culturally or religiously. It portrays people living in pitiful and depressing conditions that are dependent on and rely on those having the possibilities to help them. But were the helping hand is expected, none is offered; instead, Mr. Sandhu keeps misusing his position and authority for years because he lives in a society where material goods, well-being and the fear of authority predominate over honesty, truthfulness and self-respect and where hypocrisy is tolerated. The religious dimension into which the play was placed can be easily transformed to any other context where power and authority play a role. Behzti presents a universal warning. And perhaps those who are affronted by the menace of dialogue and discussion, need to be offended (Bhatti, 2004, p. 18).

Bibliography:

Beckett, S. First Love and Other Stories. New York: Grove Press, 1974.

Bhatti, G.K. Behzti (Dishonour). London: Oberon Books, 2004.

Donkervoet, G. The Controversy that is Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti. Available at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu

Grillo, R.D. Licence to offend? The Behzti affair. Ethnicities, 2007, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 5-29

Kennedy, M. In a sense, if you come under fire from those conservative people, you must be doing something right, 2006. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/jul/28/bookscomment.books

Procter, J. New Ethnicities, the Novel, and the Burdens of Representation. In A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. English, J.F. (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 101-120.

A story to be remembered: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

In: Silesian studies in English 2009 : Proceedings of the international conference of English and American Studies, Opava 7-8 September 2009. - Opava : Slezská univerzita, 2010. - ISBN 978-80-7248-622-9, P. 251-261.

Simona Hevešiová

Abstract:
The paper focuses on the problem of memory and trauma in the second novel of the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Half of a Yellow Sun. The novel recounts the gruesome historical events of the Nigeria-Biafra War; a war that the author believes has shaped the national identity of Nigeria to a significant extent. By interweaving several individual narratives together, the author presents the conflict from different viewpoints allowing various characters to speak on their behalf. Moreover, she manifests the necessity to remember these tragic events in order to reconstruct the nation’s identity and thus answers the question who is supposed to recreate, i.e. rewrite the collective history of Igbo people.

Successful fiction does not need to be validated by ‘real life’; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is ‘real’.

(Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)

For centuries, people have felt the need to express their opinion on things and events happening around them and to them. The urge to demonstrate and locate their own position in the spatial and temporal dimension naturally led to the process of documenting these events in various forms and by various media. Gradually, the writing of history, or in other words, the reconstruction of the past has transformed into a rather complicated process. Undoubtedly, there is some kind of a general agreement about the responsibility and the importance to remember the past but this agreement also raises many questions: Who is entitled to speak / write of it and why? What is the common ground in this process? What is worth speaking / writing about? Are there things which should be better overlooked or erased from the collective memory? Moreover, are there not fissures in our remembrances? Are our recollections to be taken as valid and reliable sources? How, if at all, can an objective and truthful account of events be achieved?, etc.
As Alena Smiešková observes, history “is no longer viewed as a sum of undoubted facts” since it is “contaminated by the process of subjectivization. The objective history is only another narration and its quality refers to general characteristics of any other text.” (Smiešková 2008, 19) Literary texts, among others, then “are understood as equally important to reconstruct what we understand as personal or national history” (ibid.). Moreover, the relation between history and fiction is to be regarded as reciprocal as the comments of the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about writing her second novel Half of a Yellow Sun, the focus of this paper, demonstrate: “If fiction is indeed the soul of history, then I was equally committed to the fiction and the history, equally keen to be true to the spirit of the time as well as to my artistic vision of it.” (Adichie 2007b, 11) The novel provides an account of Nigeria-Biafra war of the 1960s. A thorough research, based on scholarly publications and stories she heard from the war survivors, backed up her writing. Yet, the writer’s imaginative vision of the past as experienced by her socially and nationally diverse characters stands at the core of the novel which thus fuses these seemingly disparate narratives.
Adichie was born in 1977, seven years after the Nigeria-Biafra war. This conflict, representing according to the writer an unspeakable or a rather repressed part of national history, is the main focus of her second novel Half of a Yellow Sun. The primary impetus for writing a book about the war and the tribal resentments between Igbo and Hausa peoples was Adichie’s need “to engage with [her] history in order to make sense of [her] present” (p2 of the P.S.). Even though she has not experienced the conflict herself, Adichie stated several times that she regarded the war not as a history but as a memory. With members of her own family being traumatized and haunted by the shadows of the war, Adichie felt an urgent need to reconstruct the destinies of ordinary people in a written form and thus reconcile with the traumatic legacy of her ancestors.
The Biafran war and its disastrous consequences traumatized the whole country and, as Adichie mentioned, it still hangs like a shadow over Nigeria. The novel, combining history with an imaginative world created by the author, belongs, in words of Amy Novak, to the genre of contemporary trauma fiction because of “its exploration of the difficulty of recounting and voicing [the] trauma” and because the characters show “classic traumatic symptoms of disassociation and withdrawal.” (2008) The narrative oscillates mainly between the lives of three characters – Olanna, an upper-class teacher at Nsukka University; Ugwu, a teenage houseboy of her lover Odenigbo, a free-thinking professor of mathematics, and Richard, a British journalist and a great admirer of Igbo culture who falls in love with Olanna’s twin sister Kainene. All these characters suddenly become engulfed in the terrors of the war and are forced to face almost psychically unbearable situations.
The novel’s opening passage centers on Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy working for Olanna’s intellectual lover Odenigbo who lives and works in the university town of Nsukka. Ugwu is obviously a poor, uneducated village boy whose ideas about world are rather naïve and incomplete, as shaped by his limited experience and influenced by his idolized master. Yet soon enough (due to the highly intellectual and stimulating environment) it becomes clear that he is a very careful observer and his sharp intelligence and ability to learn quickly help him to mature. Adichie herself described Ugwu as the eternal student of life. Both Olanna and Odenigbo recognize this and Ugwu becomes a valid member of their family. In fact, the character of Ugwu, as it becomes apparent later on in the novel, represents the so desired anchor; the connection between traditions and modernity, intellectualism and common sense, past and future.
Nevertheless, the novel does not attempt to romanticize or idealize the characters and Ugwu is not an exception. The innocent and naïve boy from the novel’s beginning is later conscripted as a soldier and becomes directly involved in the war atrocities thus earning his nickname Target Destroyer. Together with his fellow child soldiers who are deprived of their identity and are referred to only as Kill and Go and High-Tech Ugwu fights against the vandals; yet he is aware that “[h]e was not living his life; life was living him.” (Adichie 2007a, 364) The rape of a bar girl, a crucial turning point in Ugwu’s transformation, releases a rumbling wave of self-loathing which forces him to unwrap his mind from his body (ibid., 365). The gruesome consequences of this incident become fully clear to him when he finds out that his sister Anulika was raped during the war.
Meanwhile, Olanna and Odenigbo struggle to keep up their everyday life despite the inhuman conditions; yet their relationship falters. The once fiery and self-assured Odenigbo, never afraid to voice his opinion in front of authorities, succumbs to drinking. Paralyzed by the loss of his ideals and hope, unable to intellectualize the horrors happening around, he needs to be supported by Olanna and Ugwu. The death of his mother represented the last straw in his decline which turns him into a helpless figurine. Even Olanna becomes alienated from him since his “self-assured eccentricities and his fierce moralities” (ibid., 29) she had admired so much vanished. Odenigbo’s impregnation of a village girl Amala, forced upon him by his mother, creates a definite barrier between them. The child called Baby is later adopted by Olanna and becomes the main focus of her life; she clings to her even more after Ugwu’s disappearance. At certain point in their relationship, even Odenigbo’s physical presence seems to be unbearable:

“Once he tried to hold Olanna, to kiss her, but his touch made her skin crawl and she turned away from him and went outside to sleep on a mat on the veranda, where Ugwu had sometimes slept… She did not want to speak to him, to sleep beside him… She said little to him.” (ibid., 382)

But not even the beautiful and strong Olanna is able to preserve her dignity and self-respect. In an outbreak of jealousy following the humiliation caused by Odenigbo’s infidelity, she seduces Kainene’s lover Richard and shatters the already fragile bond between the sisters. Furthermore, the struggle for sole survival has erased her upper-class uppishness and privileged attitudes which were clearly visible during her visits to poorer relatives. Suddenly, the nice and comfortable house filled with intellectuals is supplanted by a refugee camp full of starving and desperate people, feasts and social gatherings are replaced by air raids and the meals often consist just of lizards’ legs and roasted crickets.
The impact of the drastic and hostile external environment which surrounds the characters is, however, multiplied in their internal, private sphere where it leaves devastating traces. The haunting images of witnessed terrors settled down in their minds and disable their normal functioning. After seeing the mutilated body of her relative, Olanna breaks down completely and is confined to bed, unable to articulate the grisly moment. Moreover, the image of a decapitated head of a little girl held in a calabash by her desperate mother (that comes to epitomize the horrors of the war) haunts her repeatedly, rendering her unable to speak about the brutalities she has witnessed. In words of Amy Novak, Olanna “exhibits classic characteristics of the traumatized in her struggle and inability to discuss the past.” (2008)
Similarly, Ugwu who was directly involved in the killing and fighting is not able to clear his mind of the battlefield scenes. He is, moreover, not only an observer but also a perpetrator of the crimes which do not leave him unmarked.

“The ka-ka-ka of shooting, the cries of men, the smell of death, the blasts of explosions above and around him were distant. But back at the camp his memory became clear; he remembered the man who placed both hands on his blown-open belly as though to hold hi intestines in, the one who mumbled something about his son before he stiffened. And, after each operation, everything became new.” (Adichie 2007a, 365-6)

And finally Richard, the British journalist and an ardent admirer of Igbo culture who even “attempts to shed his European identity and become a Nigerian” (Novak 2008), is trying to stifle his memories of a brutal massacre of Igbo people at the Kano airport.

“He had often wished that he would lose his mind, or that his memory would suppress itself, but instead everything took on a terrible transparence and he had only to close his eyes to see the freshly dead bodies on the floor of the airport and to recall the pitch of the screams.” (Adichie 2007a, 165)

These traumatic events and memories burden the characters to such an extent that they leave them impotent. For a while, none of them is able to process them, the psychic remnants of the horrors being too vivid and terrifying. Richard attempts to come to terms with the crude reality writing things down; yet “the sentences were risible. They were too melodramatic […] The echo of unreality weighed each word down; he clearly remembered what had happened at that airport, but to write about it he would have to reimagine it, and he was not sure if he could.” (ibid., 168) Gradually, a decision to write a book about Biafra ripens in him and the reader catches few snippets from it. The book is called The World Was Silent When We Died and contains facts about the Civil war making, among others, explicit connections between the conflict and the British imperial policy in Nigeria.
Yet as the story progresses “the narration of the traumatic history of colonialism and Biafra transfers from Richard to Ugwu” (Novak 2008) allowing Adichie to make a strong political point about who should be writing the history of Africa. The diapason of characters ranging from poor and uneducated villagers, intellectuals, government officials, to foreigners and expatriates provides a wide platform for discussion. All the characters are given space to express their political / personal views on the conflict so the reader is confronted with several diverse viewpoints. But only one of them is entitled to document it. “Ugwu becomes the chronicler of trauma as the colonial voice that Richard represents fades into the background, marking the exit of the Western subject from the narrative control.” (ibid.) Ugwu’s memoir thus captures the collective memory of Igbo people with his voice controlling the narrative.
In fact, Adichie accentuates the therapeutic effect of storytelling / writing down the past and its necessity in the process of reconstructing the group identity. She makes it absolutely clear that the story of Biafra has to remain in peoples’ memories no matter how painful it is. Moreover, Brison argues that “narrating memories to others […] empowers survivors to gain more control over the traces left by trauma” (Brison 1999, 40) so when Olanna revisits the traumatic images in her mind and shares them with Ugwu, she seems to start grasping her life again.

“Ugwu was writing as she spoke, and his writing, the earnestness of his interest, suddenly made her story important, made it serve a larger purpose that even she was not sure of…” (Adichie 2007a, 410)

By writing down these traumatic memories and offering them to a listening audience, Adichie marked her novel not as “an act of closure” but as “an act of remembering”. She said: “I don’t believe in the concept of closure. I think that the traumas we have experienced remain an indelible part of who we are; we carry it with us always.” (Adichie quoted by Anyokwu 2008, 189) Half of a Yellow Sun then seeks to contribute to the act of remembrance since “we cannot begin to make sense of our present and of our future until we have engaged properly with our past.” (ibid.)

Bibliography:
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2007a. Half of a Yellow Sun. London/New York/ Toronto/Sydney: Harper Perennial.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2007b. “In the Shadow of Biafra”. In Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. London/New York/ Toronto/Sydney: Harper Perennial, 2007.
P.S. Ideas. Interviews & Features. In: Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2007a. Half of a Yellow Sun. London/New York/ Toronto/Sydney: Harper Perennial.
Anyokwu, Christopher. “May We Always Remember”: Memory and Nationhood in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. In: NTU Studies in Language and Literature, Number 20 (December 2008), 179-196.
Brison, Susan J. Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self. In: Bal, Mieke & Jonathan V. Crewe & Leo Spitzer. Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999.
Finck, Sylviane. 2006. Reading Trauma in Postmodern and Postcolonial literature: Charlotte Delbo, Toni Morrison and the Literary Imagination of the Aftermath.
Novak, Amy. 2008. Who speaks? Who listens?: The problem of address in two Nigerian trauma novels. Available at:
Smiešková, Alena. 2008. “Memory and Time: The Historiographic Representation“. In: Multicultural Awareness. Reading Ethnic Writing. Smiešková, Alena, Hevešiová, Simona, Kiššová, Mária. Nitra: FF UKF, 2008.

Art in Memory, Memory in Art

November 9-13, 2009

This project is the result of the project KEGA 3/6468/08 Vyučovanie interkultúrneho povedomia cez literatúru a kultúrne štúdiá (Teaching intercultural awareness through literature and cultural studies).

This year the Dept. of English and American Studies at Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia organizes the third week-long project designed mainly for students of the department. Each year, there is a different thematic focus which is explored through a series of lectures presented by academics, workshops, film screenings, discussions and competitions. This year’s thematic focus is MEMORY.

Memory has been understood as an experiential link between the past and present. In that way memory has served as a source of knowledge but also as a tool to re/construct the truth. Even though memory seems to differ from perception and cannot be identified with pure imagination the contemporary thought investigates how things that we remember may relate to our present day perception. Though our memories may be shaped by various forms of experience, and we remember them in words, imagery, or through our senses they all are emotional recordings.

Memory is important for personal and group identity. But the continuation of the Self can be sustained only in narration. The ways we organise our memories are very similar to the narrative in fiction, film or dream, because we summarize, construct, interpret and condense in the process of remembrance. Philosophy asks how pieces of memory are represented in mind, or whether they leave traces at all, we are interested in the exploration how an individual, or collective memory, the memory of the place or a building, how the visual memory or the memory of the sound, smell, and touch can be revoked in the formative and deformative process in works of art, political discourse, historiography, in visual art, culture and literary criticism.

Therefore, our aim is to contemplate on the role the liminal space of memory plays in our everyday lives, how it influences our acting both positively and negatively and how it constitutes our vision of the world and people around us. The idea of the memory, remembering, repression, trauma and truth, what we remember and we cannot remember and how we remember, is to be associated not only with its psychological (physical, spatial) context but it is to be transmitted beyond it in order to explore the cultural, social, spiritual and other dimensions as well. The memories may act as a constructive and creative link that may eliminate the boundaries between the past and present.

GALLERY:

day 1
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