Abstract

In this presentation I am exploring the question of collective memory in a short story that gives voice to the new North African diaspora in Spain. ‘La quema de los barcos’ by Miloudi Chagmoum forms part of CUENTOS DE LAS DOS ORILLAS, a bilingual (Arabic/Spanish) collection of short stories by Moroccan and Spanish writers. The narrative articulates the topoi of transit and travel, focusing on the journey itself rather than the post-arrival and acculturation period. The narrative employs narrative strategies which are strongly mimetic, translating the experience of migration into an complex narrative texture. In my analysis I focus on the question of collective memory. I investigate how the text reflects and reworks the ruptures in personal and collective history in the encounter between the Maghreb (Western North Africa) and Spain. In terms of its narrative structure, “La quema de los barcos” can be viewed as a ‘performance’ of collective memory, whose operations it mimics through its formal strategies. It identifies collective memory as a kind of collage which integrates memories from specific scenes, voices and impressions from the past, pasting them into the experience of the present moment. It molds one hi-story out of several discrete stories, shreds and fragments of stories. To establish temporal order, it establishes a segmentation or periodization of time: in Muslim history, time is divided by different instances of migration. It integrates the individual and the collective by stitching the story of the self together with the stories of others. Finally, collective memory reworks history in the sense of a Freudian ‘Verarbeitung’ or ‘Trauerarbeit.’ It serves to re-live and work through the pain accumulated by the collective, thereby accomplishing emotional resolution.