To Study the Socio-Political Disintegration and Reclaiming the Cultural Memories in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and A Man of the People

Abstract

The present study investigates the textual interweaving of the cultural memory discourse carried out by postcolonial writers such as Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart and A Man of the People, Ngugi wa Thiong’o in A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood, Bapsi Sidhwa in The Pakistani Bride and Ice-Candy-Man, and Rohinton Mistry in Such a Long Journey and Family Matters. This kind of critical attention on these postcolonial works abolishes the silence imposed on different voices as well as erasure of their memory. These mnemonic paradigms Lachmann in her article “Cultural Memory and the Role of Literature” calls the “mnemotechnical”, “the encyclopedic” and “the diegetic”. Here the researcher is concerned with the various aspects of literature as a memorial medium through which societies recollect the past. All the selected authors have their cultures which help to form an identity with other cultures. Interaction with other culture helps to form an identity with other cultures such as Asian, African and also Western. As Glissant says we live in a ‘fragmented diversity’ and the cultural interaction helps to bring them together on a few common levels. It is this perception of cultural memory that the researcher has noticed in the study of these selected novels by following the new understanding of historical processes.