Whiteness of memory

Author's name: Natasha Apanah

What remains of memory when the faces of those who have departed, their stories, their hopes, and the sparkle of their eyes are buried under the cement of the present?
This is a story about memory, about the journey of ancestors, about the shreds of memories, about the linens that assassinate memory, and about the hard fabric that hides the fragility of voice, sight, touch, and smell!
Natasha Appanah retraces the lines that her ancestors walked from India to the new British colonies, where they became forced laborers on sugarcane farms, on a journey that erased their faces and transformed them from names to numbers... It is a story that teaches us that writing about memory is not a mending of what has burst, nor a patching of what has been torn, but rather an imitation of the dance of the starlings, of the shapes that migratory birds draw in the sky, calling out to the stray among them... Memory is a wound that we write not to heal from it, but to make it alive and pulsating within us. We write it in order to recover names, faces, and memories, and to guide the stray bird and be guided by it... It is, then, not merely a recovery of a past story, but a questioning of the present and the future, a questioning of the washed-out memory, the memory that was intended to be clean and white, and to Surrender to the temptation of forgetfulness!