(In)Digestible Memories

Migration, as a transformative process, often evokes authorial reflection on and redefinition of the self. It also evokes various versions of (non-)belonging and home in written texts. Migration is often conditioned by the (un)availability of certain objects, by nostalgic longing for things that are no longer there, by objects that take on new meaning or evoke memories. Though feelings of home and (non-)belonging can be thought of as abstract, they are rooted in cultural and embodied experiences, as well as in memory. In his essay “Imaginary Homelands”, Rushdie writes of “exiles or emigrants or expatriates” who experience a sense of loss and who desire to reclaim or to look back at the place they left: “But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge … that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. … ‘my’ India, a version and no more than one version of all the hundreds of millions of possible versions” (Rushdie 1991: 10). In this way, home is always constructed; however, it cannot be created in an entirely arbitrary manner, as it relies on feelings of continuity and wholeness. Thus, I argue that material objects are able not only to correlate to different versions of home, but also to constitute stories about these feelings.