Objects and Spaces: Memory in Narrative
The narratives Oblivion and The Armies are both examples of non-fiction andfiction works that have emerged in response to armed conflict in Colombia. Testimony as a genre has developed from a sense that there are unheard voices of victims and from the need to address how the Colombian national intelligentsia has been impacted by armed conflict. Testimony relies on memories and attempts to provide a record for historical discourse. In the memoir Oblivion, objects and artifacts act as both ways of storing and ways of activating memory. Memories are closely tied to objects, and the author Héctor Abad Faciolince regularly references specific artifacts that he used to activate memories of his father. These memories are then incorporated into his written testimony.
On the other hand, Evelio Rosero's The Armies has appeared as a successful demonstration of how a fiction writer explores the experience of conflict and trauma. We here particularly focus on his emphasis on animals as the action and the scene of his novel delve deeper and deeper into the tragedy of a town that is seized and that starts to come to terms with low-intensity previous conflict that lead up to the final conflagration.
BY: Emma Jones, Alexandra Orta, Karrie Villarreal
The memoir Oblivion is centered around trauma and remembering trauma. The characters in this memoir use various strategies to remember violence as a way of overcoming this violence and trauma. This is done to resist the titular oblivion that death brings and that is featured prominently in the narrative through the sonnet “Epitaph”, supposedly written by Jorge Luis Borges. This artifact was in Héctor Abad Gómez’s pocket on the day he was killed. The strategies that characters in Oblivion use to remember trauma can be explored in the visualization to the left, whether personal (in blue), conversational (in green), or mediated (in red).
Throughout his novel, Abad Faciolince illustrates the ways in which the memory of his father resounds in his everyday life; the most potent reminders of a loved one, however, can often come from physical objects. This visualization explores the weight of everyday reminders in not only shaping an individual’s memories of a loved one, but in perpetuating the values that are espoused through those memories in their survivors’ lives.
For Abad Faciolince, these values range from ideological independence, to generosity, and to leveraging privilege to improve the common life. Through the objects he focuses on during these memories written in Oblivion, readers are prompted to consider how the clearest memories may be constructed not in explosions and foreign places, but in small flashes and familiar scenes.
This visualization began with a cataloging of significant objects in Oblivion, the related quotes and memories, and a short writing on what values are developed through those memories and how they apply to an audience outside of the family. After this process, the everyday objects chosen were assembled and photographed. The tagging was done in Thinglink, which allows one to attach the specific quotes and writings to their associated objects; hover to explore.
There seems to be a sense of stability when it comes to animals. We domesticate them and train them to stay by our side or we do what we need to to survive. Animals are constantly taken away from their location and displaced into communities where they are consumed, traded or bartered. In this visualization we see the consistency of animals mentioned in the novel. The cats, dogs and hens were the animals that Ismael interacted or noticed the most. Ismael's interactions with the animals guides the reader to believe that he yearns for stability in his hometown. Ismael encounters many difficulties like the kidnapping of his wife and many others in the town, the murder of members of the community and his memory deteriorating, but the animals stay the same. The animals are constantly there to remind him that they have been displaced and that now it is his turn to feel the displacement and uncomfort in his town, community and body.
