Memory in the Hybrid Literary Text: With Special Reference to Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love, and Nathalie Handal’s The Lives of Rain

Abstract

This dissertation aims at answering the question: why does the writer of the hybrid literary text recall the collective memory of his/her nation while he/she is addressing a foreign audience? This is a cross-generic study that examines the relevance of memory through ‘memory studies’ and New Historicism which immersed in the postcolonial context. These hybrid literary texts are essentially concerned with the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. Every text from the three selected deals with memory in a particular way; Wole Soyinka resorts to myths, Soueif calls for mezzaterra and Handal prepares the readers for her project of global gathering. In these texts the revealing of memory is oriented to the English reader, though they discuss the collective memory of each writer’s nation (Nigeria for Soyinka, Egypt for Soueif, and Palestine as well as other nations for Handal). In all three texts, I contend that memory substitutes official history. The texts depict the lives of the ordinary people, give voice to the voiceless where memory/history from below is shared by the whole society in ‘a marketplace.’