Hoyt Street: An Autobiography or Una Memoria de Desplazamiento or a Communo-Biography

Year 2006, Issue: 23, 87 - 93, 01.04.2006

Esra Sahtiyancı Öztarhan

Abstract

Memory is especially powerful for people who never had the opportunity to live in their homelands. Therefore longing for a past, remembering friends and family creates an “imaginary homeland”, where the diasporic people feel they belong somewhere. Memory as a reinvention of one’s past has multiple intentions whether conscious or not. First of all, remembering is a necessity, which emerges out of constructing the dissolved, lost and manipulated past Seyhan 4 . The act of remembering has a double function of both trying to narrate what has happened with names, numbers and dates as well as an act of creating a past, as one perceives or wants it to be. The purpose of creating a past may fill the gaps of the untold history. According to Seyhan, the narrative of displacement “is a narrative about narratives, more specifically, it is an investigation of stories and histories that recuperate losses incurred in migration, dislocation, and translation those deeply felt signs and markers of our age” Seyhan 4 . Such narratives are challenges to the dominant discourses.

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