Growing Up with Ghosts: Dynamics of Re-Memory and Trauma in a Malaysian Filial Memoir

Abstract

Communicating stories matter when writers highlight the dynamics of mining the most private experiences for material. Whether humiliating or painful, it is often in the hands of writers that stories are made profound, interesting and fascinating. Yet, to readers, vivid scenarios, specific identification, convincing characters and real-life snapshots, just to name a few, present insights into human condition. Malaysian writers who report such investigations describing more than just their own memories and histories include Bernice Chauly and her critically acclaimed memoir, “Growing Up with Ghosts”. “Growing Up with Ghosts” begins with a private memory of a four-year-old girl at the freak drowning of her father and gradually unfolds into a patrio/matriographic memoir that recounts the paternal and maternal history of her Chinese and Punjabi ancestries. Using key concepts of memory theory and trauma studies including rememory, postmemory and empathic unsettlement, this article primarily examines the collection of episodic and semantic memory presented in the memoir. The reflexive and often sporadic, chaotic recounts following the death of her father provides a vivid depiction of the experience of post-parental death. The findings reveal how the filial memoir implicates the reader through “empathic unsettlement” of the trauma suffered by the memoirist through acts of memory, rememory and postmemory. The reader also suffers the burden through postmemory in the act of reading the delayed, indirect and secondary memory of the memoirist. Reading a multigenre, multivocal narrative can capture the theme of loss and grief not merely as a form of selfpositioning, but more significantly, as a move towards creating an “identity forging discourse”.