Roberta Buhagiar

Lost Child at Sea: Postmemory and the Mediterranean Imaginary in Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and ‘The Sea Drinkers’

In describing the Mediterranean’s human and demographic facet, Braudel notes how ‘the Mediterranean has no unity but that created by the movements of men, the relationships they imply, and the routes they follow’.[1] Indeed, Braudel’s historiographic account of the Mediterranean traces the restless peoples of the Mediterranean as they inhabit the geographical region in a constant flux of ‘movement in space’,[2] both overland and overseas. The antithesis to the constant movement was created in ‘the resting places’,[3] towns and ports destined to become modern day metropolises and touristic locations, wherein tradesmen and travellers could rest, nourish themselves, trade and move on. The Mediterranean routes led to increased wealth, a rise in populations and an ultimate increase in prosperity that led to the industrialised years, the subsequent militarised operations and war conflicts of the twentieth century, and the globalised realities of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Braudel concludes the Mediterranean, and by proxy, the Mediterranean imaginary, constitutes ‘a thousand things at once’.[4]

This essay approaches the notion of the Mediterranean imaginary from its twenty-first century context wherein Mare Nostrum, the Roman term for the Mediterranean Sea, has been poignantly re-appropriated by the Italian military to refer to extensive air and naval operations to address the mass migration event.[5] The latter dominates media narratives about the Mediterranean region, giving rise to the Mediterranean migrant narrative. In response to this mass migration event, a plethora of works have been conceived by a variety of individuals from diverse artistic backgrounds and nationalities: from novels to film, visual performance to protest art. Such artistic manifestations become an exercise in regarding ‘the pain of others’.[6] Alternatively, such works serve the possibility, to quote Marianne Hirsch, to ‘offer each other [a chance to confront] the past without allowing its tragic dimensions to overwhelm our imagination in the present and the future’.[7] Encountering texts on the migrant experience is therefore a productive exercise in configuring and re-configuring the Mediterranean imaginary of which such texts are intimately a part of, and bound for ‘less directly affected participants’.[8] In her monograph, The Generation of Postmemory, Hirsch outlines her thesis on memory and postmemory as the ‘inter-and transgenerational return of traumatic knowledge and embodied experience’[9] wherein such knowledge serves as a ‘form of counter-history’,[10] to dominating and often generalised narratives on the subject.

In this essay, I aim to apply Hirsch’s notion of postmemory to two texts which, read together, provide a multitude of stories in relation to the Moroccan migrant’s experience. I focus particularly on the figure and trope of ‘the lost child,’ a figure, which, in the context of postmemory, can be considered as a poignant figure of dispossession due to the physical and psycho-emotional rifts caused by the perilous journey over sea, an event central to the Mediterranean migrant’s experience. I argue that the ‘lost child’ is not only an effective narratorial trope in the context of postmemory, but it also exposes the inherent conundrum of postmemory: the ‘uneasy oscillation between continuity and rupture’.[11] To conclude the current inquiry, I note how the ‘lost child’ also serves as a redemptive vehicle who, within the context of postmemory, re-activates and re-animates inaccessible cultural memories in a powerful exercise of empathy and connection.

The two texts selected for analysis are Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Youssouf Amine Elalamy’s ‘Sea Drinkers’. Both narratives provide adequate opportunity to explore the notion of the lost child: young, adult and old alike, particularly in the way the trope is used to feed into the ‘imaginative […] projection and creative process’[12] of migrant postmemory and consequently, how these findings construct the Mediterranean imaginary in the two texts. Morocco serves as the backdrop for most of Lalami and Elalamy’s narratives – specifically, a Morocco in which the Mediterranean Sea serves as a ‘frustrating geographical impediment’[13] for the characters who seek a North-bound, better life in Spain. Literary accounts of immigrant experiences, particularly Maghrebis travelling from North Africa to Europe, have been prolific since the 1990s. The prevalence of such literature became all the more pronounced in Morocco with Spain’s ‘decision in 1991 to end Moroccans’ privileged status to enter Spain without a VISA’,[14] thus establishing a ‘North’ border and a ‘South’ border, as well as ‘a pressing obsession for many Moroccans’[15] to leave their home country in search of economic prosperity in Europe. An added contextual note is required to take into account Morocco’s recent history. As Orlando notes, ‘since 1999, the death of King Hassan II […] Moroccan sociocultural production […] reflects the current transitions in democratisation’[16] whereby artists and authors reflect and write about the so called ‘Years of Lead (1963-99) under the regime of King Hassan II’,[17] a historical period wherein freedom of speech and writing was curtailed and controlled. If the Mediterranean Sea represents the geographical backdrop for Lalami and Elalamy’s narratives, the aforementioned legal and historical contexts provide the economic motive for the characters in both stories and constitute significant root causes for the traumatic event of migration and its outcomes.

Before delving into a closer analysis of Lalami and Elalamy’s work, this essay shall now turn to a brief overview of Hirsch’s theoretical framework on postmemory. Hirsch’s premise regarding postmemory describes:

The relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective and cultural trauma of those who came before […] [and] transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection and creation.[18]

Hirsch’s discussion on postmemory is located within the frame of the Holocaust, particularly since she imbues her work with personal and semi-autobiographical experiences. However, extreme value lies in the application of her framework to other contexts, as done here in the context of the Mediterranean ‘migration crisis’.[19] Within the context of Lalami and Elalamy’s texts, the traumatic event surrounding the migration crisis constitutes three facets: first, the traumatic events that led to, and ultimately sustain the impoverished life in Morocco. Secondly, the harrowing sea journey between Morocco and Spain, and, thirdly, the stark realities of life in Spain as a foreign immigrant. Postmemory, in Hirsch’s framework, highlights memory transfer and transposition which takes place between generations, whereby memories of survivors are passed on and inherited by ‘the children of exile’.[20] Such children encounter ‘the elegiac aura of the memory of a place to which one cannot return’,[21] passed on to them through parent and other survivors’ accounts. It is this act of memory transfer which gives rise to postmemory, in which the inheritor of the memory also becomes a partial creator and co-author of the memory. Hirsch notes: ‘postmemory seeks connection’[22] and thus, the agents of postmemory, often represented through the trope of the child, gain an imaginative right and license to memories. Here, Hirsch dwells on the various nuances of postmemory, particularly the difference between ‘affiliative’ and ‘collective’ postmemories.[23] However, for the purposes of this research, such terminological detail is foregone and Hirsch’s approach and interest in ‘exploring affiliative structures of memory beyond the familial […] [into] connective memory work as another form of affiliation’[24] is maintained.

Several inherent issues arise in applying postmemory theory and work to Elalamy and Lalami’s narratives. The migration crisis represents a variety of traumatic events whereby escaping or surviving one traumatic event often leads into another, as the different traumatic facets of the crisis iterated above illustrate. Delineating where the trauma ends and where the survivor phase begins, thus allowing postmemory to take place, becomes a murky exercise with no clear parameters. The additional lack of temporal distance from the ongoing Mediterranean migrant crises also limits the hindsight abilities as well as the adult generational remove that allows Hirsch to write critically about the Holocaust. Nevertheless, I argue that Hirsch’s postmemory work may be successfully applied to Lalami and Elalamy’s work and may prove to extend the original theoretical framework. A pivotal note Hirsch establishes about postmemory is the fact that it works as a generational ‘transactive, transferential process’[25] between parent and child or trauma survivor to community. In the case of the many migrant subjects dealt with by Lalalmi and Elalamy, the parent may outlive the child, or the child moves towards another traumatic event rather than away from the notion of trauma in the first place. Either way, the individual or vehicle for postmemory to take place is denied or lost. In this case, postmemory takes on multi-directional characteristics and the readers witness postmemory moving from parent to lost child, lost child to parent and ultimately, narrative to reader. Elalamy’s and Lalami’s fictional narratives provide the space for readers to act as ‘second generation’ individuals and participate in the postmemorial act as a result of the reader being exposed to the ‘embodiment, privacy, and intimacy […] [of the] the minute events of daily life’[26] of the texts’ characters. I argue that these forms of postmemory transfer still act within Hirsch’s theoretical framework given the memories relayed offer a means of ‘animating forgetting, oblivion, and erasure and thus to engage in acts of repair and redress’.[27]

Hirsch’s methodology revolves around the analysis of photographs whereby ‘as we look at these images, they look back at us, and, […] we enter the visual space of postmemory’.[28] However this research opts for fiction analysis particularly as the photograph in the context of the migrant event involves a ‘“discorpsing” discourse […] which disclose[s] unidentified subjectivities’.[29] It is through the medium of fiction that authors may provide a sense of individuality to the characters in a context when mass media relegates most migrant victims to ‘remain invisible and unreported’.[30] Lalami and Elalamy provide a number of intimate portrayals into the personal lives of characters that individuate and humanise them to the extent that the reader is able to corroborate the act of postmemory taking place within the narrative.

The trope of the lost child is particularly important within the context of migrant fiction given the fact that the child is ‘less individualized, less marked by the particularities of identity […] and [they] lend themselves to universalization’.[31] This holds truth within mass media, established as severely dehumanizing in the manner it portrays ‘the Mediterranean [as] […] a zone of interception and capture’.[32] An exception to the norm can be identified in the image of Aylan Kurdi, ‘the 3-year-old boy who drowned on 2 September 2015 in a failed attempt to flee Syria’,[33] which captured worldwide attention due to the image’s conveyance of the harrowing events unfolding in the Mediterranean sea. Lalami and Elalamy’s language and narratives provide the readers with poignant scenes. An apt example can be found in Elalamy’s work where he introduces the reader early on to a shore scene where drowned victims of a Mediterranean Sea crossing have been washed up on the town’s beach and the community gathers in trepidation to identify the individuals. The reader is told how ‘all those eyes looking right, left, ahead, behind […] desperately seeking among the multitude of signs a detail, something, anything, tooth, moustache, ring’[34] in an attempt to identify and note the fates of their fellow neighbours, family members and children.

The manner in which postmemory is analysed, apart from the fiction narrative source material, is also through the notion of the ‘testimonial object’.[35] One such prevalent physical and visual object takes form in bodily scarring and marks.[36] Through such objects and marks, the inherent ‘oscillation between continuity and rupture’,[37] what is here termed as the postmemory conundrum, emerges. Hirsch provides Sethe’s example in Beloved whereby the mother’s mark of slavery – the ‘mark of untranslatability becomes the untranslatability of the mark’.[38] The withholding of the past becomes an issue whereby a severely traumatic memory marks ‘the break […] between the one who lived […]’,[39] the traumatic experience and the one who didn’t.  The ‘multitude of signs’[40] Elalamy notes above illustrates the nature of the traumatic memory of the sea crossing and serves as a harrowing yet necessary process of identification for the Moroccan townspeople. Additionally, the stories of the characters in ‘Sea Drinkers’ unfold through the memories of the living and subsequent flashbacks of the victims. The reader encounters the corpses at the start of the story but is provided with names, life and background details on the characters throughout the story, which culminates in a moment of metafictive awareness to the following statement: ‘this is the story of twelve men and a woman. The woman is pregnant: twelve plus one makes fourteen. Fourteen characters crossing the blue in the black of night’.[41] Thus, the reader is brought into the work as a witness and collaborator in the postmemorial act and narratives of the characters.

It is important at this point to reiterate the scope of this project: to engage in a confrontation with fictive migrant narratives which constitutes a representation of the cultural and demographic context of the Mediterranean imaginary ‘without allowing its tragic dimensions to overwhelm our imagination in the present and the future’.[42] Part of this exercise requires an appreciation of postmemory as inherently fraught with a conundrum: its ‘uneasy oscillation between continuity and rupture’.[43] Lalami and Elalamy, as aforementioned, situate their texts in Morocco. Both authors use multiple narrators, characters as well as flashbacks and flashforwards to immerse the reader into the lives of individuals who attempt the crossing between Morocco and Spain, as well as the characters who stay behind in Morocco, and in some cases, outlive them. The sentiment of the sea journey is perhaps best expressed through Murad’s opening line in Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits: ‘Fourteen kilometers […] Some days he told himself that the distance was nothing […] Other days he could think only about the coast guards, the ice-cold water’.[44] The latter quotes highlights the rationalizing process that Murad undergoes, dominated at times by the sheer terror and fear such a journey entails.

The trope of the lost child is best exemplified in instances where children are lost to sea. The narration of these instances provide an insight into the denial of post-memorial work and best illustrate how the reader may be brought in instead for that matter. In a poignant scene in ‘Sea Drinkers,’ Chama, a pregnant woman who has just had her boat capsized and is stranded in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, sings her and her unborn child’s eulogy in anticipation of their death:

I sing and sing sing, never stopping, I sing to the child you planted in me and that death’s come looking for. I’ve given him a name, Gabriel […]  I sing in memory of my companions lost in the belly of the sea.[45]

Chama’s defiant song simultaneously christens and eulogises the child named after the angel tasked with enlightening the prophet Muhammed with God’s word. The child, intended to be the messenger and enabler of what would eventually account as postmemory, allowing Chama’s story, plight and trauma to live on, is lost to the sea. Singing thus becomes Chama’s ‘way of dying’,[46] an appeal to voice not only her story, but also all other drowned victims. The child is thus lost to the sea, as are many others, both literally and figuratively. Louafi’s mother, upon encountering the drowned body of her son on the Moroccan beach near their hometown, notes how the sea, ‘fierce old mother that took her son from her, […] [had] turned his head, drank him down in a gulp, spit him back on the sand’.[47] The child is thus not only lost to the sea, but in a perversion of parental lineage, Louafi’s mother notes her inferiority when faced with the ‘old mother,’ in part the human mother becomes a child when faced with the mythological power of the sea, which has now claimed her son and is dictating the specific memories that may be passed on into postmemory. The postmemory allowed in such a context is dominated, in ‘Sea Drinkers’ by the shore scene which brings together the stories and narratives of all the drowned victims in the text.

Scattered about the sand, a strange kettle of fish. Fish so big they might have been human. God forbid, they look human, dear God, like people, they are people! And oh my God, they’re our people.[48]

In some instances, the trope of the lost child represents the inherent conundrum of postmemory. In the sole instance of a character conducting a homecoming journey from Spain to Morocco following his successful entry and settling down in Spain, Aziz returns back to his home to this mother and wife. Upon returning, his mother is described as ‘looking regal and aloof’.[49] She exudes the confidence of a fulfilled matriarch, her son having not only successfully completed the journey to Spain, but prospered and returned to his home. Her sacrifices and hardships in a poor Moroccan town have not only rendered fruits, but have also enabled Aziz as the son to initiate aspects of postmemory as he detaches himself from a Moroccan world and an economically destitute familial landscape to prosperous Spain. Yet Aziz, the child who embarks on a homecoming, simultaneously illustrates ‘the lost child.’ Upon reflecting on his wife’s demeanor and reaction to him returning to Morocco he notes: ‘He had seen how she had looked at the neighbour’s child […] He didn’t want to risk having children yet, not like this’.[50] The child is thus denied existence as a result of the trauma. For postmemory to fully take place within Aziz’s family, he and his wife would have to move to Spain, successfully integrate and have children who would then serve as the conduits of the traumatic experience of the sea immigrant’s journey. And yet, the reader is denied such closure as Lalami ends Aziz’s chapter with an indicative metaphor: ‘He closed his suitcase and lifted it off the bed. It felt lighter than when he had arrived’.[51] The suitcase, hallmark of the traveler, has lightened in anticipation for a return journey and takes on the role of a ‘testimonial object.’ The chapter’s title ‘Homecoming,’ a title anticipating closure for Aziz’s trauma inverts as the notion of ‘home’ flits and shifts from Aziz’s Moroccan town to his flat in Spain. Home space becomes fractured, deepening the fissure initiated by the trauma of the sea journey and postmemory’s challenges are exposed as the familial characters attempt, and fail, to bridge the gap between the one who has made the journey, and the others who have not. The child is, thus, lost or denied.

The conundrum and impossibilities of postmemory are perhaps best exemplified through the motif of the ‘storyteller’ – a character in Lalami and Elalamy’s texts whose trade, skills and heritage revolve around storytelling. In Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, this character is Murad, who, having had to relocate in Morocco after a failed attempt at the sea crossing recalls, in a moment of nostalgia, his father’s stories and notes that he could ‘remember the stories only in fragments, names like Juha and Aisha rising to his consciousness […] pieces of a puzzle he couldn’t reconstruct’.[52] The postmemorial effort of Morocco takes place in a powerful moment for Murad as he invests in his imaginative abilities to recall the myths and tales recounted to him as a boy. In a powerful act of postmemory, Murad proceeds to reconstruct and re-tell the stories he scarcely remembers to an audience, imbuing them with his own imaginative capabilities. The reader mirrors the audience as s/he becomes witness to the multiple stories of the diverse set of characters. In ‘Sea Drinkers,’ we meet yet another son of a storyteller, however he meets a harrowing fate as he drowns and is washed up ashore where his mother mourns him and his stories - ‘drowned on the ocean floor, piles of words, thousands of words, words of every imaginable colour like little fish in the water’.[53] Any postmemorial potential is here thwarted as the mother herself notes the loss of words, of memories ‘legible but unread […] all those words he should have shared with the people of the village’.[54]

The Mediterranean crossing undoubtedly presents itself as the key traumatic event dealt with in both narratives; however, as aforementioned, the trauma extends itself to the period before and after the crossing of many characters. Lalami illustrates the complexity of the traumatic context for her characters with Noura and Fatma’s story. The former is the daughter of a Moroccan Education minister, upper-class, wealthy and destined to follow her older sibling’s journey to the Westernised world to pursue her studies. The latter is an impoverished daughter of a nameless mother and an absent father. Both girls cross paths and become friends at which point Fatma starts influencing Noura to adopt a stricter version of Islamic practice and tradition. Noura’s father – horrified, reflects: ‘Where had he gone wrong? […] He was at fault somehow […] In the end it didn’t matter, he had lost her again’.[55] The child here is figuratively lost to a way of life that is alien and incompatible with the one her parents have crafted, severing the possibility of postmemory. In response, Noura’s father ‘had pulled some strings to have [Fatma] kicked out of the university’[56] which led to Fatma’s protest against institutionalised corruption and the King. Arrested and banished, Fatma finds herself making the crossing to Spain where she becomes a prostitute. In an encounter with one of her friendlier and more caring Spanish clients, she finds herself opening up on her heritage, her faith and her future wherein she realises she cannot fully articulate her life in Morocco and does not feel able to do so. Alienated from her Moroccan life, Fatma, in parallel to Noura, has also had her connection and memories to Moroccan life severed.

Yet, the lost child also presents itself as a redemptive vehicle. In Fatma’s chapter’s closing lines, she sits down for an Eid meal with her Moroccan roommate in a conscious attempt at reconnection with her past and with the community that she originally comes from, exemplified through her surly roommate. Postmemorial work thus reveals itself to be redemptive in the face of trauma and loss – only if the characters consciously seek to navigate and encounter the aforementioned loss. Halima and her children in Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits best exemplifies the redemptive nature of the child. Having conducted the sea journey with her children, failed and nearly drowned before being rescued close to Spain and deported back to Morocco, she notes the following about her son, Farid: ‘Farid had saved her. Some people said it was impossible. They said the boy was only ten years old […] You have to forgive her, they said, she’s been through so much’.[57] The child is, in this rare instance, not only not lost, but gains the status of a saviour. Both texts are replete with religious and mythical imagery that imbue the child in this manner as the bridge and connection for postmemorial work. The survival of the child is thus celebrated, almost beatified as in the case of Farid and Chama’s unborn Gabriel. The loss of the child is mourned alongside the harrowing nature of the severed connection between the parent generation and the second generation. In both cases however, the characters seek redemption alongside the narrative in a gentle, yet defiant struggle to retain the individualised memories and enable postmemory to take place within the character’s world, or the reader’s world in an acute need and desire to pass on the imaginative capability and memories to enable postmemory.

The Mediterranean imaginary in Lalami and Elalamy’s texts reduce the sea to a body of ‘WATER […] 1. Colorless, transparent, odorless liquid’[58]oftentimes insurmountable, unconquerable and a space which in the fictional as in the real world, thwarts, frustrates and silences the characters and their stories in their attempt to carry out the sea crossing. In doing so, the Mediterranean becomes representative of a thousand stories, untold and tragic for the most part, yet redemptive and powerful in their ability to generate postmemorial work. Phrased succinctly, the type of postmemory that takes place between characters as well as between narrative and reader is crucial given that it exposes postmemory work ‘beyond the familiar, and […] [into] connective memory work’.[59] Ultimately, as Hirsch notes, ‘postmemorial work […] strives to reactivate and re-embody more distant political and cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression’.[60] Lalami and Elalamy imbue their work with such a motive in mind and Hirsch’s framework on postmemory elucidates and expands the scope of the narratives analysed in this essay with potential application to various other texts about, yet also beyond, the Mediterranean space and the migration event.

Bibliography:

Abderrezak, Hakim, ‘Burning the Sea: Clandestine Migration Across the Strait of Gibraltar in Francophone Moroccan “Illiterature”’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 13:4 (2009), pp. 461-469

Amine Elalamy, Youssouf, ‘Sea Drinkers’, in Two Novellas By YAE: A Moroccan in New York and Sea Drinkers’, trans. by John Liechty (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008)

Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. by Siân Reynolds and abridged by Richard Ollard (New York: Harper Collins, 1992)

Hirsch, Marianne, ‘Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile’, Poetics Today, 17:4 (1996), pp. 659-686

Hirsch, Marianne, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012)

Lalami, Laila, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005)

Musarò, Pierluigi, ‘Mare Nostrum: the visual politics of a military-humanitarian operation in the Mediterranean Sea’, Media, Culture & Society, 39:1 (2017), 11-28

Orlando, Valérie K., ‘Women, madness, myth and film: exploring Moroccan psychological trauma and postmemory in Pegase (Mohamed Mouftakir, 2010)’, The Journal of North African Studies, 21:1 (2016), pp. 90-107

Reekum, Rogier van, ‘The Mediterranean: Migration Corridor, Border Spectacle, Ethical Landscape’, Mediterranean Politics, 21:2 (2016), pp. 336-341

Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003)

[1] Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. by Siân Reynolds and abridged by Richard Ollard (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), p. 201.

[2] Ibid., p. 202.

[3] Ibid., p. 203.

[4] Ibid., p. 7.

[5] Pierluigi Musarò, ‘Mare Nostrum: the visual politics of a military-humanitarian operation in the Mediterranean Sea’, in Media, Culture & Society, 39:1 (2017), pp. 11-28, p. 11.

[6] Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003).

[7] Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 24-25.

[8] Ibid., p. 33.

[9] Ibid., p. 6.

[10] Ibid., p. 6.

[11] Ibid., p. 6.

[12] Ibid., p. 5.

[13] Hakim Abderrezak, ‘Burning the Sea: Clandestine Migration Across the Strait of Gibraltar in Francophone Moroccan “Illiterature”’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 13:4 (2009), pp. 461-469, p. 464.

[14] Abderrezak, p. 461.

[15] Ibid., p. 464.

[16] Valérie K. Orlando, ‘Women, madness, myth and film: exploring Moroccan psychological trauma and postmemory in Pegase (Mohamed Mouftakir, 2010)’, The Journal of North African Studies, 21:1 (2016), pp. 90-107, p. 90.

[17] Ibid., p. 90.

[18] Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, p. 5.

[19] Rogier van Reekum, ‘The Mediterranean: Migration Corridor, Border Spectacle, Ethical Landscape’, Mediterranean Politics, 21:2 (2016), pp. 336-341, p. 336.

[20] Marianne Hirsch, ‘Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile’, Poetics Today, 17:4 (1996), pp. 659-686, p. 664.

[21] Ibid., p. 664.

[22] Ibid., p. 664.

[23] Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, p. 21.

[24] Ibid., p. 21.

[25] Ibid., p. 31.

[26] Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, p. 17.

[27] Ibid., p. 16.

[28] Ibid., p. 161.

[29] Abderrezak, p. 468.

[30] Musarò, p. 12.

[31] Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, p. 162.

[32] Reekum, p. 338.

[33] Musarò, p. 12.

[34] Youssouf Amine Elalamy, ‘Sea Drinkers, in Two Novellas By YAE: A Moroccan in New York and Sea Drinkers’, trans. by John Liechty (Plymouth, United Kingdom: Lexington Books, 2008), p. 107.

[35] Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, p. 24.

[36] Ibid., p. 80.

[37] Ibid., p. 6.

[38] Ibid., p. 81.

[39] Ibid., p. 86.

[40] Elalamy, p. 107.

[41] Ibid., p. 148.

[42] Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, p. 25.

[43] Ibid., p. 6.

[44] Laila Lalami, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005), p. 1.

[45] Elalamy, pp. 118-119.

[46] Ibid., p. 137.

[47] Ibid., p. 110.

[48] Elalamy, p. 94.

[49] Lalami, p. 13.

[50] Ibid., p. 163.

[51] Ibid., p. 167.

[52] Lalami, p. 174.

[53] Elalamy, p. 124.

[54] Ibid., p. 150.

[55] Lalami, pp. 50-51.

[56] Ibid., p. 139.

[57] Lalami, p. 113.

[58] Elalamy, p. 99.

[59] Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, p. 21.

[60] Ibid., p. 33.