At the Full and Change of the Moon: The Passing Down of Cultural Memory in the Black Diaspora

Authors

• Anh Hua

Document Type

Article

Abstract

[First paragraph]

Referring to the Holocaust, James Young argues that historians mistakenly make a forced distinction between memory and history, where history is defined as that which happened and memory as that which is remembered of what happened. This leaves no room for the survivor’s voice and the survivor’s memory of the events, whose value is lost to the historians. James Young is interested in bridging the gap between a survivor’s “deep memory” and historical narrative, how to remember the past as it passes from living memory to history (276-277). Historical inquiry, for Young, is understood as “the combined study of both what happened and how it is passed down to us” (283). Instead of creating a gap between what happened and how it is remembered, Young proposes that we can benefit more by examining “what happens when the players of history remember their [pasts for] subsequent generations” (283). Like James Young, Dionne Brand imagines how the subjects of history, the slaves and their descendents, remember their past for subsequent generations. Brand attempts to understand what happened during slavery and how slavery is passed down to us. In this article, I will examine how Afro-Caribbean Canadian writer Dionne Brand reflects on the cultural memory of slavery in her novel At the Full and Change of the Moon. Brand, in her interest in exploring the psychic and material aftermath effects of slavery, is concerned with cultural memory – memory constructed from cultural forms, particularly the recollection of events of which we may not have first-hand experience and knowledge (Misztal 158).