Revoking Besieged Memories: Scanning Modes of Memory in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

The dominant history of Australia has always reflected the beauty and abundance of its aboriginal world,in dim light. An analysis of the literary canon too proves this lack of acknowledgement and understanding, of the native ways of life and identity formations. Carpentaria by Alexis Wright challenges the very notion of history as a single strand of chronologically ordered set of events. When besieged memories are evoked new traces of memory surface shedding new light on the past. It initiates a process rewriting history. Postmodern historiography today accepts the subjectivity and literariness of histories. Only a thin line exists between history and fiction. In a nation’s narrative, memory is a trope that foregrounds the polyphonic voices of the nation. The imaginary town of Desperance in Carpentaria is a microcosm of the Australian society. It is here, truth and appropriations crisscross to create a true picture of the Australian society. 
 


Introduction
Memories are alive and evolving. Forgetting is possible only if something has been memorised. Aboriginal memories are alive but marginalised and dominated by the foreigners who fail to comprehend its depth and relevance. Belonging to the Australian Waanyi tribe, Alexis Wright takes it upon herself to voice the silenced memories of her land. She has to her credit three well received novels; Plains of Promise (1997) Carpentaria (2006 and The Swan Book(2014). Carpentaria won her the coveted Miles Franklin award in 2007 and widened her international readership. This paper attempts to project Carpentaria as a "fiction of memory" (Neumann 334). The study of modes of memory that helps natives to revive identities and initiate a better understanding of themselves and the world around is an eye opener in many respects.
The term fictions of memory introduced by Ansgar Nunning, in the broad sense "refers to the stories that individuals or cultures tell about their past to answer the question "who am I?", or, collectively, "who are we?"" (Neumann 335). All postcolonial texts try to voice in one way or the other the atrocities, persecutions and resistance, of marginalised communities during the colonial regime. Dead ancestors and forgotten events resurface through such descriptions. Alexis Wright uses magic realism and dreamtime narration, to carve a niche for the aboriginal world she belongs to. In her works memory is "contested, multiple and negotiated" (Confino 80).
The text opens with the phrase "nation chants" (Wright,Carpentaria1), pulling the reader into a long chain of individual and group recollections. Wright is full of memories, supplied by her elders, especially her grandmother. Wright finds that these memories stand in stark contrast to the memories circulated by visuals, texts and culture around her. Wright has indirectly published her grandmother's stories through her novel Carpentaria. to the shared pool of memories, knowledge and information of a social group that is significantly associated with the group's identity" (Halbwachs 10). He points out that apart from individual memory, there exists social memory, created and circulated by groups. These group identities play a significant role in the formation of communities, histories and nations.

Sites of Memory
One method to concretise memories is to turn to sites of memory. Jay Winter says, "Sites of memory are places where people affirm their faith that history has a meaning" (70).
As events move further back into history, individuals and groups are forced to rely on sites aboriginal world that has disappeared behind colonisation and its accompanying modernity.
The serpent is the store house for all their history.
The ancestral serpent, a creature larger than storm clouds, came down from the stars, laden with its own creative enormity. It moved graciouslyif you had been watching with the eyes of a bird hovering in the sky far above the ground. Looking down at the serpent's wet body, glistering from the ancient sunlight, long before man was a creature who could contemplate the next Other bearers of include Normal who has three traces that makes him, a bearer of cultural memory. His workshop, a parrot and his knowledge of the ocean. In the same way Mozzie is also a bearer because he leads a convoy of zealots "along the spiritual travelling road of the great ancestor, whose journey continues to span the entire continent and is older than time itself" (Wright, Carpentaria 119). All these interactions among groups who believe in a "common image of their past" (J. Assmann 127) produce scope for circulation of communicative memory and cultural memory. www.ijellh.com 75

Conclusion
In any form literature exhibits a particular culture, language or period in history. It cannot but reflect the life of the writer and the activities around him. This impels readers to think, imagine and form responses. All the above identified sites, rituals, mnemonic devices, bearers of cultural memory etc. are emplotted to foreground native history and memory. They are separated from their original contexts and combined and juxtaposed to expose the subjugation, trauma and degeneration suffered by the native societies.