Women, rememory, and herstory: Reading Hangwoman as a feminist fiction of memory

ABSTRACT

This article reads Hangwoman (2014) by K.R. Meera as a feminist fiction of memory which narrates the herstory of India through the collective memory of the Grdhha Mullicks, a hangman family in Kolkata. It studies the novel as an example of mnemonic narrative that renders alternative histories of trauma in the lives of those at the margins, particularly, in this case, of women in the hangman family across the generations, through an exploration of counter memories. The novel’s protagonist Chetna reclaims women’s traumatic pasts as mediated through oral narratives in the form of intergenerational memory, intertwining myth and reality like the strands of a hang(wo)man’s rope. The mnemonic narrative creates a diegetic to reclaim (her)stories of women that have been erased from dominant national historiographies. By analysing how the undercurrents of rememory are infused into the fiction, the article demonstrates the potential of mnemonic feminist fiction to reclaim women’s subjectivity.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist fiction of memory
• Hangwoman
• herstory
• trauma
• mnemonic narrative
• rememory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. “Aarachar” in Malayalam is a gender-neutral term for “executioner” unlike the English equivalent “hangman”. But, as executioners are almost always men, the term “aarachar” is putatively masculine. The novel disrupts putative gender norms with this title.

2. The term “rememory” is coined by Toni Morrison (2019) to refer to the process of “recollecting and remembering the members of the body, the family, the population of the past” (n.p).

3. Morrison states that rememory is a traumatic process crucial to making sense of the present: “Nobody in [Beloved] can bear too long to dwell on the past; nobody can avoid it” (2019, n.p).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sruthi Vinayan

Sruthi Vinayan is assistant professor of English at the Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai. Her research interests include memory studies, Kerala Modernity studies, early-20^th-century women’s magazines from Kerala, and Indian writing in English.

Merin Simi Raj

Merin Simi Raj is associate professor of English at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. She is the co-founding chairperson of the Indian Network for Memory Studies (INMS). Her research interests are memory studies, Anglo Indian studies, digital humanities, and historiography studies. She has co-edited the volume Anglo-Indian Identity: Past and Present, in India and the Diaspora (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).