Remebering as resilience: translatedness and unbelonging in Hanif Kureishi’s My Ear at his Heart

This article argues a two-fold point: (a) modern-day experience is inhabited by mobility that breeds a sense of rootlessness and un-belonging, consequently, reflections on identity and selfhood are enmeshed in a fabric of translatedness; (b) memoirs and life writings can be read as acts of translation, of bearing lived experience across a narrated page. To be able to tell a story about the self, one translates the experiential into words – words that attempt to make sense out of the randomness of existence. The inherent translatedness of the genre is additionally evinced when the narrated life unfolds under the aegis of migration. All these issues are discussed a propos a biography of sorts: Hanif Kureishi’s My Ear at His Heart. Reading My Father (2004). The book presents unpublished autobiographical material by Kureishi’s father, and as it describes, and to an extent, fictionalizes a story of dislocation, the storyteller’s literal writing movement mirrors and problematizes the migrant’s translatedness of being. The complexity of Kureishi’s text is compounded by the fact that it is both an attempt at (auto)biography and a form of memoir, as the lives of father and son are inextricably entangled. Looking into the potential translatability of the memoir as a genre allows for the possibilities and constraints of representing the self to come to the forefront. Following Hall, ‘the notion of displacement as a place of ‘identity’ is a concept you learn to live with, long before you are able to speak it. Living with, living through difference’ (Hall, 1997: 134). This means that one must dismember in order to remember.