PROSTHETIC MEMORY AND THE MEDIATED CONSTRUCTION OF CHILDHOOD: ANALYSING TISHANI DOSHI'S SELECT POEMS FROM “COUNTRIES OF THE BODY

This article examines the two select poems of Tishani Doshi “The Day We Went to the Sea” and “Aj, Age 15,” from her poetry collection Countries of the Body (2006). These poems utilise childhood not as a first hand organically lived experience but as sensory, affective and somatic impression acquired through mediated representation that is capable of reshaping the subjectivity of the ones who lived through it. Engaging with Alison Landsberg’s theory of postmemory, by applying it beyond its primary cinematic and museal archive, this article shows how these lyric poems make use of the comparability of memory, that allows cross-experimental identification with coastal Indian childhood. The analysis engages Landsberg's ethical ambivalence about the politics of borrowed pasts as sites where prosthetic transfer is simultaneously enabled and complicated. Both poems taken for the study offer readers an opportunity to inhabit an intensely local coastal childhood while simultaneously marking that inhabitation as partial, second hand, and structurally belated. The article using Landsberg’s prosthetic memory framework to the literary lyrics of Doshi provides an account of how contemporary poetry participates in the circulation of cultural memory. The article concludes that the poems of Doshi not only represent childhood but also manufactures a version of that is shareable and that which can be circulated as a collective cultural memory, all the while retaining the friction between its social and historical origins.