"Gender, Generation and Memory"

Remembering a Future Caribbean"
by Alissa Trotz

My paternal grandmother died in 2003 at the age of 95. Some years earlier, she had begun to lose her short-term memory, although this did not diminish her ability to recall events in (what was for me) the distant past, complete with time of day, what she was wearing and doing, in absolutely astonishing and minute detail. There is a medical diagnosis for this condition, but in the context of what I want to offer tonight, I sometimes wonder whether my grandmother’s selective forgetting metaphorically indexed the fact that, in the dusk of her life, there was little that was memorable in the contemporary Caribbean. (full article)

Thanks
I would like to thank Alissa Trotz for allowing me to reproduce an abbrevited version of her paper. The connections between her text and the film are clear. Also, thank you to the Centre for Gender and Development Studies (CGDS)UWI, Cave Hill, Barbados; for giving permission to have the edited paper here.

The full paper will be available from the CGDS in March 2008. Visit their website or email the CGDS at gender@uwichill.edu.bb