Student Essay on Ian Baucom and Midnight's Children, Wild Thorns, and Reading in the Dark

This essay will examine how memory is profoundly shaped not only by the historical identity of the community but also that of self.

In "Among the Ruins", Ian Baucom points out that, ."..if the nation is an imagined community, then the English nation is a community in mourning." As Baucom uses V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival repeatedly as an example, the reader becomes aware of a couple of points: that the state of nationalism within the individual is predictably the state of melancholy for a culture which has disintegrated, or changed to the point of near non-recognition, and that the longing and nostalgia for what has been lost creates problems in the individual's identity. Issues of identity and memory seem to plague the main characters of the last three novels we read in class: Aadam Aziz's nostalgia for the Kashmiri of his youth and problems constructing his European-Kashmiri identity, Usama's failure to comprehend the adjustments his fellow Palestinians.....