When Things Speak: Memory, Objects, and Resistance in Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp

Abstract

Banu Mushtaq’s collection of short stories, Heart Lamp: Selected Stories, presents domestic spaces as sites of memory, resistance, and loss. The article tries to look at two select stories from this collection, “A Taste of Heaven” and “The Shroud”, to decode how fiction treats material objects not only as symbols of patriarchal confinement but also as archives of lived experiences, especially that of women. Here objects function as repositories where women’s histories are stored, transmitted, and even threatened. Sometimes the connection that an object establishes is so intimate and powerful that it promises a future opening to investigate the lives of women which would otherwise be erased once and for all. To account for this connection between memory and materiality, this article uses three interconnected theoretical frameworks: the concept of embodied memory, the notion of aura, and the distinctions between restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. These frameworks help reading the Heart Lamp as a sustained meditation on the material memory which exposes the histories of women through intimate objects even when the patriarchal structures render these histories precarious. The objects associated with women in this text are both an archive and a battleground that calls in for further discussions.