Remembering through Retelling: An analysis of Easterine Kire’s fiction

Abstract

This paper will bring forth the memory of a community that has seen immense death and heartbreak as a result of wars and political unrest in the region. Easterine Kire is a poet and novelist who has written extensively on her people, the Nagas. Kire mainly writes about the Angami Nagas in her works of fiction, which are mostly based on real-life events. Her novels Mari (2010), A Respectable Woman (2019) and Bitter Wormwood (2011) will be taken into study. In these three novels, Easterine Kire tells the story of her people, how they fought the “white-man’s war” and the Naga insurgency against the Indian union in their struggle to be a free state. The latter part of the paper will focus on the task of the writer, how s/he has to write about the unadulterated history of their people. The task of writing “ourselves/themselves” thus becomes a combined effort of the writer and the people when collective memories are recollected and put in print for future generations. This paper also acts as a detailed review of the mentioned three novels of Easterine Kire while discussing matters such as memory, history and trauma. The last part of the paper focuses on Easterine Kire’s reflections on her own novel Bitter Wormwood and her purpose of writing the novel.

Keywords: Memory, history, Battle of Kohima, NNC, factional groups, misrepresentation, cease-fire, peace talks, collective memory.