https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.044
Buried Pulses: Gendered Counter-Memories in K. R. Meera’s The Vein of Memory and Qabar
NAFILA ZUBAIR
Independent Researcher
Former Assistant Professor on Contract
Department of English (Self Finance)
Farook College (Autonomous), Kerala
Abstract: The acts of remembering and forgetting are never innocent. Memory—both individual and collective—is consistently shaped by power structures. As Maurice Halbwachs states in his seminal work The Social Frameworks of Memory, “It is in society that people gain awareness of their memories in the first place. Through it, they acquire memories. Because individual memory is nothing but an aspect of group memory.” In a patriarchal society, women’s experiences are often subverted or omitted from collective memories, rendering these silenced, fragmented herstories consciously forgotten in traditional narratives.
K. R. Meera’s short story The Vein of Memory and novel Qabar explore how female experiences are subjugated and erased within patriarchal histories. By offering counter-narratives of these selectively forgotten pasts, the author transforms memory into an introspective experience for her female protagonists. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, this paper examines how K. R. Meera’s The Vein of Memory and the novel Qabar give shape to gendered, intergenerational traumas that women inherit through maternal silence, photographs, and fragmented oral histories, and how these memories become a dynamic space for negotiation and reconstruction.
Keywords: Postmemory, Counter-Narrative, Memory Theory, Feminism
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