The Burden of Memory: Trauma, and Identity in Post-colonial Narratives

Abstract

This study interrogates postcolonial motifs in Lisa See’s novel The Island of Sea Women, arguing that the text operates as an act of decolonial assertion on behalf of subjugated populations. It demonstrates how the narrative becomes a means through which individuals actively contest the legacies of imperial violence, negotiating and repurposing inherited cultural structures in the aftermath of colonial rupture. The novel hence moves beyond a simple recounting of colonial oppression, directing sustained attention toward the measures—both personal and communal—by which identity is reconstructed in the crucible of imperial war. In the context of the Pacific theatre of the Second World War, it reveals how postcolonial discourses rearticulate collective memory in order to address enduring trauma and assert the claims of historical justice, whilst simultaneously nurturing cultural self-consciousness. Jeju Island functions in the text as a palimpsest of memory, a referential surface affixed to the withholding of the Korean landmass, and, concomitantly, as a bastion of cultural archiving against the perils of national assimilation. The surrounding sea is elaborated, in the novel’s semiotic lexicon, as a repository of profound sorrow, persistent recollection, and slow, deliberate recuperation. The study traces the operation of generational trauma, observing how domestic, imperial, and global catastrophes cohere to forfeit an entire island’s historical consciousness. Central to the narrative is Young-sook, whose battered memory accumulates the sediment of multiple colonial episodes. Her personal journey discursively charts the embeddings of Japanese servitude, American military arrival, and, finally, the duplicity of the heroine’s childhood companion, Mi-ja. Each datum of the personal chronicles is discursively framed as a microcosm of societal registers of loss—silenced, strategized, and diffused across the decades—thus sedimenting the novel as an act of collective re-membering. The inquiry investigates the mechanisms through which colonial rule fractures indigenous social formations, foregrounding the dynamics of systemic marginalization, the erosion of collective identities, and the enforced uprooting of local populations. The specific case of the Republic of Korea—persistently negotiating the tension between inherited, pre-colonial cultural vectors, traumatic legacies of imperial rule, and the imposition of ongoing, transnational cultural forces—serves as the central axis of the examination. The narrative articulates the multifaceted repercussions of colonization, including the reordering of political authority, the persistent psychogenic aftereffects of collective trauma, and the pronounced reconfiguration of cultural praxis. Attention is directed to the trans-generational continuity of remembered trauma—an intersubjective store of memorial sedimentation whose iterative reach re-codifies subsequent subjectivities. The analysis thereby traces the sedimentation of colonially legitimized violence as it rescripts both everyday experience and normative social formations.