A Curator in the House of Memory: Restoration, Implication and the Post-Conflict Novel in Aminatta Forna’s The Hired Man

Abstract

Aminatta Forna’s novel The Hired Man, on post-war Croatia, attests to the author's continued interest in transitional, post-conflict societies where mass atrocity and human rights violations such as forced disappearance and ethnic cleansing have taken place. Drawing on the conceptual framework of transitional justice and memory studies, this paper argues that the novel deepens and extends the concerns of post-conflict fiction in two main ways. Firstly, it explores the role of ordinary individuals as agents of restorative justice in small communities. The actual restoration of the house at the centre of the narrative transforms the building into a permanent site of memory that challenges collective amnesia and functions as a monument to coexistence on which to model future social relations. Secondly, the narrative provides an apt illustration of Rothberg’s notion of implication, foregrounding a model of indirect responsibility for historical injustice that problematises the figure of the naïve outsider through the foreign characters in the story. The narrative will work to engage these characters in collective restorative actions in the country’s troubled progress towards a fairer and more sustainable peace. The use of situational irony to enhance the theme of the indestructibility of the past will also be addressed.