As the past is used by some to haunt the present, the cycle of violence goes on, spawning new hostages to history, ensuring that future generations will be taught new wrongs to set right. We live, as the Mexican Nobel Prize-winning writer and poet Octavio Paz once wrote, between oblivion and memory. Memory and oblivion: how one leads to the other, and back again, has been the concern of much of my fiction. The Kashmiri–Indian poet Agha Shahid Ali wrote perceptively: ‘My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.’ As I asserted in the last words of my novel Riot, history is not a web
...more
