Trauma, Negativities, and the City in Trezza Azzopardi’s Remember Me

Abstract

This chapter explores how the Norvician protagonist of Trezza Azzopardi’s novel Remember Me, who has been displaced by circumstances throughout her life, haunts various urban coordinates of past traumas. Urban poverty has allowed transgressors to marginalize and exploit Winnie, both for profit and sexual gratification. The chapter examines how Winnie has coped with the emotional weight of her grim childhood by escaping memories. A single moment breaches her overarching avoidance of the past, however, so that she is confronted by a cascade of uncomfortable memories: a mother plagued by ghosts and madness; bullying at school; her pregnancy while evacuated; various manipulations; and incarceration. Indeed, the city successively evokes overwhelming cartographies of past pain and finally guilt, as her fragmentary recollections mirror the antagonisms and traumas she has suffered.