The earth and the graves: metaphors of memory in Voices from Chernobyl, by Svetlana Aleksiévitch

Abstract

The Belarusian writer Svetlana Aleksiévitch is well known for bringing together in her books collections of oral reports from anonymous witnesses of historical landmarks in the Soviet Union. Critically opposing the official historiography, which privileges great characters and events, her work highlights memories of ordinary people who had their lives marked by these events. To convey these, the author's voice rarely appears textually in her books, and so the voices of the witnesses tell their own stories. However, for these isolated stories to gain the collective aspect necessary for the transmission of testimony, the author uses strategies for selecting and organizing the oral reports. In Voices from Chernobyl, one of these strategies is the repetition of certain images in different testimonies, such as the earth and the grave. As Aleida Assmann (2021) states, the earth and the grave are some of the many metaphors of memory, images that have become essential for the theoretical and conceptual understanding of remembrance. Understanding that memory and forgetting are central concerns in Aleksiévitch's work, I believe that the intentional repetition of these images becomes a way for the author to connect particular stories to a collective imagination about recurrence. Therefore, this work aims to analyze how the different appearances of these images in Voices of Chernobyl can be related to conceptual thinking, based on a brief archeology of the earth and the grave as metaphors for memory.