But in the process I was facing an additional obstacle to select an episode of my past and to reconstruct it in order to share it: It should be written in a second language instead in my mother tongue. In that sense, as I experienced this particular process of remembering is closely related to what Smorti propose, in which language is at the core of the analysis. So, I purposely worked in my memories for a while, consciously engaged in a making decision process about what and how remember …show more content…
10).
Consequently, I see this entire process as the working self, which produce a cultural artifact (this short essay), scaffolded (Arango-Muñoz) in episodic memories. I will come back to this idea of what resources were mobilized during the remembering and how I reconstructed it (scaffold).
So, this specific process of my remembering is far from the definition of Roediger and Wertsch that “memoirs are written late in life, sometimes, without the aid of dairies or notes” (2008, p. 12): I never wrote about any note about this earthquake or even a twin diary; rather it is registered in my body (the taste of the dust or the movement, for instance) and in my family memories. Rather I looked for and picked images, sensations, and maybe also memories borrowed from somebody else and I put them in motion (memory in action, as Gergen point out following Barthes), working my 9-years-old-self, in a historical moment and in a specific place -“the city as a repository of people’s memories” (Misztal, p. 16)-. In other words, my personal process in this case at least is closer of the Magnussen’s …show more content…
However, I can’t distinguish clearly what is my own memory, my own images, and which ones come from the family storytelling about this episode (family as a community memory, Misztal). Doing so, I bring the ideas of kaleidoscope and reverberation: “We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell (Ondaatje, 2007, cited by Brockmeier, p. 6) and the Smorti’s perspective about how the autobiographical memories that have been narrated “have also been transformed by previous narrative acts and have acquired an altered narrative organization” (p.