Memory, oblivion and nostalgia in Trezza Azzopardi's The Hiding Place

Abstract

Shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize 2000, Trezza Azzopardi 's debut novel The Hiding Place is the devastatingly harsh but also deeply moving story of Frankie Gauci, his wife Mary, and their six daughters as seen through the eyes of Dolores, the youngest sister who slowly unravels the tragic secrets that haunt her past. Set in a Maltese immigrant community in Tiger Bay, Wales, and peopled with deeply flawed characters, The Hiding Place traces Dolores's journey through the seductive yet often terrifying labyrinth of memory, a labyrinth governed by its own primitive sense of familial law and order. Lyrical in one breath and stingingly realistic in the next, Azzopardi calls on her impressive mastery of language to weave an intensely self-reflexive story of guilt and innocence, absence and presence, fragmentation and plenitude and, above all, oblivion and memory. This paper focuses precisely on Azzopardi's treatment of memory as an instrument of reclamation and retrieval in the search for selfhood. Though memory is elusive and untrustworthy because of its polymorphic nature, at the same time it is endowed with a redemptive power capable of transforming the outside into the inside, denial into acceptance, and obscurity into revelation.