Textures of the Everyday

Ordinary Affects in Malayalam Memoirs

Abstract

Memoirs are short autobiographical compositions that are focalized around particular memories and/or experiences instead of aligning with normativities of chronology or historical progress. Historically, the privileging of everyday experiences over life histories configured memoirs as accessible forms of autobiographical composition for disprivileged groups such as women and the working-class (Nussbaum 149). A focus on affects, or states of being, facilitates an intensification of the sensory elements of our terrain, enabling the prioritization of its ‘texture’ (Sedgwick 17). The cultural theorist, Kathleen Stewart employs the term ‘ordinary affects’ to qualify this intertwining of the everyday and the affective and to facilitate an enquiry into the generative potential of everyday life (7). The habitual and the ordinary are privileged in the memoir, titled Aaru Nee (2018) composed by the celebrated Malayali writer and activist, Sarah Joseph. The paper analyses the linkages between the affective registers and Sarah Joseph’s autobiographical subjectivity in Aaru Nee.