"Before the cock crows, you will deny me" (Matthew 26: 34): Betrayal and Redemption in The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna

Abstract

The Augustinian conception of memory as self-constituting compels an inquiry of how one remembers and how one employs memory to forge a moral and authentic human self. The characters in Aminatta Forna’s novel, The memory of love, are haunted by their memories, those experienced in an intensely personal way, and those witnessed in Freetown, Sierra Leone, before, during, and in the aftermath of the violent civil conflict during the 1990s. The multidimensional impact of memory in the characters’ lives recalls their loves and losses, and their embedded, often suppressed, deceit. It invokes an ancient self-betrayal that echoes again in the recensions,
suppressions, and elisions of their narrative self-tellings in a novel that, ultimately, extends an invitation to the reader to re-member oneself redemptively.