Memory Objects, Homemaking and Translation as Affective Labour in Fadia Faqir’s My Name Is Salma

Abstract This article analyses memory and nostalgia objects in Fadia Faqir’s novel My Name Is Salma as a form of embodied remembering and cultural translation in everyday material life. Through the protagonist’s transcultural experiences and daily encounters, the novel draws attention to the creative uses of migrant nostalgia in diasporic space as a means of negotiating the intricacies of body, memory, home and identity. Migrant homebuilding and cultural translation through objects are examined as performative and embodied memory. This, I argue, becomes in the uprooting of migration a valuable strategy that connects the migrant with lost homely geographies and allows translation between past and present. Reading the novel through this lens also shows that homely objects and rituals related to food and other nostalgic attachments from home are embedded in discourses of power, race and gender and informed by experiences of trauma and hegemony.