Conscious amnesia and the politics of memory in Sayed Kashua’s Track Changes

This article argues that Sayed Kashua’s Track Changes depicts a form of memory that cannot be adequately understood as trauma, silence, or colonial aphasia alone. Rather than simply forgetting, its characters repeatedly revise, translate, suppress, and strategically displace memories to negotiate life within the Israeli settler-colonial state. This process is best understood as conscious amnesia: the contradictory practice through which acts of self-editing and memory management enable survival and social legibility while simultaneously reproducing colonial erasure. Far from merely representing this condition at the level of the plot, the novel formally enacts it through ghost-writing, layered narration, strikethroughs, code-switching, and fractured intergenerational memory. Track Changes thus becomes not simply a repository of the past but a contested site where survival, recognition, and historical continuity are continuously negotiated under settler-colonial rule. The article thus reframes Track Changes as a critique of recognition politics and a theory of narration under settler colonialism.