Memory, History, and the Construction of Self in Dina Arma’s Novel The Road Home (Doroga domoy) (2009)

History looms large in Circassian intellectual and literary imagination as a source of anxiety, anger, and affirmation for a people who were and still are denied history, whose humanity was at once disdained and derided. Dina Arma’s autobiographical novel in Russian The Road Home (Дорога домой) is a narrative of self-exploration written from the transcultural perspective of a displaced person in search of her identity. It is a novel about identity crisis and the frustrations of a person striving to capture and to define his or her identity, especially if that person was and remains a colonial person who struggles to put together the fragmented pieces of his or her shattered history. It is a novel that describes the reawakening of national memory that takes place through the process of recovering the past and the self that has been damaged by colonial encounters. In the following article, I will examine the questions: How does Arma construct and define the concept of place or home? How does it relate to memory and identity? How does Arma engage in the process of rewriting and reconstructing history and how does she articulate the ways of re-existence and transformation of one’s culture and identity?