Sensory Reliquaries: Scent, Matter and Memory in SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) Fiction

Abstract

SWANA isn’t just a geographical map; it is a horizontal network of solidarity. It connects the writers in Tehran to the refugee in Syria, proving that across these artificial borders, people are fighting the battles to remember who they are. If a dictator can burn a book, he cannot burn a memory trapped inside a human sense, SWANA and South Asian writers delve deep into this and produced a brilliant way to keep their homeland alive, they turn the physical world into secret vault. This paper investigates how SWANA literature tracked memory through the stubborn stain of dried ink in Stationery Shop of Tehran by Marjan Kamali and the volatile drop of amber perfume in Book of Everlasting Things by Anchal Malhotra. They produced sensory-counter archive to prove that the material archive holds the past alive in it most uncompromised, unburn able form.