‘All I have are fragments’: Ephemera and cultural memory in contemporary historical fiction about the First World War

Abstract

More than a century after its end, the First World War continues to loom large in cultural memory, particularly in contemporary fiction in the United Kingdom but also elsewhere. However, both commemorative practice and literary representation remain overwhelmingly dominated by a narrowly conceived narrative of the war as fought by white, middle-class men on the Western Front. This article explores the role played by ephemera – defined broadly as any small, portable items and print materials that are not books – in shaping contemporary commemorative discourse and historical fiction about the First World War. It proposes that paying attention to the ephemera that inform writing about the First World War offers a valuable tool to understand and critique the limitations and opportunities of literary contributions to the war's legacy in the present.

This article explores to what extent the continuing lack of diversity in First World War remembrance in Britain, and in the war's portrayal in contemporary literature, can be linked to the material traces of war that inform both the war's cultural memory and its literary representation. This category of ephemera can be broadly defined, with Maurice Rickards, as ‘minor transient documents of everyday life’, which includes both printed materials and ‘transient oddments’ of all kinds. ¹ In this article, I argue that ephemera are linked to the persistently selective nature of First World War memory and the war's literary canon alike. At the same time, the study of ephemera constitutes a potential route towards diversifying the war's memory and its representation in contemporary literature. Two of the most successful routes to public engagement during the centenary period were art (including literature) and community or crowdsourcing projects. ² Both drew heavily on extant material traces of the First World War: war memorials and the records pertaining to them; family ephemera, including photograph albums, letters, postcards and souvenirs brought back from the war's various frontlines; and public ephemera such as periodicals, pamphlets and posters. My exploration of two post-centenary historical novels about the First World War, Abdulrazak Gurnah's Afterlives (2020) and Alice Winn's In Memoriam (2023), demonstrates that engagement with the ephemeral traces of war in some cases, and with their absence in others, has the potential to broaden and complicate how contemporary literature can mediate the war for twenty-first-century audiences. These two novels exemplify two distinct strands of contemporary anglophone historical fiction about the First World War: the re-telling, often with incremental additions to popular memory of the war, of the well-established Western Front soldier narrative on the one hand, and the recovery of narratives neglected by mainstream memory centred on either locations away from the Western Front, groups of people other than white British men, or both, on the other hand. ³

Since 2018, scholars have been interrogating the success of centenary commemorations in reflecting the diversity of experience that characterised the First World War. The project ‘Reflections on the Centenary of the First World War’ (2017–2020) noted increased public awareness ‘that soldiers from across the Commonwealth were part of the First World War’, but also observed that ‘stories around diverse participation’ in the war needed to be publicised more widely ‘beyond minority areas’. ⁴ Breaking down this knowledge shift, the report highlighted that compared to increased public awareness around Indian soldiers’ participation, ‘the African contribution still remains a less prominent theme’. ⁵ Meanwhile, Santanu Das, writing about the invisibility of colonial soldiers in Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), speaks of a ‘wider sea of amnesia that still surrounds […] islands of Eurocentric memory in popular culture’. ⁶ In 2019, Channel 4 documentary The Unremembered: Britain's Forgotten War Heroes (dir. John Deol), presented by David Lammy, addressed gaps in knowledge about, and commemoration of, Black and especially African soldiers. This documentary, which drew on the work of several notable First World War scholars, led to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's appointment of a Special Committee to Review Historical Inequalities in Commemoration. While the documentary showcased that some recovery work is possible using existing archives, the committee's report concluded that, especially in the African theatre of war and with regards to Black personnel, ‘failures in administration meant many […] casualties were never even reported or properly recorded at all’, leading to fundamentally unequal practices of commemoration. ⁷ These are impossible to rectify retrospectively due to a lack of available records. Moreover, as Lucy Noakes and James Wallis argue, the dominance of existing commemorative narratives of white soldier sacrifice ‘acted as a powerful block to the integration of the wider and more diverse histories that were produced within the dominant cultural memory of the conflict’ in Britain during the centenary. ⁸

In part, then, the ‘sea of amnesia’ relating to colonial war experience in Britain is linked to the uneven availability of material evidence. An important but widely overlooked way in which the war has been commemorated are ephemera. Ann-Marie Foster's work has been tracing how British households across the social spectrum centred their commemoration of the war and its dead on print ephemera and small everyday objects, which could be kept in the home and serve as private tools of remembrance. ⁹ This practice was facilitated by the ubiquity of First World War ephemera even as it happened, from mass-produced miniature flags and other keepsakes, to memorial books, scrapbooks, photographs, periodicals, postcards, posters and pamphlets. Ephemeral documents and objects have remained a crucial though often overlooked part of how the war has maintained its prominent position in British cultural memory, including the production of new ephemera (such as booklets, stickers, or small craft objects) during the centenary period.

Yet owing to a variety of practical and ideological factors, those ephemera that are still widely available to the public today overwhelmingly document a white, British and predominantly middle-class perspective on the war. Not all groups and individuals affected by the war generated and retained ephemera, and decisions as to what is worth keeping and preserving in official collections are affected by intersecting biases. Foster and Wallis note that even in digital collection drives, items and stories collected replicate the racialised, class-based and gendered biases of physical collections: ‘There was a racialised split in the [“Lives of the First World War”] database, with white men overwhelmingly dominating […]. The “Life Stories” of British servicepeople of colour are sparsely populated when compared to their white counterparts’. ¹⁰ Although there are specialist ephemera collections in the UK, such as the John Johnson Collection of Ephemera at the University of Oxford, ephemera in general are most often collected incidentally and included as add-ons in collections relating to persons or events of note. Often, they are patchily catalogued or not properly catalogued at all, forming a counterpoint to more accessible collections comprised of official documents and publications. Indeed, Rickards highlights the vexed question of ephemera's relation to the official archives and points to the fact that ‘the essential appeal of most forms of ephemera lies in their fragility’ and ‘the very improbability of their survival’. ¹¹ Since the tragic scope of the war heightens the capacity of ephemera to give us ‘the human story close and sometimes raw,’ this vulnerability also explains their enduring appeal for commemorating the First World War. ¹² War-related ephemera were collected in regimental or military museums (most notably IWM) and university library collections (e.g. Cambridge University Library in the UK), but these collections are subject to the donation and collection biases outlined above. Periodicals as a distinct category of ephemera are most likely to be retained in institutional settings.

The continued place of ephemera at the heart of Anglo-American commemorative culture is demonstrated powerfully in Alice Winn's In Memoriam. Ephemera are central to the way In Memoriam reconstructs the First World War for international, anglophone, post-centenary audiences, though the focus of the novel on public-school culture places it firmly in a British context. Winn's novel is built around and indeed structured by mocked-up pages of a fictional boarding-school magazine, the Preshutian, modelled closely on the Marlburian, the magazine of Winn's own former school, Marlborough College. Winn has emphasised the genesis of the novel from the Marlburian open-access digital archive, which she calls ‘a historical treasure trove’. ¹³ Winn's approach to writing about the First World War echoes long-standing tropes of historical fiction as a recovery of the past: ‘Writing the novel, she explained, felt like translation work. For many people, especially in the United States, she said, World War I feels like it belongs in a dusty textbook’. ¹⁴ Winn's statements might seem surprising, given that the story she tells taps into some of the best-known experiences of the war. Yet the enthusiastic reception of In Memoriam, which won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize in August 2023, indicates that there is a continued appetite for re-discovering the First World War.

The success of Winn's novel attests to the growing importance of ephemera for connecting with the First World War on an emotional level. The immediacy of experience conveyed by ephemera through their being of their moment, fleeting and fragile helps to bridge the more than a century-long gap between then and now. But what of those whose war experiences are not sufficiently well documented by ephemera, or indeed any archival records? Since the perspective of public-school-educated junior officers is amply documented, In Memoriam covers particularly well-trodden ground. Although Winn's novel centres a queer love story and includes some minority perspectives – one of her main protagonists is half-Jewish, another character is half-Indian and based on real-life Royal Flying Corps pilot Erroll Suvo Chunder Sen – their minority status is cushioned by wealth and influence. A single working-class officer character, who is described as an educated factory worker with a ‘thick’ accent, serves primarily to emphasise the fact that all the other officers are public-school men. ¹⁵ While Gail Braybon cautioned back in 2003 that ‘more words have been written about the British war poets than about all the non-white troops put together’, Santanu Das reminds us that ‘the fact remains that the war poets have written more words about the conflict than all the non-white troops put together’. ¹⁶ The kind of young men Winn writes about, though they died in devastating numbers, were also sufficiently wealthy, well-connected and influential to ensure their legacy, while those who survived were more likely to produce lastingly influential writing about their experience. The very ephemera on which Winn built her novel – the wartime run of the Marlburian – attests to such privilege since this school magazine has been comprehensively digitised and made available to the public in a way that most ephemera (including most magazines) have not.

It is this contrast between the well-documented public-school story of the war and its counterpart in terms of documentation and subsequent representation – the story of African war experience – that I interrogate through the lens of ephemera. The two novels chosen illustrate the opportunities and limitations of using First World War ephemera for the contemporary historical novelist. While the public-school narrative has seemingly endless capacity to sell books – In Memoriam swiftly achieved Top Five Sunday Times Bestseller status – colonial war experience continues to be sidelined. Since 2014, only two English-language novels representing colonial war experience from the point of view of colonial subjects have been published by mainstream Anglo-American publishing houses: Kamila Shamsie's A God in Every Stone (2014), which connects the story of Indian combatants with an exploration of the war's aftermath in colonial India, and Abdulrazak Gurnah's Afterlives, set in East Africa. Additionally, French novelist David Diop's At Night All Blood Is Black (2020), first published in French in 2018, explores the war experience of African soldiers in the French army. ¹⁷ Though these novels are part of a wider effort to reclaim and re-tell marginalised historical narratives, the tiny number of historical fictions specifically about colonial experiences of the First World War, despite centenary efforts to diversify its representation, is striking. Yet in the absence of the kinds of ‘treasure trove’ that enabled Winn to write movingly about English public-school volunteers, how can historical novelists tell more diverse stories of the war?

Gurnah's Afterlives – so far the only post-centenary novel published in Britain that looks at African First World War experience through the eyes of African protagonists – can help us interrogate the links between a dearth of accessible ephemera and archival documents relating to African war experience and its representation in the British literary canon. Ephemera related to white British war experience are held and sometimes digitised by public institutions such as Imperial War Museums and also still retained as family possessions by descendants. ¹⁸ By contrast, ephemera for the East African context of which Gurnah writes are much less likely to have survived in British or even Tanzanian archives, given the fraught institutional engagement with colonial violence on the part of both former coloniser and the formerly colonised. Rose Miyonga observes for archival traces of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya that ‘[w]hile the archival material on Mau Mau was systematically destroyed at the national level, it was carefully preserved by thousands of individuals across Kenya’. ¹⁹ Ephemera documenting East African war experience in Western colonial armies during the First World War on a personal, affective level may thus be preserved in individual family homes, but these materials are difficult to access for historical novelists. Instead, they have to make do with materials held in official Western archives, which are unlikely to yield insights into the perspectives of East African soldiers and civilians.

Gurnah's novel challenges the overreliance of Western war memory and writing on materials that by necessity exclude the African story of the war, forming a poignant counterpoint to Winn's novel and its engagement with one of the most privileged forms of war ephemera, the public-school magazine. Gurnah repeatedly critiques the way a simplified European war story has been superimposed on the far more complex, nuanced and painful African experience: he notes the sheer variety of colonial soldiers fighting in the African theatre of war, ²⁰ observes that nobody was either counting or recording the African war dead, and explicitly states that Europe tells a story of the war in which African suffering is erased. ²¹ The story of supposed askari ‘loyalty’ is shown to be constructed out of an immense suffering that had little to do with loyalty and everything to do with survival. ²² In East Africa, the story told about the former askari is a different one which casts them as brutal, cruel ‘collaborators of the German colonial power’, in what Branach-Kallas refers to as ‘the collective amnesia in Tanganyika/Tanzania, which has censored and obliterated the stories of the Askari’ from national cultural memory. ²³ As Branach-Kallas also notes, Afterlives ‘recreates and at the same time shatters the myths that have emerged around the Askari as savage mercenaries absolutely loyal to their German officers’, and Gurnah's engagement with ephemera is part of the debunking. ²⁴ The novel's engagement with European and African forms of literacy and with ephemeral traces of war reveals its distinct approach to critiquing the insufficiency of European war writing representing the African war experience. Gurnah's novel adopts an impersonal, third-person narrative voice that recounts the violence of colonial East Africa and the violence of war in a dispassionate tone. It grants only minimal insight into the emotional lives of the novel's protagonists, which the novel shows to be largely undocumented by ephemeral or official documents.

Afterlives follows a small set of characters in a fictionalised port town on the Swahili coast, located in what is, at the start of the novel, German East Africa, covering the period from roughly 1900 to the 1950s. The characters span three overlapping generations whose lives are in various ways disrupted but also connected by the First World War. The older generation includes merchant Amur Biashara, his employee Khalifa, and Bi Asha, Biashara's niece, who is married to Khalifa. Next in age come Biashara's son and heir Nassor and Ilyas Hassan, a German-educated young man who moves to town, befriends Khalifa, later disappears after he volunteers for the German army in East Africa (the so-called Schutztruppe) in 1914 and is never heard from again. We also meet Ilyas's sister Afiya, rescued from violent foster parents first by Ilyas and later by Khalifa, and Hamza, another young man who appears in town as a disabled veteran following traumatic war years in the Schutztruppe. Hamza is offered work by Nassor and a room to stay in by Khalifa. Later, Hamza and Afiya fall in love and marry. Last comes Hamza and Afiya's son, also named Ilyas after his missing uncle. Towards the end of the novel, this younger Ilyas sets out to shed light on his uncle's disappearance through research in German archives.

Where Gurnah tackles a perspective on the war that is, even today, at best peripheral to British popular memory of the First World War, Winn's novel is located at the very heart of the British war myth. In Memoriam follows a small number of public-school students through the process of volunteering, frontline service, a variety of injuries and bereavements and in one case captivity and escape from a German Prisoner of War camp. The two main protagonists, Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood, are by the author's own acknowledgement loosely modelled on Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. ²⁵ Gaunt and Ellwood embark on a fraught romantic relationship and, at the end of the war, move to Brazil to escape the threat of criminal prosecution. This post-war section of the plot is an innovative development in a novel that is otherwise heavily reliant on canonical war writing. Winn's ‘Historical Note’ at the end references its indebtedness to ‘dozens of primary accounts of the war’, and specifically names Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth (1933), R.C. Sherriff's Journey's End (1929), Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel (1920) as well as poems by Sassoon and Robert Nichols's introduction to Sassoon's Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918). These are evidently but a selection of influences, as pointed out by Hephzibah Anderson in her review for the Observer, in which she notes that ‘In Memoriam acknowledges some of the period's best-known sources’. ²⁶ As Christopher Shrimpton argues in his Guardian review, however, In Memoriam ‘is rarely better than when in Boy's Own mode: when the young men are ragging and chaffing and sharing secrets and plotting escapes from their prisoner-of-war camp’ – that is, Winn’s novel is at its strongest and most innovative when it departs from its well-trodden canonical sources to take inspiration from lesser known memoirs, The Tunnellers of Holzminden (1920) by H.G. Durnford and A.J. Evans's The Escaping Club (1921). ²⁷

Not only does In Memoriam draw on an array of canonical literary accounts of the First World War, it also reinforces a narrative that has been challenged and nuanced at some length by literary critics and historians since at least the 1990s. ²⁸ In tracing the protagonists’ journey as one from patriotic naivety to disillusionment, Winn returns to the selective view of the war and its literary representation. This is facilitated and to an extent made inevitable by the ephemera Winn uses, whose very insularity and selectivity convey a heightened sense of pathos. Winn observed of the school magazines which inspired her to write the novel: ‘You feel like you’re watching this tiny little society just be completely destroyed and dismantled’. ²⁹ Besides the fictionalised school magazine, Winn's novel abounds in letters, either rendered in full or referenced in conversation, as well as references to photographs. Notably, when her protagonist Ellwood breaks the news of his enlistment to his mother, he jokes about two staple means for keeping absent soldiers present in the home, the framed portrait photograph and the letter from the front: ‘“It's done, Mother.” He sat next to her and took her into his arms. “I shall have a photograph taken of me in my uniform, and you can put it on the chimneypiece,” he said. “And I’ll write you such good letters; see if I don’t”’. ³⁰ Though intended as consolation, to twenty-first-century audiences conversant with the war's futility myth, and primed by the fictional obituaries and casualty lists in the Preshutian that precede this scene, the tropes of the prominently displayed photograph and the letters from the front powerfully evoke the main means of commemoration available to bereaved parents.

It is no overstatement to observe that In Memoriam as a novel is as fundamentally shaped by the ephemera – both letters and periodicals – with which it engages as it is by its canonical literary sources. Most conspicuously, the novel utilises its mocked-up magazine pages as an expositional and structural device. We are first introduced to many of the characters through the fictional pages of the Preshutian and we learn about their various fates through further magazine page inserts as the novel progresses. Harris describes the magazine inserts as ‘giving texture and context to the world of the novel’, and in her acknowledgements, Winn indicates that the mocked-up pages, though they presented ‘a logistical nightmare from start to finish’, were essential to her vision of the book. ³¹ By contrast, Gurnah's Afterlives showcases not a richness of source material about the First World War but a scarcity of material evidence that might shed light on the lives of East Africans who experienced the war. Where Winn's novel is fundamentally shaped by her ability to bring to life its fictional protagonists by drawing on public-school volunteers’ own words, sometimes lifted verbatim from the historical sources, Gurnah's novel is shaped precisely by the elusiveness of the voices he sets out to represent. ³² This difference in character representation is reflected in the two novels’ treatment of ephemera as sources: one uses them at every turn, relishing the detail and pathos offered by fictionalised documents and their ability to bring war experience to life; the other deploys ephemera sparsely and uses them to highlight the absence of African voices rather than their presence.

The mocked-up periodical pages opening In Memoriam remind us that in historical fiction about the First World War by white Western writers, archival enquiry or engagement with ephemera often is a starting point for a journey of discovery. Though Winn takes this approach further than most by trying to represent the physical appearance of the magazine pages, there are precedents, for instance the opening of Pat Barker's now canonical historical First World war novel Regeneration (1991), which begins with the full text of Siegfried Sassoon's protest note ‘Finished with the War: A Soldier's Declaration’ (July 1917). By contrast, this mode of connecting with the war only comes into play at the end of Gurnah's novel when Ilyas, the younger, visits German archives in the 1950s to research the fate of his uncle.

In outlining his protagonist's quest for answers, Gurnah (like other writers of postcolonial historical fiction) raises a general question: can official documents, news clippings, reports, pictures and other ephemera help us assemble stories about the lived experience of the war of (Black) East Africans? When working with colonial archives, Ann Laura Stoler argues, ‘[k]nowing what one is after is not always enough’ and that this work instead requires ‘a reckoning with how colonial sense and reason conjoined social kinds with the political order of colonial things’. ³³ Regarding East African askari, this means that the question of how these men experienced their wartime lives can only be answered by German colonial archives obliquely, via the ‘colonial sense’ instilled in what has and has not been recorded. Michelle Moyd asks, ‘how exactly does one read, interpret and use’ the assemblage of Western colonial records and heavily mediated life narratives of German askari that she calls ‘a mosaic of sources’? ³⁴ Moyd's way of ‘addressing the problem of the lack of sources where askari might have revealed aspects of their self-understandings and interpretations of their experiences’ is to read documents that exist in Western colonial repositories ‘against the grain and along the grain’, assembling a piecemeal picture of askari life out of the gaps, omissions and incidental revelations of colonial documents like training manuals, pamphlets, letters, memoirs or photographs composed or taken by white colonisers. ³⁵ Gurnah's novel similarly assembles the story of East African war experiences from available materials. Echoing Saidiya Hartman's reflections on critical fabulation, it also reflects on the process of storytelling when faced with a dearth of suitable written and/or material sources. ³⁶

The nephew's archival discoveries provide the family with seeming closure by establishing that the missing brother and uncle survived the war, settled in Germany, married a German woman and was ultimately killed by the Nazis along with his son. Yet many crucial questions remain unanswered because the archives do not capture the voice of the dead African veteran, despite the fact that he was fully literate in German. Why did Ilyas Hassan decide to emigrate to Germany following his wartime service? Why did he never again contact his loved ones, especially his sister? And how did he experience the betrayal of his loyalty to Germany under the Nazi regime? Gurnah leaves these questions unresolved because they simply cannot be answered with the help of available sources. The novel's fictional archival encounters therefore illustrate the limitations faced by novelists like Gurnah and historians like Moyd. Unlike Winn, Gurnah cannot easily draw on periodicals and letters produced by, for and about people who resemble his protagonists.

Gurnah emphasises the contrast between the written bureaucracy of Western colonial powers and the oral but no less binding systems that govern local commerce: ‘The big banks wanted business run by paperwork and securities and guarantees, which did not always suit local merchants who worked on networks and associations invisible to the naked eye’. ³⁷ This observation reflects just how closely colonial bureaucracy and exploitation are bound up with the world of trade and finance. Western education made available to characters such as Nassor Biashara, the merchant's son, is geared towards making him useful to the colonial regime, and the benefits he derives from it are gained incidentally. The same applies to Khalifa, whose ability to read and write in Roman script, speak basic English and use arithmetic and book-keeping skills secure him a precarious livelihood. Gurnah's novel posits Western, paper-based literacy as but one option to engage with the world and preserve meaning. Bi Asha's Islamic literacy, for instance, serves as a counterpoint to Khalifa's and Nassor's Western learning. Though it does not play a large part in the narrative and is on occasion dismissed as superstitious, fleeting references to Islamic literacy are nevertheless important because they showcase complex cultural knowledge systems not dependent on Western colonialism. ³⁸ Likewise, although Khalifa takes pride in his education, he also values oral culture, which takes the form of gossiping in local cafés and on his porch with friends and acquaintances.

The second part of the novel introduces the African war experience of Schutztruppe soldiers not by drawing on written records but by presenting an alternative kind of literary source capable of documenting and accessing this experience: wartime songs. Song lyrics are rendered first in the original Kiswahili, then in English translation:

We have joined the German,

We’re ready!

We’re soldiers of the governor of the Mdachi,

We’re ready!

We will fight for him without fear,

Without fear!

We will terrify our enemies and fill them with fear,

With fear! ³⁹

The lyrics illustrate the use of a widely accessible medium to unite a linguistically and ethnically diverse body of soldiers, for many of whom Kiswahili was not their mother tongue. The call-and-response style of the song allows those who do not speak Kiswahili fluently to participate by singing the short responses and thus take part in a performance of soldierly identity, demonstrating both the topical and identity-building potential of such songs. ⁴⁰ The fact that the men singing are fighting for the Germans is perhaps of secondary importance in the particular moment re-imagined by Gurnah compared to the singers’ understanding of their martial identity regardless of the cause for which they have enlisted.

In the novel, the song is described as ‘not really a song, more like a sung conversation’. ⁴¹ This description highlights an important aspect of oral literature as an alternative form of literary representation: a conversation is strongly linked to context and a piece of literature spoken and/or performed by live speakers is more than the sum of its words. Though Gurnah renders the words that are sung, they can only provide a partial picture, stripped as they are of both musical properties and performance context, which the novel attempts to capture in describing the soldiers as singing ‘cheerfully, half-mocking themselves with their chest-thumping gestures’ while the more experienced soldiers escorting the recruits look on and laugh. ⁴² Though the novel gives some detail as to the nature of the song's performance and general responses to the song among the other soldiers, the narrator does not attempt to showcase the effect of the song on Hamza, who experiences the singing as a bewildered and anxious recruit. Consequently, the reader's insights into the song's affective qualities are limited.

Including the song still gestures towards an alternative practice of representing war experiences of non-Western combatants: a spoken, unwritten, elusive kind of source that is both similar and different to physical ephemera. Despite limitations inherent in attempts to render oral literary sources as part of a written text, Gurnah, by introducing these fragments of song lyrics, models alternative ways of recording and preserving the lived reality of war, calling to mind Santanu Das's thoughts on the way sight, sound and touch can help us with ‘recovering past lives and bodies’. ⁴³ These alternative means share with ephemera their vulnerability to chance, forgetting and decontextualization. Gurnah's novel highlights both the opportunity of engaging with oral representations of the war and the challenge of accessing them. Oral sources cannot be easily preserved. They are ephemeral in the extreme. Contrary to popular misconception, Finnegan points out, oral literature is not simply memorised and repeated verbatim over time. ⁴⁴ This means that whatever oral literary representations of the First Word War in Africa survive into the present, these are likely to have evolved in a variety of ways in the intervening century. Since oral literature is not fixed in the way written texts are, ‘finding’ a First World War song like the one partially rendered by Gurnah is not comparable to ‘finding’ a written document. It is, however, just as possible to re-imagine such songs as it is to re-imagine a lost letter, postcard or photograph.

Lack of documentation overshadows every aspect of the story told in Afterlives. Following Ilyas's disappearance, Hamza and Afiya are the first to collect and create ephemera. At Afiya's request, Hamza translates part of Schiller's poem ‘The Secret’ (‘Das Geheimnis’) for her and the novel describes not only the translation but the process of preparing a suitable slip of paper: the need to remove his employer's letterhead from the top of the sheet of paper, then ‘[trimming] it so that it was only just big enough for the verse’ and ‘[folding] it so it was no wider than two fingers’, lest the letter be intercepted. ⁴⁵ The description of the physical form of Hamza's short translation, requested and understood as a declaration of love, is precise and practical, highlighting the relative difficulty for Hamza to secure a suitable piece of paper. The form of the love offering is important because, as Bookman notes for postcolonial literary contexts in general, ‘paper's physical presence is just as salient as the messages it bears’. ⁴⁶ Bookman speaks of the way that, in postcolonial fiction, ‘paper's physicality exceeds, but does not negate, its linguistic function’, and Gurnah's description of paper objects chimes with this observation. ⁴⁷

Afiya's most precious items are kept in ‘a small locked box painted in green and red diagonal stripes’ that signals their importance as keepsakes. ⁴⁸ All ‘treasures’ in Afiya's box fall within my broad definition of ephemera in that they are small, fragile items of personal significance. Besides the translated poem fragment given to her by Hamza, Afiya's box contains one item linked to her foster father Khalifa (a ‘marbled ledger’ he had brought home from work for her to practise her writing in), and the remaining items all relate to her missing brother Ilyas: notebooks in which he taught her to read and write, a gold bracelet he purchased for her which she has now outgrown and ‘a picture postcard of the mountain overlooking the town where he had worked on the German's farm and then gone to school’. ⁴⁹ Afiya's ephemera are scarce, a small number of impersonal, mass-produced mementos that offer only indirect access to the people to whom they are tied. Her box of treasures contains no photographs of any of the people she loves, only an image by proxy (the picture postcard), which documents the very thing (abduction and a German education) that ultimately takes her brother away from her. It is striking, furthermore, that although the majority of her mementos link either to Afiya's own literacy or that of her closest family and friends, none of these items contain writing by those loved ones: though Hamza's translation is a hand-written document, it is a translation of someone else's words, and Ilyas's postcard is blank. More family ephemera are subsequently produced in their quest for information about Afiya's missing brother. ⁵⁰

Earlier in the novel, there are various instances where German and British colonial newspapers and magazines are mentioned. These kinds of periodicals were commissioned for the education and/or manipulation of the local African population by their respective colonisers. Unlike Winn's Preshutian or its real-life model, the Marlburian, these periodicals were not produced by the communities that read them. References to these newspapers occur in relation to Afiya practising her reading skills and there are also multiple references to new British publications in English aimed at white settlers but also accessed and read by local populations via intermediaries such as Khalifa's teacher friend. ⁵¹ Afiya and Hamza facilitate Ilyas's access to newspapers when he is young, including ‘[s]everal new ones’ that have begun publication, ‘in Kiswahili, in English and even in German for the settlers who chose to remain after the war’. ⁵² Indeed, it is through a German-language newspaper that the missing family member becomes trackable when Hamza becomes aware of German pensions for African askari and the possibility that his wife's vanished brother might have applied for such a pension. ⁵³ However, despite the role ephemera begin to play in the novel, the quest of Ilyas to find out more about his uncle's post-war fate dramatizes the limitations of paper for recovering African family history. Hamza, who has experienced German colonial bureaucracy first hand during his time with the Schutztruppe, has faith in its ability to shed light on Ilyas the elder's fate: ‘There are records. The Germans are good with records. Then you’ll know what happened to him’. ⁵⁴ Yet ultimately, all Ilyas is able to glean about his uncle's fate is superficial information. Ironically, it is Ilyas Hassan, the character most aligned with German bureaucracy and record-keeping, who disappears from the narrative.

Ilyas's fate demonstrates the flipped perspective that Gurnah adopts: the novel centres the East African story, not the story of the German colonisers, and Western colonial documentation does not ensure the survival of Black African voices. Additionally, Afterlives, in recalling Hartman's observations on the archive as tomb, offers a poignant reflection of the way colonial bureaucratic and archival practice is set up to eclipse and erase, not preserve, the lives of oppressed colonial subjects. ⁵⁵ Ultimately, Gurnah shows men like Ilyas to be firmly entombed in the German colonial archives, buried in uncaring documentation without any meaningful trace. As Maaza Mengiste notes, ‘Gurnah is known for decentring European history: a structural decision that is also politically potent’. ⁵⁶ Mengiste sees the novel as an exploration, among other themes, of ‘the generational effects of colonialism and war’, one that asks the questions: ‘What can be salvaged when one of the consequences of colonialism is the deliberate exclusion of an African perspective from the archives? How do we remember, if we do not know what has been erased?’ ⁵⁷

Ilyas's encounter with his uncle's archival traces highlights the incidental and limited role that colonial archives can play in representing the African perspective. In the first instance, Ilyas discovers a man who might be his uncle in ‘a grainy photograph’ in a German periodical, picturing a group of uniformed Germans belonging to the Reichskolonialbund (the Nazis’ centralised organisation pushing for a reclamation of lost German colonies). Ilyas's uncle is pictured, unidentified as ‘an African man in schutztruppe uniform’ who stands ‘behind […] and to the left of the frame’. ⁵⁸ To learn more, Ilyas has to turn to the original press photograph with the help of an archivist, a picture that is ‘found […] with ease’ in the relevant archive and is accompanied by ‘a label with the name of the photographer and those of the figures in it, which the picture editor must have decided to leave out of the caption’. ⁵⁹ From the label, Ilyas learns the African man's name, Elias Essen, but he recognises his uncle by the man's likeness to his mother. We are not told anything about Ilyas's emotional response to the photograph except what is conveyed obliquely by the short, elliptical remark ‘Those eyes, that brow’. ⁶⁰ It is from such items, which document German endeavours to become a colonial power once more, that – as the novel puts it – ‘gradually he was able to assemble a sketch, a story, which still required lengthier and more determined research to fill out in detail’. ⁶¹ This necessitates not only detective work but also a degree of reading against the grain, as suggested by Moyd, who herself begins her book on East African askari by close reading a German colonial photograph in her preface. ⁶²

We learn, with Ilyas the nephew, that his uncle transformed himself into Elias Essen, who performed the story of the war in and for Deutsch-Ostafrika for nostalgic German audiences and Nazis desirous of regaining German colonial possessions. As his nephew Ilyas puts it in conversation with his mother, ‘while you were grieving for him here, […] Uncle Ilyas was dancing and singing in German cities and waving the schutztruppe flag in marches demanding the return of the colonies’. ⁶³ Ilyas the elder, the novel suggest, was employed in legitimising German demands by modelling the loyal African subject of the whitewashed colonial imagination. Through his performances, Ilyas/Elias seems to have promoted the German version of the story of the war in Africa as a noble and heroic endeavour involving stalwart German officers and loyal native askari, a story explicitly challenged earlier in the novel. At the same time, the photograph cannot tell us anything about Ilyas/Elias's real motivations for becoming involved in the neo-colonial movement, an involvement which might genuinely stem from conviction, but equally might have been motivated by a simple desire to make a living for himself and his family. We do, through the fictional archives, get a glimpse of Ilyas attempting to carve out a niche for himself, albeit with limited success, as the refusal of his application for a campaign medal demonstrates: the medals are reserved for white veterans. ⁶⁴ The novel reminds us that close-reading a photograph, even against the grain and with cross-references to other extant documents, only yields limited insights. Returning to Stoler's concept of navigating colonial archives via their underpinning ‘colonial sense’ and by asking ‘to whom, when and why’ something (or someone) mattered when those archives were assembled, Gurnah demonstrates how the younger Ilyas can only locate his uncle by following the logic of the German movement for recovering African colonies. ⁶⁵ The older Ilyas only ‘matters’ to the archives in his capacity of supporting colonial reclamation.

If Ilyas Hassan's case illustrates the limitations of colonial archives for illuminating Black African veterans’ stories, Hamza's case illustrates alternative means of approaching this recovery: by drawing on oral traditions and memories passed on across generational divides. Hamza is like a slate wiped clean by the war. He is presented as a man whose pre-war self has been all but erased. As readers, we are given only hints of what came before and even when Hamza tells Khalifa his story much is unknown even to him. ⁶⁶ Hamza's case serves as an analogy to the quest for an East African war story. Questioned about his background prior to marrying Afiya he says: ‘You want me to tell you about myself as if I have a complete story but all I have are fragments which are snagged by troubling gaps, things I would have asked about if I could, moments that ended too soon or were inconclusive’. ⁶⁷ However, it turns out that Khalifa can fill in many of the gaps in Hamza's story with the unwritten local knowledge he has gained through the practice of baraza, chatting nightly on his porch and frequenting cafés for information. Oral culture is thus offered as a viable counterpoint to the Eurocentric materiality of the colonial archive.

As Foster and Wallis point out, the prevalent ‘focus on archival and paper-based material’ in collections documenting the First World War ‘is limited and limiting, given the wealth of nuanced histories written based on oral histories, family histories, and other non-official sources’. ⁶⁸ This is borne out by the contrast between In Memoriam and Afterlives. While In Memoriam uses its ephemeral source material to strong emotive effect, it also remains tied to what has previously been told, either in the words of First World War soldiers or in earlier historical fiction. In Memoriam showcases the richness of the historical record for a particular group of people, yet also demonstrates the limitations of the public-school magazine as ‘historical treasure trove’. By contrast, Gurnah's Afterlives constitutes a far more complex engagement with ephemeral traces of East African war experience and with the absence of officially retained records. Afiya's privately kept ‘box of treasures’ and its small stock of items meaningful to the family but likely not to anyone else are posited against Winn's ‘historical treasure trove’ of well-preserved records. Afterlives tells a story of the First World War with which the majority of its Western readers are bound to be wholly unfamiliar. In the process, it highlights the limitations of the sources we rely on for insights into the war experience of former colonial subjects. Combined, these two historical novels illustrate that engagement with the war's ephemera continues to be a driving force for literary treatment of the First World War. They also show that this engagement requires moving beyond the readily available to facilitate a retrospective literature that does justice to the war's global complexity. Such nuanced literary representation requires more than the use of ephemera as a source of inspiration. As modelled by Gurnah, it requires critical reflection on the limits of paper records and, by comparison, the power of other kinds of material traces of war experience, whose poignancy ‘results from a constant frisson between presence and loss: a constant reminder of the sensuousness of the life they had known and of its absence’. ⁶⁹

The two approaches to literary representation and commemoration represented by these novels, and their respective engagement with ephemera, are perhaps most aptly captured in their titles. In Memoriam evokes not only the memorial columns in the Marlburian that first inspired Winn to write her novel but also points to other staples of traditional commemoration in Britain: the war memorial, the commemorative volume, the death notice and similar physical manifestations of remembrance. Afterlives emphasises living memory over memorial objects and ephemera. Although it refers to the realm of the dead and to the way the past can haunt those who survive, it also points to lives lived out following the war, which Gurnah describes in interview as ‘another life that comes after a traumatic experience’. ⁷⁰ Missing physical documents and missing knowledge overshadow the story told in Afterlives and the title is programmatic in its ambiguity. Thinking about In Memoriam and Afterlives as two sides of the same coin, a reading of the two novels through the lens of their relationship to and engagement with ephemera showcases the value of literature for re-evaluating not only the past we think we know, but the means of our engagement with the First World War as a truly global war.