Yet, religious systems also engage with ideas of past lives, and religious groups have perspectives on what happens after death. They call it “Leaked Memory Syndrome” (LMS). These past lives are a threat in this medical discourse, dangerously causing a collision of personalities in the rejuvenated person. The lives of the rejuvies are authored, constructed, and artificial, a veneer over a personality that has been suppressed to create the new rejuvenated self. Memory in Nostalgia is shaped by medical discourse, constructed as a danger to people’s current identities, which are authored by medical doctors who give people a new background for their new lives after rejuvenation, lives changed from the ones they are seeking to forget. Many of the ‘rejuvies’ feel a sense of disconnect in their lives, a sense of detachment and not fitting in. Yet the young are not the only ones to feel detached from their lives. They perceive of the older generation as needing to make way for the new generations. The poor are often also the disenfranchised young, who are unable to get jobs in a world where all of the best positions are already occupied. Only the most wealthy can afford rejuvenation and those who undergo it keep generating further wealth, creating a greater wealth disparity bet the rich and the poor. They engage in protests with slogans like “Let them go! The Earth for the Young! Let the Fogeys Die!”, viewing the aged as getting in the way of young people. The young feel as though they are not able to make their place in the world because of the proliferance of older people being returned to youth. Rejuvenation creates a series of social divides: between the aged and the young, the rich and the poor, and between medical ideas and religious. He invites us to explore what would happen in a world that had a “cure” for ageing. Vassanji invites us into the political questions raised by technology. Vassanji creates a world that fears its past, that tries for an eternal present. These memories are pathologized in this world and are considered a medical disease colloquially called “nostalgia”. But, memories are hard to erase and occasionally these memories resurface. Vassanji writes a near future fiction story in which immortality has been achieved, but in this future, everyone who undergoes rejuvination (the age reversal process) simultaneously has the memories of their past life erased for the new life as a younger person. Vassanji’s Nostalgia is a tale of memory’s ability to persist.

Memory is powerful and it can be fleeting, but M.G.

Vassanji’s Nostalgia (Anchor Canada, 2016)

Nostalgia vassanji