SOURCE: Sanders, Leslie. “‘The Mere Determination to Remember’: M. Nourbese Philip's ‘Stop Frame.’” West Coast Line 31, no. 1 (spring-summer 1997): 134-42.

In the following essay, Sanders maintains that the main thematic concerns of M. Nourbese Philip's “Stop Frame” are “memory and history and, in part, the relation of what has become, in North America and the Caribbean at least, competing memories of slavery and the Holocaust.”

[S]ome of the reasons why I consciously try to remember what did not happen to me personally, but which accounts for my being here today: to defy a culture that wishes to forget; to rewrite a history that at best forgot and omitted, at worst lied; to seek psychic reparations; to honour those who went before; to grieve for that which was irrevocably lost (language, religion, culture), and those for whom no one grieved; to avoid having to start over again … to “save...