Ideally, memory in life should function in a linear and perfect
             fashion, recording the world, as observed by the narrator, or as outlined a
             court transcript, in an unbiased and straightforward fashion. But even in
             its coolest fashioning, such as in ostensibly legal documents, memory can
             lie to the recollecting mind and contain omissions of great importance. In
             Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold, even the
             margins of the court documents regarding the deflowering of the central
             female protagonist Angela, because they date from so many years ago, when
             the woman was young and beautiful, seem scribbled and cobbled together.
             There are omissions in the transcripts as well, missing pages symbolically
             as well as literally highlighting the porous nature of memory as a
             transcript of one's personal life, and also the imperfect nature of memory
             on behalf of the community where Angela still lives.
             Both Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jamaica Kincaid see memory, not
             simply as a personal matter, but as a cultural history that, even when
             there is repetition in the ways that the same central event is seen,
             individuals from the same community are affected differently by it in the
             present. Not even the central character of Marquez's novel seems entirely
             certain if the man whom allegedly stole her virginity, Santiago, truly did
             so. Kincaid writes an extended essay, A Small Place, not a novel, and thus
             may seem to record more provable' facets of the repetitive texture of
             daily life of her native Antigua in her poetic prose, as seen through
             different eyes and at different times in the authors' life. But by viewing
             the world of her native Antigua both as a homeland, as a place that has
             been liberated from colonialist rule in the author's lifetime, and also
             through the eyes of a tourist, Kincaid also shows how memory can
             collectively lie to a nation, that prefers to think...