Memory, liminality and cemetery: a critical study of Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

Elif Shafak's novel 10 Minutes and 38 in this Strange World (2019) narrates the story of a dead sex worker through the liminal phase, the final moment of her brain's consciousness, through the unique point of view of a corpse. Her dealing with such a sensitive theme can be seen critically as a reaction against the social and collective marginalisation through abjection, imposed forgetting and erasure. The paper, through the theoretical framework of liminality and memory studies, seeks to: (1) explore the predicament of women sex workers, their abjection and marginalisation as outcast groups; (2) analyse how Shafak deals with the violence of erasure meted out to women sex workers and outcasts on the plane of life and in death. Using the dead body and cemetery as tropes of liminality and sites of memory, respectively, the paper highlights how Shafak uses the liminal space as a critical point of resistance, undoing the work of deliberate forgetting and thereby reconstructing the forgotten collective memories.