Reinventing the Past

Armed with nothing but the flimsy evidence of a Bata shoebox filled with her mother's old photographs, Monique Layton reconstructs her colonial childhood in Morocco in the 1930s. Nothing is as it seems as the author guides her readers through a city surrounded by ramparts two steps away from the Sahara.

Reinventing the Past is a memoir with two authors: the child who does her best to construct clues to her fleeting memories and the old woman who provides a historical context to the stories of her youth. The memoir covers colonialism in Morocco, sex education, native customs, and children's interactions, and throws into question our notions of memory and the past.

Interpretation of reality is, at its heart, a reconstitution. Layton uses that lens to reconsider her childhood and to recreate the past when she is the only witness of it left, save the so-called evidence of photographs and inert objects.