It’s weirdly fitting that Salman Rushdie’s 2024 work, Victory City, focuses on a literal "cemetery of untold stories." Books aren't just paper. They're ghosts. Honestly, the way people talk about literature these days feels a bit clinical, but Rushdie gets it. He understands that stories—especially the ones that get buried, silenced, or forgotten—have a way of haunting the present.
People think "untold" means the story hasn't been written. That's not it. Often, the cemetery of untold stories refers to the narratives that were suppressed by power, lost to time, or simply drowned out by the noise of the "official" version of history. In his recent writing, Rushdie explores a fictional space where these narratives are kept, but the concept is very real in the world of archives and historical memory.
What most people get wrong about the cemetery of untold stories
You’ve probably heard people use this phrase as a metaphor for writer's block. It’s not that. In the context of Rushdie's magical realism, particularly in his later career following the traumatic events of 2022, the concept is far more visceral. It’s about survival. It's about how a culture can only truly exist if its stories are allowed to breathe.
If you look at the work of archivists like those at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, they are essentially digging in a literal cemetery of untold stories every single day. They find letters, receipts, and scrapbooks that tell a version of history that doesn't make it into the textbooks. History is written by the winners, right? Well, the cemetery is where the "losers" keep their truth. It’s a messy, disorganized, and deeply human place.
The weight of the unspoken
Silence is heavy. Have you ever felt that? In literature, a character’s silence can be more revealing than a ten-page monologue. When we talk about the cemetery of untold stories, we are talking about the "missing" parts of our collective memory.
Take the Lost Friends column in Southwestern Christian Advocate after the American Civil War. For decades, formerly enslaved people wrote advertisements looking for family members they hadn’t seen in twenty or thirty years. These are tiny, heartbreaking snippets of stories. Thousands of them. For over a century, these were largely ignored by mainstream historians. They were buried.
The actual mechanics of story burial
How does a story end up in the cemetery? It's usually not a single event. It’s a slow erosion.
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- Institutional neglect. If a library doesn't find a manuscript "valuable," it doesn't get digitized. It rots.
- Active censorship. We see this today with the surge in book bans across the United States, targeting specific narratives about identity and history.
- Cultural trauma. Sometimes, a generation is so scarred by an event that they simply stop talking about it. The story stays in the family until the last person who remembers it passes away.
Then, it's gone.
Basically, the "cemetery" grows every time we decide that a certain perspective isn't worth the paper it’s printed on. Rushdie’s work often fights against this by giving voice to the marginalized, the exiled, and the heretical. He mixes the divine with the profane because that's how life actually feels. It’s never just one thing.
Why we need to "exhume" these narratives
Why bother? Isn't it easier to just look forward?
Maybe. But a society that doesn't know its own secrets is a brittle one. Look at the work of Saidiya Hartman. She uses a method called "critical fabulation" to write about the lives of enslaved people where the historical record is blank. She isn't just making things up; she's using the "cemetery of untold stories" as a foundation to reconstruct what must have been there. It’s a way of honoring the dead by refusing to let their silence be the final word.
What really happened with Rushdie's inspiration
It’s no secret that Salman Rushdie has lived under a shadow for decades. But after the 2022 attack in Chautauqua, New York, the idea of what is "told" and "untold" took on a physical urgency. He lost sight in one eye. He lost the use of a hand for a time. When an artist is nearly silenced permanently, the stories they haven't written yet suddenly become the most important things in the world.
In Victory City, the protagonist Pampa Kampana creates a city out of magic seeds. But she also gives the citizens their "memories" by whispering stories into their ears. Without those stories, they are just empty husks. They don't know who they are. They have no past, so they can have no future.
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This isn't just a fantasy trope. It’s a commentary on how national identity is constructed. If you control the story, you control the people. If you can bury the stories of dissent, you can create a population that believes whatever you tell them. The cemetery of untold stories is, in many ways, the only place where the truth remains pure because it hasn't been edited for public consumption.
The digital cemetery: A modern twist
We think the internet preserves everything. We’re wrong.
Link rot is real. Geocities is gone. MySpace era blogs—thousands of them—are effectively buried. We are creating a digital cemetery of untold stories at a rate faster than any previous generation. If a platform goes bust, the stories of millions of people can vanish overnight.
- Data centers are the new graveyards.
- Proprietary formats are the new forgotten languages.
- Algorithm updates are the new censors.
If a story isn't "indexed," does it even exist?
Practical steps to preserve your own stories
You don't have to be a world-famous novelist to keep your stories out of the cemetery. It sounds a bit cliché, but the "unimportant" details of your life are exactly what future historians will crave. They don't want the polished LinkedIn version of you. They want the mess.
Write it down, physically. Digital files are fragile. If you want something to last 100 years, put it on acid-free paper with decent ink. Keep a journal that isn't meant for Instagram. Write about the things that annoy you, the smells of your neighborhood, and the specific way your grandmother laughed. These are the things that the "official" record always misses.
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Record the elders. Seriously. Use your phone. Sit down with the oldest person in your family and ask them about the things they never talk about. Don't ask for "the history of the family." Ask what they ate for breakfast in 1955. Ask what the air felt like before the highway was built. These tiny details are the ghosts that live in the cemetery of untold stories.
Support local archives. Small-town historical societies are often the only things standing between a community’s memory and total oblivion. They are chronically underfunded and overworked. Donate your old photos (with names on the back!) or volunteer your time to help digitize records.
Read outside your comfort zone. The best way to keep someone else’s story alive is to witness it. Seek out translated literature, small-press poetry, and memoirs from people whose lives look nothing like yours. When you read a story, you take it out of the cemetery and give it a home in your own mind.
The cemetery of untold stories isn't a place of defeat. It's a reservoir. It's a place of potential. Every time we dig, every time we listen, and every time we refuse to let a voice be silenced, we are performing a small act of resurrection. Rushdie knows this. The archivists know this. And now, honestly, you know it too. The stories are there. They’re just waiting for someone to be quiet enough to hear them.
Next steps for engagement: Start by identifying one story in your family that hasn't been told in years. Document it. Don't worry about the "literary quality." Just get the facts down—the names, the places, the feelings. Once it's on paper, it's no longer buried. It becomes part of the living record. Explore the work of the Internet Archive or the Digital Public Library of America to see how professionals are fighting against the "digital cemetery." These organizations provide tools and resources for anyone looking to preserve their own piece of history before it's too late.