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VOLUME 17 ISSUE 1

The International Journal of

Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies _________________________________________________________________________

The Liminal Space of Postmemory An Examination of Hyphenated Identities SOHAM ADHIKARI

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Marcin Galent, Jagiellonian University, Poland

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Megan Donnan, Common Ground Research Networks, USA

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EDITOR

The Liminal Space of Postmemory: An Examination of Hyphenated Identities Abstract: This article discusses how postmemory becomes a liminal space in itself, giving birth to hyphenated identities who oscillate within the realms of this liminality. Liminal spaces are situated in the transformative bisection of the before and the after. Studying the liminal space where true memory is forgotten and a new-fangled postmemory is generated gives an insight into the minds and patterns of the collective subject. Oftentimes, such an act of forgetfulness may be forced upon the collective subject. Governments alter memory narratives, completely erasing or exponentially disfiguring them to meet their agenda. Even the hyphenated collective subject itself indulges in self-imposed forgetfulness to nullify the traumatic experiences it faces, or once faced. It willingly otherizes that which it possesses, consequently romanticizing that which it lacks. During both the Indian partition and the Bangladeshi genocide, millions of refugees flooded into India. Their progenies who grew up in India were treated with promises and visions of a utopian land beyond the borders—a land from which they had had to flee. These second-generation immigrants faced “a dramatic loss of identity and meaning” because of the cultural trauma they encountered through postmemory narratives. Stuck within this chaotic liminal space, they were forced to acknowledge both the romanticized identity that was being imposed upon them and the lacking other that they formed a part of. Narratives of postmemory passed on by the original hyphenated collective subject therefore led to the formation of another hyphenated identity, those forever stuck in a sempiternal liminality. Keywords: Migration, Postmemory, Liminality, Trauma, Memory, Narratives, Hyphenated Identities

Introduction

T

his article deals with the phenomenon of hyphenation that manifests in both collective and individual subjects, looking at it through the lens of postmemory and trauma narratives. As such, it employs first- and second-hand interviews, secondary sources, and parallel research in the fields of history, philosophy, sociopsychology, migration studies, and memory studies to achieve a universal understanding of the term “hyphenated subjects.” The primary case study has been done on the partition of India in 1947 and Bangladesh in 1971. This is to ensure the scope of the research is not limited temporally or geographically, while also not going beyond the spatial limitation of the research article. Beyond the “Introduction,” the article has been structured into three organic sections: “Hyphenated Identities and Liminal Spaces,” “Postmemory Narratives and Hyphenated Identities,” and “Conclusion.” The first of these sections establishes the proposed meaning of the term hyphenated identities and its relation to liminal spaces. The following section analyzes the dynamic between postmemory and trauma narratives, and hyphenated identities. The final section posits a few implications and applications of this research, while also raising more questions that need further prodding.

Hyphenated Identities and Liminal Spaces What Are Liminal Spaces? In his book Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer, Richard Rohr describes liminal spaces as those places where all transformations take place. There, “we have to…remain 1

Corresponding Author: Soham Adhikari, 86/1 College Street, Department of English, Presidency University, Kolkata, West Bengal, 700073, India. email: [email protected]

The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies Volume 17, Issue 1, 2022, https://thesocialsciences.com © Common Ground Research Networks, Soham Adhikari, All Rights Reserved. Permissions: cgscholar.com/cg_support ISSN: 2327-008X (Print), ISSN: 2327-2554 (Online) https://doi.org/10.18848/2327-008X/CGP/v17i01/117-129 (Article)

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Soham Adhikari, 1 Presidency University, India

on the ‘threshold’…where we are betwixt and between” what is familiar and what is completely unknown. There, “the old world is left behind, but we’re not yet sure of the new one yet” (Rohr 2003, 155). Although Rohr takes a theocentric approach in his book, he does provide and establish the fundamental understanding of the term “liminal space.” Liminal spaces are situated in the transformative intersection of the before and the after. These spaces form a figurative no-man’s land beyond the normative understanding of spatiotemporal rhythms. Studying the methods of formation and sustenance of these spaces gives us an exhaustive insight into the minds and patterns of the contemporary collective subject. It especially enables us to understand how identities stuck in a constant flux within various liminalities interact with their immediate surroundings, and what effects it has on them. This interaction forms the crux of the question that will be tackled in this article—whether or not postmemory forms a liminal space where hyphenated identities re-suppose themselves, and how these re-suppositions affect them. In the context of this article, liminal spaces have been employed as spaces which denote both the becoming and the unbecoming of the nationalities of human subjects—particularly those with hyphenated identities. Within the liminal space occupied by, for example, the IrishAmerican, the Irish hasn’t transformed into the American yet, and the American hasn’t obliviated traces of the Irish either. Both identities inhabit the transformatory pocket of liminality that forms the locus of their understanding of both the country they presently reside in, and the one that they have left behind.

The Hyphen as a Liminal Space Hyphenated identities are those beings that dwell within the confines of these liminal spaces. They do not belong fully to either of the identities, and more often than not, they are not partial or biased for or against just one of the identities they inhabit; they belong to both. They accept the hyphenation imposed upon them, considering themselves possessing a hyphenated cultural identity. As Koh remarks, “the hyphenated subject inhabits a split and double-edged space” (Koh 2004, 161). For example, the hyphen in Irish-American denotes the liminal space that Irish-Americans inhabit. As Michael Walzer writes in What Does It Mean to Be an “American”?, “It is not the case that Irish Americans, say, are culturally Irish and politically American… Rather, they are culturally Irish-American and politically Irish-American” (Walzer 1990, 651). This liminal space that the hyphenated subject resides in thus “pre-empts the possibility of speaking from a single, undivided site” 2 (Chang 1991, 17). As a result of this, the hyphenated subject lies in a limbo “between the habits of home and the habits of the mainstream” (Cheng 2004, 217). While studying the effects of hyphenation on Greek-Cypriot children, Christou and Spyrou found that although these “children had no difficulty making sense of, and explaining, the pure national categories ‘Greeks’ and ‘Turks,’” they often “had difficulty in grasping the hyphenated ethnic category ‘Turkish-Cypriots’” (Christou and Spyrou 2016, 5; see also Christou 2002, 2006, 2007; Spyrou 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2011). Such an attitude has often 2

While critically reading Henry Tsang’s edited exhibition catalogue Self not Whole, and his art project Love Stories that talks about the role of race and racism in engendering beauty and desire (see: https://henrytsang.ca/love-stories/), Chang elaborates on the “double-edged surface” that the hyphenated subject inhabits: “If we have chosen, then, to treat the topic of community instead of the self (but this is to assume we can discuss the one without the other), the decision does not rest on the simple-minded cultural crossing from West to East or East to West. Nor does the urgency come from the questioning of individuals caught between two cultures, asking after their identities. “Who am I?” seems to me less imperative than “Who are we?” (Chang 1991, 15) In a separate work, Chang notes that the “identity for the Chinese-Canadian artist” originates, ex-sists, and desists “in the hyphen.” Elaborating upon this, he says that “the task for those imprinted by a double identity is not simply to negate their co-belonging, but to discover or articulate an identity not grounded in given categories” (Chang 1994, 231– 232).

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been attributed to the pedagogical methods employed both at home and at school. Schools often use distinct national categories to distinguish between the two nations, leading to the creation of a sense of otherness among the children—a sense of “them” and “us” (Christou and Spyrou 2016; Spyrou 2000, 2006; Christou 2007). At home, often they are exposed to the cultural tropes of their parents’ homeland—cultural practices that they have to compulsorily follow (Cheng 2004). As a result of this, they are not able to culturally assimilate the ways of their present homeland, the land they are currently residing in. The hyphen therefore forms a very potent liminal space that holds these often-contradictory identities together. Within this hyphen lie all the inspirations, aspirations, demands, and necessities of culturally distinct collective subjects. The hyphen forms a symbolic melting point for all these sociological discourses to assimilate into a gooey whole, thereby creating an entangled mess that the hyphenated subject spends all its life figuring out.

The Creation of Hyphenated Identities The creation of hyphenated identities is a complex phenomenon, and one that needs to be examined in detail. This article will look at two particular instances in India and Bangladesh— erstwhile East Pakistan—which led to the creation of these identities. These instances are partition, meaning the separation of one nation into separate nations, and migration, meaning the movement of people belonging to a certain nation to another nation, forcibly or otherwise. In the case of both India and Bangladesh, these events took place in a chronological order, and it might be arguable that the latter instance was a direct reaction to the first. India gained independence in 1947. However, immediately before the day it gained independence, the larger India was separated into a Muslim-state Pakistan composed of the present states of Pakistan (then called West Pakistan) and Bangladesh (then called East Pakistan), and a smaller, secular state, India. Division of states on the basis of religious affiliation opened a valve of terror and violence. In an interview with historian Priya Satia conducted by Alex Shashkevich, while discussing the various factors that might have come into play during this post-partition violence, Satia gave some enlightening insights: The context of World War II and the transfer of power were critical in shaping the violence. During the war, the British jailed much of the Congress Party in India. In the meantime, more violently inclined nationalist movements flourished, some bearing an imprint of fascism. Indians who fought in the war came home with violent experiences. They and their arms were recruited into new defense groups and paramilitary volunteer bodies attached to these violent movements, such as the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and the Muslim League National Guard. 3 Some Indian politicians in provincial governments began to use such groups for policing as they shifted from being the opposition to being the government. Meanwhile, having secured their aim of having both newly independent countries in the Commonwealth, British officials hurried events at every turn. The hasty dismantling of the imperial state not only made it harder to address the violence, it also 3 In his case study of the pre- and post-partition violence in India, Talbot notes that: “In such cities as Lahore and Amritsar, normal life ceased with stray stabbings, arson attacks and constant curfews. Inhabitants cowered behind the large iron gates that were erected to protect localities from assault. They divided the cities into a series of no go areas for members of rival communities. The RSS and Muslim League National Guards thrived in such circumstances. By the beginning of June 1947, they numbered 58,000 and 39,000 volunteers, respectively. They were heavily involved in the mounting urban violence. Large Sikh jathas were also being formed in the countryside. The jathas led the attacks on Muslims that ethnically cleansed them from the East Punjab” (Talbot 2008, 429). Record on the jathas is also available in the Punjab Fortnightly Reports for the second half of May 1947, L/P&J/5/250 IOR; July 30, 1947 and August 13, 1947, L/P&J/5/250 IOR.

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made much of the violence possible in the first place. The imperial state shed its law and order capacity and sense of responsibility, offering little support to administrators trying to deal with routine local politics. The British Army began to depart just when India’s own army was being divided and could not be relied on to control violence. In Punjab, confidential instructions insisted that British army units had no operational functions except in emergency to save British lives. Bureaucracies became dysfunctional as officers thought of migrating or tried to please new masters or gave into [Please check if this should be “in to”] anxiety themselves. Officials were openly partisan or not at their posts. The evident breakdown of law and order produced paranoia and fear in everyday life. Whatever religious justifications may have been at play in the violence, many actions emerged from a sense of desperate need for survival in a harrowing environment. All the ingredients for ethnic cleansing were there: a feeble, polarized police force, absence of troops and an armed and terrified population. The violence marked the crumbling of an old order and abdication of responsibility for minorities by all those with any kind of power. (Satia 2019) Collective reason, along with overall law and order, was in shambles. As a result of this, right after independence, there was a migration boom since people, especially minorities, wanted to reach a safe haven where they would not be ruthlessly murdered due to their religious affiliation and cultural practices. As Talbot emphasizes, “the total movement of population represented the greatest forced migration of the twentieth century” (Talbot 2008, 420). But this migration was in itself a violent and bloody affair, leaving the collective subject on both sides of the border with traumatic memories. 4 The final count of casualties remains controversial. 5 In East Pakistan in 1971, at the onset of the Bangladesh Liberation War, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman made the proclamation of Bangladeshi Independence 6 (Ludden 2003). In reaction to this, the Pakistan Army started Operation Searchlight, thus catapulting the infamous Bangladeshi genocide and genocidal rape (Hossain 2012). Depending on which sources—government reports or independently researched figures—are to be believed, between 200,000 and 3 million people were killed, and between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women were raped in an outrageous act of genocidal rape. 7 Even the United Nations itself never really intervened or tried to stop the inhuman deeds and gross violation of human rights that was going on in the nation then, justifying the whole bloody and violent affair as a matter of

4

Stanford library’s impressive and immensely important collection of interviews provides much insight into the partition and migration narratives discussed extensively in this article. See https://exhibits.stanford.edu/1947partition/browse/interviews. 5 British estimates put the death toll at around 200,000, while Indian historians and scholars have put it at over 2 million (Moon 1998). A safer estimate would therefore be somewhere in-between at around 1 million deaths (French 1967). 6 Historian David Ludden analyzes the political decision of the proclamation of independence, along with its overall historical validity: “On 10 April 1971, the provisional government of Bangladesh at Mujibnagar proclaimed independence by confirming an earlier declaration, dated 26 March, by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. On 27 March, Major Zia-ur-Rahman of the East Bengal Regiment declared independence on radio at Swadhin Bangla Betarkendra, in Kalurghat, Chittagong, affirming that Sheikh Mujib was the leader of the government. At the time, these statements were not competitive, nor did they express partisan oppositions. Both emerged in a complex political history that included numerous other declarations of independence, in various idioms, whose implications remain intriguing subjects for research, debate, and interpretation” (Ludden 2011, 79). 7 The truth about these numbers is a subject of contentious debate. In a New York Times op-ed, David Bergman argues that “the three million figure is totemic,” used to create a vantage point to boost the Bangladeshi government’s own political agenda forward (Bergman 2016). Whatever the case might be, the fact remains that Operation Searchlight still is one of history’s most brutal acts of immoral, inhuman purification that has somehow escaped getting trapped within the memory worlds of most first-world nations, and has thus slipped into the realms of forgotten oblivion.

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domestic jurisdiction (Salzberg 1973). 8 Left to their own woes, millions of people migrated to India to escape this horrific ordeal, leaving behind everything they held dear. In both these cases, what ultimately resulted was the creation of hyphenated identities. In the former case, it is seen that the migrants had to go through massive acculturation, since the cultures in the north-western parts of former India and those in the newly formed India were quite different. In the latter case, although the cultures of East Pakistan and the Indian state of West Bengal were somewhat similar, they still had to go through massive metamorphoses simply because the people of India perceived them as their socio-lingual and geo-political Other. The hyphen was therefore created, the hyphen that would dominate their and their progenies’ identities throughout their existence.

Postmemory Narratives and Hyphenated Identities Postmemory as “Lying Truth” In the words of Marianne Hirsch, the pioneer of the concept of postmemory: “Postmemory” describes the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to the experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. To grow up with overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own life stories displaced, even evacuated by our ancestors. It is to be shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic fragments of events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension. (Hirsch 2012, 5) First-generational memories are those that are thus inherited by the later generations and in the process of inheritance, get modified and, at times, even partially forged. Such adulteration occurs when the true memory is forgotten, and the collective subject decides to create instances of lying truth to fill the void left by true memory. The postmemory thus formed is a tarnished reflection of the true Real, the true memory. It must be clarified here what “true memory” means in this context. To do so, initially a philosophical approach will be taken to broadly instate this terminology by indulging in a detailed examination of the true Real and the lying real. Subsequently, scientifically valid methodological observations will be used to re-instate this point, by drawing to the fore present research on these grounds from topics of socio-psychological significance. The true Real is that which we can never conceive or experience. This Real is absolute in itself, unadulterated by notions, politics, ideologies, and other worldly affairs. Generations of philosophers since ancient times have pondered upon the visibility and attainability of this Real—all the way from Aristotle and Plato, to modern philosophers such as Hegel, Kant, Lacan, Žižek, and many more. This Real lies in the perfect realm, the noumenal world beyond phenomenological conceptions.

8

Criticizing the UN Charter’s principles, Salzberg says, “the Bangladesh experience vividly illustrates the inextricable relationship between the UN Charter’s principles of promoting human rights and maintaining international peace and security. It also illustrates, unfortunately, that member states consider that the charter’s principle of non-interference in matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of a member state may prohibit UN intervention until a situation reaches a level of international conflict incapable of a non-violent solution” (Salzberg 1973, 115).

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The tarnished real, on the other hand, is one we are more prone and more likely to experience in our everyday endeavors. As Hegel says in The Phenomenology of Mind, this reality is “no longer something in itself null and void, something merely to be destroyed and consumed; but rather…a reality broken in sunder, which is only in one respect essentially null, but in another sense also a consecrated world. This reality is a form and embodiment of the unchangeable, for the latter has in itself preserved particularity; and because, qua unchangeable, it is a universal, its particularity as a whole has the significance of all actuality” (Hegel 2003, 125). This reality is massively altered, adulterated, and removed from the true Real. And this is the reality that beings of the phenomenal world experience—the lying real. This real is haunted by specters 9 of the “pre-ideological kernel” which engenders all later ideological formulations. Lacan argues that the reality that we experience is never the “thing-in-itself” (Lacan 1992). Žižek further clarifies that this reality “is always-already symbolized, constituted, structured by way of symbolic mechanisms. The problem resides in the fact that symbolization ultimately always fails, that it never succeeds in fully ‘covering’ the Real, that it always involves some unsettled, unredeemed symbolic debt. This Real (the part of reality that remains nonsymbolized) returns in the guise of spectral apparitions” (Žižek 2013, 229–230). This reality is thus never whole or complete, and neither consists of all the symbols and signifiers that the true Real possessed. But it is nonetheless a reality in itself, a reality felt and possessed by beings from the phenomenal world—us. Similarly, true memory is that which is unadulterated and unaltered. It is the memory of things as they happened, without much change in their quantity or quality. True memory is that which is experienced by first-generation migrants when they migrate to alien lands. It contains all of their trauma and emotional experiences. These memories are formed through direct perceptual encounters and are experienced firsthand. In socio-psychological research, “true memory” has often been meant to describe the memory and memorability of events as they were actually experienced, in contrast to how they were remembered (Bainbridge 2019; Sartori, Zangrossi, and Monaro 2018; Howes and O’Shea 2014; Guarnieri, Bueno, and Tudesco 2019). However, when true memory is passed down through various modes of narratives, it gets filtered and thus tarnished. The truth of this memory becomes a part of fiction, something nonabsolute and disjointed. The postmemory thus formed is a lying truth—a weak image of the trauma, and cultural and emotional hauntings that the original recipients of the true memory faced. The collective subject that experiences these second-hand memories never really physically interacted with the events that engendered these traumatic specters. The past in itself is a commodity prone to falsification or adulteration. As Žižek says, “the power of ‘unmaking [défaire]’ the past is conceivable only on the symbolic level: in immediate life, in its circuit, the past is only the past and as such is incontestable; but once one is situated at the level of history qua text, the network of symbolic traces, one is able to wind back what has already occurred, or erase the past” (Žižek 2013, 16). Although Žižek is primarily concerned about the discourse of negation—Freud’s das Ungeschehenmachen—we may very well introduce this philosophy in the study of postmemory narratives. And since the collective past is an intrinsic social entity, it is imperative that memory processes that have fundamental connections to the past would be tainted by it. Recent studies and literature on the subject show that this is indeed the case, and sociological factors engender the creation of modified memory narratives (Bless, Strack, and Walther 2001; Echterhoff and Hirst 2009; Barnier et al. 2008; Newbury and Monaghan 2019; Bookbinder and Brainerd 2016), and these falsified memories consecutively and inadvertently taint the formation and realization of postmemory narratives.

9 In his pathbreaking book Specters of Marx, Derrida introduces the concept of hauntology and spectral beings hidden within formulated ideologies. According to him, the present and the future always contain specters of the past haunting their spatio-temporal reaches till the ends of oblivion (Derrida 1994).

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ADHIKARI: THE LIMINAL SPACE OF POSTMEMORY

Furthermore, one may make a teleological exploration of the arrival and conception of postmemory as lying real. For the hyphenated collective subject experiencing postmemory narratives, by filling in the gaps and lapses in memory with artificiality, it can open up a spectrum of possibilities for understanding not only its own self, but also the experiences of the generations preceding it. This issue shall be taken up more comprehensively in the following section.

As seen in the previous section, true memory is always adulterated during the formation of postmemory. Such a phenomenon manifests because postmemory narratives are representations of true memory. During these re-presentations, the narratives get influenced by external factors that have some form of agency in controlling the visibility and narration of the true memories. And many times, as will be evidenced in this section, narratives get totally silenced, enabling the enforcement of forced-forgetfulness in the larger collective memory. In an article by the collective Popular Memory Group of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, they write: A knowledge of the past and present is also produced in the course of every day. There is a common sense of the past, which though it may lack consistency and explanatory force, none the less contains elements of good sense. Such knowledge may circulate, usually without amplification, in everyday talk and in personal comparisons and narratives. It may be recorded in certain intimate cultural forms: letters, diaries, photograph albums and collections of things with past associations. It may be encapsulated in anecdotes that acquire the force and generality of myth. If this is history, it is a history under extreme pressure and privations. Usually this history is held to the level of private remembrances. It is not only unrecorded, but actually silenced. It is not offered the occasion to speak. (Popular Memory Group 1982) Narratives of migration and partition have been heavily modified and silenced on both sides— Indo-Pak and Indo-Bangladeshi—of the border. These “statist narratives,” as Richard Roberts calls them 10 (Roberts 2000), have forcibly dislocated and disfigured the more personal and privatized narratives that original survivors had. The alienated hyphenated collective subject has had its voice stolen, sometimes by the very government within whose boundaries it took refuge in. As Harrington says, “in the gaping absence of public memorials or museums dedicated to the Partition of India the narration of this traumatic story 11 is vital to its commemoration. Yet the tragedy of the violent events of 1947, which saw mass displacement, death, abduction and rape, is punctuated by silence. Such silence is comparable to that surrounding the Holocaust” (Harrington 2010, 262). Although comparing the silencing of the narratives of the Holocaust and the Indian partition (and arguably even the migration engendered by the Bangladeshi genocide) might seem overtly bold and superficial to some critics, a closer observation of both these events would surely appease them. In essence, such a treatment of migrant narratives is reminiscent of Hochberg’s idea of “visible invisibility.” In her book Visual Occupations, she examines “how the unresolved and ongoing historical violence associated with the Palestinian forced exile of 1948, referred to in Arabic as the Nakba (the catastrophe), is seemingly erased or hidden from Israeli eyes, and yet nevertheless finds its way into the Israeli visual field as a haunting presence of a visible 10 Roberts accounts for, and categorically places, history and memory within the context of national and international politics and power narratives. Statist narratives become an instrumental tool in analyzing memory narratives of the collective subject faced with both corrigible and non-corrigible trauma. 11 Harrington is referring to the trauma narratives surrounding partition and the subsequent forced migration.

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Postmemory in the Context of Forced-Forgetfulness

invisibility” (Hochberg 2015, 38). Visible invisibility occurs when “a certain failure to see or to appear generates an alternative mode of visuality associated with the sociopolitical power of ghostly haunting,” and this “haunting expands the realm of the visible to include the visibility of the invisible” (Hochberg 2015, 37–38). Similarly, in the South Asian context, migrants are hidden from the public (Indian) eye, and only come back to haunt the public visual field through trivial stints (such as a Bangladeshi accent in a side character at a daily soap or an indigenous Sindhi cuisine at a metropolitan restaurant) that are almost unrecognizable at first glance. The Indian state has not erected enough instances of what Pierre Nora calls the lieux de mémoire, roughly translated in English as the sites or realms of memory (Nora 1989). Monuments and memorabilia are not only very scarce, but also more often than not quite irrelevant in the public consciousness. History textbooks taught to school children do not have much information, if any at all, regarding the perils of partition and migration. Furthermore, politicians and leaders of the state(s) often alter these narratives to incite hatred and misunderstanding among the local masses for their own political and logistical reasons: they prey on the inherent racist tendencies within the un-hyphenated subjects against their hyphenated counterparts to gain power and political support. Narratives of racism and xenophobia are rampant even to the present day. All of the first-, second-, and 1.5-generation migrants whom I had interviewed 12 on personal capacity had provided me with extensively detailed anecdotes of various instances of discrimination that they experienced upon migrating to the country they presently reside in (which, in their case, was India). For instance, Anjali Das, a 1.5-generation migrant from Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), narrated how she faced extreme linguistic terrorism and discrimination from native West Bengalis when they ridiculed her dialect and ways of speaking. 13 Ratna Sen (nee Makhijani), a first-generation migrant from West Pakistan, recalled how she had to change her college because native Gujaratis did not like the fact that she was a non-vegetarian and constantly ostracized her, leading her to ultimately move to a new state altogether. 14 Thus, in the middle of it all, the collective subject gets trapped in a massive limbo. Not only are their voices ignored and later forgotten, but they have to face rampant acts of hatred against them. Suppressing trauma narratives and experiences faced by the collective subject during partition and while migrating, such as genocide, rape, and violent riots, often becomes expressively imperative, and sometimes even inevitable. 15 Priya Satia comments that the trauma faced by the collective subject during the times of partition and migration “has lasting consequences—it affects what is shared with and what is concealed from future generations” (Satia 2019). Since history itself becomes too painful to recall, and as a sign of collective denial, true memory is forgotten and refabricated. As a result of this collective psychogenic amnesia, these narratives are once again tarnished while being passed down in the form of postmemory. Eventually, even their progenies are caught within this turbulent liminality continually faced by first-generation immigrants, although these second-generation migrants were never physically in contact with the perils and trauma of the original migration. In addition, they are fed promises and visions of a utopian land beyond the borders—a land which had, if narratives from first-generation migrants were to be believed, everything in abundance compared to the land they are residing in presently, and a land from which they had had to flee. These second-

12

The interviews for this research are available at: https://www.thehyphenationproject.com/interviews. Anjali Das, Interview by Author, Chandannagar, October 9, 2021. 14 Ratna Sen (nee Makhijani), Interview by Author, Kolkata, February 17, 2021. 15 There is extensive evidence of psychogenic amnesia among genocide and Holocaust survivors (van der Kolk and Fisler 1995; Bower 1990; Brown, Scheflin, and Whitfield 1999). Psychogenic amnesia is often categorically separated into two types according to Aydin as “loss of autobiographical memories, which might even amount to loss of personal identity (global psychogenic amnesia) and loss of episodic memories (situation-specific psychogenic amnesia)” (Aydin 2017, 130). 13

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generation immigrants face “a dramatic loss of identity and meaning” (Eyerman 2004, 160)—a consequence of the cultural trauma that they encounter through postmemory narratives.

Let us now look at how postmemory leads to the creation of these hyphenated identities. As pointed out in the previous section, the state exerts its authoritative influence onto narratives of partition and migration to obliviate them from the larger collective memory. Even the migrated subjects themselves forcibly undertake practices of forgetting to relieve themselves of not only the external trauma they faced while migrating, but also the internalized trauma that they continually face throughout their existence. They delude themselves into believing that restructured and more “fictional” narratives of their experiences would be beneficial both for themselves and the generations after them. As a result of this, the narratives they provide to their children and the children of other survivors are riddled with both inconsistency and fictional truth. Their narratives are infused with subjective denial. Gayatri Sinha, the curator of the exhibition titled “Part Narratives,” 16 which was held in Bikaner House in Delhi in 2017, says, “in their wish to be subsumed and absorbed, to move out of the margins, migrations are read as minor narratives, a conspicuous and awkward by-product of temporal change.” Elaborating upon this, she gives a personal anecdote: My mother and her family crossed from Lahore to Delhi in 1947. A military convoy brought them to safety, my grandmother bringing with her a box of valuables and her four children. The carved wooden box from Kashmir, perhaps bought on a holiday, was pasted with paper that had faded and coloured with age. When they spoke of their lives before the crossing, it was with snatches of memory—my mother’s violin lessons, now stilled in an aunt’s home amid the strange turbulence of Delhi, the sweetness of the melons of Swat, and the Government College Lahore. Collapsed, shuffled, laid out or finally packed away, these were single snapshots, the partial memory of selection and denial. Beneath them lay the chaos and compulsion of new lives, identities on the cusp of unforeseeable change. If asked about the grand image of migration, its parts and its narratives, its passage and its inheritance, like the king in Yajnavalakya’s narrative they would say, “I do not know.” (Sinha 2017) Sinha’s story is very similar to other stories of migration and people affected by it, directly or indirectly. Various survivors and their families, whom I had interviewed, had provided me with similar anecdotes and experiences. Add to this the cancelling and silencing done by the state, and one has cooked up the perfect recipe for the formation of second-generation hyphenated identities. On the one hand, these second-generation migrants are bombarded with different versions of the same memory through different forms of narrative, and on the other hand they are taught a separate, disjointed, and cancelled version of those narratives. At home they are exposed to romanticized tropical narratives about their ancestors’ homeland, a land from which they had had to migrate. While at school and everywhere else in the public space where they interact with history—a history tainted by the nationalistic bias of the country they are living in—they are taught the vulgar signification of social, political, and cultural otherness that penetrates their understanding of personal, communal, and public histories. They are bereft of the opportunity to create their own identities or accept the identities bestowed upon them. The postmemory they experience is fractured and multifaceted in both its conception and implication. At the end of it 16

See: https://thewire.in/culture/part-narratives-partition.

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all, this generation of migrants turns into hyphenated collective subjects themselves, stuck within a boiling and bubbling liminal space.

The objective of the article was to establish the phenomenon of hyphenation through an interdisciplinary analysis, primarily in the context of South Asia. Interviews, secondary readings, and parallel research in allied fields were used to posit and develop the argument that has been put forward in this article—that of the formation of hyphenated identities through postmemory and trauma narratives. Hyphenation is occurring all around the world, as countries break, make, and remake their geo-political and ethno-social borders. There has been a huge migration boom in the past decade, and studying these instances of the formation of hyphenated identities and the exchange of postmemory has become the need of the hour. It is particularly important to study this interaction between postmemory and identity formation as it allows us to devise plans to build a better and more inclusive society for the children of migrants. Further study needs to be done to extend the present definitions of hyphenated identities to include intra-national migrants too. Thereafter, the trauma leading up to both the formation and the re-calling of postmemory needs to be studied more closely to include instances of discriminatory practices and ecological warfare—especially to understand the migration of tribal and indigenous people. The spectrum thus needs to be broadened, and much research work needs to be undertaken around these sectors. During these contemporary times, as communities of natives are being forcefully migrated every year, research on these topics will be instrumental in creating safe spaces which provide a more inclusive and less sociopsychologically taxing experience to the unfortunate migrants and their future progenies.

Acknowledgement Earlier versions of this article were presented at Making Sense: A Humanities Symposium (Rice University) and Postmemory and the Contemporary World (InMind Support). I am extremely grateful to all of the interviewees who participated in this research and shared their narratives with me, especially Anjali Das and Ratna Sen (nee Makhijani) for allowing me to use excerpts from their interviews in this article. I am also thankful to Tanya Kole, Ishan Purkait, and Riddhiman Neogi for reading my initial drafts and suggesting constructive changes. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions.

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Conclusion

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Soham Adhikari: Student, Department of English, Presidency University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India

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The journal presents studies that exemplify the disciplinary and interdisciplinary practices of the social sciences. As well as articles of a traditional scholarly type, this journal invites case studies that take the form of presentations of practice—including documentation of socially engaged practices and exegeses analyzing the effects of those practices. The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies is a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal.

ISSN 2327-008X

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The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies is one of four thematically focused journals that support the Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Research Network. The Research Network is comprised of a journal collection, book imprint, conference, and online community.