Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature 103240535X, 9781032405353

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NARRATIVES OF TRAUMA IN SOUTH ASIAN LITERATURE

This volume addresses cultural and literary narratives of trauma in South Asian literature. Presenting a novel cross-cultural perspective on trauma theory, the essays within this volume study the divergent cultural responses to trauma and violence in various parts of South Asia, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Afghanistan, which have received little attention in literary writings on trauma in their specific circumstances. Through comprehensive sociocultural understanding of the region, this book creates an approachable space where trauma engages with themes like racial identity, ethnicity, nationality, religious dogma, and cultural environment. With case studies from Kashmir, the 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh, and armed conflict in Nepal and Afghanistan, the volume will be of interest to scholars, students, and researchers of literature, history, politics, conflict studies, and South Asian studies. Goutam Karmakar, Ph.D. (English), is an NRF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He is also Assistant Professor of English at Barabazar Bikram Tudu Memorial College, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia, West Bengal, India. He is the lead editor of Routledge book series on South Asian literature. His forthcoming and recently published edited volumes are Nation and Narration: Hindi Cinema and the Making and Remaking of National Consciousness (forthcoming); The Poetry of Jibanananda Das: Aesthetics, Poetics, and Narratives (forthcoming); The City Speaks: Urban Spaces in Indian Literature (2022); and Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature: Traversing Resistance, Margins and Extremism (Routledge, 2021). His areas of interest are Women and Gender Studies, South Asian Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and Ecological Studies. He has been published in journals including Visual Anthropology, Quarterly Review of

Film and Video, Intersections, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Comparative Literature: East & West, MELUS, South Asian Review, IUP Journal of English Studies, Journal of International Women’s Studies, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Interdisciplinary Literary Review, Journal of Gender Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, National Identities, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Journal of Narrative and Language Studies, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, and Asiatic, among others. Zeenat Khan, Ph.D. (English), is Sr. Assistant Professor at Post-Graduate Department of English and Research Centre, Mehr Chand Mahajan DAV College for Women, Chandigarh, India. She is also an IUC-Associate with the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. She was a Summer Institute Fellow 2021 with Holocaust Educational Foundation Northwestern University, Illinois USA. She is a member of the Board of Studies at Panjab University, Chandigarh, and is also on the editorial panel of many international journals. Apart from publishing and presenting several research papers, she also has published three books, titled An Exordium (2011), Culture and Identity: Illustrations from the Select Works of M G Vassanji (2019), and Simmering Silences and Beneath: An Anthology of Gender Issues in India (2021). Her areas of research interest are postcolonial literature, gender studies, trauma literature, and environmental humanities.

NARRATIVES OF TRAUMA IN SOUTH ASIAN LITERATURE

Edited by Goutam Karmakar and Zeenat Khan

Cover image by Naypong / Getty Images First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Goutam Karmakar and Zeenat Khan; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Goutam Karmakar and Zeenat Khan to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-25682-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-40535-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-35353-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539 Typeset in Bembo by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgmentsix List of Contributors x Introduction: Literary Trauma Theory and South Asian Literature

1

Goutam Karmakar and Zeenat Khan PART I

Partition and Beyond: Narrating Trauma of India

21

1 Trauma, Gender, and Caste: Vernacular Postcolonial Feminism and the Writing of Perumal Murugan Nalini Iyer

23

2 Pathogenic Memories and Repetitive Absence: Reading Siddhartha Gigoo’s The Garden of Solitude, Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator, and Shahnaz Bashir’s The Half Mother 31 Zeenat Khan 3 From the Lived Experience of Punjab 1984 in Punjab to Its ‘Mnemonic Imagination’: Reading Amandeep Sandhu’s Roll of Honour 45 Manjot Kaur

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PART II

Pains of Pakistan: Trauma Narratives of Pakistan

57

4 The Postcolonial Novel as a Traumatic Genre: Reading Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Geography of God 59 Margaret Scanlan 5 ‘How is a wound put into words?’: Muhammad Hanif ’s Red Birds and the Use of Magical Realism Faisal Nazir

70

6 The Construction and Dissolution of the Masculine Self: Re-reading the Unspeakable Trauma in Sorayya Khan’s Noor 81 Fatima Syeda PART III

War and Beyond: Trauma and Bangladeshi Literature

93

7 Writing War and Womanhood: Representation of Violence and Disgrace in Dilruba Z. Ara’s Blame 95 Mohammad Shafiqul Islam 8 Speaking in Fragments: The Birangona-mother’s Traumatic Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War Shamika Shabnam

108

9 Complexion, Infertility, and Sexual Orientation: Narratives of Trauma in Fayeza Hasanat’s The Bird Catcher and Other Stories 119 Goutam Karmakar PART IV

Trauma-Affected Afghanistan: Wounded Memories and Narratives 135 10 Witnessing Trauma: The Ethical Imperative of Bystanders in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and And the Mountains Echoed 137 Robin E. Field 11 Kaboul mon Hiroshima: Trauma and Narration in Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone 146 Gen’ichiro Itakura

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PART V

Conflict and Wounds: Narrating Trauma of Nepal

157

12 People’s War, Trauma, and Its Consequences in Rebel: A Cross-Cultural Study in Post-Conflict Nepali Narrative(s) Badri Prasad Pokharel

159

13 Traumatism of the Future: Reading Nepali Literature with Caruth, Derrida, and Freud Puspa Damai

168

14 Maoist Revolution and Trauma: Fight or Flight in Manjhushree Thapa’s Seasons of Flight 181 Ubaraj Katawal PART VI

Turbulent Topography: Trauma and Sri Lanka

191

15 Cumulative Trauma, Structural Racism, and Displacement in Contemporary Sri Lankan Fiction: Sharon Bala’s The Boat People and Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage 193 Maryse Jayasuriya 16 The Inside-Out Traumas of War in Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors 202 Moumin Quazi 17 Queer Recovery: Addressing Violence, Trauma, and Exile in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy 211 Marilena Zackheos 18 The Traumatic Legacy of the Sri Lankan Civil War in Selected Writings of Nayomi Munaweera Deimantas Valančiūnas

220

19 War, Wounds, and ‘Working-through’: Reading Trauma in Selected Sri Lankan Novels Sunaina Jain

232

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PART VII

South Asia, Trauma, and Beyond

245

20 Representational Consequences of Trauma for South Asian Partition Novels in English Khan Touseef Osman

247

21 Rohingya Refugee Poetry: Testimony and Cultural Activism Lopamudra Basu

261

Index 272

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank all contributors and friends for their participation and cooperation. We are immensely thankful to Aakash Chakrabarty, Senior Commissioning Editor at Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, for his confidence in our work, motivation, and assistance throughout the entire project. We also appreciate the assistance of the editorial team of Routledge in bringing out this volume.

CONTRIBUTORS

Lopamudra Basu is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, USA. She is the author of Ayad Akhtar, the American Nation and Its Others After 9/11: Homeland Insecurity and the co-editor of Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander. Her articles have been published in Women’s Studies, Studies in the Novel, South Asian Review, Social Text, and edited collections. Puspa Damai is Associate Professor of English at Marshall University, West Virginia, USA. He has published articles in journals including CR: The New Centennial Review, Discourse, Postcolonial Text, and Postcolonial Interventions. He is currently working on two research projects: a book-length study of hospitality in American multi-ethnic literature and a collection of essays on South Asian literature. Dr. Damai is also the founding editor of Critical Humanities, an open-access journal published by Marshall Digital Scholar. Robin E. Field is Professor of English at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, USA. She is the author of Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction (2020) and co-editor of Critical Perspectives on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Feminism and Diaspora (2022, with Amritjit Singh and Samina Najmi) and Transforming Diaspora: Communities Beyond National Boundaries (2011, with Parmita Kapadia). She has published over a dozen journal articles and book chapters on American literature, South Asian literature, trauma, and pedagogy. She is Managing Editor of South Asian Review. Mohammad Shafiqul Islam is Professor in the Department of English, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh. His research interests encompass, but are not limited to, postcolonialism, world literature, translation

Contributors  xi

studies, Anthropocene, and South Asian literature. Other than scholarly work in literature, he is committed to creative writing, especially poetry and literary translation. He is the author of two poetry collections, most recently Inner State, and the translator of Humayun Ahmed: Selected Short Stories and Aphorisms of Humayun Azad. Professor Islam’s work has appeared in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Critical Survey, Journal of World Literature, South Asian Review, English: Journal of the English Association, Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, English in Education, Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Gen’ichiro Itakura is Professor at the Faculty of Letters, Kansai University, Japan. He has published books and articles on contemporary British and postcolonial literatures, as well as cultural studies. His recent publications include ‘Writing Trauma, Writing Modern: Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil and Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone’ (Topography of Trauma: Fissures, Disruptions and Transfigurations, Brill, 2020) and ‘Screams and Laughter: Transfer of Affect in Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden’ ( Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 56, no. 3, 2020). Nalini Iyer is Professor of English at Seattle University, Washington, USA, where she teaches postcolonial literatures. Her publications include Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India (2009); Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest (2013); and Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays in Memory, Culture, and Politics (2016). She is currently co-editing with Pallavi Rastogi Teaching South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Literature (forthcoming MLA 2023). She is the Chief Editor of South Asian Review. Sunaina Jain is an Assistant Professor of English at MCM DAV College, Chandigarh, India. Her poems have been published in international anthologies like Shout It Out (Lost Tower Publications, London), Aquillrelle, Tranquil Muse, and Amravati Poetic Prism. Her short stories have been published on the blog of Out of Print magazine, Nuances, Muse India, The Indian Review, and Indian Ruminations. She has contributed two stories in an anthology of translated stories titled Vignettes published by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, in 2018. Maryse Jayasuriya is Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, USA. She is the author of Terror and Reconciliation: Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature, 1983-2009 (Lexington, 2012), editor of The Immigrant Experience: Critical Insights (Salem Press, 2018), and guest editor of a Special Issue of South Asian Review (33.3) on Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature. Goutam Karmakar, Ph.D. (English), is an NRF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He is also Assistant Professor of English at Barabazar Bikram Tudu Memorial College, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia, West Bengal, India. His forthcoming and recently published

xii  Contributors

edited volumes are Nation and Narration: Hindi Cinema and the Making and Remaking of National Consciousness (forthcoming); The Poetry of Jibanananda Das: Aesthetics, Poetics, and Narratives (forthcoming); The City Speaks: Urban Spaces in Indian Literature (2022); and Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature: Traversing Resistance, Margins and Extremism (Routledge, 2021). His areas of interest are Women and Gender Studies, South Asian Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and Ecological Studies. He has been published in journals including Visual Anthropology, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Intersections, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Comparative Literature: East & West, MELUS, South Asian Review, IUP Journal of English Studies, Journal of International Women’s Studies, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Interdisciplinary Literary Review, Journal of Gender Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, National Identities, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Journal of Narrative and Language Studies, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, and Asiatic, among others. Ubaraj Katawal is Associate Professor of English at Valdosta State University, Georgia, USA. He is interested in global Anglophone literature and has published his works in numerous peer-reviewed journals such as South Asian Review, Postcolonial Text, and South Central Review. Manjot Kaur is Assistant Professor in the PG Department of English at Mehr Chand Mahajan DAV College for Women, Chandigarh, India. She has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh, for five years. She has recently completed her PhD (English) from Panjab University, Chandigarh. Her thesis maps the politics of memorialization and re-presentation with an emphasis on how form impacts memorialization vis-a-vis the process of creating and evoking individual and collective traumatic memories. Zeenat Khan is Sr. Assistant Professor of English at Mehr Chand Mahajan DAV College for Women, affiliated to Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. She is also a Research Associate at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (Shimla) at present. She has published three books, titled An Exordium (2011), Culture and Identity: Illustrations from the Select Works of M G Vassanji (2019), and Simmering Silences and Beneath: An Anthology of Gender Issues in India. (2021). She was a Summer Institute Fellow 2021 with Holocaust Educational Foundation Northwestern University, USA. Faisal Nazir is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, University of Karachi, Pakistan. His research interests include postcolonial theory and literature, Post-9/11 literature, Pakistani anglophone writing, and world literature. His first book, Orientalism Post 9/11: Pakistani Anglophone Fiction in an Age of Terror was published in 2020.

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Khan Touseef Osman is a Bangladeshi academic and researcher, currently doing his second PhD in the Department of Literary, Linguistic and Historical Studies at the University of Salerno, Italy. Badri Prasad Pokharel is Associate Professor of English at Saraswati Multiple Campus, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal. He did his Ph.D. from Lumbini Bouddhist University, Nepal. He has published various books and articles on the issues of trauma and post-conflict Nepali narrative written on People’s War (1995-2005) that caused a huge destruction in the country. The title of his Ph.D. dissertation is The Evocation of Buddhism in the Healing Process: A Study of Trauma in Post-Conflict Nepali Narratives. His works have been published in journals including TU Journal, Pragyan LBU Journal, Prithvi Academic Journal, Lumbini Prava, RMC Journal, Molung Education Frontier, Crossing the Border, Saraswati Journal, International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Infinity, Molung Research Journal, J.S. Murarka Campus Rajat Jayanti Smarika, Bhanu Smarika, and Intellescope, among others. He has also worked at the Research Division of Tribhuvan University for a long time. Moumin Quazi is Professor of English at Tarleton State University, USA. He is the recipient of the 2022 South Asian Literary Association Distinguished Achievement Award for Service to the Field of South Asian Studies. He is also the editor of the South Asian Literature, Arts and Culture book series (Peter Lang Publishing); founder of Scheherazade Press; member of the College English Association Board of Directors; and has been widely published. He authored the mixed-genre Migratory Words (Lamar University Literary Press, 2016). Margaret Scanlan is Emerita Professor of English at Indiana University South Bend, USA. She has published widely in postcolonial fiction and is the author of Traces of Another Time (Princeton) and Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (Virginia). Her most recent book is Understanding Irène Némirovsky (South Carolina, 2018). Shamika Shabnam is a PhD candidate in the English and Cultural Studies Department, McMaster University, Ontario, Canada. Her doctoral dissertation explores the politics of masculinity and nation-making during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Her research focuses on gendered and sexual violence during the 1947 Partition as well as the 1971 Liberation War. Fatima Syeda is the Chairperson of the department of English at FC College University, Pakistan. She has been working as an Assistant Professor at the Department of English since Sep 2005. Her fields of interest are masculinity studies, trauma studies, South Asian literature in English, and modern drama.

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Deimantas Valančiūnas is Associate Professor of Film and Popular Cultures of Asia at the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Vilnius University, Lithuania. His research interests include Indian cinema, postcolonial theory, diaspora studies, gothic and horror cinemas in Asia. He is an editor of special journal issues ‘From Highbrow to Lowbrow. Studies of Indian B-grade Cinema and Beyond’ (Acta Orientalia Vilnensia, 2014) and ‘South Asian Diasporas and (Imaginary) Homelands: Mediated Exchanges and Representations in the 21st Century’ (South Asian Diaspora, 2021, co-edited with Dr Clelia Clini, University of Loughborough) and a number of journal articles on South Asian cinema and literature. He is also an editor of an edited volume South Asian Gothic. Haunted Cultures, Histories and Media (co-editor Katarzyna Ancuta), published in 2021 by University of Wales Press). Marilena Zackheos is an Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Nicosia, Cyprus. She has published on postcolonial literary and cultural studies, psychoanalysis and trauma, gender, and sexuality. Her research addresses island identity in print and non-print texts, investigating cases of resilience, survival, and recovery from hardship and trauma.

INTRODUCTION Literary Trauma Theory and South Asian Literature Goutam Karmakar and Zeenat Khan

Trauma: From Physical to Psychological In this world, brutal power struggles, tragic military conflicts, and environmental catastrophes are nothing new, and as a direct consequence, human misery, in both its real and perceived forms, has been widely expressed in a variety of art forms, including literature. The 1995 article ‘Art and Trauma’ by Dori Laub and Daniel Podell makes reference to the emergence of a new type of art prompted by a need to recover from the collective psychic trauma caused by the massacres of World War II and other twentieth-century armed conflicts. Furthermore, they contend that only a distinct form of art, dubbed ‘the art of trauma’, ‘begin to achieve a representation of that which defies representation in both inner and outer experience’ (Laub and Podell 1995: 992). This emergence of a new artistic expression in response to the specific imperatives of an era characterized by the conceptual framework of trauma is noteworthy. It implicitly suggests how art can become a culturally constructed space for the articulation and transmission of transpersonal trauma, providing methodologies of fortitude designed to ensure the survival and subsequent process of healing for the traumatized subject. Since antiquity, the transmission of ‘unspeakable’ traumas into something readable and viable can be traced in all forms of art, but the progression of (tangible) diagnostic terminology capable of identifying them as ‘traumatic’ is strikingly substantial (Bond and Craps 2020: 2). Earlier, the word ‘trauma’ was understood in its physical sense only, and its extension in its connotation from physical to psychological came conspicuously after both the world wars and the advent of industrialization. Massive casualties in train and airplane accidents, the visibility of unfathomable dimensions of health hazards in industrial facilities, and enormous scales of environmental degradation drew attention to wounds that had not only physical but also strikingly psychological and social aspects. This is what Roger Luckhurst aptly remarks in The Trauma Question DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-1

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that ‘the shocks of modern life’ multiplied and quantified manifold in the nineteenth century (2008: 19). Thus, the meteoric rise in the cases of mental diseases such as hysteria, neurosis, nightmares, and other psychic disorders in the victims led to a sharp surge in clinical and psychological studies that concentrated on the scars that were invisible. Here, words and verbosity articulate trauma, and thus ‘language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be “abreacted” almost as effectively’ (Freud and Breuer 2001: 8). Thus, the enormous impetus in the field of Trauma Studies led to a global knowledge and understanding, and as a necessary consequence, we now have a variety of diagnostic interpretations and perspectives on trauma, but it remains difficult to identify the one that is all-inclusive. As diversified as ‘traumas’ are, the task of disentangling, identifying, and interpreting them is arduous and complicated. While an individual may suffer another trauma while struggling with the previous one, collective traumas result from armed conflicts, mass genocides, environmental catastrophes, and food scarcity. Poverty often accumulates with interpersonal traumas and can make relationships and responses to trauma even more difficult and complex to study. Response to a trauma can further escalate it, and victimization may lead to a risk of re-­ victimization. Occasionally, a traumatic experience is not consistent with the idea that it is comprehensible or recognizable; it can be a forgotten experience that is difficult to interpret, and it remains difficult to distinguish and demarcate intersecting individual and collective traumas. Along with these complex interrelations among various forms of trauma, the age, gender, identity, religion, surroundings, environment, and culture of an individual make the response to trauma even more complicated. Additionally, there is frequent crossover between subgroups, implying that an individual may simultaneously experience multiple types of trauma. For instance, a study by Huang et al. (2012) observe that 31.7 percent of participants encountered two types of trauma simultaneously, while 18.9 percent experienced at least three types of trauma simultaneously. Thus, trauma is an interconnected circumstance that can encompass not only one or multiple incidents but also multiple types of trauma, including sexual, psychological, and physical, among others (Clift and Maratos 2020: 22). Given these complex interventions in experiences and responses to psychological trauma, trauma study essentially calls for an integrative approach. As Caruth asserts, [T]rauma is much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. (1996: 4) In the past few decades, along with neuropsychological, socio-politico-cultural, anthropological, and historical analysis, literary studies have been converging to study trauma and intend to come up with a multidirectional approach to understand trauma and also its responses and representations in various forms and mediums.

Introduction  3

The connotation of the term ‘trauma’ has evolved over the past few decades as a consequence of an increase in psychological disorder case scenarios and increasing awareness. From earlier and more standard medical descriptions of trauma as painful and debilitating bodily wounds caused by mechanical force or an exogenous intermediary, the meaning of the word ‘trauma’ has been significantly expanded. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed., DSM–5) states that, Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence in one (or more) of the following ways: directly experiencing the traumatic event(s); witnessing, in person, the traumatic event(s) as it occurred to others; learning that the traumatic event(s) occurred to a close family member or close friend (in case of actual or threatened death of a family member or friend, the event(s) must have been violent or accidental); or experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of the traumatic event(s). (Development Services Group 2016: 1–2) The above and many other comprehensive definitions are not complete because trauma is highly subjective, as a particular event may be perceived as traumatic by one person but not by another. Consequently, the study of trauma has generated more unanswered questions as our perception of psychological trauma has continued to expand in the twenty-first century. This transition from the physical to the psychological, from a tragic/traumatic event to a missed encounter, from enduring to observing, and from victim to perpetrator to bystander’s trauma, has led to previously unquestioned standpoints on trauma. For example, if future generations choose to listen to the trauma of previous generations, the traumatic event may have an impact on them. This results in multigenerational trauma, and the traumatic accounts may transfer anguish, distress, and phobias to the listeners. Though psychological trauma in all its forms induces a disruption and restructuring of conscious experience, it is enormously complicated by ‘a variety of individual and cultural factors that change over time’ (Balaev 2014: 4), which must be observed in order to comprehend trauma. The word ‘trauma’ is used in both physical and psychological senses today. It is clear that, as any physical wound requires a diagnosis so that the healing process may begin, similarly, a psychological wound also requires its recognition and identification, though the mind is unable to heal the psychological wounds like the body heals its physical wounds. In classical trauma theory, silence and inability to grieve are recognized as prominent signs of psychological trauma. The dissociative and disruptive nature of psychological trauma makes it a silent, dark, and ghost entity that lies latent in the recesses of the mind and corrodes the very psyche of an individual. External events, whether identical or non-identical, can bring back latent traumas from the past, resulting in hallucinations, nightmares, outbursts of rage, unexplained crying, and so on. Classical trauma theory explains trauma as something that is ‘encountered too quickly, too unexpectedly, to be completely comprehended’ and must therefore be fathomed and acted upon. Therefore, the mind brings it back from the racks of

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the past ‘in the (form of) nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor’ (Caruth 1996: 4) in order to make sense of it. The backward retraction of trauma leads to the integration and stuffing of inadequacies; thus, the narrative of trauma is essential for transmission, comprehension, and recovery. However, psychological trauma can manifest in a variety of ways and may communicate with us and itself in the most unorthodox ways. Additionally, the medical, psychological, and theoretical understandings of trauma have emphasized that trauma leads to repetition of the past, which makes the present inhabitable. Kai Erikson takes into account the contemporary use of the term and writes that trauma can also pertain to the circumstance that triggered the distressing state of mind. Furthermore, in contemporary usage, trauma does not inherently refer to a particular incident but rather to a frame of consciousness caused by a constellation of various experiences and a fractional occurrence, a persistent ailment, as well as a symptomatic situation. Thus, the boundaries between trauma and stress become less distinct. Erikson further asserts: The questions remaining to be asked, then, certainly include these two: To what extent may one conclude that the communal dimension of trauma is one of its distinctive clinical signatures? And to what extent does it make sense to conclude that the traumatized view of the world conveys a wisdom that ought to be heard in its own terms? Trauma can surely be called pathological in the sense that it induces discomfort and pain, but the imageries that accompany the pain have a sense all their own. (1991: 471) These questions certainly lead to the notion of silence as one of the most conspicuous expressions of trauma, with consideration of the fact that reactions and representations of trauma have always been present in lived experiences. While public reactions to catastrophic events (real or perceived as catastrophic) have been recorded from early times in pictures (art), numerous representations of the ‘Sumerian or ancient Greek period illustrates such images’ (Vasile 2014: 782). Such a need to tell stories has become critical for survival because it is a conversion act – an act intended to make sense of and thrive among the many foreboding affiliations and disassociations that, counterintuitively, segment and transcend categorized interpretation (Emanuel 2017: 23). Therefore, reading these expressions and reactions becomes an important part of human survival and is directly linked with the coping and healing process of trauma. Other than clinical studies, diverse fields such as history, cultural studies, anthropology, literary studies, and sociology converge to study the nature and manifestations of psychological trauma in its various forms. In the literary arena of the 1990s, theorists like Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, and Geoffrey Hartman laid strong foundations of literary trauma theory and created a ‘paradigm shift in literary studies that created favourable conditions for an interest in trauma to blossom’ (Bond and Craps 2020: 45). Since then, literary trauma theory has developed into a highly recognized field of research and is currently undergoing various stages and transformations.

Introduction  5

Trauma and Literature As psychologists such as Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, and Sigmund Freud laid a solid foundation for psychoanalytical studies, Freud’s Studies in Hysteria (1895), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), and Moses and Monotheism (published posthumously in 1939) linked the study of trauma with literature and history, providing a foundation for further research. Cathy Caruth claimed in her pioneering work, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996) that, If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is, indeed at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience precisely meet. (3) With this, the ethical responsibility of literary studies and the implications of the different modes of listening and reading that both the language of trauma and the silence of its mute repetition of experiencing pain are emphasized. This is followed up with requirements for the consideration of cultural exploration. This idea of the engagement of literature with trauma (then exclusively the clinical term) in its cultural and social aspects further led to rapid developments in the field of literary trauma studies, giving literary studies a new energy and purpose to engage with the real problems of the world, which were already exhausted after the moment and euphoria of the theory was over in the 1990s. Initially, literary trauma theory relied on a psychoanalytical post-structuralist approach and laid stress on a void and a gap between expression and experience, which it declared could never ever be filled. This ‘Lacanian approach crafts a concept of trauma as a recurring sense of absence that sunders knowledge of the extreme experience, thus preventing linguistic value other than a referential expression’ (Balaev 2014: 1). This approach indicates ‘the language’s indeterminacy, ambiguous referentiality and aporia’ (Balaev 2014: 1) as the significant tenants of classical trauma theory. Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, for instance, talks about the ‘inherent latency’ of the traumatic event and repetition of returning back of latent trauma in the form of ‘hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviours stemming from the event’ (Caruth 1995: 8). While Caruth contends that the latency of trauma, its resurfacing and repetitiveness, and its unrepresentable and inarticulable essence are key characteristics of trauma, many contemporary scholars and practitioners argue that ‘traumatic amnesia is a myth, and while victims may choose not to speak their trauma, there is little evidence that they cannot’ (Pederson 2014: 334). As against Caruth’s classical trauma theory, contemporary theorists purport the view that traumatic experiences can be represented and can be narrated. They significantly explore the possibilities in which language can convey the trauma. For instance, Dominick LaCapra, an intellectual historian, draws on the discourse of memory,

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historiography, and trauma to contribute significantly to this expanding field in his work. These publications, along with the others that comprise the field’s sources and references, spark an explosion of intellectual and critical engagement, as well as advancements that include new readings of texts, crucial conflicts, and necessary changes (Buelens et al. 2014: 3). While there is ‘non-linearity, incoherence and complexities of representing the trauma’, and ‘the gaps, silences in the narratives hint at the unspeakability and hindrances in conveying the trauma’ (Robson 2004: 21), yet the narratives become a plausible and vital way to read and decipher traumatic encounters through language and words, literature in particular. Literature can highlight the catastrophe and extremism of mimetic desire, assisting in redressing trauma, and introducing readers to different and shared experiences. René Girard and Julia Kristeva argue that literature has the ability to transform subjective existence. Kristeva also testifies to the strength of the narratives, stating that literary work can place words in direct communication with an entire interaction of remembering that causes us to recognize our traumas, our sufferings and pleasures, and our most primitive sensory experiences. Kristeva identifies metaphor as a means of discourse by which emotions, interpretations, and trauma are merged with the dialect of cognitive processing. By comparing the narratives to ‘lay analysis’, she suggests that literary text can be an even more helpful instrument than psychotherapy. Indeed, storytelling enables individuals to gain significant exposure to interpretation that was previously unattainable to traumatized subjects (Guberman 1996). As Colin Davis notes in a brief overview of Julia Kristeva’s commentary on Hannah Arendt, whenever one gets to hear another suggest ‘Tell me a story’, that individual starts to meditate ‘what cannot be called back to memory and what can be narrated’ (Davis 2003: 141). Thus, cognitive psychology and literary works operate in the same way: traversing the shortfalls and structural failures caused by traumatic experiences. The process of ‘tell a story’ initiates mechanisms that re-create our consciousness and bring about the pedagogy of healing (Reineke 2014: xxix– xxx). Thus, narratives of trauma are a process of retelling subjective experiences. The meaning-making process commences at the point at which an event leaves essence in limbo. In this process of constructing meaning or coming to grips with the striking new reality, the profound and frequently interminable interaction with trauma begins. Contemporary literary critics in the field of trauma studies, such as Michelle Balaev, Rothberg, and Stef Craps, have been studying the relationship between utterances and trauma and using literary works to assist us in ‘read[ing] the wound’ (Hartman 1995: 537). The shifting paradigms of literary trauma theory have transitioned exponentially alongside the changing definition of ‘trauma’ in clinical sciences and the adoption of pluralistic models by these scholars. Previously considered unutterable and indecipherable, trauma is now recognized as something that can be spoken about and conveyed, albeit at its own tempo. The cultural and historical engagement of the initially exclusively clinical term ‘trauma’ was catalyzed by the focus of Classical literary trauma theory’s engagement with the Holocaust. Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Dori Laub focused on the

Introduction  7

testimonies, history, and literature of the Holocaust exclusively and thus paved the way for understanding trauma through the lens of literature. However, in doing so, the ‘promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement, the sufferings of those belonging to non-Western or minority cultures’ (Craps 2013a: 46) was not given any attention and was left much behind. Also, the theory brought forth the view that cultures respond to their traumas in specific and exclusive ways. Caruth asserts that, [t]he history of trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can only take place through the listening of another. The meaning of the trauma’s address beyond the victim concerns, indeed, not only individual isolation but a wider historical isolation that, in our time, is communicated on the level of our cultures. (Caruth 1995: 11) However, the theory’s singular focus on the Holocaust, and the entire theorization of literary trauma theory on its basis, is a major flaw in which it fails to meet its own claim of ethical engagement with literature.

Decolonization and Trauma Studies Despite the fact that trauma theory has synthesized numerous perspectives on the relationship between psychic distress and sociocultural representation, postcolonial critics have argued for some time that trauma theory has not lived up to its promise of cross-cultural altruistic interactions. Instead of forming empathy and cohesiveness with non-Western others, a stringently Western canon of trauma literature has evolved, privileging the suffering of white Europeans while ignoring the uniqueness of non-Western and minority ethnic traumatic experiences. In 2003, for instance, Jill Bennett and Roseanne Kennedy called for the transition of trauma studies from a Eurocentric field to one capable of acknowledging the culturally diverse and transnational nature of contemporary culture (Bennet and Kennedy 2003: 5; Andermahr 2016: 1). There are several ways to categorize the various approaches that employ effective trauma approaches. Due to the diversity of methodological approaches implemented, these conceptualizations are extensive in applicability but can be collectively referred to as the pluralistic structure of trauma. Combining psychoanalytic theory with postcolonialism and cultural anthropology, a number of critics who analyze the argumentative aspects of trauma investigate how and why traumatic experience is expressed in literary works. Critics such as Rothberg and Forter, for instance, operate within a neo-Freudian and postcolonial schema. Numerous frameworks are utilized by critics such as Luckhurst, Mandel, Yaeger, and Visser to examine the profound consequences of trauma from sociocultural and political perspectives (Balaev 2014: 3). Critics such as Step Craps, Lucy Bond, and Rothberg have recently argued extensively against the Eurocentric nature of trauma theory and have initiated studies and discussions on the trauma of postcolonial nations as well. According to these critics, the majority of trauma

8  Goutam Karmakar and Zeenat Khan

theory’s focus has been on happenings in Europe or the United States, such as the Holocaust and, more lately, 9/11 (Craps 2013b: 9). The functionality of trauma in literature and society is more diverse and perplexing than early theorists conceived, and contemporary critics have shifted their attention to trauma’s specificity, which retrieves meaning through some kind of careful attention of the sociocultural environment of traumatic experience (Balaev 2014: 4). The failure of the trauma theory can be mapped onto the below-mentioned arguments given by Stef Craps, They fail on at least three counts: they marginalize or ignore traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority cultures; they tend to take for granted the universal validity of definitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of the history of Western modernity; and they often favour or even prescribe a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia as uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness to trauma. As a result of all of this, rather than promoting cross-cultural solidarity, trauma theory risks assisting in the perpetuation of the very beliefs, practices, and structures that maintain existing injustices and inequalities. (Craps 2014: 46) Craft’s arguments emphasize the necessity of reframing trauma studies from a postcolonial and borderless standpoint. Trauma theory must examine Western secular patterns of thought and be more receptive to non-Western value systems and indigenous healing ritual practices if it is to accomplish the goal of inclusivity. It is worth mentioning that ‘in postcolonial trauma studies, the original psychological approach to trauma needs to be enriched with the social context that the notion of cultural trauma provides’ and ‘it is only by combining personal and cultural trauma that one can fully grasp the complex dynamics of postcolonial trauma’ (Dolores and Baelo-Allué 2011: xiii–xiv). In other words, while trauma theory has encountered a transition in light of postcolonial critical assessment, the responsibility now is to implement these perspectives in our methodology. This volume, Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature, is one such endeavor to explore and understand certain diversified traumatic encounters communicated in the literary works of this region.

Addressing the Need: South Asian Literature in Focus Trauma is the identifier of a wide and complex realm of understanding that necessitates a pluralistic conception of the (un)speakable, recognizing the trope’s alternative or even antithetical potential outcomes (Stampfl 2014: 16). Therefore, when addressing universal human responses to adversity, anguish, suffering, and trauma, the observations are as varied as the individuals and cultures themselves. Consequently, a significant aspect is that indigenous textual cultures and mechanisms of depicting trauma frequently include an emphasis on ritual practices

Introduction  9

and ceremony; however, these significant cultural paradigms are kept ‘outside the theoretical model of trauma theory (Visser 2014: 107). In order to enhance the understanding of trauma across literary narratives, it is crucial to examine aspects of psychological cognition within a societal and cultural context (Vickroy 2014: 130). Trauma theory should become more holistic and culturally responsive by fully recognizing the miseries ‘of non-Western and minority groups more fully, for their own sake, and on their own terms’ (Craps 2013b: 38). Literary trauma theory is a significant advancement in the field of literary studies; it has introduced new layers of meaning, new insights, and perspectives into human behavior, and initiated a dialogue between clinical studies and the humanities. The diversity and multifaceted principles of trauma that change along the facets of a specific moment cannot be ignored in all of its fluidity and (unprecedented) explanations. In the context of South Asia, trauma studies can and should be restructured, repositioned, and rerouted in order to foster sensitivity to previously unheard pain and anguish (Craps 2013b: 37). Inevitable interventions in the theory and need for cultural accumulations in contemporary trauma studies have resulted from globalization. The study of unrecognized and unaddressed traumatic narratives from South Asia will modify the theories and models of trauma for the better and highlight commonalities and contrasts in psychic experiences and responses across the globe. The narrow canon of trauma theory that focuses on a single traumatic occurrence is ethically questionable and imperialist in nature. One needs to understand that ‘the primacy of place in the representations of trauma anchors the individual experience within a larger cultural context, and, in fact, organizes the memory and meaning’ (Balaev 2008: 150). Furthermore, sharing trauma can serve as a springboard for learning from one another’s traumatic experiences and catastrophic events. While studies on trauma need to transcend linguistic, regional, and cultural boundaries, this volume, Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature, covers both the unspeakable and the vocalized ones from South Asia and assembles a wide range of narratives that, in turn, obtain multiple perspectives in their entirety. Thus, this volume transcends genre and cultural specificity and contributes to the sociocultural understanding of trauma in some of its diversification and cohesiveness. This volume also aims to create an accessible and approachable space, where trauma in its fictional and poignant versions lays bare the intertextual web of South Asian discourses on trauma, thereby facilitating further collaborations and collective action that can help to transcend racial identity, ethnic background, nationality, religious dogma, and cultural environment.

Contextualizing the Volume: Trauma in/and South Asian Literature South Asia has experienced its share of tragedies, and the subcontinent, comprised of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Afghanistan, has been witness to some of the century’s most tragic events. Colonialism, Partition, the Bhopal

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Gas Tragedy, the Mumbai Attacks, the Gujarat Riots, the 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots, the concurrent Kashmir dispute, violent history of the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war, armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Sri Lankan Black July (The 1983 Anti-Tamil pogroms in Sri Lanka), The Sri Lankan Civil War, The Nepalese Civil War, the Rohingya Crisis, or natural disasters such as tsunamis, earthquakes, and droughts have impacted the people of the region in a bizarre and devastating way. Due to the region’s spatial, cultural, and linguistic diversity, these major traumatic events have a profound effect on its linguistic and cultural environments. In the form of memoirs, novels, short stories, essays, and travelogues, the literature of South Asia has navigated and proliferated around and across these catastrophic events. In South Asian literature, these cartographies of anxiety, grief, homelessness, uprooting, and anguish are notably emphatic, and the study of these intense and multifaceted discourses of trauma is analogous to navigating a labyrinth of interconnected and intercultural rhythms and responses. These narratives of trauma traverse the intense communal rivalries, the complexities of partition, colonial disempowerment and its humongous mental anguish, the psychological trauma of communalized sexual violence, military conflicts, ethnic cleansings, forced migration, and colonial pillage; all of which have periodically impacted the entirety of South Asia. Even though there is an increasing amount of literature on these traumatic incidents, there has been very little research on these representations of trauma in the context of literary trauma theory in the majority of the major tragic events mentioned above. Consequently, the study of South Asian trauma narratives will expand the scope of memory and trauma studies and the scope and practicability of literary trauma theory. Therein lies the need to consider how South Asians come to terms with and reflect upon their and our collective histories and traumas through the lens of ‘multidirectional memory’, a term coined by Rothberg, who further asserts: Against the framework that understands collective memory as competitive memory—as a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources—I suggest that we consider memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not private. … This interaction of different historical memories illustrates the productive, intercultural dynamic that I call multidirectional memory. (2009: 3) Pioneered by Cathy Caruth and her contemporaries, the study of memory and trauma through literature, particularly Holocaust literature, has galvanized the global study of trauma through the memories of literary narratives. This argument is supported by Ian Hacking’s assertion that ‘there are interconnections between group memory and personal memory. One obvious link is trauma’ (1995: 211). South Asia, which is rich and diverse in its folk and indigenous literature, has produced the finest literary works as credible archives of the past, which function as compelling premises for translating trauma across cultural contexts and geographic regions. In the absence of public memorials, official records, or historiographies

Introduction  11

highlighting the psychological effects of trauma, the testimonies of the people and the literature provide a framework for the study of loss, melancholy, mourning, silences, ruptures, incommunicability, and lapses that characterize the understanding of trauma. Thus, literary trauma theory can provide a relevant pathway through which South Asian narratives can be (re)visited, as well as an indispensable forum for the systematic reading, addressing, and acknowledging of trauma. The literature of South Asia can provide a greater understanding of the various expressions of trauma and a heightened responsiveness to localized differences in causative factors, symptomatology, the depiction of trauma, and therapeutic interventions. Through the excavation of these narratives, the theoretical mechanisms of literary trauma theory can be broadened and revisited. In this volume, the study of diversified trauma narratives from South Asia focuses on how different cultures and memories navigate and reflect traumatic histories within their own cultural and linguistic spaces. The trauma of these events is neither buried in the past nor incommunicable; rather, it is transnational, transhistorical, and transgenerational in essence and stretch, and it persists to be expressed in literary narratives and other art forms. The cultural significance of these traumatic events transcends the constraints of time and space. The memory of the majority of these traumatic events is not located that far in the past and is frequently triggered by recurring political developments. Psychologists refer to these traumatic memories as ‘pathogenic reminiscences’ because they cause the pathological symptoms to reappear in the present (Breuer and Freud 1955: 40). The ‘pathogenic reminiscences’ are the defining characteristic of the majority of the selected literary works in this volume. In the majority of the traumatic experiences covered in this anthology, the collective experiences of people across borders are diverse yet they unite them through ‘historical memory’. As Cathy Caruth asserts, ‘[H]istory like trauma, is never simply one’s own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas’ (1996: 24). This volume on trauma seeks to assert that the trauma in South Asian narratives intersects territorial boundaries and must be studied rationally and empathically. After colonial plunder, the shared psychic landscape of traumatizing experiences in South Asia has permeated deeply into their collective cultural experience. The narratives in this collection connect the dots of contextual trauma experiences through the individual as well as collective traumas explained in the chosen writings. In doing so, this volume demonstrates that the concept of unrepresentability and unutterability of trauma, which remained the central tenet and core concept of traditional literary trauma theory in the wave of scholarship after the 1990s and that followed in Caruth’s wake for the next two decades, is esoteric and open to subversion, alteration, and revision. The literary writings of loss, suffering, and extreme agony document the psychological trauma of South Asians that has not been registered anywhere in the historical chronicles. This volume expresses the depths of the collective consciousness through scholarly articles that constitute a collective cultural response. This pluralistic model of trauma, as presented in this volume, critiques the unutterable trope of traditional trauma theory and seeks to

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comprehend the linguistic and cultural dimensions of trauma through memories and the variety of their narrative interpretations. Notably, while the central tenet of literary trauma theory holds that pathological fragmentation and dissociation constitute the main argument of the traumatic experience, the pluralistic model focuses on studying traumatic experience through the unified discourses and emphasizes the social significance of trauma in developing the cultural experience. As a social and cultural phenomenon, trauma emphasizes the need for investigation into its social and cultural attributes, as well as its psychological and interventional frameworks. Literary trauma theory is an open-ended field that requires revisions and reformulations to encompass all social and cultural components of trauma. The majority of the horrific events in South Asia ‘qualify as both socially and culturally traumatic’, but placing them in the same category or accessing them through the same lens carries its own potential losses. It is also worth mentioning that despite the shared historical trauma, the cultural dimensions in complex societies, as noticed in South Asia, can also be problematic in the context of cohesiveness and connectedness (Smelsar 2004: 39). Despite these challenges, contributors to this volume engage with the narratives of individual and collective traumas and discuss the representability of cultural traumas communicated across the political borders of South Asia. This volume seeks to demonstrate that certain theoretical and textual arguments must be strengthened by an understanding of the social frame of reference, incorporating the psychological and the cultural in an integrative framework that draws on psychodynamic theory, social science, cultural anthropology, epistemology, and genealogy for the study of the artistic recognition of trauma (Dolores and Baelo-Allué 2011: xiv). Based on the theoretical as well as textual significance of studying collective and cultural trauma, a volume like this opens the gateway for further important additions to the ongoing expansion and inclusiveness of literary trauma theory led by contemporary trauma studies scholars.

Trauma, South Asia, and Literary Expressions This volume, Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature, examines diverse narratives of trauma in South Asia employing a wide variety of literary and spatial art forms. This volume investigates how previously inaccessible and entombed perspectives on traumatic memories are unearthed through creative faculty. This volume testifies that any specified trauma can be either ‘community and identity-disrupting or community and identity-solidifying’ (Smelser 2004: 44) and is typically a combination of the two. In any case, this thought process signifies why the concepts of collective trauma, shared memory, and collective (e.g., national) individuality are not only intertwined in the sociocultural and psychological texture of South Asian literature but also become a threat to the stability of societal structure in South Asia by infringing one or more of its shared cultural epistemology. The brutalities that appear incomprehensible to humans are given expressions through South Asian narratives, and the chapters, divided into seven parts, study the social, historical, and cultural aspects of collective and cultural trauma. The volume adheres to the notion

Introduction  13

that history of trauma can also occur through the listening of another individual, and the significance of this addressing is conveyed on a culturally collective level. By delving deep into individual and collective traumas and sifting through patches of traumatic memories to make sense of the intangible and inexplicable, this volume transcends the political borders and navigates the nebulous cultural territories to present a variety of artistic as well as realistic depictions of South Asian trauma. Part 1, titled ‘Partition and Beyond: Narrating Trauma of India’, examines traumatic encounters in India, a country with regional and religious diversity and numerous linguistic and cultural domains. Due to its diverse sensibilities, India has been subjected to a number of tragic and traumatic events throughout its history. This part begins with Nalini Iyer’s chapter ‘Trauma, Gender, and Caste: Vernacular Postcolonial Feminism and the Writing of Perumal Murugan’, in which she examines Murugan’s rendition of gendered trauma that emerges from caste practices and regional moral standards in marital and familial relationships. Iyer discusses the trilogy through the lens of vernacular postcolonialism, a concept theorized by S. Shankar, and argues that One Part Woman and its sequels are shaped by an integration of vernacular postcolonialism with a strong feminist stance. The second chapter ‘Pathogenic Memories and Repetitive Absence: Reading Siddhartha Gigoo’s The Garden of Solitude, Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator, and Shahnaz Bashir’s The Half Mother’, by Zeenat Khan, explores the pathogenic memories that manifest themselves in these three narratives as flashback scenes, hallucinations, and nightmares. In these novels, the memories of witnessing and being subjected to traumatic events become muddled in the aftermath of recurring traumatic experiences, as contrasted to single traumatic incidents. As these narratives represent ‘ongoing traumas’ without resolution, Khan’s chapter traces the circularity of grief where pathogenic memories and everyday witnessing of the trauma work in tandem to erode the consciousness and act as enormous disruptors of the characters’ psyches as depicted in the chosen novels. This section concludes with Manjot Kaur’s chapter ‘From the Lived Experience of Punjab 1984 in Punjab to Its ‘Mnemonic Imagination’: Reading Amandeep Sandhu’s Roll of Honour’, in which she evaluates the importance of the semi-autobiographical account of trauma and its depiction as a ‘transferential experience’ for the one on the receiving end, as well as examines a semi-autobiographical novel – as a related subject of continued existence. In this chapter, Kaur proposes a rethinking of memory studies and trauma theory by showing that traumatic memories can also give a sense of autonomy and a positive outlook on life, especially in the way that writing can be a healing experience. The second part, titled ‘Pains of Pakistan: Trauma Narratives of Pakistan’, is comprised of three chapters that analyze traumatic experiences as depicted in Pakistani literature. Margaret Scanlan’s introductory chapter ‘The Postcolonial Novel as a Traumatic Genre: Reading Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Geometry of God’ provides a different perspective on postcolonial trauma and the resources Pakistanis can find in their own history in order to avoid repeating its violence. Scanlan illustrates how this novel denotes a traumatic past: the collision of continents that formed the Himalayas, invasions by Muslim and British colonizers, massacres accompanying

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Partition, and ethnic strife caused by the massive influx of new Muslims with new languages. The second chapter in this section ‘“How is a wound put into words?”: Muhammad Hanif ’s Red Birds and the Use of Magical Realism’ by Faisal Nazir demonstrates how magical realism can be used to portray the horror and terror experienced by people during a war and its aftermath. In this chapter, Nazir affirms the effectiveness of Hanif ’s narrative strategy in depicting trauma, but he also reinforces the need for components that lift the traumatized community out of its state of hardship and hopelessness in literature about trauma. Fatima Syeda’s concluding chapter, ‘The Construction and Dissolution of the Masculine Self: Re-reading the Unspeakable Trauma in Sorayya Khan’s Noor’, examines the traumatic experience of construction and dissolution of the masculine self during and post-war circumstances in Sorayya Khan’s Noor. Syeda provides connectivity between the creation and dissolution of the masculine self and the widely accepted notion that trauma is an experience that victims find difficult or impossible to analogize into their existing archive of memories. The purpose of Syeda’s chapter is to establish a connection between this miscommunication and the inability to articulate, as well as the complex gender politics involved in the process. The 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War is a crucial factor to consider for millions of Bengalis around the world, as well as a repository of suffering, sense of loss, trauma, and grieving. The chapters of Mohammad Shafiqul Islam and Shamika Shabnam in the third section of this volume, titled ‘War and Beyond: Trauma and Bangladeshi Literature’, bring to light the traumatic memories of this violent bloodshed. In his chapter titled ‘Writing War and Womanhood: Representation of Violence and Disgrace in Dilruba Z. Ara’s Blame’, Islam examines how Dilruba Z. Ara’s Blame depicts the atrocities perpetrated against women during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. This chapter examines how women become subject to violence during war and evaluates the consequences of their traumatic experiences. Shabam’s chapter ‘Speaking in Fragments: The Birangona-mother’s Traumatic Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War’ questions the central position of class in the marginalization of the economically disadvantaged birangona-mother’s testimony from the history of the Liberation War, upholding upper-middle class discourses by the freedom fighter’s mother. The concluding chapter, ‘Complexion, Infertility, and Sexual Orientation: Narratives of Trauma in Fayeza Hasanat’s The Bird Catcher and Other Stories’, in this part considers skin tone, fertility problems, and sexual orientation as they are depicted in Hasanat’s short stories and exemplifies how these stories impart a variety of social woes, traumatic experiences, and individual memories. The fourth part, titled ‘Trauma-Affected Afghanistan: Wounded Memories and Narratives’, contains accounts of traumatized and ruptured memories of Afghanistan. Before addressing the reader’s ethical imperative as a literary bystander, Robin E. Field, in her chapter ‘Witnessing Trauma: The Ethical Imperative of Bystanders in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and And the Mountains Echoed’ explores the importance of the bystander and his ethical responsibility in two works of fiction

Introduction  15

by Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner and And the Mountains Echoed. This chapter focuses specifically on the role of bystanders as agents of social transformation in the context of the traumatic violence of the Afghanistan War. This tempo that Field establishes in this section is sustained very effectively by Gen’ichiro Itakura through his chapter ‘Kaboul mon Hiroshima: Trauma and Narration in Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone’. Here, Itakura outlines how Rahimi’s text appropriates Duras’s screenplay in order to articulate the individual and collective traumas experienced ‘somewhere in Afghanistan or elsewhere’. Notably, Duras’s text does not provide a suitable aesthetic or narrative structure for exploring non-European adventures of war and atrocities, much less long-term structural oppression. In this regard, Rahimi made a peculiar decision: he turned to a Eurocentric text, Hiroshima mon amour, despite the risk of unintentionally sidelining the trauma of his own people. Through the chapters of Badri Prasad Pokharel, Puspa Damai, and Ubaraj Katawal, the fifth section titled ‘Conflict and Wounds: Narrating Trauma of Nepal’ outlines individual and collective traumatic memories. Badri’s chapter ‘People’s War, Trauma, and Its Consequences in Rebel: A Cross-Cultural Study in PostConflict Nepali Narrative(s)’ describes how Rebel, a short story collection written by various Nepali authors who have extensively showcased traumatic experiences in contemporary Nepali society, reveals the tragic past from which every Nepali desired to flee but could not. They repeatedly find themselves dwelling on the earlier years and reliving the traumatic past. Pokharel demonstrates further how the conflict that caused massive devastation in the country has left Nepalese society in an excruciating state from which they have not provided solace for approximately 15 years. Traumatism of the future haunts contemporary Nepali literature, according to Puspa Damai’s observations in his chapter ‘Traumatism of the Future: Reading Nepali Literature with Caruth, Derrida, and Freud’. Damai concurs with Derrida’s astute observation that the ‘future’ in general and the future of Nepal in particular can only be comprehended in terms of absolute peril. The chapter turns to Cathy Caruth’s concept of the double wound and repetition to argue that, if combined, Caruth, Derrida, Freud, and Lacan could produce a robust theory of trauma and violence, which could provide a unique lens through which contemporary Nepali literature can be studied. Damai has chosen two representative works of contemporary Nepali literature for this instance: Muna Madan by Laxmi Prashad Devkota and The Royal Ghosts by Samrat Upadhyay. In the concluding chapter ‘Maoist Revolution and Trauma: Fight or Flight in Manjhushree Thapa’s Seasons of Flight’, Ubaraj Katawal analyzes the novel using concepts from trauma and violence studies. In Nepal, war is one of the major causes of trauma. In the context of the Maoist war in Nepal, Katawal looks at how words like ‘stagnation’, ‘acts of pressure’, ‘representation’, ‘national bourgeoisie’, ‘trauma’, and ‘displacement’ work in the book. The sixth section, titled ‘Turbulent Topography: Trauma and Sri Lanka’, examines a selection of traumatic narratives from the Sri Lankan literary environment. Maryse Jayasuriya’s introductory chapter ‘Cumulative Trauma, Structural Racism,

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and Displacement in Contemporary Sri Lankan Fiction: Sharon Bala’s The Boat People and Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage’ explores the plight of those who, as a result of the protracted conflict in Sri Lanka, which included war and terrorism, have been compelled to become internally displaced or asylum seekers. By focusing on these two narratives, this chapter examines the ways individuals attempt to cope with perpetual or subsequent traumatic experiences and have no hope of getting back to a previous manner of life. Moumin Quazi’s chapter ‘The Inside-Out Traumas of War in Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors’ analyzes how inversion is utilized in a postcolonial context as a response to the severe ruptures caused by the Sri Lankan civil war. In her chapter ‘Queer Recovery: Addressing Violence, Trauma, and Exile in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy’, Marilena Zackheos evaluates how psychological, postcolonial, and queer resistance intersect in Selvadurai’s narrative. Using Munaweera’s fictional and autobiographical writing as an example of a post-war Sri Lankan literary culture, Deimantas Valančiūnas in his chapter ‘The Traumatic Legacy of the Sri Lankan Civil War in Selected Writings of Nayomi Munaweera’ examines the ways in which civil war, terrorism, suicide bombing, displacement, and belonging become influential in shaping personal and collective identities, as well as how war-related trauma is experienced both on the island and in the diaspora. The concluding chapter ‘War, Wounds, and ‘Workingthrough’: Reading Trauma in Selected Sri Lankan Novels’, by Sunaina Jain, is a qualitative study that challenges the Western Cultural Trauma theory by contextualizing it within two novels – Island of a Thousand Mirrors by Nayomi Munaweera and A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam. This chapter also examines the larger issues of malaise and melancholy and attempts to determine if traumatized subjects are capable of healing and recovery. The concluding part ‘South Asia, Trauma, and Beyond’ consists of two chapters by Khan Touseef Osman and Lopa Basu. Osman’s chapter ‘Representational Consequences of Trauma for South Asian Partition Novels in English’ is a qualitative exploration of six South Asian partition novels in English, namely Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man, Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day, Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Kamila Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron in terms of their representational mechanisms and propensities. The concluding chapter ‘Rohingya Refugee Poetry: Testimony and Cultural Activism’ of this part as well as this entire volume by Lopa Basu examines the collection of poems I Am a Rohingya: Poetry from the Camps and Beyond, edited by James Byrne and Shehzar Doja, as a record of the survival of a community that has endured horrific violence as an ethnic minority in Burma and is now living in precarious conditions in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazaar refugee camps.

Beginning of a Genre This volume aims to demonstrate that trauma is best understood not as a single common object but as one of those ‘knots’ or ‘hybrid assemblages’ that ‘entangle questions of science, law, technology, capitalism, politics, medicine, and risk’

Introduction  17

(Luckhurst 2008: 14–15). It should be noted that covering diverse aspects of trauma in South Asian literature is and will continue to be a daunting task and that a single volume comprising 21 articles is inadequate to accomplish this. Individual research projects on each nation of South Asia can legitimately support this position. However, as editors of this volume, we have taken up the challenge of paving the way for further research in this field. We also believe that any emphasis solely on an individual and psychological perspective carries the risk of isolating realities from their causative factors, thereby diminishing the significance of the cultural and historical context, which is especially important in postcolonial trauma narratives of South Asia. Here, readers can find our argument is consistent with Judith Butler’s assertions, as demonstrated here: ‘isolating the individuals involved absolves us of the necessity of coming up with a broader explanation for events’ (Butler 2004: 5). Further writings on South Asian literature in the domain of trauma studies can motivate us to keep moving beyond a unitary perception of trauma studies and empower us to take a role in addressing the root causes and difficulties that require a multidimensional and multidisciplinary approach. For comprehending the intricacies of trauma in South Asian literature, a more collaborative as well as engaging academic space is required. We will be able to comprehend the implications of certain intersections for the potential for resistance, recovery, and structural transformation when we have a greater understanding of how various forms of traumatic memories permeate the sociocultural, historical, and political space of South Asian literature.

References Andermahr, Sonya. 2016. ‘Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism – Introduction’, in Sonya Andermahr (ed.), Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism, pp. 1–6. Basel, Switzerland: MDPI AG. Balaev, Michelle. 2008. ‘Trends in Literary Trauma Theory’, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 41(2): 149–166. Balaev, Michelle. 2014. Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bennet, Jill and Rosanne Kennedy. eds. 2003. World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bond, Lucy and Stef Craps. 2020. Trauma. New York: Routledge. Breuer, Joseph and Sigmund Freud. 1955 [1895]. ‘Studies on Hysteria’, in Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 2. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Buelens, Gert. et al. 2014. The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary literary and cultural criticism. New York: Routledge. Butler, Hudith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Clift, Rebecca Jade and Frances Maratos. 2020. ‘An Investigation into Trauma, Active Coping and Depression’, Journal of European Psychology Students, 11(1): 21–31.

18  Goutam Karmakar and Zeenat Khan

Craps, Stef. 2013a. ‘Beyond Eurocentrism. Trauma Theory in Global Age’, in Gert Buelens et al (eds.), The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, pp. 45–62. New York: Routledge. Craps, Stef. 2013b. Post-Colonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan. Craps, Stef. 2014. ‘The Holocaust Literature: Comparative Perspectives’, in Jenni Adams (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature. pp. 199–218, London: Bloomsbury. Davis, Colin. 2003. After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories, Theory. New York: Routledge. Development Services Group. 2016. Behind the Trauma https://calswec.berkeley.edu/sites/ default/files/4-3_behind_the_term_trauma.pdf (accessed on 14 January 2022). Dolores, Herrero and Sonia Baelo-Allué. 2011. ‘Introduction’, in Herrero Dolores and Sonia Baelo-Allué (eds.), The Splintered Glass: Facets of Trauma in the Post-Colony and Beyond, pp. ix–xxvi. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Emanuel, Sarah. 2017. ‘Trauma and Counter – Trauma in the Book of Esther’, The Bible & Critical Theory, 13(1): 23–42. Erikson, Kai. 1991. ‘Notes on Trauma and Community’, American Imago, 48(4): 455–472. Freud, Sigmund and Josef Breuer. 2001. ‘On the Psychic Mechanisms of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication’, in James Strachey et al (eds.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. II (1893–95), pp. 3–17. London: Vintage. Guberman, Ross Mitchell, ed. 1996. Julia Kristeva Interview. New York: Columbia University Press. Hacking, Ian. 1995. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hartman, Geoffrey H. 1995. ‘On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies’, New Literary Studies, 26(3): 537–563. Huang, M. C. et al. 2012. ‘Impact of Multiple Types of Childhood Trauma Exposure on Risk of Psychiatric Comorbidity among Alcoholic Inpatients’, Alcoholism, Clinical and Experimental Research, 36(6): 1099–1107. Laub, Dori and Daniel Podell. 1995. ‘Art and Trauma,’ International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 76(5): 991–1005. Luckhurst, Roger. 2008. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge. Pederson, Joshua. 2014. ‘Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revisited Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory’, Narrative, 22(3): 333–353. Reineke, Martha J. 2014. Intimate Domain: Desire, Trauma, and Mimetic Theory. Michigan: Michigan State University Press. Robson, Kathryn. 2004. Writing Wounds: The Inscription of Trauma in Post-1968 French Women’s Life Writing. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Smelsar, Neil J. 2004. ‘Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma’, in Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. (eds.), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. pp. 31–59. California: University of California Press. Stampfl, Barry. 2014. ‘Parsing the Unspeakable in the Context of Trauma’, in Michelle Balaev (ed.), Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory, pp. 15–41. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Vasile, Cristian. 2014. ‘An Analysis of Psychological Trauma Interventions’, Procedia: Social and Behavioral Sciences, 127: 781–785.

Introduction  19

Vickroy, Laurie. 2014. ‘Voices of Survivors in Contemporary Fiction’, in Michelle Balaev (ed.), Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory, pp. 130–151. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Visser, Irene. 2014. ‘Trauma and Power in Postcolonial Literary Studies’, in Michelle Balaev (ed.), Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory, pp. 106–129. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

PART I

Partition and Beyond Narrating Trauma of India

1 TRAUMA, GENDER, AND CASTE Vernacular Postcolonial Feminism and the Writing of Perumal Murugan Nalini Iyer

Introduction: Gender, Trauma, and the Vernacular Postcolonial Perumal Murugan’s fiction is intensely regional, focusing on the lives of people in the Kongunadu region of Tamil Nadu and exploring intricate caste, community, family, and gender relations. Murugan shot to notoriety globally in 2015 when his novel One Part Woman (originally published in 2010 as Maathorupagan) became available in English (first in India and globally in 2018 when Grove Atlantic published the novel in the United States) through a translation by Aniruddhan Vasudevan. That novel explored the intimate relationship between Kali and Ponna, a young couple in the 1940s experiencing infertility. The family urges the couple to consider alternatives, including having Ponna participate in an anonymous consensual sexual relationship on the night of a chariot festival at the Tiruchengode temple, when men were seen as gods and all children born of such encounters became gifts from the gods. Following the English translation, the novel’s circulation increased, and the Gounder community, backed by local Hindu fundamentalists, saw this narrative as an insult to their women and a falsification of tradition, and Perumal Murugan, himself a Gounder, received death threats. After rioting in his hometown, Murugan fled town and offered to edit the novel, and, eventually, the book was withdrawn from circulation. He announced the death of his authorial role on Facebook and went into literary silence for a few years. In 2016, a High Court petition sought to nullify the publication settlement, and the court ruled in Murugan’s favor. Murugan’s experience with censorship, legal challenges, and silencing of his authorship gave him and his work an international notoriety. Priyanka Tripathi (2018) argues in her essay that the English translation of a regional novel renders it a transnational one, thus contributing to its prominence and subsequent reactions from the caste and religious fundamentalists. The censorship and threats, Murugan’s proclamation of authorial death on Facebook, and the court judgment in his favor DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-3

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are important and exemplify the trauma writers undergo in contemporary India when they deal with topics that are contrary to the ruling party’s ideology.1 This chapter examines not the author’s trauma post-publication but the author’s examination of the trauma that women and men experience within marital and familial relationships that arises from particular caste practices and regional values. Much has been written about trauma and literary representation and trauma and the postcolonial. However, my interest in this chapter is the regional and local in contemporary India and the social structures that engender multigenerational gendered trauma within families. Little has been written about One Part Woman and its sequels that examines regional sensibility and its gender and caste politics. In an article in The New Yorker, Amitava Kumar writes about Murugan’s more recent novel, Poonachi/The Story of a Goat (2018), stating that I immediately recognized the novel as belonging to a genre that we might call “rooted literature.” What Murugan was producing was locally grown, not a canned object sold on a supermarket bookshelf. It is rare to come across a writer who enjoys such intimacy with not just the land but also the customs that govern the lives of the people who live on it. Culture, as a particular mix of religion, superstition, and the calculations of power, and with caste as a crucial determinant, is central to the story that Murugan is telling. The book is so rooted in the soil of tradition that its rebellion against it is all the more unexpected and moving. (2019: n.p.) What Kumar says about the rootedness of Murugan’s The Story of a Goat applies to the earlier works as well. Following One Part Woman, Murugan had written two sequels called A Lonely Harvest and Trial by Silence. He wrote both books in 2014 in Tamil, but their English translation was published by Penguin Random House in 2018. The sequels offer alternative narratives to the ambiguous ending of the first novel, and they continue the exploration of gender, female community support, and what S. Shankar (2012) calls vernacular postcolonialism. In the limited space available here, I want to look at a few salient points in the novel One Part Woman and its sequels.

Reading Perumal Murugan’s Trilogy Shankar writes that vernacular realism is ‘a realism aspiring to reproduce the local in all its specificity and drawing substantially, though not exclusively, on vernacular literary and theatrical traditions’ (2012: 11). Murugan’s novels fall into the category of vernacular realist fiction, in that his narratives focus on local practices in Kongunadu and engage folklore, agricultural practices, village interactions, and the relationships of the Gounders with other local castes. Shankar has discussed Murugan’s Seasons of the Palm as a vernacular postcolonialist text. M Nazir Ali (2016) connects the rootedness to Murugan’s depiction of the interactions between

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the human and non-human worlds in One Part Woman, and he argues that the rootedness also emerges in the relationship among humans and the exploration of gender relations, mythology, and folklore. I propose that an extension of vernacular postcolonialism with a strongly feminist bent shapes One Part Woman and its sequels. In these novels, Murugan examines how masculinity and femininity are constructed within the community and how these practices lead to tragic consequences for a young couple. I suggest that the intersections of caste and gender in the novel offer us a postcolonial vernacular feminism that is neither a national nor a transnational movement. Murugan’s narratives remain steadfastly local in their considerations of female trauma and resistance that comes not from organized political movement but from communally formed female solidarity. The chapter will argue that the two sequels with two alternatives for Ponna demonstrate that vernacular postcolonial feminism is neither static nor essentialist and that Murugan offers readers an opportunity to conceptualize local feminism and patriarchy through his novels. Before discussing the specifics of the novels, I want to consider why we must theorize a vernacular postcolonial feminism. Shankar, in discussing vernacular postcolonialism, notes the necessity of reading caste in Indian postcolonial literature and focuses a chapter significantly on R.K. Narayan’s Guide and its film adaptation as they engage what Shankar calls the ‘varna-jati complex’. The discussion of Narayan’s novel is followed by an analysis of Murugan’s Seasons of the Palm and writing by Dalit women writers Viramma, Bama, and P. Sivakami. In emphasizing the varna-jati complex, Shankar addresses gender minimally in the formation of the varna-jati complex, although endogamous marriage is one of the major institutions used to establish and sustain the varna-jati complex. Feminist literary scholars of South Asian literature rely significantly on transnational feminist theories and practices, and most postcolonial and feminist work centers on Anglophone literary works. Although Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s pathbreaking essay ‘Under Western Eyes’ (1988) details the pitfalls of Western feminism’s gaze on the third world, the essay does not delve deeply into feminism’s myriad manifestations locally or regionally. Within the Indian context, the articulation of the intersections of caste and gender has been analyzed and critiqued mostly by Dalit feminists and by some prominent savarna feminists, such as Uma Chakravarty and Charu Gupta.2 In his essay ‘Colonialism, Caste, and Gender: The Emergence of Critical Caste Feminism in South Asia’, Gajendran Ayyathurai identifies critical caste feminism as a movement that emerged amongst Tamil Buddhists in the early twentieth century and notes that the intersections of caste and feminism remain understudied. He writes that his article examines the intersectionality of caste-based oppressed communities during colonialism; that is, how Tamil Buddhist women and men have positioned themselves on the problem of patriarchy by seeing its connections with caste, religion, education, labor, the economy, and sexuality in modern South India. (Ayyathurai 2021: 136)

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Ayyathurai goes on to study Tamil Buddhist thinkers like Iyothee Thass and Sarvajana Sagodari and their writings to show the intersectionality of gender and caste. In comparing Thass and Sagodari with Pandita Ramabai, Ayyathurai extends the discussion of critical caste feminism outside of the Tamil world. For Ayyathurai, critical caste feminism redresses the injustice of overlooking the inseparable ties between caste and gender and foregrounding the words of the caste-oppressed communities. He writes, ‘They [critical caste feminists] not only rejected brahminical institutions such as child marriage and widowhood, but also offered an alternative vision, insisting on women’s education and employment, as well as anticaste (intercaste), interreligious, and love-based marriages’ (2021: 135). My concept of vernacular postcolonial feminism is similar to critical caste feminism but proposes that the emphasis on the rootedness and the local within particular communities (such as the Gounders in Murugan’s novels) is in deliberate opposition to the transnational, cosmopolitan, and anglophone emphasis of much of postcolonial Indian writing. In the vernacular, postcolonial feminism is not about the identity of the writer (male/ female or Dalit/savarna) but about the narrative. I use Shankar’s understanding of vernacular postcolonialism and, like Ayyathurai, insist that gender and caste are inseparable in thinking about the vernacular in Indian writing. As Shankar has noted, Murugan is neither Dalit nor savarna, and his interest as a novelist is in the intricacies of the relationship between castes and the everyday manifestations, often violent, of the hierarchical caste relationships in Kongunadu. Although Murugan has written about intercaste violence, in these novels under discussion, he explores gendered violence within families and the social dynamics of a village that reinforce violent structures. In this trilogy, Murugan focuses on the perpetration of violence through expectations about marriage and motherhood that destroy loving marriages. Although one may read these novels as about a couple’s trials and tribulations, the emphasis on marriage and bearing children recognizes that reproduction within marriage is about protecting caste identities of the collective. Hence, the possessiveness of Kali and his self-destructive behavior when Ponna follows socially sanctioned practices is not just about his love and feelings of betrayal but also about land ownership, bloodlines, and ensuring caste survival. Murugan’s narratives show how the women in the community are complicit in the violence but also offer unexpected resistance to caste values. All three of these novels are set sometime in the 1940s. However, the narrative is not preoccupied with British colonialism, World War II, or anti-colonial movements. There are occasional references to the British, and in Trial by Silence, Nallayya, a relative of Kali, mentions, ‘That bespectacled old man is negotiating with the white man. They are saying the white man is going to give back the country to us and leave in a year’s time’ (Murugan 2018b: 160). Nallayan underscores how little people in this village know about the world beyond them; their concerns are their cattle, their gods, their property, and their family and kin. Having traveled significantly, Nallayan offers a larger view of the world to the locals. At the same time, he does not romanticize village life nor attribute its troubles to colonialism. In the sequels, Murugan gives us two different perspectives on Nallayan, and in both,

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he emerges as one who provides solace to his family and questions their adherence to rigid local views on children, inheritance, and lineage. In One Part Woman, the young couple, Kali and Ponna, are desperate to have a child. In this agrarian caste, ownership of land and inheritance are vital, and a child, particularly a male child, is important to caste survival. We learn that Kali’s family is cursed because he traces his ancestry to four young Gounder men who raped and killed an Adivasi girl, who then cursed their lineage with infertility. Thus, Kali comes from a long line of only sons, and sexual violence is at the heart of his family’s problems. The childless couple are subject to village gossip, and both Kali and Ponna, despite their deep love and sexual attraction to one another, feel inadequate. Meena Kandasamy, in her review of the novel, critiques Murugan’s portrayal of Ponna as an obedient, loyal wife as one that exists only in the Tamil male mind and notes that ‘Kali treats her with utmost affection, and has a primal, reflexive desire for her that cannot quite qualify as love’ (2019: n.p.). The intensity of the couple’s passion is completely intertwined with their desperation to have a child. Kali’s mother, Seerayi, suggests various rituals, from walking a treacherous path around the barren rock to offering pongal at different temples to ensure a child. Infertility is resolved in several ways in the village: Seerayi notes that some women engage in extramarital relationships with or without the knowledge of their spouses, and others go to the annual chariot festival at the Ardhanareeswara temple, where on one day, men and women can engage in consensual sex with each other. She tries to persuade Ponna and Kali to attempt the temple festival approach, but Kali is adamantly opposed to the idea. Although he himself, when single, had partaken of the ritual in the festival, he is very possessive about his wife and cannot accept another man as her lover, even for a day and even if the village accepts the practice and sees the lover as a god. He also fears that if Ponna becomes pregnant, he will be proven impotent/infertile – a notion he finds repugnant and emasculating. Also underlying his reluctance is the absence of caste boundaries in this bacchanalian festival, and Ponna might be touched by someone who is a Dalit or of a lower caste than the Gounders. The family tricks Ponna and Kali, and she attends the festival and has sex with a stranger whom she sees as a god who resembles her husband. At the end of One Part Woman, Kali discovers that Ponna has been to the festival, and the novel ends ominously, suggesting that he is about to hang himself. In the sequel, A Lonely Harvest (2018a), Murugan imagines that Kali dies and tells Ponna’s story of grief, motherhood, and growth into self-reliance through the support of women. In Trial by Silence, Kali is rescued by his mother as he is about to kill himself, and the novel follows the anger and grief of the couple, Ponna’s motherhood, and her relationship with her family and community. Both novels offer a nuanced understanding of the position of women within the Gounder community and examine the roles of mother, mother-in-law, daughter, and daughter-in-law as they grapple with the deeply embedded patriarchy in their community but subvert that patriarchy through their growing solidarity. In both sequels, Ponna gives birth to a child that is clearly not Kali’s, although she hallucinates that he impregnated her in her dreams. Because Ponna has the support of her

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mother and her mother-in-law in the decision to participate in the temple ritual, we see the women subverting the Gounders’ focus on lineage; they take advantage of the tradition, although Kali opposes the practice. In ensuring that Ponna bears a child, Seerayi also secures her and Ponna’s futures on the farm, which would cease if Ponna did not have a child. Although the traditional practice exists to ensure the continuation of property ownership and lineage, Seerayi, Kali’s mother, recognizes that the practice also favored unbridled male sexual desire that compels women to be childbearers. In recalling the story of Paavatha, the Adivasi girl who was raped and became a goddess who cursed the family of her rapists with infertility, she underscores the power of women and critiques uncontrolled male sexual power. In A Lonely Harvest, as Ponna is maddened by grief while also deeply ambivalent about her pregnancy, Seerayi and Vellayi, Ponna’s mother, come together to support her. They move into the barnyard with Ponna, care for the cattle, and do a lot of the farm work. When they need help with farm work, they hire Vengayi, a local woman from another caste, to help them. Together, these women keep the family farm going, raise the cattle, and ensure economic security for the family. They run the farm knowing that Ponna’s child will inherit the land; while they grieve for Kali, his absence does not lead to poverty. Ponna finds solace in reviving the brinjal field that Kali had planted, which in his absence was dying. With the help of the two older women and her brother, she rejuvenates the brinjal patch as a tribute to her love for Kali, but the work with the women and the support of her brother helps her through her grief. The same brinjal patch takes a different narrative turn in Trial by Silence. Kali has taken to isolating himself in the barnyard, and the space that was the site of the couple’s sexual escapades now becomes a place of isolation and anger. While Kali is depressed and does very little work, Ponna and her mother-in-law run the farm. With her mother-in-law’s help, Ponna revives the brinjal garden. Surreptitiously, Kali begins to help out by protecting the plants from aphids and weather vagaries, and together, while still apart, they tend to the garden. Thus, cultivating the garden becomes a metaphor for the renewal and repair of a strained relationship and a path toward healing for both of them. Ponna sells the brinjals in the market when they produce more than they can use, but the brinjals themselves get cooked for the family by Ponna. Her ability to cook the vegetable in many ways that appeal to Kali becomes another indirect path of reconciliation between the two. Although Trial by Silence traces the disruption of the marriage and its path toward a tenuous reconciliation, it also emphasizes female solidarity. Seerayi cares for Ponna, and together they run the farm with the help of Vengayi. When Kali goes on his pilgrimage with Nallayan, Ponna takes over the barnyard and builds a cottage in it so she and her mother-in-law can live there comfortably while caring for the child and the farm. Kali returns to find his barnyard transformed and descends into excessive drinking. The women have proven that they can succeed without his contribution to the family economy. This version of the alternate ending focuses on the education of Kali by his mother and his uncle Nallayyan, who encourage him to rethink his rigid ideas about lineage, sexual fidelity, and possessiveness toward his wife.

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Both these novels emphasize the community of women in the village. Whenever there is a crisis or a celebration, the older women, the paatis, show up. They share gossip, life stories, offer advice on pregnancy and childbirth, and sing bawdy songs. They steadfastly support Seerayi and Ponna, even as village gossip swirls around them about Kali and Ponna’s marriage or the death of Kali. Seerayi has no in-laws because she married an only child. Her only in-law is Nallayan, who supports her autonomy, and in one of the narratives, her brothers are depicted as greedy and eager to claim her land if given the chance. For Seerayi, this community of women – the grannies, the midwife, and Vengayi, the farm laborer – are her support as she strives to heal Ponna and care for her during pregnancy. In Trial by Silence, Murugan devotes a significant number of pages to describing the mating of Kali’s cow in heat with a neighbor’s bull. That occasion leads to Kali thinking about how one bull is considered more fertile than the other and using the bull owner’s wisdom about semen quality to evaluate his own fertility. However, that portion of the narrative also subverts Kali’s sense of his role in the marriage. Since Ponna is pregnant and the farm goes on under the direction of his mother, Murugan seems to suggest that women’s communities do just fine and that the role of a man is merely that of a stud bull. On a farm, there is not much of a difference between humans and non-humans when it comes to reproduction and value.

Conclusion These three novels by Murugan question patriarchy in Kongunadu villages, in particular among the Gounders, and how violence structures this caste’s cultural practices. Even as he beautifully describes the everyday life of rural Tamil Nadu and the rhythms of agrarian life, he is critical of the male-dominant caste practices that emphasize lineage, reproduction, and caste boundaries. He critiques male sexual desire as possessive and predatory, while acknowledging female sexual desire as powerful and potent. The emphasis on female community and resilience and the gradual decentering of the male characters in the sequels suggest that we need to understand feminism at a very local level within the contexts of caste and community. These novels also refuse to present women solely as victims of violence. Such feminism may not be a movement that radically transforms gender relations but one that achieves change at the familial and village level through female solidarity. Importantly, Murugan’s novels compel us to think of trauma and violence regionally and within the context of caste practices and beliefs. Discussions of large-scale catastrophes like Partition or the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, often overlook regional and local experiences of trauma and the ways in which communities respond to situations that are also gendered. Similarly, not all trauma comes from one catastrophic event or has a national or transnational scope. Trauma experienced repeatedly within communities and families, as narrated in Murugan’s trilogy, needs to be explored and understood as well. In offering us two different sequels to Ponna and Kali’s story in One Part Woman, Murugan compels us to consider different outcomes and approaches to healing and resilience.

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Notes 1 For a detailed discussion of the politics of the censorship of Murugan in the context of freedom of expression, see S. Shankar, 2022. ‘The Ruse of Freedom: A Comparative Essay on Ahimsa and Freedom of Expression,’ Cultural Critique 115, 1–34. 2 See Uma Chakravarty, 2003. Gendering Caste through A Feminist Lens, Calcutta, Stree. Charu Gupta, 2016. The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

References Ali, M. Nazir. 2016. ‘The Human and the Non-Human in Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman’, Research Journal of English Language and Literature, 4(2): 661–664. Ayyathurai, Gajendran. 2021. ‘Colonialism, Caste, and Gender: The Emergence of Critical Caste Feminism in Modern South India’, Journal of Women’s History, 33(3): 133–156. Chakravarty, Uma. 2003. Gendering Caste through A Feminist Lens, Calcutta: Stree. Charu Gupta, Charu. 2016. The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Kandasamy, Meena. 2019. ‘One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan Review–A Skilful Tale’, The Guardian, July 25. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/25/ one-part-woman-perumal-murugan-review (accessed on 14 January 2022). Kumar, Amitava. 2019. ‘How Perumal Murugan Was Resurrected through Writing’, The New Yorker, December 12. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-perumalmurugan-was-resurrected-through-writing (accessed on 20 January 2022). Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1988. ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, Feminist Review, 30: 61–102. Murugan, Perumal. 2018a. A Lonely Harvest. New York: Penguin. ———. 2018b. Trial by Silence. New York: Penguin. ———. 2019. One Part Woman. New York: Grove Atlantic. Shankar, Subramanian. 2012. Flesh and Fish Blood: Postcolonialism, Translation, and the Vernacular. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2022. ‘The Ruse of Freedom: A Comparative Essay on Ahimsa and Freedom of Expression’, Cultural Critique, 115: 1–34. Tripathi, Priyanka. 2018. ‘Reading Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman within the Spectrum of Translation, Censorship, and Worship’, International Journal of Translation, 30(2): 85–96.

2 PATHOGENIC MEMORIES AND REPETITIVE ABSENCE Reading Siddhartha Gigoo’s The Garden of Solitude, Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator, and Shahnaz Bashir’s The Half Mother Zeenat Khan Introduction Trauma is ‘slippery blurring the boundaries between mind and body, memory and forgetting, speech and silence’ (Bond and Craps 2020: 5). It is ‘an unsolvable problem of the unconscious that illuminates the inherent contradictions of experience and language’ (Balaev 2014: 1). The victim is haunted by memories of traumatic event(s) in the form of ‘repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts, or behaviors stemming from the event’ (Caruth 1995: 4). Aspects such as ‘feeling detached from their surrounding environment’, ‘unreal or distorted qualities, similar to dreams’, ‘derealization and depersonalization’, and ‘fragmentary or vague’ thoughts are the after-effects of a traumatic experience (Krystal et al. 1995: 155–156), which make the lives of victims miserable and often make the closure impossible. There is a feature of circularity in traumatic experiences where ‘trauma is (not only) a repeated suffering of the event, but it is also a continual leaving of its site’ (Caruth 1995: 10). According to the classical model of literary trauma theory, these ‘features of trauma … refuse representation’ and are not expressible linguistically (Balaev 2014: 1), but recent pluralistic models and revisionist perspectives on trauma by critics like Craps, Balaev, and Rothberg talk about the representation of trauma and ask to ‘restructure how we understand trauma’s function in literature(s)’ (Balaev 2014: 2). These neo-pluralistic theoretical approaches contest the (un)representability and (un)speakability of trauma and demand attention to ‘the specificity of trauma that locates meaning through a greater consideration of the social and cultural contexts of traumatic experience’ (Balaev 2014: 3). Thus, they advocate for ‘trauma’s variability in literature and society’ (Balaev 2014: 4) and emphasize the study of representations and responses to trauma in various cultures and societies in order to make literary trauma theory more inclusive and relevant.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-4

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Nevertheless, the reading of traumas through the texts has always been one of the most prominent engagements of literary trauma theory from the very outset, where the study of representations and repercussions of the traumatic events through literature remains an important exercise, rather ‘to suggest that trauma and literature, or art more generally, are intimately intertwined and even inextricably bound up with one another, as literary trauma theory does, (was at one time) to make a provocative and controversial claim’ (Bond and Craps 2020: 45). However, the literary trauma theory, which itself called for an ethical ground for engagement of literature with trauma, surprisingly focused only on Western traumas and ‘largely fail(ed) to live up to this promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement’ (Craps 2014: 45). In the ‘work, of Caruth, Felman and Laub, Hartman, and LaCapra (2004), trauma theory as a field of cultural scholarship, developed out of an engagement with Holocaust testimony, literature, and history’ exclusively (Craps 2014: 46) and did not initiate much cross-cultural dialogue with other major traumas. However, it paved the way for understanding trauma beyond clinical or neurobiological studies and opened a realm of psychological, social, and cultural understanding of trauma through literature and art. Though a ‘single conceptualization of trauma will likely never fit the multiple and often contradictory depictions of trauma in literature because texts cultivate a wide variety of values that reveal individual and cultural understandings of the self, memory, and society’ (Balaev 2014: 8); therefore, cross-cultural study of trauma is vital to its understanding. In this direction, my chapter attempts to contribute insights into an ongoing, non-event-based, collective trauma of multicultural Kashmir. The chapter attempts to understand the ‘individual and cultural understandings of the self, memory, and society’ via the route of dissociative memory patterns, the circularity of pathogenic memories, and other psychological effects of the ongoing trauma on the people of Kashmir belonging to different cultural and religious communities. Through the reading of three novels from the contemporary fiction writings of Kashmir, namely Siddhartha Gigoo’s The Garden of Solitude, Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator, and Shahnaz Bashir’s The Half Mother, the chapter observes and contextualizes the collective patterns of dissociative memories and continual absence of anchorage to reality through the individual stories of the protagonists of these three selected novels. All three narratives represent the ‘ongoing traumas’ without any closure. Therefore, the chapter maps the circularity of grief, where pathogenic memories of the traumatic events and everyday witnessing of the trauma continuously remain in flux and thus simultaneously erode the individual and collective consciousness of the people. As Erikson defines, by (the) individual trauma I mean a blow to the psyche that breaks through one’s defences so suddenly and with such brutal force that one cannot react to it effectively … by collective trauma, on the other hand, I mean a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality. (1976: 153)

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It is especially true for the close-knit and cohesive Kashmiri society, which is known worldwide for its strong kinship ties, rich cultural heritage, and remarkable hospitality. The chosen works demonstrate how changing environments and everyday traumatic events act as massive disruptors in people’s collective social consciousness and mental health. These traumatic encounters of the collective psyche of the people get representation and voice through the fictional works of contemporary Kashmiri writers. These ‘writers wrest meaning from their fragmented, traumatic experiences by continuously reapproaching them’, and their ‘narratives transpose trauma into novelistic form in the belief that narrativization and fictionalization work toward coherence and meaning’ (Wilhelm 2020: 1–2). The chapter examines these narratives and understands how the pathogenic memories and everyday traumatic experiences disrupt the lives of the protagonists and haunt them in the form of continual flashbacks, hallucinations, and nightmares throughout their lives. The memories of ‘witnessing’ and being ‘subject to’ a traumatic event blur in these narratives in the wake of repetitive and ongoing traumatic events, as opposed to the done and over single traumatic event. This circularity of trauma with ‘no end’ calls for attention to the ongoing, non-event-based trauma as it is much more challenging to understand and heal because layers after layers of trauma from everyday disruptive events and perpetual military presence seep deep into the psyche of the collective consciousness of people. As Stef Craps asserts, the chronic psychic suffering produced by the structural violence of racial, gender, sexual class, and other inequities is not recognised as being traumatic by those adhering to the event based model of trauma, which assumes that trauma stands outside normal everyday experience. Brown therefore calls for hegemonic “event theory” of trauma to be supplemented with a notion of “insidious trauma” (and thus) illuminate rather than obscure the repetitive and cumulative traumas. (Craps 2010: 55) In the selected three novels, The Garden of Solitude, The Collaborator, and The Half Mother, the everyday and cumulative traumatic episodes fracture the close-knit patriarchal family structure of the households, where sons, fathers, or husbands die or disappear or are implicated in the conflict in some disturbing ways, and the daughters, wives, and mothers are left behind either in their excruciating lifelong search for the loved ones or mourning their deaths and the heavy burden of meeting the needs of their family’s livelihoods after the loss of the bread earners. Meanwhile, their pains do not end here; everyday traumatic events rend their wounds afresh. The collective loss of neighborhoods, friends, and a peaceful landscape, along with personal individual loss, builds a cloud of grief from which there seems no escape. The collective cultural practices such as funeral processions mark the collective mourning of not only individuals but loss, grief, resistance, and anguish of the whole community. They bring back memories of lost loved ones. As Suvir Kaul observes, these funeral

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processions have become ‘central to practices of community mourning, often take the form of (huge) demonstrations’ (Kaul 2018: 306). This kind of ‘experiencing trauma’, as Alexander writes, ‘can be understood as a sociological process that defines a painful injury to the collectivity’ (qtd. in Wilhelm 2020: 14). The complicated psychological ramifications of trauma on individuals and societies in an ongoing conflict situation are represented in the stories of the different sections of Kashmiri society in the selected novels. Siddhartha Gigoo’s The Garden of Solitude tells a poignant tale of a Kashmiri Pandit family’s exodus from Kashmir, Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator paints a grim tale of a teenager growing up near the Line of Control (LOC) area of Kashmir, whereas Shahnaz Bashir’s The Half Mother represents the grief of a Kashmiri mother for her disappeared son and her everyday struggle to find him. Each tragedy is of its own sort, yet all are united by the same trauma and the same socio-cultural background, leading to Kashmir’s fragmented social consciousness. The novels are representative of the bewilderment and psychological vacuum that override the contemporary literature of Kashmir. The contemporary writers from Kashmir like Mirza Waheed, Shafi Ahamad, Siddhartha Gigoo, Basharat Peer, Rahul Pandita, Nayeema Mahjoor, and Shahnaz Bashir have represented the trauma of Kashmir in their own individual ways, but the same poignant strain of grief circulates through the traumascape of Kashmir, which certainly depicts more than a pathology. As Caruth asserts, trauma is much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. (1996: 4) The textual analysis of these novels provides insights into the processes of traumatic transmission and socio-cultural implications of them. It is noted that societies are ‘in a constant process of constructing and reconstructing the meaning of the trauma, not so much in an attempt to understand the past, but because of a pressing need to make sense of the present’ (Hirschberger 2018: 7) and that ‘literary writing is a powerful indicator of the way social transitions and traumas are lived by individuals and communities’ (Kaul 2018: 306). The literature from Kashmir is a powerful medium to study trauma at all levels and in all domains as it yields important insights on the response to trauma at an individual, gender, community, and societal level. The chapter is divided into three sections. In each section, the selected novels, The Garden of Solitude, The Collaborator, and The Half Mother, will be observed as the markers of collective psychological trauma against the socio-cultural background of Kashmir.

Lost Home and Identity: Dissociative Memories in The Garden of Solitude Siddhartha Gigoo is a Commonwealth Prize-winning author from the Kashmiri Pandit community. In his novel The Garden of Solitude, he maps the trauma of a

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Kashmiri Pandit family driven away from their home due to militancy and the intense armed conflict in Kashmir in the 1990s. The protagonist of the novel, Sridar, a teenaged Pandit boy, is immensely affected by this sudden exodus of Kashmiri Pandits. He finds it difficult to come to terms with his lost neighborhood and home. His family, like other Pandit families, leaves Kashmir, their home, which is not just a place for them but their identity and cultural anchorage. During this whole painful process of uprootment, threats, and fear, the heartbroken Sridar observes the change in relationships between the Pandit and Muslim families and how the Pandits are suddenly being cut off from the roots. He becomes witness to the suspicion, betrayal, division, and mistrust that rip apart the bonds between communities living in an almost harmonious neighborhood for centuries. Longing for the lost roots, lost home, lost landscape, lost friends, and lost belongingness creates a huge vacuum in his own life and other Pandit family friends. In this turmoil, he finds only solace in writing. Gigoo, through the narrative of Sridar, represents the torment and agony that the Kashmiri Pandit community had to go through in the camps in Jammu, Delhi, and other places in India. The memories of home and loss of identity make living in the camps miserable for families like that of Sridar, leading to isolation, depression, flashbacks, dreams, and nightmares. These ‘pathologies of memory are characteristic features of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These range from amnesia for part, or all, of the traumatic events to frank dissociation, in which large realms of experience or aspects of one’s identity are disowned (qtd. in Caruth 1995: 152). The exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, which is represented by Gigoo in The Garden of Solitude, ‘marks a specific rupture in terms of relationships, (a sense of loss of unique Kashmiri Pandit identity) and this can be found for migrants from all socio-economic backgrounds’ (Datta 2016: 66). The Pandits (Hindu high-caste community) had always occupied the top position in the socio-cultural ladder of Kashmir. They lived in lavish houses and enjoyed great respect in Kashmir society for centuries. Therefore, the Pandit’s attachment to his house is great (as) he receives his kith and kin; performs various rituals and ceremonies; keeps his belongings and when the end comes, it is here he wants to die. To a pandit, his gara (home) is symbolic of the purpose of his existence and strivings. (Madan 2002: 47) After the shock of a sudden exodus from the valley, life in the camps and new-found settlements is nothing like the lost home in terms of comfort, food, weather, language, landscape, or kinship. These feelings of loss do not merely relate to the loss of a house but for the house of a certain size and quality. It is not merely a landscape and climate they miss but rather its beauty and freshness when compared with what they face in Jammu (camps and settlements) in the present. (Datta 2016: 65)

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In The Garden of Solitude, the encroachment of space is the first-ever breach in the lives of Kashmiri Pandit people. Their landscape is invaded, and so is their psyche. Suddenly, the world outside their houses becomes hostile, and the metaphor of closed windows becomes conspicuous in the novel. The neighborhood where once Sridar, the teenaged protagonist of the novel, used to play freely along with his Muslim friends, was now invaded by ‘the army convoys and the fearful armoured vehicles (which) marched the roads of the city at all times’ (Gigoo 2011: 54). The army men ‘constantly surveyed the narrow lanes, from where they feared grenades would be hurled upon them’ (Gigoo 2011: 54). Sridar’s mother forbids him to meet his friends outside the house as militants were targeting Pandits of the valley, and they were receiving threats to leave the valley or die. Sridar’s childhood is caged and suffocated as he ‘is kept indoors and spent most of the time in his room, dusting his books and trying to fill the pages of his diary. His mother kept the windows of their house shut for most parts of the day’ (Gigoo 2011: 71). Outside the house, there were funeral processions all the time in the streets. A portion of land at Eidgah was converted into a graveyard and named the ‘Freedom Graveyard’. Children had stopped playing football and flying kites in the ground. There were graves all around and tombstones with names and dates. (Gigoo 2011: 46) Thus, life became confined within the four walls of the house for the protagonist and other Pandit families of the valley. Amid the death threats, sounds of grenades, and funeral processions, Pandit families kept windows of their houses always closed as the outside was no more in cohesion with the inward. The closed windows separated the vengeful eyes of the outside world from the inside fears that were constantly on every Pandit family’s mind. The windows of the houses were permanently shut, and Pandits were fearful of venturing out on the streets. They started hiding their cultural identity, the ‘women stopped putting tilaks on their foreheads to mask their identity. The men grew beards. They did not speak to one another on the streets. They abandoned their traditional greeting Namaskar’ (Gigoo 2011: 75). Gigoo poignantly portrays the collective fears of a community bereft of their home, surroundings, and identity. The dreams and nightmares turn into hallucinations, and life for Sridar, his family, and other members of his community come under constant threat. This fear leads to a collective psychosis among the members of the Pandit community. For instance, a Pandit neighbor of Sridar dreams that he is ‘killed by a bullet while walking on the bridge’ and he sees his ‘own dead body floating in the river’ (Gigoo 2011: 87). Pandits are left with no choice but to ‘pack up (their) belongings and leave. Otherwise, (they’ll) be butchered one by one and thrown into the Vitasta (river)’ (Gigoo 2011: 42). The militancy and political situation ‘shattered the love Muslims had for the Pandits. The Pandits became suspects – informers and agents of India’ in the eyes of Muslim community’ (Gigoo 2011: 54). The once happy and prosperous valley neighborhood had suddenly turned indifferent to the Pandits.

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The exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits unites them in a collective mourning for the lost home and lost identity, especially in the camps. This collective trauma disrupts their identity on all levels and leads to ‘a gradual realization that the community no longer exists as an effective source of support and that an important part of the self has disappeared’ (Erikson 1976: 154). This kind of ‘cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways’ (Alexander 2004: 1). As a result, pandits who have settled in other parts of India never feel at home. The longing for home is a recurring theme in Kashmiri Pandit writers’ literary works. The boundaries of past and present blur in Gigoo’s description of the forced exodus of Pandit families. In the camps, the longing for a beautiful past ‘evoked a longing to be re-lived. The past aspired to race past the present and the future. The present was just a crippled memory’ (Gigoo 2011: 105). The memories of forced leaving of home were never clear, for instance, as the days progressed, ‘Mahanandju’s memory became more and more fragmented. He narrated the events which no one knew or remembered ever happened in his life’ (Gigoo 2011: 164), ‘his memory had started playing tricks with him, especially with the dates and the sequence in which the events occurred’ (Gigoo 2011: 161–162). Similarly, many other Pandit migrants turned ‘delusional owing to mental trauma’ and were unable ‘to cope up with the alien surroundings and loss of … land (Gigoo 2011: 202). There occurred a dissociation between reality and past memories, which may be ‘as a defence during trauma, an attempt to maintain mental control, just as physical control is lost’ and ‘a way of detaching … from the immediate experience of terror, pain, and helplessness’ (Spiegel 1995: 135). Gigoo’s novel traverses the journey of the Pandit community’s trauma from nightmares, hallucinations, and death threats to life in limbo, interspersed with PTSD, depression, and longing for the lost home in the camps and new settlements.

Hallucinations and Hysteria in The Collaborator In his novel The Collaborator, Mirza Waheed, tells a dark tale of grief through the story of an unnamed protagonist who is a teenaged Muslim boy living in a deserted village near the LOC. This novel is a psychological representation of the acute agony, torment, and pain that the innocent village people near LOC go through. As the title suggests, the protagonist, a teenaged Muslim boy, is employed or collaborated with by an army captain named Kadian, to collect the ID cards and other documents or belongings from the dead bodies of youth/militants killed in the encounters. The protagonist, a teenaged Muslim boy, in a way becomes an unwilling collaborator in the story and later comes to believe that he has turned a traitor against his own community in his greed to earn a little money. His visits to the heaps of corpuses from where he is supposed to procure ID cards and identify them for the army man, Captain Kadian, make him acutely hysterical, hallucinated, and sick over a period of time. He experiences dreadful flashbacks, nightmares, and agonizing dreams, which make his life miserable and unbearable. Whenever he visits the Death

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Valley of corpses, a fear looms large in his mind as he apprehends encountering the bodies of his disappeared childhood friends whom he loved so much. Throughout the story, he struggles with the decision of ‘to be or not to be’ a collaborator with Captain Kadian, but escape is difficult for him because refusing his job to Captain Kadian would result in his death. Throughout this story of mental anguish and everyday torture, the memories of his disappeared friend Hussain kept returning to him whenever he came into close contact with the mutilated dead corpses. Life turns unreal for him as he is mostly talking to himself, and there is a constant dissociation with himself and his surroundings. Everyday army crackdowns and funeral processions make the situation even more complicated for him, throughout the novel. He remains in a constant dilemma throughout, but toward the end of the novel, as a redemption to himself, he offers a ritualistic prayer on the decaying bodies he visited, and as the ceremonial burial is not possible for such a large number of corpses, he puts a fire on them and murmurs, ‘whose stories I shall tell one day. I should pay my respects … to these disappeared sons’ (Waheed 2011: 303). Mirza Waheed draws a somber picture of the horrific life of the protagonist, his mother, and the lives of his friends living near the LOC area of Kashmir. Death, like dreams and decaying corpses, is central to the theme in The Collaborator and depicts the decaying consciousness and psyche of a teenage boy who is a victim of the political situation around him. He is a victim of the dilemma of allegiance, who is so caught up in the moment of trauma that his escape seems impossible. The protagonist loses track of time, both past and present, reality and fantasy. He is constantly in a dissociative state ‘in which perceptual, affective, memory, and identity functions are altered’ and exhibits ‘symptoms associated with dissociative states (like) distorted sensory perceptions, altered time perception, amnesia, analgesia, derealization, depersonalization, conversion symptoms, fugue states’ (Krystal et al. 1995: 155). The lines below depict the dissociative state of mind that the protagonist goes through as he has to visit the corpses of young boys/militants for identification and collect ID cards. Waheed represents the whole spectrum of psychological trauma-related symptoms in the protagonist. He is dissociated from reality and lives life in his head for most of the part. He hears the moans and cries from the dead and decaying bodies, as if they were asking questions from him. His thought process becomes disjointed and fragmented. In the lines below one can read the inescapable psychological trauma of the protagonist. It’s not easy, collecting identity cards and whatever else you can find on dead bodies. Bodies after bodies – some huddled together, others forlorn and lonesome …. For God knows how long I just cannot remove my eyes from this landscape, heaps of them, big and small, body parts, belongings littered amidst the rubble of legs and arms …. Macabre, horrid ghouls on either side of the brook watch me from their melancholic black-hole eye sockets. (Waheed 2011: 14) He thus felt a constant guilt and fear when he collected ID cards from the dead bodies; these fears troubled him in the form of hallucinations later. The guilt of

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collaborating with Captain Kadian and the view of half-rotten corpses made him psychologically sick and eats him up. His state of mind is becoming delirious. In the fit of hallucinations, he sees dark figures in trees, which accuse him and haunt him on his way back home after the identification of decaying corpses. As we read in the lines below, the protagonist loses the sense of real and imaginary. They (trees) seem to take a long, considered look at me, to make up their mind, to judge me in some mysterious way while I’m trying hard to get away from their motionless gaze. I stop looking, but then, without knowing, I have turned to look at their forms again, deeply cast against a sad, manhoos (sinister), accursed horizon. It’s one of those things, you know, the harder you try not to think of something, the more you don’t want to look at something, the more you get drawn into thinking of that very thing. I suspect they will start rustling the moment I take my last step out of their line of vision. I wish I could know what they say after I have passed. Here’s the abandoned one, the left-out one, the one who must tell the story. He now goes down to check, to rummage through the pieces of those who left. He’s the only one now. (Waheed 2011: 73) The above state of mind is so very representative of the ‘repressive, repetitive, and dissociative nature of trauma’ (Balaev 2014: 5). The unnamed protagonist, a teenaged boy, continually rehearses what he sees and thinks several times a day and is mostly occupied in self-talk as ‘traumatic events are highly likely to be rehearsed extensively’ and ‘regardless of whether that trauma is a single event (such as a motor vehicle accident) or a sustained stressful experience that might involve multiple trauma types (such as military deployment)’ (Strange and Takarangi 2015: 1). The presence of heavy military deployment creates unease and stress in the lives of the characters in all three selected novels; spaces are invaded, and lives are forever changed. The protagonist in The Collaborator muses about his school days, when nobody bothered them and ‘probably no one even noticed’; the valley was for them their ‘own private patch’ where they would ‘play cricket and fool around all day in (the) secluded playground’ but now they ‘could see army pickets on either side of the valley even then, far off, like outline sketches on a school drawing’ (Waheed 2011: 12). The agony and everyday fear of crackdowns by the army sucked the blood out of the fear of the villagers in The Collaborator. While identifying the bodies was a regular routine, they still tried ‘best not to appear nervous’ as all of them knew that, ‘sometimes the Army whisked you off for the flimsiest of excuses, sometimes just because you couldn’t speak quickly enough when a soldier placed his hand on your chest and asked you why your heart beat so fast’ (Waheed 2011: 190). The result of this continuous fear leads to a circularity of grief from which there is no scope for closure, but rather life becomes an endless saga of psychological and physical torture. The continuous trauma in The Collaborator doesn’t emphasize the ‘need to tell and retell the story of the traumatic experience’, but it is to make it ‘real’ both to the victim and to the community. Such writing serves both as validation and a cathartic vehicle for the traumatized author (Tal 1995: 21).

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In The Collaborator, flashbacks, hallucinations, psychosis, and fear are conspicuous symptoms of trauma that we observe in the protagonist, but an uneasy strain of his mother’s silence runs throughout the plot. The son and mother are united in each other’s trauma, yet their expressions are different. The boy tries to avoid his mother and ‘her silence helps (him), although how long can one avoid one’s mother’ (Waheed 2011:17). She seems to be silent for ages and only answers in ‘hmm, Haan, no or yes’ (Waheed 2011: 48). Her life became meaningless and there was a void in her life. In the majority of contemporary fiction about Kashmir, women are portrayed as silent victims and sufferers, who are at the other end of the whole discourse but unfortunately at the center of the agonizing pain. The compelling framework of The Collaborator offers trauma as a sociological process, where the young boy sees himself as a traitor to his community by just collecting ID cards from the corpses; he sees his neighbors and his friends in those decaying bodies, which triggers his memories of the past and makes his life even more miserable. The constant presence of the army and the fear of crackdowns make the life of the community hellish. The Collaborator as a reading offers a deep insight into the various aspects of collective trauma. Within families, the members start avoiding each other, as the protagonist and his mother avoid each other, and within communities, a sense of fear looms large, as if it is a punishment for some grave collective sin. The molvis (priests) make them believe that whatever is happening is because of sins, ‘Allahtala is punishing us for our sins’ (Waheed 2011: 34). Religion, community, and kinship ties complicate the trauma of an individual in a society like Kashmir. The trauma thus is to be studied at ‘both (levels) the individual and society, rather than consolidating the experience of trauma into a singular, silent ghost’ (Balaev 2014: 5).

Pathogenic Memories and Agonizing Wait in The Half Mother Set in the Natipora area of Srinagar, The Half Mother by Shahnaz Bashir is a story of the traumatic aftermath of an excruciatingly painful event in the life of a Kashmiri woman, coupled with an intensely grim scenario, which doesn’t allow her any respite. The protagonist of the novel, Haleema, lives a life in limbo after her only son, the ‘apple of her eyes’, disappears. Imran, son of Haleema, grew up in the 1990s in an atmosphere of tension and horror. The lifelong tragedy for Imran and his mother, Haleema, started when, during the winter, Imran, had an ugly skirmish with the army men. Imran, being a very young teenage boy, could not bear the humiliation of Ab Jaan (his maternal grandfather) and ‘furiously sprinted towards the trooper who had punched his Ab Jaan, ramming into his legs and pummelling his thigh’ (Bashir 2014: 27). This episode made them conspicuous in the eyes of army personnel, Major Kushwaha, who had vengeful feelings against Imran and his Ab Jaan. Some days later, a patrol led by Major Kushwaha came crashing down on Natipora, severely thrashing people in its search operation. It entered forcefully into Haleema’s house, and a heated argument with Ab Jaan ensued. Major Kushwaha ‘hit Ab Jaan on the arm with his rifle’, shouting, Don’t lie, All you sisterfucking Kashmiris lie! … Tell me, or I’ll shoot you’ (Bashir 2014: 48). After a few scuffles

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and shouts, ‘three bullets were pumped into Ab Jaan’ (Bashir 2014: 49); he was killed by the cops in a broad daylight. Imran had frozen with shock and this gory and horrific cold-blooded murder of his dear grandfather changed him forever. From a happy and jovial young boy, he had changed into a silent and morose boy. A few days after this wrecking episode of brutality, troops forcibly rammed into their house again and snatched away Imran, Haleema’s only son. They took Imran with them. Haleema pleaded, begged, and did all she could do, but they did not listen. Imran shrieked, ‘Ammi! Save me!’ (Bashir 2014: 58), but her son was pulled away from her to unknown dungeons. Haleema was left all alone; her father Ab Jaan was murdered brutally and her son disappeared. She was left with an open wound, alone and restless forever. Thereon starts her hopeless search and mission of tracing her son in the prisons, police stations, and mortuaries all over the valley. From politicians to journalists, she keeps making her way around the world, hoping to find some information about Imran, her beautiful and obedient teenaged son. Haleema’s suffering is inexpressible. It remained like a cut-open gaping wound that could never heal as the search for her son never ended. Lonely and forlorn, Haleema always remained lost in the past. The memories of everyday events kept pricking her wound day and night. The circle of everyday remembering turned pathogenic. Halima’s happy and sad memories of the past kept haunting her day and night in a circularity. Clinically speaking, such pathogenic memories are ‘dysfunctional memories’ that ‘form a basis of variety of mental disorders’ (Hase et al. 2017: 4). This draws attention to not only knowing ‘how traumatic an event is, but rather (focus equally) on the pathology developing after the event’ (Hase et al. 2017: 3). For Haleema, the memories keep coming back in a repetitive manner and make healing and carrying out life normally a difficult task for her. ‘In a social and cultural set up where a woman anchors her existence to her husband and her children, understandably the loss of both proves to be detrimental to her on both levels- personal and social’ (Khan 2021: 140). Haleema eventually starts ‘hating herself ’ (Bashir 2014: 3) and keeps waiting every moment for her disappeared son. She perpetually waits for her son as ‘her eyes did not leave her wooden gate’ for even a moment, ‘her head was filled with flashing visions and buzzing memories’ (Bashir 2014: 4). Every night when she ‘laid out the utensils to serve herself dinner, she ladled the rice onto two plates … began to sob, followed by a low wail that reverberated in the empty house’ (Bashir 2014: 108–109). Her wait seems eternal and never-ending whenever somebody knocked the door, ‘she would quickly feel her heart sink. Her brain would blow over and over, It is him, maybe it is him. She would get weak in the knees; her hands would tremble’ (Bashir 2014: 112). Her mental agony is hard to describe in words. Her trauma and pain is without any closure. Such ‘(pathological) memories of trauma can often present a quite different phenomenology to everyday episodic memories. Trauma memories can sometimes feel as if they are happening in the present moment, rather than the past, and can be accompanied by the feeling of presence typically found in perceptual experience’ as we see in Haleema’s case. (McCarroll et al. 2021:16). Haleema’s trauma is aggravated by never-ending flashbacks, memories, and everyday struggle of searching for her beloved son. Such a ‘without any closure’

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traumatic struggle and pain leads to a severe ‘dissociation between cognition and affect’ (Bond and Craps 2020: 77). According to Breuer and Freud, the ‘remembering (not only) inflicts the psychological pain but also ascribes value to a previously repressed experience in the unconscious. This traumatic remembering is termed “pathogenic reminiscences” for the pathologic symptoms the memory causes’ (qtd. in Mambrol 2018: n.p.). The family ties, rituals, and religious cohesion place women at the center in the societal structure of Kashmir; such psychological ramifications of trauma have led to broken family structures in Kashmir and deteriorated the overall mental health of women like Haleema in particular and the Kashmiri society in general. What complicates the scenario further is that the discussion about mental health in South Asian societies has a stigma attached to the subject of mental trauma (which further adds to the despair). Ufra Mir, a peace-psychologist based in Kashmir, who also works regularly with female patients, said that while almost every woman in Kashmir has likely experienced distress at some point in her life, they are also likely unaware of what they are going through psychologically. And among those who do know, she said, many choose to hide it. (Mir and Parthu 2020: n. p) The trauma of victims like protagonist Haleema marks a specific circularity as there is no escape from it; it is a trauma of a disappeared loved one. There remains a hope in hopelessness that the loved one will return, yet return never happens. The everyday struggle of search and everyday pain of memories causes a ‘detrimental and irrecoverable psychosis’ (Khan 2021: 145). Women like protagonist Haleema are in hundreds and ‘with (this) unprecedented numbers of people who exhibit recognizable symptoms of trauma … it is possible to argue that all aspects of Kashmiri society, culture, and politics have been reconfigured in this period by such shared suffering’ (Kaul 2018: 306). These traumatic memories and shared psychosis have become part of the vast traumascape of Kashmir and are conspicuous in the contemporary literature of Kashmir.

Conclusion To conclude, it may be said that the narratives of the selected novels from the contemporary trauma literature of Kashmir are infinitely abysmal. The memory is no more of a beautiful valley but of a self-negation and conflictual remembrance, where the desire not to confront, not to talk, and the fear of witnessing the self-over-rules. The rigorous and topographical investigation gives the view of the impossibility of the comprehension of trauma among the victims. The (un)speakable trauma of Kashmiri households finds voice through the narratives of Kashmiri writers, but the unexplainable and deeply inflicted psychological wounds of the ongoing and perpetual trauma can’t be fully expressed ever. Thus, it can be said that the

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representations of Kashmir, as is already apparent, are a product of an ongoing exchange between the past and the present, myth and history, memory and forgetting, and the visual, oral and textual; they are also, as much, a product of an ongoing dialogue between self-representation and representations by outsiders. (Zutshi 2018:12) The contemporary fiction from Kashmir is an important site to study the psychological effects of ongoing and collective trauma on a society in general and women and children in particular. Their fragile psychological sufferings are often not observed, recorded, or reported in direct accounts or news reports but are told through such stories and poems, which ‘can encode insights into psychic processes … by exploring the links between subjective processes and public events’ (Kaul 2018: 307). Though traumas as complex as that of the protagonist Sridar of The Garden of Solitude, Haleema of The Half Mother, and the unnamed teenager of The Collaborator can be read through the literary texts, yet there always remains a much that misses the words. Hence, literary texts ‘should not encourage us to believe that they are a full revelation or accounting of trauma’, but they ‘can offer readers the opportunity to trace lineaments of pain and to sense the heft of all that is never quite realized or said (Kaul 2018: 305). Therefore, there is a need to study and take into account ‘the many sources that inform the definitions, representations, and consequences of traumatic experience’ (Balaev 2014: 6). The individual trauma of the characters in literary texts reflects the collective trauma of society. Reading of these individual traumas through texts, which form the collective voice of the literary fabric of a society, ‘are merged into consolidated stories that, over time, come to define community trauma’ (Kaul 2022: n.p.). The process of meaning-making through these individual narratives marks the beginning of an endless engagement with the collective trauma of the entire community. Literature from Kashmir can be seen as an important doorway for engagement with the trauma of its own kind, where individual traumas and collective trauma float into each other in the most complicated ways.

References Alexander, C. J. 2004. ‘Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, in Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. (eds.), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, pp. 1–30. California: University of California Press. Balaev, Michelle. 2014. ‘Literary Trauma Theory Reconsidered’, in Michelle Balaev (ed.), Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory, pp. 1–14. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bashir, Shahnaz. 2014. The Half Mother. Delhi: Hachette Book Publishing. Bond, Lucy and Stef Craps. 2020. Trauma, London and New York: Routledge. Caruth, Cathy. 1995. ‘Trauma and Experience: Introduction’, in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory, pp. 3–12. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Craps, Stef. 2010. ‘Wor(l)ds of Grief: Traumatic Memory and Literary Witnessing in CrossCultural Perspective’, Textual Practice, 24(1): 51–68.

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Craps, Stef. 2014. ‘Beyond Eurocentrism: Trauma Theory in the Global Age’, in Gert Buelens et al. (eds.), The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, pp. 45–61, London: Routledge. Datta, A. 2016. ‘Dealing with Dislocation: Migration, Place and Home Among Displaced Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu and Kashmir’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 50(1), 52–79. Erikson, K. T. 1976. Everything in its Path. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Gigoo, Siddhartha. 2011. The Garden of Solitude. London: Rupa Publications. Hase, M. et al. 2017. ‘The AIP Model of EMDR Therapy and Pathogenic Memories’, Frontiers in psychology, (8): 1578. Hirschberger, Gilad. 2018. ‘Collective Trauma and the Social Construction of Meaning’, Frontiers in psychology, (9): 1441. Kaul, Suvir. 2018. ‘The Witness of Poetry: Political Feeling in Kashmiri Poems’, in Chitralekha Zutshi (ed.), Kashmir: History, Politics, Representation, pp. 301–324. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kaul, Suvir. 2022. ‘Kashmir: Loss, Memory and a Shared History’, The India Forum: A Journal-Magazine on Contemporary Issues, https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/kashmirloss-memory-history (accessed on 12 December 2021) Khan, Zeenat. 2021. ‘Psychological Ramifications of Trauma in Women as Represented in Shahnaz Bashir’s The Half Mother’, International Journal of English Language, Literature in Humanities, 9(7): 139–150. Krystal, John H. et al. 1995. ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Psychobiological Mechanisms of Traumatic Remembrance’, in Daniel L. Schacter (ed.), Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains and Societies Reconstruct Past, pp. 149–172. London: Harvard University Press. LaCapra, Dominick. 2004. History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Madan, T.N. 2002. Family and Kinship: A Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mambrol, Nasrulla. 2018. ‘Trauma Studies’. Literary Theory and Criticism. https://literariness. org/2018/12/19/trauma-studies/ (accessed on 10 December 2021). McCarroll, Christopher et al. 2021. ‘Memory and Perception, Insights at the Interface: Editors’ Introduction’, Estudios de Filosofía, (64): 5–19. Mir, Shoaib and Parthu Venkatesh P. 2020. ‘The Silent Mental Health Crisis Among Women in Kashmir’, Women’s Media Center, https://womensmediacenter.com/womenunder siege/the-silent-mental-health-crisis-among-women-in-kashmir (accessed on 10 December 2021). Spiegel, David. 1995. ‘Hypnosis and Suggestion’, in Daniel L. Schacter (ed.), Memory distortion: How Minds, Brains and Societies Reconstruct Past, pp 129–148. London: Harvard University Press. Strange, D and M. K. Takarangi. 2015. ‘Memory Distortion for Traumatic Events: The Role of Mental Imagery’, Frontiers in Psychiatry, (6): 27. Tal, Kali. 1995. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waheed, Mirza. 2011.The Collaborator. London: Penguin Books. Wilhelm, Thorsten. 2020. Holocaust Narratives: Trauma, Memory and Identity Across Generations. New Yok: Routledge. Zutshi, Chitralekha. 2018. ‘Introduction: New Directions in the Study of Kashmir’, in Chitralekha Zutshi (ed.), Kashmir: History, Politics, Representation. pp. 1–21. New York: Cambridge University Press.

3 FROM THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF PUNJAB 1984 IN PUNJAB TO ITS ‘MNEMONIC IMAGINATION’ Reading Amandeep Sandhu’s Roll of Honour Manjot Kaur

Introduction The turbulent year of 1984 in Punjab and across India has been the subject of several memorializing events organized both in Punjab and overseas. Most of these are either political or sectarian and fail to capture the experiences of the common people during the heydays of militancy in Punjab. Both the state and the radical religious establishment have blamed each other for the incidents leading to the events of 1984. The violence of 1984 is not forgotten, and the search for justice and the truth stimulates memories of violence and trauma. It has continued to haunt the ‘Punjabi collective consciousness’ since 1984. The act and process of memory have never been predominantly ingenuous, how and what one remembers is colored by multiple facets. Memory, like art, is always balancing a precarious relationship with the past. It is also largely socially, historically, and culturally made.

Memory and Trauma In its social, cultural, and personal relevance, traumatic memory is inherently linked to issues around representation and identity, and their relationship and transmission are quite complex. The theorists of memory studies raise vital questions concerning the modes of transmission and contestation of memory. Although giant strides have been made in recent years in the field of memory studies, there still remains a question as to what extent the historical past and events can be approached through individual and collective memory. While critically analyzing the elements of semi-autobiographical writing, the present study has tried to see the flow of trauma and its interjection in the act of recollecting and articulating personal and collective trauma. Amandeep Sandhu’s memoirs, Sepia Leaves (2008) and Roll of Honour (2012), are an amalgamation of trauma and pain. The unifying thread between the two novels is DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-5

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mental illness and religious conflicts. Sandhu’s recent work Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines (2019) retriggered the traumatic memories of Punjab in 1984, especially the aftermath of Operation Bluestar. The book again puts a question mark on the legacy of the past, such as the partition of Punjab, the events of 1984, and the militancy, and how it continues to define the present. While including an analysis of the literary techniques used by the author, the present chapter may also help to comprehend how the individuals (re)member, (re)imagine, and finally (re)construct fragmented personal/public memories and anecdotes. The chapter has been divided into three segments. In the first one, this semi-autobiographical writing is studied as a tool to narrate one’s lived experiences, and in the second, the act of writing about trauma is seen as a creative and aesthetic process. The final segment of the chapter has tried to yoke together both these aspects or segments so that the act of writing can be seen through the lens/threads of trauma studies. The dual timeline of the novel is intrinsically dominated by the experience of witnessing and living a traumatic past and the way a Sikh adult recollects the violence and ceaseless torture of those times. His anecdotal experiences have been supplemented either through state records or through other historical evidence. Readers can still find a space or gap between their individual or personal experience and the collective or shared trauma of a community. Most of the representations of past events are always contested by the current conditions in which they appear. Re-presentation, rather than representation, holds up the mirror in a light that enables us to see the reality, which is both reflected and refracted. Documented texts, literary, and cinematic representations of Punjab 1984 display various means of remembering and memorializing, and simultaneously expose the haunting nature of traumatic memories and remembrance. By default, it influences the individual’s subjectivity and political consciousness. Literature is viewed as a form where individual expression accommodates memory, which can be individual and can simultaneously also belong to a culture, a nation, or even other kinds of group identity. In this regard, Susan J. Brison, highlighting ‘collective trauma’, proposes that when dealing with human-inflicted trauma, the narrativity of trauma is an important step in shifting from being an object of the perpetrator’s speech narrative into being a subject of one’s own narrative. This, according to Brison, helps the trauma survivor to overcome their traumatic experience. Brison particularly refers to human-inflicted trauma and acts of violence. ‘The act of bearing witness to the trauma facilitates this shift, not only by transforming a traumatic memory into a community but also by re-establishing connections essential to selfhood’ (Brison 2002: 40). Brison clearly addresses the issue of the limitation of speech and language for translating trauma and discusses the importance of the listener’s willingness to understand the traumatic narrative, since the narrator’s experience is virtually ‘unrepresentable’ within the norms of linguistics.

Reading Roll of Honour The present novel, Roll of Honour, is about a Sikh boy, studying in an army school in a fictional town named Jassabad in Punjab, struggling with internal and external demons during the turbulent times of 1984. As Appu enters the 12th standard, he

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looks forward to three things, which have been depicted through the metaphor of Trishul: the three-pointed blades, Lord Shiva’s weapon. The trident symbol is used significantly in this book, which intends to parade the author’s own dithering state of mind: first, the loss of the physical world of social status (school), the second is sodomy, and the third is the denial of justice to Sikhs in riots. In post-Operation Bluestar, life and times turned out quite vicious and callous for the Sikhs as the state machinery carried out counter-insurgency programs in Punjab and across India to curb the movement that had emerged in the name of Khalistan. Furthermore, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwala, the chief propagandist of the Khalistan movement, the Sikh separatist movement prevalent in the 1980s, lost his life along with other comrades during the 1984 army operation. These upheaval movements affected the atmosphere not only inside the army school but outside too. The separatist movement divides the students of the army school along the demarcated lines of Sikhism and Hinduism. The cohorts of the Khalistan movement in the school deify Jarnail Singh Bhindranwala and want to tread the same path, while the other students, like people outside the school, want to stay as part of India. This semi-autobiographical novel/memoir is a convincing narrative, written with honesty, and records an intensely personal and lived experience. Furthermore, the desolation triggered by split and divided loyalties, the trauma of sodomy, and personal and collective mortification in an army school during the days of Operation Bluestar are truthfully captured. The novel shows how socio-political upheavals blur the emotions of young lads. The first line of the novel reads as: ‘I ran away. Two and a half decades ago, when a revolver kissed me, I was then studying in a military school in Punjab’ (Sandhu 2012: 1), showing how Sandhu accentuates the role of memory and trauma. This novel is an amalgamation of actions, events, and individuals, retaining the essence of one’s experience as a survivor and the one who witnessed those testing times of the massacre of Sikhs in 1984. Roll of Honour takes us 25 years ago when the protagonist/narrator of the story fled from Punjab to Hyderabad and later settled in Bangalore. But for years, he is unable to sleep due to his numerous devastating inner fears, a scattered self, and personal dilemmas: Yet I could not sleep. I could not forget how the black narrow circle of muzzle had looked at me and how I had looked at it. How my knees had trembled? How I could have been killed. Since 1984, the stench of fear has plagued me. Sometimes, I wish the bullet had ended this story there and then it had remained untold. (Sandhu 2012: 1) The novel acknowledges the intricacy of the act of remembrance. Readers can clearly peep into the causal subtexts of the collective memory and the individual trauma that connect the reflections of a troubled past and the way it consequently shaped the journey of this writing experience. Despite the complex fabric of individual trauma, the journey of the novel ends with a renewed hope and with a renewed sense of what turns out to be a way of looking back at the past, where one can learn and unlearn numerous things. This means that our memories and how

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we remember the past, both as individuals and as a group, have everything to do with our experiences. The Halbwachian term, ‘collective memory’, somehow, remains distant from the realm of tradition, transmission, and transferences. While using the term, ‘borrowed memory’, Halbwach (1992) presents the idea of extended memory – the memory we have of historical events that we did not experience and of which we received knowledge either through the state education, books, or narratives of our parents or from other sources. This specific part of individual memory that is not really ‘ours’ is rather ‘borrowed’ from alternate sources. Likewise, he provides the notion of ‘Fata Morgana Effect’, which demonstrates the ways in which external or public memory can influence our own personal thoughts. ‘The Fata Morgana effect’ comprises memories of historical events, particularly traumatic events, which are most of the time directly and purposefully re-applied to the contemporary conflict for political benefits. As Sandhu reflects on his lived experiences and the reliant, unpredictable ways in which he understands himself through them, he keeps on illustrating his past experiences: ‘I am full of cracks and leaking everywhere’ (Sandhu 2012: 5). In this context, the concept ‘Mnemonic imagination’ denotes the alliance between personal life and public culture that puts forth a new dimension while representing trauma: Imagining the painful pasts of others is the precondition for empathy, and empathy is itself the precondition for sharing such pasts, but even before mnemonic imagining of this kind can occur, any traumatic experience has to have been worked through, for without this there can be no emphatic engagement, whether of the mnemonic imagination or the historical imagination. It is only a painful experience which can be co-performed discursively, and this is always dependent on the intersubjective relations of those involved. (Keightely and Pickering 2012: 172) Intertwining the concept of traumatic memory with imagination makes the idea of memory and the act of commemorating even more vigorous. In general, imagination and traumatic memory work in conjunction with each other. The moment we are engrossed in a musical or a fictional narrative, what we derive from it through our imaginative engagement connects with our own societal and historical understanding/experience. The power play between history and politics in the novel is tortuously symbolized through the intense, grisly, and disturbing account of male rape as a source of power and a site of dominance. During his school days, Appu witnessed boys being fascinated with each other and experienced the same homosexual impulse in himself. He saw a friend being slaughtered, and the images of violence would haunt him for a long time. In his course of life, he goes through an internal, mental, and emotional war to comprehend the complexity of his personal and national turmoil. In some ways, the novel or the act of writing about his own trauma helps him look at the situation inside himself from two points of view: that

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of an author looking back on his youth and that of a teenager whose spirit was broken by the events in Punjab at the time.

Violence and Trauma Subsequently, violence has been incorporated at multiple levels in the novel, but in this study, it can be classified into three segments: first inside the school, where students are abandoned and betrayed by their own seniors and teachers; second outside the school, where sodomy is used as a weapon of exploitation and domination; and, third, outside the school where bullying is practiced every now and then. Here, the readers are reminded of the atrocities and violence of 1984 and its aftermath through the narratives of Balraj (Appu’s senior), who becomes a separatist, and Joga (Appu’s classmate and confidant), who is arrested by the police during a vacation in June 1984 because of being a turbaned Sikh. Another character, Lalten (Appu’s junior), loses his brother during the counter-insurgency period. Through these multiple narratives, the author tends to represent some unsaid truth about Punjab 1984 – the pinnacle of violence on the Sikh community. While exhibiting the ferocity of terrorism and counter-insurgency, the novel questions authoritative power, power that problematizes the phenomenon of identity in an individual on the basis of color, religion, community, language, and nation. In the same manner, Appu feels that he belongs nowhere, and his circumstances push him to question his own identity in the context of both religion and nation. He is a ‘mona’ (Mona means bald or clean-shaven or trimmed hair) and is considered a lesser Sikh by Sikhs and non-Sikhs too. Later, he grows his hair. He is seen as a lesser Indian by the police too, and as a result, he is put up behind bars for being a Sikh adult. In school, he receives some special treatment as the person in charge of his class, but he can belong to neither the victims nor the bullies. The narrative is fluid, and the novel’s vivid imagery of violence highlights exploitations at both the surface and subterranean levels. Mnemonic imagination and collected cultural memory engross the indeterminate space that lies between the moment/an event one experiences, sees, and perceives. Subsequently, temporal meaning gets produced, and thereafter, a conglomerate of social or public memory is formed. While explaining the relationship between individual memory and cultural products, Keightley and Pickering call it a ‘complex process of cultural production and consumption’ that includes ‘the persistence of cultural traditions as well as the ingenuity of memory makers and the subversive interests of memory consumers’ (Keightely and Pickering 2012: 173). So basically, the link between the past and present has to proceed as it is determined and imagined by the remembered. Subsequently, popular memory is a persistently contested entity as the remembered is constantly governed by the influences of contemporary time, space, and politics. It should be noted that mnemonic imagination not only deals with individual memory but also works in terms of social and collective memory, which supports any text/work to formulate past memories along with one’s creative imagination, as is displayed by the selected texts as they present symbolic imagery and textual

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versions of the historical event. This is what Maurice Halbwach (1980) refers to as ‘borrowed memory’, which refers to the concept of extended memory, or the memory we have of historical events that we did not witness but about which we have learned through state education, books, parental generation, or other sources. Likewise, he provides the notion of the ‘fata morgana effect’, which demonstrates the ways in which the exterior or public memory can influence our own personal thoughts. ‘fata morgana effect’ constitutes memories of historical events, particularly traumatic events, which are time and again resurrected for political benefits. Appu finally reconciles with the painful memories once and for all. The novel states, ‘Words are not only combinations of letters of the alphabet and symbols; they are vehicles of intent that come from deep convictions, from intuition. Sense does not come from reading letters but by listening to one’s intuition’ (Sandhu 2012: 126). The novel clearly shows that his present experience is always influenced by traumatic sites and past memories.

Interplay: Writing and Memory The author embarked on the voyage of writing this novel when he encountered the tragedy of 2002 in Gujrat. His lived but traumatic past was triggered by the Godhra riots, and there have been numerous concrete depictions of the Ayodhya riots, and the Hindu-Muslim riots in the wake of the Babri Mosque demolition. By explicitly comparing Operation Bluestar 1984 and the Godhra riots time and again, he articulates certain instances of sodomy from his army school days. Though it seems quite difficult for him to articulate the darkness of the past as they haunt still. He is unable to figure out the problems and the fears he had in his mind as the novel depicts: ‘The not knowing was a fear in itself: like the barrel of the gun that pointed at me that dark night in the fields. I sought to know the unknown’ (Sandhu 2012: 226). The first step of writing begins in 2002, but he is unable to articulate anything substantial. Then he finds some parallelism between his state of mind and that of his schizophrenic mother. Appu defines how difficult it was for him to tell the truth, ‘I never felt satisfied with what I had written’ (Sandhu 2012: 72). He starts forgetting things and feels fragmented. His mother’s psychiatrist advised him to continue writing. He said, ‘It will break you. Then build you’ (Sandhu 2012: 230). This writing creates a powerful and compelling discourse to address the challenges survivors face while addressing pain and suffering. Experience is the link between the past and the future. And it is the lived experience of an event that makes its memory a dichotomy of survival and trauma. As the novel represents this experience, it drives us to the crossroads of selfhood and social order. While unraveling one’s past, particularly a past that involves socio-political issues, dilemmas, and fears, the act of remembering becomes the key to ensuring that it is kept alive in the present. It is in such transactional moves that we can trace the creative potential; ‘both experience and memory are viewed as personal and social, situated and mediated, proximate and distant’ (Keightely and Pickering 2012: 4). The plot of the novel traverses multiple locations, from Amritsar to the Bangla Sahib Gurudwara

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in Delhi, to the refugee camps, to the houses of boys who were encountered by the police, and to the Punjab fields where young lads were murdered, tortured, and abandoned by the state. The interplay between memoir and fiction, that Roll of Honour covers, gives an insight into the author’s journey from innocence to the stage of experience. The semi-autobiographical writing pertaining to or being a work of fiction is strongly influenced by events in the author’s life. Appu remains acutely conscious of his biographical association with the Sikhs and his own somewhat troubled childhood, with the sinister memory of 1984 looming large in the backdrop. Consequently, his partial identification with his classmates during the troubled past can be read as a signifier of his personal past, which is also troubled like that of the nation. The quest of a survivor for his layered past results in an intriguing mixture of disparate voices and equivocal ‘facts’ that only enhance the radical inaccessibility of the past. Interestingly, this lack of closure on the level of history is matched by the author’s impressive ethical openness to and empathy for what may or may not be the trauma of the radically Other. While expressing the author’s dilemmas, trauma, perceptions, and observations of his own lived experience, this work explores the unsaid and the silent voices of 1984 through the use of evocative and pictorial references. Readers can almost see, imagine, and hear what Appu has been going through at each event described in the narrative. Appu’s blister bursts when he finally meets A1, his classmate, almost two decades after, the episode narrates: How bad was the attack on the Golden Temple? Many more were killed. Amritsar burned for more than two weeks. It is still burning…the terrorists extorted money from people in my locality and assured us protection. We were accustomed to sleep with the deafening sounds of the grenades and bullet firing. It was the anniversary of Guru Arjun Dev’s martyrdom. Thousands of pilgrims died, Appu. Many died. Many were wounded. We did not believe that the Indian army could have attacked and captured the Golden temple. Yet, it all happened, and we saw it. (Sandhu 2012: 41) Apart from his personal experiences, Sandhu has vividly exposed the social, historical, and political impulses of those times and later returned, consequently, time and again to his own individual reception of loss and invasion. Through various projections, he imparts certain historical facts and anecdotal interpretations of the past. Like Daarji, Appu’s grandfather, is the one who has been used as a means of narrating the history of Amritsar and the legacy of sacrifices related to it: the ghallughara (Holocaust or genocide in Sikh terminology) in Ancient Sikh history and then the reinterpretation of the Jalliawalah Bagh massacre, which happened in 1919. The phrase ‘third Ghallughara’, as it came to be commonly known among the Sikh community, occurred some 222 years later in 1984 during, what is called, Operation Bluestar. Furthermore, ‘Nanaji’ (Appu’s maternal grandfather) narrates

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the pre-independence history of Sikhs and the contribution Sikhs made in 1857, and eventually, how the Sikh community received the status of the ‘martial race’. In the middle of the novel, Baba, Appu’s father, makes him aware of the separatist movement, the consequences of Operation Bluestar, and particularly the situation outside the army school. Interestingly, Daarji and Naanaji, the minor characters but the ones who witnessed the atrocities and times of the 1947 partition, call it the second tragedy in Indian history. When Naanaji hears about Operation Bluestar, his past memories come back, and he fears for his family’s well-being. Appu is in pain while seeing his Naanaji crying while listening to the news about Operation Bluestar and addressing it as a ghallughara. The novel has revived the multiple layers of 1984 and the atrocities/violence that the public saw and read about in the newspapers. The times when the masses were confused about the idea of Khalistan. Not only young adults but also people like Daarji and Nanaji were appalled by the callous attitude of the times. Addressing the nuances of bullying, where the victim and the perpetrator are trapped in a cynical relationship, the author is making substantial efforts so that he could face the fear of the unknown forces he has experienced through the ages: ‘I  am not writing this story to talk about the mere loss of status from senior to not senior. This is really about something else. It is a story about invasion and loss’ (Sandhu 2012: 78). This metaphorical depiction of ‘invasion and loss’ signifies the demolition of the Golden Temple at the macroscopic level. The author draws a clear distinction between the obscene events of the army school and the indecency with which the dark days of terrorism shattered the faith and lives of thousands of individuals. The various elements of speech and silence, forgetting and memory, and trauma and healing are at the center of this novel. The act of writing itself pushed him to re-write his past experiences, his position at the death of Joga, and the violence he faced in Delhi in the aftermath of the anti-Sikh pogrom. Silence on the part of those who are victims, particularly the students’ position, is addressed explicitly. Socio-cultural critics consider that in most cases, victims refuse to share their experiences and generally repress their pain and inner turmoil in order to proceed with their lives smoothly. This layer of trauma is revealed by Sandhu as he recalls his visit to Trilokpuri, New Delhi, where survivors of the Sikh pogrom of 1984 refused to narrate their traumatic past. They did not even want to relive/remember the turmoil and harrowing times of 1984. Cathy Caruth considers that trauma allows us ‘to recognize the possibility of a history that is no longer straightforwardly referential’ (Caruth 1996: 11). Essentially, trauma offers a ‘powerful alternative to notions of history (and memory) that presume the existence of a single ‘true’ and ‘factual’ past that, with enough effort, can be made to reappear in the present’ (Turner 1994: xxi). Furthermore, Turner opines that ‘history is what hurts; it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to the individual as well as collective praxis’ (1994: 102). In this manner, collective cultural traumas are those historical discourses that emerge out of a conflation of individual or anecdotal experiences. This journey of writing begins in Delhi, the place of his lived experience: ‘After living in Bangalore for eleven years, in order to find my sleep, I decided to return closer to the site where my fear had begun’ (Sandhu 2012: 1). Delhi has a unique

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place in his memory as he watched Sikhs being incinerated during the 1984 riots after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. He starts staying at a rented barsati behind the Nizamuddin Dargah. He did not meet any of his schoolmates until he completed this novel. Although many tried to get in touch with him through social networking sites, he did not respond to anyone: I realize I do not want to meet anyone because I wanted to preserve the story in my mind the way I thought it had played out. I am scared that if I meet others, they would change my understanding of the story…and when we meet, we might reach new understanding or new differences, and I fear his version could be too different from how I have kept the story alive in my head all these years, lived with it. (Sandhu 2012: 30) Sandhu did seek to write and rewrite his past on his own without others’ intervention, interaction, and validation. The process of writing the novel started in 2005 and he finished it in 2012. Originally written in 1,500 pages, it had to be compressed to 242 pages. Over a period of time, he succeeded in leaving the sites of trauma and horror, but he could not get rid of the fear of past experiences. It took him 25 good years to put certain events and incidents into order. The system, the situation of the school and the state, had entangled Appu, and even in his thirties he often felt that this recurrent trauma had made his ‘self ’ and soul fragile. After all, he staked more than 25 years of his life by experiencing the mental suffering and intense agony of those times and situations. Consequently, he decides to sort out the conflicts and the dilemmas in his mind through the act of writing and finishes this novel. Generally, while citing his personal diary in the novel, Sandhu keeps on re-interpreting his own past, the past and experiences he could not figure out then. Life in a military school offers distinct challenges. The life of a disciplined soldier is to be attained by undergoing the agonizing process of ragra (punishment). Discipline is the priority of the army school, whereas the regular classroom teachings play a secondary role. Ragra lies with the school prefect or the seniors. The year 1984 brought multiple alterations in the lives of students, and Appu finds himself giving refuge to an ex-student, Balraj, who is now a Khalistani militant, and who had escaped from the army. Students are agitated and old love and friendships are forced to take sides. The punishments, or ‘ragra’, were so damaging that they would cause bleeding, broken bones, and trips to the medical center. In its worst form, Ragra also emerges as another weapon of domination through sodomy: It is male rape. Male rape. He who becomes a gandu gets fucked, loses his respect. I talked to Lalten and he asked me to avoid the seniors and do the following: never look straight into a senior’s eye, it provoked them; never let a senior catch you alone; never wear anything without nadas and tie the knot if a senior asked you to remove your clothes; like in jungle camps, never go to the bathroom alone at night. (Sandhu 2012: 80)

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The journey of the novel unfolds in nine chapters, and the titles of the chapters are taken from the iconic poem The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats. The evolution of Appu’s consciousness, as it enables him to re-order his scattered memories in search of a cohesive existence, is at the center. Every time he visits his own past, his long-suppressed personal losses and pains are gradually released into the ever-­ widening spirals of betrayal, guilt, helplessness, and suffering. Appu’s emotional pain and suffering gave birth to this story and the stories of hundreds of untold individuals. It is Appu’s repressed pains and agony that enable him to go and visit the realm of knowledge and make the final step from ‘political unconsciousness’ to political consciousness.

Community, Narration, and Memory The novel discusses how bullying works and trickles down from the nation-state to the community. It examines its manifestations in the relationship between the senior and junior students in a closed system, between the strong and the weak, and finally, how the weak fight back when the cloak of secrecy of the armed world order is taken down. As stated in the novel, sodomy is an attack by a man on a man in a defenseless position. In the context of Operation Bluestar, religion is involved (the most vulnerable institution in a society); the attack by a ‘male force’, which is the Indian Army, on a male force, which is the Sikhs (the martial race), at a place where the Sikhs could not defend themselves. As the story navigates from Operation Bluestar to the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the resulting anti-Sikh riots, the students at the military school attempt to make sense of the events. Appu comes to the realization that he is a member of an oppressed minority, and it causes him to question his place as a Sikh and a future soldier of India: ‘How would I fight for a country when my people were not sure we belonged to it?’ (Sandhu 2012: 122). The narrative of the novel is not linear. However, there are smooth transitions between the past and the present. The other timeline is in the present or near past when Appu is a grown man and finally comes to terms with what happened to him in 1984, the permanent effects the event had on him, and to what extent. He also realizes that it took 25 years to absorb it all before coming out on the other side as a survivor. The language used to narrate this part is more beautiful and artistic. While analyzing the concepts like trauma and identity, the present study has made an attempt to understand the way narratives and iconic images of violence in Punjab 1984 have been conceived and perceived in contemporary literature, and how the past events continue to be reshaped and reconstructed through various modes of art. The study offers a comparison and contrast with the mediated representation of traumatic events and collective memory. Every society has a distinctive way of representing their past and, specifically, when the past is traumatic, the means of representation are often challenging. As classical historiography often focuses on the grand narrative of political-diplomatic relations, it has a tendency to overlook the

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particular socio-cultural and personal accounts. The struggle over the representation of historical events could be seen as the struggle between popular and collective memories. Starting this journey of representation from the act of ‘wekhan’ (to see things) to the act of ‘samjhan’ (to understand), the author’s internal monologues, past memories, and experiences converge and become tools in the formation of this novel. Through the act of writing, Sandhu not only shares the experience of the ‘self ’ but also highlights the collective trauma that he experienced with his generation. The young Appu wanted to see the past events and incidents happening around him because he could neither relate to nor understand the dilemma through which he was actually passing. The novel raises multiple questions, though it could not respond to all of them, but gradually clarifies that one’s perception of the past is not frozen or stagnant but keeps on changing. The more we try to understand, the more it gets complex. In his concluding words: ‘Maybe Wekhan was not at all Samjhan, understanding, was what I needed and through understanding, a way of judging. Pehchanan’ (Sandhu 2012: 233). The re-presentation of the violent past and its trauma in the text takes place not just through one or two pages but many.

Conclusion In a nutshell, memories can play a vital role in the formation of the future, and no doubt, the rumbles of the past, and the narratives and images are the best devices to help in its formation. It is equally important to see how the devastating events are remembered at the individual and collective levels and how these memories intersect and diverge as the state representatives or spokesperson always intend to produce a monolithic ‘truth’ about the past. In the course of action, Sandhu’s writing process works both for and against his liberation. His persona is presented as a victim, then emerges as a rebel, and at once a silent observer, and lastly, he turns out to be a transformative subject. This reflexive sense draws upon the remembered experience. ‘Remembering is therefore always retrospectively part of our temporally unfolding experience, and so occurs at definite points of time within the intermediate space between the individual subject and institutional orders’ (Keightely and Pickering 2012: 20). It then shows up as an active process of putting together the past into a story about a person’s identity in a certain set of social relationships. The representational events and episodes of 1984 document the violation of human rights carried on by the state and the tale of misguided youth from a relatively broader perspective. The photographs are the symbolic markers of the trauma to which the Sikh psyche or ‘the collective cultural memory’ often returns. To some extent, these modes of memorializing succeed to represent the suffering and its consequences but fail to fully uncover the suffering itself. There are other images of 1984 which instill hatred, anger, and despair among people. Such an exhibition through a verbal medium shows the extent of damage that was wrecked on the hapless people. There are various incidents that have been provoking anger beyond the

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lines of Amritsar and today are seen as photographs stimulating the traumas and the scars that the history of Sikh heritage suffered in Punjab during those tumultuous times of 1984. The particular incidents or episodes related to Operation Bluestar as described in the novel raise significant moral and ethical concerns. It shows a new aspect of reality that was earlier missed or ignored. Earlier, these sorts of memoirs or lived experiences just conveyed a sense of pain that accompanied the trauma. But with time, such writings convey not just the horrors of past times but a deeper level of collective hurt and the entirety of that experience, which may carry many hidden wounds.

References Brison, Susan J. 2002. Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Halbwach, Maurice. 1980. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper and Row Colophon Books. Halbwach, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Edited and Trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Keightely, Emily and Michael Pickering. 2012. The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice. London: Sage publications. Sandhu, Amandeep. 2012. Sepia Roll of Honour. New Delhi: Rupa Publications. Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1994. The Frontier in American History. Arizona: The University of Arizona Press.

PART II

Pains of Pakistan Trauma Narratives of Pakistan

4 THE POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL AS A TRAUMATIC GENRE Reading Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Geography of God Margaret Scanlan

Introduction Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Geometry of God (2009) offers a fresh view of postcolonial trauma and the resources its own history offers to Pakistanis intent on surviving, rather than repeating, its violence. Written in English, the novel is highly self-conscious about its own postcoloniality, including the need to address readers who know no other Pakistani languages and have not visited the country. The novel repurposes many techniques associated with Western modernism and postmodernism, using them to strip away any illusion that the Pakistan figured in the Western press or the rhetoric of the War on Terror corresponds to the actual land and its people. It is a paradoxical project, using Western tools to suggest the truth about a South Asian country, but trauma theory, which uses psychoanalysis to read literary fiction, offers a useful guide.

Freud and Trauma In its heyday, psychoanalysis represented itself as a science, a claim few contemporary psychologists accept. Psychoanalysis, as Edward Said might have said, traveled from the medical school to the Department of Comparative Literature, which welcomes theories that open up texts for interpretation without insisting on scientific verification. Literary people make a good audience for Freud, who read extensively and found names for his books and theories in Sophocles and the Hebrew Bible. His famous analysis of E.T.A. Hoffman’s ‘The Sandman’, a full demonstration of his theory of the ‘uncanny’, was a model for the first generation of Freudian critics of literature. In Studies in Hysteria (1895/1937), Freud focused on individual cases of sexual assault. He explained how the mind, repressing trauma, buries it in the unconscious, DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-7

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where it causes painful symptoms apparently unconnected to its origin. In the ‘talking cure’, the therapist helps the patient bring the repressed event into consciousness, ‘producing positive change in physical health, as well as beneficial cognitive and emotional effects’ (Sorsoli 2004, 89). Although the traumas of the shell-shocked soldiers he saw during and after World War I originated in a collective rather than a private experience, Freud saw them benefiting from the ‘talking cure’. In normal civilian life, he argued, the mind uses anxiety as a ‘protective shield’ against external stimuli, such as our relief, for example, when a dental appointment turns out not to have been as bad as we feared. In combat, however, people ‘run into danger without being prepared for it’; breaching their defenses, the ensuing ‘fright’ overwhelms the ‘inner psyche’ (Mambrol 2018). The vivid nightmares of returning soldiers, in which flashes of near-death experiences arose nightly with all their horror fresh, confirmed his new theory that the death drive overpowers even the drive for pleasure. Such nightmares suggest repression: ‘what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential parts of [the trauma]’ (Mambrol 2018: n.p.). The therapist helps the patient recover his memories, so that he can recall them as incidents from the past, which he can narrate as one episode in his ongoing life story.

Trauma Theory The idea of narrative as healing acquired fresh urgency in the 1990s, when the literary world was reeling from discovering that Paul de Man, a leading exponent of deconstruction at Yale, had published an openly anti-Semitic essay for a fascist newspaper in his native Belgium during the Nazi occupation. One can always say that the validity of a philosophical system does not rest on its proponent’s behavior. Yet Paul de Man’s claim that the creation of a ‘“Jewish colony isolated from Europe” would cause only negligible damage to European culture’ could be defended by admitting literature’s irrelevance to history (Atlas 1988: 36). Deconstruction’s emphasis on the failures of language and our inability to get ‘outside the text’ looked politically evasive. Human suffering was at the center of Freud’s work, and literary critics looking for a theory that could engage, rather than ignore, the Holocaust found new value in the theories of a scholar and refugee from Hitler. Rather than using Freudian theory to decode literary texts, a new generation of critics saw his writings on trauma as a model for how serious literature represents historical atrocities. In her foundational Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Carruth declared, ‘At the point at which knowing and not knowing intersect the language of literature and of psychoanalytic theory meet’ (Caruth 1996: 3). Literature, like psychoanalysis, can engage seriously with suffering and suggest healing. For psychoanalysis, ‘not knowing’ points to a complex theory of mind, in which pain intolerable to the conscious mind remains alive in the unconscious, wreaking harm until articulated into narrative. What is the ‘not knowing’ of literature? Some see Caruth reflecting deconstruction here: ‘not knowing’ as the equivalent of what it calls ‘aporia’, the breakdown of meaning, ‘the brick wall’ a text hits when

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interpretation seems impossible. It is also useful to frame the ‘not knowing’ of literature as a text’s representation of how forgotten trauma plagues private lives and even nations. In this imaginary space between ‘knowing and not knowing’, the text constructs a healing vision.

Trauma Theory and the Postcolonial Novel Rather than seeing the Holocaust as an exclusively Western event, postcolonial scholars should claim it as a political cataclysm that, for all its singularity, reproduced many colonial evils: invasion, war, and genocide; massive displacements of the population; a living language spoken by millions left struggling for survival. Although some victims were prosperous, assimilated Jews like Freud, even more were part of a racialized minority, living apart from the powerful elites of the countries like Poland and Ukraine into which their ancestors had fled massacres by their Roman colonizers. They were frequent victims of pogroms, their alien status stamped on their religion, dress, diet, and continuing use of the Hebrew alphabet of their lost homeland. In The Geometry of God, Khan presents a deeply traumatized Pakistan. Although it was written more than a decade after 9/11, when many Westerners saw their country solely in the context of the War on Terror, Khan’s novel ends just before the turn of the twentieth century.1 Notably, it anticipates the post-9/11 era by making reference to the Clinton administration’s 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and a rural area in Afghanistan as retaliation for Al-Qaeda’s bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (Khan 2009: 368). For the most part, however, The Geometry of God evokes the past: the geological shock that shaped its geography, a history of invasions, a traumatic division from India, and internal conflicts traceable to the huge migrations that followed partition. None of these traumas, however, spares the characters the private, familial traumas that afflicted Freud’s first patients in Vienna.

Managing the Language Barrier Colonial languages often survive colonial rule. The colonizers of America, by introducing English and Spanish, brought their original inhabitants into the European sphere, with their own schools, religion, and government. The trauma of colonization often included the loss of indigenous languages, either because their speakers died out or learned the colonizer’s language to survive. The postcolonial novelist who uses English gains a global audience, but at a loss of authenticity. In the case of Pakistan, a nation where some half a dozen languages each claim at least ten million speakers, a novel written in English risks suggesting that the writer’s homeland is as monoglot as the American Midwest. Khan’s solution is to keep the language barrier visible, so that Anglophone readers will never forget that the characters are speaking another language. She brings the Anglophone reader into the text itself, as Wolfgang Iser’s theory suggests novelists

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often do, forcing readers to participate actively as the writer presents a world with norms different from the ones to which they are accustomed, impelling them to ‘seek a positive counterbalance elsewhere than in the world immediately familiar’ to them (Iser 1974: xii). Khan is occasionally solicitous of that reader’s ignorance, as she shows by providing a glossary (Khan 2009: 382–383). She explains matters locals already know: that ‘alif ’ is the first letter of the Urdu alphabet and ‘ayin’ the 24th; that ‘Zahoor means becoming visible, like the day after noon’, the ‘heart’ of Lahore is ‘red-brick … Victorian’; Pakistan’s blasphemy law was written by the British Sir Peacock in the nineteenth century (Khan 2009: 5–6, 13, 45, 233). Yet this foreigner, possibly in deference to the Pakistani reader jostling her elbow in the imaginary library, is not to be indulged. Many other words, equally incomprehensible to her, will be left unglossed: for example, ‘simbul’, ‘imloo’, ‘haveli’, ‘bhainchod’, ‘Mu’tazilites’, (Khan 2009: 27, 43, 68, 79, 115). If the Anglophone reader is not to wallow in misunderstanding, she must leave the text to find answers. Nor will the implicit Westerner feel altogether welcome, as Western habits are annoying: ‘a thing about goras: they chew to the husk the one local word they learn … and expect us to cheer’ (Khan 2009: 70). Their political influence is dangerous, for example, inadvertently arming Pakistani extremists; their popular culture creates the dismal ‘scene’ associated with Amal’s friend Zora, where parties of young people dressed in Armani dance drunkenly to out-of-date rock and roll. Like Judith Fetterley’s (1981) female reader making her way through Melville, Twain, and Hemingway, an American reader may find herself resisting the ideological assumptions embedded in the few of her countrymen on view, eager to protest, for example, that she never voted for George Bush. Zahoor’s American collaborators rescue the dog-fish fossil and take it to their homeland, where they are allowed to study it. Yet they stumble over his name, calling him Mr. Zoo-Whore, and irritatingly mispronounce their native language, referring to ‘inneresting’ (sic) puzzles (Khan 2009: 89, 90). In the novel, no foreigner is ever seen from the inside, as a feeling, self-conscious person. This active, uncomfortable relationship between its implicit reader and the culture of its setting sharpens the novel’s critical edge. For a speaker of Urdu who protests that he or she is a native, and should not be patronized, the experience is probably equally uncomfortable. Yet although Khan understands linguistic differences as markers of past power struggles and potent sources of future conflict, she also sees their creative possibilities. An exuberant linguistic play, recalling James Joyce, springs from bilingual puns. Thus, the pleasure that the child Amal hears as she shows her sketch of the dog-whale to her Urdu-speaking household: ‘Manduck … Not a man or a duck, a frog … Jinn … not Nana’s drink, a demon … Joot … Not a plant, a lie’ (Khan 2009: 101). Although Omar is as fluent in English as Amal, his first language is ‘manly Punjabi’ rather than ‘lady-like Urdu’; as they make love, he teaches her the Punjabi names for her body parts, although the problem may be more cultural and linguistic: ‘Urdu is not as proper as you Urdu wallahs think it is’ (Khan 2009: 317). Delight aside, misunderstanding persists. Reluctant to commit to marriage, Amal seeks out the words Punjabi speakers associate with wives and

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comes away puzzled: ‘She mustn’t have man. Not a lover, arrogance … She must give awlad. Not one wondrous lad, several …. Already she has no hokum … authority?’ (Khan 2009: 322–323). The question of Omar and Amal’s happiness remains open at the novel’s end. At times, the English meaning of a word overshadows the original, providing a dissonant sense. ‘Noman’, for example, is a common Muslim name, meaning ‘man with all the blessings of Allah’, but the English context adds literary allusions. When she senses Noman’s presence at their grandfather’s last lecture, blind Mehwish asks who he is but Amal, not seeing him, says ‘There’s no man’. As Mehwish observes, ‘I will never know how she new (sic) his name’ (Khan 2009: 65). If it is a literary allusion, then John Donne’s ‘No man is an island’, which Noman quotes, springs to mind (Khan 2009: 66). Given his love for Mehwish, an allusion to the trick Odysseus plays on Polyphemus after blinding him seems apt. Calling himself ‘no man’, Odysseus escapes, but for a Greek hero, meant to make a name for himself so that future generations will tell his story, the Cyclops episode is also a low point. Khan’s Noman, born into an equally patriarchal culture, first honors his father’s wishes; when disappointed, he finds another father in Zahoor.

Islamizing Pakistan As The Geometry of God begins in 1980, General Zia, whose military coup overthrew Zulfikar Bhutto in 1977, is tightening his Islamization campaign. Zia attacked Western institutions, such as the free press and the research university, and restored many traditional limitations on women’s roles. Like fundamentalist movements elsewhere, he declared that scripture should be read literally and obeyed absolutely. Islamizing Pakistan split the country along historical fault lines. Although he saw Pakistan as an Islamic state, its founder, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, argued on August 7, 1947, for a secular government granting equal rights to all people of any religion. Though Jinnah saw no conflict between democracy and what he called truly Islamic ideals and principles, the Pakistan Movement was defined by the tension between his openness and a theocratic state enforcing Shariah law even before 1947. By 1980, Iran had already installed its revolutionary Islamic Republic, and the Taliban were waging what would be a successful war against a socialist government supported by Soviet troops. The United States backed the rebels and diverted American weapons and money across the Pakistani border. Islamization’s most visible victim was Zahoor, the paleontologist. He loses his position at the university, spends months in a filthy jail, and then, just ‘as suddenly’ is acquitted by a judge who finds ‘no evidence’ against him (Khan 2009: 324). By then, the ‘trajectory’ of violence operates outside the legal system, employing mysterious thugs with anonymous paymasters. After his acquittal, Zahoor’s bodyguard is murdered, followed by the men guarding his lawyer and the judge who acquitted him. When he leaves hiding to attend Amal’s wedding, assassins kill Munir Manoo, his long-estranged son, and Zahoor’s beloved friend Junayd, a Sufi; his wounded granddaughters Mehwish and Noman recover, but after two surgeries, the aged

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scientist is ‘too weak to survive a third’, and dies the day Amal returns with her second fossilized s-bone (Khan 2009: 349). Zahoor’s legal persecutors belong to the Party of Creation, and the warrant for his arrest cites an attack that appeared in the party’s journal, Akhlaq. A key irony is that Noman, who comes to admire Zahoor and falls in love with his granddaughter, wrote the fatal article. Although thoroughly alienated as a teenager from his father, an enthusiastic Party of Creation supporter, he accepted when offered a chance to write for Akhlaq. The opportunity awoke a sense of power, ‘to say the words Aba will speak’ (sic Khan 2009: 97). His first assignment for Akhlaq is to prove that Jinnah’s argument for secular government means the opposite, since ‘truly Islamic ideals and principles’ require literal adherence to Shariah law. Next, he must use ‘verses from the Quran to prove [scientific] laws false’; since we cannot question God’s will, we do not need ‘Newton and his so-called gravity to explain why an apple falls from a tree’ (Khan 2009: 125). It is God’s will, like the release of energy or the inheritance of characteristics, and the believer must ‘delete all references to Einstein and his so-called relativity’ along with ‘Mendel and his so-called peas’ (Khan 2009: 126). Unfortunately, this assignment forces Noman to actually read the Quran, and he ‘can’t always find verses to fit and sometimes … find(s) the opposite’ (Khan 2009: 124). If the Quran says God ‘made water of every living thing’ and ‘out of this very water created man’, might it not support the Darwinian view that ‘we develop in stages from … a loop of lizard in embryonic fluid’ (sic Khan 2009: 133). Instead of following up this thought, Noman claims that Sharia law gives the believer a ‘third’ eye’ to ‘see All, the visible and invisible’; ‘we need not “interpret” or even “read”’ (Khan 2009: 137). His success at believing his father ‘wrong and prov(ing) him right’, leaves him empty (Khan 2009: 137). Having ‘no beliefs of my own’, he crashes: ‘Meet Noman’, he says, ‘who is an island’ (Khan 2009: 137). His despair lessens after visiting Morocco, where the intellectual climate is freer; he hears a debate between literalists and believing Muslims willing ‘to learn from the past and promote free inquiry in the present’ (Khan 2009: 115). There he discovers the Mu’tazilites, who ‘embraced free will’, and despite his father’s accusation of ‘heresy’, he resolves to purchase copies of their work right away (Khan 2009: 116). Like Noman, readers may be seeing the term ‘Mu’tazilite’ for the first time, and as Khan does not gloss it, let us note that the name comes from i’tizal, ‘to withdraw or secede’. The movement emerged some two centuries after the 622 A.D. hejira of Muslims from Mecca to Medina and developed over centuries of theological debate. What seems most important to the novel is the undeniable historicity of the Mu’tazilites, neither modern nor Western, which demonstrates that questions the Party of Creation forbids have deep Islamic roots. Key Mu’tazilite ideas included the invisibility of God, even in Paradise, with the corollary that he should never be anthropomorphized; that the Quran is a ‘created’ text, not ‘eternal like God himself ’; God gives human beings rational minds to enable them to discern good and evil, so that moral choices demand reasoning, rather than obedience; God ‘does

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not bring into effect evil deeds’ (Adamson 2016: 11). Though not labeled as such, from the beginning of the novel, we associate these ideas with Zahoor and Junayd. An Islam permitting Mu’tazilites to flourish has no need to suppress science. Scenes where Zahoor deplores the Party of Creation’s insistence that ‘science is Western’ and evokes medieval Islamic scientific achievements, ‘the calendar Omar Khayyam gave us’ or Ibn Haitham’s experiments that proved Aristotle wrong about the eye, ‘like a torch’ creating light, emphasize that Islamic hostility to science is a modern development (Khan 2009: 42, 182). Historiography should be as open to new evidence as paleontology; the fear that leads people to accept the fiction of a ‘golden past ‘makes them ‘slaves of dead literalists’ (Khan 2009: 88). Returning from Morocco, Noman arrives unannounced on Zahoor’s doorstep with two forbidden books, one on Darwin and one on the Mu’tazilites. When they meet, Zahoor is still free, though forbidden to teach. Noman introduces himself as a journalist, expressing an awkward interest in the dog-fish fossil. Since Zahoor immediately discerns that he knows little science and seems hazy about politics, he challenges Noman to say what he really does. He answers, ‘I match-fix’, explaining that he can take a verse from the Quran and ‘prove both Divine Will and biological evolution wrong and right’ or show that ‘our founder was a believer and a kafir’ (Khan 2009: 141). While Zahoor flips through the copies of the forbidden books, Amal and Junayd fret that the Party of Creation sent him. Though Noman readily takes responsibility for two warnings sent to Zahoor, the paleontologist laughs and offers him a drink. For a year and a half, Zahoor, Noman, Amal, and Mehwish meet weekly, forming such a close attachment that Amal says they ‘feel like four shifting chambers of the same heart’ (Khan 2009: 192). When Noman first saw the sisters at their grandfather’s lecture, he recognized the quality of their love as something holy; he wanted to ‘take off my shoes and step inside’ (Khan 2009: 95). What makes Zahoor willing to admit him as an intimate visitor, knowing his ties to his own worst enemies? Perhaps Zahoor thinks he can spite ‘his foes by welcoming one of their offspring’ or perhaps, as Amal also imagines, he is ‘the grandson Nana never had’ (Khan 2009: 143). Or perhaps Zahoor recognizes Noman’s spiritual depth, even while the young man feels entirely disoriented. Whatever its sources, the meetings that forge their bond end immediately with Zahoor’s arrest (Khan 2009: 196).

Science and the Infinite In Islamic as well as Christian countries, science is often pitted against religion, partly because it accompanies technological and philosophical innovation. Zahoor’s vocation as a paleontologist is inseparable, however, from his own ideas about spirituality and Islamic history. His careful fieldwork and his formulation of hypotheses that he tests against real-world specimens is a model of scrupulous reading, but his sense of the provisionality of his knowledge reveals a mystic’s awe. ‘Infinite curiosity’ is a ‘precious gift’ but a threat to powerful figures in Pakistan and elsewhere

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‘because they cannot control it’ (sic Khan 2009: 92).2 When Amal tells her grandfather that she fears her reconstruction of a crocodile from fossils is a ‘forgery’, he tells her that ‘all first models are necessarily lost. It’s the people who deny this who cause the trouble’, an idea readily applied to sacred texts (Khan 2009: 212). In his last public lecture, Zahoor tells the story of Pascal and the tick, a parable to which the novel returns several times. Pascal gazed at the stars and ‘saw the infinite world above and felt right (sic Khan 2009:91). But when he noticed a tick one day, he wept because it shared his physiology, ‘a head, joints, veins, blood’ (Khan: 91). Why weep? ‘He saw a chain of reactions with no beginning and no end. […] the universe inside himself ’ (Khan 2009: 92). This universe was invisible, he only ‘recognized it’; now ‘the only way to see was by searching. … His mind would never rest again’ (sic, Khan 2009: 92). This allegiance to searching rather than simply seeing gives paleontology its metaphysical side, although the unimaginative would disagree. One such is the presumably American Henry, who leaps to his feet after the lecture to demand: ‘Why does politics have to come into everything in your country? This is science’. The older gora, his arms folded in resignation, advises, ‘Always prepare yourself for sermons’ (Khan 2009: 94). Snatching the microphone back, Zahoor cries out ‘It’s all connected! It’s how we live here—or try to!’ (Khan 2009: 94). The ‘we’ is Muslim, Pakistani citizens, not the scientific community that supports his scientific work. In Noman’s much-repented article, he argued that Zahoor’s error was making Islam ‘a puzzle full of hidden metaphors and poetry’ (Khan 2009: 137). According to Zahoor, truly understanding Islam requires infinite curiosity. The militant literalists ‘grill me to ignite the very physics of my faith! My faith is what they bury when they force me to expose it’ (Khan 2009: 213). As he tells Noman, the design of the cupolas in the Great Mosque in Cordoba points to a mystical apprehension of God: ‘These logical yet random forms—from square to dome to octagon—are … an exact intimation, causing … a leap both mystical and sensual’ (Khan 2009: 270). Paleontology, to a man who is looking for proof of the whale’s evolution but is sure that he can’t make original models, gives him a sense of infinite space. The knowledge prized in Cordoba was ‘holistic. It had to be tasted (sic 270)’. In a distinction the novel consistently urges, there are two ways to ‘know God’ … zauq and khayal. Khayal is a ‘thought or an image’, zauq is ‘joy’, ‘taste’ (Khan 2009: 209). ‘Zauq is even lovelier than khayal … because it’s physical’ or, as Amal explains to Mehwish, ‘The only way to taste divine sensuality is through the love of a mortal’ (Khan 2009: 209, 291). As the older sister, Amal often instructs Mehwish, but Mehwish understands ‘even better than Nana why Pascal cried when he saw the little tick’ (Khan 2009: 333). Because Mehwish cannot physically see, forcing her to sense everything and ask questions continually; passages devoted to her consciousness are sprinkled with spelling and punctuation errors that represent literal misunderstandings but hint at deeper insight.3 In one example, when Zahoor explains why Sufis refuse to anthropomorphize God, she hears him say, ‘To define Him is to put him in a pen and ants throw per more flies ink’ (Khan 2009: 60). Although long passages in such prose can frustrate, note how easily we see the

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association Lévi-Straus found between writing and slavery, that is, between writing things down and casting them into stone, in Mehwish’s sentence. In part because she learns Braille after the written alphabets of her two languages, Mehwish knows that this ‘new alphabet that was straight and made with holes’ organizes thought differently (Khan 2009: 201). Braille, as much as chemistry, influences her ‘Periodic Table of Stinks Shades and Sounds’, a chart consisting of boxes, each with a capital letter representing a noun to which she adds ‘small words for what I touch, feel, and hear’ when someone says the name. ‘A’ is for her father; its associated words are ‘Baking Soda’, ‘Yellow’, and ‘pakistan television’; she uses pencil ‘in case you have to rub it out (Khan 2009: 167, 168). The table ‘is never complete’, so Noman’s literalist father would hate it: ‘He says all the boxes are all ready made they can never move they are not in pencil’ (Khan 2009: 170). So, after Mehwish remarks to Noman that she is ‘all gory … a fish in a dish of sensuous wine’, he asks Amal if she understands. No, she says: Mehwish ‘is tasting’ (Khan 2009: 311). When Mehwish and Noman ride on his Vespa, she easily maintains her balance. Noman expresses his surprise to Amal, whose answer, ‘she has it in her’, is the novel’s last sentence (Khan 2009: 381). This risk-taking ride and Amal’s affirmation of Mehwish’s spirit replaces the marriage assured of happiness that Victorian novels offered. It does not obliterate the memory of the attack on Amal’s wedding but suggests a healing movement forward.

Conclusion: The Geometry of God as Vison of Healing At its most basic, Freudian therapy helps patients put a long-suppressed trauma into words, constructing a story with which they can live free of the debilitating symptoms and compulsions that its repression caused. Freud did not guarantee happiness, but only the ‘much that will be gained if we transform … hysterical misery into ordinary human unhappiness’ (Freud 1895: 172). A postcolonial novel conceived as an imaginary point between ‘knowing and unknowing’ offers no vision of utopia, but the possibility that a capacity for mutual understanding and constructive action offsets the bloodbath of the gunmen’s intrusion on Amal’s wedding. Trauma theory counts as ‘unknown’ the injuries victims cannot bear to recall; we have expanded that category, seeing the literalists’ denial of historical Islam’s support for science, art, and speculation as a product of colonialism. The drive for certainty, for control, for absolute conformity to unchangeable laws is greatest where people feel humiliated and challenged by aliens. We have also expanded ‘unknowing’ to include the unmotivated ignorance that is part of the human condition – no one speaks every language or escapes entirely the biases of national history or family. To survive, this novel suggests, people need to acknowledge ‘unknowing’, respect their own limitations, and see the freedom infinite perspectives offer. As a minor character, Bilal Uncle, affirms after Zahoor’s death: ‘he died the way he needed to, without saying who he was … because he is becoming’ (Khan 2009: 365). This novel, with its unanswered questions, is also open to becoming and surviving.

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‘You can be as learned as Aristotle or the Mu’tazilites’, thinks Noman on his visit to Rabat, ‘but in the face of bloodlust, what good is it?’ (Khan 2009:117). The headlines of any era, certainly of March 2022, when this essay is being written, confirm his suspicion. A missile can burn down any library or theatre, and anyone with a gun can kill someone holding a book. Uzma Aslam Khan proves that a capacity for respecting difference, for rejecting rigid dogma, and modesty about the limits of one’s own knowledge do not require an education in Western theories like deconstruction and trauma theory. Yet they are values that these theories at their best affirm, which aid us in understanding this postcolonial novel.

Notes 1 See Kanwal (2015) on ‘retrospective prologues to 9/11 fiction’ designed to de-centre 9/11 as the focus of representations of Pakistan (73). From an eco-critical perspective, Chaudhuri makes a related point, placing Khan’s representation of Pakistan in the context of similar attempts by South Asian women ‘to recuperate a sense of place through an engagement with the sciences that deal with the disclosure of the past through the examination of its stratified segments’ (Chaudhuri 2021:325). 2 Later, Amal tells Omar that ‘all history is selectively assembled by those in power, it’s the people who deny this who make trouble’ (358). 3 Pascal Zinck (2011) provides an extended analysis of what he calls ‘Mehwish’s reconstituted idiolect’ in Mehwish’s narratives and the ‘illegal ghazals’ she composes with Zahoor, which the novel casts in her idiolect as well (49–51).

References Adamson, Peter. 2016. ‘All for One—the Mu’tazilites,’ Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy without Any Gaps, 3:10–18. Atlas, James. 1988. ‘The Case of Paul De Man,’ The New York Times Magazine. 28 August 1988: 36. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/28/magazine/the-case-of-paul-de-man (Accessed on 24 March 2022). Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Chaudhuri, Diviani. 2021. ‘Between Glaciers and Fossils: Landscape, Literature and the Anthropocene in Pakistan,’ South Asian Review, 42(4): 234–340. Fetterley, Judith. 1981. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1895/1937. Studies on Hysteria. Trans. A. A. Brill. New York: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing. Iser, Wolfgang. 1974. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Kanwal, Aroosa. 2015. ‘Responding to 9/11: Contextualising the Subcontinent and Beyond’, in Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction: Beyond 9/11. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Khan, Uzma Aslam. 2009. The Geography of God. Northampton, MA: Clockroot-Interlink. Mambrol, Nasrullah. 2018. ‘Trauma Studies,’Literariness, https://literariness.org/2018/12/19/ trauma-studies (Accessed on 3 March 2022).

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Sorsoli, Lynn, 2004. ‘Echoes of Silence: Remembering and Repeating Childhood Trauma’, in Lieblich, Amia, Dan P. McAdams, and Ruthellen Josselson (eds), Healing Plots: The Narrative Basis of Psychotherapy, 89–110. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Zinck, Pascal. 2011. ‘Bones of Contention in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Geometry of God’, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 34(1): 43–53.

5 ‘HOW IS A WOUND PUT INTO WORDS?’ Muhammad Hanif’s Red Birds and the Use of Magical Realism Faisal Nazir

Introduction War and the trauma it entails have long been a subject of literature. However, it is only in the post-World War period and since then that the trauma of war has become a major literary theme. While Holocaust literature is usually taken as the paradigmatic literary representation of trauma caused by war, post-9/11 literature has also developed its own engagement with experiences of war and trauma. The 9/11 attacks and the ensuing war on terror have inspired numerous narratives that depict the impact of war and terror upon the people of various regions of the world. Post-9/11 South Asian Anglophone literature also includes many narratives that describe how the lives of the South Asian people have been affected by the war on terror that the United States launched in response to the 9/11 attacks. These narratives employ innovative narrative strategies to describe the traumatic experiences people go through in times of war. This chapter focuses on Muhammad Hanif ’s narrative technique, particularly the use of multiple narrators and magical realism, in his novel Red Birds, which, due to its theme and setting, may be placed within the category of post-9/11 literature. According to Robert Eaglestone, ‘trauma is a kind of “limit case” of language— the representation of an event so overpowering that just naming it is already to be profoundly engaged with it’ (Eaglestone 2020: 288). As Eaglestone relates, many critics believe that ‘trauma can only be represented in complex, challenging, and, even perhaps, modernist or postmodernist forms’ (290). This is due to the fact that a novel that is challenging in form, ‘broken’, makes demands on the readers and asks questions of them. This form of literary unsettlement can be seen as

DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-8

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an analogy to trauma, or at least as a way of making the traumatic event harder to process as a reader: a kind of prick to the conscience, an interruption in the conventional reading process. (Eaglestone 2020: 290–291) The following sections of the chapter will highlight how Hanif ’s narrative technique conveys the trauma of war forcefully and how it justifies the idea that representation of trauma is best accomplished through creative narrative strategies.

Narrating Trauma: Hanif’s use of Multiple Narrators Muhammad Hanif ’s 2018 novel, Red Birds, relates the trauma of loss undergone by an unnamed and unidentified Muslim community as a result of America’s war on terror. In particular, it tells the story of one family, which bears the loss of the older of its two sons, Ali, in the ongoing war in the region. Ali is taken from his family by the American military, probably in exchange for money or favors. His father, who has been working for the Americans, tells the family that Ali is getting employment at the Hangar, the American military base, and he drops him off at the destination, never to return. The whole novel is built around the search for Ali conducted by his younger brother Momo and his dog Mutt, the two main narrators of the novel. In this search, they are later aided, though reluctantly, by an American air force pilot, Major Ellie, who is rescued by Momo when his plane crashes in the desert. Ellie is also a narrator in the novel. The narrative also involves Mother Dear, the mother of Ali and Momo, who is the most affected by the disappearance of Ali, and Lady Flowerbody, an American researcher who is studying the impact of war on the minds of Muslim youth. Toward the end of the novel, characters other than the three main narrators are also given their own narrative voice. The use of multiple narrators is not a new device, as it has been used frequently in modern and postmodern novels. Even the use of a dog as a narrator is not highly innovative, as the use of animals as narrators is also practiced by many writers. However, the combination of a dog, a young teenage boy, and an American fighter pilot as narrators in the novel is quite interesting and meaningful. Since Ellie and Momo represent two opposing sides in the war, the dog Mutt can be seen to provide an objective view of the situation. This is not so. Mutt is loyal to his owner, Momo, and reinforces his perspective in the narration. Together, the three of them, each in their own way, highlight the absurdity of this ongoing war and the calamities it has brought to the victims. Momo is a teenage boy who is clever beyond his age. He is the younger of the two sons of Father Dear and Mother Dear. The older son, Ali, has disappeared, and Momo has dedicated his life to finding his brother and bringing him back. While Momo belongs to the Muslim community, he has no deep love for his community. The only strong attachment he has is with his brother. Momo has a very cynical

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view of his people. The community, to him, is made up of swindlers and thieves who steal everything, from scrap material to an entire boundary wall. As he says: You’re gonna say how can anyone steal an entire boundary wall? And I’m gonna say you don’t know these people, my people. When it comes to stealing, they are artists. (Hanif, 2018: 13) Living among such people means that ‘you can’t be a child in this place for long’ (Hanif 2018: 15). Thus, Momo has mentally grown up far beyond his age and has become an entrepreneur. He runs his own business, which involves buying and selling, with no strong moral conscience. This is the result of living in a society of this nature: ‘How’re you gonna keep your integrity in a place where thievery is not only accepted but also expected’ (Hanif 2018: 16). Ever since the disappearance of his brother, Momo has taken up the mission of bringing him back. The disappearance itself is no mystery. He was ‘sold’ to the Americans by his own father. One day, instead of putting on his uniform, Ali puts on black overalls and is taken by his father to the Hangar, where he claims Ali is being offered contractual employment. Ali, who is extraordinarily intelligent and a born genius, is used by the Americans to identify targets for bombing raids. Momo often questions his loyalty to his country and asks him if this doesn’t make him a traitor. Ali remains quiet, but we learn later from Momo what he was actually doing. According to Momo, Ali was identifying targets for the American military. These targets were the local ‘evil guys’ whom Ali was determined to root out of his community. However, once this mission was accomplished, Ali started to send confusing signals to the American bomber planes, which came crashing down as a result of miscommunication. He wanted to rid his community of the Americans after the terrorists had been eliminated (Hanif 2018: 64). When Momo finds Ellie in the desert and brings him home, he forms a scheme in his mind: he could bargain with the Americans for the return of his brother in exchange for Ellie: ‘My Ali for your Ellie’ (Hanif 2018: 169). Thus, Momo’s life revolves around a single goal: recovering Ali. The disappearance of Ali was the most traumatic event of his life. It is this trauma that has transformed him into a cynical and worldly young man. To have a 15-year-old narrator display such worldly wisdom is amusing but understandable. As a ‘survivor of the most useless war in the history of wars’ (Hanif 2018: 69), Momo has been made aware of things that boys of his age learn much later in life. Yet the determination with which he pursues the aim of recovering his brother and his unsentimental view of life are admirable. War has hardened his heart, and he does not believe in kindness and love. As a narrator, Momo is an individual, but he is also a representative of the Muslim community. He is the only local human character who speaks in his own voice throughout the novel. His role is that of an insider in the community, and thus he is supposed to provide first-hand knowledge of the life of the community.

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In describing a war-ravaged community, the challenge before a novelist is not to let the story become overly sentimental and yet to convey the trauma of war. In making Momo the narrator, Hanif masterfully overcomes this challenge. Instead of direct statements of grief and gloom, irony, understatement, and the absurdity of events and characters convey the trauma of war powerfully. A case in point is the representation of Mother Dear’s feelings. She is heartbroken at the loss of her elder and favorite son. The trauma of this loss is unbearable for her, and she is constantly praying for and demanding the return of her son. Yet her feelings are not directly conveyed in the narrative but through the voice of Momo or Mutt. The impact of the loss of a child upon a mother is not easy to convey, and many a writer has found it challenging to handle this situation. Through Momo and Mutt’s eyes, her suffering and misery are depicted movingly, yet from a distance. Here is a conversation between Ellie and Momo: ‘She cries,’ he [Momo] says, looking down examining his sneakers. ‘She cries every night after we go to sleep.’ How do you know if you are asleep? You are probably having nightmares. I can’t go to sleep until she stops crying. Some days she is still crying when Mutt comes to wake me. That’s why I used to be late for school. That’s why I got expelled. (Hanif 2018: 185) In this way, Mother Dear’s grief is communicated without the representation becoming overwhelmingly sentimental. Sentiments are the last thing one expects from soldiers in a war, and particularly not from pilots on a bombing mission. Yet Major Ellie, one of the three main narrators in the novel, goes through an emotional as well as a cultural experience when his plane crashes and he ends up staying with Momo and his family for several days. He continues throughout the novel to reminisce about his wife, Cath, and keeps thinking about their conflicted relationship. In this way, Ellie’s character is humanized, and his role as a bomber is pushed back. Moreover, Ellie’s narrative produces a ghastly satire of American war strategies and actions. Ellie recalls the training he received and the mission briefs he used to receive from his officer, Colonel Slatter, as an insider to the American military. The various training programs he goes through to get ready for his bombing mission are hilariously absurd and yet may be true. He attends programs like Advanced Desert Survival and Cultural Sensitivity 101. The Central Command, which according to rumors, ‘have been reading too many Sufi texts’ (Hanif 2018: 9), teach courses like ‘Moral Enigma, Modern Wars’ and ‘How to Conquer Yourself Before You Conquer Your Enemy’ (Hanif 2018: 11). In this way, the hypocrisy and contradictions in the war on terror discourse are highlighted. The cultural sensitivity course, for example, provides information about the target population’s culture and includes modules like ‘Basic Good Manners with Tribals’ and ‘Eat and Drink with the Enemy’. There are more details of this cultural

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sensitivity program dispersed throughout Ellie’s narrative in the second part of the novel, ‘In the Camp’. In complete contrast to these insights about the target people’s culture and how to behave sensitively when interacting with them are Colonel Slatter’s views about the same culture. Colonel Slatter describes the refugee camp as ‘Basically a real bad place full of bad bad people. You can smell the evil from the skies. Nobody is going to miss this lot. Trust me on that’ (Hanif 2018: 8). Slatter also describes the new war strategy: We used to have art for art’s sake; now we have war for the sake of war. … War has been condensed to carpet-bombing followed by dry rations and craft classes for the refugees. People who had not left their little hamlets for centuries, goatherds who believed in nothing but grassy fields and folk music, women who had never walked beyond the village well, now they could all go and live in UN tents, eat exotic food donated by USAID and burp after drinking fizzy drinks. (Hanif 2018: 32–33) This hypocrisy and contradiction are further brought forward by the character of Lady Flowerbody, a researcher who is doing research on the impact of war upon the minds of Muslim youth. She is introduced as ‘Coordinating Officer for the Families Rehabilitation Programme’ (Hanif 2018: 41). She is not the first such researcher to arrive here to analyze the traumatic impact of war upon the community. As Momo recalls, many such researchers have visited the place before ‘to look into our mental health needs’ while the bombing raids continued. These researchers used to conduct workshops like ‘Living with Trauma’ and conduct surveys like ‘Traditional Cures in a Time of Distress and Disorder’, and this made the camp a ‘tourist destination for foreign people with good intentions’ (Hanif 2018: 44). Lady Flowerbody informs Momo and family that her ‘PhD thesis is on the Teenage Muslim Mind, their hopes and desires; it might come out as a book called The Children of the Desert’. However, she wants to go beyond academic work and actually apply her ideas to the people she is studying. This war-ravaged community for her is a ‘laboratory’ for testing her hypotheses (Hanif 2018: 44). This blatant contradiction between the raids and aid is not lost upon the local community. Mother Dear, for example, is very clear about what can relieve her of her trauma – the return of her son Ali: ‘Mother Dear doesn’t need consultants in this house. She doesn’t need psychological assistance to get a grip on her life. She doesn’t need folklore or any such sad-ass lectures to get her life-work balance right. She wants her son back’ (Hanif 2018: 46). She also sees how the American raids and aid are connected. When Lady Flowerbody says that she is there to help, Mother Dear responds: ‘How? … First they bomb our house, then they take away my son and now you are here to make us feel alright’ (Hanif 2018: 48). Thus, even as simple minded a woman as Mother Dear, she sees through the hypocrisy of the benign intentions of such researchers. Their academic and relief work depends upon the existence of the trauma of war, so raids and aid are very intimately connected.

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The inhumanity of this situation is not just felt by the humans but also by Mutt, Momo’s pet dog. Mutt is one of the three narrators and plays the role of a witness to the entire traumatic experience that his owner’s family goes through. As Bernaerts et al. discuss in ‘The Storied Lives of Non-Human Narrators’, non-human narrators have been a common feature in fiction and have been used to create a variety of effects. The writers state: We take our departure from the paradoxical idea that readers are invited to reflect upon aspects of human life when reading the fictional life stories of non-human narrators, whether they are animals, objects, or indefinable entities. By giving voice to non-human things and animals such as a stuffed squirrel, a lump of coal, or a dog, these narratives may highlight and even challenge our conception of the human. (Bernaerts et al. 2014: 68–69) Mutt is the first character in the novel who is able to see the titular red birds. The significance of these symbolic birds is reflected in the fact that the novel is titled after them. They are not only seen by Mutt, but he is also able to explain their meaning. According to Mutt: When someone dies in a raid or a shooting or when someone’s throat is slit, their last drop of blood transforms into a tiny red bird and flies away. And then reappears when we are trying hard to forget them, when we think we have forgotten them, when we utter those stupid words that we have ‘moved on’. (Hanif 2018: 84) The red birds are therefore the symbol of trauma in the novel. This trauma is so intense that people going through it cannot face it and, therefore, are unable to see the red birds. The memory of the loved ones lost in war is too painful to retain in consciousness. Therefore, these red birds remain invisible to people because they want to forget their loss, which is essential for their own survival (Hanif 2018: 84). Mutt does not tell Momo or anyone else about the red birds because he knows Momo will not believe him. And even if he did believe him, he would consider it a business opportunity to capture and sell these strange birds. He would trap these birds and sell them to the Americans or to Arab sheikhs (Hanif 2018: 86). In this way, Mutt’s narrative supports the claim of Bernaerts et al. (2014) that the non-human narrators do not just defamiliarize the narrative but rather throw light upon the experience of the humans through what they call a ‘double dialectic of empathy and defamiliarization, human and non-human experientiality’ (Bernaerts et al. 2014: 69). According to the writers, on the one hand, the non-human narrators invite readers to see them as human agents and thus engage their empathy. On the other hand, these narrators often ‘question (defamiliarize) some of the readers’ assumptions and expectations about human life and consciousness’ (Bernaerts et al. 2014: 69). On the one hand, Mutt is a dog and behaves like one within his own

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narrative and that of the other characters. He chases after cats, climbs to the low-rise rooftops, and plays with Momo. On the other hand, he is intelligent and perceptive. He talks about what people do and adds an ethical dimension to the story. Through these multiple narrators, Hanif provides a diversity of perspectives on war and trauma. Though innovative, this technique is not new by any means, but that is not important. What is more important is that it has been used so effectively in the novel to highlight human suffering and trauma. Another technique Hanif uses in the novel is magical realism. Again, as a narrative technique, magical realism is hardly new, but many writers have found it very effective in telling stories of war and trauma.

The Traumatic Imagination: Magical Realism and Trauma Robert Young is of the opinion that because postcolonial literature always addresses historical experiences, ‘realism remains the predominant aesthetic of postcolonial literature’ (Young 2011: 217). Though Young acknowledges the frequent use of magical realism in postcolonial literature, he privileges the realist mode over other modes of writing. However, many postcolonial writers have demonstrated how magical realism can be used effectively in telling stories that relate to real historical events. In post-9/11 literature, magical realism has been used not only in fiction but also in other media, such as films, to represent the traumatic experiences of people affected by that event and the subsequent war on terror. In ‘The Analogical Legacy of Ground Zero: Magical Realism in Post-9/11 Literary and Filmic Trauma Narratives’ (2020), Eugene Arva has convincingly argued for the appropriateness of magical realism in narrating trauma. According to Arva: Through magical realist narratives, the traumatic imagination transfers to narrative memory events that have been precluded from narrativization by trauma. This postmodern storytelling practice does not copy reality, but rather reconstructs it by reshuffling all of its familiar elements, concrete details easily recognizable by readers or film viewers. Thus, the magical (the unexplainable, the supernatural) comes to act as an indispensable ontological ingredient by which the traumatic imagination re-arranges and re-presents reality. (Arva 2020: 242) Hanif ’s narrative is not entirely in the magical realist mode. Some magical elements are described early in the novel, such as Ellie’s vision of ‘dead fellow soldiers come back to claim their medals and back pay from Mother Nature’ (Hanif 2018: 57). Mutt’s vision of the red birds may also be considered a use of magical realism. However, it is in the last part of the novel ‘To the Hangar’ that magical realism becomes a prominent literary technique. The climax of the novel, the discovery of Ali, is rendered through the means of magical realism. Ali is found dead, hanging in chains from the roof of the hangar, and this discovery is devastating for the family. The intense pain of this traumatic event cannot be rendered in plain language.

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The realist mode fails to capture the deep shock the family receives at finding their beloved son hanging from the roof. Momo, along with Mother Dear, Father Dear, Ellie, and Mutt, enters the hangar in his jeep, with a gun by his side. They are followed by the Doctor and Lady Flowerbody. All the major characters in the novel are there in one place. Upon entering the hangar, what they discover is that there isn’t a single living being there, but there is a whole herd of ghosts of dead soldiers hovering in the air having a feast. The ghosts are led by Colonel Slatter. In Ellie’s words, ‘Colonel Slatter has thrown himself a farewell party’ (Hanif 2018: 238). Ellie requests Colonel Slatter to hand over the boy but Slatter only points his gun toward him, saying ‘You too, Ellie, you too’ (Hanif 2018: 239). Mother Dear, who had played only a minor role until this time, now takes the leadership role along with Momo. She enters the Hangar armed with her rosary and a knife made of salt. She is there to retrieve her son, but her motherly instincts and sympathies are roused by seeing the ghosts of dead soldiers. In a moving passage, she extends her motherly love to these dead soldiers. Looking at the ghosts, her ‘heart melts’ as to her, they all look like ‘lost sons’ who died too early to be ready to accept death and therefore continue to haunt the world of the living. She identifies with the mothers of these dead soldiers, mothers who keep their doors open for their sons’ expected and hoped-for return and keep on dreaming about them (Hanif 2018: 242). This shows that people who have been through a lot of trauma can be able to feel for other people, even their enemies. This is what Judith Butler says in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. Writing after the September 11 attacks and reflecting upon these attacks, Butler critiques the way the American government ‘heightened nationalist discourse, extended surveillance mechanisms, suspended constitutional rights, and developed forms of explicit and implicit censorship’ in response to the attacks, instead of taking these traumatic events as ‘an opportunity to redefine itself as part of a global community’ (Butler 2004: XI). She acknowledges that death and consciousness of vulnerability are experiences that produce fear and grief but questions the idea that such experiences must always lead to ‘military violence and retribution’ (Butler 2004: XII). In her view, ‘there are other passages’ and it is important to explore ‘what might be made of grief besides a cry of war’ (Butler 2004: XII). Mother Dear’s sympathy for the ghosts of American soldiers, who not only abducted her son but also destroyed the life of the community, suggests the possibility that the experience of trauma can make people sensitive to the suffering of others. Mother Dear is also clear about why she is there: not for revenge or to ‘save our national honour’ (Hanif 2018: 242) but only to retrieve her son. She doesn’t want any more bloodshed, not even the blood of those who have been bombing her region. She even decides to help these ghosts and relieve them of their imprisonment in the world. This she does by plunging her dagger into the hearts of the ghosts, first Colonel Slatter, and then followed by all the ghosts who willingly get themselves wounded in the heart and even line up for the procedure. Every ghost

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who receives a wound turns into a red bird and flies away. This time, the red birds are visible to all. The red birds are, therefore, the symbol of the trauma of war, as all the lost souls in this prolonged war turn into red birds. This happens to the souls of both attackers and victims. This shows that there are no victors in this war, only victims. While Mother Dear is busy relieving the ghosts, Momo discovers Ali, who is hanging in chains from the roof of the Hangar. From a distance, Ali appears to be alive, or so Momo hopes. He manages to reach up to him with the help of Ellie, who lifts up Momo’s jeep by working some mechanism. When he reaches Ali, Momo discovers that Ali is dead, there is no heartbeat. But his eyes are open and the last wish he makes to his brother – they talk even when Ali is dead – is to close his eyes. The meeting of the brothers is the climactic moment in the narrative, and the horror and the trauma of the dead son/brother’s discovery by his family is narrated through magical realism. The pain of this discovery is unbearable and also unrepresentable. No words can describe the trauma of a mother finding her dead son hanging by the roof in chains. It is through magical realism that Hanif is able to render this tragic climax of the novel with great control and understatement. The novel ends with Mother Dear’s chant of holy names into the ears of her dead son. Her suffering is brought home through her insistence that it is an act of divine mercy that her two sons are now together: ‘My sons come to me hugging each other’ (Hanif 2018: 282). She does not register the fact that Ali is dead. For her, he is only asleep. And she whispers the holy names into her dead son’s ears, believing he is not dead, only asleep. It is through this heart-wrenching irony produced by the use of magical realism that the trauma of the mother and her family is represented.

Reliving Trauma or Relieving Trauma? Red Birds demonstrates how war and its attendant trauma can be represented effectively through creative narrative strategies. Traditional realism, with its basis in the representability of experience in language, is unable to convey the intensity of extreme experiences to which war exposes human beings. Such experiences disclose the limitations of language and logic. Through the use of multiple narrators, including a non-human narrator, and magical realism, Hanif has conveyed the horror of war and the suffering it inflicts upon everyone involved. According to Asim Karim, Hanif ‘establishes an anti-colonial textuality’ and ‘combines it with a stringent critique of the novel’s local Muslim society’ (Karim 2020: 11). As Karim discusses, Hanif ’s satire is all encompassing and no one is spared. On the one hand, ‘The novel’s dark humour satirizes the way in which “reason” and “modernist enlightenment” underwrite a US strategy to dominate the Middle East through research, entrepreneurship, and promises of reconstruction, as well as military means’ (Karim 2020: 11). On the other hand, Hanif shows the Muslim culture as characterized by ‘greed, corruption, lust for monetary gains, and above all, total dependency on foreign aid (Karim 2020: 11). The Muslim community, therefore,

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does not suffer only from the violence of war but has its own internal problems, which cannot be blamed on any foreign power. As Karim describes, Islam as a religion does not exert any ethical force in this society and is merely limited to the performance of certain rites and obligations that have no impact on the moral life of the community. While Karim is right in appreciating Hanif ’s double-edged irony and satire, his role as a South Asian Muslim writer also needs to be considered. If there is any value that is affirmed in the novel, it is that of love – motherly love, brotherly love – and friendship, not only between human and non-human beings but also between attackers and victims, Ellie and Momo. Though this last can hardly be called friendship, it is certainly cooperation on Ellie’s part, even if reluctantly given. The close homonymy between Ali and Ellie cannot be ignored. In order to find Ali, Momo needs the help of Ellie to enter the Hangar. Apart from love and friendship at a personal level, all ideologies and religions are rendered deceptive and exploitative. The local Muslim community is nothing but a gang of thieves. As a community, it has no positive values. The novel seems to suggest that this propensity for theft is an inherent trait of the community and is not a result of the prolonged and meaningless wars that have been imposed upon it. The relationship between South Asian Anglophone writers and the cultures they supposedly belong to and represent has been a subject of fierce critical debates. In the case of Pakistani Anglophone fiction, Masood Ashraf Raja has discussed how Pakistani writers have been asked to carry the ‘burden of representation’ (Raja 2018: 3) by their local readers. The writers, on the other hand, refuse to be bound by any kind of limitation on their creative work and prefer to present their vision of history and culture in their own terms. Nevertheless, it is relevant to consider how South Asian writers depict their cultures of origin in their works. In Red Birds, the only identity of the community is a religious identity. It is a Muslim community residing in a refugee camp somewhere in the desert. The desert, of course, brings the Middle East to mind. In choosing to give a religious identity to a community, the writer has given privilege to the religious identity only to make it a target of satire and derision. Nowhere in the novel is there a character who lives up to the description of a pious religious man. Religion seems to have no positive impact on the community that is designated in its name. Thus, Red Birds, like many other South Asian novels, affirms personal relationships and condemns ideological, religious, and communitarian ones. While it garners sympathies for individuals and individual families, the larger community is treated with bitter satire and ridicule. One of the problems in the use of magical realism and other innovative narrative strategies is the difficulty the writer faces in affirming values and cultural practices. It is consistent with Hanif ’s narrative technique to submit all people, places, and things to satire. However, if societies and cultures that have been traumatized by war and terrorism are to be reconstructed and brought out of this trauma, affirmative values will have to be found. Red Birds leaves us with the tragedy of a family that discovers the dead body of its beloved son/ brother, and it does so without offering any consolation or hope. The community

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does not have any solid foundation to reconstruct itself and lift itself up from this fallen condition. Perhaps, it is religion, which is the only common thing among the individuals in the community, that will have to provide that foundation. Red Birds, however, denies this possibility.

Conclusion: Trauma Kitsch or Tragedy? Robert Eaglestone distinguishes ‘between a novelist who forms the “uncreated conscience” of a community, and one who simply exploits suffering’ (Eaglestone 2020: 292). In his view, ‘If authors can write interesting, thoughtful, moving fiction, they can “get away with it”, but a clumsy novel is soon “trauma kitsch” or cultural appropriation’ (Eaglestone 2020: 292). Hanif ’s use of magical realism and other innovative narrative strategies saves it from becoming ‘trauma kitsch’ and makes it an intense, moving, sad, and yet “enjoyable”, novel of war and trauma.

References Arva, Eugene. 2020. ‘The Analogical Legacy of Ground Zero: Magical Realism in Post9/11 Literary and Filmic Trauma Narratives’, in Richard Perez and Victoria A. Chevalier (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan. Bernaerts, Lars. et al. 2014. ‘The Storied Lives of Non-Human Narrators’, Narrative, 22(1): 68–93. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Eaglestone, Robert. 2020. ‘Trauma and Fiction’, in Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, pp. 287–295, New York: Routledge. Hanif, Muhammad. 2018. Red Birds. London: Bloomsbury. Karim, Asim. 2020. ‘Mohammed Hanif ’s Red Birds: “Anti-colonial textuality” and Beyond’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 56(6): 746–760. Raja, Masood Ashraf. 2018. ‘The Pakistani English Novel: The Burden of Representation and the Horizon of Expectations’, Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies, 6: 1–17. Young, Robert J.C. 2011. ‘World Literature and Postcolonialism’, in Theo D’haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir (eds.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature, pp. 213–222. New York: Routledge.

6 THE CONSTRUCTION AND DISSOLUTION OF THE MASCULINE SELF Re-reading the Unspeakable Trauma in Sorayya Khan’s Noor Fatima Syeda Introduction The subject of male victimization, though ignored or silenced previously, forms a very important aspect of gender studies and its relevant fields of study. Just as male victimization is not voiced, male traumatic disorders are also silenced and rendered unspeakable. The presentation of trauma by most of the early writers in trauma studies (Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, and others) is that of a wound caused by experiences that are unspeakable and linguistically evasive. Unspeakability appears, in the works of these writers, as a preeminent feature of trauma and traumatic experiences, evading materialization or even full comprehension, not just for the victims but also for those around them. This research aims to focus on the sociological aspect of trauma to establish that, in the cases of men, the traumatic experience remains unspeakable due to the conflicting positions of males in society. In the novel Noor (2003) by Sorayya Khan, the male protagonist (Ali), experiences the trauma of creating a masculine self, particularly during times of stress (the division of East Pakistan in this case). This masculine self, created under certain pressures, however, surrenders, rather than dissolves once confronted with the traumatic experiences of war. The whole process renders these men speechless as they continue to resolve the conflicts between their original instincts and the sociological roles they are forced to perform. It is very intriguing that the lack of the ability to speak about the traumatic experiences is accompanied by the presence of an impetus to rediscover the traumatic happenings, which may also help the men rediscover their true selves. Although Ali seemingly evades the horrors of his traumatic experiences, he may be seen working instantly to sow the seeds of revelations of truth by deciding to bring a child with him from East Pakistan. These revelations manifest themselves as a series of artistic representations drawn or painted by Noor, the victim Sajida’s daughter. The implication DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-9

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is that both the victim and the perpetrator are connected by a traumatic memory, which once materialized, releases both of them from the burden they have been carrying upon their consciousness since the actual happenings. It seems as if both Ali and Sajida find themselves locked into the memory of a single traumatic experience, and only they themselves can release each other from this interlocked binding. The elements of incomprehension are enhanced by the initial refusal on Ali’s part to talk about the actual events. Though he locks each and every detail very carefully into the innermost recesses of his self, his masculine self, created during wartime, recedes, rather dissolves along with the progression of the confrontation of the traumatic experiences. Even during the war, he discovered that he had lost his ability to perform sexually. This impotence is reflected in his life after he arrives in Pakistan. He loses his appetite, abstains from eating meat, refuses to marry, and demonstrates superhuman patience, which was never a part of his persona prior to the war. This research offers a study of the psychosocial aspects of the unspeakability of Ali’s traumatic experiences by examining the creation as well as dissolution of his masculine self in Noor by Sorayya Khan, supported by the theoretical framework developed from the fields of masculinity studies and trauma studies.

Masculinity as a Traumatic Social Construct Manhood has been associated with many attributes, but combative drive and excellence are two of the foremost defining features of masculinity. David D. Gilmore, a well-known critic of masculinities, studies the struggle men make to acquire a socially approved masculine self. According to him, manhood is treated as ‘a prize to be won and wrested through struggle’ (Gilmore 1990: 1). The fact that men have to strive to fulfill the demands of the socially constructed view of masculinity proves that the performance of men in a society is in no way a manifestation of their natural or biological self. He asserts that men, all around the world, have to face similar exhortations to acquire a masculine self. He writes about the presence of ‘something almost generic, something repetitive, about the criteria of man-­ playing’ (Gilmore 1990: 2). This performative aspect reinforces the social practice of the construction of the concepts of manhood. All such constructions negate the Freudian concept of the presence of both masculine and feminine in all human beings. The military training of men trains them to repress the feminine and softer aspects of their personality and produce ‘militarized masculinities’ (Baines 2014: 83). Forcing men to acquire a gender identity that does not come natural to them causes trauma. Greg Forter writes about the ‘trauma induced by patriarchal identity formation’ (Forter 2007: 260), which he believes is ‘so chronic and cumulative, so woven into the fabric of our societies’ (Forter 2007: 260) that it no longer appears as trauma. Polemic gender identities and their role playing, in his opinion, ‘have been thoroughly naturalized in ways that make it necessary to excavate and “estrange” them’ (Forter 2007: 260) if one needs to read them as social traumas. He investigates how patriarchal structures can be regarded as ‘normally traumatogenic institution(s)’ (Forter 2007: 261). One of the greatest struggles for men is to avoid

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alignment with women. Michael Kimmel, another major writer on masculinities, asserts, ‘Masculinity is a homosocial enactment. We test ourselves, perform heroic feats, take enormous risks, all because we want other men to grant us our manhood’ (Kimmel 2016: 65). Ali, in Noor, takes such an enormous risk when he decides to go to the war in East Pakistan. Surrounded by his mother, his aunt, and his fiancé, he feels the urge to go into the world of men and prove himself. He feels that if he goes out to fight for his country, his mother will be proud of him. He says, ‘I’m worthy of this’ (Khan 2003: 70). Going to the war meant ‘an adventure of a lifetime’ (Khan 2003: 214). Despite his mother’s repeated warnings, he goes to the war without realizing that he will have to lose a part of himself to prove himself man enough to be involved in a war. It is during his experience in a combative position that Ali becomes conscious of ‘the mode of masculinity appropriate to soldiering’ (Mason 2016: 160). At one point, while talking about a fellow from East Pakistan, he tells Noor how this man was posted in Baluchistan, ‘where army officers promised to make a man out of him’ (Khan 2003: 156). Ali’s own choice of being involved in the war between East and West Pakistan had sprung from his wish for a free life. And this is how he went to war: ‘strong and brash’ (Khan 2003: 71) ‘running full speed into a life that was unscripted and abounding with possibility’ (Khan 2003: 240). His combative status, however, earns him a position far more restrained than the one he enjoyed in West Pakistan. While reminiscing about his experiences in the army, he clearly conveys his sympathy for the victims. It is obvious from his descriptions that he had a soft corner for the women who were exploited by the army officials. He, however, could not manifest this softer aspect of his being in front of his fellow soldiers. In one particular case, he was ordered to fetch a girl for his officer. All the while he was bringing this girl to the officer, his attention was more focused on her wounds and bruises than on her body. On the other hand, he was unable to express his vulnerable self because of the ‘ultra-masculine context of the military’ (Mason 2016: 163). While pushing the girl into the officer’s room, Ali remembers, ‘I put my hand on her bruise … I tightened my grip to show the officer I was, indeed, in charge’ (Khan 2003: 181). He has to hide his feelings of pity for the girl to demonstrate his fitness for the job of a soldier. During war and in other combative positions, there seems to be a strict denunciation of feelings of shame, fear, or any sign of weakness. Paul Mason writes, ‘… military training involves a renunciation of the feminine’ (Mason 2016: 160). Any show of weakness will deprive these men of the manly status awarded to them for repressing their softer selves. While relating Khalid’s (one of his drivers) death, Ali recounts how Khalid’s family rejected accepting his body because his widow refused to accept that Khalid could have ‘Fear’ (Khan 2003: 222) on his face while dying. The family did not claim his body, nor did they bury him. This may be studied as a clear case of the brutal societal expectations of a man turned into a soldier. Khalid’s family could not accept him because of his lack of courage in the wake of his death. Any man who shows a sign of weakness is naturally denied the status of a man. In this regard, men require ‘validation of other men’ (Stoltenberg 2000: 168), an

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essential step in the confirmation of their status as men. John Stoltenberg writes, ‘You grow up to become a boy and you are terrorized into acting like a boy and you are rewarded for being a boy … and you learn what you need to learn to be accepted into the company of other men’ (Stoltenberg 2000: 173). Ali’s senior officer offers him to rape the girl once he himself has raped her. On Ali’s refusal, he ridicules his lack of power, asking, ‘Do you have a prick on you or not? It’s your turn’ (Khan 2003: 182). What comes next is a series of derisive remarks by this senior officer, who may be regarded here as a representative of the conforming social status of an Army man. Robert Augustus Masters views such derogatory remarks as’ ‘powerful shame amplifier(s)’ (Masters 2015: 1). He discusses the interdependence of shame and performance in a society. Each man lives in the fear of trespassing in the realm of gender boundaries. Kimmel writes about such fears: ‘Homophobia is the fear that other men will unmask us, emasculate us, reveal to us and the world that we do not measure up, that we are not real men’ (Kimmel 2016: 65). The senior officer’s derisive remarks about Ali refer to his lack of the required masculine power. The lack of masculine power deprives men of being called military men. Ali is subjected to humiliation by his officer, who demands to confirm his masculine power by having a look at its physical manifestation. Ira Brenner writes about the ‘traumatic pathway to the development of a masculine self ’ (Brenner 2009: xiv). The senior officer curses him, ‘Behn Choud (sister fucker) … You have a prick or not? … Show me’ (Khan 2003: 183). Ali’s body betrays his manly status, and the display of the physical manifestation of his manliness proves him to be someone less than a man. The show of his ‘shriveled and hidden’ (Khan 2003: 183) organ diminishes his status both as a man and as a soldier. Seeing this, the officer declares that he cannot be a soldier. Ali accepts his unmanly status but is aware of the shame that accompanies such an acceptance. He says, ‘shameless, right?’ (Khan 2003: 183). Kimmel, too, writes about this shame and fear syndrome, ‘We are afraid to let other men see that fear. Fear makes us ashamed, because the recognition of fear in ourselves proves to ourselves that we are not as manly as we pretend, that we are’ (Kimmel 2016: 65). Ali remembers the story of a soldier who was ordered to cut off the private parts of their enemy (men): ‘He pictured the confused officer whose lobeless ears trembled as he trailed behind, obeying orders to sever genitals with nothing but a blunt kitchen knife and his own hands’ (Khan 2003: 76). In severing the genitals of their enemy soldiers, these men themselves were also emasculated or re-masculated. The price paid by all such men is the loss of their identity. Gilmore writes, ‘Manhood ideologies force men to shape up on the penalty of being robbed of their identity, a threat apparently worse than death’ (Gilmore 1990: 221). This study argues that men pay a price by being emasculated as a result of this exhortative construct of a wild and violent masculine self. Ali’s disillusionment with war starts right after he finds himself in an environment that requires a violent and unnatural performance from him. Devoid of all the noble reasons to fight in this war, he now remembers his acts of killing as desperate attempts to ‘save himself ’ (Khan 2003: 215). In an attempt to hide and silence the fear and vulnerability and to avoid the excoriation of the male community, men are reduced to something less than men. The realization of their

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weaknesses was traumatic, rather fatalistic. Gary Baines writes, ‘Recognition of vulnerability and mortality meant that fatalism invariably set in’ (Baines 2014: 38). In most cases, men tend to hide any such feelings or emotions. Ali’s mother, fearing her son’s death in the war, receives a son who has lost his true self. She feels the estrangement of war upon her son, who ‘had returned home a man’ (Khan 2003: 74). On coming back from the war, Ali’s greatest urge is to lock away all the memories of the traumatizing experiences of war. His choice to remain silent is his own decision. Shoshana Felman writes, ‘Silence here is not a simple absence of an act of speech, but a positive avoidance and erasure’ (Felman 1991: 221). The reality is ‘insistently asserted (re-asserted) as not known … because (of) essentially remaining unacknowledged’ (Felman 1991: 221). Furthermore, the conflicting effects of war, that is, the construction of a required masculine self and the dissolution of the same very self in the wake of the violent events and the nature of his involvement in them, render him emasculated. His head felt like a wall-size cabinet of drawers that could be nailed closed … he relegated the screams to one drawer, the pit of dead bodies and scattered flinching into another … he put the rich colour of blood disappearing into a pit of mud into its own compartment, as far back as possible. (Khan 2003: 75) The process of burying his violent manly exploits is cross-checked by him. ‘He fortified the drawer with more nails’ (Khan 2003: 183). The whole thing becomes a kind of a rite in which he renounces not only the memories of war but also his manly status.

The Unspeakable Trauma and the Dissolution of Masculinity Ali’s war memories thus lie locked in the innermost recesses of his mind, not, however, without changing him into a man who has renounced his masculine self. In one of his conversations with Noor, he explains to her how birds shed their feathers each melting season and grow new ones. Noor, worried about the birds’ shedding ‘necessary parts of themselves’ (Khan 2003: 216), does not realize that her grandfather has also shed a part of himself. Harvey L. Schwartz writes that ‘more vulnerable traumatized individuals must resort to dissociation to switch off unbearable feelings and sensations …’ (Schwartz 2013: 9–10). Ali switches off all the feelings that are unbearable for him, and yet, these remain with him in the deeper alcoves of his mind. Anna Hunter cogitates on the storage of traumatic memories, ‘the traumatic event is stored only in the subconscious memory of the sufferer …’ (Hunter 2018: 67). After his return from East Pakistan, Ali could never again sleep during the Monsoon season. His mother tells Sajida, ‘Ali gave up meat and marriage … he didn’t pray … his face was gently transformed … he can never sleep during the monsoons’ (Khan 2003: 148–169). From a boy who used to scream, cry and shout, he has turned into someone who is ‘an ocean of patience’ (Khan 2003: 170). From

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being someone who used to devour food, he has become a really slow eater. He has become a vegetarian because he’d smelled flesh in every possible manifestation. Freshly dead, not-so-freshly dead, rotted, singed, burned, baked, and every variety in between, and he never wanted to set eyes on it, much less his tongue on it, again’ (Khan 2003: 185). He cannot explain his renunciation of meat without externalizing the horrors of war and the role he played in it. It is this inability of his that results in the locking down of war memories. Ali’s mother, Nanijan, sums up the change in him by saying, ‘He dwindled …. He was once a 16 ½ neck size. Then he lost his shoulders. People thought he was weak. He was thin. He wasn’t the same was all’ (Khan 2003: 171). His dwindling status stands in sharp contrast with his ‘once sturdy frame’ (Khan 2003: 174). This reduction unmans him, rendering him incapable of manly tasks. He resolves never to get married or enjoy any of the other privileges of a normal life. He has never let anyone else, except Sajida, in his life. The completion and the ultimacy of Ali’s fortification may be seen when he forces his son-in-law to live with them and when he builds his new house. Ali’s sector, as it was called, was completely fortified, blocking even the view of the Margalla Hills. The unspeakability of his traumatic war experiences relies mainly on the conflicting roles that these men perform, especially during times of stress. Michelle Balaev, while discussing the conventional approach toward trauma, primarily by Cathy Caruth, writes, ‘Trauma is an unsolvable problem of the unconscious that illuminates the inherent contradictions of experience and language’ (Balaev 2014: 1). The masculine self, created in the wake of the peer pressure during the war, recedes as soon as Ali finds himself unable to absorb more violence any more. He surrenders to his vulnerable self and resolves to reject the demands of a society that expects him to live up to the socially constructed image of man and masculinity. Ira Brenner quotes John Munder to discuss the conflicting identities of men that may lead to trauma: ‘Men … struggle against two dangers—the danger of succumbing to their feminine nature and the danger of affirming their masculine integrity through repeated acts of aggression’ (Brenner 2009: 2). It is not only his mind but his body as well that rejects the normative masculine ideals, accelerating the ‘dissolution of the masculine self ’ (Brenner 2009: 103). From the claim that he will make his mother proud by fighting in the war, he reaches a point at which he decides to leave East Pakistan even before he has completed half of the time of his placement there. He was supposed to stay for two years, but after about eight months, he returns, weak, ill, and transformed. The inability to recount or confront the traumatic experiences of war by Ali may correspond to the conventional interpretations of trauma that are mainly psychoanalytical and post-structural in nature. Dauri Laub writes, ‘There are never enough words or the right words …’ (Laub 1995: 63) to relate a traumatic experience. This previously established fact that trauma cannot be expressed in any linguistic form is consolidated through Ali’s resolve to carefully lock away all of his war memories. However, if one moves a bit away from this conventional approach toward trauma,

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one may see that this unspeakability does not just refer to the post-structural or psychoanalytical aspect of trauma but also includes the sociological aspect. Laub asserts that no one can ‘stay entirely outside of the trapping roles, and the consequent identities, either of the victim and the executioner’ (Laub 1995: 66). Both the victim and the perpetrator face this lack of expression; the reasons may depend upon the relevant sociological aspect. For instance, in Ali’s case, trauma is unspeakable due to Ali’s inability to reconcile the conflicting roles he has to play in society. The paradoxical nature of the societal expectations placed upon a male character threatens to ruin Ali’s mental peace. The same society that takes pride and honours Ali’s heroic character in the war is not ready to accept the bloody, violent, and aggressive face of war and military heroes. His own mother, who had been fearing his death during the war, considers no violent aspect of the war to be discussed when he comes back battered by it. After years of Ali’s ‘dormancy’ (Stampfl 2014:  24), when she finally comes to know about the facts of his experiences, she is not ready to accept them. And though she holds him responsible for his own actions, she realises that she too has contributed to leading him toward taking these actions. She recognizes his need for a ‘closure’ (Khan 2003: 178) while also acknowledging her failure to assist him in finding one. Ali’s decision to bring Sajida to West Pakistan may be examined as his hidden desire to find an expression for his deeply buried traumatic war experiences. His surrender to his vulnerable self and his recession from his so-called masculine self put him in a conflicting situation, which deters him from expressing his traumatic memories. Simultaneously, however, he had decided to bring a girl child from East Pakistan. Ali reflects near the end of the novel that he brought her because he wanted to erase that hyper masculine self, which was created as a necessity of war but is now someone ‘he wanted, so badly, not to be’ (Khan 2003: 221). On their return to Ali’s home, both of them may be seen clinging to each other, thereby necessitating a retention of their traumatic memories. For Balaev the need to ‘explore trauma as a subject that invites the study of the relationship between language, the psyche, and behavior without assuming the classic definition of trauma that asserts an unrepresentable and pathological universalism’ (Balaev 2014: 4). Ali did not let Sajida leave, even when she got married, even when Nanijan suggested it was a good time to ‘let her go’ (Khan 2003: 92). She tells him, ‘You can’t hold on to her forever’ (Khan 2003: 92). Ali, however, holds on to her until she gives birth to her third child, Noor, who later helps both Ali and Sajida confront and express their war experiences. This aspect renders the ‘trope of the unspeakable’ (Stampfl 2014: 15) reduced to a mere phase during one’s recovery from trauma and not an ultimate condition. The bond between Ali and Sajida and their resolve to hold on to each other signifies the urgency of the resolution of the ‘traumatogenic’ (Stampfl 2014: 31) experiences that bind them both. This may be one of the reasons that both Ali and Sajida accept Noor more readily as compared to the other members of the family. It was only after some time had passed since Noor’s interest in drawing and

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painting was discovered, that Ali recognized Noor’s ability to ‘pluck from someone else’s head’ (Khan 2003: 165). Ali’s involvement in Noor’s creative paintings and drawings no longer allows him to muffle the memories of his past. It is significant to see how both Ali (perpetrator) and Sajida (victim) welcome each of Noor’s paintings, almost thankful to Noor for bringing to the fore what they had always kept secret. Their readiness to give names to the paintings and to display them in a gallery reflects upon their hidden desire to reveal what has long been hidden in their consciousness. Furthermore, ‘the unspeakable is always already (paradoxically) part of a universe of discourse, a form of signification’ (Stampfl 2014: 25). Nanijan was aware of the presence of this discourse. She reflects that she never asked him about his wartime experiences because ‘she’d been afraid of the answer’ (Khan 2003: 165). She could perhaps hear Ali’s testimony ‘informed by acute silences and epistemological gaps that reflect the impact of a traumatic experience on the speaker’s psyche’ (Stampfl 2014: 20). Being thankful for his life, she, too, muffles her questions and leaves them unasked and thus unanswered. Noor’s art work offers healing not just to her mother but also to Ali. Ali remembers his old way of calming himself down through exercise and feels that ‘sitting in Noor’s presence was much like that’ (Khan 2003: 213). He finally decides to ‘include her (Noor) in his healing’ (Khan 2003: 213). Once the process sets in, he makes sure that what has remained unspeakable till now should be spoken now. Caruth writes about trauma, ‘It is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in an attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available’ (Caruth 1996: 4). Ali himself engages Sajida in a conversation, which leads to the recognition of their past and long buried truths. Saira Mohamed writes that ‘only by reclaiming those traumatic memories and enabling the sufferer to put the experience into words could those symptoms be relieved and the traumatizing experience be re-appropriated as a lived experience’ (Mohamed 2015: 1171). Ali poses different questions to Sajida because, ‘he wanted Sajida to share what she knew, suspecting that if she put it into words, something important might be laid to rest’ (Khan 2003: 219). Shoshana Felman writes about the elusive yet reiterative nature of the traumatic experience that carries the seed of the urge to complete itself. She writes about the sufferers of trauma whose life after the traumatic experience ‘strive unwittingly and compulsively toward an impossible completion of the missed experience’ (Felman 1991: 203). It is during his conversations with Sajida, that Ali realizes that he has never been able to distance himself from the memories that he thought he had locked away. He tries hard to keep these memories at bay, ‘but when the whiffs of stories rose like a stench from the file cabinets inside his head’ (Khan 2003: 231), it becomes hard for him to resist their acknowledgement. He realizes that the only way to deal with them ‘was to put them into words… But the words were always wrong, lacking’ (Khan 2003: 233). His action of naming Noor’s paintings trains him to use words to express his traumatic experiences. Joshua Pederson in his article ‘Trauma: Toward Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory’ refers to Susan Brison’s belief in the healing powers of narrating trauma. He writes, ‘Speaking trauma pulls it from the realm of painful obscurity

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and hastens the process of rehabilitation’ (Pederson 2014: 338). The very first thing that he does is apologize to his daughter ‘for his fear’ (Khan 2003: 234). He also implores her to understand his situation, and she tries to understand him. She, who could never think of her father as being afraid of anything, tries to accept the fact that he too once felt fear. She, however, keeps on wondering about the manifestations of this fear: ‘Did he cry? Shake? Run?’ (Khan 2003: 236). She can identify with him because she has also been guilty of hiding things from Hussein. It may be for this reason that she takes the first step toward understanding, and later on, forgiving Ali. The ultimate episode of the pit/mass grave provides a common ground for the trauma both Ali and Sajida have been facing since their arrival from East Pakistan. The narration of this incident reveals the void in Ali’s character caused by the violence he was forced to perform. He’d climbed out of the mud and taken the pit with him. It was as deep as the boots he’d worn when he stood thigh deep in the mass grave. It was a sinking hole forever filling with muck, the stink of it, the frozen stiffness of bloated, rotting corpses, the soft sound of bullets hitting live flesh in stinging rain. (Khan 2003: 250–251) All his life, Ali has been trying to fill this void. Sajida and her little family have helped him not to drown, but the pit remains there inside him. He feels the inevitable presence of the dark deeds committed by and around him: ‘what had, in fact, been the war, would go on happening inside of him for as long as he lived. (Khan 2003: 251). Ali’s healing from this traumatic experience could come only from Sajida’s understanding of his intricate position. He is one of the soldiers who were appointed to fill the mud pit with dead bodies, but he is also the one who saved Sajida, brought him along to be raised with love and care. Sajida feels that ‘the two of them would have been forever joined by a pit of mud …’ (Khan 2003: 254). And, while she recognizes that Ali had the ability to kill her that day in the pit, she also recognizes that healing necessitates reconciliation, because, as Susan Rubin Suleiman writes, ‘trauma is not only a drama of a past event, but also, and perhaps most importantly, a drama of survival’ (Suleiman 2008: 280). The survival of both Ali and Sajida depends upon the healing from this trauma.

Conclusion The trauma of Ali and Sajida assumes the shape of a collective trauma at the end. ‘The moan, deep and immense, rose gradually. It began in Ali’s belly. It rode through his strained vocal chords and gaping throat. It hurled out of his mouth, stretching wide like a dead buffalo’s. The groan filled Ali’s sector like no other sound had ever done before (Khan 2003: 260). Ali’s trauma is not just that of the horrifying memories of war but also that of the creation, distortion, and finally dissolution of his masculine self, necessitated specifically by war. Ali’s condition may remind one

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of what Cathy Caruth finds remarkable in trauma: ‘the moving and sorrowful voice that cries out, a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound’ (Caruth 1996: 2). This wound may heal if both Ali and Sajida are able to perceive the gender politics involved in constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing Ali’s masculine identity. The last posture of Ali and Sajida is important in understanding their relationship. ‘Sajida leaned toward her father. Stretching, she locked her arms with his’ (Khan 2003: 260). Their interlocked positions make it clear that none of them may heal privately and that collective healing is the only way to ensure reconciliation and restoration in their lives.

References Baines, Gary. 2014. South Africa’s ‘Border War’: Contested Narratives and Conflicting Memories. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Balaev, Michelle. 2014. ‘Literary Trauma Theory Reconsidered’, in Michelle Balaev (ed.), Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory, pp. 1–14. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brenner, Ira. 2009. Injured Men: Trauma, Healing, and The Masculine Self. New York: Jason Aronson. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Felman, Shoshana. 1991. ‘Crisis of Witnessing: Albert Camus “Postwar Writing”’, Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, 3(2): 197–242. Forter, Greg. 2007. ‘Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form’, Narrative, 15(3): 259–285. Gilmore, David. 1990. Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hunter, Anna. 2018. ‘The Holocaust as the Ultimate Trauma’, in J. Roger Kurtz (ed.), Trauma and Literature, pp. 66–82. New York: Cambridge University Press. Khan, Sorayya. 2003. Noor. Islamabad: Alhamra Publishing. Kimmel, Michael S. 2016. ‘Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the construction of Gender Identity’, in Paula S. Rothenberg and Soniya Munshi (eds.), Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study, pp. 59–70. New York: Worth Publishers. Laub, Dori. 1995. ‘Truth and Testimony: The process and the Struggle’, in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory, pp. 61– 75. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Mason, Paul. 2016. ‘Contesting Masculinities: Two Border War Memoirs’, English in Africa, 43(2): 157–180. Masters, Robert Augustus. 2015. To Be A Man: A Guide To True Masculine Power. Colorado: Sounds True Publishers. Mohamed, Saira. 2015. ‘Of Monsters and Men: Perpetrator Trauma and Mass Atrocity’, Columbia Law Review, 115(5): 1157–1216. Pederson, Joshua. 2014. ‘Trauma: Toward revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory’, Narrative, 22(3): 333–353. Schwartz, Harvey L. 2013. The Alchemy of Wolves and Sheep: A Relational Approach to Internalized Perpetration in Complex Trauma Survivors. London: Routledge.

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Stampfl, Barry. 2014. ‘Parsing the Unspeakable in the Context of Trauma’, in Michelle Balaev (ed.), Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory, pp. 15–41. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stoltenberg, John. 2000. Refusing to be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice. London: UCL Press. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. 2008. ‘Judith Herman and Contemporary Trauma Theory’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 36(1/2): 276–281.

PART III

War and Beyond Trauma and Bangladeshi Literature

7 WRITING WAR AND WOMANHOOD Representation of Violence and Disgrace in Dilruba Z. Ara’s Blame Mohammad Shafiqul Islam

Introduction Dilruba Z. Ara’s Blame (2015), no doubt a war novel, presents the picture of ­wartime experiences of the people in Bangladesh, highlighting women’s dreadful experiences. The author writes the novel with the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh and the pre-war years of the country in the backdrop, when tension between East Pakistan and West Pakistan began to surface. In her note, the author writes, ‘Blame is based on my personal experience. Though some parts are fictional, most of the characters are drawn from real life, so the story is more or less true.’ Ara makes it clear, as the remark suggests, at the outset of the novel that she keenly observed how the relationship between the extreme followers of two religions, Islam and Hinduism, was deteriorating in the 1960s. She was 14 years old during the war, so she spent her teen years in East Pakistan, witnessing the events happening in the pre-war years and during the nine-month-long war between East Pakistan and West Pakistan. At some point, the author recounts that through this novel she intends to show the ‘Bangladeshi psyche’ and ‘the role played by Bangladeshi women during the liberation war’ (Ara 2015a: n.p.). Here is a clear indication that the novelist underlines the attitudes of the people of Bangladesh toward the war, especially toward women who were oppressed by the Pakistani army and its collaborators. Bangladesh earned independence in 1971 after fighting a gruesome war against West Pakistan. Before that, the country was part of Pakistan, an illogical division that occurred after the British had left the Indian subcontinent. There was no land connection between East Pakistan and West Pakistan, but this part was annexed to West Pakistan only because of the majority of Muslims in two places. On the basis of religion, such a confederation between two parts was unusual. Besides, the link between the two parts was unlikely because East Pakistani people were not culturally and linguistically identical. The people of East Pakistan were predominantly DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-11

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Bengalis, whereas West Pakistanis were Urdu-speaking people, and their culture was also different. As a result, the people of the two parts began to feel an unusual sense of inequality and difference soon after the departure of the British. West Pakistan retained power and all the administrative posts, depriving a majority of people and politicians from East Pakistan. Soon, they began to show East Pakistanis that they were in charge, as if they were neo-colonizers. A new era of colonization had begun.

Pakistan’s Pre-War Aggression The Pakistani government gradually increased their motives of exploiting East Pakistanis, limiting their job opportunities in various sectors and even depriving them of their basic rights. At one stage, they declared the imposition of Urdu as the state language, although Bengali was the mother tongue of the wide majority of the people of East Pakistan. The Bengalis vehemently protested against the declaration, and finally, at the cost of some valuable lives, they wrested their rights to speak in their mother tongue, fighting against the Pakistani government in 1952. This rare resistance to save their own language against Pakistani aggression is considered the root of the independence movement of the Bengalis. As history witnesses, several events took place between 1952 and 1971, including the 1966 Six-Point Movement, the 1969 Mass Upsurge, and the 1970 General Election. Despite a landslide victory by Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his party in the 1970 election, West Pakistan denied handing over power. Sheikh Mujib and the people of East Pakistan wanted a peaceful handover of power so that the country could be led by elected representatives, but Pakistani rulers delayed and eventually denied giving power to the majority. Finally, well-armed Pakistani military forces started the war that stunned the Bengali nation as it was a sudden attack on them. Rounaq Jahan, a prominent Bangladeshi scholar, articulates: In 1970, the Awami League (AL), led by the Bengali nationalist leader Bangabandhu Shiekh Mujibur Rahman (Sheikh Mujib), won an overwhelming victory in the Pakistan general election, the first free election held in the country. But the West Pakistan- based leadership refused to hand over power. Instead, on March 25, 1971, they arrested Shiekh Mujib and launched a military campaign throughout East Pakistan. This triggered the declaration of independence of Bangladesh on March 26, 1971, and the start of a national liberation war which received logistical support from India. (2013: 249) Under Mujib’s leadership, the Bengalis continued their resistance against Pakistani oppression. Finally, the Pakistani army launched a crackdown upon the innocent Bengalis in the dead of night on March 25, 1971, killing thousands of people around the country. The war continued for nine months, with three million Bengalis killed and two hundred to four hundred thousand women violated by the Pakistani army

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and their collaborators. When the war began – Ara presents in Blame – the Pakistani army men and their collaborators: were butchering people indiscriminately. The streets were running with blood, students and intellectuals were being shot dead in their sleep, and girls were being raped in their homes and hostels. Young boys were tortured, killed, and buried in mass graves. Hindu areas were set on fire. Hindu men’s penises were chopped off. Hindu girls were taken prisoner. Sheikh Mujib, the leader of the Bengalis, was arrested. The sky of Dacca was invaded by vultures. Human flesh had become their fare. (Ara 2015b: 179) In the preliminary days of the war, just after the launch of the crackdown, the armed forces of Pakistan did not spare anyone on the streets from killing or torturing. With all their evil intentions, they also raped women either in their homes or abducted them back to their camps, where they resumed their orgies month after month. Ara describes the atrocities perpetrated by the Pakistani army as, ‘They are killing happily in Dacca; the flights of stairs and floors of students’ halls in Dacca are coated with blood; dead bodies are rotting in gutters, vultures feasting on human meat’ (2015b: 198). The soldiers were killing the innocent people of Bangladesh indiscriminately. Entering Dhaka University, they dragged out the students from the halls and shot them dead one after another, raping and killing female students as well. Later, the streets of Dhaka were crammed with rows of dead bodies, scattering stench in the air within a few days of the start of the war.

The 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh and Violence against Women The 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh is a historically significant event in which the Pakistani army launched a dreadful killing mission. As Jahan observes, The nine-months-long liberation war in Bangladesh in 1971 drew world attention because of the genocide committed by the Pakistani armed forces, which, with the support of local militant groups, conducted widely documented massacres, tortures, rapes, disappearances, destruction of property, and forced displacements. (2013: 250) As the above statement suggests, all forms of crimes that happen in a genocide took place in the Bangladesh liberation war, committed by Pakistani armed forces and their allies in the country. This is an instance of one of the worst genocides taking place in the history of the world, as Tulshi Kumar Das et al state, ‘… this independence was gained after the country witnessed one of the worst genocides in world’s history’ (2022: 15). The country earned independence, but it had to

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sacrifice millions of lives. Suzannah Linton confirms that in the 1971 war between West Pakistan and East Pakistan ‘200,000–400,000 women were raped, leading to approximately 25,000 pregnancies’ (2010: 194). To be certain of the figure, Linton gives reference to Susan Brownmiller’s seminal work Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975). From this figure, it is worth calculating how destructive the intentions of the Pakistani armed forces were to terminate the Bengali nationhood. West Pakistan is blamed for this mass killing, which most people agree was a genocide and that Bengali women were violated and tortured. Brownmiller’s book, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, is an influential scholarly work on genocide, with a particular reference to the victimization of women in war. Out of several references to different wars around the world, the details and exploration of the Liberation War of Bangladesh are rich and reliable sources for further research on the area. Brownmiller makes numerous references to women’s rights violations during the war; many rape victims describe how brutally Pakistani soldiers treated them. Such a rape victim was a beautiful Hindu woman, who was a bride for one month; she was raped by several Pakistani soldiers. Aubrey Menen, who was on assignment reporting the war in Bangladesh, gives an account of this girl. Brownmiller includes this incident in her book, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. One night, around ten o’clock, a truckload of Pakistani soldiers went to the girl’s house. First, they tortured the people of the house, and then, in the presence of her husband and other family members, six soldiers raped the girl. Menen describes the incident: Two went into the room that had been built for the bridal couple. The others stayed behind with the family, one of them covering them with his gun. They heard a barked order, and the bridegroom’s voice protesting. Then there was silence until the bride screamed. Then there was silence again, except for some muffled cries that soon subsided. In a few minutes one of the soldiers came out, his uniform in disarray. He grinned to his companions. Another soldier took his place in the extra room. And so on, until all the six had raped the belle of the village. (1975: 81–82) Menen interviewed several victims of rape and torture, along with their eyewitnesses and family members. In the case of this young Hindu bride, her father gave a description of this terrible experience for his daughter and the whole family. Another victim that Menen interviewed was Khadiga, only a 13-yearold girl. In her book, Brownmiller also includes Khadiga’s case, ‘Khadiga was regularly abused by two men a day; others, she said, had to service seven to ten men daily. (Some accounts have mentioned as many as eighty assaults in a single night, a bodily abuse that is beyond my ability to fully comprehend, even as I write these words)’ (Brownmiller 1975: 83). Pakistani soldiers committed several hundred or thousands of brutal incidents of rape during the whole nine months. Victims like Khadiga and the Hindu young bride survived killing, but

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their struggle increased in postwar Bangladesh – in fear of disgrace in society, their family members abandoned them. As far as Ara’s Blame is concerned, the Hindu bride’s case is similar to Gita’s, and Laila goes through almost the same experience as Khadiga.

Biragonas in Postwar Bangladesh and Post-Rape Trauma In connection to the postwar struggle of the rape survivors, Lisa Sharlach observes, ‘The rape survivor’s victimization continues long after the initial sexual assault. Post-rape trauma is compounded by “the second rape” of becoming a pariah in one’s own society and even one’s own family’ (2000: 90). Wartime rape was a severe assault for the birangonas – an honorific conferred on rape victims to show respect to them; it literally means war heroines – but when their own people abandoned them and denied their return to the family, their distress increased to an unbearable extent. Post-rape trauma made the birangonas struggle hard in postwar Bangladesh. Trauma and war are interlinked because the victims of violence in war bear the unbearable weight of horrible memories. Their suffering intensifies if extreme torture is perpetrated upon them. It is worth noting that ‘traumatic experiences and their consequences often constitute the core of the life stories told by those who have survived natural disasters or war, or other kinds of social, state, or interpersonal violence’ (Leydesdorff et al. 1999: 1). Life stories of war victims experiencing extreme violence are different as they survive the past trauma, which they can never forget. Moreover, postwar societies do not show empathy for any victims, especially if they are women. It happened to the female victims of the Bangladesh Liberation War. In Ara’s novel, Laila and Gita live a kind of life in postwar Bangladesh, which is not normal; they are not given the due respect that they deserve as human beings. As they cannot forget their past traumatic experiences and cannot stand the ill-treatment of the people, they decide to live on their own. Both Laila and Gita stare in disbelief, experiencing the oblique looks and comments of the people around them; they gradually become obsessed with their past, at times living in the terrain of remembering and forgetting in confusion, sometimes feeling completely blank within. Usually, prejudiced, illiterate, so-called religious, and rural people derided the raped victims and strongly opposed their return to their families and society in postwar Bangladesh. As a result, the honorific birangona turned horrific, becoming synonymous with shame and guilt. In the case of Laila, the protagonist of the novel Blame, her own family members thought that it would be a sin to talk to her or to stay with her in the same place. As Ara, the novelist, writes, ‘But Salma Begum was asking God to forgive her for being in a room with a raped woman’ (2015b: 351). It is so pathetic that this woman considers staying with a raped victim in the same room to be sinful. A birangona’s tale in Neelima Ibrahim’s A War Heroine, I Speak (2017) bears testimony to how the family members of the rape victims treated them after their return. When a war heroine comes back after independence, her mother sneers at her as Ibrahim records:

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Why did you come back? Why didn’t you die? Why didn’t they kill you? Why didn’t you stay out of our lives and rot somewhere in a brothel? At least we would not have to suffer for your sins?’ Mayna’s mother’s rant poisoned the environment. The angry mother slapped and shoved and pushed the daughter. Mayna fell on the ground and lay there, like a broken tree. (2017: 104) The way Bangladeshi women were violated by Pakistani army men during the 1971 war is unprecedented in history. But it is highly deplorable for the victims to be rejected by their family members. They had endured an ordeal for nine months, but after the independence of the country, when they managed to meet their family members, they experienced another shock, which was more agonizing for them. Mayna’s case is a glaring example of this kind of inhuman behavior by near and dear ones. Fayeza Hasanat also addresses this issue in her scholarly book titled, The Voices of War Heroines: Sexual Violence, Testimony, and the Bangladesh Liberation War (2022). She critically examines how the rape victims struggled to survive and witnessed their sisters and brothers being killed in front of them. It is a detailed study of the Bangladesh Liberation War in general, and rape survivors and their traumatic war experiences in particular. While talking about the rape victims, Hasanat writes, ‘The ending of a war is never an indicator of the ending of violence over women. In fact, a new war begins for these survivors as they combat new enemies in every sphere – both at home and in the outside world’ (2022: 1). Testimonies of thousands of wartime rape survivors indicate that their return to their family and society was unwelcoming, and so they started fighting another war, combating sneers and the brunt of denial. Nayanika Mookherjee observes that by using numerous abusive words, the ‘villagers express scorn, construct varied subjectivities of the women as raped, liberation fighters, victims, or weak, and hence ensure the strengthening of existing social control, power, and inequality’ (2006: 435). In different villages around the country, when some rape survivors returned, the concerned families tried to keep it secret, but somehow, when revelation of the incident of rape occurred, the villagers started expressing scorn and bringing disgrace to the families. A few people, however, also highlighted their contributions to the independence of the country. But there is no denying that the rape survivors went through an excruciating experience in postwar Bangladesh. Mookherjee further observes that the birangonas ‘were equated as prostitutes because … like a prostitute a birangona’s sexual activity has been with men outside of marriage’ (2006: 440). Some people, especially the ones supporting anti-Liberation forces in Bangladesh, jeered at the birangonas whenever they came forward to seek justice and punishment against the criminals, the collaborators of the Pakistani army. Addressing the birangonas as prostitutes is adding salt to their injuries; it is as if they were raped a second time, an experience that is a huge blow to them.

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Immediately after the independence of the country, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the then Prime Minister of Bangladesh, took many steps to integrate the birangonas into society. Mujib gave them the honorific birangona so that people treated them with respect and received them warmly. In her book, The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971, Mookherjee addresses this issue: Rehabilitation became a trope symbolically evoking the dynamism and modernity of the new nation of Bangladesh. By referring to the women as birangonas, the Bangladeshi state was able to highlight its own position as a victim of the West Pakistani state’s abuses as well as emphasize the rapes perpetrated by the Pakistani army on the Bangladeshi women. (2015: 129) But many people, especially the anti-Liberation forces and those who considered the incidents of wartime rape to be sexual acts outside of marriage, began to scorn them, bringing disgrace to both victims and their families. The birangonas simply fell prey to the lust and war strategies of the Pakistani army, so holding them responsible for the act is another instance of inhuman behavior toward them. In his article titled ‘Explaining Wartime Rape,’ Jonathan Gottschall observes that: Wartime rape is strategic rape’ and that these incidents of rape ‘are predicated on the deleterious effects that mass rape has on enemy populations. It is credited with spreading debilitating terror, diminishing the resistance of civilians, and demoralizing, humiliating, and emasculating enemy soldiers who are thereby shown to have failed in their most elemental protective duties. (2004: 131) As far as the history of war is concerned, armed forces include wartime rapes as part of their overall war strategies, but in the case of the Pakistani army, raping Bengali women was at the top of their priorities. They not only raped the women but forced them to starve for several days and stay naked month after month in the camp so that they could not escape. In many cases, the Pakistani soldiers exhibited their perverted behavior toward the women, torturing them to an extreme scale, sometimes splitting breasts from their bodies or severely injuring their genitals.

War and Women in Bangladeshi Literature Writers and poets from Bangladesh have portrayed the Liberation War in various ways, recording the horrendous incidents of human suffering, particularly the suffering of the women victims. Innumerable pieces based on the Liberation War are available in Bengali literature, but only a handful of novels, short stories, and poetry collections have been written in English on this historically significant event. Zia Haider Rahman gives a hint at the war in his debut but seminal novel titled In the

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Light of What We Know (2014), while the focus of Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age (2007) and The Good Muslim (2011) is the war. Tarfia Faizullah’s debut collection titled Seam (2014) is an influential collection of poetry, which is based on interviews with the rape survivors of the 1971 war. Ara’s Blame is an outstanding work of fiction about the 1971 war, which depicts the tension between Hindus and Muslims as well as women’s predicament during the harrowing days of the war. Although the novel gives a background on how tension grew between East Pakistan and West Pakistan, the novelist highlights women’s experience in the war. Although a wide range of research needs to be conducted on the rape victims of the 1971 war, only a few scholars and academicians have explored the area and published scholarly articles in international journals. But the war and its economic and socio-cultural impact on this part of South Asia are enormous. The experience that the Bangladeshi women went through during the war was extreme and beyond comparison with other similar incidents in the world. Yasmin Saikia, a well-known scholar, who has written widely on genocide, recounts the traumatized women’s experience in the war, ‘Conversations with the survivors confirmed that women had been subject to extreme violence. Some of them shared with me their tightly-guarded secrets and asked me to ensure that their stories gained international attention’ (2004: 278). Soldiers of the Pakistani army made an assault on the women so that the whole nation refrained from putting up resistance against them. Their goal was to instill fear in the Bengalis in order to prevent them from fighting. The armed forces, therefore, adopted rape as their war strategy, but the consequence was terrible for two to four lakh women in the country. A rape victim shares her traumatized experience as Ibrahim writes, ‘And when my throat went dry, I cried for a little drink of water; and you know what they did? They urinated in my mouth! Can you believe how cruel a man can be—to piss on a girl’s mouth when she cried for water?’ (2017: 119). Pakistani soldiers exposed their brutalities in a limitless manner, exhibiting the most heinous attitudes and committing the most debauched acts against women. A woman seeks water at the moment when she feels like dying. Pakistani soldiers urinate on her mouth after torturing and raping her several times. Does language help to describe these acts? More debilitating was the fact that the militants, allies of the Pakistani army, helped them find families with young girls and women, subsequently abducting them for the soldiers. The birangonas were ‘emotionally traumatized, psychologically dishevelled, and socially ostracized’ (Hasanat 2022: 26). The Pakistani army and their collaborators made the lives of Bengali women so miserable that the rape survivors lived traumatic lives in postwar Bangladesh. It is widely known that Pakistani soldiers and their collaborators targeted and tortured Hindu girls, but no family could save their young girls and beautiful women from the enemies’ clutches and lust. Pro-Pakistani neighbors and their relatives took the war as a chance to give a lesson to the independence-loving people of the country; as a result, neighbors and family friends supporting Pakistan abducted and violated the girls and women. Ibrahim, a renowned professor and scholar, has written a ground-breaking book, a reportage, titled Ami Birangona Bolchi (1998), which was

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translated into English by Fayeza Hasanat as A War Heroine, I Speak (2017). Fakrul Alam, an eminent Bangladeshi scholar and professor of English literature, claims: Neelima Ibrahim’s Aami Birangana Balchi … is an astonishing, haunting and gripping book. Its seven chapters collect the stories of seven Bangladeshi women who were gangraped indiscriminately during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 by Pakistani Army men; it also narrates their slow, painful and complicated return to everyday life after their harrowing experiences. (2017: vii) A War Heroine, I Speak must be an influential document of violence against women during the Liberation War of 1971. The experiences that the women have shared with Ibrahim in several interviews conducted by the author are bone-chilling for any human being on earth. The situation that the war victim describes here reveals the scale of the atrocity that the Pakistani army perpetrated upon the Bengali women.

Women’s Ordeal Represented in Blame In Blame, Ara captures the devastating pictures of the war, in which the Pakistani army launched an orgy of violence and oppression, killing hundreds and thousands of Bengalis and raping women indiscriminately. The novelist writes: In the light of the flame was an orgy of dead bodies. A decapitated woman – slumped against the wall to his left – was suckling a stiff, blood-coated infant in her arms, her head connected to her neck only by a string of tendon. … On the floor in front of him were the bodies of two young women, tattooed with cigarette burns, their breasts hacked off but nowhere to be seen. Whoever had killed them had slashed their genitals. (2015b: 224) When Alam Khan’s family, along with Laila’s, were traveling back to Chittagong from Potiya by boat at night, they were faced with grotesque pictures of the war. Alam Khan is an important major character in the novel, who is one of the pro-­ Liberation people. Lots of dead bodies were floating in the river, some of which looked mutilated and slashed, heads separated, and women’s organs hacked. The army committed atrocities as if they had been on a dehumanizing mission to destroy the whole Bengali nation. Laila was brought up in a conservative family, but as she was lucky enough to study at Dhaka University, she was able to see life differently, which is why she could think about fighting for the country. After struggling hard against a conservative society stowed with so many restrictions on women and against her own family, she received training and joined the liberation war. Once, when Pakistani soldiers were killing her father, she put up resistance, but soon they took her as a captive in their camp, where she was tortured and raped. When she was still incarcerated

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in the camp, Jamil, another character in the novel, was desperate to rescue her as he loved her and would marry her soon. In such a situation, Laila’s fate is sealed in society. Ara writes, ‘Laila’s returning alive would undermine the family’s status; it would stigmatise the honour of the Kazis’ (2015b: 273). As she belongs to a Kazi family, which is well known in society, it is disgraceful for her to join the war; more disgraceful is for her to be raped by Pakistani soldiers. Her family members ‘had already decided that Laila had become impure by falling into the hands of the soldiers from the country of the pure’ (2015b: 274). This is ridiculous that the soldiers of Pakistan – the country whose name literally means the land of the pure – fought for a religious cause too, as they had more grudges against the Hindu Bengalis, raped women extensively. As the razakars, the collaborators of the Pakistani army, had a more damaging attitude toward the raped victims. Mullah Yousef, one of the pro-Pakistani characters in Blame, expresses his views, ‘… a disgraced woman is better left alone. Still better, forgotten’ (2015b: 281). A raped woman is humiliated by almost everyone in society, including razakars and family members. They are treated as though they committed the act out of their own volition. At one point, when Laila was extremely helpless and was being raped by Pakistani soldiers time and again, she felt that it was better to live the life of an insect than the life of a woman. Ara adroitly depicts this image, ‘Her bruised body was down there, by the toilet hole. A rat was encircling her. Some cockroaches walked on the wall. They were fat, smooth and shiny. They were not bruised! Their dignity was not taken’ (2015b: 286). As Laila goes through such an uncanny experience in the military camp, she thinks that even cockroaches on the wall have a better life without a little sense of fear or tension. They do not have a fear of losing dignity or honor, nor are they oppressed by dogs. She knew that her family members were ‘ashamed of having her in the family’ (2015b: 295). As far as scholarship on birangonas is concerned, the society and even family members wanted them either dead or segregated from them. Laila’s childhood friend Gita, Santo’s sister, is also raped by Pakistani soldiers. Ara gives a description of how she is raped and tortured, ‘Big paws kneaded her flesh, the sharp tip of a bayonet scrolled down her spine, fingers probed her private parts but thanks to her bad eyesight everything below her navel remained blurred to her’ (2015b: 313). Gita being a Hindu girl makes the soldiers more brutal toward her; they torture her more severely. Upon negotiation with a collaborator, Jamil barters Gita for Laila, an act that remains unforgettable and unforgivable to both Laila and the freedom fighters. Jamil had to pay a high price until his death in Sweden, where he absconded to save himself from the wrath of freedom fighters after independence. The level of oppression that Gita goes through at the hands of Pakistani army men is extreme, and it happens because they are on a mission to induce fear among the Bengalis and terrorize them by raping their women and killing people. The commander of the army camp rapes Gita every day for over a month, and then he throws her among other soldiers as if she were thrown among hungry dogs. Ara writes, Within an hour she was attacked by several men, now turned into wild beasts. Her clothes were torn away. Her naked, soft body was pinned to the ground,

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twisted, turned and bent, manhandled, tossed, pressed against a wall; they clawed at her, bit her, hit her, and filled every orifice of her body with their juice. (2015b: 316) The soldiers turn into hyenas, swooping on Gita, pounding on her one after another, as if she were a piece of flesh among hundreds of vultures. They performed almost all forms of sadist sexual acts on her; they indeed played with her body. At some point ‘one soldier took off his belt and tied it around her neck, and then he moved around the walls of the room as she struggled to crawl behind him, like an exhausted dog on a leash’ (316). After raping her frequently, a soldier ties her with his belt and pulls her around the room where she stays. He pulls her as if she were an animal following her master. This is a sheer act of dehumanizing a human being, a process of dehumanizing a nation, the Bengali nation. As a fiction writer, Ara is successful in depicting the war with its extremity and portraying the characters like Laila and Gita who represent the birangonas in postwar Bangladesh. The novelist presents Laila and Gita in such a manner that they appear as birangonas living in a postwar society in Bangladesh, bearing the derision of people now and then. And that is how society makes them live with their traumatic experiences. The Pakistani army vowed to destroy the whole nation so that it could not stand on its own in the future. To the people in society, raped women are ‘Fallen. Disgraced. Disowned’ (Ara 2015b: 341). For that matter, Laila offers Gita, ‘… our families don’t want us, so we will have to find a way to take control of our own lives’ (Ara 2015b: 336). Since society, family members, relatives, and neighbors abandon them, they want to find their own ways of survival, and that is what they are able to accomplish through some organizations and individuals, but their own suffering is beyond imagination. Laila’s mother-in-law, Salma Khan, Jamil’s mother, expresses extreme hatred toward Laila, ‘I blame her for every misfortune in this family. … This girl is bad. She is bad luck personified’ (Ara 2015b: 364). To Laila, it is a blow to her already severe wound when Salma Khan adds, ‘She is a disgrace. I won’t have her pollute our daughters’ (Ara 2015b: 365). Girls like Laila and Gita were trained freedom fighters who fought courageously, but they became prey to the enemies who used them disgracefully, whereas their own society held them responsible and therefore declared them unwanted. When Laila and Gita took their leave of family members, never to return, they heard the door slamming behind them. When they walked down to corridor to the stairs, the other families didn’t open their doors. No one followed them to bid good bye. But when they opened the gate in front of them a crow was walking on the blood-stained road. (Ara 2015b: 366) Abandoned by the family members, both Laila and Gita feel extremely hurt and decide to leave home forever. But when they leave, anyone among the neighbors does not show an iota of empathy for them; rather, they shut their doors never to

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see their faces again. It is an ominous picture that the novelist draws here – only a crow walks along the road they pass by. Such is the treatment of family members, relatives, and neighbors toward the raped victims of the war of independence. No one even cares to look at their faces, let alone say a few words of comfort to them when they leave their own homes forever. This kind of inhuman treatment is rare in history.

Conclusion The birangonas participated in the liberation war, fighting against enemies, the Pakistani army and their collaborators, but they were treated most heinously. Because of their identity as women and the patriarchal society’s attitude toward them, they did not receive due respect in postwar Bangladesh. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, known as Bangabandhu, the Father of the Bengali nation, extended all-out support, also conferring on them the title ‘birangona,’ but many people in society continued to treat them as fallen and disgraced. Bangladesh, no doubt, emerged as an independent country through this war, but the Bengalis had to sacrifice immensely. As Ara skillfully demonstrates in Blame, women were the worst victims of the war in this regard. The novel, therefore, is a successful depiction of the 1971 war of independence; the utmost violence and atrocities committed by the Pakistani army; the betrayal of some Bangladeshi people known as razakars, and the victimization of Bengali women.

References Alam, Fakrul. 2017. ‘Preface’, in A War Heroine, I Speak by Neelima Ibrahim. Trans. Fayeza Hasanat. Dhaka: Bangla Academy. Anam, Tahmima. 2007. A Golden Age. Dhaka: Daily Star Books. Anam, Tahmima. 2011. The Good Muslim. Dhaka: Daily Star Books. Ara, Dilruba Z. 2015a. ‘A Note from the Author’, in Blame by Dilruba Z. Ara. Dhaka: The University Press Limited. Ara, Dilruba Z. 2015b. Blame. Dhaka: The University Press Limited. Brownmiller, Susan. 1975. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Ballantine Books. Das, Tulshi Kumar, et al. 2022. ‘Revisiting Geographies of Nationalism and National Identity in Bangladesh’, GeoJournal, 87: 1099–1120. Faizullah, Tarfia. 2014. Seam. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Gottschall, Jonathan. 2004. ‘Explaining Wartime Rape’, The Journal of Sex Research, 41(2): 129–136. Hasanat, Fayeza. 2022. The Voices of War Heroines: Sexual Violence, Testimony, and the Bangladesh Liberation War. Leiden: Brill. Ibrahim, Neelima. 2017. A War Heroine, I Speak. Trans. Fayeza Hasanat. Dhaka: Bangla Academy. Jahan, Rounaq. 2013. ‘Genocide in Bangladesh’, in Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, (eds), Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, pp. 245–265, New York: Routledge.

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Leydesdorff, Selma, et al. 1999. ‘Introduction’, in Kim Lacy Rogers, Selma Leydesdorff, and Graham Dawson (eds.), Trauma and Life Stories: International Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Linton, Suzannah. 2010. ‘Completing the Circle: Accountability for the Crimes of the 1971 Bangladesh War of Liberation’, Criminal Law Forum, 21: 191–311. Mookherjee, Nayanika. 2006. “Remembering to Forget’: Public Secrecy and Memory of Sexual Violence in the Bangladesh War of 1971’, The Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 12(2): 433–450. Mookherjee, Nayanika. 2015. The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Rahman, Zia Haider. 2014. In the Light of What We Know. London: Picador. Saikia, Yasmin. 2004. ‘Beyond the Archive of Silence: Narratives of Violence of the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh’, History Workshop Journal, 58: 275–287. Sharlach, Lisa. 2000. ‘Rape as Genocide: Bangladesh, the Former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda’, New Political Science, 22(1): 89–102.

8 SPEAKING IN FRAGMENTS The Birangona-mother’s Traumatic Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War Shamika Shabnam

Introduction Muktijuddho, or the Liberation War of Bangladesh, was a nine-month-long war between East Pakistan and West Pakistan. The war officially started on March 26, 1971, and ended on December 16, 1971, with Bangladesh, former East Pakistan, emerging as an independent nation (Dowlah 2016: 53, 64; Saikia 2011: 39, 44). The Liberation War occurred because of cultural, linguistic, and political disparities between the eastern and western parts of Pakistan. For example, dominant West Pakistani policymakers, along with East Pakistani government accomplices, limited East Pakistani peoples’ participation in national politics (Jahan 1972: 29). The Pakistani military and Bangladeshi freedom fighters or liberation fighters who went to battle during 1971, or muktijouddhas, fought against each other in this war. On March 25, 1971, East Pakistan was proclaimed an independent nation and officially renamed Bangladesh. The declaration of independence was announced by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (popularly referred to as Mujib) (Dowlah 2016: 54), Bangladesh’s first prime minister and a well-known political figure who led the country to its sovereignty. In Bangladesh, the war of 1971 ‘is celebrated as the War of Liberation from Pakistan’ (Saikia 2011: 3). Moreover, the male muktijouddha is praised in Bangladeshi nationalist discourse for his contribution toward attaining independence. For example, in 1971, the Bangladeshi foreign minister, Moshtaque Ahmed, lauds the muktijouddhas as ‘heroic men’ while the wartime prime minister, Tajuddin Ahmed, commends their ‘courage, their dedication, and their … acceptance of hardship [on the battleground]’ (Biswas 2005: 49, 131). Similarly, the author Faruq Aziz Khan holds, ‘many … unsung heroes laid down their lives to liberate the mother land [sic]’ (1993: 194). Aziz Khan echoes the writer and journalist Anisul Hoque, who interconnects the freedom fighter with the motherland and human mother in his DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-12

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semi-­fictional text Freedom’s Mother.1 Hoque’s text illustrates the freedom fighter’s mother as the ideal mother who sends her son to war to liberate the motherland. Freedom’s Mother pays homage to two such mothers: Jahanara Imam, mother of muktijouddha Shafi Imam Rumi, and Safia Begum, mother of muktijouddha Magfar Ahmed Chowdhury Azad. Hoque asks in his book, ‘Will you find another mother like Jahanara Imam? … Will there ever be a mother like Azad’s? … Can all this go [to] waste? The fighters’ blood, the mothers’ tears’ (2012: 347). Hoque urges us to create collective awareness of the muktijouddha’s mother, who sacrifices her son because it is considered a worthwhile loss, for the birth of a new future, a new nation. If, in Hoque’s view, we must acknowledge the wartime contributions and suffering of the muktijouddha’s mother, then should we not also acknowledge the impact the war had on the non-muktijouddha’s mother and other women? This question steers my inquiry into the story of the woman and mother discussed in this chapter. I explore the woman who was sexually violated during the Liberation War and who is classified in post-1971 Bangladesh as a birangona, a Bangla word that translates to ‘war heroine’. As notes Bina D’Costa, ‘As a term, “Birangona” was introduced by the first prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (“Mujib”), in order to “acknowledge” the “sacrifice” of women for the freedom of Bangladesh in 1971’ (2011: 120). I use the expression, ‘birangona-mother’ to address the intersectionality of being a mother and a survivor of rape and sexual violence during the war.2 The birangona-mother, I argue, offers an alternate historical understanding of the war that disrupts the singular dominant construct of the muktijouddha’s mother, who is glorified in nationalist texts. More precisely, I examine the intersectional identity of the poor birangona-mother, whose voice is missing from dominant narratives invested in stories by upper-middle-class mothers of male freedom fighters. An example of an upper-middle-class mother of a muktijouddha is Jahanara Imam, a teacher and author well-known in Bangladesh, who remembers her muktijouddha son Rumi in her 1998 autobiography, Of Blood and Fire. Imam’s poignant memoir is also a testament to her privilege as a ‘valiant’ muktijouddha’s ‘iconic’ mother (Naznin 2015, ‘The Shaheed Janani’), whose writing enriches Liberation War history. In Hoque’s view, Imam contributes to nationalist archives through writing ‘about mothers like her who lost their children to the war’ (2012: 349). The phrase ‘mothers like her’ signifies the freedom fighter’s mother. In contrast, the financially and socially underprivileged birangona-mother’s testimony remains unheard. She is not the mother of a muktijouddha, so her story doesn’t fit into nationalist middle-class narratives that praise the freedom fighter. In this chapter, I call for a change in the way the nation recalls the birangona-mother and, thereby, the birangona. Listening to the birangona-mother when she speaks and understanding how she speaks are strong catalysts for undoing her national marginalization. How the birangona remembers and speaks of the war is evident through the works of postcolonial South Asian theorists like Yasmin Saikia (2011), Nayanika Mookherjee (2015), and Bina D’Costa (2011). While D’Costa close-reads women’s

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written testimonies (2011: 110–143), Saikia explores the affective state of women who recount traumatic war memories while speaking to her (2011: 109–157). Mookherjee elaborates on Saikia and focuses on the importance of what is left untold by female survivors (2015: 20, 108). Mookherjee further examines how women’s trauma lives within their bodies (2015: 115) and how these women hint at their trauma through speaking of quotidian forms of pain. I expand this body of postcolonial feminist scholarship through developing a sustained conversation on how the birangona-mother’s trauma is inscribed through her words and her doubly painful act of simultaneously remembering her sexual abuse and talking about the violence that her child underwent. I analyze the story of a birangona-mother, Komola Begum, a wartime rape survivor whose account is recorded in the 2017 Bangla testimony collection, Birangona Noy Muktijouddha (‘Freedom Fighter, Not War Heroine’), edited by Sharifa Bulbul. There are a few women’s written and oral testimonies about the war. For example, the 2018 book, Ami Birangona Bolchi (‘The War Heroine Speaks’), and the 2000 Bangla documentary, Narir Kotha: Women and War (Masud and Masud 2000), portray survivors who speak of their wartime experiences. Birangona Noy Muktijouddha adds to the existing archives of women’s written testimonies and documentaries. It needs to be talked about because it mostly focuses on birangona-mothers, who don’t fit the typical picture of the muktijouddha’s mother, and show how class, wartime atrocities, and motherhood are all connected.

Contextualizing the Birangona-mother In this section, I examine how the expression birangona-mother must be understood in opposition to the national and social conception of the term birangona in post-1971 or post-war Bangladesh. The signification of birangona is evident in Mookherjee’s discussion of Gayatri Spivak’s observation of the term. In Mookherjee’s words, ‘Spivak critically pointed out to me that the justification behind the term birangona constructs rape as a sacrifice in exchange for which the country gained independence’ (2015: 150, emphasis in original). Mookherjee continues, ‘Spivak pointed out that, ironically, bir [heroic and valiant] is etymologically a male term, used here to bestow heroism on women raped during the war’ (2015: 150, emphasis in original). Spivak contends that the Liberation War-time rape survivor is romanticized as a war heroine. The individual trauma of survivors is subsumed within a larger framework of heroic sacrifice. The use of ‘bir’ in bir-angona, evokes male freedom fighters, characterized in nationalist discourse as bir jouddhas. Here, bir jouddha symbolizes a valiant fighter or a war hero, and the phrase is used to praise male freedom fighters who went to battle during the 1971 war (Biswas 2005; Khan 1993). While the bir jouddha man is heavily lauded in government archives and books, the birangona is simply labeled ‘war heroine’ and left out of dominant war discourse. In elaborating on the concept of birangona, Mookherjee contends, ‘Though Sheikh Mujib might have coined this term with a view to reinstate the women socially, the visibility and exclusivity that they were consequently accorded ended

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up ostracizing them’ (2015: 151). The nation-state sought to reintegrate survivors back into the folds of society. One way in which this reintegration took place was via the state-issued appeal for men to marry survivors for money provided by the government (Mookherjee 2015: 144). In this context, birangona is not simply an aestheticized expression of rape survivors. It underscores the state’s systemic erasure of women’s history of sexual violence through a regulatory rehabilitation of survivors within the realm of the normative and familial, that which is considered socially acceptable. Women’s rehabilitation becomes a means to generate the collective suppression or forgetting of traumatic memories that would rupture the celebratory history of how Bangladesh attained independence through war. The state’s use of the word birangona to implement the erasure of women’s past is disrupted at the social level through the public usage of a pejorative concept, barangona. In Bengali, notes Bina D’Costa, ‘a term phonetically similar to ‘Birangona’ – barangona – means a prostitute or a loose woman, and has been used in some instances to mock the survivors’ (2011: 120, emphasis in original). ‘Barangona’ becomes a word that the public uses to not only scorn the survivor but to emphatically remind her of her brutal encounter with rape. A social shaming of both the birangona and the sex worker takes place through the linking of one with the other. To D’Costa’s comment, Mookherjee adds, people … referred to them [survivors] derogatorily as barangonas, bara, a crude obscenity for “penis” (thus they were calling them “women of the penis”), thereby branding the women with the words of the penetration and rape they had been subjected to. (2015: 150, emphasis in original) Barangona not only ascribes war heroines as raped but ‘rapable’ (Saikia 2011: 100). The phrase ‘women of the penis’, classifies women who ‘deserve’ to be subjected to sexual violence because they are socially viewed as making themselves available for rape. Numerous survivors, on the other hand, debunk the social and national meanings of birangona. For instance, a survivor named Shefali narrates, ‘I am a war heroine in body, soul, and heart. … I am a birangona, you all turned me into barangona’ (Ibrahim 2018: 94, my translation). She identifies as a birangona without internalizing the term’s social castigation. Shefali’s ‘body, soul, and heart’ carry memories of a past that enables her to reconstruct an individual understanding of the term birangona. She does not state who a birangona is but reinforces who she is not: a ‘rapable’ (Saikia 2011: 100) woman. Similarly, another survivor named Moyna affirms, ‘I am a birangona. There are those who see me as barangona’ (Ibrahim 2018: 151, my translation). Both Moyna and Shefali confirm birangona as the ‘survivor’s word’ while inscribing barangona as a concept that reinforces the public’s lack of collective compassion for survivors. In this chapter, my use of birangona adheres to Moyna’s and Shefali’s reclamation of the term as opposed to state-based and public definitions that either romanticize, efface, or stigmatize survivors. My analysis does not portray the

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birangona-mother as a figure of sacrifice for the nation. Rather, the ­birangona-mother is a survivor who, as I discuss below, remembers her past in fragments.

Pain and Trauma: Remnants of Komola Begum’s Testimony This section analyzes a birangona-mother, Komola Begum’s, remembrance of the war in the testimony collection, Birangona Noy Muktijouddha (‘Freedom Fighter Not War Heroine’). Begum’s first-person account is interspersed with third-person reportage by the collection’s editor, Sharifa Bulbul, who documents the following: They slap Komola Begum and throw her into a lake. She manages to get up, but they kick her violently in the back. One of them kicks Begum’s child three times with his boot. The daughter is half dead. One [soldier] remains with Begum while the other takes the semi-conscious child elsewhere. While speaking of her memories Begum’s eyes become rife with tears. (Bulbul 2017: 52, my translation) Bulbul presents a narrative form that depicts a linear connection of consecutive events. She begins Begum’s story with the Bangla word ‘prothome’, which translates to ‘firstly’ (Bulbul 2017: 52). Bulbul records, ‘firstly, they slap Komola Begum and throw her into the lake. [then] She manages to get up, but they kick her violently in the back’ (2017: 52). Bulbul incorporates into her writing sporadic moments of Begum’s visible affective response where she cries profusely. Begum, according to Bulbul, cries when she talks about what happened in a step-by-step way. Bulbul’s notion of Begum’s pain and recollection, however, does not quite capture the complexities of how the Liberation War-time rape survivor remembers the past. One wonders if Begum, while speaking with Bulbul, provided a chronological account of her physical violence that led up to her sexual violence. In Saikia’s words, ‘Retrieving survivors’ memories is, of course, not an easy, straightforward process. The memories of violence are inchoate; there is nothing coherent about the violence that has left survivors asking how to tell the experiences’ (2011: 8). Saikia’s contention pertains to women who underwent rape and sexual violence during the Liberation War. She describes survivors’ memories as ‘inchoate’ and thereby fragmented. Saikia argues that the ‘trauma of violence’ affects how survivors begin to un-think, let alone speak of sexual atrocity (2011: 8). Un-think, in this context, denotes how snippets of their memories are either ‘forgotten’ or ‘suppressed’ (Saikia 2011: 8). This form of suppression or forgetting happens at an individual level and is distinct from the national marginalization of women’s stories. The survivor copes with her trauma through both an inadvertent and a conscious unremembering of certain aspects of the past. The interconnection among trauma, (un)remembering, and speaking in remnants is relevant to Komola Begum’s testimony. During her communication with Bulbul, Begum indicates how narrating her past for the public to know would only

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worsen her already existing social ostracism. As Begum recounts, ‘it is difficult to live in the village. … Many people classify us as wicked women who should be expelled from the village’ (Bulbul 2017: 54, my translation). Through the use of ‘us’, Begum suggests that there are other birangonas and possibly birangona-mothers in her village, Bindupara, northern Bangladesh. The people of Bindupara repudiate Begum and other survivors into the realm of the abject. Begum’s status as an abject reinforces her social castigation as the disposable other. The phrase ‘should be expelled from the village’, signifies a sense of collective duty among the people to rid the village of birangonas. The public imagines a moral boundary that separates the ‘respectful’ village community from birangonas ascribed as ‘wicked women’. This boundary is based on an idea of misogyny, which is evident through the Bangla word ‘kharap’, which translates to ‘wicked’ or ‘morally corrupt’. Begum’s stigmatization as ‘kharap mey [wicked woman]’ (Bulbul 2017: 54, my translation) becomes a synonym for both ‘prostitute’ (D’Costa 2011: 120) and ‘barangona’ or ‘woman of the penis’ (Mookherjee 2012: 1593) who makes herself available for rape. If, as Begum states, it is difficult for her to reside in the village currently, then what happens to her once her testimony is published? How did the nation view her then? Is she allowed to remain in the peripheries of Bindupara? It appears that Begum does not want to explicitly disclose her memories of 1971 in fear of physical exclusion from her village and her becoming a subject of public scrutiny. Often, Begum talks about the past in pieces, which implies that she and her daughter were abused. Begum recollects the way her daughter gets kicked repeatedly by a soldier with his boot (Bulbul 2017: 52). She does not overtly speak of her daughter’s wounds; instead, she uses words like ‘half dead’ and ‘semi-conscious’ (Bulbul 2017: 52) to inscribe the reality of her daughter’s suffering. Begum focuses on particular words, namely ‘boot’ and ‘military’ (Bulbul 2017: 52–53) to draw attention to the intersectional nature of militarized brutality. She uses ‘they’ to classify the perpetrators, which marks them as faceless people who wear boots as part of their uniform. The perpetrators’ boots function as a microcosmic representation of the ruling military regime that enacted systemic violence against civilians before and during the Liberation War.3 In the context of Begum and her daughter, this form of violence is determined by gender and power structures, whereby military men in boots injure an ‘innocent daughter’ (Bulbul 2017: 52) and her mother, who do not have the financial resources to escape and protect themselves from the war.4 Begum notes, ‘I am a poor individual. From where am I going to get money?’ (Bulbul 2017: 54). She indicates that her poverty is what resulted in her and her daughter’s physical harm by the perpetrators. The soldier’s boot becomes an object of violence, which is made to ‘kick’ and thereby dehumanize the poor. ‘Kick’ becomes a key word that Begum uses to illustrate a link between her and her daughter. Bulbul interprets Begum’s testimony thus, ‘[T]hey kick her violently in the back. One of them kicks Begum’s child three times’ (2017: 52). Begum witnesses her daughter’s physical abuse (in the form of kicking) while getting violated (kicked) herself. She undergoes multiple modes of pain: that of being kicked, seeing her daughter being kicked, and recalling these memories. Upon witnessing her

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daughter’s pain, Begum turns it into her own. Her daughter’s pain lives through her body, which is also the bearer of her own pain. This form of double pain, as a result of being kicked, is complex. On the one hand, it connects her to a harrowing past, while on the other hand, it symbolically ties her to her daughter. The very memory of her daughter being physically harmed was one that she could not forget, for it would disrupt Begum’s link with her. Through an ambiguous means of speaking and unspeaking, Begum reveals memories of herself and her daughter. Bulbul cites Begum verbatim accordingly, ‘[T]hey torture me in the lake itself. … My daughter was right by my side. They did not even spare my one-and-a-half-year-old daughter. They hit her. They tortured a lot’ (2017: 53, my translation). Begum uses the word ‘nirjaton’ or ‘torture’, which has the connotation of rape. Post-war Bangladesh signifies rape with certain expressions. For instance, according to Nayanika Mookherjee, ‘the war heroines themselves referred to it as “secret words,” “the event” and “loss”’ (2015: 109). She adds, ‘The Bengali word for rape—dhorshon—was rarely used’ (2015: 109, emphasis in original). In Mookherjee’s contention, birangonas evoke rape as a loss of honor (shomman) and respect (ijjot), which extends to their family and community at large. Shomman means honor with regard to family and community. The term is used in the social context of the survivor’s ‘loss of honor’, which extends to the loss of family, community, and nation’s honor. At the same time, the term ijjot is used in the social context of the survivor’s loss of ‘respect’, which extends to the loss of family, community and nation’s respect. This idea parallels that of Begum, who is deemed a pariah amongst the Bindupara village community, as evident through the public’s remark, ‘wicked women […] should be expelled from the village. (Bulbul 2017: 54) The term dhorshon (rape) is not just socially reprimanded but elicits certain stark memories of the past that Begum would rather not remember. Begum’s ‘secret word’ (Mookherjee 2015: 109) allows her to allude to her rape without overtly classifying herself as raped. It is this reference to rape that turns nirjaton (torture; a term that alludes to rape and sexual violence) into a word, which enables Begum to cope with her trauma as she recalls fragments of the past. Her narrative appears more disjointed as she speaks of her daughter using the following phrases: ‘tortured a lot’ and ‘hit her’ (Bulbul 2017: 53). Here, Begum gestures to her daughter’s physical and sexual violence. Her account, ‘[T]hey did not even spare my one-and-a-half-year-old daughter’ (Bulbul 2017: 53), subtly echoes that her child might have also been raped. Begum provides another evocation of her daughter’s suffering from sexual brutality when she narrates, ‘onek ottachar koreche (‘they tortured a lot’)’ (Bulbul 2017: 53, my translation). Ottachar, a synonym for nirjaton, translates to torment and torture; a term that alludes to rape and sexual violence. The absent pronoun ‘us’ in the phrase ‘they tortured [us] a lot’ presents Begum’s narrative as one that is ruptured in both memory and language.

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In relation to Begum, I reiterate Mookherjee’s concept of language in her discourse of birangonas. For Mookherjee, language signifies ‘words that trickle out, showing the impact of violence … by means of everyday idioms rather than articulating it explicitly’ (2015: 108). Terms such as torture, kick, and hit, which conspicuously affirm violence, become quotidian words for Begum that reflect her painful memory with snippets of muddled accounts and missing pronouns. An absent unspoken pronoun creates a hazy story where the statement, ‘they tortured a lot’ (Bulbul 2017: 53) does not clearly reveal who, between Begum and her daughter, was sexually violated. The missing pronoun hints at Begum’s (perhaps conscious) unremembering of parts of her traumatic past even as she attempts to remember this past. On the birangona’s traumatic memories, Mookherjee states, ‘The metaphors of everyday activities signal the inexpressibility of the trauma encoded in the body’ (2015: 115). Mookherjee argues that the birangona’s trauma includes ‘pain and suffering’ (2015: 115), which lives within the body and becomes a throbbing reminder of her wartime rape. She provides the example of a war heroine, Rohima, who recounts that ‘this monthly nightmare would not let her forget ‘the incident’ even if she wanted to’ (Mookherjee 2015: 113). Here, Rohima talks of menstrual cramps within the body while fleetingly referring to her wartime sexual violation as ‘the incident’. Mookherjee’s idea of trauma as a form of pain is relevant to Begum’s trauma (pain) that exists both within and beyond her body. Begum’s trauma can be further understood through Sara Ahmed’s argument on pain. Ahmed contends, ‘Pain involves the violation or transgression of the border between inside and outside, and it is through this transgression that I feel the border in the first place’ (2014: 27). Ahmed observes how pain not only stays within the body but also resides outwardly. In Begum’s context, Bulbul narrates her affective state as follows: ‘While speaking of her memories [her] eyes become rife with tears’ (2017: 52). Begum’s skin symbolizes a boundary-in-flesh that enables her pain and trauma to straddle between the inner and the outer. Her tears not only bear testament to her internal pain but also metaphorically inscribe her trauma on the skin. It is through her tears that Begum makes palpable her invisible scars as remnants of her double pain. Bulbul’s observation indicates that Begum pauses while speaking and then starts to cry. Begum speaks her story in both tongues and tears. At a symbolic level, her tears represent shards of those memories that Begum struggles to articulate via words. Her teary eyes reflect her fragmented inward eye that looks within as a means of recalling aspects of her traumatic past.

Negotiating Nationalist History through Memory Snippets Bulbul’s work of bringing attention to financially underprivileged birangona-mothers, like Begum, must be acknowledged. At the same time, how she construes Begum’s wartime suffering is reminiscent of a larger political framework that appropriates and homogenizes the survivor’s experience. The national homogenizing of the birangona is apparent in Mookherjee’s discussion of the public visibility of three

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survivors in the late 1990s. Mookherjee holds, ‘various national and regional programs … featured the stories of three birangonas—Moyna, Kajoli, and Rohima— whose experiences have also been documented in videos, newspapers, and oral history projects’ (2015: 47). ‘Politicians and media representatives urged these women to “cry their own tears,” represent their pain, and be a birangona. Here, going public is what gained the women the identity of war heroines’ (Mookherjee 2015: 58). The survivors, Moyna, Kajoli, and Rohima, are asked to showcase their individual pain through collective tears. The act of crying inscribes their status as victims whose visible suffering invokes the urgency of eliminating rajakars, or war collaborators, from post-war Bangladesh. The rajakar is a Bangladeshi war collaborator who worked with the West Pakistani military to perpetrate violence against unarmed civilians in East Pakistan/Bangladesh. Bangladeshi war discourse and national media derogate rajakars for helping West Pakistani soldiers commit wartime atrocities against civilians, especially women (Ibrahim 2018: 49, 97; Ora Agaro Jon [‘A Team of Eleven’] 1972). Multiple political leaders, freedom fighters, and government officials used women’s stories as leverage to punish war collaborators deemed national traitors (Mookherjee 2015: 58). The birangona, nationally excluded and socially castigated, here becomes a patriot whose evident pain works in the nation’s interest. On a similar note, Bulbul portrays Begum as one such patriotic birangona who visibly demonstrates her pain through tears. In contrast, what I argue is that Begum’s tears do not illustrate her as the ideal birangona but instead foreground her intersectional identity as a birangona-mother. She cries profusely, not only as a means to articulate her pain but also the pain of her daughter. Her tears are an outward representation of the symbolic tie she develops with her daughter through bearing double pain and narrating her disjointed story. Begum’s tears subtly echo both her and her daughter’s memories that nationalist history omits. Begum’s snippets of the past, such as ‘hit her’ and ‘tortured’ (Bulbul 2017: 53), disrupt the nationalist formation of the birangona’s pain, which eliminates the actuality of the survivors’ complex trauma from dominant history. On the birangona’s trauma, a Bangladeshi government official reckons, ‘poor women … feel less trauma, pain, and shame’ (Mookherjee 2015: 230). The official suggests that trauma is directly proportional to a survivor’s social class position. The phrase ‘feel less trauma’ implies that the financially underprivileged birangona does not render her sexual violence painful or traumatic enough, if not at all. Begum contests this notion through affirming that the poor birangona-mother’s traumatic impact of violence destroys her ability to speak of the past in a manner that is deemed ‘coherent’ (Saikia 2011: 8). In engaging with Saikia’s notion of ‘inchoate’ memories (2011: 8) and Mookherjee’s idea of trauma within the body (2015: 115), I have contended that Begum’s dispersed testimony provides an alternate historical telling of the Liberation War. This form of telling comes with risks for the survivor, such as social repudiation in the case of Begum. Women’s acts of remembering themselves is a deeply affective process that involves suppressing and forgetting as a way to deal with trauma and to, at the very least, continue remaining within the

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margins of society. Their painful stories are crucial for negotiating the nation’s uniform portrayal of the muktijouddha as well as the muktijouddha’s mother. More importantly, listening to women/birangonas/birangona-mothers is a step toward facilitating their rightful acceptance in both national memory and social life.

Notes 1 In Freedom’s Mother, the author infuses elements of fiction into the historical account of a freedom fighter, Magfar Ahmed Chowdhury Azad, and his mother, Safia Begum. The author, Hoque himself, states, ‘Memory and myth mix to spice up the past, make their collective remembrance heady’ (2012: 11). 2 My use of the concept ‘birangona-mother’ is different from Bina D’Costa’s notion of ‘Birangona-Mother’ (2011: 140), which classifies Liberation War-time rape survivors who were impregnated. 3 In the 1950s and 1960s, East Pakistan witnessed military attacks on civilians who protested their exclusion from national politics. On March 25, 1971, army officials launched Operation Searchlight, a planned military attack on East Pakistani civilians, namely teachers, students, and politicians who strongly supported the creation of Bangladesh as an independent nation (Iqbal 2008: 8). 4 During the Liberation War, many civilians went from East Pakistan to India to protect themselves from genocide. According to Iqbal, ‘One million [1 crore] East Pakistani refugees went to India. Bangladesh’s population then was seventy million [7 crore]. This means that 1 out of 7 people sought refuge in India’ (2008:10).

References Ahmed, Sara. 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Biswas, Sukumar, ed. 2005. Mujibnagar Government Documents 1971: Bangladesh Liberation War. Dhaka: Mowla Brothers. Bulbul, Sharifa. 2017. Birangona Noy Muktijouddha [‘Freedom Fighter not War Heroine’]. Dhaka: Balaka Prokshon. D’Costa, Bina. 2011. Nationbuilding, Gender and War Crimes in South Asia. New York: Routledge. Dowlah, Caf. 2016. The Bangladesh Liberation War, the Sheikh Mujib Regime, and Contemporary Controversies. Lanham: Lexington Books. Hoque, Anisul. 2012. Freedom’s Mother. Trans. and edited by Falguni Ray New Delhi: Palimpsest Publishing House. Ibrahim, Nilima. 2018. Ami Birangona Bolchi [‘The War Heroine Speaks’]. Dhaka: Jagriti Prokashoni. Imam, Jahanara. 1998. Of Blood and Fire: The Untold Story of Bangladesh’s War of Independence. Translated and edited by Mustafizur Rahman. Dhaka: The University Press Limited. Iqbal, Mohammed Zafar. 2008. Muktijuddher Itihash [‘The History of the Liberation War’]. Dhaka: Protiti. Islam, C.S. (dir.). 1972. Ora Egaro Jon [‘A Team of Eleven’]. Dhaka: Star Film Corporation Ltd. Jahan, Rounaq. 1972. Pakistan: Failure in National Integration. New York: Columbia University Press. Khan, Faruq Aziz. 1993. Spring 1971: A Centre Stage Account of Bangladesh War of Liberation. Dhaka: The University Press Limited.

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Masud, T., and C. Masud. (Dir.). 2000. Narir Kotha: Women and War—Trauma and Triumph of Women in’71. Dhaka: Audiovision and Ain-O-Salish Kendra. Mookherjee, Nayanika. 2012. ‘The absent piece of skin: Gendered, racialized and territorial inscriptions of sexual violence during the Bangladesh war’, Modern Asian Studies, 46(6): 1572–1601. Mookherjee, Nayanika. 2015. The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971. Durham: Duke University Press. Naznin, Farzana. 2015. ‘The ‘Shaheed Janani’ [Mother of Martyrs] in Our History’, The Daily Observer, https://www.observerbd.com/2015/05/04/86868.php (accessed on 21 February 2022). Saikia, Yasmin. 2011. Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971. New Delhi: Duke University Press.

9 COMPLEXION, INFERTILITY, AND SEXUAL ORIENTATION Narratives of Trauma in Fayeza Hasanat’s The Bird Catcher and Other Stories Goutam Karmakar

Introduction It is worth noting that Bangladesh underwent numerous historical phases in its quest for identity during and after British colonial rule – East Bengal (1905–1911) and East Pakistan (1947–1971). These numerous historical phases make it exceedingly difficult to periodize the canon of Bangladeshi literature in English, a genre that is likely the least evolved and least well known in the subcontinent, compared to its Indian, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan counterparts. While the subcontinent’s historical transitions have shaped the identities of writers, artists, and ordinary people in Bangladesh over the past two centuries, the unique tradition of Bangladeshi literature in English has not received the scholarly recognition it deserves. The common reason why it took a long time for English literary cultural practice to gain a foothold in independent Bangladesh and why early works were so sparse seems to be that Bangladesh was born out of a language movement and formed exclusively on the basis of language identity. Additionally, Bengali was put in place as the single most important medium of instruction in the educational institutions of this newly independent country (Quayum and Mahmudul Hasan 2021: 3). However, as community awareness of the 1971 Liberation War waned, the necessity of adapting English – the increasingly globalized language – became more reasonable. Thus, English language education began expanding and gradually reclaiming its pre-­eminence in Bangladesh. And it has regained vitality in the modern era as writers in Bangladesh, and the diaspora have produced English writings both in the original language and in translated versions (Quayum and Mahmudul Hasan 2018: 1). It is worth noting that the literary works of Bangladeshi diaspora writers have made a significant contribution to the increasing popularity of Bangladeshi literature in English and the Anglophone literary tradition.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-13

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Bangladeshi-born and US-based Fayeza Hasanat’s literary works, including translations, bear witness to her Bangladeshi-American ideology, cultural history, and values and norms. The Bird Catcher and Other Stories (2018), Hasanat’s debut collection of eight short stories, brings to light the traumatic narratives of the hardships of Bangladeshi women and men – struggles that are frequently fueled by misogyny or other systems of oppression. Hasanat here seeks to establish the psychic correlations between trauma and literature, resonating with the discourse of Foucault and Caruth. While Freud himself turns to literature to illustrate the symptoms he observes in his patients, Caruth Caruth argues: If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relations between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience precisely meet. (1996: 3) Like Caruth, Hasanat seeks to depict certain individual as well as collective traumatic experiences through a collection of multi-layered stories about gender bias, infertility, racial prejudice, xenophobia, and the difficulties associated with forging a new identity in terms of a plethora of external diversity. It is interesting to note that this collection was published by Jaded Ibis Press, a feminist press dedicated to publishing socially oriented literary works with a strong emphasis on the discourses of racial minorities, individuals with disabilities, and other disempowered and demographically vulnerable perspectives. Experiences of Bangladeshi diaspora communities, structural subjugation of women, and the strive to make a connection in a language other than one’s own serve as the backdrop for these stories that not only make readers feel incredibly intimate but also encompass the traumatic experiences of many individuals from varying backgrounds (Pendleton 2018; Tankersley 2019). In an interview with Deborah Kalb, Hasanat states that this collection is issuedriven, as she intends to discuss the marginalized, the suppressed, the restrained, and the unnoticed but resilient voices of women and men of South Asia. Regarding the varied issues addressed in this book, she further opines, The central theme is the role and representation of Bangladeshi women at home and abroad. A woman’s social, mental, or physical health, and her place in her house and the world are the recurrent themes. Family bonding, loneliness, depression, struggle for identity, discrimination based on skin color or sexual orientation, and violence—over a woman’s mind and body—these themes also run through the collection. (Kalb 2018: n.p.) By taking into consideration issues like complexion, infertility, and sexual orientation, this essay seeks to depict how these stories showcase varied social evils and traumatic experiences as well as memories of certain individuals.

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On Being Dark: Skin-Tone Trauma Similar to racial issues, skin tone and perceptions of colorism – an often-overlooked form of prejudice that favors lighter-skinned individuals over darker-skinned ones – may indeed lead to psychological trauma. In the short story ‘Bride of the Vanishing Sun’, specific embarrassing instances in the lives of Aandhi and her daughter Shila demonstrate how their subjective, associative, and collaborative situations of colorism, wherein they feel uncomfortable, flawed, and stigmatized due to their skin tone, are traumatic. The first chapter of this story focuses on Aandhi and her family, who have a tough time finding a suitable bridegroom for her due to her dark complexion. While Aandhi’s two fair-skinned older sisters have encountered no impediments on their journey to marital adjustment, Aandhi’s mother, Sufia, has always understood that her youngest daughter Aandhi’s destiny will be as bleak as her complexion. While Sufia’s seven sons observe how their younger sister Aandhi grows ‘like an ugly mole, a wart, or an incurable scar right on top of their nose’, they continued to observe the scar expand ‘bigger and darker every day’ (Hasanat 2018: 30) and dearly wish she would disappear somewhere, somehow. This outlook demonstrates how a family desperately wants to get rid of the issues of colorism. Colorism, which is outlined as the inequitable treatment and discrimination of people depending on the lightness or darkness of their complexions, accords specific privileges to fair-skinned individuals, albeit not predictably, within and between races and ethnicities (Landor and Smith 2019: 797). Aandhi, the tenth child of Sufia, was born during the day when a monsoon storm was intensifying the darkening sky, and her grandmother’s remark on her birth exemplifies the shame and embarrassment associated with a dark complexion: ‘Look! This one has absorbed all the darkness of the monsoon storm in her skin! You should name her after this weather and call her a storm—Aandhi!’ (Hasanat 2018: 31). Even Sufia keeps blaming herself for succumbing to the irresistible urge to sit by the window and observe an evening storm, believing that the storm has entered her body and formed a dark skin around Aandhi’s body. Sufia and others do their utmost to conceal Aandhi’s dark complexion when her uncle manages to invite Fazlu, a completely wealthy but insane man who is occasionally possessed by a jinn (any of a class of spirits, lower than the angels, capable of appearing in human and animal forms and influencing humankind for either good or evil) as a potential groom. On thinking of Aandhi’s future pregnancy, her grandmother specifically prohibits her from sitting by a window after dark or during a storm. She also informs Aandhi: Sit during midday when the sun is right in the middle of the sky. If your baby is born when the sun shines so bright that your eyes go blind if you want to look, then her skin will be white as sunlight—like those memsahibs! (Hasanat 2018: 33) In this context, memsahibs resemble light and fair-skinned women. According to studies, individuals with fair skin are accorded socio-economic privileges due to their closer morphological similarities to whites and their presumed higher societal

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value compared to those with darker complexions (Dixon and Telles 2017: 411). As soon as Fazlu cautiously observes Aandhi, he rejects her, stating, ‘I am full and sleepy, and this woman is very dark—like…like…Bholi, our black cow. I can’t marry a Bholi. Never!’ (Hasanat 2018: 34). Aandhi is abandoned, like the shadow of a solitary black cow with dark, profound eyes grazing in an empty room. After this shameful repudiation, Aandhi’s family members consider suggesting that this kind of occasion should be held either during the day, when no one would have been able to detect her complexion under the vibrant bright lights, or in the evening, when a dark woman appears acceptable under the setting sun. Shortly afterward, Abdur Rahman is observed trying to prepare a tea party for the prospective bridegroom’s family, and Aandhi’s grandmother has compelled her to wear a yellow sari. Earlier that same day, Aandhi had received a raw turmeric therapy in which her entire body was covered in a turmeric coating, and she was instructed to sit still in a darkened room for two hours so that her dark skin could soak up some of the orange hue from the turmeric mixture. According to Angela R. Dixon and Edward E. Telles, this preparation of skin-lightening techniques as logical and reasonable continues to draw intensity from conceptual frameworks of skin color as a form of capital, capital in terms of getting a social status and avoiding further traumatic rejections here. They further assert that ‘the disproportionate use of skin-lightening products by women highlights that both ideas of beauty and the consequences of skin color are undeniably gendered’ (Dixon and Telles 2017: 412). The turmeric paste that has been made for Aandhi is meant to make her skin brighter, and the yellow sari is meant to make her skin even brighter. Like on the previous occasion, the groom’s father, observing Aandhi, remarks: ‘She is unusually dark. Very, very dark. My son is a white sahib compared to her’ (Hasanat 2018: 38). It is important to note that the groom’s father’s ‘fetishization of fair skin as a random or benign aesthetic preference’ certainly ‘neglects the power and continuing vitality of the rhetoric of white supremacy throughout the world’ (Grewal 2009: 330). After some bribery agreements, Aandhi is finally wed to Nizam, who cannot see past her dark complexion. Her mother asks her motherin-law the cause of men’s inability to appreciate Aandhi’s beauty and see her attractiveness, only to discover that men are opportunists who can see what they would like to see. Aandhi’s traumatic memories associated with her family’s efforts to get a groom for her become apparent when she strives to find a suitable husband for her dark-skinned daughter, Shila. Aandhi feels like she has been ‘stuck in a tunnel of torment, trying to appease a defiant daughter who did not understand the magnitude of the misfortune imprinted on her skin!’ (Hasanat 2018: 40). Trauma here eludes comprehension and withstands illustration, conveying a ‘radical intensity’ that Michael S. Roth associates with dystopia. Roth remarks, Trauma, like utopia, designates phenomena that cannot be properly represented, but one characterized by radical intensity. A widespread longing for intensity has come to magnetize the concept of trauma, giving it a cultural currency far beyond the borders of psychology and psychoanalysis. Trauma

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has become the dystopia of the spirit, showing us much about our own preoccupations with catastrophe, memory, and the grave difficulties we seem to have in negotiating between the internal and external worlds. (Roth 2012: 90–91) This negotiating process between the internal and external worlds is immediately apparent when Aandhi becomes extremely upset, not with Shila, but with the entire world, and particularly with her neighbor’s dark-skinned daughter, who recently married an engineer and moved to California. Even Nizam is concerned about Shila, as she has retained Aandhi’s skinny body, dark eyes, and dark complexion. Shila desires to marry Ronnie, the man of her passion and the destination of her happiness, who later reveals himself to be an unprincipled lover. Ronni’s humility melted like ice when Shila approached him to safeguard her from the arranged marriage her parents had arranged for her. Ronni reminds her ‘of all the walls that [stands] between them: he [is] a rich man’s only son, and she [is] still a girl too brown to be accepted by his parents’ (Hasanat 2018: 43). Shila’s skin tone and behavioral patterns with colorism lead to psychological, personal, structural, and cognitive insecurity, which leads to severe trauma, or what Landor and Smith refer to as ‘skin-tone trauma’. They further assert that this ‘skin-tone trauma originates with colorism’ and ‘the complexities of skin-tone trauma as a result of intersectional identities based on existing social hierarchies’ (Landor and Smith 2019: 799). This social hierarchy compels Ronni to leave and merge into the throng of people, abandoning Shila to remain alone as a broken and dejected individual. Since childhood, Aandhi has always compelled Shila to drink milk containing a teaspoon of paste made from turmeric, orange peel, honey, and ground fenugreek seed, considering these parts of her daily skin care. This effort to integrate into a society constituted by cultural superiority, despite the psychological turmoil it has exacerbated, brings forth Ronald Hall’s concept of ‘the bleaching syndrome’. Whereas bleach is a verb that signifies to remove color or start making white, this syndrome describes how a dark-skinned individual not only strives to become light-skinned but also intends to assimilate with a white or fair-skinned individual. Besides that, ‘because degree of assimilation closely correlates with skin color according to dominant culture standards, light skin has emerged as one of the most critical ideals relative to degree of assimilation’ (Hall 1995: 173). Shila’s traumatic memories comprise her awareness that her mother’s special precautions epitomize her lack of elegance and fairness and that her thoughts and feelings, as well as her sufferings, are of little importance to anyone – neither Ronni nor the families of all the potential grooms who have rejected her because of her dark complexion. Shila is uncomfortable and embarrassed when her mother forces her to wear a yellow sari and her cousins take her to a beauty parlor to get her haircut. These processes that have the implication of whitening her looks to make her beautiful cause her to remember traumatic events associated with her skin tone. On the day of the bridal viewing, Shila’s magnificent yellow sari and 24-karat gold jewelry, however, fail to conceal her color of skin, and the prospective groom, Shifat Alam, believes

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that if she were not so dark, the chemistry between them would have worked. This perception points out that ‘dark-skinned individuals, especially women, tend to have fewer social, economic, and political resources to navigate life compared with their lighter skinned counterparts, resulting in constrained choices for healthy living and increased exposure to stressors’ (Hargrove 2019: 374). When Zinnah Alam, the eldest son of Mr. Alam, tells Nizam that all the daughters-in-law in their family are as white as talcum powder and that it is a requirement if one desires attractive children, skin-tone trauma becomes more perceptible. He also notes that the dark skin of her daughter can only be disregarded if he guarantees their bank loans without legal responsibility. Nizam accepts all of their terms, taking into account his daughter’s darker skin tone, which frequently leads to embarrassment, rejection, and traumatic experiences. Consequently, Aandhi and Shila’s narratives demonstrate the essentiality of dismantling this structural hegemony of color. As noted by Margaret L. Hunter, The systematic discrimination against dark-skinned people of color in the labor market, educational institutions, and marriage market create marked economic disadvantages. Without minimizing the psychological trauma of exclusion from ethnic communities, it is important to clarify that the disadvantages of dark skin still far outweigh the disadvantages of light. (2005: 110)

On Being a Hijra: Sexual Orientation and Trauma The original meaning of hijra in Urdu (Rehan et al. 2009: 380) and Hindi (Nanda 1999: 12) is eunuch or hermaphrodite, and hijras are ‘those people who are born as hermaphrodites or mixed unformed biological sexual characteristics’ (Mondal et al. 2020: 165). Rehan et al. (2009: 380) describe the word hijra as ‘an umbrella term used for those men, who are transgender, eunuch, transvestites, hermaphrodites or intersexed, bisexuals or homosexuals’. According to research findings (Khan et al. 2009: 441), hijras are positioned at the extreme end of the spectrum of exclusion and have no sociocultural environment in which they can lead a dignified life. Their deprivations stem from the fact that they are not recognized as distinct gendered humans beyond the male-female binary. Being outside of this norm has deterred them from securing a position in a societal structure with greater meaning, purpose, and safety. While they are subjected to physical, verbal, and sexual assault, inordinate stereotyping devalues their sense of self-worth and social norms. Hasanat’s short story ‘The Hyacinth Boy’ certainly talks about this social exclusion and physical abuse of Shojol, whose sexual orientation posits him in the paradigm of non-normativity. Shojol and his friends Rodela, Rana, and Tito are seen attempting to catch fish from a bridge in the opening sequence of the narrative. When Shojol announces that he will be leaving on the ‘7th of next month’, the demeanor of their happy adda (a conversation among a group of people) suddenly becomes intense. He states that

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he will depart by train, and in the course of this journey across various countries, he will seek out my father and stay with him because he detests living here in this state (Hasanat 2018: 69). This disdain of having lived in this location sets a tone for the story, which is about Shojol, who has been humiliated and abused due to his sexual orientation. Shojol desires to leave Dhaka and ultimately his native Bangladesh due to the malevolent gaze of certain individuals, including Rahimuddin Uncle, Kana Bokul, and Milton. Shojol despises being noticed and retains a detailed list of men he perceives to be unsafe. While Rahimuddin is positioned third on this list, Kana Bokul is second on the list, and Milton is the first (Hasanat 2018: 69). Social abuse, including sexual assault, child molestation, communal tensions, geopolitical victimization, and identity-based violence, can be caused by societal norms and values. Social abuse is frequently based on gender, as a corollary to gendered power dynamics and the construction of machismo (Moser 2004: 5). This social abuse, coupled with masculinity, is very apparent when Shojol enters Rahimuddin’s shop, where he not only drags Shojol onto his lap and continues to hold him there tightly, but also makes his two hands swim like fish through the nooks and crannies and crevasses of Shojol’s body. This kind of deriving perverted pleasure from people like Shojol is essentially linked to the concept of ‘structural violence’, a term used by Caroline Moser. According to Moser, ‘this concept draws attention to the fact that violence may not always be just a physical act, but also a process that can be embedded into wider social structures’ (Moser 2004: 6). When Shojol looks into Rahimuddin’s sneaky eyes and sees a reflection of this little man’s violent power, he feels traumatized by this structural violence. This type of traumatic experience frequently induces feelings of shame and apprehension due to the fear of public and private disclosure. When Shojol leaves the shop and walks as quickly as he can, the streets are too gloomy for him to identify the faces of the shadows that pass him on their way home. A pack of stray dogs appears out of nowhere and begins to bark. Shojol starts running out of insecurities, hoping not to encounter Milton or Kana Bokul along the way, as they could sexually harass him. This expectation recognizes that people like Shojol ‘may have higher-than-published rates of trauma exposure because of the additive effects of general trauma exposure plus exposure to bias-related traumatic events’ (Shipherd et al. 2011: 57). These individuals are at enhanced danger in at least two different ways: they are significantly more likely to experience trauma as a result of bias-­ related incidents, and they experience steadily increasing symptoms, possibly as a result of cognitions connected with these occurrences (Kaysen et al. 2005). Trauma manifests itself when Shojol is duped by Milton, who initially assures him that his secret is safe and then begins molesting him belligerently. According to the narrator, To Shojol, Milton was the name of an abominable fear. ‘Your secret is safe with me,’ Milton had told him once—when they were friends and when Milton was still human. After dropping out of school, Milton became the leader of a small gang of delinquents and committed petty crimes on the streets in broad daylight. As time passed, the daylight crimes pushed Milton

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into darker alleys—where he had tried to take Shojol—the alleys that led to places more horrifying than Rahimuddin’s convenience store. (Hasanat 2018: 73) On his way back home, Shojol confronts Milton and his gang on the balcony of an abandoned house, where Milton yells for Shojol to sit in his lap. Even further, Milton mocks him by stating that he should not run away like a girl. Milton remarks with a horrendous laugh: ‘Don’t run too fast, you’ll hurt yourself, bitch! … Don’t go anywhere tomorrow. I’ll be coming for you’ (Hasanat 2018: 74). When these incidents occur frequently, typically, a boy seems to be more worried about his feminine psyche and thinks himself a misfit for social norms and practices. As a result of his feminine behavior patterns, he discloses experiencing a series of abuse and harassment in public (Khan et al. 2009: 446). As stigmatization and abusive behavior are everyday occurrences in the lives of adolescent hijras in Bangladeshi society, they have been forced to abandon their families and the places where they can find a safe and secure atmosphere. Furthermore, in addition to the vulnerability of hijra as a sexual minority in Bangladesh, is that there is no law to penalize “male-to-male” rape; as the conceptualization of rape in the society of Bangladesh is understood as an exclusively heterosexual problem, both socially and culturally. (Stenqvist 2015: 13; Sexual Rights Initiative 2009: 3) Shojol is extremely wary of being traumatized by so many people and other insecurities. As he understands that he will soon be far away from all of these distressing experiences, he manages to find some solace in the thought of his upcoming journey and is relieved. When Rana asks Shojol how he plans to travel to other countries without money and a passport, Shojol responds that he is only particularly worried about the money and not the passport. He feels completely isolated from his people, society, and place. He clearly states: Money, a little, but passport? No. I won’t be traveling like you guys. I will smuggle myself—like some shipments of perishable goods. I’ll blend in easily, with perishable goods, I mean. (Hasanat 2018: 69) This is a clear indication of how disheartened, traumatized, and desperate he is to leave this place and Bangladesh. For Shojol, social exclusion is the combination of collinear mechanisms with subsequent ruptures emanating from the core of his sexual orientation, gender politics, and social normative hierarchy. All of these factors progressively relegate him and others like him to subordinate positions in relation to the dominant powers, intellectual capital, and moral standards. Beall and Piron describe this social exclusion as ‘a process and a state that prevents individuals or groups from full participation in social, economic and political life and from asserting their rights. It derives from exclusionary relationships based on

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power’ (2005: 9). To escape a life of disgrace and trauma, an excluder such as Shojol disregards social relationships, including his mother and friends, and even considers contravening rights of citizenship and territorial regulations. As soon as Shojol survives the vicious gaze of Milton, Kana Bokul spots him and tells him to stop because he has something to share. Recognizing the imminent danger of violation, Shojol runs faster than a deer while clutching the shopping bag to his chest as if it were the shield he frantically put in place to protect the chest that contained his heart. This is the heart that ‘pounding louder than the world, with presentiments of danger and possibilities of hope’ (Hasanat 2018: 74). Shojol is not aware of the fact that Kana Bokul makes certain plans to break Rahimuddin’s secret bond with him and take him under his care and control. It is worth noting that while the hijras’ preference for appearance and community housing gives them a distinguishable and reliable individuality and may confer security, it also makes it much more difficult to conceal their identity, which may result in violence and discrimination (Sartaj et al. 2021: 294–295). Qualitative research demonstrates that this discrimination transcends to myriad spheres of hijras’ lives, including their engagement with compositional facets of society, such as access to medical care, health coverage, participation in politics, and work opportunities (Chakrapani 2010), as well as interpersonal interactions (Bazargan and Galvan 2012). When Kana Bokul threatens Rahimuddin with the sharply pointed neem twig and belligerently commands him to leave Shojol so he can abuse him at his discretion, this dehumanization on the part of these interpersonal interactions and relationships becomes glaringly apparent. Shojol is seized by the arm and leads him out of the store; he then pushes Shojol against a broken wall and orders him to stand naked in a deserted laneway. He forcefully and impatiently undresses Shojol while keeping his two eyes, one of which is floating like a dead fish and the other of which is still swimming in its socket, firmly attached to her body. Kana Bokul’s perverseness essentially is a kind of ‘sexual imaginary’ that ‘predominantly constructed the hijra as victims of the perverse desire of men who use hijra for their sexual gratification rather than their being desirous subjects themselves’ (Hossain 2017: 1422). During these humiliating, abusive, and traumatic moments, Shojol stands like an inanimate object, ‘naked and shivering, with his eyes lowered and his emergent breasts—risen, like a pair of defiant suns, and his docile manhood rested—on a cushiony scrotum over a hidden cave of creation’ (Hasanat 2018: 79–80). Kana Bokul cannot believe his eyes upon discovering that multiple human bodies exist in the same body of Shojol. He even manipulates Shojol by making him believe that he will protect him as Milton and his gang are intending to abduct and sell him to the merciless pimp Matuli Hijra. To overcome this traumatic encounter, Shojol tries to be bold and assertive, as he tells Kana Bokul, I don’t need your protection. I can take care of myself. Besides, I’m not going to stay in this fucking town forever. I don’t care about Milton, or that pimp, or you. In two weeks, I’ll be gone. … I don’t need to tell nobody nothing. And I can take care of myself! I don’t need a bodyguard. (Hasanat 2018: 80)

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This phrase, ‘I’ll be gone’, is figurative and connotative in the sense that Shojol’s three friends never find him at their usual designated spot, where he is expected to move out of the city. A few days later, the corpse of Shojol is discovered in the lake where his friends catch fish, with distended blood stains in the middle of his body and aquatic roots covering his face like a shielded shroud. The narrative concludes with a horrific and pitiful description of this body and society in general. The ‘crotch [of Shojol’s body is] slit open, and strings of ovate hyacinth leaves hung loosely over its unfilled scrotum, trying to hide the gaping void of a deferred manhood from the relentless gaze of humankind’ (Hasanat 2018: 83). Shojol’s death elicits a ‘ripple effect’ in which hate crimes are perceived as targeting ‘not only their individual victims but all people who share membership in the targeted group’ (Noelle 2002: 28). This stereotypical trauma, such as Shojol’s and his tragedy, serves as a ‘warning’ to others like him to remain in ‘their place’ (Herek and Berrill 1992: 3) and be wary of how society treats hijras.

On Being Infertile: Traumatic Experiences of Daisy Infertility is defined as the failure of women of reproductive age to achieve pregnancy or carry a healthy pregnancy after one year of unprotected sexual intercourse. Women who experience difficulties with fertility issues frequently view their infertility as a recurring problem. They often become unable to move forward with transition periods and are perpetually in mourning for the mother–child relationship that never materialized (Johansson and Berg 2005). The protracted psychological consequences of stress associated with fertility problems are significant compared to those of a chronic illness. Infertility causes anguish, breakdown, and trauma in women, and it is personally experienced as a cognitive and psychosocial loss with far-reaching consequences (Schwerdtfeger and Shreffler 2009: 213–214). Infertility has a pervasive psychological resonance for women who are going through this traumatic stage, and they undergo an emotional journey of expectations, fear, sense of loss, anguish, and frustration. In her story, ‘Darkling, I Listen’, Hasanat addresses this issue of infertility through the character Daisy, revealing the naked and pathetically sad truth about a society that considers someone a complete woman only if she gives birth to healthy babies. Daisy says at the beginning of the story that winter comes and spring never comes for her, and she falls upon the thorns of a miserable life. She is made to believe that a good wife must seek her heaven under her husband’s feet, while her husband always keeps his wife’s redemption on hold until he can secure his own place in heaven. Life seems endless for a woman, and she will be considered a complete woman when she will be ‘the whole baggage-a woe, not a man’ (Hasanat 2018: 108). This phrase ‘whole baggage’ essentially represents a woman’s responsibility to successfully give birth. Because of her infertility, Daisy has become subjected to humiliation and verbal abuse by her mother-in-law to such an extent that she starts to believe that she is a man-eating whore who moans like a cow all night long and soils a good husband’s bed with an unnecessary flow of fluid. Out of extreme trauma, she utters:

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‘I am wasting vital gametes by letting them slip through the dungeon of hell that lies between my legs. In other words, because I do not hold them in, I am not a woman’ (Hasanat 2018: 108). Recalling her first encounter with Amir, she remembers how Amir falls in love with her at first sight and they get married. Daisy’s life has become so traumatic that she appears to believe there is only one person in love: the one who is bigger and more powerful, who consumes the other like a sponge and absorbs them like a flesh-eating microbial species. She even believes that in a loving relationship, there must be an unlawful killing in which one heart ends up dead so that the other can rise like a blood-stained sword, branded as absolutely adored. She confesses that she loves Reza because he doesn’t want her to become pregnant as he thinks that children are a nuisance’ and ‘they eat up all our time and energy and money’ (Hasanat 2018: 110). This approach to identifying motives for love suggests that Daisy does not want to experience humiliation, rejection, or traumatic situations due to her infertility. She does not want to be in a circumstance that persuades her to become pregnant. Here, Daisy’s viewpoint can be contextualized within the corpus of ‘lay trauma theory’. Traumas, as per lay theory, are naturally occurring experiences that disintegrate the perception of well-being of a person or a group. In other words, the ability to suppress the trauma is considered to have originated from the occurrences collectively. As Jeffrey C. Alexander notes, According to the lay perspective, the trauma experience occurs when the traumatizing event interacts with human nature. Human beings need security, order, love, and connection. If something happens that sharply undermines these needs, it hardly seems surprising, according to the lay theory, that people will be traumatized as a result. (2012: 8) The situation gets worse when Reza marries an immigrant girl from his neighborhood and moves to New York with her. This leaves Daisy with a broken heart and the unaccomplished hope of staying with someone who doesn’t want kids. As a way to avoid thinking about her current woes, she tries to imagine herself walking through Central Park in New York and hearing Reza yell her name. Even though she is aware that ‘like a shiny book cover of a romantic novel, it only offers, for a very brief moment, an impending displeasure’ (Hasanat 2018: 111), she refuses to allow heartaches in her dreams. Daisy’s family initially believes that Amir and his mother will comprehend that the issue of infertility is not so grave that Daisy must constantly apologize. As Amir’s mother desires grandchildren, he decides to remarry and informs Daisy that he can give her a new apartment, send her abroad, or even divorce her if she so desires. When Daisy hears these unwelcome offers, she tries her best to get over this terrible and traumatic moment in her life by saying, You fool, I am not a woman. Don’t you see? Knives don’t cut me. Your mother’s words can’t touch me. Your pathetic excuses and your sacrificial

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voice don’t melt me. I am glad I don’t have a son like you. I am glad I am nobody’s mother. (Hasanat 2018: 114) Here, Daisy strives to dismantle ‘the experience of motherhood’ that ‘often remains taken for granted as a natural and uneventful ‘destiny’ for women, transcending borders and cultures’ and challenge ‘commonly held notions of motherhood as the ultimate fulfillment and as a universal journey’ (Lazzari and Ségeral 2021: 2–3). She decides that if any woman or Amir attempts to humiliate her father, she will rip out their tongues and feed them to the stray animals. According to the stress theory, the level of distress and trauma associated with infertility will depend on accessible resources and positions. Based on Thoits’s (1999) proposition, the general role-accumulation hypothesis suggests that a blocked individuality or position (like infertility) will result in greater emotional turmoil for those with few alternative positions and identities. This condition ‘suggests that individuals who occupy multiple roles will be protected from stress, whereas those with no children, no employment, or no spouse will be the most distressed’ (McQuillan et al. 2003: 1008). Daisy is similarly helpless, and she desires to free herself of all humiliations and traumatic memories by setting herself on fire with gasoline oil. The conclusion of the story projects Daisy’s resolute assertion – one last attempt to mitigate her suffering: My heart does not ache and my senses never go numb in pain. So, darkling, I listen to the music of my night jasmines. I soak my senses with gasoline and light my bonfire. I kick the dying world one more time before flying away like a blazing phoenix, burning, burning, burning. Burning. (Hasanat 2018: 116)

Conclusion: Burdened by Memories: (Un)living with Trauma The variety of pluralistic framework mentioned in this collection shifts the emphasis from ‘trauma as unrepresentable’ (Balaev 2014: 3) to its binding affinity, which retrieves meaning through a comprehensive view of the sociocultural environment of traumatic ordeals. As is the case with all memories, traumatic memories are persistent and susceptible to disturbance. While people remember more trauma than they encountered, they seem to perceive more ‘re-experiencing’ clinical signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Additionally, traumatic experiences are recurrently memorized (un)intentionally through burdensome images, impulses, and flashbacks. After, certain traumatic incidents, ‘intentional remembering (effortful retrieval) and unintentional remembering (intrusive mental imagery) can introduce new details that, over time, assimilate into a person’s memory for the event’ (Strange and Takarangi 2015:1). This integration of (un)intentionally ‘re-­ experiencing’ symptoms and PTSD vividly disrupts the memories and emotions of Aandhi and her trauma resulting from her dark-skinned complexion, which has

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transmitted into Shila’s mental and physical life, compel Shila to experience her as well as her mother’s trauma. Psychological trauma is one of the most challenging public health issues in the world today. Individuals’ ability to function, their perception of physiological threat, and their notions of themselves can be irrevocably altered by traumatic events like socially violent behavior in their family, violent assaults, mishaps, conflicts, fatalities, and rapacious interpersonal violence. Women and children are more likely to be traumatized by domestic abuse than by stressful situations perpetrated on them by random people (van dar Kolk 2020: 7–8). In Daisy’s case, the verbal abuse from her mother-in-law and her husband’s unwillingness to stand up for her fertility problems result in severe psychological trauma. Her primary focus on life expectancy and sanity results in a combination of numbness, resignation, frustration, distress, and flabbergasted turmoil, which eventually drives her to end her life as a (in) complete woman burdened by traumatic memories of shame and abusive behavior. Recurring and forceful intimidations of one’s individuality in the form of everyday discriminatory practices, like extremely severe psychological trauma, prove detrimental to a person’s fundamental needs for integrity, awareness, authority, and companionship, resulting in significant adverse outcomes (Reisner et al. 2006: 509– 511). In accordance with minority stress theory (Hendricks and Testa 2012), both violent and non-violent forms of prejudice are associated with psychotic symptoms in hijras, such as anxiety, fear, mental trauma, and sexual abuse. This discrimination reduces the opportunity for a non-binary person like Shojol to live with dignity, social harmony, and hope for a more equitable and secure future.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2012. Trauma: A Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Balaev, Michelle. 2014. ‘Literary Trauma Theory Reconsidered’, in Michelle Balaev (ed.), Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory, pp. 1–14. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bazargan, M. and F. Galvan. 2012. ‘Perceived Discrimination and Depression among LowIncome Latina Male-to-female Transgender Women’, BMC Public Health, 12(1): 663. Beall, J. and L-H Piron. 2005. DFID Social Exclusion Review. London: Overseas Development Institute. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Chakrapani, Venkatesan. 2010. Hijras/Transgender Women in India: HIV, Human Rights and Exclusion: TG Issue Brief. India: United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Dixon, Angela R, and Edward E. Telles. 2017. ‘Skin Color and Colorism: Global Research, Concepts, and Measurement’, Annual Review of Sociology, 43: 405–424. Grewal, Zareena A. 2009. ‘Marriage in Colour: Race, Religion and Spouse Selection in Four American Mosques’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 32(2): 323–345. Hall, Ronald. 1995. ‘The Bleaching Syndrome: African Americans’ Response to Cultural Domination Vis-à-Vis Skin Color’, Journal of Black Studies, 26(2): 172–184. Hargrove, Taylor W. 2019. ‘Light Privilege? Skin Tone Stratification in Health among African Americans’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 5(3): 370–87.

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Hasanat, Fayeza. 2018. The Birdcatcher and Other Stories. USA: Jaded Ibis Press. Hendricks M. L. and R. J. Testa. 2012. ‘A Conceptual Framework for Clinical Work with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Clients: An Adaptation of the Minority Stress Model’, Professional Psychology Research and Practice, 43(5): 460–467. Herek, G. M. and K.T. Berrill. eds. 1992. Hate Crimes: Confronting Violence Against Lesbians and Gay Men. Newbery Park, CA: Sage. Hossain, Adnan. 2017. ‘The Paradox of Recognition: Hijra, Third Gender and Sexual Rights in Bangladesh’, Culture, Health & Sexuality, 19(12): 1418–1431. Hunter, Margaret L. 2005. Race, Gender, and the Politics of Skin Tone. New York: Routledge. Johansson, Marianne and Marie Berg. 2005. ‘Women’s Experiences of Childlessness 2 years After the End of In Vitro Fertilization Treatment’, Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 19(1): 58–63. Kalb, Deborah. 2018. ‘Q&A with Fayeza Hasanat’, deborahkalbbooks, http://deborahkalbbooks. blogspot.com/2018/11/q-with-fayeza-hasanat.html (accessed on 30 October 2021). Kaysen, D. et al. 2005. ‘Cognitive Processing Therapy for Acute Stress Disorder Resulting from an Anti-Gay Assault’, Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 12: 278–89. Khan, Sharful Islam. et al. 2009. ‘Living on the Extreme Margin: Social Exclusion of the Transgender Population (Hijra) in Bangladesh’, Journal of health, population, and nutrition, 27(4): 441–451. Landor, A. M. and S. M. Smith. 2019. ‘Skin-Tone Trauma: Historical and Contemporary Influences on the Health and Interpersonal Outcomes of African Americans’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(5): 797–815. Lazzari, Laura and Nathalie Ségeral. 2021. ‘Trauma and Recovery: New Challenges to Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture’, in Laura Lazzari and Nathalie Ségeral (eds.), Trauma and Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture, pp. 1–10. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. McQuillan, J. et al. 2003. ‘Frustrated Fertility: Infertility and Psychological Distress Among Women’, Journal of Marriage and Family, 65: 1007–1018. Mondal, B. et al. 2020. ‘“Their Untold Stories…”: Lived Experiences of Being a Transgender (Hijra), A Qualitative Study From India’, Journal of Psychosexual Health, 2(2):165–173. Moser, Caroline O N. 2004. ‘Urban Violence and Insecurity: An Introductory Roadmap’, Environment and Urbanization, 16(2): 3–16. Nanda, S. 1999. Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India (2nd ed). London: Wadsworth. Noelle, M. 2002. ‘The Ripple Effect of the Matthew Shepard Murder: Impact on the Assumptive Worlds of Members of the Targeted Group’, American Behavioral Scientist, 46(1): 27–50. Pendleton, Nicole. 2018. ‘Nuanced Performances of Perfected Women: Review of The Bird Catcher and Other Stories’, The Florida Review, https://floridareview.cah.ucf.edu/article/ nuanced-performances-of-perfected-women/ (accessed on 30 October 2021). Quayum, Mohammad A. and Md. Mahmudul Hasan. 2018. ‘Introducing Bangladeshi Writing in English: Emergence to the Present’, Asiatic, 12(1): 1–8. Quayum, Mohammad A. and Md. Mahmudul Hasan. 2021. Bangladeshi Literature in English: A Critical Anthology. Dhaka, Asiatic Society of Bangladesh. Rehan, N. et al. 2009. ‘Socio-sexual Behaviour of Hijras of Lahore’, Journal of Pakistan Medical Association, 59(6): 380–384. Reisner, Sari L. et al. 2006. ‘Discriminatory Experiences Associated with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms Among Transgender Adults’, Journal of Counseling Psychology, 63(5): 509–519. Roth, Michael S. 2012. Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Sartaj, D. et al. 2021. ‘Mental illnesses and Related Vulnerabilities in the Hijra Community: A Cross-Sectional Study from India’, International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 67(3), pp. 290–297. Schwerdtfeger, Kami L and Karina M Shreffler. 2009. ‘Trauma of Pregnancy Loss and Infertility for Mothers and Involuntarily Childless Women in the Contemporary United States’, Journal of Loss & Trauma, 14(3), 211–227. Sexual Rights Initiative. 2009. ‘Report on Bangladesh—4th Round of the Universal Periodic Review’, https://lib.ohchr.org/HRBodies/UPR/Documents/Session4/BD/ SRI_BGD_UPR_S4_2009_SexualRightsInitiative_JOINT_upr.pdf Shipherd, J. C. et al. 2011. ‘Potentially Traumatic Events in a Transgender Sample: Frequency and Associated Symptoms’, Traumatology, 17(2): 56–67. Stenqvist, Tove. 2015. ‘The Social Struggle of Being HIJRA in Bangladesh—Cultural Aspiration between Inclusion and Illegitimacy’. Unpublished Master’s dissertation, Malmö University. Strange, Deryn and Melanie K.T. Takarangi. 2015. ‘Memory Distortion for Traumatic Events: The Role of Mental Imagery’, Frontiers in psychiatry, 6(27): 1–4. Tankersley, Caleb. 2019. ‘Review of The Bird Catcher and Other Stories by Fayeza Hasanat’, Necessary Fiction, http://necessaryfiction.com/reviews/TheBirdCatcherbyFayezaHasanat (accessed on 30 October 2021). Thoits, P. A. 1999. ‘Self, Identity, Stress, and Mental Health’, in C. S. Aneshensel and J. C. Phelan (eds.), Handbook of the sociology of mental health, pp. 345–368. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. van der Kolk, B. 2000. ‘Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and the Nature of Trauma’, Dialogues in clinical neuroscience, 2(1): 7–22.

PART IV

Trauma-Affected Afghanistan Wounded Memories and Narratives

10 WITNESSING TRAUMA The Ethical Imperative of Bystanders in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and And the Mountains Echoed Robin E. Field

Introduction Contemporary discourse on trauma, as well as the literature that portrays trauma, has focused on the experiences of victim-survivors and, more recently, perpetrators. Yet there is a third party that must be considered: the bystanders. Judith L. Herman, in her ground-breaking work, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, writes: To study psychological trauma means bearing witness to horrible events. When the events are natural disasters or ‘acts of God,’ those who bear witness sympathize readily with the victim. But when the traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. It is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict. The bystander is forced to take sides. (Herman 1992: 7) Herman’s assertation that the bystander cannot remain neutral underscores the ethical imperative inherent in all occurrences of trauma. In this chapter, I examine the role of bystanders and their ethical responsibility in two works of fiction by Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (2003) and And the Mountains Echoed (2013), before turning to the reader’s ethical imperative as a literary bystander. The Kite Runner offers a model for becoming a responsible bystander – and reader – through Hosseini’s depiction of his protagonist Amir’s evolution. As a child in Afghanistan, Amir first demonstrates inertia in witnessing the rape of Hassan, his servant and friend (and, as later revealed, half-brother); he then assuages his guilt about his inaction by exiling Hassan from his life. As an adult in the United States, Amir has the chance ‘to be good again’, and he returns to Afghanistan to rescue DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-15

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Hassan’s son Sohrab from sexual slavery (Hosseini 2003: 2). The Kite Runner not only underscores the consequences of inertia and ‘forgetting’ upon bystanders of trauma but also reveals the importance of acknowledging trauma and working toward justice for the victim-survivors, tenets critical to Herman’s notions of survival. And the Mountains Echoed is a short-story cycle, wherein each chapter may be read independently. I analyze the chapter ‘Spring 2003’, which features the cousins Idris and Timur returning from the United States to Afghanistan to recover their family’s lost property. The chapter is focalized through Idris, who believes Timur voyeuristically consumes the tragic stories of civilian survivors of the War in Afghanistan. Idris’s own treatment of Roshi, a girl with a traumatic brain injury, initially appears to model a victim-centered and action-oriented model of witnessing the physical and psychological consequences of traumatic violence. However, Hosseini upends readerly expectations by demonstrating how Idris abandons Roshi and his promises to obtain the necessary medical intervention for her; instead, the brash Timur is the cousin who follows through and saves Roshi’s life, much to Idris’s shame. Hosseini’s story emphasizes the importance of taking action to address injustices and implicitly encourages readers to act, even in small ways, to improve the world. Ultimately, this essay underscores the impact of bystanders as agents for social transformation in the context of the traumatic violence of the War in Afghanistan.

‘To Be Good Again’: Action and Accountability in The Kite Runner The responsibility of the bystander is a key question in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. As a child in Afghanistan, Amir witnesses the rape of his friend and servant, Hassan, by a male teenager, Assef; and to his lifelong shame, he does nothing to stop the assault. Indeed, the book opens with Amir testifying to the impact of what he witnesses: ‘I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek’ (Hosseini 2003: 1). Once the rape begins, Amir flees the scene, and when he sees Hassan later, he pretends not to know what occurred. As a child, Amir justifies his inaction in multiple ways. While he is genuinely afraid of what Assef would do to him if he intervened, Amir also underplays the significance of the assault by reflecting that Hassan is ‘just a Hazara’ (Hosseini 2003: 77). As an oppressed ethnic minority within the majority Pashtun society of Afghanistan, the Hazaras (Minority Rights Group 2021) often suffer discrimination. Although he tries to minimize his culpability in Hassan’s trauma, Amir is overwhelmed by guilt and cannot face his friend; hence, he convinces his father to fire Hassan. When, decades later in California, Amir is contacted by a family friend to bring Hassan’s son, Sohrab, out of Afghanistan, Amir embraces the chance ‘to be good again’ (Hosseini 2003: 2); he also knows at this point that Hassan was his half-brother. Afghanistan is under the control of the Taliban, and Hassan and his wife are victims of ethnic cleansing. Amir finds Sohrab living as a sex slave to a Taliban commander, who turns out to be Assef, the man who raped Hassan. Against the odds, Amir and Sohrab escape from Assef and make it back to

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the United States. The novel ends with Amir adopting Sohrab and hoping to help the boy heal from his traumatic past. The Kite Runner demonstrates the impact of rape upon the bystander, who literally allows the attack to continue, ignores its existence, and denies the victim justice. Even as a child, Amir knows he has done wrong, for he names the crime he witnessed: ‘“I watched Hassan get raped,” I said to no one’ (Hosseini 2003: 86). This admission simultaneously erases and perpetuates his knowledge: Amir tells nobody in his community about the rape, but this erasure is recorded through his narration of Hassan’s experience to the readers. While Amir probably could not stop Assef from raping Hassan even if he had intervened, his intense guilt demonstrates that the role of the bystander is not only to witness but to stand with the victim by acknowledging the crime and demanding retribution. As Amir does neither, his guilt remains with him for decades. Although he cannot make up for his misdeeds to Hassan, he rescues Hassan’s son, Sohrab, another rape victim; at the end of the novel, Amir hopes Sohrab will recover from his trauma, even though the boy attempts suicide and will not speak. Witnessing Amir’s guilt is critical for readers to understand the trauma of rape and the culpability of the bystander. Timothy Aubry, in Reading as Therapy, argues that readers develop their compassion and expand their emotional capacities by engaging with Amir’s suffering; additionally, Amir’s mistakes remind them of their own humanity and missteps. Ultimately, as Aubry writes, ‘The pain of the reading experience—a mix of guilt-saturated discomfort, embarrassed self-recognition, and visceral compassion—enables them to imagine themselves partaking in Amir’s difficult process of atonement’ (2011: 185). The depiction of rape in The Kite Runner thus explores not only the horror of the assault but also the appropriate reaction by the bystander and the community at large. The Kite Runner allows readers to judge Amir and, in turn, to assess their own capacity to choose the morally correct action. Indeed, Hosseini’s narrative structure in The Kite Runner ensures that readers align themselves with Amir, the bystander, rather than Hassan or Sohrab, the victims of sexual violence. Because Amir is the first-person narrator, readers do not see Hassan or Sohrab’s perspectives on their violent experiences. This omission positions them as passive figures without reactions of their own; only Amir may present their stories.1 Further complicating this representation is Amir’s position as a savior figure to Sohrab as a way to compensate for not helping Hassan decades earlier. As a member of the minority Hazaras already bereft of power in this ­society – and as a child – Sohrab is depicted as unable to help himself and in need of a Pashtun/ American savior.2 Such ethnic and national dynamics further obfuscate the male rape victim as a person with concerns of his own. It is important that in The Kite Runner the existence of male rape is acknowledged at all – and acknowledged as traumatic to the victims as well as to the community itself – for ultimately, rape harms not only the person violated but the safety and integrity of the community itself.3 Yet, with this type of narrative focus, Hosseini’s novel continues the tradition of positioning the male rape victim as unknowable; instead, he aligns readers with the bystander whose power far exceeds the rape survivor’s.

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This focus upon the bystander is underscored through an allegorical reading of the ending of The Kite Runner, where Amir switches roles to become the kite runner, the person who chases the kite freed from its string to present it to his master. In his youth, Amir was the master, and Hassan was the servant who, in chasing the kite, found himself in the alley where he was raped by Assef. As an adult, Amir becomes the ‘servant’ to Sohrab when he chases a kite for his nephew, hoping to earn a smile from the traumatized child. Indeed, Amir ‘chases the kite’ for Hassan on his return to Afghanistan to rescue Sohrab: he risks everything to bring his nephew out of Afghanistan and offer him a new life in the United States. While rescuing Sohrab, Amir faces Assef and suffers a violent beating at his hands. Yet Amir is never portrayed as being at risk for rape during his fight with Assef; the risk of male rape is relevant to the boy’s body, not the adult male body. Because of this elision – Amir ‘cannot’ be raped as an adult male – his acts of atonement are not equivalent to Hassan and Sohrab’s suffering. In this way, readers are reminded that being a bystander is never as perilous as being the victim of trauma.4 Such a reminder may inspire readers to take their responsibility to witness, to intervene, or to seek retribution and justice for survivors very seriously. As Channette Romero argues, ‘If readers choose to empathize with the characters and situations portrayed, they become implicated in the story of social injustice and obligated to think about their connection to the society that tolerates such injustices’ (2012: 42). In The Kite Runner, readers must grapple with the ethical imperative of witnessing atrocities and acting on behalf of the victims. As a child, Amir cannot prevent sexual predators from targeting Hassan; he can only save himself. The frustration produced by this decidedly unhappy decision may prompt readers to assess their own responses to past ethical challenges and to wonder whether they took the side of the perpetrator (through silence and inaction) or the victim (through intervention and action). While Hassan suffered both inaction and further injustice from the young Amir, Sohrab may have a happier future after the adult Amir rescues him from sexual slavery and brings him to the United States. In this novel, the AfghaniAmerican community, as represented by Amir, finally recognizes its responsibility to the most vulnerable populations and makes recompense for previous suffering. The Kite Runner, like other types of activist fiction, ‘attempts to empower [readers] to become socially and politically accountable to their communities’ (Romero 2012: 179). Hosseini further explores the complicated ethical questions about the bystander’s personal responsibility to child survivors of traumatic violence in his third novel, And the Mountains Echoed.

‘Do Both’: Bystander’s Guilt and the Ethics of Inaction in And the Mountains Echoed Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed features a chapter directly interrogating the inaction of the bystander in the chapter ‘Spring 2003’. Cousins Idris and Timur Bashiri return to Kabul to reclaim the family property lost during the two decades of war in Afghanistan after the family fled to the United States. The chapter is

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framed through the perspective of the physician Idris, whose introversion contrasts with the genial and exuberant personality of Timur. Idris is embarrassed by Timur’s behavior in Kabul: [Timur] has behaved like the quintessential ugly Afghan-American, Idris thinks. Tearing through the war-torn city like he belongs here, backslapping locals with great bonhomie and calling them brother, sister, uncle, making a show of handing money to beggars from what he calls the Bakhsheesh bundle, joking with old women he calls mother and talking them into telling their story into his camcorder as he strikes a woebegone expression, pretending he is one of them, like he’s been here all along, like he wasn’t lifting at Gold’s in San Jose, working on his pecs and abs, when these people were getting shelled, murdered, raped. (Hosseini 2013: 153–154) Idris is especially upset by Timur’s claim that the cousins are in Kabul to ‘bear witness’ and ‘give back’ to the compatriots whom they left behind in the early 1980s (Hosseini 2013: 142). Idris believes he and his cousin should be honest about their motives for reclaiming the family house and be respectful to the Afghanis who lived through the trauma of war. Idris’s behavior contrasts with his cousin’s words and actions when the two men meet a young girl, Roshi, while touring a local hospital. Roshi suffers a horrific brain injury that cannot be treated in the understaffed and undersupplied hospital. The two men are introduced to the girl on the condition that they will not show shock about her injury: ‘the fist-sized mass of glistening brain tissue… sitting on her head like the knot of a sikh’s turban’ (Hosseini 2013: 158). While Idris silently looks away after glancing at Roshi, Timur moans loudly and his eyes well with tears, leading the girl’s nurse, Amra, to end the visit abruptly. Amra deflects when Timur asks how Roshi became injured, but she volunteers the information to Idris later that evening after he deplores Timur’s interest in traumatic experiences: ‘The stories these people have to tell, we’re not entitled to them’ (Hosseini 2013: 154). Musing that ‘maybe [Idris is a] good guy’ (Hosseini 2013: 155), Amra explains that Roshi’s uncle murdered her entire family – and thought he had murdered Roshi with an ax-blow to the head – to claim the family property. Startlingly, the motives of Roshi’s homicidal uncle and the cousins align – taking back property from other Afghanis. The similarity, however, serves to underscore the contrast between the rapacious and violent greed of Roshi’s uncle and the beneficent actions of the Bashiri cousins – Idris’s in Kabul, and Timur’s in the United States. Unlike Timur’s proclamation that the stories he collects will be used later to ‘raise awareness, and funds’ for Afghanistan, Idris acts immediately to help Roshi (Hosseini 2013: 142). As he cannot use his medical training to treat her traumatic brain injury, Idris instead buys a VCR and videocassettes of children’s films to distract the girl from her pain. Through his daily visits, Idris establishes an emotional bond with the girl, and she soon calls him Kaka Idris, or Uncle Idris, in the Dari

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Persian spoken in Afghanistan. Just before he is scheduled to return to the United States, Idris promises Amra that he will bring Roshi to California for the surgery, paying for everything himself if necessary. He imagines raising Roshi alongside his sons, who are not as ‘well-mannered’ and ‘humble’ as the girl (Hosseini 2013: 164). Idris is proud that he has not trumpeted his generous pledge to help Roshi to anyone but Amra; indeed, he does not even tell his wife of his plans. He contrasts his quiet pledge with Timur’s showmanship of generosity to others, finding his discretion morally superior. However, Hosseini complicates the ethics of Idris’s moral superiority upon his return to the United States. Initially, Idris chafes at the extravagance of his American lifestyle: how he and his wife, Nahil, are remodeling their home in the latest styles, creating a home theatre, and buying expensive clothes and cars. He deplores his young sons’ lack of curiosity in Kabul and his wife’s interest in the deprivations of life in post-war Afghanistan. He muses to Nahil, ‘For the price of that home theatre we could have built a school in Afghanistan’ (Hosseini 2013: 171). Nahil reminds Idris that they both worked hard for their economic success, but then notes, ‘Then do both. … I don’t see why you can’t’ (Hosseini 2013: 172). Nahil herself lives her values, as she supported a Colombian child even when the couple were impoverished students and never told Idris of her generous actions until he saw her reading a thank you letter from the boy (Hosseini 2013: 172). Nahil’s blunt advice to her husband makes Idris’s subsequent behavior all the more startling: he does nothing to help Roshi or anyone else in Afghanistan. Within a month of his return to California, Idris becomes subsumed by his own patients and family obligations. The magnitude of his pledge to help Roshi feels overwhelming once he no longer sees the girl – and her traumatic brain injury – on a daily basis: ‘his promise to her [feels] misguided, a reckless mistake, a terrible misreading of the measures of his own powers and will and character’ (Hosseini 2013: 178). Just like the other Americans and Europeans whom Amra introduced to Roshi in the hope that they would help the girl obtain medical treatment, Idris stops replying to Amra’s email queries. Although he could ‘do both’ – help Roshi and maintain his affluent lifestyle – Idris chooses not to. The final three pages of the chapter indict Idris for his solipsism. Moving forward in time approximately five years, Hosseini places Idris at a book-signing for Roshi’s autobiography.5 Idris feels profoundly guilty about his past inaction; but even more, he fears his own inaction will be depicted in the book. For, in a brilliant twist, the person who helps Roshi is Timur. The book’s dedication reads, ‘To the two angels in my life: my mother Amra, and my Kaka Timur. You are my saviors. I owe you everything’ (Hosseini 2013: 180, italics in original). Idris cannot ignore his inaction because his cousin did what Idris himself should have done to help Roshi. This revelation underscores the selfishness and judgmental nature of Idris, who was so quick to condemn Timur’s flamboyant generosity and promises to raise awareness and funds for Afghanis. While Idris’s critique of Timur’s showmanship has some merit, Hosseini renders it insignificant in contrast to Timur’s actions that procure

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the necessary surgery to save Roshi’s life. Doing nothing to help someone in need, Hosseini implies, is much worse than broadcasting your good deeds, because doing something to help when you can is morally superior to doing nothing. Certainly, Timur is a flawed man – unfaithful to his wife, vain about his appearance, prideful about his accomplishments – but he is much less the ‘ugly Afghan-American’ than he appeared through Idris’s focalization. Instead, at the end of the story, Idris is the ‘ugly Afghan-American’, for he is so consumed by his fear of being exposed in the book as uncaring and selfish that he does not manage even to apologize to Roshi when he sees her at the book-signing, merely stammering, ‘I am—’ (Hosseini 2013: 181). The word ‘sorry’ remains unspoken. And is he sorry for failing Roshi? Or sorry only that his self-absorption is revealed because his cousin does what he should have done? For at the end of the chapter, Idris feels hurt by the dismissive words Roshi scrawls in his book in lieu of her signature: ‘Don’t worry. You’re not in it’ (Hosseini 2013: 181). Instead of feeling relieved that his failure to act remains hidden, Idris feels pained by her response to him. It is ‘[a]n act of kindness. Perhaps, more accurately, an act of charity. He should be relieved. But it hurts. He feels the blow of it, like an ax to the head’ (Hosseini 2013: 181). Outrageously, Idris compares Roshi’s dismissal of him to her own experience of traumatic violence. With these words, Hosseini extinguishes any doubt that Timur is a better man than his cousin Idris.

Conclusion ‘Spring 2003’ and The Kite Runner demand that readers evaluate their own actions – and inactions – as bystanders to the traumatic experiences of others. As Romero points out, ‘Agency requires that writers, readers, and scholars replace notions of individual selves and private reading practices with a more transformative concept of self-in-relationship subjectivity that interacts more actively and publicly with both novels and the world’ (2012: 52). For readers who have not experienced or witnessed a traumatic event, reading about the violence of war, or rape, or familial acts of terror allows them to gauge their own ethical response, preparing them for possible moments in the future where they may be victim-survivors or bystanders of trauma. As noted previously by Herman, these texts bring to the fore the impossibility of moral and ethical neutrality for bystanders. And while The Kite Runner demonstrates a tremendous personal sacrifice by Amir to save Sohrab, ‘Spring 2003’ underscores how smaller acts are ethically imperative to perform. The dedication of Timur and Amra to saving Roshi’s life may be beyond the capabilities of many readers, but Nahil’s financial contribution to a Colombian boy’s education and upbringing reveals how these smaller actions still make a significant difference. Historian Howard Zinn famously writes, ‘Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people … can transform the world’ (2006: 270). Readers of Khaled Hosseini’s fiction learn not only how to acknowledge the trauma they witness as literary bystanders but also how to work toward justice for the victim-survivors, safety for their community, and a better world for all.

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Notes 1 Yet Hosseini himself risks appropriating the voices and stories of Hazaras had he used the first-person voice for Hassan and Sohrab. 2 Indeed, Sohrab rescues Amir from being beaten to death by putting out one of Assef ’s eyes with a slingshot. Amir’s extensive injuries include a split upper lip akin to a harelip – which Hassan himself had. Amir takes on the role of Hassan, who is rescued from the Taliban this time; the fact that Sohrab saves Amir demonstrates how Amir cannot redeem himself alone – another survivor of sexual assault must play this role. The novel complicates whether Amir continues to take more than he gives to Hassan and Sohrab. 3 In Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction, I argue that most depictions of rape and sexual violence against men and boys before 2000 either feminised the male body to explain ‘how’ rape could occur or portrayed the assault as a smarmy joke. See Field 2020: 189–204. I am grateful to reprint portions of this essay that appear in that book. 4 Another allegorical reading using ethnicity, nationality, and politics further turns attention back to the readers/bystanders. The Kite Runner is often read as a political commentary on President George W. Bush’s War on Terror, particularly the invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. Although the narrative arc of The Kite Runner is instigated by Amir’s reaction to Hassan’s rape, Hosseini’s text shifts away from the depiction of sexual violence to build an allegory of Amir/the United States battling Assef/the Taliban over the fate of Sohrab/Afghanistan. The wounded body of Sohrab provides Amir’s ‘chance to be good again’. Yet equating Amir’s actions with goodness may lead readers to see the United States’ actions in Afghanistan in fighting the Taliban as innately good. Indeed, Aubry demonstrates that many readers have interpreted the novel as promoting this message; his analysis of one thousand reader reviews on Amazon between 2003 and 2006 revealed that readers ‘who interpret the book as supporting Bush’s overall foreign policy outnumber those who read it as rejecting his policy by approximately two to one’ (2011: 191–192). Given how the protagonist and narrator Amir faces down the one-dimensional antagonist Assef, such an interpretation of good versus evil (Amir versus Assef, United States versus Taliban) easily arises. Yet Aubry argues that both the positive and negative reactions to the novel’s allegorical depiction of Bush’s foreign policy occur because of Americans’ desire to see themselves as ‘imperfect but nonetheless compassionate and benign’ humans (2011: 191). Such a reading circles back to the role of bystanders: what actions should they take in times of violent conflict? Amir models the shift from passive viewer to active participant against evil, just as in the allegorical reading, the United States intervened against the Taliban after the events of September 11, 2001 (the speciousness of the connection between the two notwithstanding). Readers of this novel, and especially American readers, may be inspired to act rather than stand by in the face of violent atrocities. 5 This scene most explicitly ties Roshi to Malala Yousafzai, whose own recovery from a violent head injury is documented in her memoir, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban (2013).

References Aubry, Timothy. 2011. Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Field, Robin E. 2020. Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction. Clemson: Clemson University Press. Herman, Judith Lewis. 1992. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books. Hosseini, Khaled. 2003. The Kite Runner. New York: Riverhead Books.

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Hosseini, Khaled. 2013. And the Mountains Echoed. New York: Riverhead Books. Minority Rights Group. 2021. ‘Hazaras’, Minority Rights Group International, https:// minorityrights.org/minorities/hazaras/ (accessed on 11 April 2022). Romero, Channette. 2012. Activism and the American Novel: Religion and Resistance in Fiction by Women of Color. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Zinn, Howard. 2006. A Power Governments Cannot Suppress. San Francisco: City Lights Publishing.

11 KABOUL MON HIROSHIMA Trauma and Narration in Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone Gen’ichiro Itakura

Introduction With his first French novel, The Patience Stone (Syngué sabour, 2008), Atiq Rahimi became the first Afghan writer to win the Prix Goncourt. This story of a young woman beaten to death by her husband was apparently inspired by the disturbing news of the 2005 murder of the Afghan poet Nadia Anjuman (La Meslée 2008), who wrote in Dari (Persian), like Rahimi. Interestingly, he not only wrote the novel ‘in memory of N.A.’ but also dedicated it to ‘M.D.’ (Rahimi 2011: n.p.). In a 2008 interview, as if to disclose the identity of ‘M.D.’, he expressed his passion for Marguerite Duras and Hiroshima mon amour (1959), which he had watched in the midst of the Soviet-Afghan War. He summed up his immediate responses as follows: Je ne comprenais rien, et pourtant, j’étais bouleversé. Je me suis dit: Kaboul sera mon Hiroshima. [I did not understand anything, and yet I was deeply moved. I told myself: Kabul will be my Hiroshima]. (Chemin 2008; my translation) Predictably, he became fascinated by Marguerite Duras, the film’s scriptwriter. Not only did he treasure a copy of the Persian translation of her novel, but he also lavished his allowance on the hardcover edition of L’Amant (1984) when he received asylum in France (Chemin 2008). His remark, ‘Kabul will be my Hiroshima’, then, can be read as an expression of his determination to re-imagine or re-create Kabul as Duras does – or he thinks she does – with Hiroshima in that film. This apparently innocuous comment, however, can be considered controversial when read alongside the recent allegations of Eurocentrism made against the film’s screenplay and Cathy Caruth’s reading of it. In Unclaimed Experience (1996), Caruth contends that trauma can forge ‘a link between cultures’ (Caruth 1996: 56). DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-16

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The  film certainly draws a parallel between the unnamed Japanese man’s loss of his family in the atomic bombing and the unnamed French woman’s loss of her German lover in Nevers. As Stef Craps correctly points out in Postcolonial Witnessing (2012), the film’s purported cross-cultural exchange is asymmetrical. While offering virtually no glimpse into the man’s past, the film consecrates its dialogue and flashbacks to reconstruct the woman’s fragmented memories. Thus, Hiroshima serves as the site of a femme tondue’s struggle to work through her personal trauma, and not the collective suffering of the Japanese hibakusha (Craps 2012: 18). As such, Craps argues, Duras’s text does not provide a suitable aesthetic format to explore non-European experiences of suffering, let alone the long-term, everyday oppression that the Western tradition of psychiatry and psychoanalysis has failed to recognize (Craps 2012: 27–28). In this respect, Rahimi made a strange choice: he turned to Hiroshima mon amour, despite the risk of inadvertently marginalizing his own people’s trauma. This chapter, then, seeks to map out the ways Rahimi’s text appropriates Duras’s screenplay to articulate the personal and collective traumas experienced ‘[s]omewhere in Afghanistan or elsewhere’ (Rahimi 2011: n.p.). Like Duras, he explores personal trauma, frustrated love, and filial discontent through the lopsided dialogue between the unnamed woman and the unnamed man – who does not come out of a coma until the end of the novel. As Hiroshima mon amour bypasses the familiar questions of war crimes, nuclear armament, and radiation hazards, The Patience Stone deliberately circumvents the Soviet-Afghan War, the rise of the mujahideen, and the Taliban at least on a superficial level. In contrast to his engagement with the theme in Earth and Ashes (Khākestar-o-khāk, 1999) and Les Porteurs d’eau (2019), the ongoing civil war and tribal conflicts in Afghanistan surface only intermittently in short paragraphs written in unadorned prose, as if to endorse the validity of the Western modernist aesthetic for non-European suffering (Itakura 2019: 163–68). On the other hand, the novel grapples with everyday experiences of domestic oppression, as opposed to a clear-cut incident, as the cause of the Afghans’ – specifically Afghan women’s – collective trauma. In this regard, Rahimi addresses the common dilemma in modern Afghan literature in Persian: while trying not to be swamped in Western culture, especially French culture, which has attracted the educated class since the turn of the twentieth century (Rahimi 2008a), the writers have had to turn to a universalist approach due to the absence of an ‘uncontaminated’, ‘authentic’ national culture (Ahmadi 2008: 6; Arbabzadah 2013: 42). By transplanting Duras to Afghan soil, he manages to create his Hiroshima and articulate the nation’s collective trauma instead of suppressing it.

Suffering as Political Resistance Rahimi makes use of Duras’s ostensibly minimalist setting to explore the woman’s personal trauma, even though their texts end radically differently. Hiroshima mon amour is composed of a series of conversations the French woman has with the Japanese man, punctuated by sexual intercourse, film shooting, and short travels.

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Likewise, The Patience Stone unfolds with the woman’s confessions to her comatose husband, disrupted by war, raids, and rape. Rahimi’s narrator presents the events through cinematic external focalization with little authorial intervention (Körömi 2019: 8) and the woman’s monologue. His silencing of the man pushes forward the asymmetrical composition of Duras’s dialogue. Throughout the film, the Japanese man merely functions as a ‘catalyst or facilitator’ (Craps 2012: 18) for the woman’s working-through of her own personal trauma, the loss of her German lover. Early on in the film, she momentarily flashbacks to her memory of the German man lying face-down, dying in Nevers, while watching the Japanese man sleeping on his stomach in Hiroshima (Resnais 1959; Caruth 1996: 36–37). Halfway through the film, the Japanese man even begins to refer to the German man in the first-person pronoun (Resnais 1959; Duras 1961: 54) to accelerate this confusion and facilitate her imaginary journey back to the site of her own trauma, Nevers, at the end of World War II. Only through her encounter with the Japanese man, whom she names ‘Hiroshima’, the woman – whom the man names ‘Nevers’ in return (Resnais 1959; Duras 1961: 83) – comes to terms with her own trauma belatedly, as if to illustrate the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit, or the nature of trauma that returns to us, haunts us, and makes us live it again after the initial traumatizing event (Freud 2001a: 18–22). The man plays the role of a psychiatrist in a talk therapy, encouraging the woman to ‘work through’ her trauma in a quasi-Freudian manner,1 while his own remains untold or at best is reduced to stock images from the documentary footage (Resnais 1959).2 Rahimi does not need this trick, as his heroine stays at the site of her trauma: she is constantly exposed to traumatizing situations right where she is. She must survive the never-ending war while also enduring poverty, humiliation, and other stresses of everyday life, all while being separated from her family and without anyone to rely on or talk to, except her small daughters. With the man lying unconscious, she could speak without interruption. Rahimi’s text adheres to Duras’s de facto confessional mode or talk-therapy format to allow a socially marginalized woman to articulate her personal experience in her own words. These two texts harness this personal trauma to the collective trauma differently: while Hiroshima mon amour engages with a shameful chapter in modern French history, shoving Hiroshima into the background, The Patience Stone subtly evokes the social context of post-civil war Afghanistan in which the novel is set. In Resnais’s film, the woman’s father confines her in a cellar to pretend that she, now disgraced with her head shaven in public for sleeping with the enemy, is dead (Resnais 1959; Duras 1961: 55). This is where her personal trauma meets the French people’s collective trauma: while she keeps returning to her own site of trauma, the moment of her lover’s death, the film reminds us of ‘the ultimate of horror and stupidity’ (Duras 1961: 12), or a disgraceful moment in modern French history (Virgili 2002). Both the father’s incarceration of the woman and her sexual transgression appear in The Patience Stone, but with more relevance to the long-term, slow oppression than a moment of mass hysteria. In her childhood, the woman’s father beats her and locks

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her up in a cellar as punishment for killing the expensive quail he purchases for quail fighting. This monetary sport brings the existing oppression to the fore. He would place bets. Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost. When he lost he would get upset, and nasty. He would come home in a rage and find any pretext to beat us … and also my mother. (Rahimi 2011: 58) The subjugation of women in the family culminates in his decision to sell his 12-year-old daughter – the protagonist’s elder sister – to a middle-aged man (Rahimi 2011: 58–59). Interestingly, the repressed memory of her separation from her sister returns to her after her casual reference to the husband’s love for firearms and a story of a military officer calling their gun ‘your mother, your sister, your honour’ (Rahimi 2011: 56). Despite their appearances, these two are different instances of the ongoing subjugation of women in contemporary Afghanistan. Both her father’s obsession with quails and the mujahideen’s – and by extension, her husband’s – addiction to weaponry and war originated in the liquidation of traditional ‘communal security’ and ‘gender relations’ caused by a series of social upheavals (Rostani-Povey 2007: 19; Walter 2017: 77). With the collapse of the formal national economy – and, thus, the diminished role of men – and the increasing power of the mujahideen, male aggression against women multiplied (Rostani-Povey 2007: 21). The woman’s father indulges in the masturbatory pleasure of cherishing quails, even in his undergarments (Rahimi 2011: 58), and tries to rehabilitate his wounded pride by harassing and beating his wife and daughters. Like commanders and warlords in post-civil war Afghanistan, he ends up destroying the traditional, patriarchal family structure in defiance of the Islamic law that prohibits forcing a daughter into marriage without consent (Rostani-Povey 2007: 22).3 The transference of power from the government and traditional communities to the armed forces that operate ‘independently of the country’s tribes’ accelerated the idealization of hypermasculine warriorhood after the Saur Revolution (Walter 2017: 76). Like all those soldiers, the woman’s husband is overwhelmed by this cult of male power, where women have no place. Naturally, they fail to protect women as they are supposed to do in traditional, patriarchal gender relations at the cost of their honor (Rahimi 2011: 15).4 Through her recount of this adolescent episode, the woman unwittingly connects her personal trauma to a wider social context of ongoing male violence in contemporary Afghanistan. The woman’s tasting of blood in, or prior to, the cellar scene further indicates the different avenues her trauma takes. While Duras’s text points to the woman’s resistance to the ‘working through’ of her own trauma, Rahimi’s ramifies into the realm of the political resistance, unbeknownst to the woman herself. In Hiroshima mon amour, the woman licks her own bruised hands in the cellar, imagining herself tasting her lover’s blood (Resnais 1959; Duras 1961: 55). Besides her use of the second-person pronoun, the close-ups of the woman’s and the Japanese man’s

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hands that sandwich the flashback here remind us that she actually feels her German lover’s hand and blood both in the cellar and at a café in Hiroshima. In this regard, she continues to compulsively return to the site of her traumatic loss through an imaginary consummation of unfulfilled love, which she knows is impossible. As in Duras’s stage direction, the woman empties the glass of beer (Resnais 1959; Duras 1961: 55) as if to quench her thirst for the memory of her lover’s death that she does not want to relinquish. In The Patience Stone, the woman’s blood-tasting is not simply an ‘acting out’ of her personal trauma but an act of resistance to domestic tyranny. The woman gets her father’s quail out of the cage, leaving a stray cat to catch and eat it – a mischief for which her father later locks her up in the cellar as a punishment. Watching the cat savoring the quail, she becomes ‘jealous, and sad’ (Rahimi 2011: 59) and finally licks the floor to taste the drops of blood from the quail, the root cause of her traumatic separation from her sister (Rahimi 2011: 60). The quail does not simply represent her father’s vanity or a deranged notion of male dignity. As suggested by his overtly erotic fondling, it functions as a female fetish, or femininity objectified in a reductive manner to provide sexual gratification and protection against castration anxiety (Freud 2001b: 154). Significantly, the woman tells her injured, unconscious husband about this episode ‘[a]s if still tasting the warm wetness of the blood’ (Rahimi 2011: 60). Tasting the blood in her imagination, she indulges herself in the bittersweet memory of her unfulfilled revenge on male dominance. By remembering and telling it, she transfers her pain of political resistance to tyranny, though in her own small way. While it is not clear whether she can truly escape the grip of her own trauma, she gears toward the ethico-political action that Sara Ahmed prescribes as a remedy for collective suffering (Ahmed 2014: 33), an aspect totally absent in Duras’s screenplay.

Narrating Trauma as Weaponry Importantly, Rahimi adds the dimension of resistance we have discussed to the woman’s storytelling. An Afghan wife’s experience is unspeakable, but not in the same way as the femme tendue’s. Like many Afghans, she is literally forced into silence by ‘this new law’ that the likes of her husband have enacted (Rahimi 2011: 27). In Afghanistan, the post-war empowerment of women only benefited the wealthy urban elite, leaving behind the majority of the population who dismissed these movements as ‘foreign domination and humiliation’ (Rostani-Povey 2007:  12). Feeding upon this discontent, the Taliban re-established the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, and curtailed women’s rights to education and even restricted their travel (Rostani-Povey 2007: 24). The collapse of state institutions during the civil war and the Taliban rule worsened the male subjugation of women, as only men could claim a particular woman’s marital state, testify to her adultery, and punish her by death (Rostani-Povey 2007: 62). In Rahimi’s text, even the male Mullah is ‘afraid’ of being caught saying something inappropriate (Rahimi 2011: 27). After an initial attempt to suppress her words, she could not help speaking her mind (Rahimi 2011: 14, 52). Talking to her husband

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in a coma, she is first ‘[u]nsettled’ and ‘upset’ by this ‘mad[ness]’ of her own action for which he may kill her (Rahimi 2011: 60, 61). She overcomes her initial fear of punitive violence and even entertains an apparently perverse desire to make him hear her story indefinitely: ‘You’ll see. Just as my secrets were able to resuscitate my father’s quail, they will bring you back to life! Look, it’s been three weeks now that you’ve been living with a bullet in your neck. … A miracle for me, and thanks to me. Your breath hangs on the telling of my secrets.’ She gets to her feet with ease and then stands over him, full of grace, as if to say: ‘Don’t worry, there is no end to my secrets.’ Her words can be heard through the door. ‘I no longer want to lose you!’ (Rahimi 2011: 70; ellipsis added) Her ‘telling’ – or ‘récit’ (Rahimi 2008b: 78)5 – openly challenges the all-too-­ common counsel of forgetting and keeps the past alive, as it allows the taste of the quail’s blood to return with intensity. This testifies to the presence of the free spirit and resilience in the face of pervasive oppression. By aiming this weaponized narration at her husband, she tries to move him somehow – even if he may not be moved as she expects him to – and thereby demands a connection with this narrative. This telling/listening, like sexual intercourse with a prostitute that horrifies the Taliban, transforms the hierarchical gender relations into ‘a matter of exchange’ (Rahimi 2011: 82), where the male does not simply affect but he is also affected by the female. Even when she can no longer tell her story, it (récit) survives at once as a testimony of the wound – not just hers but the nation’s – and as a sign of ‘the persistence of a connection, a thread between others’, as do the testimonies of subjugated peoples (Ahmed 2014: 39). Rahimi also underlines the role of the woman’s sexual misbehavior in this passage from trauma to political resistance. In Duras’s screenplay, the woman simply loves the wrong man – ‘an official enemy of her country’ (Duras 1961: 12) – and her life changes irrecoverably because she cannot ‘die of love’ at the death of the lover (Duras 1961: 112). Her wartime romance with the German soldier is merely a variation on star-crossed lovers like Romeo and Juliet. In contrast, Rahimi enables the woman to use her body to resist the patriarchal order deeply entrenched in the nation’s imagination. While nothing in shari‘a laws authorizes a man’s right to divorce a wife solely on account of her infertility, let alone persecute her, societal pressure, as well as family members’ surveillance, disciplines the protagonist into the patriarchal social structure that confines women to reproductive roles. A woman’s deviance from this norm would easily turn her into a social pariah, as in the case of the woman’s aunt. The infertile aunt is dumped by her husband and thrusted on his father, who rapes her without end until she attacks him; since then, she is considered a disgrace (Rahimi 2011: 86). Leaving her father-in-law’s home, the aunt has no choice but to earn a living through prostitution. Recognizing the risk of being thrown away like her aunt – because of her husband’s infertility, and not

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her own – the woman asks her aunt’s pimp to find someone to make her pregnant (Rahimi 2011: 132). By the time he locks her up with a young blindfolded boy in a pitch-dark room, she is prepared to sacrifice her own dignity and sexual pleasure for her own survival (Rahimi 2011: 133). While women’s fertile bodies are exploited as a means of preserving family lineage, Rahimi’s heroine uses her own body to flee from quotidian barbarism and micro-aggressions perpetrated in the name of honor. In this respect, her apparently apolitical action transforms the hypermasculine cult of honor and oppressive gender hierarchy into a burlesque. The woman’s weaponization of her storytelling and body brings to the fore the subtext of political resistance, not an individual’s working-through of a personal trauma, which may serve as a remedy for and yet may aggravate the nation’s malaise. In Hiroshima mon amour, the man slaps the woman in the face twice when she tells him that she could hardly distinguish between the body of the dead German lover and her own (Resnais 1959; Duras 1961: 65–66). As a stand-in for a therapist, he brings her forcefully from the world of the dead to that of the living, the past to the present, and the site of repetition compulsion to the site of resilience. Rahimi radically rewrites the man’s intervention into a murderous assault. When the woman tells the man that her daughters are not his, he finally wakes up from the coma and kills her. Significantly, this violent finale emerges as a moment of exchange rather than a process of personal healing. While the woman stabs him in the heart for his neglect – and his family’s enslavement – of her, the man strangles her to death for the story she has told him. Despite the impending danger, she welcomes his violent response ‘ecstatically’ (Rahimi 2011: 135). By disrupting the widespread myth of hypermasculine warriors and their grandiose sense of honor, she manages to affect others, or implicate others in her narrative of suffering and resistance. As someone comes in, she opens her eyes to see the sky: ‘The breeze rises, sending the migrating birds into flight over her body’ (Rahimi 2011: 136). Although idiomatic, the first part of the sentence echoes Paul Valéry’s ‘Le Cimetière marin’ (1920), as both read ‘Le vent se lève’ (the wind rises) in French (Rahimi 2008b: 138; Valéry 1957: 151; Itakura 2019: 168). As the wind arouses waves in the paralyzed sea that the poet sees beyond the cemetery, he tells himself that we must try to live (Valéry 1957: 151). Likewise, the breeze here signals a new beginning of life – or the flight of souls – among the dead, as her story creates ripples in the nation’s imagination and thereby intervenes in tenacious, quotidian oppression, albeit on a small scale.

Conclusion By appropriating Duras’s text, Rahimi revises the story of a French woman’s personal trauma and possible resilience into the story of an Afghan woman’s personal trauma and resistance. Duras deliberately reduces Hiroshima to a somewhat artificial therapeutic space. Safely sequestered from Nevers, her protagonist is given a chance to work through her personal trauma. In contrast, Rahimi successfully re-imagines Kabul as his Hiroshima, or as one of the many Afghan cities and villages where similar tragedies occur without being told or noticed. Rahimi’s protagonist is not

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privileged enough to work through her personal trauma in a safe environment, as the threat of pervasive violence is found everywhere in contemporary Afghanistan. Even for her own recuperation, she must resist male aggression, the very source of her trauma. This conflation of trauma and resistance stands as powerful – though fictional – testimony to the harsh reality of the war-stricken country where trauma is ‘a constant presence’, and neither ‘pre-traumatized’ self nor coherent history is retrievable (Craps 2012: 33). While appropriating Duras’s allegedly Eurocentric textual strategy, Rahimi helps us better relate to traumatized women in Afghanistan. The Patience Stone even contrasts sharply with journalistic writing with ostensible appeals to sympathy, which easily slides into sentimentality. Instead of transforming a disempowered population into pathetic, passive victims, Rahimi focuses on a victimized woman’s agency like Duras, or – in his case – an Afghan woman’s effort to narrate her own story into which to integrate her trauma and with which to resist oppression. In this respect, he radically reshapes and attunes Duras’s text, as well as the Western model of trauma it is based on, to rarely heard voices from Afghanistan, his Hiroshima. By so doing, he constantly reminds us that Afghan people’s psychological wounds, either personal or collective, still remain open in the present, as we re-experience them in the present tense by reading this novel.

Acknowledgments The author’s current research on this subject has been funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (grant no. 21K00354).

Notes 1 Needless to say, the man does not have a sufficient amount of time required by this art as Freud proposed (Freud 2001c: 155). 2 As Varsava points out, the sequence encapsulates the woman’s ‘cursory’ look and ‘failure to gain insight into the experiences of individual survivors, or to address and compensate their silences’ (Varsava 2011: 113). The newsreels even include coverage of the Daigo Fukuryū Maru incident of 1954 and the May Day protests of the same year (Resnais 1959). In March 1954, the crew of the Daigo Fukuryū Maru, a Japanese fishing boat from Yaizu – 540 kilometres away from Hiroshima – were exposed to the fallout from the US nuclear test at Bikini Atoll. They suffered from acute radiation syndrome, which reawakened the nationwide interest in global nuclear disarmament. 3 Although the practice of forced marriage is considered incongruous with the universal Islamic sense of honor (nāmūs), Pashtunwali, the ethnic code of honor originally observed by farming Pashtuns, condoned the patriarch’s trade of daughters in the marriage market for the sake of the honor of the family (Walter 2017: 54–55). This local code of honor had penetrated the country until the coup d’état of 1978 and returned during the Taliban rule (Rostani-Povey 2007: 23). However, even this custom did not permit a man to sell his daughter off to clear up his debts. 4 Interestingly, Rahimi’s previous novel Earth and Ashes, set clearly in the wake of the Soviet invasion, explores this gendered sense of honor from a different point of view. Unlike The Patience Stone’s morally corrupt father or mujahideen husband, the novel’s hero represents a generation of conflicted male Afghans. Torn between a sense of

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honor and emotional attachment to the loved ones, he secretly accuses the foreman for not allowing his son to come back to their village for revenge, knowing that if he had returned, his son would have been killed (Rahimi 2003: 48, 45). 5 The French word récit is used for both a story and a theatrical monologue or the act of narrating a story.

References Ahmadi, Wali. 2008. Modern Persian Literature in Afghanistan: Anomalous Visions of History and Form. London: Routledge. Ahmed, Sara. 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Arbabzadah, Nushin. 2013. ‘Modernizing, Nationalizing, Internationalizing: How Mahmud Tarzi’s Hybrid Identity Transformed Afghan Literature,’ in Nile Green and Nushin Arbabzadah (eds.), Afghanistan in Ink: Literature Between Diaspora and Nation, pp. 31–65. London: Hurst. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chemin, Ariane. 2008. ‘Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’Atiq Rahimi,’ BibliObs, 10 November, https://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/romans/20081110.BIB2386/deux-ou-troischoses-que-je-sais-d-atiq-rahimi.html (accessed on 19 January 2022). Craps, Stef. 2012. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Duras, Marguerite. 1961. Hiroshima mon amour. Trans. Richard Seaver. New York: Grove Press. Freud, Sigmund. 2001a. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in James Strachey et al. (eds.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume XVIII (1920– 1922), Trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud, pp. 1–64. London: Vintage. Freud, Sigmund. 2001b. ‘Fetishism,’ in James Strachey et al. (eds.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume XXI (1927–1931), Trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud, pp. 147–57. London: Vintage. Freud, Sigmund. 2001c. ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II),’ in James Strachey et al. (eds.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume XII (1911–1913), Trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud, pp. 145–56, London: Vintage. Itakura, Gen’ichiro. 2019. ‘Writing Trauma, Writing Modern: Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil and Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone,’ in Danielle Schaub et al. (eds.), Topography of Trauma: Fissures, Disruptions and Transfigurations, pp. 153–172. Leiden: Brill. Körömi, Gabriella. 2019. ‘L’Hybridité générique dans Syngué sabour. Pierre de patience d’Atiq Raphimi,’ e-Scripta Romanica, 7: 1–14. La Meslée, Valérie Marin. 2008. ‘Syngué sabour. Pierre de patience, d’Atiq Rahimi: La voix des épouses silencieuses,’ Le Monde, 2 October, https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/ article/2008/10/02/syngue-sabour-pierre-de-patience-d-atiq-rahimi_1102119_3260. html (accessed on 19 January 2022). Rahimi, Atiq. 2003. Earth and Ashes. Trans. Erdrag M. Göknar. London: Vintage. Rahimi, Atiq. 2008a. ‘Mon éducation française à Kaboul,’ BibliObs, 20 November, https:// bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/romans/20081120.BIB2380/mon-education-francaise-akaboul.html (accessed on 19 January 2022). Rahimi, Atiq. 2008b. Syngué sabour. Pierre de patience. Paris: POL. Rahimi, Atiq. 2011. The Patience Stone. Trans. Polly McLean. London: Vintage.

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Resnais, Alain. (dir.). 1959. Hiroshima mon amour. Argos Films, Como Films, Daiei Motion Picture Company and Pathé Overseas Productions. Rostani-Povey, Elaheh. 2007. Afghan Women: Identity and Invasion. London: Zed Books. Valéry, Paul. 1957. ‘Le Cimetière marin,’ in Jean Hytier (ed.), Œuvres, vol. 1, pp. 147–151. Paris: Gallimard. Varsava, Nina. 2011. ‘Processions of Trauma in Hiroshima mon amour: Towards an Ethic of Representation,’ Studies in French Cinema, 11(2): 111–123. Virgili, Fabrice. 2002. Shorn Women: Gender and Punishment in Liberation France. Trans. John Flower. Oxford: Berg. Walter, Ben. 2017. Gendering Human Security in Afghanistan: In a Time of Western Intervention. London: Routledge.

PART V

Conflict and Wounds Narrating Trauma of Nepal

12 PEOPLE’S WAR, TRAUMA, AND ITS CONSEQUENCES IN REBEL A Cross-Cultural Study in Post-Conflict Nepali Narrative(s) Badri Prasad Pokharel

Introduction Wars have wreaked havoc, and everyone is terrified of the horrifying consequences. Those who have witnessed and experienced the horrible consequences of wars and conflicts in the world have been traumatized for a long time. The Nepali people who witnessed and experienced the ten-year-long Maoist People’s War have not forgotten the fatal consequences of the conflict. For the purpose of healing the traumatic pain of the war-affected people, along with sustainable peace and prosperity, focus must be given to the sustainable social and cultural importance of peace building and settlement of political disputes among all fighting groups, and a corresponding choice of means. Remembering past events, ‘actions and outcomes might be crucial to subsequent planning of future actions’ (Bhattarai 2014: 211). But things like that would not normally happen. Hope for a better life is certainly a basic choice for all concerned people, but it would not be sufficient to achieve sustainable peace, which has been a long-aspired goal for healing wounds. But as expected, the people concerned with state mechanisms, the media, civil society, and the international community as bridge facilitators would have major responsibilities in awareness of the peace and healing process. Due to the apathy of people and how unconcerned they are, all this looks like it is lagging behind what ordinary people expect for sustainable peace. Political alignments are still fluid, and the possibility of working through a consensual process to draft the new laws has yet to be vitiated by the polarization of politics. It is again the political polarization on the issues directly related to the lives of people that causes concrete decisions that are needed for the permanent solution of the problems to deteriorate, undermining the fundamental rights of the people. To bring those bitter experiences to light, some enthusiastic Nepali prolific writers who have witnessed and experienced the decade-long insurgency have brought DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-18

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to light some narratives that narrate traumatic tales that would unfold many horrible facts about the war that crippled the ordinary Nepali people’s lives. Those narratives show how the country witnesses ‘the death of more than 17000 innocent people’ (Bhattarai 2014: 211). The ability to re-experience a past event through automatic consciousness could lead him or her to create a world with the concept of ‘mental time travel’, which is envisaged as ‘the ability to mentally re-experience events from the past’ (Eacott and Easton 2012: 200) and is taken as a cognitive idea to develop the experience. Unlike many neighboring countries, Nepal has not been colonized internally or externally in history; rather, the feeling of strong nationalism has grown time and again. The response of the Nepali people to any kind of domination is ‘fiercely nationalistic, particularly in response to the domination of their country’ (Reith 2009: 9). As the tussle between the Maoist rebels and security forces grew bitterly during the decade of 1995–2005, Nepal got through a severe tough time and the conflict expanded to all over the country ‘from the direct armed confrontation between the state security forces and the Maoist guerrillas’ (Hachhethu 2015: 1). In making the country a perilous land and letting people live in terror and trauma, the Maoists governed the local areas, forming people’s governments as a party’s policy to expand the movement to suit its best for pursuance in base areas. In doing so, for the expansion of the insurgency, many factors played a crucial role in escalating violent activities and their influence all over the country. Krisna Hechhethu further explains that, first, the geographical landscape was one of the most favorable conditions for waging war and having close contact with the people. Second, the national security force’s severe oppression of the majority of ethnic groups in the name of controlling the movement aggravated the areas. Third, making farmers aware of their rights, doing cultural programs in rural areas, and living with them, participating in all their rural activities, helped the rebels initiate guerrilla wars in different parts of the country, which consequently instigated the protracted areas severely. Fourth, since the government was not in the condition to depute the military, the rebels took advantage of this to acquire a definite area as a ladder to reach the destination. Finally, well-planned actions, carefully utilized topographical location, its geographical closeness with neighboring India, farmers’ involvement in conflict and the excluded ethnic groups’ participation and guerrilla tactics, and certain other unavoidable factors, such as systemic inequality, unemployment, backwardness, marginalization, and poor governance, are some of the most important factors that contribute to the emergence and escalation of Maoist armed activities. The decade-long People’s War took many lives and left many others missing and tormented, in addition to being compelled to choose one or the other military force. Hundreds of people have vanished, thousands have died, hundreds of thousands have been displaced, and many have been wounded. The inter-conflict or intra-conflict deposed the tranquility of the peaceful land and ‘engulfed it into the quicksand of bloodiest rebellion that oscillated lakhs of people’s accommodations, lives and harmony that had once tied each of them in a chain of belief ’

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(Muni 2010:  4). Police, rebels, and officials were all responsible for the acts of torture, imprisonments, disappearance, and all other forms of ill-treatment. Both the Maoists and the state security forces were blamed to ‘have killed, abducted, confined and finally disappeared the common people in the name of controlling the movement and spreading the impacts of the armed conflict’ (Adhikari 2014: 228). From both sides, women and children were being victimized, and their condition was very traumatic due to the severity of their atrocities in the name of protecting their rights and privileges. But in a desperate call for peace, once talking to a journalist, women expressed ‘their consistent belief that there would be peace if the government stopped its oppression of the people’ (Thapa and Sijapati 2012: 161). Besides, such victims would not expect to be penetrated like this. In short, the conditions of the victims and perpetrators persisted despite the long-lasting anticipation of good results. In such a condition, what they could do was reminisce about those hiatus moments that would haunt them time and again. Besides looking back at what had happened, they would be in a state of penetrating repentance for the past events that mostly tormented them. The memories of bygone days can captivate you for a long time, leaving you pondering what happened to them. People could hardly forget what had happened to them and their families during the conflict. Later, such memories came in the form of literary writing, which many writers took up to mesmerize in written form.

Trauma and Rebel: A Textual Analysis Showing the importance of writing about ordinary people’s painful experiences, Cathy Caruth says, ‘The story of trauma, then, as the narrative of belated experience, far from telling of an escape from reality – the escape from a death, or from its referential force – rather attests to its endless impact on a life’ (1996: 7). She contends that literature enables one to pay attention to events that cannot be fully comprehended and to allow access to one’s ears to experiences that would otherwise have gone largely unrecognized and unnoticed (Caruth 1996). Along with illustrating the glorious events that happened in the past, history must also bring to light those traumatic events that badly impacted contemporary society and caused many ordinary people to became victims of ‘overwhelming experience of sudden and catastrophic events’ (1996: 11). There must be a description of the trauma and other painful events that happened in ordinary people’s lives along with the events of development and glories. Converting trauma into narratives can help the story be verbalized and communicated, ‘to be integrated into one’s own and others’ knowledge of the past’ (Caruth 1995: 153). It should accept the pain that has affected the victims. Then, he or she can feel relieved. Such people’s trauma, as a part of collective reminiscence, would become very momentum as they are ‘subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories for ever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways’ (Alexander 2004: 1). It incorporates the domains of both social responsibility and political action. It would not be good to underestimate

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the existence of others’ trauma and refuse to accept their responsibility for their suffering, which only propagates the tension. But the memory of organized violence and terror has been an important site for political and literary investment. The traumatic memory would be a good source for writers to create their own world in order to analyze not only the commemoration of such events but also the practices of redistribution, recovery, and reconciliation for their reawakening (Edkins 2003: 100). The experience of catastrophe shows the difficulties of generalizing trauma and its impacts on how one reacts to trauma depending on ‘his or her psychic history, memories mixed with fantasies of prior catastrophe’ (Kaplan 2008: 1). Consequently, to bring traumatic experience in narrative, the concept of middle voice envisioned by LaCapra takes writing as ‘intransitive or to see it as self – ­referential, thereby bracketing the question of reference and focusing exclusively on the relation of speaker and discourse (or signified and signifier)’ (LaCapra 2001: 19). The narratives written about trauma and its impacts on society might provoke more agitation in readers if they are biased toward one group. The middle voice to bring the traumatic experience into the narrative would play an important role. There are some important people whom the storytellers have fictionalized as characters in Rebel: Stories of Conflict and War from Nepal, who have borne the traumatic experiences and presented their painful testimonies from different socio-cultural aspects, which help one access how much trauma they have gone through during the tenyear long insurgency. The life of Nirmaya, the wife of a policeman in Singh’s ‘The Silence of Violence’, who has gone missing in the clash with the rebels at the police station, is one important character to portray the pain and suffering of ordinary Nepali people sandwiched between two forces, that is, the Maoist rebels and the security forces during the ten-year long civil war. She was raped by the rebels in her own residence after having served them food and has been receiving psychiatric therapy at a rehabilitation center. Along with Nirmaya, Singh conveyed the agony of an elderly woman whose only son ‘was slain by the security force some days back’ (Singh 2011: 80). She remains crying and calling her son, saying ‘Kancha … Kancha’ (2011: 80). Her situation is emotionally damaging, as she discovers that everyone is weeping alongside her. Bisnumaya, another insurgent victim, whose innocent husband was brutally murdered next to her by rebels on the presumption of spying, has been eagerly anticipating justice in a rehabilitation center and receiving treatment for the trauma that haunts her countless times. Ramaniya, Lakhidevi, Malkhamai, and Pawankali’s stories are also heartbreaking for anyone who has lost a family member or been unfairly targeted by rebels or security forces. Another traumatized woman, Rukmana, a rural woman in Maya Thakuri’s ‘The Descending Mountain’, is one of the victims of the People’s War. Her son has been missing for a long period of time, and his location is unknown. Her life in the village, along with her small daughter, Muna, has been even very tough and difficult. The war has devastated the village to the point where residents are afraid of living there. The village once used to be fairly quiet and hospitable for each of them at one point. If there is anything audible, it is only gunshots, bomb explosions, and

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weeping. Such terroristic trauma has ‘left the country in a dreadful silent state. If the situation continues like this, today’s history will be written with blood’ (Thakuri 2011: 30). She and her nine-year-old daughter Muna took shelter in the cave after her only son caused chaos in society by plundering, damaging property, and drinking. He turned himself into a group of rebels who were trying to change society. Subsequently, the villagers have been apprehensive about greeting visitors or frowning at random people who might otherwise respond brazenly. Their lives were perilous, and as a result, they were severely traumatized and appeared to be looking forward to their own demise. The trauma of Bhashkar Sharma in ‘Execution’, by Bhagirathi Shrestha, has become too chronic to bear as neither could he run away nor could he accept it heartily. His personal aptitude was inept for him to accomplish his regular work. He believes that the insurgency has only weakened society’s foundations and made everyone’s lives worse. Even the caw of a crow seems to him an imminent tragedy, but it is not easy for him to leave the house, as his friend advised him, because his father, bedridden by paralysis on the right part of his body, his mother with her heart ailment, his wife; the farm; and the rice mill, he would be leaving them all destitute. How can he leave the house for an uncertain length of time? (Shrestha, 2011: 67) He finds the surrounding atmosphere teasing him and laughing at him for his imminent tragedy. The crow’s caw seems to him to be the message of his death. He feels the trees such as bananas, guavas, mangoes, grapefruits, and litchi are demons. The movement of a single leaf shakes his heart. He does not find any place to hide from this upcoming death. The whole scenario has traumatized him and he feels pain in everything. In a sense, he seems to be awaiting his termination. The main character in Raj Kumar Dikpal’s ‘Liwang 2006’, Dilsara Ghartimagar, is a 60-year-old lady, a traumatized patient – whose son Purnaman has been missing for a long time and had been abducted by the security forces – who is a victim of the conflict of the People’s War and compelled to live an isolated life. She is seen to be ‘staring at the distant Gwarpa Hill instead of relaxing in the sun’ (Dikpal 2011: 131). Coming to Tundikhel every afternoon, she is waiting for her son to mutter something that other people cannot understand. She is a representative of all those mothers and wives who have lost their children and other family members. Dilsara’s suffering is related to her only son, Purnaman, who was about to go to a foreign country to earn more money to make her happy, but suddenly, on the charge of giving refuge to the Maoist cadres, the security forces arrested him and made him one of many missing. The only son whom she had reared with many difficulties has been lost and her staring at the hill may signal that she has lost her hope as well as her aspiration to meet him again. Her condition ‘worsened after her son, whom she had reared with difficulty and great care, did not return’ (Dikpal 2011: 134). People like her living in Liwang, the capital town of Rolpa, have been sandwiched between two forces.

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In ‘Now, Your Turn, My Dear’ by Manu Brajaki, the bitter truth of the People’s War is revealed in which a social worker, ‘the hypocrite social worker’ (Brajaki 2011: 7) in rebels’ words, Chetman, has badly been manhandled in front of his wife and children for not paying the rebel five thousand rupees as a donation because he had participated in ‘the school or adult education program’ (2011: 7). Later, he was called to the ‘jungle’ for not obeying them as a form of ‘people’s punishment’. In spite of his wife Radha’s request, he was ‘staggering on his feet. Even the sleepers had stopped making sound. He walked amidst the green paddy field as if he was a dry leaf flying in a storm of horror’ (2011: 11). As much as he was nearing his destination – the inner part of the jungle where the rebels had stationed – he felt ‘a growing heaviness on the left side of his shoulder and ribcage. His eyes filmed over. His back hunched more and his heart pounded faster’ (2011: 13). Finally, he reached the place, and ‘a moment later, five to seven men appeared out of the bush’ (2011: 13). But, he could not resist seeing these people surrounding him. He felt very nervous and ‘his blood surged through his whole body. He felt his chest exploding with each heartbeat. His bent body stretched once. Then, pressing his chest tightly with his right hand, he felt to the ground, face down’ (2011: 14). The moment Chetman went through was very terrific and traumatic, which he could not bear, and lost his life forever. The traumatic experience of a government official in the office in ‘The Senseless Killing of a Man’, by Bhaupanthi, can be seen during the time of insurgency. He was brooding over his duty and terror crept into his mind almost every time he tried to come out because ‘it seemed that he had had a premonition of his imminent murder’ (Bhaupanthi 2011: 17). He had heard that ‘the rebels had come to blow up his office building. He was so scared that he almost pissed himself; however, his fear was tempered by the fact that he was accustomed to seeing similar incidents in the news’ (2011: 22). But the most shocking incident mentioned in the story is that the rebel who had come to detonate the bomb in the office was none other than his own nephew, Ramesh, who had determined to obey the party’s order to blow up his own uncle’s office. Ramesh thought that ‘a revolution requires sacrifices from a father, uncle, nephew, and son. Such a bold determination towards the party’s revolution would set an example’ (2011: 24). Here, a nephew becomes ready to kill his own uncle by setting a bomb in his own office and closing the door from outside. The People’s War was not only a political movement that was about to bring a change in society but also became a testimony for murdering a close friend and his mother in the name of the security personnel’s duty in ‘Hareram’s Mother’ by Khagendra Sangraula. For a long time, Kisne, a policeman, happened to kill his own friend, Hareram, who was a Maoist rebel and was involved in different violent activities against the government for a long time. He was in search of the security people who used to threaten his mother, ‘Either show us your us your son or lose your life’ (Sangraula 2011: 45). Finally, Kisne was able to kill Hareram in the so-called crossfire and his body was found lying dead on the bank of Turture brook. ‘The dead body was given tight security as if it was that of a VIP. The corpse lay flat – as lifeless, deserted, and dejected as the sandy bank surrounding it’ (2011: 40). In spite of Kisne’s warning, Hareram’s mother tried to resuscitate the dead body,

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‘he pointed his rifle at her chest and fired. A big hole in her body! She was hurled towards the brook and fell down stretching her hands and legs’ (2011: 49). Firing on this old lady who was mourning the death of her only son was beyond the toleration that would have helped erupt the fierce violence. During the ten-year Maoist insurgency, it is needless to say that among the people involved in the war, ordinary people became unnecessary victims and lost their lives without any meaning. People working at home, plowing the farm, grazing cattle in the field, going to and from the market, teaching or reading in school or college were frequently kidnapped, savagely tortured, and thrown elsewhere. Ghanashyam Dhakal’s ‘Remorse’ narrates the trauma of a housewife, Buddhikala, whose husband was one of many who had been kidnapped by the police without any prior notice at night. She could not sleep as ‘night passed hour by hour and it was ten in the morning, but she knew nothing of her husband’s whereabouts’ (Dhakal 2011: 87). She could hardly convince her children that her husband would come tomorrow, and ‘people in the village talked about his disappearance’ (2011: 89). Later, the eye witness was a cow grazer who saw how the security personnel took Buddhikala’s husband to the jungle and shot him dead and threw him into the waterfall. Unknown to the facts, Buddhikala was in the headquarter ‘hoping to see him in court’ (90). She was still hoping that she would meet him and get justice. Those who return home from abroad after a few years will have even more horrific stories to tell about Nepal’s decade-long Maoist-government conflict. Here, in Roshan Thapa Neerav’s ‘Unbearable’, is a youth who has returned home after 12 years and eight months only to find that everything he knew was ruined. He finds ‘the settlement slumbers guiltlessly under a blanket of terror’ (Neerav 2011: 119) and the whole of the surrounding area is seen ‘under the shroud of silence far and wide’ (2011: 120). Not only his home but the whole of his village ‘has been reduced to a pile of ashes’ (2011: 120). He flies from one scene to another, unfolding several horrible scenes involving the dead bodies of his near and dear ones. The very unbearable scenes of the dead bodies of his mother, wife, sisters, and other villagers that he finds scattered here and there make him panic and seek for refuge to get relief, which he can hardly get anywhere. He feels himself ‘running, chased by terror, keeping its distance behind at all times’ (2011: 127), from which he can hardly get aloof. The war prisoners’ testimony is another aspect of trauma when they were brought here and there to the kangaroo court for punishment. In Nawa Silwal’s ‘The Prisoner’, after taking over the town with their night-long attack, the rebels made it fierce as ‘the dawn turned night into daylight, streets and fields were seen awash with corpses. The still-smoldering police offices and government buildings were emanating fear’ (Silwal 2011:149). A government soldier, as a prisoner of the rebels, had to go through several traumatic situations from which he could hardly get over. His retrained hands, which were tied together very tightly, ‘were suffering from an increasing pain’ (2011: 143). As punishment, the Kangaroo court assigned two guerillas to shoot him and transport him to a ‘hillock in the middle of the dense jungle’ (2011: 149). Before he was shot, his reminiscence of his old mother waiting for him made him very sorry, and he closed his eyes, making himself ready to be sacrificed for the peace and security of the nation.

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The ten-year-long Maoist insurgency brought a change in the class of Nepali people, omitting the line between higher and lower classes that prevailed in Nepali society. Sharmila khadka’s ‘Sukanya, Alias Nilima’ deletes the boundary between a high-ranking government officer and a Maoist cadre. The officer is psychologically attached to the young girl, Sukanya, who helps and takes care of him after he is badly maimed in a Maoist attack at the district headquarters. It’s also about those people who could not get legal documents, for example, citizenship certificates due to the absence of their father, and seeing no other way joined the Maoist movement. Poor people were far from the reach of the fulfillment of their basic needs. Class discrimination was another reason for many youths to join the Maoist revolt so that ‘the exploited class should be uplifted and the corrupted and hypocrite landowning exploiters should be rooted out’ (Khadka 2011: 113). Sukanya is representative of all such youth who were happy to be sacrificed for change and ‘to make a prosperous New Nepal’ (2011: 113). Such people are the victims of trauma both psychologically and economically.

Conclusion This work has attempted to enumerate the traumatic effects of the ten-year-long Maoist revolt on ordinary people, detached from the state mechanism, who were crippled by both the state and the rebels. It shows the cross-cultural traumatic effect on them. These 11 stories have explored how the revolt, though starting to introduce total change in the country, has left the very ordinary people, such as the wife whose husband has been missing and has been gangraped, the miserable mother and daughter being killed in the cave in the name of the total change, the mother and her son who were killed at the same spot, the social worker who denied providing the donation, the solitary soldier prisoner wailing for his lonely mother at home, in a dilapidated condition and their lives are full of trauma from which they could hardly get relief even after a long time. Another aspect of this work is the presentation of female characters who are the actual victims of the revolt in which the violence and conflict were prior to changing the patterns of their lives. Their involvement in the war has brought about lots of problems that have created deep physical, psychological, and social wounds while living the traumatized life during the Civil War in Nepal. This research work has tried to picture Nepal as it was about 20 years ago, in terms of geopolitical and social aspects as well as cross-cultural aspects during the Civil War and the traumatic facts of ordinary people living in the hinterlands.

References Adhikari, Aditya. 2014. The Bullets and the Ballot Box: The Story of Nepal’s Maoist Revolution. New Delhi: Aleph Book Company. Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. ‘Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, In Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. (eds.), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, pp. 1–31. California: Cambridge University Press.

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Bhattarai, Umesh K. 2014. Conflict to Peace Transition in Nepal. New Delhi: Adarsh Books. Bhaupanthi. 2011. ‘The Senseless Killing of a Man’, in Khatri C. Ramchandra (trans and ed.), Rebel: Stories of Conflict and War from Nepal, pp. 17–26. Kathmandu: Trans Reprint. Brajaki, Manu. 2011. ‘Now, Your Turn, My Dear’, in Khatri C. Ramchandra (trans and ed.), Rebel: Stories of Conflict and War from Nepal, pp. 3–14. Kathmandu: Trans Reprint. Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Trauma: Exploration in Memory. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Dhakal, Ghanashyam. 2011. ‘Remorse’, in Khatri C. Ramchandra (trans and ed.), Rebel: Stories of Conflict and War from Nepal, pp. 79–90. Kathmandu: Trans Reprint. Dikpal, Rajkumar. 2011. ‘Liwang 2006’, in Khatri C. Ramchandra (trans and ed.), Rebel: Stories of Conflict and War from Nepal, pp. 131–138. Kathmandu: Trans Reprint. Eacott, Madeline J. and Alexander Easton. 2012. ‘Remembering the Past and Thinking About the Future: Is It Really About Time?’, Learning and Motivation, l(43): 200–208. Edkins, Jenny. 2003. Trauma and Memory of Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hachhethu, Krishna. 2015. ‘Nepali Politics: Political Crisis, Political Parties and Problems of Governance’, CiteSeerX, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download? doi=10.1.1.504.6578&rep=rep1&type=pdf (accessed on 11 June 2021). Kaplan, E. Ann. 2008. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press. Khadka, Sharmila. 2011. ‘Sukanya, Alias Nilima’, in Khatri C. Ramchandra (trans and ed.), Rebel: Stories of Conflict and War from Nepal, pp. 105–116. Kathmandu: Trans Reprint. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Muni, S.D. 2010. ‘The Maoist Insurgency in Nepal: Origin and Evolution’, ISAS Working Papers, 11(1): 1–17. Neerav, Roshan Thapa. 2011. ‘Unbearable’, in Khatri C. Ramchandra (trans and ed.), Rebel: Stories of Conflict and War from Nepal, pp. 119–128. Kathmandu: Trans Reprint. Reith, Alastair. 2009. ‘Revolution in Nepal’, A Workers Party Pamphlet, 3(1): 1–26. Sangraula, Khagendra. 2011. ‘Hareram’s Mother’, in Khatri C. Ramchandra (trans and ed.), Rebel: Stories of Conflict and War from Nepal, pp. 39–50. Kathmandu: Trans Reprint. Shrestha, Bhagirathi. 2011. ‘Execution’, in Khatri C. Ramchandra (trans and ed.), Rebel Stories of Conflict and War from Nepal, pp. 65–76. Kathmandu: Trans Reprint, 2011. Silwal, Nawa. 2011. ‘The Prisoner’, in Khatri C. Ramchandra (trans and ed.), Rebel: Stories of Conflict and War from Nepal, pp. 141–152. Kathmandu: Trans Reprint. Singh, Padmavati. 2011. ‘The Silence of Violence’, in Khatri C. Ramchandra (trans and ed.), Rebel Stories of Conflict and War from Nepal, pp. 53–62. Kathmandu: Trans Reprint. Thakuri, Maya. 2011. ‘The Descending Mountain’, in Khatri C. Ramchandra (trans and ed.), Rebel Stories of Conflict and War from Nepal, pp. 29–36. Kathmandu: Trans Reprint. Thapa, Deepak and Bandita Sijapati. 2012, A Kingdom Under Siege. Kathmandu: The Printhouse.

13 TRAUMATISM OF THE FUTURE Reading Nepali Literature with Caruth, Derrida, and Freud Puspa Damai

Introduction: Silence in Trauma Studies In the introduction of an important work of scholarship in the field of trauma ­studies and literature, Trauma, Memory and Healing in Asian Literature and Culture, Rahul Gairola and Sharanya Jayawickrama note that ‘the untold suffering’ caused by the legacies of colonialism, military regimes, and dictatorships in contemporary Asia is only ‘punctuated by conspicuous silence in the field of trauma studies’ (2021: 5). Tracing this silence back to the historical fact of ‘Asia’ being a European construct, they ask ‘what room is left for occidental empathy’ in Europe’s ‘heart that could be brutal in its race projects designed to justify conflicts, wars [and] xenophobia?’ (2021: 6). In some ways, this current collection of essays could be seen as a continuation of the critical voices represented in Gairola and Jayawickrama’s anthology, where these voices make at least three distinct appeals: for interrupting the silence within trauma studies regarding the wounds, pain, and suffering of Asians across the globe; for decolonizing trauma studies by critiquing Europe’s brutal legacy of colonialism and by searching for an empathetic heart for healing; and, perhaps most importantly, for re-engaging not just with trauma’s temporality but also with its spatiality. Building on the resonance generated by these three ‘differential’ injunctions, this chapter intends to revisit trauma theory and explore its relevance to and potential for articulating, analyzing, and exposing violence and suffering in Nepali literature and history. In light of this differentiality in relation to trauma, this chapter recalls the works by Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan. Derrida’s deconstructionist thinking, especially his destabilization of the writing– speech binary and his critique of ‘being’ pivoted on temporality as in Hegel’s and Heidegger’s philosophy, and his supplementary logic of différance, through which he introduces the dimension of spatiality, would be particularly crucial in this chapter DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-19

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to transition from a theory of trauma revolving solely around temporality, past, memory, and the wound toward a discussion of trauma in which temporality gets supplemented by spatiality, past by future, memory by menace, and the wound by language, event, and address. Especially pertinent for this chapter is Derrida’s assertion that the ‘future can be anticipated only in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and therefore only announces itself, presents itself in the species of monstrosity’ (2016: 5). The main argument of this chapter, that the future of a country like Nepal can only be understood in terms of absolute danger, is grounded in this insight from Derrida. Two representative literary texts have been chosen to illustrate this insight: Muna Madan, a classic work of Nepali literature by Nepal’s legendary poet Laxmi Prasad Devkota in Michael Hutt’s crisp translation, and The Royal Ghosts, a short story collection by a contemporary Nepali diasporic writer, Samrat Upadhyay. Devkota was born in Kathmandu in 1909, and in his relatively short literary career (he died in 1959), he was able to author more than 40 books, including a number of epics such as Shakuntala (1945), Sulochana (1946), and Prometheus (1951). Some of his popular works include Muna Madan (1936), ‘The Lunatic’ (1953), and ‘The Beggar’ (1953). His vast literary oeuvre earned him the title of mahakavi, or ‘Great Poet.’ His works are often influenced or inspired by the circumstances of his own tumultuous and tragic life, encumbered by destitution, the death of his eldest son, and depression, for which he was put for months in a mental asylum in India in 1939. Like Devkota, Upadhyay was also born in Kathmandu, but unlike the mahakavi, who authored books in almost all genres of literature in both Nepali and English, Upadhyay writes mostly fiction and only in English. He left Nepal when he was 21, and lives now in the United States, where he also teaches creative writing at a public university. His novels and short stories include Arresting God in Kathmandu (2001), Guru of Love (2003), Buddha’s Orphans (2017), and The Royal Ghosts (2006). Devkota and Upadhyay could not be called ‘Nepalis’ in the same way either. Devkota is more resourceful with his vast repertoire of characters, settings, and topics, which include both nationalism and cosmopolitanism, imperialism and freedom, myths, history, and folktales. As a diasporic writer, Upadhyay is more focused on painting a picture of Nepal by cashing in on the motifs more appealing to American or Western audiences. However, Upadhyay’s work is close to Devkota’s Muna Madan in its representation of the urban middle-class sensibilities of its characters in or around Kathmandu. As a result, neither Muna Madan nor The Royal Ghosts represents the entirety or diversity of Nepali culture and history. In many ways, no two texts could be further apart than Muna Madan and The Royal Ghost – temporally, thematically, aesthetically, formalistically, and even ideologically. More than 70 years of historical, cultural, and politico-economic transformation of Nepal and the world separate the two. Written in the vein of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Devkota’s text blends ethnic Newari Buddhist content with the Hindu folk form called the jhyaure metre, which is used mostly in folk songs from the hills in Nepal. Michael Hutt calls the book a ‘romantic tragedy

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designed to tug at the heartstrings’ (1995: 42). Upadhyay offers a mélange of Nepali content and global novelistic form. Influenced by some of the South Asian and Western ‘masters’ of storytelling such as Anton Chekhov, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, and Ray Carver, we see in his works a blend of Anita Desai and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Upadhyay 2014). And yet, both give voice to a range of traumatizing experiences, events, and structures reverberating through Nepal’s history and culture. Many people may not think of these two texts as stories about trauma, but trauma’s uniqueness means that we should not assume that trauma is shown in literature as a given. We should be able to recognize trauma even when it is dormant or hidden by silence.

The Spatiality of Trauma Trauma’s differentiality here signifies not just the discursive view of trauma, which Freud hints at in Moses and Monotheism with the remarks that ‘all depends on what is defined as traumatic’ (1940: 118). Nor does it just mean what Stef Craps calls the marginalization or outright disregard of ‘traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority cultures’ in the founding texts of trauma theory (2014: 45). What is being evoked, projected, and formulated as trauma in this chapter and in the collection we cited in the opening paragraph is always differential in the Derridian sense of différance – its temporality overlapping with its becoming-space as well. In his book, Marges de la Philosophie (later translated as Margins of Philosophy), Derrida outlines his notion of difference. As a term dallying on the margins of philosophy without ever becoming a concept, différance for Derrida simultaneously carries two contradictory and complementary meanings: ‘to differ as discernibility, distinction, separation, diastema, spacing; and to defer as detour, relay, reserve, temporization’ (Derrida 1982: 18). If the margins of philosophy are manifested in différance, then what is marginalized in Eurocentric theories of trauma is also manifested in différance, calling for detour, discernibility, but also distinction and singularity – the temporality of trauma as well as its spatiality. Ever since Freud used it in his Project for a Scientific Psychology in 1895, the term Nachtraglichkeit – which has been translated variously as ‘deferred action,’ ‘afterwardness’ or ‘belatedness’ – is at the origin of trauma’s fixation on temporality. As Ruth Leys summarizes the operation, trauma is constituted by a relationship between two events: a first event that was not necessarily traumatic because it came too early in the child’s development … and a second event that also was not inherently traumatic but that triggered the memory of the first event that only then was given traumatic meaning. (2000: 20) Though the ‘unconscious temporality of Nachtraglichkeit problematises the status of the traumatic event as originary’ (Bellamy 1997: 142), thereby foregrounding the

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role interpretation plays in characterizing and recognizing an experience as traumatic, reading trauma as temporal only results in such a linearity that excludes any consideration of detours and distinctions capable of articulating traumatic experiences occurring in marginal places such as Nepal. Engaging with trauma’s temporality, therefore, must accompany an exploration of trauma’s differential topography. Of course, trauma’s spatiality is not a new invention. In his interview with Cathy Caruth, Jean Laplanche talks about two models of trauma: temporal and spatial. He relates the spatial model of trauma to the ‘outside’ that breaches the envelope of our biological existence. In other words, trauma for Laplanche is ‘the problem of the other’, which is ‘strictly bound to the fact that the small human being has no unconscious, and he is confronted with messages invaded by the unconscious of the other’ (2014: 29). The spatial model, therefore, is crucial in our attempt to approach the other in its strangeness. Virginia Blum and Anna Secor revisit a case Freud discusses in Project for a Scientific Psychology in which Emma refuses to enter shops alone because when she was 8, the shopkeeper where she had gone to buy some sweets grabbed her genitals. They contend that Emma’s trauma is spatial in nature because traumatic neuroses frequently reintroduce the patient to the scene of the accident (2014: 104). Robin Mackay coins a new term for his spatial model of trauma: ‘geotrauma’, but unlike Laplanche or Blum and Secor, his notion is more geo-historical, for he notes: [t]he theory of trauma was a crypto-geological hybrid from the very start. Darwin and the geologists had already established that the entire surface of the earth and everything that crawls upon it is a living fossil record, a memory bank rigorously laid down over unimaginable aeons and sealed against introspection. (Mackay 2012: n.p.) In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan describes trauma as a missed encounter with the real. He adds that the subject of trauma presents itself as a missed encounter in the history of psychoanalysis (Lacan 1977: 55). Psychoanalysis, however, is not the only entity to experience this missed encounter with trauma. As Judith Butler points out, we live in a world divided into grievable and ungrievable lives (2009: 38). The ungrievable lives of this world, however precarious their existence might be, always miss their encounter with trauma – at least with a certain notion of trauma, as their pain is never recognized as suffering. This chapter intends to read Nepal and its literature as sites where the missed encounter with trauma occurs and how one may rethink trauma via detour so that lives that have remained ungrievable hitherto are rendered discernible. Without certain critical calibration, the concept of trauma would not lend itself to the task of analyzing literature from Nepal and that calibration involves focusing on both trauma’s spatiality and temporality. It is painful and, to risk being a bit hyperbolic, even traumatizing, to see how the theory of trauma fixated on temporality poses a threat to a meaningful discussion of trauma in Nepali literature.

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Such an in-differential understanding of trauma would pose at least four traumatizing conceptual impediments to our reading of the real trauma depicted in the poems and narratives by Nepali writers. The first such impediment is what could be best described as the giganticist syndrome in trauma studies. We are all aware of this syndrome according to which only events of a certain magnitude, proportions, and significance could qualify for the title of being traumatic. This top-down model of trauma studies not only precludes the assessment and exposition of injuries suffered on a more mundane scale, it also entirely overlooks the violence suffered by those from places such as Nepal that only enjoy nugatory importance in the history of the global neo-colonial, capitalist world order. Not that Nepal hasn’t had its fair share of blood, toil, tears, and sweat in the world’s major events. Recalling his experience with the Gurkha Regiment during World War I, Sir Ralph Turner describes Nepali soldiers as ‘[b]ravest of the brave, most generous of the generous’ and apostrophizes: [u]ncomplaining you endure hunger and thirst and wounds; and at the last your unwavering lines disappear into the smoke and wrath of battle’ (Turner 1931: viv). Why haven’t these wounds featured as subject in trauma studies? Is that because Nepal, or the land of the Gurkhas, is a colonial construct, and therefore not real, without any real wounds, according to Europe’s brutal heart? Or is it because these wounds were bodily and not psychic for them to qualify as traumatic? Were they ‘experienced too soon, too unexpectedly’ therefore unclaimed, as Caruth would describe traumatic wounds in Unclaimed Experience (1996: 4). To use Caruth’s terminology from the same text, in what language do we need to hear the voice of the crying wounds of a Nepali soldier injured in the world wars? The second occurrence of impediment, which is in fact an extension of the first, can be seen in the works by Dominick LaCapra, who puts forward the notion of the founding trauma or traumatropism and opines that ‘Western tradition and societies … have had founding traumas as myths of origin’ starting with the Old Testament’s fall of Adam and Eve, the New Testament’s crucifixion, the French and American War of Independence, down to 9/11 (2014: xii–xiii). LaCapra quips, ‘[W]hether all societies have traumas,’ implying that non-Western, especially non-Christian societies might lack this ‘big-bang variety’ (his words) of traumas (2014: xii). As a non-Western and primarily a non-Christian society, Nepal will only have a passing encounter with this big bang theory of trauma. The birth model of trauma theory would also pose the same obstacle to the analysis of trauma in Nepali literature. In many ways, this model – influenced by Otto Rank’s so-called theory of ‘the birth trauma’ and its assertion that to be born is to be traumatized, and ‘anxiety at birth forms the basis of every anxiety or fear’ (Rank 1929: 17) – is an antidote to the big bang model for its inclusivity and innatism. As one of its critics summarized the position, ‘[t]rauma is the great equalizer’ (Mitchell 1998: 121). However, this position does not jibe with Judith Butler’s description of an affectively uneven world where some lives are grievable and others are not. The last hurdle trauma’s temporality poses to a place like Nepal that features in trauma theory is the decolonializing model of trauma, which recognizes the

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importance of place but assumes that the globe is divided evenly into two hemispheres representing the colonizers and the colonized, or the West and the rest. According to this model, ‘the rest’ has a uniform relationship with the centers of Europe’s empires. This dyadic thinking, which we also see to some extent in Gairola and Jayawickrama’s discussion of trauma, overlooks places such as Nepal, which did not have the same relationship with the British empire as its other South Asian neighbors. Nepal’s trauma originates not just from its exposure to colonialism in the Indian subcontinent but also from its unhomely present and an uncertain and threatening future. Its present is unhomely because of decades of political instability and socio-economic collapse that resulted in the Maoist War, assassination of the Royal Family, and a mass exodus of young Nepalis from its villages in search of work and refuge abroad. An estimate has it that about 14 percent of the total Nepali population are migrant workers in India, Malaysia, and the Middle East (Ghimire 2022: n.p.). Nepal’s future is uncertain and threatening because, as a landlocked nation with mostly mountainous terrain, it feels its economic prospects are stymied, and it is forced to depend economically and politically on Asia’s two nuclear-armed giants, both in the race to be the World’s next superpowers – China and India.

A Country Is Burning Trauma’s temporality alone would not enable us to bear witness to the trauma represented in the two literary texts we will be discussing next – Muna Madan and The Royal Ghosts. Retheorizing trauma so that it allows us to listen to the crying wounds in these two texts would involve our critical engagement with the spatial dimension of our traumatic experiences. In order to explain this retheorizing, let’s revisit a scene popularly known as ‘the dream of the burning child’ from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and examine its manifestations in two key theorists of psychoanalysis and trauma: Lacan and Caruth. Anyone familiar with The Interpretation of Dreams should be able to recall Freud’s intriguing recounting and analysis of the dream. A father has been by his sick child’s bed for many days and nights but to no avail. When the child finally succumbs to a burning fever, the father retires to snooze in an adjacent room. After a few hours of sleep, the father dreams that his child is standing by his bed and saying reproachfully, ‘Father, can’t you see that I’m burning?’ The father wakes up to find that a candle has fallen on the sheets and has burnt one of the arms of his beloved child. For Freud, this dream is about wish-fulfillment: the father’s wish to see his child alive again; he argues that ‘it was for this wish-fulfilment that the father slept a moment longer. The dream was given precedence over waking reflection because it was able to show the child still living’ (Freud 1931: 368). Lacan, on the other hand, argues that this dream is not about wish-fulfillment (Lacan 1977: 59), rather it is ‘an act of homage to the missed reality, the reality that can no longer be produced except by repeating itself endlessly, in some never attained awakening’ (Lacan 1977: 58). Thus, for him, the missed encounter as real or as trauma takes place ‘between dream and

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awakening’ (Lacan 1977: 59). It concerns a voice, a firebrand sentence that reverberates across an entirely sleeping world (Lacan 1977: 59). In ‘Trauma, Time and Address,’ Cathy Caruth returns once again to Freud’s ‘dream of the burning child’ and its reinterpretation by Jacque Lacan. Caruth had already visited this scene in the final chapter of her influential work, Unclaimed Experiences: Trauma, Narrative and History. For Caruth, this dream functions as a paradigmatic case of trauma’s belatedness in the Freudian sense of Nachtraglichkeit – ‘a fundamental paradox at the heart of trauma’ says Caruth, ‘it is the most immediate but the least accessible’ (2020: 79). Focusing on the question of awakening and address, Caruth argues that the father wakes up from the dream not because of the burning outside but because of the address within the dream. This leads Caruth to assert that trauma is not just constituted as an unexpected accident or nightmare; instead, it also involves an undoing or ‘collapse of address inscribed as a possibility within every appeal as it crosses, not fully heard, just whispered … a mortal call to a mortal listening’ (2020: 83). As we move from Freud’s understanding of traumatic neurosis as wish-fulfillment toward belatedness (the father being too late to save the child from burning or from fever) and toward Lacan and Caruth’s notions of encounter/tuché and address, we also move from the personal wound model of trauma to a discursive, interpersonal, collective, and spatial model of trauma in which the firebrand sentence resonating across the sleeping world functions as an event, a missed encounter with the real, an appeal coming from the future in the form of an absolute danger. The burning in Freud’s dream is threefold: the child burning with a fever, the father dreaming about his child burning, and the actual fire consuming parts of the dead child’s body. The story of Devkota’s Muna Madan is also placed between three burnings or three fires. In the opening stanza of the poem, Muna urges Madan not to undertake that fateful and futile journey to Tibet. She addresses Madan as her ‘life’ and implores him to ‘not leave [her] alone’ by lighting ‘the fire of longing in the forest of my heart’ for the ‘endless fire of longing’ will be the result of the journey that is destined to separate the two (Hutt 1996: 23). As the story unfolds, this ‘fire of longing’ spreads and culminates in two different kinds of burnings. Madan returns from Tibet only to find a wholesale holocaust of his world, seeing which impels him toward a grave determination to let go of his hold on life. When Madan learns that his beloved Muna has died as if in disbelief he asks how ‘fire [could] consume’ ‘the lotus body’ of his love (Hutt 1996: 53). He is shocked by fire’s cruelty and asks for Muna’s ashes so that he could ‘wear them in mourning on [his] breast’ (Hutt 1996: 53). This symbolic attempt to (unsuccessfully) incorporate or introject the other into one’s own body, which is how survivor’s guilt manifests leads Madan to announce: ‘My mother, my Muna, I cannot live here’ (Hutt 1996: 53). Devkota is said to have entreated his readers to burn all of his works except for Muna Madan, perhaps because the great poet knew that Muna Madan was already ablaze. We, like its protagonist, are too late to ‘save’ it. This book represents a crucial aspect of Nepal’s national missed encounter with the real.

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Madan is traumatized, however, not because he is unable or too late to fulfill his mother’s wishes to ‘build a resthouse and spout’, to ‘adorn [Muna’s] arms with solid gold,’ and to ‘shore up this house which now totters in debt’ (Hutt 1996: 26). The wounds that he might have sustained from the rugged terrain of his trail to Tibet or from his near-fatal exposure to cholera could not be the source of his trauma either. Even the unmistakable mythical, intertextual subtext hinted at in the book – the exile of Rama – which echoes what we termed the giganticist model above cannot explain Madan’s trauma. In her attempt to dissuade her husband from his quest for wealth, Muna calls him ‘my Rama,’ and reminds him that on his way to Lhasa, he will have to cross many jungles, mountains, and cliffs and will have to face many wild beasts and savages who eat cows (Hutt 1996: 24). The cow reference further strengthens Muna Madan’s mythical and intertextual association with Hinduism, especially with the Ramayana. She offers to accompany him as his travel attendant. Madan must leave home to fulfill his mother’s wishes; he must also go to the Himalayas in search of the herb capable of resurrecting the dead so that he can shore up his house, tottering in debt – both mythical allusions provide the spatial dimension that Laplanche called ‘the outside.’ However, unlike his mythical counterparts, there is no triumphant return of the hero for him – actually, there is no longer a place or home for him to return to. The collapse of address, therefore, is twofold in Muna Madan: as a dying subject of enunciation addressing dead objects of love and as an itinerant subject without an address to arrive at. This diasporic subject in dispersal and différance is at the heart of trauma in Devkota’s text; a subject that, of course, would, like Lacan’s automaton, repeat his actions – knocking on heaven’s door – another outside – with another pot of gold, this time, the diamond of love left behind by Muna on earth. This automaton, however, betrays a moment of tuché, our missed encounter with the real.

Traumatism of the Future The Royal Ghosts further challenges the giganticist model of trauma, even though the title might mislead one into believing that the whole book revolves around the royal massacre of 2001. The collection includes nine short stories, and their plots revolve around topics such as retirement, friendship, political activism, police brutality, arranged marriages, love affairs and divorce, mistresses and domestic helpers, caste, class, gender, and, of course, the Maoist conflict and royal massacre. Published nearly 70 years after Devkota’s Muna Madan, The Royal Ghosts presents a more complex contemporary picture of Nepal’s political, historical, and cultural life. To the emotion of guilt that we saw the protagonist of Devkota’s poem experience when he arrived too late to save his mother and wife, Upadhyay adds the affect of afterwardness. And, as the title suggests, this affect manifests itself through spectrality or the return of the repressed. These repressed entities include, on the one hand, the ghostly presence of the royals. On the other hand, they include a variety of repressed subjects such as women and the working class, cab drivers and cobblers, and homosexuals and domestic helpers. If the trauma in Muna Madan

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originates with the event that is experienced too late, by foregrounding trauma’s spatial dimension, The Royal Ghosts explores trauma as too broad. For instance, the tremors of the Maoist conflict, mostly concentrated in the rural areas in the opening story of the collection ‘A Refugee’ reach the capital city of Kathmandu and rock and almost ruin the peaceful lives of Pitamber, Shailaja, and Sumit. In this story, the arc of trauma that started with the killing of Kabita’s husband by the Maoists leads to a memorable discussion between Pitamber and his co-worker Neupane on the insane cycle of violence during this dark period in Nepal’s history: ‘You are doing the right thing Pitamberji [by granting refuge to Kabita and her daughter in his house] . . . I would have done the same thing.’ ‘Can you believe they would murder a schoolteacher […]’ ‘Well, the police and the army are just as cruel. Haven’t you heard how they raped and killed those two teenage girls and then accused them of being of being Maobadis.’ Pitamber grew silent, then he said, ‘Do you suppose Kabita thinks about revenge?’ (Upadhyay 2006: 14) This is a crucial conversation in the story not just because it depicts the atrocities carried out by the Maoists and the state during the conflict; this conversation, this retelling, recounting, representing, and witnessing of the events also demonstrate trauma’s entanglement. It’s not just that in trauma ‘knowing and not knowing are entangled’ (Caruth 1996: 4), but that in a traumatic entanglement, the injury of one always reveals the wounds of another. Of course, as a physically displaced, psychologically mutilated, and socio-culturally and economically unmoored subject, Kabita, moves through the story as a trace, and knowing and not knowing her endangered and unpredictable future are entangled in such a way that through her invisible wounds we hear the cries of the whole country in paralysis. Her husband’s killing by the Maoists is inextricably tied to the rape and murder of the girls at the hands of the police and army. The reason why temporality of trauma cannot fully grasp the intensity and scope of trauma in the story is that beyond the historical events purported to be at the origin of the traumatic experience described here lie other layers of structural and spatial traumas. The fact that a widow in Nepal loses her relevance and place in society after the death of her husband; the fact that women were routinely targeted for rape and sexual assaults by the police and the army in their pursuit of the ‘rebels’; and the fact that rural Nepal has always been a place excluded from the economic development, and educational and technological advancement one often sees occurring in the cities, amplify the point that some in Nepal have been experiencing or living in a permanent state of trauma, as it were arrested, without the freedom or luxury of forgetting it.

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In this sense, in the story, Kabita’s physical and psychological condition represents what Derrida calls traumatism of the future because the event or the weapon of the conflict wounds not once but potentially perpetually, for its temporality proceeds neither from the now that is present nor from the present that is past, but from an im-presentable future (á venir). A weapon wounds and leaves forever open an unconscious scar; but this weapon is terrifying because it comes from the to-come, from the future. (Derrida 2003: 97) The terror to come thus relates to Pitamber’s silence after Neupane’s mention of the rape and murder and his question: ‘Do you suppose Kabita thinks about revenge?’ What if she does? What if her daughter will eventually do it? What if Pitamber does, not just for Kabita but for Priya or for those raped and murdered girls?’ (Upadhyay 2006: 14). The probability of one individual or a group with a common ideological or political persuasion or institutional affiliation always remains high for carrying out acts of violence against the so-called enemies in the name of revenge, even ‘justice’. The father was mysteriously absent in Devkota’s Muna Madan. His responsibilities were shouldered by the protagonist until the task proved to be too big for him. In The Royal Ghosts, the father, as the titular story suggests, is either murdered or hunted down as a feudal or despotic figure of authority by the Maoists or other cultural forces plotting to replace him or at least make his authority diminished. In Upadhyay’s stories, fathers are either dead (as in ‘Supreme Pronouncements’) or emasculated (as in ‘Chintamani’s Women’ or ‘The Third Stage’) or merely ghostly presences (as in ‘The Weight of the Gun’) or absent (as in ‘The Royal Ghost’). If they are alive, as in ‘Father, Daughter,’ they, like the father in Freud’s dream of the burning child, they are completely paralyzed by the trauma of their inability or unwillingness to help their burning child. In this story, we meet Shivaram, a father, first traumatized by his daughter Shova’s decision to end her marriage (arranged by the parents), then by her decision to marry her college friend, Mukti, who is considered low-caste. Therefore, Gairola and Jayawickrama must revise their assessment of the brutal and xenophobic occidental heart and add one of the Asian hearts to the list. Shivaram quits talking to her daughter because of her rebellious defiance of caste rules. This collapse of address between him and Shova is further complicated by the reaction of his relatives and neighbors. His brother’s wife, Anita, for example, is willing to cut ties with him and his wife, Urmila. When Anita learns about Shova’s impending marriage with Mukti, she storms into their house and accuses Urmila of betrayal: ‘[a]lthough you and I had our differences, I still thought of you as my own sister-in-law and a friend, but now I see how wrong I was’ (Upadhyay 2006: 166). There is a memorable moment early on in ‘Father Daughter’ when Shova goes to her father’s room, but he is still not talking to her because of her decision to

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not return to her husband only four weeks after their wedding. When he continues to slurp tea and pretends to read the newspaper, Shova says: ‘I dreamt about you last night. You were standing in front of me, and I kept calling your name, but you wouldn’t respond. Then you raised your hand and I woke up’ (Upadhyay 2006: 148). When Shivaram was furious that Shova was thinking only about herself without even realizing the harm she had done to the family, as in Freud’s dream, Shova was accusing him of hurting her by not only not responding but threatening to physically hurt her. The real meaning of this dream is not Shova’s wish that her father supports her in her decision to get a divorce and marry her outcast college friend, but her timely wakening to the fact that she might be physically hurt by some misguided orthodox members of society or even by her father. The change of heart that we see taking place in the father at the end of the story is hardly a consolation because the wound from the future emerges almost as a certainty after Mukti and Shova decide to get married, for now they are exposed not just to the resistance of the family but to the antipathy and antagonism of society at large. The concluding story of this collection, ‘The Royal Ghosts’ is a supreme example of traumatic entanglement in the dual sense of the term. First, the story illustrates how the other speaks through trauma, or as we phrased it earlier, the injury of one reveals the wounds of the other. Second, this story explores traumatic entanglement in the conceptual sense of the term as well. In it, all four traumatic processes we have been discussing are at work: differentiality, collapse of the address, patricide, and traumatism of the future. Beginning with the title, we enter into the ghostly and uncanny world in the wake of the royal massacre of 2001. This story begins as if it were an objective correlative to what Lacan said about the dream of the burning child and the firebrand sentence: that a voice emerged, cutting through the slumber shrouding over the entirety of the world. The narrative of the story resembles Lacan’s firebrand sentence as it begins by stating that ‘[t]hat June morning, a Saturday, the whole country woke to the news of the killings inside the palace. People walked the street bewildered’ (Upadhyay 2006: 106). This trauma of belatedness is historical as the protagonist, who pretends to be a history buff, immediately recalls that the killings have only repeated the court massacre of 1846. The bewildered people were not just late because the killings happened while they were asleep, but in some ways, the killings had already happened way back in 1846, yet were present in front of their eyes that morning. It is as if the massacres at the court in 1846 that to some extent set the direction of history in Nepal were deferred only to re-merge as killings inside the palace in 2001. This differentiality of truama, which is both temporal as well as spatial, is what Caruth refers to when she says that trauma is at once inaccessible but also the most immediate. The royal palace killings of 2001 involved the crown prince, who was said to have killed his parents and other family members before fatally shooting himself. This act of patricide throws the country into a political whirlwind of fear and uncertainty whose ripples are being felt even today. The issue of patricide, as Freud

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already identified as the key component of traumatic neurosis, also represents the wounds from the to-come or traumatism of the future insofar as it is an event that is not over and done with. The wounds from the to-come constitute traumatism of the future, not because the past has the tendency to repeat, as 1846 repeated in 2001. Instead, a traumatic event always manages to reveal something new, unexpected, unforeseen, unpredictable, sheer tuche. And that is where Upadhyay takes the direction of the story. As the narrator points out in the story, the brother of the king was implicated in the killings. Instead of staying with this plot, Upadhyay adds another entanglement in which another brother discovers that his younger brother is gay, and is sleeping around with a number of young men in the neighborhood. The injuries sustained by the royals that day reveal the wound of the accidental discovery of Dharma’s homosexuality by his elder brother Ganga.

Conclusion This chapter starts with the discussion of silence in trauma studies due to its eurocentrism; then it echoes the call to decolonize trauma theory. It introduces differentiality as a way of exploring trauma as opposed to focusing just on trauma theory’s focus on temporality, which might be at the basis of trauma’s Eurocentrism. In response, the chapter revisits Caruth, Derrida, Freud, and Lacan’s theories of trauma and put forward three key concepts of address, patricide, and futurity, as crucial concepts to talk about literature from countries such as Nepal. At the heart of the discussion is Freud’s ‘dream of the burning child,’ and with the help of Caruth, Lacan, and Derrida’s theory, this chapter foregrounds the notions of tuche, awakening and event as key to our understanding of trauma. By briefly looking at two texts from Nepali literature, the chapter shows how a country such as Nepal is always in the grips of the traumatism of the future. If one achieves anything from this analysis, it should be the argument that Nepali literature helps us overcome trauma theory’s silence by helping us awaken, albeit belatedly, to the events of the encounter with the voice of the other.

References Bellamy, Elizabeth J. 1997. Affective Genealogies: Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism, and the ‘Jewish Question’ after Auschwitz. Lincoln: Nebraska University Press. Blum, Virginia and Anna Secor. 2014. ‘Mapping Trauma: from Topography to Topology’, in Paul Kingsbury and Steve Pile (eds.), Psychoanalytic Geographies, pp. 103–118. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable. London: Verso. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 2020. ‘Trauma, Time and Address’, in Collin Davis and Hannah Meretoja (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, pp. 79–88. London: Routledge.

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Craps, Stef. 2014. ‘Beyond Eurocentrism: Trauma Theory in the Global Age’, in Gert Buelens, Samuel Durrant and Robert Eaglestone (eds.), The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, pp. 45–62. London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 2003. ‘Auto-immunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,’ in Giovanna Barradori (ed.), Philosophy in a Time of Terror, pp. 85–136. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Sussex: The Harvester Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1931. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. Alfred Adler. New York: Carleton House. Freud, Sigmund. 1940. Moses and Monotheism. Trans. Katherine Jones. London: Hogarth Press. Gairola, Rahul K. and Sharanya Jayawickrama. 2021. ‘The “Asian Pandemic”: Rethinking Memory and Trauma in Cultural Narratives of Asia’, in Rahul K. Gairola and Sharanya Jayawickrama (eds.), Trauma, Memory and Healing in Asian Literature and Culture, pp. 1–27. London: Routledge. Ghimire, Anita. ‘Nepal Brief.’ MIDEQ—Migration for Development and Equality, https:// www.mideq.org/en/resources-index-page/nepal-brief/ (accessed on 4 January 2022). Hutt, Michael. 1995. Himalayan Voices: An Introduction to Modern Nepali Literature. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers. Hutt, Michael. 1996. Devkota’s Muna Madan: Translation and Analysis. Kathmandu: Sajha Co-operative Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Penguin. LaCapra, Dominick. 2014. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Laplanche, Jean and Cathy Caruth. 2014. ‘Traumatic Temporality: An Interview with Jean Laplanche,’ in Cathy Caruth, Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience, pp. 25–46. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Leys, Ruth. 2000. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mackay, Robin. 2012. ‘A Brief History of Geotrauma,’ http://readthis.wtf/writing/a-briefhistory-of-geotrauma/ (accessed on 25 March 2022). Mitchell, Juliet. 1998. ‘Trauma, Recognition, and the Place of Language’, Diacritics, 28(4): 121–133. Rank, Otto. 1929. The Trauma of Birth. New York: Hartcourt, Brace and Company. Turner, Ralph Lilley. 1931. ‘Preface’, in A Comparative and Etymological Dictionary of the Nepali Language, pp. vi–viv. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Upadhyay, Samrat. 2006. The Royal Ghosts: Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Upadhyay, Samrat. 2014. ‘NAW Interview with Samrat Upadhyay’, New Asian Writing, http://www.new-asian-writing.com/naw-interview-with-samrat-upadhyay/ (accessed on 28 March 2022).

14 MAOIST REVOLUTION AND TRAUMA Fight or Flight in Manjhushree Thapa’s Seasons of Flight Ubaraj Katawal

Introduction This chapter examines the possibility of a third option, namely the ‘politics of pressure,’ when people are faced with a fight or flight choice at a time when their nation is experiencing a traumatic situation caused by war. In Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams hints at this possibility, even though he does not fully explain how this event plays out in the real world. In effect, he argues that ‘society’ is not always marked by stagnation, but ‘is always constitutive process with very powerful pressures which are both political, economic, and cultural formations’ (Williams 1977: 87). Stagnation occurs in situations when a meaningful change or progress fails to happen, in either the personal or public domain. Stagnation also occurs when the powers that be fail to produce any new ideas or strategic plans for collective progress. Acts of pressure can unsettle any sense of order in the hegemonic group, as long as the people do not become complacent about their conditions. Moreover, as I will argue later in the chapter by way of discussing Manjhushree Thapa’s novel, Seasons of Flight (2010), running away from one’s condition of existence does not appear to be a viable option since such flight could annul any possibility for meaningful changes in the status quo. As opposed to some critical attempts to isolate different categories, such as determining factors of economic and political structures, and individual wills, overdetermination, Williams suggests, ‘is an attempt to avoid the isolation of autonomous categories but at the same time to emphasize relatively autonomous yet of course interactive practices’ (Williams 1977: 88; emphasis in the original). I wanted to begin this article with some discussion of overdetermination as it relates to stagnation, because Thapa’s novel challenges readers to uncover multiple determining factors of the economic and political structures of a nation that constitute the individual characters’ lived social experiences. In other words, Thapa’s novel is, to use DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-20

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Deepika Bahri’s phrase, ‘structured by trauma’ (Bahri 2019: 144), as a result of a decade-long Maoist violence and the subsequent flight of people in search of peace and opportunities. To analyze Seasons of Flight as a literary representation of political and economic overdetermination within a nation, I will also invoke the idea of the subaltern – and the complexity of the figure of the subaltern – national consciousness, or lack thereof, and violence without freedom, as opposed to a truly revolutionary violence espoused by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, as well as hegemony that Gayatri Spivak discusses in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ My goal in this chapter is to reflect on the possibilities, or what Williams calls ‘productive forms’ (Spivak 2010: 88), in the backdrop of a dystopian narrative about Nepal. The dilemma the main character in the novel, Prema, is faced with is: what should one do if presented with a choice to stay, even participate, in what turns out in hindsight to be inauthentic revolutionary violence, or pack up and leave for good if an opportunity arrives? Whereas the desire to take a flight comes with consequences of its own, the second choice poses more risks to the character’s personal well-being, even though it presents the possibility of a better future in the long run.

Bourgeois Institutions and Representation Traditions, institutions, and formations, that is, extra-institutional human interactions, movements, and tendencies ‘which have a variable and often oblique relations to formal institutions’ such as literary movements (Williams 1977: 117), inform the political life in a nation. The hegemonic selective traditions constituting a national culture are akin to the ones that Spivak invokes in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?,’ namely the tradition that deems women’s voices as unimportant or even dangerous. Alternatively, as Spivak further argues, ‘the indigenous colonial elite’ of the selective nativist traditions tend to romanticize women’s oppositional acts as tokens of ‘purity, strength, and love’ toward their families and nation (Spivak 2010: 55). Needless to say, the hegemonic cultural tradition in Nepal was, and continues to be, patriarchal. However, as Williams reminds us, it is a mistake to reduce the complex overdetermination of a tradition to a simple opposition between patriarchy and women, or a tripartite tug of war between the indigenous ruling elite, the ‘development’ of colonialism (or its doppelganger, socialism), and the subaltern. Spivak uses the figure of a brown woman to make her case about the mis/representation of women’s struggle in colonial India, but the figure of a woman represents marginalized people, including even men, who are subjected to a hegemonic tradition. While selective tradition and its attendant institutions in a nation such as Nepal promote the preferential treatment of male children over others, the formations, following Williams’s discussion of the term, within Nepal’s patriarchal tradition are more complex, since in many private settings, such as family, women play a double role in both maintaining and challenging the same tradition for various reasons. The point that I would like to make here is that patriarchy is not a finished cultural product, but a network of embodied, active, contested, and contestable practices that, like other hegemonic institutions, constantly change to make room for new formations.

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I should make my own political position clear: I am an expatriate in the United States, born and raised in Nepal. Hence, I am aware of the influence that my background may have on the way I view the world and the relationships that I build with other fellow expatriates, co-workers, and my own people. Much like Prema in Seasons of Flight, I decided to leave Nepal for further studies at first, but new determinations that took shape after my arrival in the United States have transformed me into an expatriate for life. Again, like Prema, I communicate with my folks in Nepal but always with a sense of double consciousness. Nevertheless, individual perspectives and identities, my own included, are always in the process of becoming and, as Stuart Hall puts it, ‘undergo constant transformation’ (Hall 2003: 236). And, I share Prema’s guilt in opting to choose an easier path to peace and opportunities by leaving a war-torn country, where I could have stayed and fought for the less fortunate and marginalized. Even so, I take my exilic consciousness and experiences as my unique advantage to reflect on institutions, formations, and positions within the Nepali hegemonic national consciousness or culture, as depicted in Thapa’s novel. Fanon writes about a specific historical conjuncture, in which nations are on the cusp of radical transformation following their territorial freedom from EuroAmerican colonialism. Moreover, he speaks about the relations between the soonto-be-free nations, their pseudo-bourgeois leaders, and their departing colonizers. In comparison, Nepal was never colonized formally, even though it remained under a constant gaze of the British Empire, which could annex it easily if it wanted to. It is true that, unlike many nations in Asia and Africa, Nepali people did not have to deal with colonial justice and law enforcement, or have their cultural repertoire belittled, at least not directly, or even get intervened in their daily ‘structures of feeling,’ in Williams’s terms (Williams 1977: 132). Nevertheless, there was a political hegemony in place, namely, the Rana dynasty, which, not unlike the British colonizers in most of Asia, dictated the nation’s traditions, institutions, and positions. In fact, the Ranas were exactly the type of national bourgeoisie Fanon chastises in The Wretched of the Earth as intermediaries of European hegemony. Fanon writes, The national bourgeoisie, with no misgivings and with great pride, revels in the role of agent in its dealings with the Western bourgeoisie. This lucrative role, this function as small-time racketeer, this narrow-mindedness and lack of ambition are symptomatic of the incapacity of the national bourgeoisie to fulfill its historic role as bourgeoisie. (Fanon 2004: 101) Whether it is the royal institution or the ‘democratic’ governments that succeeded the Rana rule in 1951, one can witness resistance at work in Nepal, sometimes exploding into more violent revolutions, while other times working more passively. However, no hegemonic power had complete control of the nation’s traditions, institutions, positions, or formations at any given time. The Maoist revolution marked a form of political discontent, at least at the beginning, against the oppression of people from different social backgrounds. It is also important here to ponder how

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an active resistance from the people can easily turn into a violent civil war if either the leadership of the resistance group falls into the wrong hands or the hegemony is incapable of realizing the magnitude of the people’s concerns. In any case, the fall of the Nepali monarchy is attributed not only to the Maoist war but also to the deaths and disappearances of thousands of, mostly innocent, people. When a political movement morphs into a violent civil war, the result is often a pyrrhic victory, even if the self-proclaimed revolutionaries win. Worse, the new revolutionary leaders, Fanon’s false national bourgeoisie, quickly either begin to appease the same dominant group that they fought against and temporarily defeated, or they begin to fold into the status quo because, as Fanon warns us about the emergent national bourgeoisie, they lack ambition: ‘The dynamic pioneering aspect, the inventive, discoverer-of-new-worlds aspect common to every national bourgeoisie is [in the new leaders] lamentably absent’ (Fanon 2004: 101). In the absence of well-thoughtout national strategies for growth and the economic resources and determination to implement them, life quickly turns to stagnation. Fanon’s prophetic examination of a nation following its independence from colonialism is worth quoting at length, Independence [after a revolution] does not bring a change of direction. The same old groundnut harvest, cocoa harvest, and olive harvest. Likewise the traffic of commodities goes unchanged. No industry is established in the country. We continue to ship raw materials, we continue to grow produce for Europe [and America] and pass for specialists of unfinished products. (Fanon 2004: 100) Lacking innovative ideas, strategies, and economic resources, the new leaders beat the drum of petty nationalism in order to cling to power. Following Fanon’s thought, this post-revolutionary phase will force an economically dependent nation to export its skilled and unskilled labor to the international labor market, something so detrimental to its own economy. Meanwhile, the opportunistic bureaucrats, upstart business people, and political leaders compete for the meager resources within the country to maintain their quasi-bourgeois lifestyles while the nation’s infrastructures such as public schools and colleges, hospitals, industries, roads, and bridges deteriorate. This cycle continues as Thapa’s Seasons of Flight successfully dramatizes.

Trauma, the National Consciousness, and the Role of Pressures Bijaya, Prema’s sister, joins the Maoist revolution because she does not have any better option than a cycle of stagnation in her village. When Prema comes to visit her from the United States several years later, she finds Bijaya back home from the war. Even though things seem to have changed now, as compared to Bijaya’s situation at the beginning of the novel – for example, she has married a fellow Maoist fighter and has given birth to a son, the Maoists are now in mainstream politics, and so on – she still has not made much ‘progress’ in her gender and class positions. One dilemma that Thapa’s novel haunts readers is, who is right, Prema, who leaves

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her country for better opportunities, or Bijaya, who, left with no choice, joins a revolutionary war? It seems to me that the ending of the novel asks for a third option, since both Prema and Bijaya, once again, are back at point one. It appears that they might have better days ahead of them: Bijaya has a young son to care for, while Prema finds her purpose in working to save an endangered species of butterfly in Los Angeles. However, the fact that Bijaya is alone to fend for her family with no known support from her son’s father or the government might ultimately lead to her own stagnation. Similarly, Prema’s erratic and frequent moves within the United States can be interpreted as a sign of her permanent displacement, for better or worse. Prema’s inability to form a stable relationship in the United States is indicative of her lack of purpose in life and vice versa. She seems to be able to reconnect with her sense of purpose toward the end, but one wonders if the whole travail and displacement were worth the pain in the first place. Financially, she might be more independent in the United States, but she is not able to save a whole lot more than what she was already saving working in Nepal: ‘Back in the hill bazaar, Prema had had two hundred thousand rupees in her bank account—a small fortune by Nepali measure. In coming to America she had become poor’ (Thapa 2010: 105). Readers can see why Bijaya, on her part, decides to join the Maoist war, but in the end, her struggles have not come to any fruition either. Even though Bijaya’s and Prema’s situations are very different from each other, both of them make it clear that there is another way to stand up to the hegemonic structures, traditions, and institutions that are in power. This third option to either fight or flight involves ‘exertion of pressures’ (Williams 1977: 87). It activates the latent ‘productive forces’ (Williams 1977: 89), by creating tensions within multiple determining factors in formations, such as selective traditions and their discontents, institutional practices and structures of feeling, and the hegemonic group and the people, or even the subaltern. Theoretically, classifications based on class, gender, and race appear to hold sway, but praxis defies ossification of any categories or classes. As Spivak reminds us, the subaltern constitutes and speaks to the hegemony, even if their speech acts are incomplete due to a lack of attention paid to them. Spivak asks, ‘On the other side of the international division of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education, supplementing an earlier economic text, can the subaltern speak?’ (Spivak 2010: 37; emphasis in the original). Spivak suggests throughout her essay, however, that the subaltern speak all the time, especially in the face of the hegemonic institutions rendering their speech ‘transparent’ (Spivak 2010: 23) or, to use Williams’s words, representing it as ‘alien’ (Williams 1977: 116). Spivak and Williams both concur that a society comes into its own through a constant tension between the pressures exercised on the one hand by the existing hegemonic traditions, institutions, and positions, and wielded by the people on the other. While it is true that some aspects of human conditions, such as the gendered positions of the subaltern, have remained more or less constant throughout history, others, such as freedom from territorial imperialism or the rules and limits of social

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roles, have changed forms, shifted positions, and taken on new meanings. In fact, even in the area of gendered division of labor, new factors, formations, and practices have come to pass, giving way to more active pressures. At the time of the Maoist war in Nepal, both the revolutionaries and the government vied to control hegemonic traditions, institutions, and other vital locations in culture and the economy, while the ordinary people deployed oppositional pressures, even though their pressure was weaker, and more passive, during the war than at other times. This passivity happened as both the parties involved claimed to have mandates from the people. In fact, taking a cue from Spivak’s question above, one can ask: cast between the Maoists and the government, the ‘revolutionary’ and ‘reactionary’ violence, could the common people in Nepal speak? The term ‘revolutionary’ itself remains complicated in a situation where the party launching an armed struggle claims to represent the common, oppressed people, while, in fact, the leaders themselves come from and will eventually go back to the bourgeois group. In economic and cultural contradictions, where multiple factors overlap, making it hard to separate the oppressed from the oppressors, the ruled from the rulers, the marginalized from the dominant, one finds it hard to tell who belongs on which side of a divide. Interestingly, people who came from traditionally marginalized communities got involved in the Maoist revolution in Nepal at the bidding of those coming from traditionally ruling groups. This confusion did not efface the reality of atrocious acts, and counter pressures, even if passive, from the people, however. The traumatic arrest and the subsequent disappearance of Suk Bahadur Ale, aka ‘Kanchha,’ in Seasons of Flight lays bare the price that people have to pay to even dream of a quick reprieve from the hegemony. A 14-year-old boy, Kanchha, may not have full access to knowledge about freedom from hegemonic traditions, institutions, and formations. This, however, does not mean he was not sympathetic to the Maoists, a reason for which the government forcefully captured, tortured, and most likely executed him. The spectacle of Kanchha’s arrest and torture is meant to discourage people from adopting violence as a way to express their discontent. The action often leads, however, to unintended consequences: it fuels further bitterness and discontent in the general public, motivating them to resort to even more violent and destructive actions. Middlemen and ‘small-time racketeers’ (Fanon 2004: 101), like Harihar-dai, only make the already charged situations worse. Nevertheless, readers can locate signs of pressure in the various actions the characters take after Kanchha’s arrest. A flight from the present predicament into a place with more safety and opportunity seems to be a no-brainer. The question is: does a flight help to make the world a more just place? One could argue that if tensions and pressures are fundamental for any positive changes to happen, then people like Prema need to stay; she is an educated, independent, and informed member of her community. Compared to her sister, Bijaya, who remains in the village throughout the novel – besides her time in the Maoist war – Prema possesses what it takes to represent people like Kanchha’s father because she has been through more structures of feelings and experiences; in other words, she can lead the people in the right direction with

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her national consciousness. Together with Rajan, another educated member of the community, she can do something more to investigate Kanchha’s disappearance by the government force. Her flight to the United States provides her with the reprieve she needs, but it is a brain-drain that her community cannot afford because it allows cases like Kanchha’s to repeat, which she is aware of: ‘It felt like she [Prema] was abandoning everyone, to secure her own future. Yet that was what she did’ (Thapa 2010: 55). In hindsight, her future in the United States was anything but secure and satisfactory until, arguably, toward the end. And even though her work to educate people in Los Angeles about the environmental hazards created by humans is noteworthy, it pales when compared with her potential role among her people at the time that she decided to leave. My point is that her decision to run away from a crisis lessens, if not effaces, any possibility of creating and representing a better community. Spivak refers to the term ‘representation’ to suggest that subaltern subjects need to be represented in the hegemonic networks of forms and parlance that will help them to be heard. This representation, in the sense of the German vertrent, meaning ‘representation within the state and political economy,’ must happen concurrently with another representation, darstellen, meaning representation ‘within the theory of the Subject’ (Spivak 2010: 29). Put simply, intellectuals’ task is to represent those who cannot represent themselves, while also, without forgetting, representing their own political position in the intersection of gender, class, and race, as well as the international division of labor. I contend that the concept of representation as suggested by Spivak is akin to Williams’s idea of pressures and tensions at the intersections of race, class, gender, and nationality, leading to political movements. Revolutionary violence, as we witness in Seasons of Flight, often results in long-lasting war scars, if not a subsequent reign of terror or chaos. In Nepal, the Maoists were successful in coming to mainstream political hegemony, but they did so at the price of many innocent lives lost in the wake, such as Kanchha’s. Even years after the end of the revolution, Nepal struggles to recover from the trauma of loss. Granted, violence sometimes leads to a new beginning, but as Fanon has powerfully shown, a better way to effectively stop the total hegemony of one dominant group is to create multiple instances of pressure and tension during the process of overdetermination of an event. Pressures and tensions can engage the powers that be without alienating them completely, as does a violent revolution. It is also possible that pressures and tensions can disturb the hegemons’ psychological state of mind, often forcing them to accept changes. While violent struggles leave no option for the rulers but to use more potent force against the people, pressures and tensions provide them with the flexibility to opt for a potentially less destructive choice. Specifically, my point is that with pressures coming from people like Prema, Rajan, and others, the military that drags Kanchha away in front of his father would be forced to at least disclose the location where he is imprisoned. In hindsight, this could have potentially saved Kanchha’s life. After Prema’s flight, Rajan provides some glimpses of the pressures in the novel. He is the one who makes inquiries about Kanchha’s detention location and files a

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case on Kanchha’s family’s behalf. Additionally, he puts other forms of pressure on the government: Dissatisfied, with the lawyer’s progress, [Rajan] began to lobby national and international Committee of the Red Cross about Kanchha’s disappearance. Then he lobbied Amnesty International which appealed for the boy’s release. Officials at the Bar Association in the capital promised to follow up. Rajan was triumphant when Human Rights watch mentioned Suk Bahadur Ale [aka Kanchha] in one of their reports. (Thapa 2010: 50) Rajan, on the other hand, cannot do it alone unless he has someone on his side. Subsequently, Kanchha’s case remains unresolved. Stuck in between the Maoist revolution and the reactionary government, people like Kanchha’s family could not speak. Prema’s psychological and material predicaments also underscore the debate about whether one can ever run away from one’s past. She thinks she can be ‘as far away as she could from the past’ (Thapa 2010: 102). In his celebrated essay, ‘Reflections on Exile,’ Edward Said underscores the reality of working through one’s past, rather than trying to abandon it, because one can never leave one’s past behind. He contends in the essay that while exiles and refugees are geographically separated from their past, the past cannot be completely detached from people’s everyday emotional configurations. Said writes: But note that [Victor] Hugo twice makes it clear that the ‘strong’ or ‘perfect’ man achieves independence and detachment by working through attachments, not by rejecting them. Exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and bond with, one’s native place; what is true of all exile is not that home and love of home are lost, but that loss is inherent in the existence of both. (Said 2001: 185) Said explains that for an exile, no home is permanent; rather, every home is provisional and contingent. As he notes, ‘Exile is life led outside habitual order. It is nomadic, decentered, contrapuntal; but no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew’ (Said 2001: 186). Mostly unbeknownst to them, Prema and other exilic figures in Seasons of Flight inhabit this contrapuntal nature of exile. Prema comes to grips with her past, suggesting that she is prepared to work through it, and not reject it completely. She, for example, learns through her partner, Luis, in Los Angeles, that his dad, Carl Reyes, moved to the United States from a war-torn Guatemala in the late 1960s (Thapa 2010: 137). Even though Reyes never returned to his home country, he still kept in touch with his family (Thapa 2010: 137). As indicated by his failed marriage and constant moves, he did not seem to be fully settled in the United States. Her desire to learn more about Carl

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Reyes and his past stems from her belated attempt to acknowledge the role of the past in the present. In other words, even though she intends to move away from her past, partly because of her opposition to patriarchal tradition, which ultimately took her mother’s life, she displaces her longing to know more about her own past by learning about Carl Reyes’s roots in Guatemala. She visits a library to research Guatemala’s history for a reason that belies her expressed intention of moving away from the past: ‘Trying to get the feel of Carl Reyes. For he would have been different. A foreigner. He would have known of the world’s sorrows’ (Thapa 2010: 136). It should be noted that one of Prema’s own sorrows from her past has to do with her mother’s preference to have a male child. ‘Only a son can open the gates of heaven,’ the latter believed (Thapa 2010: 157). This patriarchal belief forces Prema to opt out of marriage altogether, so she does not have to die young like her mother, which is fair to some extent. However, it is precisely for this reason that Prema needs to be the vector of change among her people, rather than choosing to pack and leave.

Conclusion Lived social experiences or structures of feelings are marked by contradictions and overdeterminations, and it is hard to pinpoint any single factor as the sole cause of traumatic events that take place. Similarly, many people who are caught in the middle of violence are presented with tough choices that they must make without the luxury of enough time and space. In hindsight, people realize that the choice that they made was a wrong one, but there is nothing they can do about it. This article suggests the possibility of an alternative beginning, namely the politics of pressure, which would offer people the possibility of avoiding situations that engender violence and trauma in the first place. As it becomes clear to Prema in Seasons of Flight, an easy, individual route out of a difficult predicament facing a nation will not address or redress social problems that cause political revolutions. Rather, a relentless fight in the form of tensions or pressures provides one with a chance to preempt such revolutions. In the aftermath of the Maoist revolution, war scars linger, and so does guilt in people who survive it. However, nothing trumps the significance of constant pressures when it comes to refashioning one’s condition in terms of gender, racial, and class dynamics, a herculean task that only people like Prema and Rajan can take on.

References Bahri, Deepika. 2019. ‘Make It New: Trauma and the Postcolonial Modern in The God of Small Things’, in Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses (eds.), Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism: Anglophone Literature, 1950 to the Present, pp. 144–160. New York: Oxford University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Hall, Stuart. 2003. ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (eds.), Theorizing Diaspora, pp. 233–246. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

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Said, Edward. 2001. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Boston: Harvard University Press. Spivak, Gayatri. 2010. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Rosalind C. Morris (ed.), Reflections on the History of an Idea, pp. 21–78. New York: Columbia University Press. Thapa, Manjushree. 2010. Seasons of Flight. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.

PART VI

Turbulent Topography Trauma and Sri Lanka

15 CUMULATIVE TRAUMA, STRUCTURAL RACISM, AND DISPLACEMENT IN CONTEMPORARY SRI LANKAN FICTION Sharon Bala’s The Boat People and Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage Maryse Jayasuriya Stef Craps has argued that Eurocentric models of trauma tend to focus on one event (such as the Holocaust or, more recently, the 9/11 attacks) that affects individuals. Unlike those who are subjected to the event-model of trauma and therefore struggle to get back to normal life, the ‘normal’ life of people in postcolonial countries can comprise a series of endless traumatic events, full of, as Craps puts it, ‘chronic suffering and structural violence’ in contrast to ‘the Western standard of normality’ (Craps 2014: 53). He calls for ‘a supplementary model of trauma which—unlike the traditional individual and event-based model—can account for and respond to collective, ongoing, everyday forms of traumatizing violence’ (Craps 2015: 4). Lyndsey Stonebridge has pointed out that ‘it is hard not to see the future of trauma theory as bound to the political fate of today’s refugees’ (Stonebridge 2014: 113). This essay considers the plight of those who, due to the long-running conflict in Sri Lanka that includes war and terrorism, have been forced to become internally displaced persons within their homeland or asylum seekers elsewhere. Focusing on two recent Anglophone novels about displaced people by Sri Lankan Tamil diasporic writers, The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016) by Anuk Arudpragasam and The Boat People (2018) by Sharon Bala, the essay explores the ways in which individuals attempt to deal with continuous or successive traumatic experiences and have no recourse to a ‘normal’ way of life to which they can hope to return.1 As Sri Lankan Tamils living in a formerly colonized country, the characters in the two novels deal with the cumulative trauma of postcolonial peoples as well as the structural trauma of racism faced by an ethnic minority within a majority Sinhalese society. These characters illustrate the ongoing trauma caused by racist structures and the way in which trauma accumulates when there is no acceptable old normal to which to return, and possibilities for a just ‘new normal’ still need to be imagined.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-22

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The roots of both the cumulative trauma and the structural racism encountered by the Sri Lankan Tamil characters in these novels lie in the long history of Sri Lanka’s colonization by European powers. Sri Lanka was colonized by three successive European powers – the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British. The latter, in particular, applied (as they did throughout the British Empire) the divideand-rule policy in the colony that they called Ceylon, exacerbating divisions that existed among the majority Sinhalese and other ethnic groups such as the Tamils (the largest ethnic minority in the country) to the advantage of the colonizers. On the pretext of implementing decolonization measures, unscrupulous Sinhalese politicians were able to carry out large-scale discrimination against minority groups – first through the disenfranchisement of Indian Tamils brought to Sri Lanka by the British to work in tea plantations and then through exclusionary policies such as the Sinhala-Only Act of 1956, which made Sinhala, the mother tongue of the majority ethnic group, the only official language in the country (Bandarage 2009: 38–46). Successive governments carried out further discriminatory policies against the Tamils – giving Buddhism (the majority religion among the Sinhalese) prominence as the state-sponsored religion, limiting the number of Tamils admitted to universities through quota systems and thereby also restricting their employment opportunities – until young Tamils formed militant groups to fight for a separate state, Eelam, for the Tamil people in the Tamil-dominated North and East of the country. The ethnic conflict erupted in 1983 following a pogrom that resulted in thousands of Tamils being killed and their property being destroyed by Sinhalese mobs with the support of the state (Bandarage 2009: 104–109). As detailed in Rajan Hoole’s meticulous Sri Lanka: the Arrogance of Power: Myths, Decadence, and Murder, this conflict went through many different phases, including Indian intervention through a so-called Indian Peace-Keeping Force, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) decimating rival Tamil militant groups, and rounds of ceasefires and negotiations brokered by European countries such as Norway. The war finally came to an end in 2009, when the Sri Lankan army defeated the LTTE at the cost of many Tamil civilian lives.

Trauma and Internal Displacement in Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage Published after the end of the Sri Lankan conflict, and focused on its later stages, Anuk Arudpragasam’s novel The Story of a Brief Marriage focuses on one Sri Lankan Tamil man, Dinesh, a civilian, who seems to have experienced nothing but war, violence, and displacement throughout his life. He has been displaced from his home for a prolonged period as a result of violence and has lost everything, including his loved ones: he has been compelled to gradually discard his belongings, and his mother was killed in an aerial bombing. In what would turn out to be the final days of the war, we find Dinesh at a camp designated as a ‘no-fire zone’ volunteering at the make-shift clinic and grappling with the possibility of imminent death, either as a result of air raids by the Sri Lankan military or due to conscription by

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the LTTE. He is also trying to figure out whether to accept a stranger’s unexpected offer for Dinesh to marry his daughter, Ganga, for the sake of protecting the latter from Sinhalese soldiers should the Sri Lankan army defeat the LTTE, an offer that jolts Dinesh out of his stupefied state: It was as though he’d been moving around, all this time, in a heavy fog, doing whatever he needed to do mindlessly, refusing to register the world around him, and refusing to let it have any effect on him, so that having been caught off guard by the unexpected proposal, forced to wake up suddenly after how many months of being like this he didn’t know. (Arudpragasam 2016: 9) Due to Dinesh having grown up in the midst of war as a member of a persecuted minority group and all the resulting losses that he has experienced, there is no possibility of his going back to any type of normality; as Craps says in his analysis of a similar context in Sierra Leone, Dinesh’s ‘normal experience’ has become ‘one of oppression, deprivation, and upheaval; freedom, affluence, and stability—the Western standard of normality—are actually the exception rather than the rule’ in this particular situation (Craps 2014: 53). He focuses on getting by from moment to moment. We are given a glimpse into his interior life over a period of 24 hours – he does not dwell on the history of disenfranchisement that led to the war or on who is responsible for his current plight. He can no longer remember the faces of his lost loved ones and has not been able to interact with other people. He seems to have been moving about in a state of stupefaction, devoid of memory, thought, and perception, like a tortoise with its head and limbs fully retracted into its shell, so how could it be surprising if he couldn’t understand anything of what had happened further back in time? Recollections of that life did come back to him now and then, but only in brief traces. (Arudpragasam 2014: 112) He is driven to collect abandoned objects he has found on the side of the road during his travels from one camp to another. Just like him, these abandoned objects are displaced and helpless. ‘The only possessions Dinesh had carried since then were little objects that he found here and there and took pity on … anything that was lost or abandoned by other evacuees and that seemed to him in need of companionship’ (Arudpragasam 2016: 83). The sense of connection he has with, and the compassion he directs toward, these objects indicate how alone and unmoored he himself feels. Stef Craps asserts that ‘silence plays a beneficial role in keeping trauma at bay … rather than merely a symptom of trauma, to be dispelled without a second thought, silence is also a coping mechanism, a conscious choice deserving or respect’ (Craps 2014: 55). Dinesh maintains this type of silence. Knowing that death could happen at any time, Dinesh focuses on his own body, thinking of his limbs and organs and paying attention to his own bodily functions, such as defecation.

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His eventual decision to marry Ganga and begin to get to know her makes him pay more attention to himself and his surroundings. For the first time in months, Dinesh is able to initiate brief conversations with another human being, cry and show his vulnerability in front of Ganga, and possibly as a result of this release, fall asleep. He even begins to have some paltry hope that they might be able to have some sort of life together despite possible injuries, amputations, or other calamities that would surely befall them. Ganga’s death in a shelling the day after their wedding leaves him even more desolate than before. Arudpragasam makes this point by describing Dinesh’s violent physical reaction as he tends to his wife’s prone body. This shows that there are limits to what we can know or understand about another person’s trauma: There were things, after all, that could happen to human beings, after which their thoughts and feelings became unknowable. There were events after which, no matter how long or intimately one has tried to be by their side, no matter how earnestly or with how much self-reproach one desires to understand their situation, how meticulously one tries to imagine and infer it from one’s own experiences, one has no choice but to watch blindly from the outside. (Arudpragasam 2016: 191) This inability to understand another’s trauma is, according to Arudpragasam, not so much because the writer’s or reader’s experiences or circumstances are so very different but because the person going through the traumatic experience is in a state that precludes any physical or material indication of that experience. As Arudpragasam’s painfully lyrical reflection on Dinesh’s response to Ganga’s death as well as the limits of the writer’s ability to describe or the reader’s ability to grasp such an experience indicates, trauma cannot always be resolved by a return to normality, nor is a post-traumatic future available to everyone. Those who suffer trauma are not always able to reflect back on the meaning of their experience on the other side, and there are traumas that even a well-intentioned third party cannot pretend to understand, let alone empathize with. It is a necessary reminder that ‘the otherness of the other remains beyond our grasp, and that the best we can do is imagine some version of it’ (Gauthier 2015: 2).

Trauma in the Diaspora: Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Sharon Bala’s The Boat People If Arudpragasam is engaged by the trauma of internal displacement, other stories can explore the trauma of those who have had to flee their homeland and of refugees and asylum seekers who meet with structural racism and collective trauma abroad as well as at home. Sharon Bala’s novel The Boat People focuses on those who survived the final days of the military conflict and managed to escape the Sri Lankan government-run camp for internally displaced people to which they were confined

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after the war. The novel begins with the arrival of a cargo ship carrying five hundred and three Sri Lankan Tamil asylum seekers in Canada, whom the Canadian government suspects have ties with the LTTE, which has been classified as a terrorist organization.2 The refugees are detained and face detention reviews at regular intervals while investigations take place to verify and establish the true identity of each asylum seeker, and hearings are held regarding their admissibility – permission to make a claim for asylum – to the country. Our attention is particularly focused on Mahindan, a young widower who has a six-year-old son, Sellian. Like Dinesh, Mahindan has lost his home, the garage that was his source of income, and his loved ones, and has known nothing but war throughout his life. He is determined to survive, protect his son, and ensure a new life for both of them in Canada. The experience of Mahindan and the other refugees on the ship in detention is juxtaposed with that of Grace Nakamura, a Japanese-Canadian who is a new adjudicator on the Immigration and Refugee Board. She has been appointed to the Board by the conservative Minister of Security, who pressures her to deny the Sri Lankan refugees entry into Canada. As she struggles to understand her duties, grasp relevant regulations, and make the correct decisions relating to the refugees, Grace also grapples with the dilemma posed by her mother, Kumi, who is fighting to regain what her Japanese first-generation immigrant parents lost when they experienced internment during World War II. Every few chapters, we get flashbacks through Mahindan’s perspective of his experiences in Sri Lanka that contributed to his decision to leave his homeland – his life with his pregnant wife during the ceasefire between the LTTE and the government before the eruption of the final phase of the war, her sudden death in childbirth, caused in part by a lack of necessary medications and supplies, his attempt to avoid being conscripted by the LTTE on the basis of his work as a mechanic repairing (and outfitting) their vehicles, the evacuation from his village in the face of the advancing Sri Lankan army, his experiences in the ‘no-fire zone’ during the final battle between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan military, and his time in the temporary camp following the end of the war. Even the periods that seem most ‘normal’ to Mahindan include embargoes that have led to privations, shelling by the state military, and fears of being conscripted by the LTTE. Few of his recollections are comforting since he has lost so much and so many loved ones. Many of his memories are suffused with guilt because he has done work for the LTTE in order to escape their clutches; thus, he is implicated in deaths caused by suicide bombings. He is linked, for example, with a bus that was used in a suicide bombing that killed multiple Sinhalese civilians: Every time he was made to rig up the brakes on a car or strap bombs to the underside of a truck, he thought of how he was bound to these weapons, one link in a chain of events that would end a life. It gave him nightmares … But what choice did he have? (Bala 2018: 125)

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From time to time, he is wracked by guilt for having scavenged dead bodies that he encountered during the exodus in order to collect money and jewelry as a safeguard for the future of his son and himself, which he used for his and his son’s passage on the boat to Canada; he has also sold documents he has found on dead bodies – such as passports and national identity cards – to fellow displaced people in need of such documents for escaping to another land. While in detention in Canada, Mahindan realizes the gravity of some of his actions when he is questioned during the detention hearings about fitting out vehicles with explosives for the LTTE and when an identity card that he has sold to a fellow refugee turns out to be that of an LTTE leader wanted by international authorities, which ultimately leads to a deportation order for the refugee in possession of it. Yet the only thing that Mahindan can cling to is the knowledge that he must survive for the sake of his son, and survival has to be prioritized over other ethical and moral considerations. All the refugees are suffering from trauma. Hema Sokolingham, for example, is unable to function at all on certain days due to what she has experienced in her homeland, while Savithri Kumurun has lost her husband as well as two of her sons and ‘has been diagnosed with PTSD and depression’ (Bala 2018: 108). Prasad, a journalist considered to be the ‘model migrant’, has experienced kidnapping and torture and witnessed the assassination of his editor for criticizing the Sri Lankan government. Ranga lost his leg and the vegetable stall that was his means of livelihood in a bomb blast and later sinks into a depression when a deportation order is made against him. Mahindan’s extended family perished in an air raid on the camp, and while he is kept in detention, he has been separated from his son, who is being raised by Canadian foster parents. He is constantly disturbed by fellow detainees grappling with their own traumas at night: The night terrors—which had died down on the boat as they sailed farther away from Sri Lanka, had recently revived, so commonplace again they no longer sent the guards sprinting. Men screamed in their sleep, reliving old horrors. Names were shouted, or just the word No, indecipherable lamentations. (Bala 2018: 105) However, none of these people is able or willing to talk about their experiences in therapy for the simple reason that what they say could send them back to the homeland from which they have fled so desperately. They can’t trust that what they say won’t be used against them or others, especially since the Canadian government is ‘influenced by public opinion and politics’ in taking a hard line on these particular asylum seekers (Bala 2018: 100). As Mahindan ponders when he is being questioned about his past, ‘Do work for the Tigers or be crushed by them. Give the Canadians a reason to deport him or tell a pack of lies. There was never a good option’ (Bala 2018: 169). The lawyers hired by the Tamil Alliance – a welfare organization comprising Tamil Canadians – to represent some of the asylum seekers point out that the conservative Canadian government is attempting to score political points by showing its dedication to protecting borders and maintaining the country’s sovereignty

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through a tough stance on this group of refugees, especially since they are people of color. As Priya, a Tamil Canadian law student assisting the lawyers, wryly observes, ‘The Minister [of Public Safety] is of the opinion that all these brown people look exactly the same, which is to say, like terrorists’ (Bala 2018: 99). According to Pilar Royo-Grasa, This categorization of incoming refugees as potential terrorists changes the public image that refugees have in the receiving countries: no longer regarded as people whose plea for international protection should be supported, they are seen as a threat to the nation. The possibilities for the receiving citizens to empathize with the refugees are downplayed and the receiving nations feel both legitimately and morally entitled to reject refugees’ requests for asylum. (Royo-Grasa 2020: 534) It is ironic that the structural racism against Tamils in Sri Lanka that originally led to the conflict from which the asylum seekers have attempted to escape is being repeated here in the land in which they are trying to find a safe haven. As Amy Shuman and Carol Bohmer assert in their study of asylum seekers in the United States, ‘the asylum process itself is an emotional struggle comparable to the experience of persecution’ (Shumer and Bohmer 2004: 406). The parallels between the racism that the Tamils in Sharon Bala’s novel face in Sri Lanka and Canada reinforce Shuman and Bohmer’s point. The experiences of the Sri Lankan asylum seekers languishing in detention are juxtaposed in the novel with those of Grace Nakimura’s own grandparents, who lost everything when they were forced into internment camps by the government in 1942, during World War II. As Grace’s mother Kumi asserts, ‘They took everything from us. Our homes, our jobs, our dignity. … Our childhoods’ (Bala 2018: 45). Grace’s grandfather, Hiro (who is from Hiroshima and whose extended family would vanish as a result of the atom bomb that would be dropped on the city), was separated from his wife and children – who were confined to the internment camp – and taken to a labor camp, where he was made to break rocks. As in the case of the asylum seekers from Sri Lanka, the focus of the Japanese-Americans was to survive and continue with their lives when they were released from the internment camps in 1945, at the end of the war, and in certain ways, avoid speaking of their traumatic experiences and suffering or even seeking reparation for the homes and businesses that they had lost. Grace tells her daughters, Once my grandparents got to Ontario, I think they just put their old life and moved on. … Wergild—who wants that? Here’s some blood money for your misery, now please stop whining. It’s so easy to cut a check. But what does it solve? (Bala 2018: 94) Even though Grace admires the ‘quiet dignity’ and the ‘stoicism’ of her grandparents, Kumi – ironically attempting to preserve the collective memories of what

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Japanese-Canadians lost at the point when she is losing her own personal memories to Alzheimer’s disease – no longer wants to keep quiet about the trauma experienced by her parents and herself during her childhood. Kumi talks about how ‘that generation was humiliated by what was done to them’ and ‘shame held their tongues’ (Bala 2018: 202). Kumi’s stories about what happened in wartime have a devastating impact on her teenaged granddaughter: ‘the injustice reaching forward three generations to latch on. How personal it felt, a nation’s betrayal’ (Bala 2018: 201). Stef Craps has observed that those who suffer from structural trauma do not necessarily find healing through therapy or speaking about trauma (Craps 2014: 55). In this situation, the asylum seekers are forced to speak out about their traumas during the detention review, which is itself an intensely painful process. For example, Hema reveals how her husband was killed by a bomb, her mother beaten to death, and her brothers taken by the LTTE, after which she deserted to the Sri Lankan side (126–128). When Grace, the adjudicator, asks her when she deserted, Hema says, ‘Every day and night, it was the same—bombs and shelling and people dying’ (Bala 2018: 128). She goes on to reveal how one of her teenaged daughters was raped by Sinhalese soldiers at the IDP camp: ‘One night two men came. I tried to stop them …. They took my daughter …. She came back in the morning. Her dress was torn. And those dogs, they had cut her hair’ (Bala 2018: 135). In this scenario, Hema has to reveal something that has traumatized herself and her daughters not to a sympathetic audience but to suspicious interlocutors, including a Border Services representative who constantly challenges her – ‘This testimony deviates from what was told to Immigration at the Port of Entry’ (Bala 2018: 134) – and an adjudicator who is determined not to be swayed by the ‘gory details of people’s alleged life stories’ (Bala 2018: 126). It is an almost impossible situation in which traumatized individuals are pressured to talk in a hostile environment in order to avoid being sent back to the very location where they experienced a series of traumas; this is why Hema declares at the end of her hearing, ‘Tell them, if they try to send us back, I will kill myself and my daughters. Better to die here in heaven than go back to hell’ (Bala 2018: 135). At the end of the novel, Mahindan faces yet another hearing. Yet Grace, his adjudicator, has been pondering what her mother has said: ‘It was a mistake to keep quiet all these years …. People who forget the wrongs that were done to them perpetuate those same wrongs on others’ (Bala 2018: 201). Some of Kumi’s statements have particular resonance for Grace: ‘her mother’s words echoing in her ears: in another time and place, we were those people’ (Bala 2018: 321). There is a hint that perhaps Grace will keep the trauma due to racism experienced by her grandparents and her mother in mind as she decides on the fate of other minorities who have been similarly traumatized.

Conclusion As Stef Craps has advocated, Bala’s and Arudpragasam’s novels offer an alternative understanding of trauma to more conventional Eurocentric models. Arudpragasam

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provides a powerful look at the way in which the trauma experienced by internally displaced persons in Sri Lanka has been unrelenting. Bala has extended the consideration of trauma experienced by Sri Lankan refugees and asylum seekers in North America by connecting it with the broader traumas experienced by Asian diasporics in Canada. Bala and Arudpragasam are only beginning to be recognized by critics working in postcolonial literary studies, but they offer an important testimony to the suffering of Sri Lankan Tamils and an important alternative to postcolonial narratives that replicate European modes of representing trauma.

Notes 1 Stef Craps has challenged the notion that ‘traumatic experiences can only be adequately represented through the use of experimental, modernist textual strategies’ since ‘this assumption could lead to a narrow trauma canon consisting of non-linear, modernist texts by mostly Western writers’ (Craps 2014: 50). Arudpragasam’s and Bala’s novels are both linear narratives, though the latter does include the flashbacks of one of the main characters. 2 Bala says in an ‘Author’s Note’ that the inspiration for the novel came from two ships that arrived in British Columbia – the Ocean Lady in October 2009 and the MV Sun Sea in August 2010 – bearing over 550 Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka (Bala 2018: 333).

References Arudpragasam, Anuk. 2016. The Story of a Brief Marriage. New York: Flatiron Books. Bala, Sharon. 2018. The Boat People. New York: Anchor Books. Bandarage, Asoka. 2009. The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka: Terrorism, Ethnicity, Political Economy. Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications. Craps, Stef. 2014. ‘Beyond Eurocentricism: Trauma Theory in the Global Age’, in Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone (eds.), The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, pp. 45–61. New York: Routledge. Craps, Stef. 2015. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gauthier, Timothy. 2015. 9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and Otherness. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Hoole, Rajan. 2001. Sri Lanka: The Arrogance of Power: Myths, Decadence and Murder. Nugegoda: University Teachers for Human Rights ( Jaffna). Royo-Grasa, Pilar. 2020. ‘Gail Jones’s The Ocean (2013) and A Guide to Berlin (2015): A Literary Challenge to Asylum-Seekers’ Precarity’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 56(4): 532–546. Shumer, Amy, and Carol Bohmer. 2004. ‘Representing Trauma: Political Asylum Narrative’, Journal of American Folklore, 117(466): 394–414. Stonebridge, Lyndsey. 2014. ‘“That Which You are Denying Us”: Refugees, Rights and Writing in Arendt’, in Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone (eds.), The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, pp. 113–125. New York: Routledge.

16 THE INSIDE-OUT TRAUMAS OF WAR IN NAYOMI MUNAWEERA’S ISLAND OF A THOUSAND MIRRORS Moumin Quazi

Introduction In a previous article, ‘Sri Lankan Postcolonial Inversion and a “Thousand Mirrors” of Resistance’,1 I focused my attention on Nayomi Munaweera’s debut novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors,2 and particularly the character Saraswathi, whose trauma from being brutally raped by Sinhalese soldiers becomes the pivotal locus of her metamorphosis into a suicide bomber with the secessionist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) Black Widows contingent. Through her fictional response to the Sri Lankan Civil War,3 I argued, Munaweera resisted war violence by offering a narrative that spurs an understanding of the postcolonial ruptures through a variety of mimicries that reframe the paradoxes inherent to the Sri Lankan conflict. Particularly, in that article, I note that she uses the trope of inversion4 (in the sense of something being inside out) to reframe the absurdity of war violence and its aftermath. Island of a Thousand Mirrors, published in 2012, is a diasporic imagining of the island nation of Sri Lanka and its 30-year civil war. Told from the perspective of a writer born in Sri Lanka but then emigrated to Nigeria and then immigrated to the United States, the novel has become an important fictional voicing of the horrific effect of war violence, particularly on Sri Lankan women, who are both victims and perpetrators of violence,5 some even becoming victims of their own violence in the form of suicide bombings.6 This current chapter is concerned with how inversion is used in a postcolonial context as a response to the profound war trauma connected to the Sri Lankan civil war. My focus will continue to be on Island of a Thousand Mirrors. Munaweera uses inversion, along with mirroring, and mimicry, throughout the novel to engage the hybrid fluidity of diasporic postcolonial consciousness/memory/homeliness. She also uses the pattern of inversion and mirroring in her descriptions of nature, family relations, gardening, and even the act of giving birth. Her parodying of the sex act DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-23

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becomes a trope that accentuates the dual nature of hybridity (unity through plurality). The metaphoric inversions accentuate the trauma of the war violence that plagued her homeland from 1987 to 2009.

Trauma and the Reinscription of Nature One way that Munaweera inverts the notion of nature as pastoral is that her narrative imbues nature with violence, as if it has been traumatized or perpetrates trauma. To start, Munaweera uses the imagery of mirroring at the start of her narrative as she describes the sea and its fish not as peaceful creatures, but as ‘living shards’: ‘To be there is to be surrounded by living shards of light. At a secret signal, all is chaos, a thousand mirrors shattering about him’ (Munaweera 2012: 8). The mirrors are shattering, yet the description is of the beauty of the sea. Later, we see a distorted mirror image of this same image when the narrator describes Saraswathi’s perspective: ‘It is the dry season here in the northern war zone of Sri Lanka, and the lagoon reflects the sunlight like the shards of a thousand broken bottles’ (Munaweera 2012: 129). Again, the lagoon (a natural setting) is perceived in terms of broken bottles. Another setting that is described in violent imagery is that of gardening. Like fishing, which produces sustenance for the islanders, gardening provides bounteous food. Yasodhara’s maternal grandfather, referred to only as ‘The Judge’, for example, ‘sends the gardener to rip and uproot. But days after these attacks, the mutilated branches send forth vines to once again wind into the embrace of the wrought iron balcony. Birds return once again to build nests in the outstretched arms of the trees’ (Munaweera 2012: 16). One should note the language: ‘rip’, ‘uproot’, ‘attacks’, ‘mutilated’, yet afterward, ‘embrace’, ‘build’, and ‘outstretched arms’. In an inversion of the beauty found in natural imagery, Munaweera describes horribly violent images. In one of the scenes in the novel, Radhini (Yasodhara’s father’s girlfriend) is ‘jerked upward like a fish plucked out of water by a cormorant’s skewering beak. A machete tip traces her upper arm’ (Munaweera 2012: 25). Later, Munaweera invokes the imagery of a beautiful bird to describe the immolation: The Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran ‘remembers an old Tamil woman beset by Sinhala youths, who beat her with sticks and then, laughing as if at a fair or some other amusement, set her alight so that she squawks and screams, her sari flapping like the wings of a great flaming bird’ (Munaweera 2012: 27–28). Sylvia Sunethra (Yasodhara’s grandmother) punishes Shiva (a Tamil tenant) for teaching Yasodhara Tamil: ‘suddenly my grandmother, her attention telescoped on us, pins him like an insect. Her iced voice, incredulous, ‘Are you teaching my granddaughter Tamil?’ Her hand smashing hard across his cheek’ (Munaweera 2012: 62). Later, Yasodhara describes her sister Lanka’s (aka La) downplaying of her own beauty by dressing modestly as part of ‘Her need to tear up the labels that had us pinned like specimens under glass’ (Munaweera 2012: 120). She and Shiva have been ‘pinned’ but only by being scrutinized or having expectations placed on them. Furthermore, the first line of the novel is situated in a ‘Prologue’, which is actually a narration of thoughts that have occurred after the action of the novel, and reveals

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mimicry that employs inversion: ‘I lie in the cave of his body … my limbs are heavy, weighted with exhaustion and frantic, war-like lovemaking’ (Munaweera 2012: 1). The sexual activity has been consensual; it has been cathartic, yet, Munaweera describes it as ‘war-like’. Later, Yasodhara describes her diasporic sexual relations as follows: ‘I make love that feels like war’ (Munaweera 2012: 162) and ‘On those nights we make love as if dying’ (Munaweera 2012: 168). Munaweera continues this pattern of multiple inversions early in the first part of her novel, as well. She writes, They [the fishermen] are ruthless with the flesh of the creatures they catch, upturning gentle sea turtles in the sand to carve off chunks of their living flesh. The turtles bleed slowly, dripping salt tears from the corners of their ancient eyes. The fishermen explain that in this way, the meat stays fresh for days. For similar reasons, the fishermen grasp just caught octopuses and turn them inside out, exposing delicate internals that flash through cycles of color. Decades later, in America, when my father sees Christmas lights for the first time, he will astound us with the observation that they look just like dying octopuses. (Munaweera 2012: 8) She reveals the brutal nature of fishing, the act of harvesting the sea to sustain their livelihood, not by immediately killing some of their catch, but by using the catch as food, even as they are alive, prolonging the suffering of the turtles and octopi toward their ultimate demise. The turtles and octopi are in a form of living-death, but their sacrifice is sustaining Sri Lanka’s fisher-economy. This death-for-life pattern is exploited later by the leader of the LTTE, who assures his suicide fighters that they are doing the same for the cause, dying to bring life. Another aspect of the inversion is found in the octopus being literally turned ‘inside out’, revealing a ‘cycles of color’, and then later remembered in a completely non-fisherman context, on a Christian holiday. The multi-colored Christmas lights remind the narrator, Yasodhara’s father (a former fisherman), of ‘dying octopuses’ (Munaweera 2012: 8). The inversion of seeing a form of death during a season of birth (that of Jesus)) is one that ‘astounds’. Similarly, when books are destroyed, they are described as being part of a funeral pyre (as though they had once lived): ‘In 1981, … Sinhala policemen and paramilitaries storm the old Tamil library, rip books from the shelves, set fire to the mountains of paper. The conflagration shoots high into the sky, a funeral pyre visible for miles’ (Munaweera 2012: 77). The action in the novel pivots on the notion of two significant binaries that often mirror each other: old versus new, pure versus impure. The old ways are often seen as being related to purity, while the new ways are equated with a sense of being polluted. For example, Nishan, Yasodhara’s father, is comfortable in the waters of Sri Lanka’s Gulf of Mannar. The ocean he fishes in is ‘unpolluted by the gasoline-powered tourist boats of the future’ (Munaweera 2012: 7). These are familiar waters, safe waters, warm waters, and clean waters. These are the home waters of the Yasodhara’s ancestry. Later, she will leave Sri Lanka for the United States of America, and she will find that those faraway waters are not as welcoming,

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comforting, or comfortable. Instead, they provide a shocking moment when she and her sister Lanka step into the seemingly inviting Pacific Ocean on the West Coast of the United States. She describes the contrast: We step in and instantly the water cuts at our ankles like a hundred shiny silver blades. We leap out shivering, icy drops splashed across our skins. The ocean we grew up with was as warm as bathwater, pulling you in to hold you tenderly; you could fall asleep in such water, lulled and embraced, the temperature at one with that of your own body. (Munaweera 2012: 111) For the diaspora, there’s an adjustment period, where one learns to navigate the new waters or suffers the consequences. Munaweera foreshadows that sense of precarity when she describes the flooding rains in Sri Lanka, causing the catastrophe of fish being trapped in the wrong kind of water: ‘In the churning roadside gutters, fluttering sea fish gasp and slowly drown in the onslaught of fresh water’ (Munaweera 2012: 73). Those of her family that have emigrated before her, Anuradha and Mala, cope in their own way, finding solace in each other’s company, even at parties. For example, they are more comfortable ‘in the in-between no-man’s-land of darkened hallways, laughing together and touching often’ (Munaweera 2012: 75).

Trauma and the Inversion of Family Interactions Another time when something quite benign is being described, typical family interactions, for example, Munaweera uses vicious war imagery. Yasodhara’s paternal grandmother, Beatrice Muriel, threatens her husband, for example, ‘One day I will find you up in a coconut tree with the toddy tappers. That’s the day I will skin you alive’ (Munaweera 2012: 9). Being skinned alive is such a hyperbolic threat that it would never be exercised by her. Even her gaze, though, is described as ‘sharp as knives’ (Munaweera 2012: 13). Later, having offspring, a relatively (pun intended) innocuous activity, is associated with war: ‘A single dream emerges: to build a house and fill it chock-full of dutiful children, illustrious sons and daughters-in-law, an army of projected grandchildren stretching into the distant future’ (emphasis mine; Munaweera 2012, 30). Hyperbole associated with violence is used to describe reactions to relational choices, as well. Hearing that her son has chosen to fall in love with a Burgher (Dutch and Portuguese), instead of a pure-blooded Sri Lankan, Sylvia Sunethra (Yasodhara’s maternal grandmother) frets, ‘What am I to do? … This will kill your father; I just know it. It will kill him dead’ (Munaweera 2012: 32). Further, the relatively peaceful interaction between the Sinhala landlords and the Tamil tenants is framed as a war: ‘the Upstairs-Downstairs, Linga-Singha wars’ (Munaweera, 36), in which the ‘two heads engage in battle’ (Munaweera 2012: 37). Sylvia Sunethra (Yasodhara’s grandmother) punishes Shiva (a Tamil tenant) for teaching Yasodhara Tamil: ‘Suddenly, my grandmother, her attention telescoped on us, pinned him like an insect. Her iced voice, incredulous, “Are you

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teaching my granddaughter Tamil?” Her hand smashing hard across his cheek’ (Munaweera 2012: 62). Later, Yasodhara describes her sister Lanka’s (aka La) downplaying of her own beauty by dressing modestly as part of ‘Her need to tear up the labels that had us pinned like specimens under glass’ (Munaweera 2012: 120). She and Shiva have been ‘pinned’, though only by being scrutinized or expectations. Sexual relations, even consensual, pleasurable ones, are described in inverted terms of violence: Sylvia Sunethra’s imagination is carried away by the Demon King, taken to his palace, and seduced by a thousand courtesies. She smiles into the darkness, … turns uneasily and utters small, wounded noises in her sleep’ (Munaweera 2012: 39). She is seduced, yet utters wounded noises. Later, the sexual activity between Sylvia Sunethra’s daughter Visaka and her paramour Ravan, a Tamil boy, is described: ‘He takes away the necklace of her teeth marks on his shoulder blade like a prize won in battle. A bruise blooms on her inner arm, and she almost flaunts it’ (Munaweera 2012: 42). The death of Anuradha (Yasodhara’s uncle) as he tries to shield a Tamil boy from rioters is likened to lovemaking: She sees the blade raised and brought down. The flutter of his lids was so familiar. His body jerked and then sagged, as it has done many times over hers in their bed. But this time, it is the unnamed boy who receives his weight, who shrieks the ear-shattering screams of an animal in terror. (Munaweera 2012: 87) Earlier in the novel, consensual sex had been described as painful and frightening: ‘It isn’t until the fourth night that she allows him to push hard into her. … It is painful, frightening, the way his breath becomes tense, taut, until finally he shudders into her’ (Munaweera 2012: 57).

Trauma and the Inversion of the Body Birth, the ultimate eruption of life, is inverted by Munaweera, when a character loses her baby in the first moments of its life, albeit naturally. She paints the following picture, using the brushstrokes of fishing culture: The large, cruel knuckled fingers of fear and grief are forcing apart her labia lips, reaching into pink, then breaking into red, tearing through her smooth curved cervix into the sealed chamber where her forming child lies dreaming. Cold fingers wrap around a tiny ankle, start tugging. … Knees slipping, she rocks the amphibious creature as it gasps for air, tiny eyes blinking, a deep-sea fish hooked and dragged too quickly into light. Its gills fluttering as it drowns in air. She holds it until dawn, the girl’s arms tight around her. (Munaweera 2012: 90) Later, this inversion will take monstrous shape as a suicide bomber disguises herself as a pregnant woman, hiding an I.E.D. within her clothing. Saraswathi puts on the

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latex costume of pregnancy, mimicking the swollen belly of a woman carrying a child in her womb: Then, with hands as gentle as Amma’s, he pulls the contraption over my head, snuggles it against my belly, beneath my breasts. The latex runs down my body like water, all that wiring and hardware fused to my muscle and sinew seamlessly, the secret mechanisms of it hidden in my now heavily pregnant stomach. (Munaweera 2012: 210) Heidemann notes that ‘With a suicide belt hidden behind a fake pregnant belly, her body is transformed into a woman-arsenal’ (Heidemann 2019, 393).7 In this instance, Munaweera highlights the LTTE’s use of mimicry to gain access into a crowd for nefarious purposes, with the view of bringing life through destruction (as the paradoxical thinking of the resistance to hegemonic brutality goes), by becoming more than ‘symbolic bearers of the nation’ (McClintock 1993: 62). More will be said about this nation-building later in this essay. What is notable here is that Munaweera mimics the actual murder of Sri Lankan Army Commander Sarath Fonseka in April 2006 by a pregnant suicide bomber who escaped detection because of her pregnancy (Bandarage 2010: 658). As a diasporic writer, Munaweera reveals the precarity of ‘home’ in her characters’ experience of the United States as the locus of ambivalence. It’s the place where home isn’t homey (or as has been mentioned earlier, it is ‘unhomely’).8 For example, Rosie, the housekeeper (in the United States), berates Lanka and Yasodhara for venturing out of their uncle’s home alone after they arrive in the United States: ‘Where did you go? Don’t you know that you can’t just go walking anywhere in this country? There are people, men who like to take little girls and do all sorts of dirty chee-chee things to them’ (Munaweera 2012: 104). Even the water in America is not the same. Amaresekera and Pillai note, ‘The realisation that the water in the Pacific Ocean is not the same as the Indian Ocean, reminds the girls that they are in an unfamiliar place’ (2016, 24). They are home, but not at home. Even the apartment in the United States is called a ‘combat zone’, in contrast to having ‘their own piece of land’ termed ‘the most cherished slice of the immigrant dream pie’ (Munaweera 2012: 117). Perhaps the most dramatic inversion relates to the greatest sacrifice, that of giving one’s life or limbs to a cause. Often, the pitch to sacrifice is altruistic, while at other times, the pitch is self-serving. In the novel, Munaweera reveals that sometimes, a sacrifice must be made to save the rest of the body. Two examples from the text include amputating a leg after a swordfish has skewered a boy’s kneecap (Munaweera 2012: 13), and the other ‘a three-legged dog, Kalu Balla, who, unlike so many of her four-legged colleagues, survives the quiet morning train, losing only a leg to the Doctor’s merciful knife’ (Munaweera 2012: 13). Later in the novel, a recently martyred Tamil Tiger is described as having ‘sold her life dearly, … ­taking with her dozens of the enemy in the midst of Colombo along with a beloved Sinhala

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politician’ (Munaweera 2012: 138). As a recruiting tool, the Tigers proclaim, ‘It is your duty to fight for your Motherland. Only by taking up arms can we save ourselves. A separate country, Ealam, is the only answer’ (Munaweera 2012: 146). Later, the rhetoric is amped up: Women are good for so much more than getting married and having babies. Our Leader teaches us that women are as brave as men. We, too, can fight as fearlessly, as ferociously. You must have greater goals for your daughter. What bigger aspiration could you have than for her to fight for her people? (Munaweera 2012: 149) In this inside-out twist of logic, meting out death (and dying) ensures the promise of more life (and a future).

Conclusion The inversion of images goes in multiple directions. Not only does Munaweera describe natural and seemingly peaceful things or activities with imagery and metaphors of violence and violation, she describes the horrors of war and other violations using mundane and oftentimes natural images. For example, she illustrates the banality of evil when she describes the riots in Sri Lanka: They committed the usual atrocities in the usual ways, but here was something unexpected and incongruous. In their earth-encrusted calloused fingers, they clutched clean white pages, neatly corner-stapled. Census accounts, voting registrations, pages detailing who lived where and most important, who was Tamil, Burgher, Muslim, or Sinhala. And in these lists was revealed precision and orchestration in the midst of the smoky, charred flesh-smelling chaos. (Munaweera 2012: 83) Later in the book, an exodus of refugees is described in terms of natural waterways: Tamils flee the city via arteries and water sources such as rivers. They end up leaving behind plundered, soot-blackened dwellings, unburied or unburned bodies of loved ones, ancestral material possessions, lost young kids, and a feeling of belongingness and nationalism. It is a record that persists on the tongue, inspiring imaginings of vengeance, partition, and sectionalism (Munaweera 2012: 91). Again, images of agriculture are used to describe the revolutionary LTTE’s rhetoric. Their Leader takes up the majority of the screen by delivering a speech at a Fallen Heroes Day ceremony. The leader states that they have planted a seed of idealism that will be cultivate it using the blood of their martyrs as fertilizer. The seed will mature into a magnificent tree, fulfilling the visions of their martyrs. And then, ultimately, the suicide bomber sees herself as a nurturer of new life. Saraswathi takes the metaphor and applies the promise of life out of death to heart: ‘… I fall into ten thousand sharp pieces. […] A tiny sapling breaks through the ground, draws my blood into its translucent stem; it grows, feeding on me. … It eats up my body

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until I am gone. But I am no longer important’ (190–191). In this way, she is no longer spoiled. In her follow-up novel, Munaweera will tell another story of loss, What Lies Between Us, wherein she exploits the dual-nature of nature as giver and taker. Her narrator describes the Ganges River: She is birthed out of the purest snowmelt. In the cities they burn their dead upon her bosom, they fertilise their fields with her, they bathe and drink from her endless flow. And yet the water is always sacred, always pure, an elixir of life. (305) What the reader also knows is that the water is also devastating and can ‘rip a body miles away in minutes’ (297). Water is both a giver and a taker for Munaweera. Her own life has mirrored the transience that war can bring. Born in Sri Lanka, emigrated to Nigeria and then the United States, her diasporic experience has shaped her narrative voice. And through that voice, she can’t help but relay the traumas of abuse and incivility. For her, nature is traumatic, and as such, it can be used to illustrate to full effect the traumas of war and the violence perpetrated by it.

Notes 1 Published in In the Crossfire of History: Women’s War Resistance Discourse in the Global South, edited by Lava Asaad and Fayeza Hasanat (Rutgers University Press, 2022). 2 Maryse Jayasuriya and Aparna Halpé outline the ways many writers (they mention no fewer than seventy) have responded to the 30-year conflict and its phases: ‘the separatist struggle by militant groups such as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE), which turned into terrorist brutality; the second JVP insurrection in the late 1980s; and the brutal repression of the insurgents by paramilitary forces associated with the government, which led to countless deaths and disappearances. The acceleration of the diaspora due to the war and violence resulted in many new writers emerging outside Sri Lanka’, one of which is Nayomi Munaweera ( Jayasuriya and Halpé 2017: 20). 3 According to the 2017 research article, ‘Intimate Partner Violence in the Post-War Context: Women’s Experiences and Community Leaders’ Perceptions in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka’, Sri Lanka’s Civil War had strong ethnic and geographical dimensions: it was driven by demands from a separatist, predominantly Tamil, ethnic minority group in the northern and eastern region of the country for a state independent from the Sinhalese majority. … The war ended in 2009, but in 2015 more than 70,000 persons were still displaced within war-affected areas’ (Guruge et al. 2017: 2). Furthermore, ‘Sri Lanka has a population of approximately 20 million consisting of an ethno-religious mix of Sinhalese [Buddhists] (75%), Tamils [Hindus] (11%), Moors (Muslims) (9%), and other groups such as Burghers and Malays (5%)’ (Guruge et al. 2017: 3). ‘Since 1983, between 80,000 and 100,000 people – the majority of them Tamil, Sinhalese, and Muslim civilians – have been killed due to the conflict’ (Human Rights Watch, 2009, qtd. in Bandarage 2010: 653). The war finally ended with the ‘Sri Lankan government’s military defeat of the secessionist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE) in May 2009’ (Bandarage 2010: 653). 4 In her collection of essays entitled The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society (1978), Barbara A. Babcock broadly defines ‘symbolic inversion’ as ‘any act of expressive behavior which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values, and norms be they linguistic, literary or artistic, religious, or social and political’ (1978: 14). She adds, ‘Since the early Renaissance at

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least, the word ‘inversion’ has been used to mean ‘a turning upside down’ and ‘a reversal of position, order, sequence, or relation’ (OED: 1477)’ (1978: 15). Ultimately, she notes, ‘Symbolic inversion is central to the literary notions of irony, parody, and paradox’ (1978: 16). Her anthology concerns itself with the ways symbolic inversions ‘affect the ways we perceive, group ourselves, and interact with others’, especially ‘the ways and means and purposes for manipulating and upending sociocultural orders’ (1978: 31). This paper illustrates in detail how inversion is used in a postcolonial diasporic context. 5 Vandana Bhatia and W. Andy Knight refer to the condition of female suicide bombers as being victims of ‘zombification’, for ‘having failed to uphold the standards of the patriarchal society as virgins, chaste characters and bearers of children, they are then considered aberrations of the that patriarchal society’ (2011: 22). 6 See Brite Hiedemann. 2019. ‘The Symbolic Survival of the ‘Living Dead’: Narrating the LTTE Female Fighter in Post War Sri Lankan Women’s Writing’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 54(3): 387. 7 This mimicry of the pregnant woman as a means of disguising an explosive device is richly discussed in Heidemann’s article, ‘The symbolic survival of the ‘living dead’: Narrating the LTTE female fighter in post-war Sri Lankan women’s writing’ (2019, 393). 8 See further, Homi K. Bhabha’s ‘The World and the Home’ and Payel Chattopadhyay Mukherjee’s ‘Unhomely Home, Unhomely Women: The Precariousness of Being, Belonging, and Becoming in the Sri Lankan Diasporic Fiction of Nayomi Munaweera’.

References Babcock, Barbara A. 1978. The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bandarage, Asoka. 2010. ‘Women, Armed Conflict, and Peacemaking in Sri Lanka: Toward a Political Economy Perspective’, Asian Politics & Policy, 2(4): 653–667. Bhabha, Homi K. 1992. ‘The World and the Home’, Social Text in Text, 31/32: 141–153. Bhatia, Vandana and W. Andy Knight. 2011. ‘Female Suicide Terrorism in South Asia: Comparing the Tamil Separatists and Kashmir Insurgents’, South Asian Survey, 18(1): 7–26. Guruge, Sepali, et al. 2017. ‘Intimate Partner Violence in the Post-War Context: Women’s Experiences and Community Leaders’ Perceptions in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka’, PLOS One, 12(3): 1–16. Heidemann, Birte. 2019. ‘The Symbolic Survival of the ‘Living Dead’: Narrating the LTTE Female Fighter in Post War Sri Lankan Women’s Writing’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 54(3): 384–398. Jayasuriya, Maryse, and Aparna Halpé. 2017. ‘Contestation, Marginality, and (Trans)nationalism: Considering Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature’, South Asian Review, 33(3): 17–28. McClintock, Anne. 1993. ‘Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism, and the Family’, Feminist Review, 44: 61–80. Mukherjee, Payel Chattopadhyay. 2020. ‘Unhomely Home, Unhomely Women: The Precariousness of Being, Belonging, and Becoming in the Sri Lankan Diasporic Fiction of Nayomi Munaweera’, South Asian Review, 42(3): 285–300. Munaweera, Nayomi. 2012. Island of a Thousand Mirrors. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin Press. Munaweera, Nayomi. 2016. What Lies Between Us. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin Press. Quazi, Moumin. 2022. ‘Sri Lankan Postcolonial Inversion and a “Thousand Mirrors” of Resistance’, in Lava Asaad and Fayeza Hasanat (eds.), In the Crossfire of History: Women’s War Resistance Discourse in the Global South. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

17 QUEER RECOVERY Addressing Violence, Trauma, and Exile in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy Marilena Zackheos

Introduction The protagonist of Shyam Selvadurai’s novel Funny Boy, Arjie, grows up in a ­conflict-ridden Sri Lanka, where he participates in a number of ‘funny’, illicit, or non-normative intimacies that come to challenge oppressive normative forces that separate people based on differences of gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and religion. Through his non-normative connections, Arjie learns the nation’s limitations on safekeeping all of its subjects, but he in turn realizes that assuming a position of debasement helps the marginalized become privy to a powerful queer resistance. While by the end of Selvadurai’s work, Arjie and his family flee to Canada following Sri Lanka’s 1983 riots, Arjie’s non-normative intimacies and queer resistance – rather than national connections – ultimately support Arjie in helping counterviolence, national trauma, and negotiating life in exile. This chapter investigates how psychological, postcolonial, and queer resistance overlap in Selvadurai’s work.1 It puts forth that queer resistance stems from a perspective from below, as queer of color critic Kathryn Bond Stockton suggests; it embraces vulnerability in queer theorist Judith Butler’s understanding and enacts ‘sly civility’ and ‘mimicry’, subversive acts as explained by postcolonial scholar and theorist Homi Bhabha. Additionally, this chapter formulates the concept of queer recovery, postulating that the emphasis on queer or non-normative intimacy fulfills principal criteria for recovery from trauma: It generates minor, personal stories to counter oppressive metanarratives in psychologists and family therapists Alan Parry and Robert E. Doan’s sense; it revises experiences of violence, which clinician Judith Herman explains serves as a survivor mission; and forges relations with others having experienced similar occurrences of suffering, according to trauma theorists and practitioners Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-24

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Debasement through Non-Normative Intimacies Being a minority Tamil but also a queer youth in a predominantly heteronormative and Sinhalese Sri Lanka, Arjie is labeled a ‘funny’ outsider from the start. Throughout the novel, he explores this difference in a number of non-normative intimacies2 that teach him the pleasures and pains of debasement associated with queerness but also the power of queer resistance. Selvadurai’s first chapter relates Arjie’s time spent with his cousins at their grandparents’ house. While his male cousins and tomboy Meena play cricket outside, he blissfully plays the ‘bride-bride’ game with the girls. Through his Butlerian performance, Arjie forges an intimacy with his female cousins that, as he explains, is transfigurative. His interaction with his female cousins is constituted by immense pleasure and transgresses the ‘constraints of [his gendered] self ’ toward becoming a ‘more brilliant, more beautiful self ’ (Selvadurai 1994: 5). He queerly resists heteronormativity’s binaries of gender and these become fluid. In turn, his transgendering is especially unsettling in the heteronormative Sri Lankan context since, according to Gayatri Gopinath, it points to a celebration of queer male femininity, cross-gender identity as well as potential female homoeroticism in the domestic sphere that functions through an erasure of the groom (2006: 171). It follows that Meena’s gender transgression is less of a concern than Arjie’s performance, which completely erases the groom and soon-to-be patriarch and puts the heterosexual home in danger. While Arjie’s bride role is not unfitting for the other game participants, when cousin Tanuja/Her Fatness arrives from America and desires to join their game by taking on Arjie’s role in the game, she proclaims: ‘A boy cannot be the bride’ (Selvadurai 1994: 11). She calls Arjie names like ‘pansy’ and ‘faggot’ but her insults have no effect on Arjie and the girls; they are foreign definitions in their children’s world. Her fatness screams ‘in desperation’ that Arjie is a ‘sissy’ and finally, these register as insults. Cousin Lakshmi retaliates calling her a ‘fatty-boom-boom’, an insult that Arjie tells all the children understood and found hilariously funny (Selvadurai 1994: 11–12). Upon this reciprocated ridicule, Her Fatness leaves. It is the whimsical and makeshift fabrication of ‘fatty-boom-boom’ that becomes a definition charged with great possibilities to resist Her Fatness’s heteronormative order, though Arjie soon learns that such resistance has a cost. In fact, Her Fatness discloses Arjie’s transgression to the family. Cyril Uncle pronounces Arjie ‘a funny one’, he is laughed at by his other aunts and uncles (Selvadurai 1994: 14) and additionally forbidden from playing ‘bride-bride’. He is consequently evicted from the cousins’ game of cricket too (Selvadurai 1994: 28), and Arjie is left with a feeling of displacement, cast aside from the worlds of his boy cousins, his girl cousins, and the rest of his family. One can argue that this ridicule is traumatic for Arjie as the experience is registered as a threat to his life and bodily integrity, leading to a feeling of disconnection from the community (Herman 1997: 33). As Herman explains, trauma ‘shatter[s] the sense of connection between individual and community, creating a crisis of faith’ (Herman 1997: 55). In turn, the damage is especially great ‘when the traumatic events themselves involve the

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betrayal of important relationships’ (Herman 1997: 55). When we lose touch with people we care about, we lose our sense of self and control (Herman 1997: 52). Arjie’s experience of ridicule constitutes his first experience of displacement, within his home (Selvadurai 1994: 5). Furthermore, the experience foreshadows the tense relations between Tamils and Sinhalese that eventually drive Arjie into permanent exile in Canada. The uncovering of Arjie’s cross-dressing also forms Arjie’s first experience of debasement, where he becomes his uncles’ and aunts’ laughing stock. Another non-normative intimacy from which Arjie develops a greater understanding of debasement, national trauma, and exile is that of Radha Aunty and Anil. Radha Aunty returns from America to become engaged to Tamil Rajan but falls in love with Sinhalese Anil. As this interethnic relationship is frowned upon by the family, Radha Aunty proceeds to meet Anil secretly, accompanied by Arjie, so as to circumvent suspicions. However, when Radha Aunty is injured by a Sinhalese attack on her train, she breaks off her affair and becomes engaged to Rajan. Arjie notes that the shock of having been assaulted by the two Sinhalese men with a stick and a belt had changed Radha Aunty: ‘There was a seriousness to her face that was new, a harshness that I had never seen before’ (Selvadurai 1994: 90). As Herman argues, the identity that the traumatized ‘have formed prior to the trauma is irrevocably destroyed’ (Herman 1997: 56). Radha Aunty’s responses to Anil are henceforth full of anger (Selvadurai 1994: 91–92), displaying the traumatic symptoms of fear and anger of a threatened individual (Herman 1997: 34). Essentially, the traumatic incident on the train makes the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict all the more real for Radha Aunty and scares her into submitting to socially acceptable relations, but Arjie notes that surely ‘something important’ will be missing from Radha Aunty’s subsequent union with Rajan (Selvadurai 1994: 96). Arjie here learns of the TamilSinhalese conflict and witnesses Radha Aunty’s ostracism from her family as well as her perceived debasement due to her non-normative choices. Arjie is further educated about Sri Lanka’s complex politics and interethnic clashes through the interethnic and adulterous relationship of his mother with Daryl Uncle, belonging to the ethnic groups of the Tamils and Burghers, respectively. Daryl Uncle is a journalist who returns from Australia to enquire into crimes supposedly committed by the government of Sri Lanka, but it is soon apparent from Daryl Uncle’s daily visits that there is a history between him and Amma. When Daryl Uncle disappears in Jaffna, news spread that a policeman was killed there by the Tamil Tigers and, in retribution, the police had ‘gone on a rampage’ (Selvadurai 1994: 118–119). Arjie and his mother worry that Daryl Uncle has somehow gotten caught up in the riot or was attacked for his investigations; hence, they venture out to his abode and subsequently to the police station for additional information. When Amma receives word that Daryl Uncle has been found dead, accompanied by Arjie, she seeks the counsel of a civil rights lawyer and then direction from Daryl Uncle’s servant at his village to further investigate her lover’s death. The villagers verbally and physically attack them for being well-off, leading Arjie to denounce his mother’s behavior as reckless. Arjie thus learns the hazards of physical debasement despite his good intentions in undertaking the risk.

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Arjie understands that the aphorism ‘see no evil, hear no evil’, assigned as the chapter’s title, is his only choice regarding his mother’s adulterous affair. In turn, it is the sole choice to deal with the Sinhalese government’s brutality, which Arjie learns extends to Tamils as well as national subjects of other ethnicities, including the Burghers, in the case of governmental opposition. Overall, Daryl Uncle’s death signifies the extreme violent measures and physical debasement that national authorities can inflict on its citizens. Arjie ruminates that Daryl Uncle’s death is ‘a momentous event’ for him (Selvadurai 1994: 132) but seems unaware exactly how, showing thus a ‘detached stat[e] of consciousness’ (Herman 1997: 43), not allowing himself to think of the greater meaning of this traumatic event (Herman 1997: 46). Nonetheless, the hazards Arjie and his mother face while investigating the disappearance of Daryl Uncle teach Arjie how necessary it is to proceed in precarious situations with caution. On the one hand, Arjie’s involvement in the illicit affairs of his Radha Aunty and of his mother exposes him to what Laura Kipnis describes as ‘chances of self-reinvention’ (Kipnis 2000: 42) made available by adultery. These intimacies challenge ‘the prevailing system’ (Kipnis 2000: 18). On the other hand, through these illicit affairs, Arjie is exposed to the prevailing system’s violence and, specifically, Sri Lanka’s interethnic conflicts that can jeopardize survival, happiness, and interethnic intimacy. Likewise, Arjie’s blossoming intimacy with Jegan, an employee at Arjie’s family’s hotel, is compromised due to the violence of the prevailing system. Arjie is drawn to Jegan not only for sexual reasons (Selvadurai 1994: 157) but also because Jegan accepts Arjie for who he is. Jegan smiles, consenting to Arjie staring at him (Selvadurai 1994: 157). Furthermore, when Arjie’s father tries to recruit Jegan to aid Arjie ‘outgrow’ his feminine inclinations, Jegan defends Arjie, saying that there is nothing wrong with him (Selvadurai 1994: 162). Though Jegan and Arjie develop a friendship, their relationship deteriorates once the police seek out Jegan to question his involvement in an assassination attempt orchestrated by the Tamil Tigers. Arjie learns that the Tamil Tigers seek a separate Tamil state on the island and are willing to achieve this through extremism. Though Jegan has left the Tamil Tigers, his identity as a terrorist is fixed by his social milieu. Consequently, the hotel staff turn violent toward Jegan, and Appa lays off Jegan to safeguard his family and hotel business. Finally, Arjie’s interest in aiding Jegan enervates Jegan, and the two quarrel, ending their relationship. Ultimately, Jegan’s relations with Appa, Arjie, and the staff of the hotel are severed due to a perceived threat of the Tamil Tigers’ nationalist demands. In other words, socio-national matters stand in the way of intimate connections. Moreover, Arjie understands the joys and pains of a debased position and realizes that resistance necessitates caution since heteronormative structures can be resolute.

Articulating the Resistance Arjie’s coming of age culminates in his school experience at the Queen Victoria Academy and specifically at Arjie’s participation in the school’s prize-giving celebration. Arjie is enlisted by the school principal, Black Tie, to recite poems that

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highlight an all-inclusive message. Black Tie aims to promote this message in front of government officials, urging them not to change the school’s multi-ethnic character, in contrast to the vice principal, who aspires to make the school Sinhalese. Arjie attends daily rehearsals at Black Tie’s office along with his schoolmate and love interest, Sinhalese Shehan, who is there to ensure Arjie’s excellence. That is to say, whenever Arjie makes a mistake, Black Tie beats Shehan. In response to Black Tie’s injustice, Arjie decides to muddle up his performance on prize-giving day, sabotaging Black Tie’s plans. In effect, Arjie’s engagement in non-normative intimacies leads him to understand the true power of debasement and to use this power for his own goals; he chooses to embarrass himself and become the butt of everyone’s joke at prize-giving day, but simultaneously, the joker. Debasement becomes a political tool, and, as I will show, a therapeutic one too. Stockton argues that debasement is a perspective from below that makes available a queer agency or queer resistance for the shamed subject (2006: 24). Similarly, Butler (2004) holds that embracing vulnerability can resist oppressive structures. These queer positions are similar to the processes of postcolonial and psychological resistance that disturb dominant oppressive ideologies from within. Postcolonial resistance for Bhabha can work through sly civility and mimicry, which subvert oppressive colonial discourse. Herman explains that a traumatic experience is rearticulated in a dignified manner within the context of a survivor mission. For Parry and Doan (1994), metanarratives, in other words, shared communal narratives or imperatives, which an individual has not authored but which can isolate the individual socially, must be rearticulated through other personal stories to legitimize the individual’s own experience. Davoine and Gaudillière (2004) argue that subjects immobilized and isolated from others by historical trauma must also rearticulate this experience, specifically through the compassionate sharing of trauma. Where we see all these disparate processes overlapping,3 we can argue for the work of queer recovery whereby therapeutic resistance shakes up oppressive and isolating social structures. According to Stockton, debasement makes ‘cultural logics’ as well as ‘histories of fantasies, pain, and attractions’ more apparent (2006: 24). Ruminating on Arjie and Shehan’s first sexual intercourse in Arjie’s garage, Arjie expresses the pleasures of debasement (Stockton 2006: 7) through a description of existing at the depths of a pool governed solely by the affective qualities of ‘smell, taste and sensation’ (Selvadurai 1994: 253). At the same time, Arjie experiences the bottom’s other less pleasurable aspects, noting Shehan’s ‘wetness against my thighs’ as ‘a violation’ (Selvadurai 1994: 254). Stockton argues that queer anality’s debasement is related to a sense of impurity and a physical lowering (2006: 7), which can explain Arjie’s feeling of violation with Shehan. Ashamed, Arjie later tries to debase Shehan by bringing up school rumors regarding him having such ‘revolting’ sexual relations with the head prefect (Selvadurai 1994: 258). To this, Shehan replies: ‘Pretend that you’re normal or that you’re doing it because you can’t get a girl’, adding ‘But in the end you’re no different than me’ (Selvadurai 1994: 259). It is the oppressive ‘cultural logics’ of boys necessarily being attracted to girls that Shehan here reiterates. So unnerved by his contradictory sexual yearning for Shehan and sense of ‘disgust’

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for this lust (Selvadurai 1994: 260), Arjie reacts in a surprising manner, even to himself, striking Shehan (Selvadurai 1994: 259). In the end, Arjie realizes that Shehan had not degraded him, but had ‘offered me his love’ (Selvadurai 1994: 262), which was a misinterpretation of debasement as a meritless shameful experience. Arjie and Shehan’s connection through debasement also allows them a deeper understanding of queerness. Their bond is uncontained by the domestic; it grows in the school’s public sphere and is not necessarily established through national ties (Berlant and Warner 2000: 322) that keep Tamil and Sinhalese subjects apart. Their relationship is formed and sustained through debasement, which ultimately makes them all the more aware of their ‘subordinate relation’ in the world (Berlant and Warner 2000: 322). Conscious of Arjie and Shejan’s subordinate relations in the world, Arjie reasons that there must be some power in this. Arjie wonders if the boys must necessarily always obey powerful figures like Black Tie and Arjie’s father, who are always the ones giving out orders and if ‘people like Shehan and me’ must always follow (Selvadurai 1994: 267–268). Similarly, Butler rhetorically asks if the grieving have agency (2004: 30) and argues that if we tap into suffering and vulnerability, we can turn grief into a source of peaceful activism (2004: 30, 42). Supporting Black Tie’s school of ‘all races and religions’ (Selvadurai 1994: 215) may be in Arjie’s best interest seeing as he is a Tamil but Arjie’s own interests in resisting Black Tie’s oppression and violence override his ethnic subjectivity interests. Arjie characterizes Black Tie as ‘cruel’ and is apprehensive about maintaining any ‘loyalties’ to him (Selvadurai 1994: 241). Instead, he chooses to resist Black Tie via a peaceful yet disjointed poetry performance, which induces laughter, thus undermining himself and Black Tie’s pre-scripted speech, hearkening back to Arjie’s primary humiliation for his role in the bride-bride game, thus showing a parallel in understandings of the debased position. Arjie’s school performance essentially asks for his ‘vulnerability’ to be recognized, which Butler explains is paramount in ‘an ethical encounter’ (2004: 43) that may yield justice for the oppressed. Asking to be recognized by another reveals our need for others. Arjie realizes he needs Black Tie and Black Tie needs Arjie equally. Hence, Arjie understands ‘because he needed me’, that is, to authorize Black Tie’s authority, ‘power had moved into my hands’ (Selvadurai 1994: 270). According to Bhabha (2006: 140), this is similar to how power shifts from the colonizer to the colonized. This slippage accentuates the uncertainty of authority (2006: 136). Moreover, Arjie’s performance of resistance against Black Tie on prize-giving day follows queer, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theory strategies for resisting debilitating structures and oppressive ideologies. Arjie’s performance is a form of postcolonial resistance. Like Bhabha’s concept of ‘sly civility’ through which the colonized subject challenges the colonizer within the colonizer’s own terms (Bhabha 2006: 141), Arjie resists Black Tie’s oppressive power precisely within Black Tie’s orders to recite his chosen poems. Like Bhabha’s idea of ‘mimicry’ whereby the native mimes colonial discourse and makes subtle but consequential changes (Bhabha 2006: 169), Arjie’s performance similarly deauthorizes Black Tie’s authority. Arjie’s mimicry ultimately reveals colonial authority’s

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fragility (Bhabha 2006: 130). Additionally, Arjie’s performance revises his experience of debasement by Black Tie in a way that is reminiscent of a survivor’s mission, turning ‘personal tragedy’ into ‘the basis for social action’ (Herman 1997: 207). Like the rape survivor who tells the trauma story in order to heal and stay connected to community, Arjie tells his story in a way that is life-affirming and also puts his relationship with Shehan first. Following Parry and Doan’s understanding of individuals identifying and sticking to the script of their community’s single metanarrative, one might expect Arjie to feel pressure to support continuing Tamil inclusion in his school, but as Parry and Doan explain, one story is not enough to describe our multifaceted lives (1994: 64). Arjie’s community’s metanarrative of oppression comes to silence personal ‘significant narratives’ (Parry and Doan 17). Consequently, Arjie acts just as Parry and Doan advocate: to reinterpret a metanarrative based on one’s own experiences and not those of others (1994: 50) for ‘a life [to] be lived intentionally’ (Parry and Doan 1994: 6). Parry and Doan make compassion, directed toward others and oneself, central to their family counseling (1994: 28). It follows that Parry and Doan urge us to turn ‘negative misreadings’ into ‘compassionate misreadings’ and acknowledge each other as fellow sufferers (1994: 29). In the same way, Arjie’s misreading of the poems strives for a revision of Black Tie’s violent behavior to a compassionate one. For Davoine and Gaudillière, trauma must be rearticulated transferentially for recovery. What is needed is for one to speak of another person’s suffering, ‘a philos’ who has undergone similar suffering (Davoine and Gaudillière 2004: 49; 159). Shehan’s suffering becomes an echo in Arjie’s voice. As Davoine and Gaudillière explain, there is a real potential for recovery at those converging moments of shared trauma (2004: 164).

Conclusion: Queer Recovery The end of the novel features Arjie’s journal records of the 1983 events where his grandparents are killed and his home burned down. Arjie and Shehan make love one final time, and Arjie departs from Sri Lanka with his family. Although Arjie is displaced in Canada while relating these events, his account centralizes the queer body’s experience of displacement in Sri Lanka. The novel thus repeats Arjie’s experiences in the form of a memoir reminiscent of a survivor’s mission and highlights specifically the importance of non-normative intimacies that were formative for Arjie’s identity and queer resistance growing up in Sri Lanka. Moreover, Selvadurai tackles violence, national trauma, and exile through a queer focus on intimacy that I argue can best be described as a process of queer recovery.4 Agreeing with postcolonial, psychoanalytic, and queer theory ideas about resisting debilitating structures and oppressive ideologies, Selvadurai’s text exhibits a narrative sensibility that seeks to represent the experiences of marginalized, traumatized, and diasporic subjects in life-affirming and empathetic ways. This queer recovery unsettles debilitating normative social structures for a life-affirming present and future. It does so intimately; the personal becomes the political. The focus

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on intimacy is subversive. The marginalized, queer, private sphere is publicized and given a voice; it speaks from a debased position, eclipsing oppressive normative structures. Queer recovery’s small personal narratives therapeutically unsettle a debilitating hegemonic metanarrative. It promotes intimate relations formed inside and outside of the nation, calling for a ‘philia’ to generate empathetic sharing of suffering. Insisting on interdependent agency, it reaches out to other people for acknowledgment, enacting a survivor mission to make queer lives more livable. Occupying a vexed relationship with the nation, queer recovery strives to diminish isolation in the local sphere and increase visibility in the global sphere. Published in 1994 by McClellan and Steward, a Canadian publishing company, Funny Boy went on to win the Lambda Literary Award for best gay male novel that same year, as well as the Smithbooks/Books in Canada Award for best first novel. Ultimately, through this text, Selvadurai unsettles identification with the traumatic history of Sri Lanka’s politics and raises awareness abroad of Sri Lankan subjects’ multiple experiences of violence, debasement, and displacement, seeking to empathetically forge connections with others.5 According to diasporic theorist Svetlana Boym, displacement breaks ‘The illusion of complete belonging’ but by virtue of surviving this immense loss, the displaced view ‘possibility after loss’ (2000: 230). Our perception of home, belonging, and ourselves rests on our experiences of intimacy, which convey our deepest essence (Boym 2000: 227). In the end, intimacy, however transient, vexed, or unconforming, has the power to comfort and intimate home, belonging, and identity—in times of turmoil, this can make all the difference.

Notes 1 This chapter is developed from ‘Chapter 3: Queer Island Recovery’ of my PhD thesis, ‘The ex-isle reinvention: Postcolonial trauma and recovery in contemporary island literature’ (2011) from George Washington University. 2 Not all relationships are homosexual, but they deviate from heteronormative time and space standards, which can classify them as queer (Zackheos and Philippou 2021: 123). 3 There are certainly important differences among these positions, but their overlap underscores the intricacy of life-affirming processes. 4 I also explore this process in ‘Amazon Island: Revisiting Female Intimacy in Luz María Umpierre-Herrera’s The Margarita Poems’, published in the journal Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, 37(2): 27–47. 5 Michael Ondaatje does this too. See my piece ‘Michael Ondaatje’s Sri Lanka in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid’, published in South Asian Review, 33(3): 51–69.

References Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner. 2000. ‘Sex in Public’, in Lauren Berlant (ed.), Intimacy, pp. 311. University of Chicago Press. Bhabha, Homi. 2006. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Boym, Svetlana. 2000. ‘On Diasporic Intimacy: Ilya Kabakov’s Installations and Immigrant Homes’, in Lauren Berlant (ed.), Intimacy, pp. 226–252. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso. Davoine, Françoise and Jean-Max Gaudillière. 2004. History Beyond Trauma. New York: Other Press. Gopinath, Gayatri. 2006. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press. Herman, Judith. 1997. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books. Kipnis, Laura. 2000. ‘Adultery’, in Lauren Berlant (ed.), Intimacy, pp. 9–47. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Parry, Alan and Robert E. Doan. 1994. Story Revisions: Narrative Therapy in the Postmodern World. New York: The Guilford Press. Selvadurai, Shyam. 1994. Funny Boy. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. 2006. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where ‘Black’ Meets ‘Queer’. Durham: Duke University Press. Zackheos, Marilena. 2011. The ex-isle reinvention: Postcolonial trauma and recovery in contemporary island literature. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. George Washington University. Zackheos, Marilena. 2012. ‘Michael Ondaatje’s Sri Lanka in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid’, South Asian Review, 33(3): 51–69. Zackheos, Marilena. 2016. ‘Amazon Island: Revisiting Female Intimacy in Luz María Umpierre-Herrera’s The Margarita Poems’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, 37(2): 27–47. Zackheos, Marilena and Nicos Philippou. 2021. ‘Nicosia’s Queer Art Subculture: Outside and Inside Formal Institutions’, in Evi Tselika, Elena Stylianou and Gabriel Koureas (eds.), Contemporary Art in Cyprus: Politics, Identity and Culture Across Borders, pp. 119–136, London: Bloomsbury.

18 THE TRAUMATIC LEGACY OF THE SRI LANKAN CIVIL WAR IN SELECTED WRITINGS OF NAYOMI MUNAWEERA Deimantas Valanc ̌iūnas

Introduction The church bombings in and around Colombo during Easter 2019 drew media attention from all around the world. Despite the fact that this gruesome and violent assault on civilians praying during the festive season was framed as a terrorist attack by Islamic fundamentalists, the attacks also revived references to the Sri Lankan civil war (Ethirajan 2019: n.p.). The civil war between the Sri Lankan government and separatist Tamil militants, the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), claiming the northern parts of Sri Lanka to become a separate Tamil state of Eelam, has ravaged the island for more than two decades (1984–2009). One of the most gruesome military conflicts in South Asia in recent decades, the civil war has left thousands dead and an equally large number (mostly Tamils) migrated. And even though the conflict officially ended in 2009 with Sri Lankan governmental troops defeating the Tigers and killing their leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran, the immediate response to the 2019 church bombings from the public and the media indicates that the wounds of war are far from healed and that the nation still remembers. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that more than two decades of intense violence in the country has produced a specific block of literature, which is concerned with the representation of the civil war and its aftermaths. A large body of such literature came from Sri Lankan diasporic writers, such as Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, and Romesh Gunesekera. However, recent years have also witnessed the emergence of young writers (from both Sri Lanka and the diaspora), many of them women (such as V.V. Ganeshananthan, Chandani Lokuge, and Nayomi Munaweera, to name but a few), as well as growing academic research on the subject (Salgado 2007; Jayasuriya 2012; Watkins 2015). The reconciliation with the aftermaths of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-25

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war through writing is also evident in various creative writing projects, such as Write to Reconcile, inaugurated in November 2012, by Canadian-Sri Lankan writer Shyam Selvadurai. The project brought together emerging Sri Lankan writers who were interested in writing fiction, memoir, or poetry in English on the issues of conflict, peace, reconciliation, memory, and trauma related to Sri Lanka’s civil war and the postwar period. One of the participants and mentors in this project was Nayomi Munaweera, a Sri Lankan-born American novelist. Her life exemplifies the experiences of many people of the war generation: Munaweera left Sri Lanka when she was only three; their family moved first to Nigeria and then to Los Angeles, and, subsequently, Munaweera came back to Sri Lanka to join Shyam Selvadurai in the Write to Reconcile project. The focus of this chapter is Munaweera’s novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors (originally published in 2012, winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize for the Asian Region), as well as her autobiographical short story ‘One House. Meditations on Home, Return and Breaking Silence’ (2013), published in the Write to Reconcile collection. Even though Munaweera did not experience the civil war first-hand and left Sri Lanka several years before the main conflicts of the 1980s began, it seems that she could not escape it psychologically. Therefore, Island is important in the context of Sri Lankan writing because in a single novel, Munaweera includes concerns actualized by many postwar Sri Lankans of different backgrounds: simultaneous Sinhalese and Tamil perspectives, civil war, terrorism, suicide bombing, displacement, and belonging. Even though Island is a fictional novel, together with Munaweera’s autobiographical short story ‘One House’, both can be seen as revealing different aspects of life writing, since this particular field of literature may refer to ‘writing of diverse kinds that takes a life as its subject’ and can be ‘biographical, novelistic, historical, or an explicit self-reference to the writer’ (Smith and Watson 2001: 3). I am following the idea that it is possible to ‘see the works as integral to the author’s construction of his or her identity’ and to read fiction as ‘aspects of autobiography’ (Horner and Zlosnik 1998: 3). Moreover, as argued by Paul John Eakin, the fictional and autobiographical are closely linked together, and even autobiographical truth is ‘an evolving content in an intricate process of self-­ discovery and self-creation’ (Eakin 1985: 3). This perspective allows us to consider Munaweera’s writing (both fiction and autobiographical) as a certain process of a constantly evolving postwar diasporic Sri Lankan identity and as a way of dealing with civil war-inflicted ‘prosthetic trauma’ – trauma, inherited and experienced by a person who did not live out the trauma-related events in reality (Valančiūnas 2021: 42). While taking Munaweera’s fictional and autobiographical writing as an example of a postwar Sri Lankan literary culture, this chapter will investigate the ways abovementioned concerns become instrumental in shaping personal, as well as collective identities, and how war-related trauma is experienced both on the island and in the diasporic space.

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Divided Identities When asked the question ‘Why are you still writing about the war when it ended in 2009, and is therefore a dead and buried subject?’ (Munaweera 2013: 12) Nayomi Munaweera provides a definite answer regarding the war, trauma, and silence: To me, the idea that … the conflict could be considered a dead subject — that silence and collective amnesia are necessary in order to ‘move forward’— is ludicrous. The suppression of truth and emotion is a dangerous thing leading to dysfunction, whether in a family or a nation. I believe that people need to talk about what happened across the divides of race, ethnicity and religion in order to understand what each community lost and gained. This has to happen before we can see each other’s common humanity again. (Munaweera 2013: 12) Munaweera sees the act of communication about the war ‘in every way we can’ (Munaweera 2013: 12) as a profound way to face the trauma. By placing the Sri Lankan civil war as a central event of her novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, Munaweera is able to discuss not only the war and its consequences but also the (possible) origins of the ethnic divide that propelled it. And so, even though the novel is narrated in first person by both of the protagonists (Yasodhara and Saraswathi), it does not, however, begin with their personal stories. Island begins with the British leaving Sri Lanka in 1948, when the country gained independence. By choosing this specific historical moment as a starting point of her novel, Munaweera attempts to discursively recreate a version of national history. In doing so, she emphasizes the everlasting interconnectivity between the nation and the person-an idea Island’s protagonist Yasodhara reflects upon at the very beginning of the novel: ‘… this is the story of my family. This is also one possible narrative of my island. But we are always interlopers into history, dropped into a story that has been going on far before we are born …’ (Munaweera 2016: 7). This mutual link between the nation, its people, and history is especially significant in a context of diasporic writing as it crafts out a space of belonging and affiliation for a diasporic subject. As the British are leaving the island, their departure is overseen by a flag of the newly established country – ‘a stylized lion, all curving flank and ornate muscle, a long, cruel sword gripped in its front paw’ (Munaweera 2016: 6). The now-independent country attempts to appreciate its ethnical and religious multifacetedness through the symbolic color composition of the flag: ‘a green stripe represents that small and much-tossed Muslim population. An orange stripe represents the larger, Tamil minority’ (Munaweera 2016: 6). However, as Munaweera later contemplates in ‘One House’, ‘the simultaneity of faiths would always be both the greatest of strengths as well as the largest of threats’ (Munaweera 2013: 8). And so in Island, despite the seemingly optimistic postcolonial beginning, the narrator foresees the years of violence to come, as the national flag ‘will be replaced by a new flag. On its face, a snarling tiger, all bared fang and bristling whisker’ (Munaweera 2016: 6–7).

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At this point, it seems that in Island Munaweera, through the omniscient spectral presence over history, does not attempt to glorify this newly established postcolonial nation but rather proceeds to discover, trace, and document the growing tensions between the two major communities of the island, the Sinhalese and the Tamils: ‘A rifle-totting tiger. A sword-gripping lion. This is a war that will be waged between related beasts’ (Munaweera 2016: 7). Munaweera acknowledges the mutuality and relatedness between the two ethnic communities (an idea which will be constantly reinforced throughout the novel and ‘One House’), but also suspects an encoded militancy through the animal figures in both of the flags. The communal conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamils has been raging constantly in Sri Lanka since its independence (Nissan and Stirrat 2002). One of the impulses for the conflict was the growth of Sinhalese nationalism, which became especially prominent with the S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s government of the 1950s, which proclaimed Sinhala as the official language of Sri Lanka in 1956 and provided state support for Buddhism (Heidemann 2019). From early on in Island, Munaweera carefully draws our attention to the rise of Sinhalese nationalism and the escalation of varied ideologies and discourses on the origins of the inhabitants of the island. As a prelude to the civil war, as one-legged fisherman Seeni Banda explains to children: Of the two races on this island, we Sinhala are Aryans and the Tamils are Dravidians. This island is ours, given to us from the Buddha’s own hand long, long before they came. And now they have come and we are forced to share this place. But really it belongs to us. (Munaweera 2016: 23) Here, Munaweera attempts to reconstruct the dissemination of a popular nationalist myth that it was the Buddha himself who ensured that the island should be ruled by the bodhisattvas, the reason why Sinhalese kings began claiming their direct descent from the Buddha from the tenth century onward (Gunawardana 2002: 62). The same myth has been vigorously employed by the Sinhalese nationalists after independence and continued to be actively disseminated before and during the time of the civil war. To enforce the discursively constructed version of postcolonial history, Munaweera chooses to employ the metaphor of a house to represent different stages of the country’s development. When Yasodhara’s grandfather, the Judge, decides to demolish their old ancestral ‘meandering mansion’ (Munaweera 2016: 29) and proceeds to build a modern two-story house, this stands for the transience from ‘the country under the colonial regime’ into a ‘brave new postcolonial era’, as Maryse Jayasuriya suggests (Jayasuriya 2016b: 146). This metaphor becomes even more apparent when Sylvia Sunethra, Yasodhara’s grandmother, decides to rent out half of their big house to an extensive Tamil family to cover the debts accumulated during the construction. A Tamil family upstairs, and the Sinhalese family downstairs, ‘the house itself standing as an extended metaphor for the disputed nation’ (Munaweera 2013: 9).

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Through the portrayal of these two families, Munaweera is constantly trying to underline the prejudices that rule the nation’s consciousness. She establishes this position through comical, sometimes trivial encounters between the two families: ‘Overnight, the upstairs becomes foreign territory, ruled by different gods and divergent histories …. This is the beginning of what we will come to call the Upstairs-Downstairs, Linga-Singha wars’ (Munaweera 2016: 36). This ‘war’, as it also stands metaphorically for the real war soon to wage on the country, is also based on trivial and ungrounded petty conflicts, like Sunethra’s complaints of Tamil boys stealing the mangoes and the Tamil family’s complaints about Sunethra’s children listening to loud songs of modern Western music. While Munaweera’s strategy in Island is aimed first at representing the identities as divided, she is also concerned with emphasizing the communalities, which at times are much stronger than the differences. As a result, she includes inter-ethnic romances in the novel, first between Yasodhara’s mother and Ravan from upstairs, and then between Yasodhara, Lanka (her sister), and Shiva, Ravan’s son. Despite the inherited racial prejudices permeating the social consciousness, the narrative of Island presents us with numerous instances to suggest a much more natural interconnectivity. In the house, Yasodhara and Shiva’s mothers both become pregnant and give birth at the same time: ‘The two are driven to the hospital, pain making them forget enmity so that they grip each other’s hands white and scream in unison’ (Munaweera 2016: 59). This communality is further emphasized in Island as the children are growing: ‘We are breastfed at the same time, our mothers nodding over our tiny heads, chatting in a mixture of Tamil, Sinhala and English that makes them laugh often’ (Munaweera 2016: 61). Therefore, the conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese is presented as far from natural, but inherited, ideologically driven, and constructed. This ideologically constructed difference is challenged in the novel during the moment when Saraswathi, already a suicide bomber, is riding a bus to her suicidal mission. She meets Lanka riding the same bus while returning home from school. Munaweera constructs an uncanny similarity between the two girls: ‘That girl is here, too, her profile so familiar. The angles of her face, as if I have seen them over and over and over again, and she must feel this, too, because she looks my way often’ (Munaweera 2016: 215). Despite the infused hatred for the Sinhalese by the Tigers, the communality, rather than difference, stands out: ‘She wants to look into my eyes and feel sisterhood’ (Munaweera 2016: 215). There is also a suppressed longing for this communality, which especially becomes apparent when Saraswathi finally acknowledges the shared identity with Lanka – the girl she does not know, but who is inextricably bound to her by a shared national identity: ‘I know her, but it is too late’ (Munaweera 2016: 216). The mission cannot be stopped and the realization of communality is not strong enough to overwrite the ideologically constructed difference which drives Saraswathi to detonate the bomb inside the bus. In a similar manner, Munaweera in ‘One House’ describes her experience during the Write to Reconcile project. Here, Munaweera once again returns to the idea of a communal identity that is constantly being challenged by social and racial

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prejudices: ‘people are locked into their own cultural belief systems, buying all sorts of ancient stereotypes about each other and denied access to people who share so much with them in terms of history, land, and common experience’ (Munaweera 2013: 14). Thus, Munaweera in her writing tirelessly returns to the idea of constructed and ideologically constituted differences, which prevent her from gluing the mosaic of Sri Lankan linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversities. In Island Munaweera attempts to foster a humane perspective, presenting the conflict in the island as highly escalated and ideologically constructed. This is further emphasized in the novel when Munaweera discusses the relevant issues of the civil war, suicide bombers, displacement, and subsequent traumatic experiences for both those living in the midst of the conflict and those in the diaspora.

War and Trauma While discussing the civil war, Nayomi Munaweera in ‘One House’ contemplates the question of ‘What has been the price of war?’ and lists ‘Life, Identity, Children, Respect (of self and other), Virginity (of many kinds), Bodily Cohesion, Houses, Belonging, Rest, Ancestral Land, Innocence, Certainty, Love, Sleep, Trust, Parents, Family, Generosity, Safety, Friendship, and the Sacred’ (Munaweera 2013: 11). It is apparent from this quote that Munaweera sees the war as all-corrupting, affecting, and penetrating the realms of the personal as well as collective, physical, and spiritual. To emphasize the disastrous effects of the civil war, Munaweera in Island documents some of the pivotal episodes of this Sinhalese and Tamil war. One of them is the burning of the Jaffna public library by the Sri Lankan police in 1981 – an event to which many Sri Lankan authors go back to over and over again in their writing (Jayasuriya 2016a: 196). Since the library housed over 95,000 precious and rare volumes and manuscripts (Ganesan 2014), the act was considered to be an assault on Tamil culture. In Island Munaweera also vividly describes another tragic instance of communal violence – the anti-Tamil pogrom and riots in Colombo in July 1983, otherwise known as the ‘Black July’. Even though the riots were framed as an outburst of violence by random groups of Sinhalese, allegedly enraged by the killing of 13 Sinhalese soldiers by insurgent militants of LTTE in the north, the riot was actually orchestrated by the Sinhalese government ( Jayasuriya 2016a). The week-long pogrom and riots in Colombo, leaving 3,000 people dead and up to 200,000 homeless (Heidemann 2019), stimulated the immediate rise of the militant LTTE organization to power and, therefore, features prominently in Island, as Munaweera dedicates an entire chapter to vividly describing the atrocities committed by the mob and the failure of civil society. The reason why events such as the burning of the Jaffna library or the Colombo riots feature frequently and prominently in Sri Lankan literature is that they have become a national trauma, a ‘wound that cries out’ (Caruth 1996: 4) in the collective memory and identity of Sri Lankans. In ‘One House’ Munaweera acknowledges the ‘insidious effects of war’ as ‘no one is exempt, and the repercussions widen like ripples through a still pool’ (Munaweera 2013: 11). Similarly, in Island

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Munaweera does not present us with a one-sided perspective of war and constructs it as an ambiguous, manipulated, and ideologically constituted phenomenon. She is able to showcase that through the first-person narration of Saraswathi, a young girl from the north, who becomes a member of the LTTE and a suicide bomber. The discussion of the image of female suicide bombers has become an important angle in the discussions of the Sri Lankan civil war, primarily because the Tamil Tigers were one of the first militant groups to master this terrorist assault technique. It is estimated that the LTTE’s special squad of female suicide bombers, or the Black Tigresses, have executed around 30 to 50 percent of all the suicide campaigns and are responsible for the highest number of suicide attacks globally (Rajan 2011: 44). But the female suicide bomber also occupies an important place in critical discussions since she complicates the representation of the female role in war discourses, especially taking into account questions such as victimhood, female agency, patriarchy, and empowerment. The female suicide bomber also becomes a certain spectacle in public discourses because, as De Mel points out, ‘her subjectivity unavailable to the public before her death, she becomes the object of literary and visual portrayal, public speculation and fascination’ (De Mel 2007: 192). In a similar way, in one interview, Munaweera admitted that she was also ‘obsessed’ with the question of a female suicide bomber (Islam 2015). Her curiosity echoes in the questions raised by Yasodhara in Island while she is watching the news report on a female suicide bomber’s mission on TV: ‘what could have led her to this singularly terrible act? What secret wound bled until she chose this most public disassembly of herself?’ (Munaweera 2016: 121) Munaweera attempts to answer this question by providing a voice for Saraswathi through her first-person narration. In doing so, she reveals the ambiguity of the figure of a suicide bomber, primarily by showcasing the traumatic experience of rape and thus questioning Saraswathi’s apparently liberating agency when she becomes a Tamil Tigress. At first, Munaweera positions Saraswathi as a war victim who is gang raped by a group of Sinhalese military men who suspect her of being associated with the LTTE. As Saraswathi is already ‘spoiled’ (Munaweera 2016: 159), she is provided with only two possibilities: suicide or joining the Tamil Tigers. As she is removed from the family and society and is integrated into the LTTE, Munaweera documents her gradual transformation from a simple village girl into a fearless fighter. At this point, it is quite easy to assume that Saraswathi uses violence and revenge not only to liberate herself from the victimizing experience of rape but also from the patriarchal constriction of women’s freedom. We see this position articulated when Tamil Tigresses visit Saraswathi’s parents: ‘Women are good for so much more than getting married and having babies’ (Munaweera 2016: 149). However, Munaweera proceeds to challenge this conceptualization of agency. As Meegaswatta accurately observes, ‘the novel re-imagines and recreates symbols associated with marriage, sexuality, and reproduction, which are often sites of constricting women, in a way that is iconoclastic’ (Meegaswatta 2019: 31). It is quite striking how, while depicting Saraswathi’s transformation into a Tamil Tigress, Munaweera employs many allusions to marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth: at first, Saraswathi, like many other

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female members of the LTTE, becomes symbolically married to the leader and is given a cyanide capsule as a marriage thali. Furthermore, the bomb is masked as her pregnancy, indicating that the suicide mission, like childbirth, is often assumed to be a woman’s sole responsibility. The ambiguous imagination of life’s creation from destruction is encoded at the time when Saraswathi detonates the bomb. Munaweera employs religious symbolism as Saraswathi imagines herself in comparison to Shiva Nataraja: ‘The Shiva Nataraja is watching and I am dancing, swirling and stamping. … I am in motion. Unstoppable and Immaculate’ (Munaweera 2016: 216). Saraswathi, the suicide bomber, equates herself with Shiva Nataraja in his cosmic dance – which is bound to be destructive but also creative at the same time. In setting the world on fire in this self-sacrificial act of suicide, she believes it to be creating a completely new world – a world promised to Tamils by LTTE militants. In this way, Munaweera highly problematizes the discourse of war, terrorism and interpellation. In the LTTE training camp at the martyr’s room, Saraswathi observes photographs of other militants, already dead while carrying out their suicidal missions: They will remember me. All of them. My portrait, miles high, will hang everywhere, extolling my bravery, the new cadres will come to stand in front of it, inhale the scent of jasmine garland, be inspired by my fearlessness, my dedication. Amma and Appa will be proud. Laxmi will be the sister of a martyr. (Munaweera 2016: 214) In this passage, we are able to trace the ideology of the LTTE and see how it interpellates [to use Althusser’s (2014) terminology] its subjects into the discourse of war through the romanticization of a martyr’s death. However, the purpose of a suicidal mission is just an illusion. When Yasodhara, Lanka, and Shiva appear to be driving into ‘the path of a million suicidal butterflies’ (Munaweera 2016: 209), who are drawn by the car lights that are shattering against the windscreen, they are trying to understand why they are doing this. And since the three of them ‘can only shake our heads struck dumb by the massacre’ (Munaweera 2016: 210), Munaweera renders the suicide missions of the Tamil bombers as pointless, thoughtless, and manipulated by the commands of their leaders and their promises, compared to the butterflies, which are thoughtlessly drawn by the light. In an interview, Munaweera explains: ‘[W]e’re talking about is female bodies as a weapon of war, the crime of rape, rape as a weapon of war’ (Islam 2015), indicating that Saraswathi’s broken body and her psychological trauma in the novel become manipulated and used as a weapon. And even though in a number of instances Saraswathi imagines herself to be a predator, fearless, and free (Munaweera 2016: 185), this freedom is nothing more than illusion, as to her very last day Saraswathi is never freed from her rape incident. Since the Greek word ‘trauma’, or ‘wound’, originally refers to an injury (Caruth 1996: 3), it appears that Saraswathi’s psychological injury from the

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rape never healed, manifesting and haunting her in nightmares. This deep, personal trauma may be covered up by the mission Saraswathi believes in, but it never goes away. The LTTE leaders then use it against her, which makes the whole story about female suicide bombers and empowerment problematic. Finally, in Island Munaweera directs our attention to another major outcome of the war – displacement. The communal conflicts of the 1980s and the civil war have had a tremendous impact on Sinhalese and Tamil communities, not only in terms of thousands of deaths and injuries but also in one of the largest forced migrations in the subcontinent in recent history. As an émigré herself (even if not a war refugee), Munaweera incorporates the migration narrative into her writing to discuss displacement, belonging, and, more importantly, the question of the relationship between war, diaspora, and trauma. The war in the diaspora is first of all reinforced over the diasporic subjects through the media, and Munaweera puts great emphasis on the role the media plays in depicting and exploiting the civil war. In Island Munaweera paints gruesome images of suicide bombers presented on the newsreels, which the whole family is bound to watch – a grotesque exploitation of disembodiment: ‘her eyes and mouth agape, hair streaming down the steps and with it the various sinews and octopus strips of flesh blown from her neck’ (Munaweera 2016: 121). And these are not single images – ‘there were images like this around all the time’ (Munaweera 2016: 121), indicating that diasporic subjects are constantly surrounded by war even in the diasporic space. In this way, Munaweera emphasizes how war traumatizes not only those directly affected by it but also diasporic subjects as well. In ‘One House’ Munaweera contends that the topic of war is rarely addressed by Sri Lankans and that ‘trauma in most contexts is not easily discussed. In Sri Lanka it is often taboo’ (Munaweera 2013: 11). Similarly, in Island Yasodhara and her family never talk about or discuss the events in Sri Lanka and what they see on the news (Munaweera 2016: 121), and so the images from TV newsreels translate into internalized traumatic experience. The war trauma is here experienced indirectly – it settles in the subconscious of the diasporic subject. Trauma studies emphasize the ‘haunting quality’ of the trauma, where it possesses the subject ‘with its insistent repetitions and returns’ (Whitehead 2004: 12), and so Yasodhara dreams of ‘that head every night for a week’ (Munaweera 2016: 121). Anne Whitehead points out that ‘one of the key literary strategies in trauma fiction is the device of repetition, which can act at the levels of language, imagery or plot’ (Whitehead 2004: 86). In Island Munaweera also transfers to us the trauma narrative indirectly and through language, as she repetitively employs war-related lexicon and metaphors to describe even the most mundane daily situations: ‘On weekends, the tiny apartment is as tense as a war zone’ (Munaweera 2016: 108) and ‘we negotiate these territories carefully, striving for neutrality, like the Swiss or the Norwegians’ (Munaweera 2016: 107). War seeps not only in the division of the flat but also in other mundane, daily situations, for example, Yasodhara’s husband’s infidelity like ‘I slam down the receiver before she can detonate the bombs buried under my skin’, (Munaweera 2016: 173), sexual experiences like ‘I make love that

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feels like war’ (Munaweera 2016: 162), illness as ‘his cough in the night sounds like a hundred soldiers trampling on his chest’ (Munaweera 2016: 137) and on many other instances. Despite these haunting traumatic instances, Munaweera concludes her novel with the end of the civil war and with a hope for reconciliation, especially for the postwar generation, for those at home on the island, and those who already claim other places as their homes.

Conclusion In her essay ‘One House’, Nayomi Munaweera contemplates the role of the writer: It strikes me that to be a writer is to be concerned with death, to be obsessed with ghosts, to be always aware of the history of the thing. … Ghosts follow us more closely than others, hoping perhaps that we will scent their story in the air and tell it. (Munaweera 2013: 16) This quote exemplifies the important mission Sri Lankan writers, both from the island and the diaspora, are carrying out in order to come to terms with the legacies of the civil war – one of the most traumatizing events in recent Sri Lankan history. And even though Munaweera’s novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors does not employ the literary figure of a ghost, it does present us with a certain haunting in the form of dreams, nightmares, and visions: a result of the profound traumas of war. The two protagonists of the novel, Yasodhara and Saraswathi, are both traumatized by war, but in different ways. Saraswathi, who is raped by the Sinhalese soldiers, is forced to leave her parents’ house and join the LTTE and become a suicide bomber, while Yasodhara migrates to the USA but is not able to escape the war that comes after her through the media and the involved diasporic communities. Therefore, Munaweera suggests that every Sri Lankan is affected by war, no matter which ethnicity s/he belongs to or where one lives. As the analysis of Nayomi Munaweera’s writings has shown, the civil war in Sri Lanka has left an ongoing scar and the people are still coping with its aftermath. As much as Munaweera is concerned with showing how ethnic conflict is manipulated, escalated, and ideologically constructed through various competing discourses (popular and political), she tirelessly insists on the importance of communality. The communality of Sri Lankan people is acknowledged in the Epilogue of Island, where Yasodhara, after the tragic death of her sister Lanka, comes back from Sri Lanka to the United States and tries to shut herself off from her country. Her American-born daughter, however, enjoys painting and has ‘inherited La’s love of color’ (Munaweera 2016: 227). She also becomes fascinated with Bharatanatyam, Indian classical dance establishing a spectral connectivity with Saraswathi, a suicide bomber whose detonated bomb killed Lanka, and who had been mastering this dance form since early childhood. Even though the ending of Island ‘underscores

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the fact that no Truth and Reconciliation commission is established by the Sri Lankan president’ ( Jayasuriya 2016b: 150), the nation has to move forward and the reconciliation has to come from the people, because, as Munaweera concludes her essay ‘One House’, ‘at the end of the day, we do really share one house’ (Munaweera 2013: 19).

References Althusser, Louis. 2014. On the Reproduction of Capitalism. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. London: Verso. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press. De Mel, Neloufer. 2007. Militarizing Sri Lanka. Popular Culture, Memory and Narrative in the Armed Conflict. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Eakin, Paul John. 1985. Fictions in Autobiography. Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Ethirajan, Anbarasan. 2019. ‘Sri Lanka Attacks. What Led to Violence?’, BBC, https:// www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-48018417 (Accessed on 13 January 2022). Ganesan, Sundar. 2014. ‘A Requiem for the Jaffna Library. Chronicling the Fall and Resurrection of the Jaffna Public Library, and Mourning All That Can Never Be Recovered’, Himal Southasian, https://www.himalmag.com/requiem-jaffna-library/ (Accessed on 20 January 2022). Gunawardana, R.A.L.H. 2002. ‘The People of the Lion: The Sinhala Identity and Ideology in History and Historiography’, in Jonathan Spencer (ed.), Sri Lanka. History and the Roots of Conflict, pp. 45–86. London and New York: Routledge. Heidemann, Birte. 2019. ‘The Symbolic Survival of the “Living Dead”: Narrating the LTTE Female Fighter in Post-war Sri Lankan Women’s Writing’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 54(3): 384–398. Horner, Avril and Sue Zlosnik. 1998. Daphne du Maurier. Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination. Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press Ltd. Islam, Tanwi Nandini. 2015. ‘The Kind that Destroys You: An Interview with Nayomi Munaweera’, The Margins, https://aaww.org/munaweera/ (Accessed on 20 January 2022). Jayasuriya, Maryse. 2012. Terror and Reconciliation. Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature 1983– 2009. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Jayasuriya, Maryse. 2016a. ‘Terror, Trauma, Transitions: Representing Violence in Sri Lankan Literature’, Indi@logs, 3: 195–209. Jayasuriya, Maryse. 2016b. ‘Legacies of War in Current Diasporic Sri Lankan Women’s Writing’, Asiatic, 10(1): 145–156. Meegaswatta, T. N. K. 2019. ‘Violence as a Site of Women’s Agency in War: The Representation of Female Militants in Sri Lanka’s Post-War Literature’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 20(3): 28–43. Munaweera, Nayomi. 2013. ‘One House. Meditations on Home, Return and Breaking Silence’, in Shyam Selvadurai (ed.), Write to Reconcile. An Anthology. Available at http:// www.shyamselvadurai.com/doc/Write_to_Reconcile_Anthology_1.pdf Munaweera, Nayomi. 2016. Island of Thousand Mirrors, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Nissan, Elizabeth and R. L. Stirrat. 2002. ‘The Generation of Communal Identities’, in Jonathan Spencer (ed.), Sri Lanka. History and the Roots of Conflict, pp. 19–44. London and New York: Routledge.

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Rajan, V. G. Julie. 2011. Women Suicide Bombers. Narratives of Violence. New York: Routledge. Salgado, Minoli. 2007. Writing Sri Lanka. Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place. London and New York: Routledge. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. 2001. Reading Autobiography. A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Valančiūnas, Deimantas. 2021. ‘Haunting Memories: Sri Lankan Civil War, Trauma and Diaspora in Literature and Film’, South Asian Diaspora, 13(1): 37–49. Watkins, Alexandra. 2015. Problematic Identities in Women’s Fiction of the Sri Lankan Diaspora. Leiden: Brill/Rodopi. Whitehead, Anne. 2004. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

19 WAR, WOUNDS, AND ‘WORKING-THROUGH’ Reading Trauma in Selected Sri Lankan Novels Sunaina Jain

Introduction Trauma as a discursive category in the medical and legal fields in the 19th century turned into a fluid and dynamic concept as it moved spatially and temporally across many disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, literature, and history, in the 20th and 21st centuries. The 1990s was a decisive period when many European scholars, including Cathy Caruth (1995, 1996), Dori Laub, and Shoshana Felman, expanded the paradigms of trauma studies by building upon the seminal work of clinical inquiry done in the field of trauma by Sigmund Freud, Pierre Janet, and Jean-Martin Charcot, for whom trauma was predominantly a field of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. According to Cathy Caruth, trauma inherently defies representation because ‘the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it’ and immediacy, conversely, ‘may take the form of belatedness’ (Caruth 1996: 92). Caruth’s classic trauma model utilizes psychoanalytical and deconstructive modes of interpretation and iterates the repressive, repetitive, and dissociative nature of trauma.

The Need for Decolonizing the Eurocentric Paradigms of Trauma The centrality of trauma across various cultural groups, races, ethnicities, and gender orientations cannot be denied, yet its definition, theory, application, and cultural scholarship have been the prerogative of the Eurocentric discourse, which prioritizes and universalizes the Western experience of genocides, such as the Holocaust and later 9/11. Clearly, such Eurocentric paradigms seem to gloss over the sufferings of minorities or non-Western groups. Though Cathy Caruth and her contemporary scholars’ vision and scholarship cannot be undermined completely, there is a growing need for a paradigmatic and epistemological shift from a colonial Western model DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-26

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to a decolonized and pluralistic approach that subsumes factors hitherto ignored by the Western model of trauma, including war, refugee crisis, and ‘slavery, colonialism, apartheid, Partition, and the Stolen Generations’ (Bond and Craps 2020: 9). The growing challenge to Western trauma theory has been pioneered by scholars such as Gert Beulens, Stef Craps (2014), Michael Rothberg, and Roger Luckhurst, who demand a seismic shift and restructuring of the theory, including its foundational concept of ‘unspeakability’ of trauma. The classic trauma model, according to Rothberg, considers the singular traumatic event to have a completed past, whereas colonial and postcolonial traumas persist into the present (Rothberg 2008: 230). Michela Borzaga also demands that a study of conditions, rather than events, in which trauma is implicated, is important (Borzaga 2012: 68). Hence, reading the quotidian and persistent nature of trauma in literary works raises wider issues regarding the experience, representation, and language of postcolonial subjects, as well as their historical and geographical specificities and diverse cultural experiences.

Theoretical Framework and Research Methodology The present chapter is a qualitative textual study that attempts to problematize and contest the Western Cultural Trauma theory by contextualizing it within a diasporic Sri Lankan Sinhalese writer Nayomi Munaweera’s novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors (2013) (later abbreviated in the chapter as ITM) and Sri Lankan Tamil novelist Anuk Arudpragasam’s second novel, A Passage North (2021). One of the crucial concerns of the chapter is to study whether trauma theory can be released from the stranglehold of early trauma theory’s deconstructionist approach to narrative that emphasized the semantic and linguistic impossibility of meaning and representation of trauma. This posits the question of whether the realist and conventional mode of narration is capable of deciphering traumatic feelings or experiences. The chapter also seeks to delve into the larger questions of malaise and melancholia experienced by the trauma victims and attempts to inquire critically whether healing and recovery are possible for the traumatized subjects. A few pertinent theoretical standpoints like Refugee Trauma Theory by Kunz, Michelle Balaev’s challenge against the trope of ‘unspeakability’, and Dominick LaCapra’s analysis of ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ will be pressed into service to offer a critique of the Eurocentric Trauma Theory Model and posit challenges to be encountered while attempting to construct a decolonized trauma theory.

The History of Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka The narrative of Nayomi Munaweera’s novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors oscillates between the perspectives of two girls – Yasodhara, a Sinhalese, and Saraswati, a Tamil, both of whom witness the horror of Sri Lankan ethnic conflict. On the other hand, Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North portrays the trauma and aftermath after the bloody civil war ended in Sri Lanka in 2009. The third-person omniscient narration largely takes the reader inside the mind of the protagonist,

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Krishan, who makes a literal and metaphorical journey from Colombo to the devastated north-east side of Sri Lanka to attend the funeral of the former caretaker, Rani, who nursed his grandmother back to health. The reading of trauma and its representation in these novels presumes the reader to have a historical perspective of the catastrophic events that spanned almost six decades in Sri Lanka. In the late 20th century, the island nation of Sri Lanka was ripped apart by the bloodiest civil war in world history, which resulted from the ethnic tension between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamil citizens. In the post-independence era, the Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948 effectively barred Indian Tamils from holding citizenship, making stateless people out of some 700,000 (Szczepanski 2020: n.p.). In 1972, the Sinhalese changed the country’s name from Ceylon to Sri Lanka and made Buddhism the nation’s primary religion. The devaluing of their language made Sri Lankan Tamils apprehensive about their rights and security after independence. As ethnic tension grew, in 1976, the LTTE (the Liberation of Tamil Tigers Eelam) was formed under the leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran, and it began to campaign for a Tamil homeland in northern and eastern Sri Lanka, where most of the island’s Tamils resided. After the early 1980s, civil war ensued, which reached its culmination when the Sri Lankan government and Tamil Tigers of LTTE collided, and eventually government forces decimated LTTE and killed its leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, after a 26-year-long civil war. Instead of looking at a simplistic divide between the Sinhalese and Tamils, it is important to remember how the colonizers created fault lines along the then newly independent postcolonial state.

Refugee Trauma and Its Representation Literature provides a prism through which the struggles of refugees and the resultant trauma of displacement may be represented in their grim and sordid reality. In ITM, the reader comes across two culturally different sets of refugees, including Visaka and Nishan’s family with their daughters, Yasodhara and Lanka, and the Shivalingam family, with a focus mainly on Shiva, the childhood friend of Yasodhara and Lanka. A Passage North also deals with migration, albeit not a permanent flight abroad by Krishan or other characters, rather it focuses more on internal displacement. Krishan’s migration to India for higher studies is a voluntary one, which later leads to survivor’s guilt syndrome for having abandoned his people ravaged by war; the other is the displacement of Rani from her village in the northeast of Sri Lanka to the internment camps set up by the army in the immediate post-war times, and later to Colombo. Egon F. Kunz categorizes the migration and settling down patterns of most refugees into two types – anticipatory refugee movement and acute refugee movement (1973: 131). Anticipatory refugees, according to Kunz, understand the socio-­ political foreboding early, thus preparing themselves for an orderly departure before the crisis occurs (Kunz 1973: 131). Acute refugee movements result from major political changes or army movements (Kunz 1973: 132). For an acute refugee, the

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primary purpose is to escape the existing perilous conditions, and he may seek asylum in a neighboring country before ‘administrative, economic, and psychological pressures may force him to take a further step and to become an immigrant in a country willing to receive him’ (Kunz 1973: 133). Whether the flight of the refugees is anticipatory or acute, Kunz further classified refugees in terms of their social relationship with the citizens of the native country as majority-identified, event-­ alienated, and self-alienated refugees. Majority-identified refugees seek asylum for socio-political reasons; they believe that a majority of the population supports them in their opposition to past or current events. They also hold a typically favorable attitude toward Western countries (qtd. in George 2009: 380). Considering this classification, Visaka and Nishan’s families can be seen as majority-identified, whereas the Shivalingams’ flight is event-alienated after the Tamils are identified through census reports and other data, and face the threat of being persecuted or killed by the majority Sinhalese mob. Isaksen and Vejling mention the three different stages of trauma that mirror the refugee experience. First is the pre-displacement phase, the native place that is brutally assailed; next is the displacement phase, where the refugee will flee his homeland; but the journey toward a supposed safe haven in a foreign land can itself provide the refugee with traumatic experiences (Isaksen and Vejling 2018: 14). Last is the post-displacement phase, which is what it’s like to be a refugee living in a new country, which often makes people feel like they don’t belong (Isaksen and Vejling 2018: 14). For healing and recovery, and coping with confused identity, it is crucial for the victims of displacement to not only narrate but also interpret their trauma stories (Mollica et al. 2001). Additionally, the trauma victims may realize that their experiences and stories will extend the existing know-how and research on the most fruitful interventions to deal with refugee trauma, and as a result, it may help in the process of healing and integration within the host nation. In ITM, the story of the first narrator, Yasodhara Rajasinghe, a Sinhalese, flashes back to the Sri Lanka before 1948, unencumbered by the blood-soaked future civil war. Later in Colombo, the upper portion of the house owned by the Sinhalese matriarch, Sylvia Sumethra (Yasodhara’s maternal grandmother), is rented to an extended Hindu Tamil family. From the time of relative peace with some episodic violence in the backdrop, Yasodhara’s family is finally engulfed in full-throttled violence and tragedy that results in the killing of the husband of Yasodhara’s aunt Mala in Colombo. This pre-displacement phase for Yasodhara’s family is followed by the displacement phase. The ensuing trauma of losing one’s kith and kin morphs into an unimaginable threat for Visaka and Nishan (Yasodhara’s parents), and the family eventually migrates to the United States. The post-displacement phase comprises stressors such as adaptation, appropriation, acculturation, identity confusion, feelings of shame, loss of language and cultural heritage, and a constant wavering between belongingness and non-­ belongingness. Loss and nostalgia fill migrants’ lives for whom uprooting was abrupt. Yasodhara remembers: ‘I miss Alice, Mala Aunty, our grandmother, the house cats,

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Shiva, and everything familiar that we have lost, with a sudden sharp tearing in my chest’ (Munaweera 2013: 97). Yasodhara and Lanka often struggle in an alien land to create a sense of self and acceptance in mainstream American society. At the other end of the spectrum is the Shivalingam family, who lived as tenants in Sylvia Sunethra’s house. However, threatened by violence and killing by a Sinhalese mob, the family has to evacuate the place and leave for London in an exigency in order to save their lives. This also brings an abrupt end to the childhood friendship among Yasodhara, Lanka, and Shiva. Therefore, refugee migrants encounter blatant as well as unequivocal threats in Sri Lanka, which informs their decision to move abroad. In A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam deals with refugee trauma of a different kind, propelled by the natives’ displacement crisis that developed within the island state of Sri Lanka after the end of the war. The novel, with its slim plotline, revolves around Krishan, a young man working at an NGO in Colombo, whose father was killed in a bombing in Colombo in 1996. Krishan recounts his past memories, which surface during his stroll along Marine Drive and during a train journey undertaken from Colombo to a village in the north-east (once controlled by the Tamil Tigers and still reeling from the devastation caused by decades-long civil war), during which he reflects on his own migration to India for higher studies, his love-affair and separation with an activist, Anjum, and his aging grandmother, Appamma, and a significant part of his reminiscences revolves around Rani, a former caretaker of Appamma, whose news of death jolts him and forces him to rationalize and question the cause as he speculates about her accidental or suicidal death. Rani, who was hired as a caretaker following a chance meeting with Krishan in a hospital, lived and died in the haunting memories of her dead sons. Though she relocated from her village in the north-east to escape the trauma, the change of geography did not alter her troubled mental and emotional state much. Rani was ‘irretrievably traumatized’ (Arudpragasam 2021: 187) by the loss of both of her sons – the first lost his life fighting for the Tigers, and the second, only 12 years old, was killed by shrapnel on the penultimate day of the war. The trauma did not end with the killings of her sons but continued in the form of internment inside army camps as refugees with nothing of one’s own in the name of belongings, she held except her sons’ photographs. Rani also goes through stages of displacement. Her pre-displacement phase comes as the army makes them evacuate their native place close to the end of the war; next is the displacement phase when she moves to Colombo as a means to overcome the psychic wounds inflicted by war; and lastly is the post-displacement phase, when she encounters stressors which manifest in her wavering between the state of belongingness and non-belongingness in Colombo, and after having spent almost a couple of years, she moves back to her home in a north-east village. In ITM, there is a deep-seated desire for belongingness to the native land, which propels Lanka and, later, Yasodhara to find their roots in the once-lost island, though the disastrous death of Lanka in a suicide bomb attack, makes this search tragic and farcical. In A Passage to North, Arudpragasam also expresses this yearning of the Tamil migrants who spend ‘their free time trying to convince themselves

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that their pasts on this island have really taken place’ (Arudpragasam 2021: 68), as the novelist cites a Tamil Sri Lankan who started a campaign to have Hindu temple Visa Pillayar named on Google Map to give some semblance of their connection to a homeland, fearing that their culture and heritage might get erased systemically.

Representation of the ‘Unrepresentable’ The impossibility of representation and ‘unspeakability’ as the accepted normative position in the reception of trauma was opposed by psychiatrist Judith Herman (1994), in particular, in her book Trauma and Recovery. While guiding the practitioners through the stages of treatment, Herman considers narrative (individual narration or group sharing) as an effective method in the treatment of trauma victims, which may result in their empowerment, reconnection, and integration back into society. Herman’s work particularly brings out the interface between psychological trauma and politics, considering that it draws attention to the oppressed and disempowered people in a society. Michelle Balaev, in her essay ‘Trends in Literary Trauma Theory’, argues that while a traumatic experience ruptures an individual’s memory or sense of self or social relationships, yet unspeakability about the event should be understood ‘less as an epistemological conundrum or neurobiological fact’ (Balaev 2008: 157) but more as a result of particular social contexts and cultural codifications that may inhibit a character’s capacity to express his/her experience. According to Balaev (2014), there is an essential difference between what is difficult to express and what must remain under wraps. In fact, for some postcolonial authors, including diasporic writers like Nayomi Munaweera and Anuk Arudpragasam, the act of narrativizing trauma transforms into an act of resistance against the erasure of traumatized voices because their texts capture the ramifications of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and other forms of exclusionary politics. In ITM, the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict, with its politics of caste and class hierarchies, parental ambitions, marital disappointments, and the immigrant experience imbued with attendant trauma, is intimately braided into the narrative memory of Yasodhara. On the other hand, woven into the story of Saraswati is the brutal human cost of war, irreparable losses, and systemic trauma, which is narrated in the form of testimony. Munaweera largely uses conventional and realistic modes of writing but sporadically uses silence as a trope to let the reader paradoxically imagine the unimaginable barbarity of the event. When Mala’s husband is murdered by the mob, the extreme violence of the moment makes the event imperceptible to her, and the extremity of the shock manifests itself in the form of a dead child born to Mala afterward. Yasodhara tries to narrativize Mala’s feelings of shock: ‘The scene is closed off from Mala’s eyes like a book of naughty illustrations slammed shut. So fast that she almost cannot accept what she has seen’ (Munaweera 2013: 115). The infliction of violence has a different impact on different characters. Saraswati, after she is physically violated by the soldiers, is ashamed of her ‘polluted’ body and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is more a result of cultural

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codification, which legitimizes ‘who’ can speak and ‘what’ can be narrated. A polluted woman is shunned not only by the community but also by her immediate family, and the ‘speaking’ of such a shameful event is not permissible in Saraswati’s community. She recalls how she could not satisfy the ‘terrified curiosity’ in her sister, Luxshmi’s eyes: ‘But I cannot meet her eyes, cannot explain to her the shame of what has happened’ (Munaweera 2013: 149). The traumatic event returns as a compulsive-repetitive act for Saraswati in the form of nightmares and in displaced ways, as she recounts, … night after night, the faces of the soldiers change into the face of the one I love the most in this world…it is not the soldiers who rip me apart, but our Leader himself … yet I cannot rid myself of this grotesque nightmare. (Munaweera 2013: 179) Saraswati undergoes ‘rape syndrome’ after her body and soul are ruptured by the sudden violent attack. Munaweera unravels the barbarity of the Sinhalese soldiers as well as the Tamil Tigers in equal measure. The graphic and gruesome details of the horrendous incident of rape, which violates the integrity of a 16-year-old girl, Saraswati, challenge the Eurocentric paradigm, especially the Caruthian model, which underpins aporia, ambiguity, and linguistic indeterminacy of the traumatic event. In this case, Saraswati’s testimony bears witness to her trauma. The ‘burned-out carcass of a house, into a back room with bullet-riddled, broken cement walls, no roof ’ (Munaweera 2013: 145) forebodes and embodies within its shattered frame a lifein-death experience for Saraswati, but she still musters up courage to turn her ‘traumatic memory’ into ‘narrative memory’ (a phrase used by Pierre Janet that narrates the past as past). Nevertheless, the traumatic experiences of different characters in the novels are ‘a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality’ (Erikson 1976: 153–154). In A Passage North, Rani, who belongs to the Tamilian minority community, suffers from PTSD with symptoms of chronic depression, and becomes a regular patient at a psychiatric ward in Vavuniya as she spends a few days every month there not only to get medication and to receive electroshock therapy but also as an escape from the physical environment where she was beleaguered by interminable thoughts of her sons and ‘images came to her of her two dead sons, the younger one especially, in flashbacks when she was awake and in nightmares when she was asleep, leaving her unable to return to ordinary life afterward …’ (Arudpragasam 2021: 187). Whereas Munaweera, through the character of Saraswati, uses testimonial validation to underpin her trauma, the traumatic state of mind of Rani is largely narrated in the third person through the perspective of the protagonist Krishan, who tries to fathom her trauma and can also sense its relapse. Nevertheless, Rani, on one occasion, unequivocally narrativizes her ‘traumatic memory’ and, despite constant interruptions by Appamma, does not pause in the middle of her story as

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Krishan remains transfixed ‘by the strange tension and immediacy in her eyes … as if the world she was describing was somehow in front of her as she spoke, as if she’d never left that other world behind’ (Arudpragasam 2021: 168–169). Rani’s agency and autonomy, though fleeting and short-lived, serve to counter the Caruthian model, which puts focus on the ambiguity and linguistic impossibility of the traumatic event. Munaweera lifts off the label of ‘medicalized’ subjects from the trauma survivors and foregrounds the self-defining subjectivity of the ‘speaking’ characters like Saraswati. Arudpragasam foregrounds the disturbed psychiatric condition of Rani, yet even this ‘medicalized’ subject, in her lucid moments, tries to unburden her grief through realistic narration.

Postcolonial Context and the Notion of Self The Western humanist ideas of self or personhood are defined by operations of consciousness, including rationality, free will, and self-reflection. The Western trauma model preconceives ‘a psychologically healthy subject’ as ‘unified, integrated, and whole’, and presupposes that recovery from trauma lies in overcoming the rupturing of the self and identity loss caused by a distressing event of great magnitude (Craps 2013: 33). However, this is a lopsided approach as the lives of refugees, people living in war-zones deprived of the basics of life, and people facing structural racism, are inherently entrenched in everyday traumatic encounters. Therefore, in a postcolonial nation riddled with strife, insurgency, and war, the notion of self as a unified whole seems incredulous. In the novel, Saraswati and her siblings have grown up amid war, bombings, and lynchings, and this uncertainty is internalized to the extent that they consider it to be a natural way of life. Saraswati says, ‘I’ve grown up inside this war, so now I can’t imagine what it would be like to live outside it’. (Munaweera 2013: 124) and that ‘I remember nothing from the time before people started dying’ (Munaweera 2013: 130). Similar feelings engulf Rani in A Passage North, whose children have been born and brought up amid shelling and crossfires. The narrative of A Passage North dwells more on the individual trauma experienced by a minority Tamilian in the aftermath of war. Nevertheless, the crisis of faith, identity, and self-hood permeates both the novels. Thus, for people living in war-zones, a ‘self ’ in control is only an abstraction, and this unstable and incoherent self may choose self-destructive trajectories during the course of existential angst and traumatic encounters.

‘Acting Out’ and ‘Working-through’ Dominick LaCapra challenged Caruth’s Freudian framework, which prioritized melancholia and fragility as the hallmarks of the post-traumatic stage, and results in long-lasting weakened communal and individual identities (Capra 2001: xi–xiii). For postcolonial literary studies, the ramifications of colonial trauma expressed only in terms of debilitation, victimization, and melancholia create fault lines, as the themes of social and political activism, and mental recovery and resilience get

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obscured. LaCapra instead poses ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ as two interrelated, non-dualistic approaches to coping with traumatic experiences, in which melancholia and constant reliving of the past may be regarded as a form of ‘acting out’, whereas the concept of ‘working through’ (inspired by Freud) is a mode of articulation that enables the traumatized subject to recount memories of ‘something that happened to one (or one’s people) back then while realizing that one is living here and now with openings to the future’ (Visser 2006: 11). In the ‘acting out’ phase, the sufferers become over-cautious and their desire for security becomes their fundamental concern. On the other hand, ‘working through’ is ‘a politically engaged response that refuses to be seduced by simple stories about trauma’ (Schick 2011: 1838), which defies the neat classification of society into the binary of good and evil, and is a relatively difficult task to work through the non-linear trajectory of pain and loss. In fact, it is a painstaking task involving ‘self-examination, struggle, and critical engagement’ (Schick 2011: 1842). Yasodhara’s narrative journey traverses various phases that can be measured at the textual level as a transition from ‘acting out’ to ‘working through’, whereas Saraswati allows herself to heal her wounded self by joining the separatist militant group, LTTE. Agency, empowerment, affirmative politics, or post-traumatic growth (in general terms, understood in terms of resilience) are some of the ways of responding to trauma that may be observed in postcolonial contexts. In many ways, fiction foregrounds ways to come to terms with traumatic and repressed wounding, opens the way to recovery, and helps in the social reconstruction of meaning. Saraswati is given agency by Munaweera and she demonstrates how Saraswati feels empowered for once in her life, though she is indoctrinated by the Tamil tigers to die and kill for the cause of a separatist state. Saraswati declares proudly her newly adopted identity as a Tamil Tiger: ‘I am fearless. I am free. Now, I am the predator’ (Munaweera 2013: 176). Lanka, as a child, feels the pain of uprootedness deep inside her heart. As a migrant adapted to Americanism, Lanka still tries to recover the lost meaning and memories of the lost island through her art, which acts as a means of ‘working through’ the personal losses. Later, after heartbreak, Lanka decides to help disabled children by moving back to Sri Lanka to teach ‘art to these kids, they’ve gone through incredible trauma’ (Munaweera 2013: 169). After the war is over in 2009, Yasodhara’s ‘working through’ comes through a complex mix of emotions of sadness, defiance, acceptance, and celebration of peace as she tries to come to grips with the dark reality of civil war and the resultant killing of her sister Lanka in a suicide bombing attack. She recounts: ‘I shall wake up from these long decades of war and begin to see what we can do in peace, what sort of creatures we are when the mask of lion or tiger falls from us’ (Munaweera 2013: 224). As the story comes full circle, love, hope, and history converge with equal force and create deep resonance in the current times. In her attempt to represent the disintegration and fragmentation of one’s fragile sense of identity, Munaweera uses repression and compulsive repetition as the tropes for ‘acting out’ but at the same time, she exemplifies recovery and ‘post-traumatic growth’ through the characters

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of Yasodhara and Shiva. Yasodhara and Shiva’s settling in San Francisco may be escapism from the painful memories, but this spatial resettlement is also an attempt to negotiate and reconcile with the hurtful memories of the island and the personal losses. The second post-displacement stage (after being back from Colombo after Lanka’s death) is replete with more adjustments and adaptations. Yasodhara writes, ‘When the fog lifts, San Francisco sparkles. In this most European of American cities, exile, forgetting, escape seemed possible, even common. We sought solace here, found work, bought a small house. We put down crude roots’ (Munaweera 2013: 215). ‘Acting out’ and ‘working through’ in the case of Anuk Arudpragasam’s narrative is even more rife with complexities and destabilization. Rani seems to be in a perpetual state of ‘acting out’, as she is haunted by nightmares, and during her bad days, she would not utter a word, but with medication her condition seemed to be in ‘manageable bounds that allowed her to live with relative normalcy’ (Arudpragasam 2021: 175). However, the episodes of relapse were triggered by two more consecutive deaths, that of her husband due to cancer and of her nephew in an accident. Despite this, the resurgence of Rani’s malady stemmed more from the depth and the pull of her original trauma than anything else, a trauma she could never fully escape, which the novelty of her new life in Colombo had temporarily concealed and which, as she became more used to her new situation, had begun once more to exert its hold on her. (Arudpragasam 2021: 176) Her deteriorating mental state made her increasingly ‘taciturn, distracted, and lethargic’ (Arudpragasam 2021: 178). Her ‘acting out’ state led to melancholia and constant reliving of past memories. As a means of escape, she herself demanded higher doses of electroshock therapy, as she felt ‘ordinary consciousness increasingly intolerable …’ (Arudpragasam 2021: 179). Her ‘acting out’ defies some defining traits of LaCapra’s definition because, instead of being over-cautious, Rani, after her brief ‘manageable’ period in Colombo, inflicts self-harm as a way to deal with trauma. Hence, empowerment, life affirmation, and post-traumatic growth do not measure up in Rani’s life, and the undertones of the novel hint at her possible attempt at suicide, though the real cause of her death remains shrouded in mystery. In contrast with ITM, A Passage North does not seem to offer much chance of ‘working out’. Rani’s affection for and engagement with her granddaughters seem to offer some hope of recovery in the future, but eventually this possibility is blighted by her untimely death.

Conclusion The selected Sri Lankan novels in this literary study of trauma provide strong and powerful representations of testimony and exemplify the linear and conventional mode of narration, as opposed to the post-modernist mode of narration with its

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inherent ambiguity and fragmentation. In the postcolonial context, the reading of ITM and A Passage North provides multiple grounds and approaches, within which postcolonial emendations to trauma theory and some of the problems it still encounters are addressed. For many postcolonial authors like Munaweera, writing is an epistemological tool of resistance that challenges the supposed unspeakability of trauma and gives agency to victims like Saraswati, who strive to define ‘self ’ and ‘identity’ through testimonial narration. Arudpragasam also presents characters whose lives are upended because of traumatic experiences during and after the civil war. Despite observing silence as a more potent tool to deal with her repressed emotions, Rani bears witness to her trauma through her narration as well. These characters constantly affirm their own ways of representing and dealing with their grief, whereby the ‘personal’ becomes ‘political’ insofar as it challenges a very long history of disenfranchised expression of suffering due to colonization, poverty, war, and political strife. In contrast to the Caruthian model, trauma here is obviously not unspeakable but spoken, represented, symbolized, and struggled with and also hints at some renewed structures of solidarity. However, it should also be noted that the road from ‘acting out’ to ‘working through’ is not always simple as the pain of poverty, dislocation, and the aftermath of the brutal war remains, which complicates our attempt to interpret the text. As we see, in ITM, strategic ambivalence and its dismissal of monolithic understanding of Tamil and Sinhalese cultures and conflict are in contradistinction with the dominant and prescriptive trauma aesthetic. Needless to say, while we are in the process of reflecting on the articulation of a postcolonial trauma theory, we should not only try to expand the mainstream trauma paradigm to find texts that fit into it but be particularly open to appreciating the texts that resist it. The intent of the chapter is not to denounce the Western psychoanalytic model but to look for alternatives as well as to analyze trauma in its cultural and historical complexities, which were largely ignored by the classic trauma model. Hence, literary trauma must leave room for theoretical pluralism that offers dynamic representations of trauma that may retain the pathological and ambiguous treatment of the same but may also offer an expansive and unconventional terrain of interpretation.

References Arudpragasam, Anuk. 2021. A Passage North. Gurugram, India: Penguin Random House. Balaev, Michelle. 2008. Trends in Literary Trauma Theory. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 41(2): 149–166. Balaev, Michelle, ed. 2014. Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bond, Lucy and Stef Craps. 2020. Trauma. New York: Routledge. Borzaga, Michela. 2012. ‘Trauma in the Postcolony: Towards a New Theoretical Approach’, in Edwald Mengel and Michela Borzaga (eds.), Trauma, Memory and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel, pp. 65–91. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi. Caruth, Cathy. 1995. ‘Recapturing the Past: Introduction’, in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory. John Hopkins University Press, pp. 151–157.

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———. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Craps, Stef. 2013. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2014. ‘Beyond Eurocentrism: Trauma Theory in the Global Age’, in Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone (eds.), The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. pp. 45–61. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Erikson, K. T. 1976. Everything in its Path. London: Simon and Schuster. George, Miriam. 2009. ‘A Theoretical Understanding of Refugee Trauma’, Springer Science+Business Media, 38: 379–387. Herman, Judith Lewis. 1994. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Norfolk, United Kingdom: Pandora. Isaksen, Ane T and Thomas V. Vejling. 2018. Traumatic Movements: A Study on Refugee Displacement and Trauma in Contemporary Literature. Unpublished Masters Thesis, Aalborg University. Kunz, E. F. 1973. ‘The Refugee in Flight: Kinetic Models and Forms of Displacement’, The International Migration Review, 7(2): 125–146. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mollica Richard, F. et al. 2001. ‘Longitudinal Study of Psychiatric Symptoms, Disability, Mortality, and Emigration among Bosnian Refugees,’ Journal of the American Medical Association, 285: 546–554. Munaweera, Nayomi. 2013. Island of a Thousand Mirrors. Gurugram, India: Hachette India. Rothberg, Michael. 2008. ‘Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response’, Studies in the Novel, 40(1/2): 224–34, Schick, Kate. 2011. ‘Acting Out and Working Through: Trauma and (In)security’, Review of International Studies, 37(4), 1837–1855. Szczepanski, Kallie. 2020. ‘The Sri Lankan Civil War’, ThoughtCo, https://www.thoughtco. com/the-sri-lankan-civil-war-195086 (Accessed on 3 January 2022). Visser, Irene. 2006. Decolonizing Trauma Theory: Retrospect and Prospects’, in Sonya Andermahr, and Shu-Kun Lin (eds.), Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism, pp. 7–23. Basel, Switzerland: MDPI AG.

PART VII

South Asia, Trauma, and Beyond

20 REPRESENTATIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF TRAUMA FOR SOUTH ASIAN PARTITION NOVELS IN ENGLISH Khan Touseef Osman

Introduction Before embarking on any review of formal representational tendencies in anglophone partition novels, this is to be taken into account that these novels have been written over around 70 years. As such, no generalized statement is applicable to all of them, as the complex trajectory of subcontinental English fiction writing does not allow for any such statement to be universally true. Authors of partition fiction have employed different representational modes – from strictly realistic to ingenuously experimental ones. In the post-Partition postcolonial reality after 1947, fiction writers have often been influenced by and, in turn, assimilated into their works the concerns of making their previously unheard voices heard. Their use of the English language is often explicitly aimed at writing back to the empire in a Calibanesque endeavor. This impulse has naturally been accompanied by the highlighting of native cultural signifiers and indigenous themes and issues. The postcolonial subject, often torn between its native roots and Western education and cultural assimilation, is portrayed as hybrid. As the wave of postmodernism began influencing subcontinental fiction writing in the 1980s, experimentation with formal devices, characterization, language, etc., reached a whole new level. Consequently, literary realism, with its assumption of an undisturbed referentiality between the world and art, gave way to the emergence of experimental fiction characterized by a profound distrust for the realist mode, the chronological and causal development of events, and the unified human subject. In the selection of novels for this study, these varied tendencies are evident in Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (2009), at one end of the spectrum and Kamila Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron (2001) at the other, with Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man (1989), Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day (2007), Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines (1999), and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (2013) in between. DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-28

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The differences in representational approaches are also owed to the generational differences among authors. The Partition as a historical event is likely to feature differently in the creative consciousness of Khushwant Singh, Anita Desai, or Bapsi Sidhwa, who witnessed the partition violence first-hand, from how it does for authors like Salman Rushdie or Amitav Ghosh, whose perception of the Partition has formed out of postmemory, nationalistic as well as subaltern discourse, and individual scholarly and artistic engagements. Kamila Shamsie, who belongs to the third generation of writers on the Partition, is likely to see it differently from the other two groups; her perspectives on the Partition will probably focus more on the afterlife of the Partition than the event itself. Furthermore, because of the existence of contending versions of history – nationalistic (in both India and Pakistan with starkly different interpretation of events), British, subaltern, etc. – the Partition has no single definitive meaning for the creative authors. These factors preclude any consideration of ‘partition novel’ as a genre with specific stylistic features or modes of representation. However, because these novels have the historical event of the Partition and its psychological and cultural consequences as some of their common concerns, they often tend to share some narrative modes and tendencies, which I will discuss in the next few sections.

Indirect Representation in Realist and/or Experimental Fiction Many of the partition novels are written in the realistic mode, and there is a significant tendency, however little in scope or unsuccessful, to recognize the limitations of realism and bypassing them in a manner I termed ‘narrative indirection’ in an article (Osman 2017: 10). This mode of narrative uses a realist approach to writing along with its formal limitations in representing catastrophic events. Instead of attempting a faithful portrayal of the world outside the narrative where violence has taken place, it aims at an indirect representation, perhaps by taking the audience to sites of cultural or familial disintegration instead of giving a direct glimpse of the scene of partition violence. Therefore, realism and indirect representation need not be mutually exclusive. For instance, indirect exposure to violence through the sight of fire on the horizon, which nonetheless affects the lives of Das family members profoundly, is seen in Clear Light of Day. The four books of Desai’s novel, with their unchronological temporal settings, further subvert the novel’s apparent realism. IceCandy-Man, also an otherwise realist novel, surprisingly contains multiple subject positionings – one in Lenny’s narrative and the other in ‘Ranna’s story’. In addition, the many dream sequences in the novel form an unconscious subversive undercurrent beneath its realistic narrative. These texts demonstrate that South Asian partition novels written in the realist mode may very well accommodate narrative and representational tensions within themselves that undermine their commitment to realism. In most of the novels that came out since 1980, however, a recognition of the fictionality of the real and the reality of fiction is noticed on the part of the authors. Narratives crafted within the conflicting demands of documentation, introspection

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about the formal limits by the author, and the condition of image circulation in the globalized world (Rothberg 2000: 7) demonstrate simultaneous self- and historical consciousnesses, typically characteristic of historiographic metafiction, a term coined by Linda Hutcheon to refer to ‘novels which are both intensely self-reflexive [or metafictional] and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages [therefore, historiographic]…’ (2004: 5). The exploration of the past does not aim at conjuring up a historical event where many real people partake, nor is it characterized by a wistfulness for a time bygone. Rather, ‘…it is always a critical reworking, never a nostalgic “return”’ (Hutcheon 2004: 4), the latter being a common feature of modernist works. Apart from being self-reflexive, some of the characteristics of the genre include the preoccupation of historiographic metafiction with ‘the presence of the past’ (Hutcheon 2004: 4) or how the past has resonances in the present; the reinstallation of historical referentiality, not innocently but ironically (Hutcheon 2004: 90); the undermining, or, rather, destruction of the ‘perceiving subject’ as a ‘coherent, meaning-generating entity’ (Hutcheon 2004: 11); the highlighting of the ‘local and culture-specific nature of each past’ (Hutcheon 2004:12) as opposed to the approach of grand narratives; and, finally, the problematization of the ‘nature of the referent … by its paradoxical combination of metafictional self-reflexivity with historical subject matter’ (Hutcheon 2004: 19). The two magical realist novels studied here – Midnight’s Children and Salt and Saffron – feature all these aspects of historiographic metafiction. Magical realism mixes the elements of the fantastic and the real on the same representational plane, thereby blurring the distinction between the two. Initially applied to a certain trend in German fiction in the 1950s, the term is now mostly associated with the works of Central and South American novelists like Gabriel García Márquez and ‘has also been extended to works from very different cultures, designating a tendency … to reach beyond the confines of realism and draw upon the energies of fable, folktale, and myth while retaining a strong contemporary social relevance’ (Baldick 1990: 146). This technique provides an alternative to Western fictional practices as well in its assimilation of native cultural elements. Critics such as Eugene L. Arva and Jenni Adams see a possibility for the representation of trauma in magical realism by ‘implicitly questioning conventional modes of narrative and their ontological and epistemological assumptions through the self-conscious mobilization of “other” discursive techniques’ (Adams 2011: 7). As any limit experience falls beyond the ontology and epistemology of the everyday, traditional realism or conventional narrative fails to capture trauma and render it in an affective representation. In this context, Arva remarks: …[B]y transgressing the boundaries of verisimilitude, the magical realist text may both convey the authors’ empathy (through their narrators and/or characters) and at the same time induce empathy on the part of the readers – not by appropriating the victims’ voices but, rather, by making them heard for the first time. And even if the extreme events which the text re-creates can be neither understood nor represented (in the traditional, mimetic sense) as a

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coherent history, magical realist writing takes on the daunting task of reconstructing history in order to bring it closer to the readers’ conceptual system and their affective world. (2011: 6–7)

Fragmented, Dispersed, and/or Unreliable Narrative One of the most common stylistic features in partition novels is their employment of fragmented or dispersed narrative voice, that, I argue, stems from the dissociative psychological repercussions of the partition trauma. Dissociation is an inevitable psychological consequence of a human being’s encounter with an overwhelmingly violent event. The fracture of the self that the traumatized suffers deeply affects his/her post-traumatic survival. The horror of the trauma, although unavailable to willed recollection, comes back to the victim, bystander, or perpetrator as psychological intrusions. The traumatized is, therefore, torn between an apparent ignorance of the event and its literal re-enactment in the forms of nightmares and flashbacks. This dual existence results in a split personality, which manifests itself in the behavioral pattern of the traumatized person and his/her perception of the event (Caruth 1995: 5–10). The recovery from trauma involves a narrative reconstruction of the traumatic event. Since this reconstruction takes place without the help of memory at a conscious level, it is generally fraught with gaps, breaks, and silences (Caruth 1995: 153–55). In an attempt to represent traumatized individuals in novels, partition fiction writers tend to recognize the split in their personalities. Their portrayal of these characters, therefore, strives to capture individuals with their internal fractures. In Ice-Candy-Man and The Shadow Lines, the personality of the narrator consists of a child self-informed by its adult consciousness, which is indicative of a childhood trauma. Indeed, both narrators have suffered traumas in childhood, which has caused their narrative voices to be fragmentary. Lenny’s betrayal of the Ayah in Ice-Candy-Man and the unnamed narrator’s loss of Tridib in The Shadow Lines constitute their traumas, respectively, and deeply impact their post-traumatic lives. As a result, fractures can be detected in their personalities as well as their narrative voices. In the case of Ice-Candy-Man, the frequent authorial intervention adds a further layer to the narrative and implies Bapsi Sidhwa’s over-identification with her narrator-protagonist. By presenting these fragmented narratives, the authors position the readers within the disoriented existence that the narrators bear. It is by listening carefully to the fractured voices that one may get an empathetic sense of their survival. These two instances are also illustrative of the pernicious pull of the traumatic past and its impact on the growth of individuals into adults. Not only do the multiple voices evidence a split in the narrator, they are often set against one another in a dialogic interaction. The resultant polyvalence eliminates the possibility of the sustenance of a unified ego in the event of a traumatic experience. This way, the multiplicity of narrative voices may convey the various disorientations of the traumatized individual to the audience, opening up a window for empathetic

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understanding. This empathy-inducing reading activity may, in turn, create the prospect for community healing of cultural/collective traumas. The narrative of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is both dispersed and unreliable. The protagonist, Saleem Sinai, by virtue of being born at the exact moment of India’s Independence, is ‘handcuffed’ to the nation’s history (Rushdie 2013: 3) and becomes one of the gifted midnight’s children endowed with the miracle of telepathy. An extremely authoritative narrator, Saleem describes and interprets India’s post-Partition history in terms of the vicissitudes of his and his family’s fate. For example, he believes that the sole purpose of the 1965 war between India and Pakistan is the obliteration of his family. His gift of hearing other people’s thoughts and effortless intrusion into their dreams further aggrandizes his authority as a narrator. Even so, Saleem is also ironically unreliable; he gets the date of Mahatma Gandhi wrong in his narrative but refuses to stand corrected in hubristic self-assurance. However, as the family condition worsens and his position in the family becomes precarious when the truth of his birth comes to light, Saleem gradually starts to lose his confidence and narrative authority. The Midnight Children’s Conference, with which he envisions great exploits for the country, also falls apart largely because of the opposition of Siva. The tragedy that befalls him and his family during the 1965 war wipes out the entire family except his sister Jamila Singer, and Saleem loses all his memories due to being hit by a silver spittoon on the back of his head. During this period of amnesia, Saleem manifests the original or literal sense of trauma as a physical injury. The narration of his exploits during his service in the 1971 Bangladesh War in the CUTIA Unit 22 as a man-dog devoid of all memories implies a self-fractured by trauma. Though the entire novel is written in the first person, Saleem presents the description of how he comes to be drafted as a sniffer for CUTIA Unit 22 to the anguished Padma in the third person. The shift from first to third person is suggestive of a self-alienation and fractured ego: So – believe me, don’t believe, but this is what it was like! – I must reiterate that everything ended, everything began again, when a spittoon hit me on the back of the head. Saleem, with his desperation for meaning, for worthy purpose, for genius-like-a-shawl, had gone; would not return until a jungle snake – for the moment, anyway, there is was only the buddha; who recognizes no singing voice as his relative; who remembers neither fathers nor mothers; for whom midnight holds no importance; who, some time after a cleansing accident, awoke in a military hospital bed, and accepted the Army as his lot; who submits to the life in which he finds himself, and does his duty; who follows orders; who lives both in-the-world and not-in-the-world; who bows his head; who can track man or beast through streets or down rivers; who neither knows nor cares how, under whose auspices, as a favour to whom, at whose vengeful instigation he was put into uniform; who is, in short, no more and no less than the accredited tracker of CUTIA Unit 22. (Rushdie 2013: 496)

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Saleem draws a line between himself and the Buddha by using different pronouns: the Saleem who narrates his life-history to Padma and the Saleem who has served in the Pakistan army – the Buddha – are two different entities, as it were. Laurie Vickroy observes a similar narrative approach in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, a novel based on the author’s traumatic youth in Indochina, where the narrator shifts back and forth between ‘I’ and ‘she’. Vickroy believes that the multiple subject positions have resulted from the narrator’s ‘defensive dissociation from painful memories’ (2002: 29). In Midnight’s Children, too, the shift from the first person to the third person may very well constitute the narrator’s attempt to shield himself from the recollection of traumatic memories of the Buddha. Also, Buddha’s role in the genocide of 1971 is something Saleem feels guilty about in all probability, and his dissociation may very well be his defense mechanism from the perpetrator’s trauma.

Disturbed and/or Non-Linear Temporality Another significant feature of partition novels is their representation of disturbed temporality, a tendency that arguably stems from the very nature of the traumatic experience of partition. The fundamental paradox of any traumatic experience is the immediacy of the traumatic event and its belated re-enactment. The event itself or the images associated with it are not registered in memory and consciousness as it happens; rather, these images re-enact themselves in the forms of flashbacks, nightmares, and other intrusive elements, thereby haunting the traumatized individual throughout his/her post-traumatic life unless a sort of healing takes place. Consequently, the past and present remain intertwined in his/her consciousness and become somewhat inseparable. ‘The “presentness” of the past’, as Linda Hutcheon puts it in another context, comes to be his/her survival condition (2004: 34). For example, the unnamed narrator of The Shadow Lines believes he has spotted Victor Gollancz’s publishing house at Charing Cross in London, about which he has heard from Tridib, and ‘… having seen it first through Tridib’s eyes, its past seemed concurrent with its present’ (Ghosh 1999: 31). The representation of traumatized characters in the medium of fiction often reflects their temporal confusion. In The Shadow Lines, again, the narrative shuttles back and forth between Gole Park in Calcutta, London during World War II, Dhaka in 1964, and London in 1980, among other times and places, doing away with a chronological and spatially consistent accounts of events. In the narrator’s memory, spatio-temporal sequences take trauma-induced turns and twists. Ghosh’s narrative reads like a neurotic meandering through personal, subcontinental, and world histories. The narrator’s own memories are confounded with those of other people, especially Tridib; postmemories or inherited memories seem to colonize his own perception of the past and present. Marianne Hirsch used the term ‘postmemory’ in an article in the early 1990s and then defined and re(de)fined it throughout her entire academic career. Postmemories are the memories that the second generation of a traumatic upheaval receives from the first generation through stories, photographs, behaviors, etc. that are mediated by ‘imaginative investment, projection, and creation’ (Hirsch 2008: 107). A particularly

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disturbing aspect of the postmemorial process is that memories of an unresolved past get transmitted to the second generation, colonizing its own memories. This may result in extreme obsession with the past and feelings of loss and nostalgia. Since postmemories have the potential to overshadow one’s own memories, they often affect identity formation and personality development. There are strong reasons, therefore, to conclude that Tridib’s stories have a crippling effect on the growth of the narrator. His retracing of Tridib’s journey to England further evidences that, for the narrator, the past (which is often Tridib’s rather than his own) is inextricably confused with his present. The disoriented temporality represented in The Shadow Lines probably aims at putting readers in a place where they may get a sense of a traumatized individual’s perception of the world through affective means. Partition novels represent disturbed temporality mainly through two stylistic devices: the figure of the ghost and repetition. The possession of the traumatic past and its haunting in the post-traumatic present acquire a metaphorical representation through ghosts in these novels. In this way, ghosts refuse to be buried in the past and haunt the traumatized individual and the collective long after the violent event in a way similar to traumatic re-enactments. As Anne Whitehead puts it: The ghost represents an appropriate embodiment of the disjunction of temporality, the surfacing of the past in the present… In contemporary fiction … the ghost story is reconfigured to explore the nature of trauma as psychological possession. The ghosts embody or incarnate the traumas of recent history and represent a form of collective or cultural haunting. (2004: 6–7) A very good example of a novel in contemporary literature featuring a ghost to imply psychological and cultural haunting is Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The novel has been treated as a paradigm in terms of formal and thematic devices for fiction written on the traumas of the past. The house at 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati, Ohio, where Sethe, a former slave, lives with her daughter Denver, is ‘[f]ull of a baby’s venom’ (Morrison 2014: 4). A child ghost, who may very well be the ghost of the daughter whom Sethe has murdered preferring death to slavery for her, haunts the house and the people dwelling there. The haunted house is a reminder for the Black community of Bluestone Road of the bearing of the violent past on the present. Beloved’s appearance out of nowhere at 124 one day can also be interpreted as the return of the culturally repressed. As there is no way of knowing Beloved’s past, one may assume her appearance to be the resurrection of Sethe’s long-deceased daughter. This implies a non-negotiation with past atrocities, which may ultimately result in psychological and cultural possession. Similarly, in South Asian partition novels, the figure of the ghost appears as a symptom of non-negotiated pasts. In Midnight’s Children, for instance, Saleem Sinai’s ayah Mary’s guilt-ridden conscience for swapping babies at Dr. Narlikar’s Nursing Home and for telling on her lover Joseph D’Costa’s revolutionary militarism to the

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church father that may have led to his being chased by the police and eventual death by snakebite causes her to have nightmares. Saleem’s gift of knowing the contents of other people’s dreams enables him to learn all about Joseph. However, Joseph refuses to be confined to the realm of dreams, but enters the real world as a ghost: Joseph D’Costa had, in fact, managed to cross the blurred frontier, and now appeared in Buckingham Villa not as a nightmare, but as a full-fledged ghost. Visible (at this time) only to Mary Pereira, he began haunting her in all the rooms of our home, which, to her horror and shame, he treated as casually as if it were his own. She saw him in the drawing-room amongst cut-glass vases and Dresden figurines and the rotating shadows of ceiling fans, lounging in soft armchairs with his long raggedy legs sprawling over the arms; his eyes were filled up with egg-whites and there were holes in his feet where the snake had bitten him. (Rushdie 2013: 284) Though Joseph appears only in Mary’s nightmares at first, she later hallucinates his ghost, which suggests a worsening of her traumatic pathology. The figure of Joseph’s ghost enables Rushdie to represent the temporal disjunction that accompanies traumatic experiences. Amitav Ghosh’s deliberation in The Shadow Lines on the ghost as ‘a presence displaced in time’ precisely captures the disrupted chronology that such a figure conveys (1999: 181). At the stylistic level, the ghost motif is used to imply disturbed temporality and chronological breakdown; seeing ghosts suggests the pathological symptoms of trauma as images of the violent past get re-enacted through them. Bim’s liminal experience of seeing or hallucinating Mira Masi’s apparition by the hedge out of the corner of her eye for a long time after her death performs similar functions in Clear Light of Day, at both formal and pathological levels (Desai 2007: 62). Repetition in the use of certain words, images, themes, symbols, and motifs also disrupts the linearity and chronological development of events in fiction. It mimics the symptoms of trauma so as to position readers within a narrative world beset with re-enactments. Through repetition, the past surfaces in the present, much like the return of traumatic images to the victim of violence. For example, with the repetitive appearances of ‘not-quite-twins’ in Salt and Saffron in the long family line of Dard-e-Dils, the curse dogging the family’s history is played out. One set of these not-quite-twins – Akbar born before midnight on February 28, 1920, Sulaiman just after midnight on February 29, and Taimur at the precise moment of midnight (Shamsie 2001: 13) – brings about the disintegration of the family before and after the Partition of 1947. What starts as a minor argument between Akbar and Sulaiman eventually divides the whole clan into two, one of which stays back in India while the other migrates to the new country, Pakistan. The last of the notquites, the narrator-protagonist Aliya and her aunt Mariam, labeled arbitrarily as such in Babuji’s family tree of Dard-e-Dils (Shamsie 2001: 47) even though they are in no way biological sisters, brings fresh disaster to the family. Mariam runs

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away with the cook, Masood, permanently besmirching the family name, which has been the last source of their pride and glory as new socio-cultural and familial formations have diminished their place to a large extent. Despite the extreme class consciousness of the family, Aliya ultimately manages to transcend its biases by accepting to be engaged with Khaleel, who comes from a poor part of Karachi, in a radical reversal of the curse-narrative associated with not-quite-twins. The story owes to Shamsie’s use of the ‘not-quite-twins’ motif to its representation of class bias leaking into every member of the family and the misgivings Aliya has as a result of accepting Khaleel’s hand. It is the curse-narrative, therefore, that holds different parts of the story together on the one hand and communicates the insistent recurrence of the past on the other. Midnight’s Children contains numerous examples of repetitions, contributing to the novel’s richness in terms of fantastic elements and, therefore, to indirect representation. However, they also render the temporal strata – the past, present, and future – confused and intertwined. Saleem’s sister Brass Monkey’s setting fire on the leather shoes foreshadows not only the burning of Ahmed Sinai’s materials of his rexine and leathercloth business in the godown by the Ravana gang but also her destructive impulses toward Saleem when she manages to enlist him in the Pakistan military as a man-dog that leads him to the horrific battlefield of Bangladesh during 1971. This way, a simple delinquent act of Brass Monkey gets re-enacted throughout several temporal junctures. Another instance of repetition in the novel involves Amina Sinai’s transforming her second husband, Ahmed Sinai, into a semblance of her first husband, Nadir Khan, and their house, the subterranean chamber of Adam Aziz’s house in Agra. A deep sense of loss for Nadir and Amina’s love for him make her convert Ahmed Sinai into a surrogate Nadir until, of course, a real Nadir returns to her life as Quasim, the communist party candidate. The repetition of Nadir Khan as Nadir the poet, then Ahmed Sinai as Nadir the surrogate, and finally Nadir as Quasim the communist, problematizes his place in any specific time, thereby causing temporal disjunction.

Localized and/or Alternative History The representation of a localized view of history or alternative history has acquired particular salience in partition novels. These texts frequently portray an individual, a family, or a village undergoing the ordeal of the partition and its negative repercussions on their post-partition survival. This brings out the human dimension of this massive historical event instead of indulging in the discourse of grand political affairs. Political events are played out in the microcosm of a family or a community, for example. With a localized treatment of history, therefore, it is possible to engage the readers experientially with the reality on the ground. Alternative history, on the other hand, attempts to present a view of the past that is sometimes radically different from the official or nationalistic accounts. Looking at history from non-standard or seemingly imperfect perspectives, it interrogates the accepted beliefs and established premises about the past. Alternative histories, as represented in partition

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novels, undercut the metanarratives prevalent in both India and Pakistan about the Partition. Consequently, the official history is rendered unstable and open to multifarious interpretations. Even if the alternatives to the metanarratives are found to be apparently fallacious and unbelievable, they serve the purpose of inspiring a fresh re-evaluation of the past on the part of the reader. Among the six novels considered in this study, Train to Pakistan, Ice-Candy-Man, Clear Light of Day, and The Shadow Lines present localized views of history, while Midnight’s Children and Salt and Saffron offer alternatives to the official history. Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan centers around a sleepy village called Mano Majra near the Punjab border, where communal syncretism gets completely disrupted in the wake of the Partition. The village is mostly inhabited by an almost equal number of Sikhs and Muslims. However, the magistrate and district commissioner, Mr. Hukum Chand, decide to evacuate the Muslim population of the village out of fear of bloodshed. To aggravate the situation, a train from Pakistan reaches the Mano Majra station with a cargo of corpses; another similar train follows; and, with the flow of the Sutlej river, numerous dead bodies – human and animal – are seen. Even though the Sikh population of the village pledges to protect their Muslim neighbors at first, they later give in to the grim reality that Muslims are not going to be safe in the village due to the inflow of angry Sikhs and Hindus from the other side of the border. Mano Majra as a composite community radically and irreversibly changes overnight with the Muslims gone. Singh illustrates the terrible effect of the Partition on the collective configuration and cultural syncretism with the example of Mano Majra. Though the village has remained an abode for both Muslims and Sikhs since time immemorial, the partition violently disrupts their harmonious co-existence. Some Sikh youths succeed to rouse the remaining villagers to avenge their erstwhile neighbors for the violence perpetrated on Sikhs and Hindus on the other side of the border – a crime Muslims of this village have definitely not committed and should not be held responsible for. But, at a time such as this, reason seldom prevails, and the Sikhs plan to attack the train to Pakistan that carries their former neighbors. Their plan gets foiled though by the badmash, Juggut Singh, the central character of the novel, who sacrifices his life to save the people on the train. It is, therefore, a story of the triumph of the individual will against a collective failure. The novel, without getting into the discourse of border awarding or the movement for freedom, etc., demonstrates how the Partition has torn communities apart. Mano Majra ultimately symbolizes communal harmony and its violent disruption in the wake of Partition. While Train to Pakistan demonstrates disintegration at the level of the collective, Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day does so at the familial level. The partition violence features in the novel as a fire burning on the horizon that can be seen from the rooftop of Das family home. Although the partition only appears to form the backdrop of the narrative, it affects the lives of the members of the Das family profoundly, albeit imperceptibly. Despite being far from the violence of New Delhi, their Old Delhi existence is affected by the goings on of the summer of 1947 to the extent that Raja’s choice of education is determined by it, Mira Masi descends into

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alcoholism, and an ever-widening gap between Bim and Raja emerges. Raja leaves Bim and their mentally challenged brother Baba behind to join Hyder Ali’s family to help him with the business, whose daughter he eventually marries. When Hyder Ali passes away, Raja writes a condescendingly offensive letter to Bim, informing her that she and Baba can stay in their house, which has been owned by Hyder Ali before and belongs to Raja now, at the same rent they have always paid. This renders the gap between the brother and sister almost unbridgeable, as it remains until the end of the novel, when Bim realizes the necessity of forgiveness. Desai uses the idea of ‘sibling rivalry’, which Suvir Kaul identifies as a frequently used metaphor for partition violence (Kaul 2011: 8), to symbolize the enmity between communities and the two newly independent countries. Just as Mano Majra acts as the microcosm of the subcontinent in Khushwant Singh’s novel, the Das family, with its sour relationship between siblings does the same. The enmity between Bim and Raja hints at larger political events through the story of the disintegration of the Das family. In contrast to Train to Pakistan and Clear Light of Day, Ice-Candy-Man and The Shadow Lines show the psychological ramifications of the partition violence and its aftermath on individuals. Though these two novels refer to the political events of the time they are set in to a larger extent than the other two novels discussed above, their focus is mostly on the protagonists’ post-traumatic survival. The narrators (and protagonists) of both novels are children and their losses constitute their traumas: in Ice-Candy-Man, the abduction, brutalization, and eventual disappearance of the Ayah with Lenny as an unwitting complicit in the crime and the murder of Tridib in the 1964 riots in the case of Ghosh’s narrator. Though deeply steeped in political events, these two novels focus more on the lives of the traumatized individuals than on politics. Also, as the events are seen through the lenses of marginalized narrators, they capture their personal perspectives and interpretations of history. Midnight’s Children and Salt and Saffron give an intentionally flawed account of the history of the subcontinent, where the line between history as a factual truth about the past and as fiction gets blurred. Postmodernist novels as they are, their representation of history draws attention to its mediated nature, often in a metafictional manner. In Midnight’s Children, as discussed earlier, Saleem even gets the date of Mahatma Gandhi’s death wrong and self-reflexively finds out about it, but refuses to stand corrected, claiming that, in his subjective history, the date will remain as he has put it: The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages [of the novel], on the wrong date. But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time. (Rushdie 2013: 229–30) This is reminiscent of Linda Hutcheon’s distinction between ‘events’ as historical truth and ‘facts’ as their interpretation (2004: 89, 119): the event of Gandhi’s death is different from the fact of Saleem’s personal perception of history. Salman Rushdie binds the life of his narrator with Indian history through the techniques of magical

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realism so as to show the vicissitudes in Saleem’s life as inextricably linked to that of the nation. Although traditionally, socio-political occurrences are believed to influence an individual’s life, with Midnight’s Children, it is the other way around. The 1965 war between India and Pakistan was waged for the purpose of destroying Saleem’s entire family, and not the contrary. This radical inversion of the traditional idea of history not only offers an alternative to the official or nationalistic account, but it interrogates and undercuts them as well. The novel undermines the Nehruvian metanarrative of secularism and harmonious communal co-existence by describing the effect of Ahmed Sinai’s frozen bank accounts, presumably because of his Muslim faith, as well as his frozen sexuality or impotence. Salt and Saffron presents a more or less accepted version of subcontinental history from the Mughal times through British colonialism till the present. However, the novel entwines it with the fictional account of the Dard-e-Dil family stories, so that the difference between history and fiction gets problematized. As a result, it engages in a critical dialogue between the fictionality of history and the historicity of fiction. The way fictional events are demonstrated to influence historical ones and vice-versa destabilizes the traditional narratives of the past. For example, the accepted history of the events around the construction of the Taj Mahal is given a brilliant twist in the novel with the story that the design of the Taj Mahal was originally meant for Dil Mahal, which never gets constructed due to the curse of the not-quite-twins on the Dard-e-Dil family (Shamsie 2001: 44). This way, the alternative histories in Midnight’s Children and Salt and Saffron deconstruct the metanarrative of the subcontinental past.

Conclusion Other than the formal devices discussed so far, there are some techniques often seen to be used in South Asian partition novels in English. However, they are less frequently used by the authors and more or less fashionable in contemporary fictional practices. Their employment also does not require the Partition to be their subject; rather, they may be found in novels on any theme whatsoever provided they are felt appropriate to use by novelists. Considering these reasons, these stylistic features have not been discussed in much detail. However, a brief look at them is necessary in order to have a more comprehensive idea of the representational techniques of partition novels in English. Intertextuality is one such feature commonly found in partition novels, which enables one text to be woven with the tissues from other texts. Intertexts may range from purely literary ones to journalistic works, and the references to other texts may be obvious or merely implied. Intertextuality is a very common feature of postcolonial and postmodernist writings. It helps position a new fictional work within a larger literary or cultural tradition on the one hand and brings out repressed histories on the other. As South Asian partition novels are essentially fictional works based on historical events, they naturally engage in dialogic interaction with historical texts, albeit covertly most of the time. It is apparent that intertextuality has

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been used in a variety of ways in partition novels in English. The intertexts used in these novels are mainly of three kinds: non-fictional as in Ice-Candy-Man and The Shadow Lines, mythological as in Midnight’s Children and Salt and Saffron, and literary as in Salt and Saffron and Clear Light of Day. Most of the time, authors have used a combination of all or two of these kinds. Also, partition fiction has used intertexts from Western as well as subcontinental cultures and literary traditions, often in combination rather than exclusively. For instance, Clear Light of Day alludes to both Byron and Iqbal’s poetry. Arguably, their use of English and the potential readership in the world beyond the subcontinent have perhaps determined the authors’ choice of textual postmemories. Another prominent feature commonly seen in South Asian partition novels in English is orality: writing in a way that the indigenous oral tradition is reflected in the fiction. This is a typical postcolonial tendency as it champions the native cultural practice of telling a story. Among the texts of this study, orality can be identified in Midnight’s Children and Salt and Saffron. Rushdie’s protagonist-narrator Saleem tells his life-history to Padma and the reading audience at the same time. He often addresses the audience directly in a manner that only an oral storyteller does. The same is true about Kamila Shamsie’s novel, where Aliya establishes herself as a storyteller right from the beginning. She tells stories about her family to the passengers, who come from America to London with her in the airplane, and confesses to have earned a name for storytelling in college. Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron, at least the first half of it, is a conversation with the audience. The narrators in both novels draw the readers’ attention to the fictionality of their stories, thereby indulging in narcissistic narrative. Self-reflexivity in fiction stems from an awareness of ontological, epistemological, and representational crises, rather than a naïve assumption of a direct referentiality. The authorial intervention and the adult self ’s bearing on the child narrator Lenny in Ice-Candy-Man also suggest some amount of self-reflexivity. This is a common feature of postmodernist fictional writing, by which, instead of attempting to present reality as it is, the tensions within the realist assumptions are made obvious to the audience. As discussed earlier in this chapter, postcolonialism and postmodernism are two politico-­ historico-literary conditions by which trauma fiction in general and partition novels in particular have been profoundly influenced. Consequently, it is no surprise that partition novels will contain some of the features brought into literary practices by these factors.

References Adams, Jenni. 2011. Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Arva, Eugene L. 2011. The Traumatic Imagination: Histories of Violence in Magical Realist Fiction. New York: Cambria. Baldick, Chris. 1990. Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Desai, Anita. 2007. Clear Light of Day. Noida: Random House. Ghosh, Amitav. 1999. The Shadow Lines: With Critical Essays. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hirsch, Marianne. 2008. ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today, 29(1): 103–28. Hutcheon, Linda. 2004. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge. Kaul, Suvir. 2011. The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Khushwant, Singh. 2009. Train to Pakistan. New Delhi: Penguin, and Ravi Dayal. Morrison, Toni. 2014. Beloved. New York: Vintage. Osman, Khan Touseef. 2017. ‘Narrative Indirection and Representational Crisis in Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan’, English Studies in India, 25(1): 10–24. Rothberg, Michael. 2000. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rushdie, Salman. 2013. Midnight’s Children. London: Vintage. Shamsie, Kamila. 2001. Salt and Saffron. London: Bloomsbury. Sidhwa, Bapsi. 1989. Ice-Candy-Man. New Delhi: Penguin. Vickroy, Laurie. 2002. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Whitehead, Anne. 2004. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

21 ROHINGYA REFUGEE POETRY Testimony and Cultural Activism Lopamudra Basu

Introduction: New Beginnings in Rohingya Refugee Poetry The Rohingyas are an ethnic minority in Burma/Myanmar who have been subjected to genocidal violence by the Burmese military for many decades, with the worst atrocities happening in 2017 when targeted destruction of Rohingya villages and sexual violence on women prompted a massive migration of Rohingyas, forcing many of them to seek refuge in neighboring Bangladesh. In this chapter, I argue that the genocidal violence against the Rohingyas has not received sufficient media attention in the global north. Nor has there been any sustained effort to mediate a political solution to resettle the Rohingyas or facilitate a passage back to Burma. What we have seen instead are inadequate humanitarian efforts that create conditions of de facto incarceration and perpetuate the statelessness of the Rohingyas. Within the context of this erasure and lack of international motivation to facilitate a political solution to the Rohingya crisis, the literary and artistic endeavors of the Rohingyas perform the functions of memorializing this genocidal history, bearing testimony to the continuing atrocities, and preserving the uniqueness of the Rohingya language and culture, which have been denied any space in Burma. Anthony Rowland in Poetry as Testimony follows the lead of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub in arguing for the place of poetry in fulfilling the vital function of testimony. In this chapter, I examine the collection, I Am a Rohingya: Poetry from the Camps and Beyond, edited by James Byrne and Shehzar Doja, to argue that these collaborations facilitated by established poets and Rohingya refugees are expressions of cross-border solidarity that attempt to rehumanize the refugees and memorialize the traumatic memory of the Rohingya exodus from Burma. Moreover, the poems produced are not just testimonial documents for future human rights cases but also fulfill formal expectations of aesthetic and literary value. While some poems perform the necessary task of documenting the historical details of this catastrophe, DOI: 10.4324/9781003353539-29

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others use poetry as a mode of expressing in symbolic language memories that are too horrific to fit the frame of everyday language. A third group of poems explicitly works to preserve the Rohingya language and culture by curating folk songs and translating them into English. This anthology is made up of poems that were written in workshops that were held by the editors in the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh. It includes poems by well-known Rohingya poets like Mayyu Ali, as well as poems written for the first time.

Rohingyas as Political Refugees According to an article published on the BBC website, The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has described the Rohingya as ‘one of, if not the, most discriminated people in the world’ (Myanmar Rohingya 2020: n.p.). The Rohingya are the largest Muslim minority among the many, minority ethnic groups in Burma. They have lived in the Rakhine state for generations, practicing not just a different religion from the majority religion of Buddhism but also a distinct language and culture: their language is similar to a dialect of Bengali but uses an Arabic script. The Burmese military rulers have since independence stripped them of citizenship rights and categorized them as illegal migrants from Bangladesh. The slow violence of discrimination had already precipitated a steady stream of Rohingya refugees, but the 2017 crackdown by the Burmese military on Rohingya villages, ostensibly to rout out Rohingya Islamic militants, has caused over a half million Rohingyas to cross the border and seek shelter in Cox’s Bazaar and other locations in Bangladesh. Afroza Anwary, in her essay ‘Atrocities Against the Rohingya Community of Myanmar’, chronicles the waves of discrimination and violence faced by Rohingyas from the decolonization of Burma in 1948 to 2017, concluding that [t]he Myanmar military government has superimposed socio-political inequality between Rakhines and Rohingyas, periodically accelerating Rohingya genocide The conflicts have led to episodes of violence between Rohingyas and Rakhines. Although many forces have contributed to atrocities against Rohingyas, the Myanmar government’s role in it requires attention. (Anwary 2018: 97) Not only were the Rohingyas subjected to mass killings and the destruction of their villages, Rohingya women were victims of sexual violence and rape as yet another strategy of intimidation and coerced eviction. The conditions of refugee life in the tarpaulin makeshift shelters of Cox’s Bazaar are precarious, with no hopes for education or gainful employment. Rohingya refugees thus exemplify what Kelly Oliver, following Hannah Arendt’s theorization of refugees, has described as the conditions of ‘carceral humanitarianism.’ Oliver draws on Hannah Arendt’s work on refugees to explain the peculiar dilemma of the refugee condition. Arendt, writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust, observes, ‘Apparently nobody wants to know

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that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings – the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends’ (Arendt 1943, qtd. in Oliver 2017: 1). Oliver is very critical of the shift in policies of the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees from a commitment to seeking a political solution to the conditions producing refugees and the work of providing refugees asylum to the offering of humanitarian aid as a bandaid solution to the problem. The solution to refugee crises in many different parts of the world takes the form of housing refugees in camps, sometimes for decades, keeping them in a state of limbo in conditions of subsistence living. Refugee camps are similar to prisons, in that they lack food, clean water, and shelter. Hence the term ‘carceral’ from the root word ‘incarceration.’ Kelly Oliver argues that refugees are held in camps like prisoners. Moreover, there is no great sympathy for refugees. Writing in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis, Oliver argues that refugees are seen as collateral damage in the War on Terror and that ‘at best refugees are seen as victims in need of rescue, at worst, they are seen as terrorists’ (Oliver 2017:10–11). The purpose of the refugee camps is to stall refugees from gaining access to the rights and privileges of the host countries. It may be questioned whether the camps serve to help refugees or slow down the process of refugees flooding the borders of the countries they are trying to reach. Conditions in refugee camps resemble conditions of slow death or what Giorgio Agamben has described as ‘bare life’ in his book Homo Sacer (1998). Agamben’s theories of ‘bare life’ emerge from his theorization of the Nazi concentration camp, where normal laws of the state are suspended, and sovereign power is exercised by the police. In such a space, which represents a state of exception, life is reduced to conditions of biological subsistence. Agamben focuses most on the Nazi concentration camp but also draws parallels with many holding areas for refugees, where conditions resemble those of ‘bare life’. The conditions of life in the Rohingya refugee settlements in Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh exemplify the realities of carceral humanitarianism, theorized by Oliver, as well as the conditions of bare life posited by Giorgio Agamben. This condition of abjectness and imprisonment is an overarching theme in the collection. The Rohingya refugee crisis of mass migration resulting from state-sponsored terrorism or genocide against its own people happened at about the same time as the Syrian refugee crisis erupted in 2016, when millions of Syrians attempted to save themselves from the civil war perpetrated by the Bashar-Al-Assad regime by escaping to the bordering countries of Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey and then seeking ways to escape into Europe. The Syrian refugee crisis received widespread news coverage with the now iconic photograph of three-year-old Alan Kurdi being washed ashore on the shores of Bodrum, Turkey in 2015. In contrast, the Rohingya crisis has been relegated to relative international oblivion, arguably because of the remoteness of Burma from Europe and the United States and the lack of concern that millions of displaced people will be seeking residence in the developed world. Moreover, the narrative of the War on Terror is unable to accommodate the Rohingya Muslim figure of victimhood when the dominant media representations

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categorize Muslims as terrorists and perpetrators of violence. Slavoj Žižek, in his book On Violence, alludes to this while discussing the coverage of the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo by Time magazine. Even though the magazine featured the deadly war that has killed more than four million people on its cover, it did not elicit any widespread response, with the exception of a few reader comments. Žižek explains this disjuncture by writing, To put it cynically, Time picked the wrong victim in the struggle for hegemony in suffering. … The Congo today has effectively reemerged as a Conradian ‘heart of darkness.’ No one dares to confront it head on. The death of a West Bank Palestinian child, not to mention an Israeli or American, is mediatically worth thousands of times more than the death of a nameless Congolese. (Žižek 2008: 3) The Congolese example used by Žižek is equally applicable to the Rohingya example. Even though, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 700,000 Rohingyas were forced out of Burma in the largest of the cycle of evictions that began a long time ago, for most of the global north, this crisis is too far removed to even register as a colossal human tragedy (Rohingya Emergency 2019: n.p.). The Rohingya, to use a term used by cultural critic Judith Butler, does not constitute a ‘grievable life.’ In her book, Precarious Life, Butler begins by reflecting on ‘Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives. And finally, ‘what makes for a grievable life?’ (Butler 2004: 20) As she reflects on a collective sense of ‘we’ who have experienced loss, she concedes that ‘corporeal vulnerability’ is distributed in ‘radically inequitable ways’ across the globe. The Rohingya thus emerge as a group that faces extreme corporeal vulnerability because history has rendered this group stateless and therefore shorn of all the protections afforded by states to citizens. In a world without citizenship rights, the Rohingya are not visible because they are far away from the rest of the world and don’t have access to global media networks.

Preserving Rohingya Culture during Genocide In the absence of a clearly defined political path ahead, the aesthetic endeavor of the volume and the preservation of this unique culture through poetry become the only available options that seek to reverse the condition of Agamben’s ‘bare life,’ that is faced by the Rohingya community. Theodor Adorno declared in his essay ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ (1949) that ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ He went on to revise this pronouncement by stating: ‘It is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it’ (Adorno 1962: 312). Adorno’s statement has provoked a response by Slavoj Žižek, who comments: ‘That is to say, when Adorno declares poetry impossible (or rather barbaric) after Auschwitz, this impossibility is an enabling impossibility: poetry is always by definition, ‘about’ something that cannot be

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addressed directly, only alluded to’ (Zizek 2008: 5). In comparing prose testimonies of the Holocaust with poetic compositions, Antony Rowland argues that ‘prose accounts may be all too understandable, leaving readers unaffected as they turn to the next book’ (Rowland 2014: 9). In their book Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (Felman and Laub 1992), Shoshanna Felman and Dori Laub write, ‘Testimony has become a crucial mode of our relation to events of our times—our relation to the traumas of contemporary history … What testimony does not offer, is however a completed statement, a totalizable account of those events’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 5). They characterize testimony as a ‘discursive practice’ one that was originally produced in a court in preparation for a verdict. Following the lead of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Anthony Rowland traces how poetic testimony functions, arguing that, testimony does not comprise a mimetic reflection of the experience but the reinscription of trauma in literary form. Positivistic aspects of biography and history ‘are neither simply represented nor simply reflected, but are reinscribed, translated, radically rethought and fundamentally worked over by the text.’ (Rowland 2014: 11) In analyzing I Am a Rohingya: Poetry from the Camps and Beyond, edited by James Byrne and Shehzar Doja, we can detect the twin strains of realism associated more with prose testimony and the symbolic aspects of poetic testimony that Žižek and Rowland refer to. In terms of their aesthetic choices, the poems can be divided into those that document the brutal genocide that the survivor poets have experienced. Second, the poems are a concerted attempt to preserve not just the lives and memories of the survivors but also their indigenous culture, which is under threat of extinction because of the denial of the rights to education, religious and cultural practice, and language. This is achieved by curating in this volume songs from the Rohingya oral folk traditions in the Rohingya language and also providing English translations for a global audience. Finally, there are poems that employ symbolic forms to speak about what is unspeakable, that which robs witnesses and survivors of the resources of everyday language and cannot be spoken of directly. Even though the predicament of the Rohingya may fail to receive sustained media attention, lyric poetry freezes images of what they are continuing to endure for future generations. These literary productions fulfill Theodor Adorno’s criteria for the autonomy of art, as opposed to art in the service of a political cause. In his introduction to the anthology, I Am a Rohingya: Poetry from the Camps and Beyond, James Byrne declares that the book is an attempt ‘to celebrate and to document powerful new voices in Rohingya poetry …’ (Byrne and Doja 2019: 13). This simple manifesto gestures at the dual purpose of this volume of poetry: to record the genocidal violence faced by the Rohingyas, but also, at the same time, to use the volume as a vehicle to preserve a culture that has been under systematic attack in Burma. Byrne writes that the poems were produced after a two-day workshop at

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the Friendship Learning Centre conducted by Shehzar Doja and Byrne himself. In his own essay, ‘Riversongs of the Rohingyas,’ Shehzar Doja notes that in his visits to the Rohingya refugee camps, he observed the focus on healthcare and emergency relief, but he wondered, ‘Where were the archives of written literature, poetry and songs? … the Rohingya population, which has existed for centuries, was systematically purged of its identity, including, essentially, its culture in a manner reminiscent of great ethnic purges of the past’ (Byrne and Doja 2019: 19). Mayyu Ali, one of the established poets featured in the volume, has also alluded to the cultural losses faced by the Rohingya and the attempts to preserve Rohingya culture in the camps. In an interview, Ali states, ‘You might not think that in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, one of the world’s largest refugee camps, we are living through a renaissance of the Rohingya culture’ (Ali 2020: n.p.). Ali goes on to describe the ancient Rohingya art of calligraphy and the Rohingya musical performances that have been revived in the camps. Ali describes his own work in establishing a Rohingya poetry website as well as reading in online events with other Burmese poets. He states, ‘Poetry is also a force for solidarity and peace when it is shared with others.’ The first poem in the anthology, ‘I Am a Rohingya’ by the established Rohingya poet, Mayyu Ali, himself, is an example of the documentary style, which is in evidence in much of the volume. This poem is a three-page catalog of the atrocities faced by Rohingyas, rendered in the first person. The first of several quatrains begins with the absence of a birth certificate for the Rohingya poet/narrator and continues to accumulate the bureaucratic operations of the Burmese state that rob the Rohingya of citizenship and human identity. This includes the denial of residency and work authorization, primary and university education, job opportunities in the civil service, and even the confiscation of vendor permits. The poem is a chronicle of Rohingya statelessness, permeating every aspect of life and reducing Rohingya life in Burma to a state of incarceration. The cumulative effect of these recurrent losses of human rights is emphasized by variations to the refrain, ending each quatrain with ‘Just a Rohingya,’ which changes in other verses to ‘Just illegitimate,’ ‘Just like quarantine’ and ‘Just like an alien.’ Together the accretion of these varied refrains exacerbates the perception of Rohingya life in Burma being like a state of incarceration, ending with an ardent dream of freedom: ‘My skin trembles/Just to feel once the full meaning of freedom’ (Ali, qtd. in Byrne and Doja 2019: 25). However, this is an unfulfilled wish, with the poem ending with a reminder of the stark feeling of isolation in the realization that the Rohingya are likely the most persecuted community in the world: ‘Nowadays, no one is like me/ only myself/Just a Rohingya’ (Ali, qtd. in Byrne and Doja 2019: 25). Azad Mohammed’s ‘Misfortune’ is a poem that builds on Mayyu Ali’s theme of incarceration. While Ali depicts life for the Rohingya in Burma as one of incarceration, Azad Mohammed’s poem is a depiction of the condition of ‘carceral humanitarianism,’ the theoretical concept of Kelly Oliver that I explained earlier. Mohammed’s poem juxtaposes the landscapes of Arakan, Burma, and Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh, to reveal a stark contrast between the natural beauty of the lost homeland and the abjectness of refugee camp life in Bangladesh. In the lines following,

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Mohammed evokes this sense of severance from the homeland: ‘In our golden land the trees give shade/In Cox’s Bazaar tarpaulin offers heat.’ (Mohammed, qtd. in Byrne and Doja 2019: 48). The lyrics end with a series of questions, each of the last three lines of the poem beginning with ‘why’ Mohammed asks, ‘Why in this treeless, shadeless refugee camp, /why like the Myanmar government, /do you still set us on fire?’ (Mohammed, qtd. in Byrne and Doja 2019: 48). This poem thus documents the suffering of the Rohingya people in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazaar, which are temporary shelters made with tarpaulin sheets. The Rohingya refugees living in the camps have to suffer the unbearable heat produced by these sheets. The conditions of the Cox’s Bazaar camps are not just a source of heat and discomfort. The manner in which these camps are constructed with bamboo and tarpaulin, as well as the wired fencing used in the camps, has caused very dangerous fires. A fire in January 2021 destroyed many shelters, literally fulfilling the prophetic words of the poem about refugee camps raining fire on the Rohingya like the genocidal Burmese military. The fire in January 2021 ravaged more than a thousand houses in the camp, according to a report in The Guardian (Ratcliffe 2022: n.p.). The hazardous living conditions in Cox’s Bazaar refugee camps prove Kelly Oliver’s argument that conditions in many refugee camps are subhuman and meet the definitions of genocide. Mayyu Ali’s second poem in the anthology ‘They’re Kind Killers’ continues with the style of documentary realism that was evident in ‘That’s Me, A Rohingya.’ But while the first poem in the collection documented the slow violence of the Burmese state in denying any identity, citizenship status, and educational opportunities to Rohingyas, the poem ‘They’re Kind Killers’ expresses the gendered nature of violence experienced by Rohingya women. Ali adopts the voice of a Rohingya woman to offer a narrative that documents the brutality of sexual violence experienced by Rohingya women fleeing Burma. The female narrator in the poem catalogs the horrific violence wreaked on her family. She witnesses the murders of her husband and children, the youngest baby ‘thrown into a bonfire’, which leaves her with no corpses to bury. The irony of the female narrator reaches its peak when Ali writes, ‘They’re kind killers’. These ‘kind killers’ after murdering her husband and children, rob her of her last possessions and then proceed to rape and torture her, setting her aflame to die. However, the narrator survives and offers yet another ironic comment in the last line of the poem, shaming the world for its inaction and apathy toward the Rohingya crisis when the poem ends with the lines stirring the conscience of humanity: ‘The world is too brave to watch us being killed’ (Ali, qtd. in Byrne and Doja 2019: 44). Yasmin Ullah’s long poem ‘Birth’ is another example of a poem cataloging the horrors of genocide and sexual violence against women with the aim of stirring the community of listeners and the international audience to action. Through much of the poem, the first line of each stanza begins with the refrain, ‘I was born.’ Each verse, whose length is variable, encapsulates more of the atrocities suffered by the Rohingyas, punctuated by brief insights into the apathy and inaction of the world. The poem ends with the observation ‘The complex case of the Rohingya/might

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easily be solved/if we all just brush upon our/empathy’ (Yasmin Ullah, qtd. in Byrne and Doja 2019: 55). This poem thus advances the work of poems by Mayyu Ali and Azad Mohammed by not just documenting the atrocities faced by the Rohingya in Burma and their subhuman conditions in Bangladesh but also directly challenging the worldwide readership of these poems not to passively consume the news of this crisis but to commit to a solution to this problem. Yasmin Ullah suggests that the problem stems from the fact that the Rohingya are not seen as human and that the rest of the world does not identify with nor empathize with the predicament of the Rohingyas. This poetic statement resonates with Žižek’s observations about the invisibility of suffering in non-Western parts of the world. Although the volume contains a plethora of poems that document the horrific traumas faced by the Rohingyas and those that urge political action, there are other poems in the collection that eschew this documentary style of testimonial narrative and embrace a more indirect method of symbolic signification. Yar Tin’s poem ‘Too Much Bitterness’ adopts this strategy. The opening lines of this poem, which is one of the few written in Burmese and then translated into English, seem to echo Adorno’s pronouncement about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz: ‘To make rhymes out of gunshots/To make poetry out of death and destruction/This heart of mine is not skilled enough’ (Tin, qtd. in Byrne and Doja 2019: 60). Yet, in spite of this struggle to find language to represent trauma, the poem develops an extended simile comparing the Rohingya refugees to birds in flight, birds whose nests have been burnt: ‘The smoke rising from our nest/Takes the place of clouds’ (Tin, qtd. in Byrne and Doja 2019: 60). This poem, like others I have analyzed, mocks the inadequate response of the world community towards this tragedy. Tin mocks the epithet that has been conferred on the Rohingyas as ‘the world’s most oppressed people.’ Other names that Rohingyas have been called are mentioned in the poem. These include the epithet of ‘terrorists.’ This particular name and the rampant Islamophobia in Burma have served as justification for genocidal violence. The Muslim Rohingyas have been depicted as militant Islamists, whereas Buddhist monks who worked in conjunction with the Burmese military to terrorize Rohingyas into leaving their homes have not been maligned as religious extremists. The poem ends with the survivor’s dilemma through a meta-­poetic commentary on writing about these atrocities that have been witnessed. The concluding stanza reflects: ‘When I have to use another’s tragedy/As pages for my poetry/My heart shudders and aches’ (Tin, qtd. in Byrne and Doja 2019: 60). Thus, this volume contains poems that even question the ethics of representing these tragedies. Is there a purpose served by documenting these acts of gratuitous violence? Is it exploitative of survivors to narrate stories of those who did not survive? The answer to the question of the ultimate justification of the project is offered through the inclusion of these poems, which are translations of Rohingya folk songs into English. As mentioned by Mayyu Ali in his interview, these are attempts to preserve Rohingya culture and identity in the face of brutal state-sponsored attempts to erase it. This volume contains three examples of a unique artifact of Rohingya culture: folk songs in the Rohingya language that are sung and passed

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down orally. Shehzar Doja, in his introductory essay ‘Riversongs of the Rohingyas’ writes about the Naf river, which is shared by Burma and Bangladesh and forms a border between the two countries. Just like the waters that are shared, the people inhabiting this region share a common culture and a love for oral traditions and songs. Doja describes the process by which three of the songs were curated for the collection I Am a Rohingya: Poetry from the Camps and Beyond. The three songs chosen for this volume were sung by Jani Alam and then transcribed by Bilkis Akhter. After the transcription, Shehzar Doja translated them into English. This is a highly collaborative process made necessary by the fact that the Rohingya language is very close to the Bengali dialect spoken in Chittagong, while others have argued that only 75 percent of the vocabulary is the same. Moreover, the script of the Rohingya language originated from the Arabic alphabet but later was based on the Urdu script. Since the 1980s, a script known as ‘Hanifi,’ created by Mohammed Hanif, has been in use. In the first of the translated Rohingya folk songs, titled ‘Love Song’, we are given the Rohingya title ‘Moli Meyer Bor Dala.’ Even though it is titled ‘Love Song,’ the poem evokes varied threats and terrors lurking in the landscape of Rohingya life. The first is the fear of the tiger. The second image of impending violence is that of a jug of water: ‘a black water jar—cracked on a dark night’ (‘Lovesong,’ qtd. in Byrne and Doja 2019: 26). The images of a predatory tiger, scattered flowers, and a broken water jug evoke a landscape of violence and forced eviction. Instead of testimony, the folk song, as it is passed down generationally, morphs from a love song to a song of trauma and unspeakable memories, expressing what is difficult to verbalize in everyday language. The second of these folk songs offered in the collection is ‘Mother Arakan’ This poem attempts to juxtapose the past of a beloved, verdant homeland with the present of destitute refugee life. These are memories of the ‘golden land’ (Anonymous, qtd. in Byrne and Doja 2019: 70). The lines are punctuated by the refrain ‘When Arakan floats up,’ plunging the poet and the audience into a state of remorse at the memory of the lost homeland in the last line. The last of the Rohingya songs appears as the last poem in the collection. This poem is titled ‘Night Blooming Jasmine’ and, unlike the two other songs in the volume, this song is attributed to Ro Mehrooz. Another unique feature of this poem is that it is offered in two versions, the Rohingya version in English script and the English translation produced as a collaboration between Ro Mehrooz and the editor James Byrne. This poem is addressed to the moon. The poet refers to the moon as ‘Moon Uncle’ and requests his presence at the upcoming wedding of his elder sister. The bride is described as a young girl who will wear jasmine buds in her hair and dye her hands with henna. Reading the poem in the Rohingya language was, for me, a very moving experience. As a native Bengali speaker, I was able to understand nearly all of the words. This accentuated the poignancy of the Rohingya situation. This most oppressed group of people in the world speak a language very close to my native Bengali and address the moon as ‘Moon Uncle,’ as millions of children in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India, do. This poem is almost a nursery rhyme, or a lullaby addressed to the moon. It connotes the promise of moonlight

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and the magic of fragrant flowers in preparation for a wedding. The poem embodies hopes of growing up and enjoying the basic human rights of family, shelter, and happiness. It underscores the desire for the ordinary routines of childhood and the passage to adulthood and marriage. These are the fundamental aspirations of all human beings that have been cruelly robbed from the Rohingya. The poem evokes the magical world of childhood and innocence, and it is in sharp contrast with most of the poems that depict the savage loss of this pristine innocence.

Conclusion: Poetry as Empathy Work In tracing the arc of the poems collected in the volume I Am Rohingya: Poetry from the Camps and Beyond, I have analyzed the varied styles represented by the poets featured. While several poems showcase the aesthetics of testimony, noting with unflinching documentary realism the horrific atrocities faced by the Rohingya, others adopt a more indirect or symbolic method to allude to traumatic memories of rape and torture. Finally, the volume curates three poems, which are translations of Rohingya traditional folk songs. While these songs often preserve oral traditions of children’s lullabies and paeans to the lost homeland of Arakan, they underscore the common yearning of the Rohingya people for a peaceful childhood and passage to adulthood. Moreover, when given to us in the Rohingya language, the words are immediately recognizable as very similar to Bengali. These poems, therefore, produce empathy and cross-border solidarity at the same time as they preserve the Rohingya language and history for posterity. This volume offers poetry as testimony to the brutal genocide that Rohingya were subjected to by the Burmese military and for which they should be prosecuted in an International Court of Justice. In addition, poetry is presented as active effort in arousing empathy in a transnational audience, who may then join in this project of restitution and justice through actions of solidarity.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1949. ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, pp. 17–29. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 1962. ‘Commitment’, in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, pp. 300–319. New York: Continuum. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press. Ali, Mayyu. 2020. ‘As a Rohingya Refugee, I See a Renaissance of My People’s Culture in the Bangladesh Camps,’ The Independent Online, https://www.independent.co. uk/voices/rohingya-refugee-crisis-myanmar-bangladesh-camps-culture-art-musicpoetry-a9341961.html (Accessed on 10 March 2022). Anwary, Afroza. 2018. ‘Atrocities Against the Rohingya Community of Myanmar’, Indian Journal of Asian Affairs, 31(1–2): 91–102. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso.

Rohingya Refugee Poetry  271

Byrne, James and Shehzar Doja (eds.). 2019. I am a Rohingya: Poetry from the Camps and Beyond. Todmorden, UK: Arc Publications. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. 1992. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge. ‘Myanmar Rohingya: What You Need to Know About the Crisis’, January 23, 2020. https:// www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41566561 (Accessed on 6 May 2022). Oliver, Kelly. 2017. Carceral Humanitarianism: The Logics of Refugee Detention. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ratcliffe, Rebecca. 2022. ‘Thousands Homeless as Fire Sweeps through Rohingya Refugee Camp’, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/09/fire-sweepsthrough-coxs-bazar-rohingya-refugee-camp-in-bangladesh. (Accessed on 12 February 2022). ‘Rohingya Emergency’. July 2019. https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/rohingya-emergency. html. (Accessed on 6 May 2022). Rowland, Anthony. 2014. Poetry as Testimony: Witnessing and Testimony in Twentieth Century Poems. New York: Routledge. Zizek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador.

INDEX

Pages followed by n refer notes action-oriented model 138 act of writing 52–53 acts of violence 46 acute refugee movements 234 Adams, Jenni 249 Adorno, Theodor 264–265, 268 Advanced Desert Survival and Cultural Sensitivity 101 73 Afghani-American community 140 Afghanistan War 15 Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Brownmiller) 98 Agamben, Giorgio 263 A Golden Age (Anam) 102 Ahamad, Shafi 34 Ahmed, Moshtaque 108 Ahmed, Sara 115, 150 Ahmed, Tajuddin 108 Akhter, Bilkis 269 Alam, Fakrul 103 Alam, Jani 269 Alexander, Jeffrey C. 129 Ali, Mayyu 266–268 Al-Qaeda 61 Alzheimer’s disease 200 American war 73 Ami Birangona Bolchi (Ibrahim) 102 amnesia 5, 35, 222 Anam, Tahmima 102 And the Mountains Echoed (Hosseini) 140–143

animals as narrators 71 Anjuman, Nadia 146 anticipatory refugees 234 anti-colonial textuality 78 anti-Liberation forces 100–101 anti-Semitic essay 60 anti-Sikh pogrom 52, 54 Anwary, Afroza 262 anxiety 30, 131, 150, 172 A Passage North (Arudpragasam) 16, 233–234, 236, 238, 241–242 aporia 60 Ara, Dilruba Z. 14, 95–106 Arendt, Hannah 6, 262 Aristotle 68 art of trauma 1 Arudpragasam, Anuk 16, 193–201, 233, 236–237, 239, 241–242 Arva, Eugene L. 76, 249 Asaad, Lava 209n1 asylum seekers 16, 196–200 Aubry, Timothy 139 Awami League (AL) 96 A War Heroine, I Speak (Hasanat) 103 Ayodhya riots 50 Babcock, Barbara A. 209n4 Bahri, Deepika 182 Baines, Gary 85 Balaev, Michelle 6, 86–87, 233, 237

Index  273

Bala, Sharon 16, 193, 196–201, 201n1–201n2 Bangabandhu 106 Bangladeshi-American ideology 120 Bangladeshi psyche 95 Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 14, 108, 251; and violence against women 97–99 Bashir, Shahnaz 32, 34 Basu, Lopa 16 Basu, Lopamudra 261–270 Beall, J. 126 Bennett, Jill 7 Bernaerts, Lars 75 Beulens, Gert 233 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 5 Bhabha, Homi 210n7, 211, 215–216 Bhatia, Vandana 210n5 Bhaupanthi 164 Bhindranwala, Sant Jarnail Singh 47 Bhutto, Zulfikar 63 birangona-mother 109–113, 117n2 birangonas 104–105, 109, 114–115; in postwar Bangladesh and post-rape trauma 99–102 The Bird Catcher and Other Stories (Hasanat) 119–131 bir jouddhas 110 birth trauma, theory of 172 ‘Black July,’ 225 Blame (Ara) 95–106 blasphemy law 62 bleaching syndrome 123 Blum, Virginia 171 The Boat People (Bala) 193, 196–201 Bohmer, Carol 199 Bond, Lucy 7 Border Services 200 borrowed memory 48, 50 Boym, Svetlana 218 Brajaki, Manu 164 Brenner, Ira 84, 86 Breuer, Joseph 42 Brison, Susan J. 46, 88 British colonialism 258 British Empire 183, 194 Brownmiller, Susan 98 Buddhism 194, 223, 234, 262 Bulbul, Sharifa 110, 112–116 Bush, George W. 62, 144n4 Butler, Judith 17, 77, 171–172, 211, 215–216, 264 Byrne, James 16, 261, 265–266, 269

Canadian government 198 Caruth, Cathy 2, 10–11, 15, 32, 34, 52, 60, 81, 86, 88, 90, 120, 146, 161, 168, 171–174, 178, 232 Caruthian model 238, 242 catastrophic events 4 Central Command 73 Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948 234 Charcot, Jean-Martin 5, 232 chronic depression 238 chronic psychic 33 civil war 147, 150, 166 class discrimination 166 classical trauma theory 3, 5 Clear Light of Day (Desai) 16, 247–248, 254, 256–257, 259 Clinton administration 61 cognitive and emotional effects 60 cognitive processing 6 cognitive psychology 6 The Collaborator (Waheed) 32, 37–40 collective cultural memory 49, 55 collective cultural traumas 52 collective memory 47–49, 54–55 collective psychic trauma 1 collective psychosis 36 collective traumas 4–7, 12–13, 15, 32, 37, 45–46, 147–148, 196 colonialism 25, 67, 168, 173, 182, 184, 233, 237 colonial justice 183 colonial languages 61 colorism 121, 123 communal security 149 community 54–55 conventional approach 86 corporeal vulnerability 264 cosmopolitanism 169 counter-insurgency 47, 49 counter-insurgency programs 47 Craps, Stef 6–8, 33, 147, 170, 193, 195, 200, 201n1, 233 cross-cultural altruistic interactions 7 cross-cultural ethical engagement 7, 32 cross-cultural study 32, 159–166 cross-cultural traumatic effect 166 cross-gender identity 212 cultural anthropology 7, 12 cultural appropriation 80 cultural assimilation 247 cultural identity 36 cultural logics 215 cultural programs 160 cultural sensitivity 73–74

274  Index

cultural trauma 12, 37 cumulative trauma, in Sri Lanka 193–201 Damai, Puspa 15, 168–179 Dargah, Nizamuddin 53 Darwin 64–65, 171 Das, Tulshi Kumar 97 Davis, Colin 6 Davoine, Françoise 211, 215, 217 D’Costa, Bina 109–111, 117n2 D’Costa, Joseph 253–254 debasement through non-normative intimacies 212–214 decolonization 7–8, 172 defamiliarization 75 defense mechanism 252 de Man, Paul 60 De Mel, Neloufer 226 depersonalization 31, 38 depression 35, 37, 120, 169, 198, 238 derealization 31, 38 Derrida, Jacques 15, 168, 170, 177 Desai, Anita 16, 247–248, 256 Devkota, Laxmi Prasad 15, 169, 174–175, 177 Dhakal, Ghanashyam 165 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed., DSM–5) 3 Dikpal, Rajkumar 163 discrimination 120–121, 124, 127, 131, 138, 194 dissociative memories, in The Garden of Solitude 34–37 Dixon, Angela R. 122 Doan, Robert E. 211, 215, 217 Doja, Shehzar 16, 261, 265–266, 269 dormancy 87 double dialectic of empathy 75 Duras, Marguerite 146–149, 151–152, 252 dysfunctional memories 41 dystopia 122–123 Eaglestone, Robert 70, 80 Eakin, Paul John 221 Eelam 194, 208, 220 electroshock therapy 238, 241 empathy 7, 48, 51, 105, 168, 249 English language education 119 environmental degradation 1 epistemology 12, 249 Erikson, Kai 4 Erikson, K. T. 32 ethnic conflict 194, 229; in Sri Lanka 233–234

ethnic groups 160, 194, 213 ethnicity 121, 214, 144n4, 211 ethnic minority 16, 138, 193–194, 209n3 Euro-American colonialism 183 Eurocentric field 7 Eurocentric paradigms of trauma 232–233 Eurocentric textual strategy 153 Eurocentric Trauma Theory Model 170, 193, 233 European culture 60 event-model of trauma 193 event theory 33 extended memory 48, 50 Faizullah, Tarfia 102 Fanon, Frantz 182–184, 187 ‘Fata Morgana Effect,’ 48, 50 fear 84, 213 Felman, Shoshana 4, 6, 32, 81, 85, 88, 232, 261, 265 Fetterley, Judith 62 Field, Robin E. 14–15, 137–144 Fonseka, Sarath 207 Forter, Greg 7, 82 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Lacan) 171 French and American War of Independence 172 French culture 147 Freudian theory 60, 67 Freud, Sigmund 5, 15, 42, 59–61, 120, 168, 170, 173–174, 178–179, 232 Funny Boy (Selvadurai) 211–218 Gairola, Rahul K. 168, 173, 177 Gandhi, Indira 53 Gandhi, Mahatma 251, 257 The Garden of Solitude (Gigoo) 32, 34–37 Gaudillière, Jean-Max 211, 215, 217 gender bias 120 gender identity 82 gender politics 126 gender relations 149 gender transgression 212 genealogy 12 1970 General Election 96 general role-accumulation hypothesis 130 genocidal violence 261 genocide 51, 61, 97, 117n4; preserving Rohingya culture during 264–270 The Geometry of God (Khan) 59, 61, 63, 67–68 ghallughara 51–52 Ghosh, Amitav 16, 247–248

Index  275

Gigoo, Siddhartha 32, 34–36 Gilmore, David D. 82, 84 Girard, René 6 Godhra riots 50 Gollancz, Victor 252 The Good Muslim (Anam) 102 Gopinath, Gayatri 212 Gottschall, Jonathan 101 grievable lives 171 group identity 46 Gunesekera, Romesh 220 Guterres, Antonio 262 Hacking, Ian 10 Haitham, Ibn 65 Halbwach, Maurice 48, 50 The Half Mother (Bashir) 32, 40–42 Hall, Ronald 123 Hall, Stuart 183 hallucinations 5, 37–40 Halpé, Aparna 209n2 Hanif, Muhammad 14, 70–80, 269; magical realism 76–78; multiple narrators, use of 71–75 Hartman, Geoffrey H. 4, 32 Hasanat, Fayeza 14, 100, 103, 119–131, 209n1 haunting quality of trauma 228 healing 1, 3, 6, 16, 52, 67–68, 88–89, 159, 235 Hechhethu, Krisna 160 Herman, Judith 137, 211, 215, 237 heterosexual problem 126 Hiedemann, Brite 210n6 hijra 124–128 Hinduism 47, 95, 175 Hindu-Muslim riots 50 Hiroshima 146–154 Hiroshima mon amour 146–148 Hirsch, Marianne 252 historical memory 11 Hoffman, E.T.A. 59 homophobia 84 Homo Sacer (Agamben) 263 homosexuality 179, 218n2 Hoole, Rajan 194 Hoque, Anisul 108–109 Hosseini, Khaled 14–15, 137–144 Huang, M. C. 2 human and non-human experientiality 75 human-inflicted trauma 46 human rights 188, 266 Hunter, Anna 85 Hunter, Margaret L. 124 Hutcheon, Linda 249, 252, 257

Hutt, Michael 169–170 hybrid assemblages 16 hypermasculine warriors 152 hypocrisy 73–74 hypocrite social worker 164 hysteria 37–40 Ibrahim, Neelima 99–100, 102–103 Ice-Candy-Man (Sidhwa) 16, 247–248, 250, 257, 259 Immigration and Refugee Board 197 imperialism 169 Indian Peace-Keeping Force 194 indigenous healing ritual practices 8 indigenous languages 61 individual memory 45–46, 49 individual trauma 15, 47, 110 infertility 120, 128–130, 151 infinite curiosity, science 65–67 inherent latency 5 injury 227 insidious effects of war 225 insidious trauma 33 inter-conflict 160 The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud) 173 intersectional identity 109, 116, 123 intertextuality 258 In the Light of What We Know (Rahman) 101–102 intra-conflict 160 invasion and loss 52 Iran 63 Isaksen, Ane T 235 Iser, Wolfgang 61 Islam 14, 66, 95 Islamic law 149 Islamic Republic 63 Islamizing Pakistan 63–65 Islam, Mohammad Shafiqul 14, 95–106 Island of a Thousand Mirrors (Munaweera) 16, 202–210, 221–222, 233 Itakura, Gen’ichiro 15, 146–154 Iyer, Nalini 13 Jahan, Rounaq 96–97 Jain, Sunaina 16, 232–242 Janet, Pierre 5, 232 Japanese-Canadians 200 Jayasuriya, Maryse 15, 193–201, 209n2, 223 Jayawickrama, Sharanya 168, 173, 177 Jews/Jewish 60–61 jhyaure metre 169 Jinnah, Muhammed Ali 63–64 Joyce, James 62

276  Index

Kalb, Deborah 120 Karim, Asim 78–79 Karmakar, Goutam 119–131 Kashmir, trauma literature of 31–42 Katawal, Ubaraj 15, 181–189 Kaul, Suvir 33 Kaur, Manjot 13, 45–56 Kennedy, Roseanne 7 khadka, Sharmila 166 Khan, Faruq Aziz 108 Khan, Sorayya 14, 81–82 Khan, Uzma Aslam 13, 59, 61–64, 68 Khan, Zeenat 13, 31–43 Kimmel, Michael 83–84 The Kite Runner (Hosseini) 138–140 Knight, W. Andy 210n5 Kristeva, Julia 6 Kunz, Egon F. 233–235 Lacanian approach 5 Lacan, Jacques 15, 168, 171, 173–175, 178 LaCapra, Dominick 5–6, 32, 162, 172, 230, 233, 239 language barrier management 61–63 language identity 119 Laplanche, Jean 171, 175 latency of trauma 5 Laub, Dori 1, 4, 6, 32, 81, 86–87, 232, 261, 265 law enforcement 183 lay trauma theory 129 Leys, Ruth 170 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) 194–195, 197–198, 200, 202, 204, 207– 208, 209n2, 220, 225–229, 234, 240 Liberation War of Bangladesh see Bangladesh Liberation War, 1971 Line of Control (LOC) 34, 37 Linton, Suzannah 98 literary trauma theory 4–7, 9, 11–12, 31–32 Luckhurst, Roger 1, 7, 233 Mackay, Robin 171 magical realism 14, 76–78, 257–258 Mahjoor, Nayeema 34 majority-identified refugees seek asylum 235 male rape, risk of 140 male-to-male rape 126 male traumatic disorders 81 male victimization 81 Maoist-government conflict 165 Maoist revolution 181–189; bourgeois institutions and representation 182–184; national consciousness 184–189; role of pressures 184–189

Maoist War 173 Márquez, Gabriel García 249 martial race 52, 54 masculine self 81–90 masculinity 82, 125; dissolution of 85–89; as traumatic social construct 82–85 Mason, Paul 83 massive devastation 15 1969 Mass Upsurge 96 Masters, Robert Augustus 84 May Day 153n2 meaning-generating entity 249 meaning-making process 6 memory 54–55; and trauma 45–46; writing and 50–54 Menen, Aubrey 98 mental disorders 2, 41 mental health 33, 42 mental time travel 160 mental trauma 37, 42 micro-aggressions 152 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie) 16, 247, 249, 251–253, 255, 257–259 militarized masculinities 82 military deployment 39 military violence and retribution 77 minority cultures 170 minority stress theory 131 Mir, Ufra 42 mnemonic imagination 48–49 model migrant 198 Mohamed, Saira 88 Mohammed, Azad 266–268 Mookherjee, Nayanika 100–101, 109–111, 114–116 Morrison, Toni 253 Moser, Caroline 125 Moses and Monotheism (Freud) 5 muktijouddhas 108–109 multidimensional approach 17 multidirectional approach 2 multidirectional memory 10 multidisciplinary approach 17 multigenerational trauma 3 multiple narrators, use of 70–75 Muna Madan (Devkota) 169, 173–175, 177 Munaweera, Nayomi 16, 202–210, 220–230, 233, 237–239 Munder, John 86 Muslim community 71–72, 78–79 Muslim minority 262 Mu’tazilites 62, 64–65, 68

Index  277

Nakamura, Grace 197 narrating trauma: multiple narrators, use of 71–76; as weaponry 150–152 narrative indirection 248 narrative memory 238 national bourgeoisie 15 national consciousness 184–189 national identity 224 nationalism 169 national liberation war 96 Nazi concentration camp 263 Nazi occupation 60 Nazir, Faisal 14, 70–80 neo-colonialism 237 neo-pluralistic theoretical approaches 31 Nepal: hegemonic cultural tradition in 182; Maoist revolution in 181–189 Nepalese Civil War 10 Nepali monarchy 184 Nepali soldiers 172 neurosis 174, 179 New Testament 172 9/11 attacks 61, 70, 77, 172 non-Christian society 172 non-dualistic approaches 230 non-European adventures of war 15 non-event-based trauma 33 non-human narrators 75, 78 non-linearity 6 non-normative intimacies 212–214, 217 non-Western value systems 8 Noor (Khan) 81–82 Odysseus 62 Old Testament 172 Oliver, Kelly 262–263, 266–267 Ondaatje, Michael 218n5, 220 ontology 249 On Violence (Žižek) 264 Operation Bluestar 47, 50–52, 54, 56 Operation Searchlight 117n3 Osman, Khan Touseef 16, 247–259 pain 37, 40–41, 45, 52, 54, 112–115, 159 Pakistan 61, 65, 108; blasphemy law 62; Islamizing Pakistan 63–65; pre-war aggression 96–97 Pakistani aggression 96 Pakistan Movement 63 paleontology 65 Pandita, Rahul 34 paradigm shift 4 paradoxical idea 75 Parry, Alan 211, 215, 217

partition novel 247–259; alternative history 255–258; disturbed and/or non-linear temporality 252–255; figure of the ghost 253–254; fragmented, dispersed, and/or unreliable narrative 250–252; indirect representation in realist and/or experimental fiction 248–250; localized view of history 255–258; repetition 253–254 Party of Creation 64–65 pathogenic memories, of traumatic events 31–43; agonizing wait in The Half Mother 40–42; The Collaborator 37–40; The Garden of Solitude 34–37 pathogenic reminiscences 11, 42 The Patience Stone (Rahimi) 146–154 patricide 178 Pederson, Joshua 88 Peer, Basharat 34 People’s War 159–160, 162–164 personal healing 152 personal trauma 147–148, 150, 152 personal wound model of trauma 174 philosophical innovation 65 physical debasement 214 physical violence 112, 114 Piron, L-H 126 pluralistic models 11, 31, 233 pluralistic structure of trauma 7 Podell, Daniel 1 Poetry as Testimony (Rowland) 261 Pokharel, Badri Prasad 15, 159–166 political alignments 159 political consciousness 46 political resistance, suffering as 147–150 political unconsciousness 54 politics of pressure 181 popular memory 49 post-civil war Afghanistan 148–149 postcolonial literature, magical realism in 76 postcolonial novel 59–68; Islamizing Pakistan 63–65; language barrier management 61–63; science, infinite curiosity 65–67; trauma theory and 61 postcolonial resistance 215–216 postcolonial traumas 233, 242 Postcolonial Witnessing (Craps) 147 post-displacement phase 235, 241 post-9/11 literature, magical realism in 76 postmodernism 259 post-Operation Bluestar 47 post-rape trauma 99–101 post-revolutionary phase 184

278  Index

post-9/11 South Asian Anglophone literature 70 post-traumatic growth 240 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 35, 37, 130, 198, 237–238 post-war Afghanistan 142 post-war Bangladesh 114, 116; birangona in 99–101, 110 post-war Sri Lankan literary culture 16 post-World War 70 poverty 2, 148 Prabhakaran, Velupillai 203, 220, 234 pre-displacement phase 235 pressures, role of 184–189 Project for a Scientific Psychology (Freud) 170 Prologue 203 prominent literary technique 76 prosthetic trauma 221 pseudo-bourgeois leaders 183 psychiatric therapy 162 psychoanalysis 5, 59–60, 120, 122, 147, 171, 232, 265 psychoanalytical post-structuralist approach 5 psychodynamic theory 12 psychological disorder 3 psychological trauma 2–4, 34, 38, 121, 131, 137, 227 psychology 122 psychosis 40 psychotherapy 6, 232 public memory 49 Punjabi collective consciousness 45 Punjab, trauma in 45–56 quasi-Freudian manner 148 Quazi, Moumin 16, 202–210 Queen Victoria Academy 214 queer male femininity 212 queer recovery 211–218; articulating the resistance 214–217; debasement through non-normative intimacies 212–214 queer resistance 211 quiet dignity 199 quotidian barbarism 152 Quran 64–65 race 211 racial prejudice 120 radical intensity 122 ragra (punishment) 53 Rahimi, Atiq 146–154 Rahman, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur 96–97, 101, 106, 108–110 Rahman, Zia aider 101

Raja, Masood Ashraf 79 Rana rule in 1951 183 Rank, Otto 172 rape survivor 99–100, 109–111, 117n2, 139 rape syndrome 238 razakars 104, 106 reactionary violence 186 realism 76, 248 reconciliation 89, 221 Red Birds (Hanif) 14, 70–80 refugee crisis 233 refugees 196–200, 234–236, 261 Refugee Trauma Theory 233 rehabilitation 89, 101, 111 rehabilitation center 162 Rehan, N. 124 religious conflicts 46 religious identity 79 reliving/relieving trauma 78–80 research methodology 233 revolutionary violence 186–187 Rohingya 10; as political refugees 262–264; preserving Rohingya culture during genocide 264–270; refugee poetry 261–270 role of pressures 184–189 Roll of Honour 46–49, 51 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 169 Romero, Channette 140 Rothberg, Michael 6, 10, 233 Roth, Michael S. 122 Rowland, Anthony 261, 265 The Royal Ghosts (Upadhyaya) 169, 173, 175–177 Royo-Grasa, Pilar 199 Rushdie, Salman 16, 247–248, 251, 257, 259 Said, Edward 59, 188 Saikia, Yasmin 102, 109–110, 112, 116 Salt and Saffron (Shamsie) 16, 247, 249, 254, 257–259 Sandhu, Amandeep 45–46, 51, 53, 55 Saur Revolution 149 Scanlan, Margaret 13, 59–68 Schwartz, Harvey L. 85 science 65–67; infinite curiosity 65–67 Seasons of Flight (Thapa) 181, 184, 187, 189 The Second Coming (Yeats) 54 Secor, Anna 171 security forces 160–163 self-absorption 143 Selvadurai, Shyam 16, 211–218, 220–221 semi-autobiographical novel 13 semi-conscious 112–113 sentiments 73

Index  279

sexual abuse 110 sexual activity 204, 206 sexual assault 124–125 sexual gratification 127, 150 sexual imaginary 127 sexual minority 126 sexual orientation 120, 124–128, 211 sexual transgression 148 sexual violence 109, 111–112, 114, 116, 139, 144n3, 261, 267 sex worker 111 Shabnam, Shamika 14 Shadow Lines (Ghosh) 16, 247, 250, 252 Shamsie, Kamila 16, 247–248, 259 Shankar, S. 13 Shariah law 63–64 Sharlach, Lisa 99 Shrestha, Bhagirathi 163 Shuman, Amy 199 Sidhwa, Bapsi 16, 247–248, 250 Sikhism 47, 256 Silwal, Nawa 165 Sinai, Saleem 251 Singh, Khushwant 16, 247–248, 256–257 Sinhala-Only Act of 1956 194 Sinhalese nationalism 223 1966 Six-Point Movement 96 skin-lightening techniques 121 skin-tone trauma 121–124 sly civility 211, 215–216 social abuse 125 social castigation 111, 113 social exclusion 124, 126 social memory 49 social normative hierarchy 126 social ostracism 113 social responsibility 161 social science 12 socio-cultural critics 52 sociological process 34 sodomy 47, 49–50, 53–54 South Asian Anglophone writers 79 South Asian Literature 8–12 South Asian partition novels 247–259 Soviet-Afghan War 146–147 spatial model of trauma 171, 174 Spivak, Gayatri 110, 182, 185–187 Sri Lanka 193; acting out and workingthrough 239–241; cumulative trauma in 193–201; history of ethnic conflict in 233–234; postcolonial context and notion of self 239; refugee trauma and its representation 234–236; structural racism in 193–201

Sri Lankan civil war 10, 16, 202, 209n3, 220–230; divided identities 222–225; war and trauma 225–229 stereotypical trauma 127 stoicism 199 Stoltenberg, John 84 Stonebridge, Lyndsey 193 The Story of a Brief Marriage (Arudpragasam) 193–201 storytelling 6, 152 structural racism, in Sri Lanka 193–201 structural violence 33, 125 Studies in Hysteria (Freud) 5, 59 subcontinental fiction 247 Suleiman, Susan Rubin 89 Syeda, Fatima 14, 81–90 symbolic inversion 209n4 Syrian refugee crisis 263 systematic discrimination 124 Taliban 138, 144n4, 150–151 talk-therapy 148 Tamil Alliance 198 Tamil-Sinhalese conflict 213 Tamil Tigers 213–214, 226, 234, 236, 238, 240 technological innovation 65 Teenage Muslim Mind 74 Telles, Edward E. 122 temporal model of trauma 171 terrorism 16, 49, 52, 79, 193, 221, 227, 263 terroristic trauma 163 terrorist organization 197 Thapa, Manjhushree 15, 181, 183 Thoits, P. A. 130 Tin, Yar 268 top-down model of trauma 172 Traditional Cures in a Time of Distress and Disorder 74 Train to Pakistan (Singh) 16, 247, 256–257 transferential experience 13 transpersonal trauma 1 trauma: of colonization 61; complicated psychological ramifications of 34; decolonizing the Eurocentric paradigms of 232–233; defined 8, 31; in diaspora 196–200; inversion of family interactions 205–206; inversion of the body 206–208; in Kashmiri society 31–42; and literature 5–7, 32; magical realism and 76–78; memory and 45–46; pain and 112–115; from physical to psychological 1–4; rebel and 161–166;

280  Index

reinscription of nature 203–205; representational consequences, for South Asian partition novel 247–259; sexual orientation and 124–128; silence, in studies 168–171; skin-tone 121–124; spatiality of 170–173; spatial model of 171; temporal model of 171; violence and 49–50 traumas, postcolonial 233 Trauma Studies 2 trauma theory 7, 9, 60–61, 67, 168–170, 233; birth model of 172; classical trauma theory 3, 5; crypto-geological hybrid 171; failure of 8; literary trauma theory 4–7, 9, 11–12, 31–32; and postcolonial novel 61 traumatic brain injury 138, 141–142 traumatic imagination 76–78 traumatic memory 12–14, 45–46, 48, 82, 108–117, 162, 238, 261 traumatic symptoms 213 traumatism of future 175–179 tsunamis 10 Turner, Sir Ralph 172 Ullah, Yasmin 267 Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Caruth) 5, 146, 172 ungrievable lives 171 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 263–264 unspeakable trauma 1, 85–89, 233, 237 Upadhyaya, Samrat 15, 169–170, 177, 179 Valančiūnas, Deimantas 220–230 Valéry, Paul 152 Vejling, Thomas V. 235 vernacular postcolonialism 13 Vickroy, Laurie 252 victim-centered model 138 Victorian novels 67 violence, and trauma 49–50 Visser, Irene 7

The Voices of War Heroines: Sexual Violence, Testimony, and the Bangladesh Liberation War (Hasanat) 100 vulnerability 84–85, 126, 196, 211, 216 Waheed, Mirza 32, 34, 37–38 war heroine 110 War in Afghanistan 138 War on Terror 59, 61, 70–71, 263 war prisoners’ testimony 165 war-ravaged community 73–74 wartime rape 99–101 Western education 247 Western trauma theory 16, 32, 233, 239 Whitehead, Anne 253 wicked women 113–114 Williams, Raymond 181–182, 185, 187 witnessing trauma 137–144 womanhood, writing war and 95–106 women 109; in Blame 103–106; burdened by traumatic memories 131; infertility 128; post-war empowerment of 150; rehabilitation 111; sexual misbehavior 151; trauma 110; sexual violence on 261; victimization of 98; violence against 97–99, 103; and war in Bangladeshi literature 101–103 working-through concept 239–241 World War I 60, 172 World War II 1, 148, 197, 199, 252 The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon) 182 writing and memory 50–54 writing war 95–106 xenophobia 120, 168 Yaeger 7 Yeats, W. B. 54 Young, Robert 76 Zackheos, Marilena 16 Zinck, Pascal 68n3 Zinn, Howard 143 Žižek, Slavoj 264–265, 268 zombification 210n5