Interpreting Collective and Individual War Memories in Borders in Anuk Arudprakasam’s The Passage North: Affective Memories in a Hot Spot Interpreting Collective and Individual War Memories in Borders in Anuk Arudprakasam’s The Passage North: Affecti

War memories are the patchwork of collective and individual memory, public and private remembrance and a recollection of current knowledge, and interpretation of the facts and events during and after the wars. The knowledge and interpretation of wars occur through the conscience, trauma, and injury which shapes the personal and public memory of an individual or an ethnic group. This paper deals with the effect of war memory in the post-Srilankan civil war state with the novel The Passage North by Anuk Arudprakasam. This novel narrates the oral testimonies, the ravages of the civil war and its effects on the survivors. The thoughts and personal memories of the protagonist, Krishan, concern how people live, yet become diminished in the aftermath of civil war, and the horrors Rani experienced during the Civil war reveal the memories, trauma and actions that have determined the scar in their lives as they cope up with displacement from borders and longingness for the lived land. This research paper employs the theoretical framework of Theodule Ribot’s affective memory and conceptualises it along with the collective and individual war memory of the survivor. The paper also moves towards the application of the theory of ethnic conflict in the borders where it does reveal the alien and dreadful memories and also transcends intermittently of reconnecting, of reimagining and of reconstituting the past as network or as archive or as present as Hoskins says (Hoskin, 05). This research attempts to probe the questions of civil war memory, and remembering and forgetting of violence and trauma in the mental borders.