Remembering Place: The Temporality of Trauma in Rudraprayag After the 2013 Flash Floods

The 2013 flash floods reproduced an everyday that was textural, the returning past of the event combined with gestures from within the everyday, to disorient survivors of the event. I attempt in this essay to analyze the return of the event as producing psycho-spatial affects, drawn from the psyche’s own propensity to return while repressing the event that causes the return, described within psycho-analytic literature as “afterwardsness.” Such afterwardsness is conditioned by the sheer incomprehensibility of environmental change that took place in just three days in the Mandakini Valley between June 15 and June 17, 2013. Following the flood, delays with the recovery process, and particularly with the process of compensation, exacerbate this trauma, leading to an extension of the temporality of trauma infinitely forward.