Writing Trauma: Poetics of Cultural Trauma and Memory in Anglophonic Kashmiri Literature

This study concentrates on the Anglophonic literature produced in the region of Jammu and Kashmir. It explores its narratives through the lens of trauma theory, pertaining to the region’s history of forced conflict. After the Second World War, the relevance of trauma in literary studies has increased and texts have been characterized by an archeology of traumatic consciousness. Also, the narratives act as vehicles for transmitting stories of suppressed and wounded consciousness. This research focuses upon Mirza Waheed’s (2011) novel The Collaborator and Basharat Peer’s (2010) memoir Curfewed Night as the primary texts and investigates the art of writing trauma by exploring the narrative structures deployed by the authors. The objective is to find out as to how the very act of writing trauma is shaped by traumatic memories of a past rooted in the partition conflict, war, and prolonged violence. Furthermore, the study probes into how the fictional characters embody and express pain and anguish as part of their memories. The key focus remains on how both the works portray the (un)speakability of grief and the (in)comprehensibility of trauma drawing on some of the seminal contemporary theories of cultural trauma and memory studies. Using qualitative methodology and trauma theory as the theoretical framework, it is concluded that apart from presenting reality as horrific, gloomy, and glim, Kashmiri texts discuss how causalities create memories riddled with unspoken fears by bringing forth the intricacies of speechless terror and trauma. Thus, the study captures the narration’s struggle to represent evasive and suppressed memories and the challenges of trauma writing.