Cartographies of Pain: Remembering Violence and Displacement in the Fiction of Easterine Kire

This paper examines the literary landscapes of Easterine Kire’s fiction through the lens of memory, trauma, and embodied experience in the context of Northeast India. Kire’s narratives provide a vital cartography of the socio-political ruptures that have marked the region, particularly the experiences of violence and displacement endured by its indigenous communities. Drawing on Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (from “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”), Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory, Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory, and Judith Butler’s ideas on grievability and precarity, this study investigates how Kire’s protagonists preserve cultural memory and articulate personal pain amid systemic marginalization. The paper also invokes regional specificity to foreground how literary remembrance becomes a mode of resistance, healing, and identity reclamation.