Issues of Psychopathology

Resurrection of Self through Trauma in The AppointmentChitra.V.S.

Assistant Professor of English,VTM NSS College, Dhanuvachapuram.

Contemporary fiction is enriched with narratives that limn traumatic situations and

protagonists who demonstrate the psychoanalytical aspects of trauma that influence the

reformulation of the self. Trauma and memory are so inevitably entangled that their

boundaries have widened beyond the ambit of extremely severe or abnormal circumstances

to accommodate many common distresses of every day life. Although traditional entries of

war, violent rape, concentration camp experiences, sexual and psychological abuses during

childhood, are labelled as ‘trauma’, it has now been effectively extended to many other

experiences situated between either extreme. Trauma can become a condition of everyday

life where the subject’s residence in a city that has experienced wars, terrorist attacks, ethnic

or communal violence can trigger a series of narrative repetitions of the violence and the

traumatic memories associated with it. Memories of a violent past can often obscure the fine

line between reality and imagination, actuating a sense of confusion and incomprehension.

Eyewitness accounts of genocides and other ethnic and communal conflicts testify to this

state of delirium, indicative of the pervasiveness of assault that stretch beyond the realms of

the physical to the psychological and the cultural.

Trauma theory, in relation to literature asserts that trauma creates a speechless fright

that divides or destroys identity. Often identity is seen as a reflection of intergenerational

transmission of trauma. The readings on trauma theory have lead to the categorisation of the

‘trauma novel’. The term ‘trauma novel’ refers to a work of fiction that conveys a profound

sense of loss or intense fear at the individual or the collective level. In a novel where trauma

plays a major role, the geographical location represents traumatic effects and events through

metaphoric and material aspects. Geographical descriptions of the location of the traumatic

experience and its remembrance in relation to a larger cultural context containing social

values that influence the recollection of the event and reconfiguration of the self are the

results of trauma. These novels represent the disruption between the self and others by

carefully describing the place of trauma because the physical environment offers the

opportunity to examine both the personal and cultural histories. The primacy of place in the

representation of trauma anchors the individual experience within a larger cultural context

and organizes the memory and meaning of trauma.

This paper is primarily concerned with the features of trauma novels, the

aftermaths of trauma on victims, the complex fables of memory that impress upon and

restructure the individual and collective identities. The paper also attempts to analyze how

the aspects of trauma can be applied to literary texts, mainly Herta Muller’s The

Appointment, to unfold the underlying subtexts of individual memory that bear the imprint of

a troubled past, the effect of political persecution on individuals and how that experience and

its memories shape the lives of those affected. Muller adopts as a strategy the articulation of

trauma in The Appointment, which is attained through a rare economy of words. The effect of

political persecution is most acutely felt in the novel in the loss of identity and orientation, in

the dehumanizing attitude towards human aspirations.

Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) views that “the

struggle of man against power is a struggle of memory against forgetting.” Authors and

literary critics have extensively employed their works to provide a better knowledge of

trauma, its symptoms and an illustration of how the human mind experiences and processes

traumatic events. The literary texts representing trauma are not merely documentational

narratives of trauma, but a realistic portrayal of the symptoms of trauma through the

protagonist’s experiences and the images.Authors frequently utilize imagery to emphasize

the theme: woven together into a complex structure, illustrations of personal traumatic

experiences and national traumatic events represent the growing fear, helplessness and the

isolation experienced by an individual during and after a traumatic event.

In her critical work Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth explains trauma and

its symptoms: “In its most general definition, trauma describes an overwhelming experience

of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often

delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena”

(11). Learning about trauma allows for a better understanding of its effects on individuals

and ways to reduce its impact on the victims. There are many formalistic features that could

be used to express trauma. As Ann Whitehead describes in her work, Trauma Fiction, there

are a number of key stylistic features which tend to recur in (trauma) narratives. These

include intertextuality, repetition and a dispersed or fragmented narrative voice” (84). These

stylistic features interrupt the text; act as intrusions on the story to illustrate traumatic

symptoms and experiences by “mirroring at a formal level, the effects of trauma”,

particularly the intrusive symptoms. Isolated pictures, divided by a gutter, tell a fragmented

story and the reader has to put together the story and fill in the blanks. Judith Herman in her

work Trauma and Recovery, views that “traumatic memories lack verbal narrative and

content; rather they are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images” (38). Images are

immensely employed to emphasize the “frozen and wordless quality of traumatic

memories….” (37). Emotional impact, repetition, compulsion, state of helplessness and other

symptoms of trauma can all be delivered through visual clues, such as color, panel size and

repetitive imagery. The combination of words and images provide many opportunities for

illustrating the impact of traumatic experiences. Traumatic experiences alter the victims,

causing a detachment from society, which make them feel isolated, utterly abandoned, with a

sense of alienation and disconnection pervading every relationship from the most intimate

familial bonds to the most abstract affiliations of community and religion. Post- traumatic

symptoms in these novels are experienced at two formal stylistic levels: fragmented

chronology and repetition of imagery. “Trauma survivors live not with memories of the past,

but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, has no

ending, attained no closure and therefore as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into

the present and is current in every respect .

Herta Muller’s The Appointment is a realistic depiction of the unnamed

protagonist’s disrupted self and her surroundings. The confrontation with the trauma she

suffers prompts her resistance to it providing a resultant resurrection of her self. The

transformation of the unnamed narrator’s self ignited by an external, often terrifying

experience illuminates the process of coming to terms with the dynamics of memory that

inform the new perceptions of her self and the world around her. Freudian concept of trauma

and memory emphasizes the necessity to recall the experience. Trauma is brought out

through repetitive flash backs that literally re-enact the event because the mind cannot

represent it otherwise. The Appointment by Muller is conventionally structured around the

events of one morning in the life of the central character, who is unnamed, takes a tram ride

on her way to her regular interrogation. The trauma of the protagonist is brought out through

the description of the journey being punctuated by flashbacks as she reviews her life and

remembers the events which led her to this point in her life. She does not reach her

destination, and the denouement of the last few pages undermines the basis on which she has

found the courage to resist when she discovers that her beloved husband Paul, on whom she

depends as her only ally has been spying upon her.

The effect of political persecution is most acutely felt in the novel, in the loss

of identity and orientation, in the dehumanizing attitude towards human aspirations. For

example, the buried layers of history are seen to impinge on the present when the narrator

unwittingly marries the son of the man responsible for the forced deportation of her

grandparents, and hear in detail of the material and emotional hardships of everyday life.

Muller’s narration is a direct depiction of the political situations pervading in Romania which

gradually filters to the collective conscious of an individual. The power of the state invades

the private sphere of the unnamed narrator which leads her to a sense of insecurity and fear.

She is haunted by the helplessness of her situation while undertaking the tram ride to her

interrogative sessions. The protagonist of the novel is ever seen as suffering from the fear of

being interrogated. The ‘crime’ for which she is being persecuted is that of placing notes

‘marry me’ with her name and address inside the clothing bound for Italy in the hope of

escaping from the oppression of the state. The expression of desire is seen as subversive by

the state. The lack of freedom to exercise her desire and the constant threat of interrogation

by her interrogator, Major Albu seeks to instil fear in her through suspense and indirect

threat of violence. The past is entwined with the present experiences to bring out the trauma

experienced by the unnamed narrator. She is in many ways a weak person who is led by her

desires, but gradually she realizes the absolute necessity of offering resistance. She

compartmentalizes herself from the society which in turn helps her to overcome the trauma

and reconfigure the ‘self’ to resist the power of the State. She remains in control by dividing

her ‘self’ into the ‘stressed self’ whose actions are governed by a compulsive reaction to fear

and the ‘detached, observing self’. The fragmented story of the unnamed narrator and the

sense of isolation depict the real impact of trauma and its aftermath.

The aftermath of trauma watermarks a major departure from the familiar

uniformity of mundane perceptions, often, to the alien and uncertain grounds of the surreal. It

leads to differential interpretation of reality and the reformulation of memories and identities.

It affects the perception of history and the past, in ways that may not always be immediately

apparent. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Studies reveal that in the victims of trauma

experience of violence has a profound influence on perception. The irony of trauma is that

memory which is often considered to be the burden of our experience nurtures within itself

the secrets of replenishment by offering resistance to the prevailing situations.

Works Cited

Muller, Herta. The Appointment. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001. Print.

Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. New York: 1981, 4. Print.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore:

John Hopkins UP, 1996. Print.

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of violence - from Domestic

Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Print.

Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. Print.

Tangled: Nostalgia and Displacement in Amy TanDivya Johnson,

Assistant Professor of English,St. John’s College, Anchal.

Establishing clear parallels between past and present, between historical events and

contemporary problems, Amy Tan expresses the feelings of the lovesick Chinese immigrant

making their exit from the life of a beloved; their homeland. Amy Tan is an Asian American

writer who is considered a guide to the landscape of the Asian American experience. The

tensions in her dual heritage eventually found their way into her novels in her portrayal of

the generational conflicts in immigrant families. The multiple spaces she inhabits- Asia and

America- raise important questions about belonging, identity, ethnicity, migrancy, diaspora,

nation and multiculturalism. The vitality of her writing springs from the emphasis laid on the

stark contrast in the histories, cultures, languages and politics of the two places that Amy Tan

inhabits.

The crucial events in Tan's novels are contained within definitive boundaries: a

circumscribed Chinatown neighborhood, the tiny village of Changmian, one-room

accommodations for Chinese pilots and their wives or a stuffy apartment crammed with

elderly mah-jongg enthusiasts. Juxtaposing events separated by decades, Tan parallels the

dislocations experienced by emigrants from a familiar culture into an alien one with their

daughters' painful journeys from cultural confusion to acceptance of their dual heritage. 

Tan's protagonists--members of that diaspora community called Asian Americans--

represent two groups: Chinese-born immigrants imperfectly acculturated despite decades of

life in America, and American-born women of Chinese ancestry, uncomfortably straddling

the border between their ethnic heritage and the American milieu that is their home.

Enmeshed by their shared histories in California's ethnic neighborhoods, the women in Tan's

novels struggle to create personal identities that reflect their lives, needs, and desires.

 

The Kitchen God's Wife which explores the dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship in

the context of cultural and ethnic disjunctions, focuses on a woman's journey to wholeness

after an eventful life that replicates the Chinese immigrant experience in microcosm. In

contrast to Winnie Louie's version of the story of the Kitchen God who achieves deity status

when he proves to be capable of shame upon discovering that the wife he has mistreated still

cares about his welfare, Amy Tan depicts an alternate version where Winnie, the Kitchen

God's wife is denied membership in the Chinese pantheon of deities despite her fidelity.  

Presenting a widening rift between Winnie and her daughter, Pearl Tan has succeeded in

narrating the fully developed chronicle of Winnie's life in China. Through her story, Pearl

contextualizes Winnie's reminiscences, describing a series of events and revelations that

ultimately changes their relationship. Required by family obligations to attend the funeral of

an ancient "aunt" and the engagement party of a "cousin," Pearl spends more time with

Winnie than she has in many months, and the enforced companionship prompts the younger

woman to examine the roots of their estrangement. Winnie, goaded to action by a letter from

China that closes a painful chapter in her past, decides to tell Pearl about her life in China.

Being a member of a native-Chinese community that had to face too many predicaments

related to cultural identity, her behavior is hybrid. In order to settle down in the new

environment, her nativeness is suspended to align herself to western environment. Counter

discourse happens and reflects the domination of Kwan Li over the Americans.

               Although she has interwoven her cultural identity with colonial behaviour, it is

done in order to influence and alter their culture. Besides, she is able to make the alien

environment believe in her at the end of story, instead. Thus, her migration as a part of the

first generation of diasporic people results in the contrary effect of migration. Her existance

threats western’s domination as Young (2004) points out thoroughly within his book :

“...characteristics of cultural movements became visible to Europeans in two ways: in the

disruption of domestic culture and in the increasing anxiety about racial difference and racial

amalgamation that was apparent as an effect of colonialism and enforced migration”.

         As it is stated by Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994) : “Transnational

dimensions of cultural transformation –migration, displacement, diaspora, relocation- makes

the process of cultural translation a complex form of cultural signification.” (172) Back to

the concept which has been revealed by Said, colonizer –occident- use to be superior to

colonized people. Normatively, the Occidents is upper than the Orients.

Even though mixing of races frequently happens resulting in the formation of cross

cultural identities, occident is still supposed to be superior. It becomes conspicuous when the

Orient enacts a counter-discourse toward the colonizer’s reign, and dominates them back. It

is because transmigration of the colonizer or colonized people is based on colonial desire as

it is mentioned in Colonial Desire (1994) : “Transmigration is the form taken by colonial

desire, whose attraction and fantasies were no doubt complicit with colonialism itself .“(2)

Colonized is only an object, but in many cases, colonized is always able to give response.

Despite of their inferiority, they do move across cultural identities and sometimes even resist

the colonizer’s culture. Moreover, they are also able to create domination over colonizer’s

power.

Tan examines identity--its construction, boundaries, and contexts. Indelibly branded

by their visible ethnicity, Tan's characters daily negotiate the minefields of cultural

disjunction and tensions between Chinese tradition and Americanization in family

connections and individual desires. These tensions inevitably surface, causing

intergenerational conflict and the disintegration of family relationships as the mother

belonging to the older generation, looks back to China while her daughter remains firmly

connected to the new land. Unable to discover common ground, the two groups of women

speak different languages, embrace different values, nurture different ambitions, and lead

divergent lives.

The novel chronicles the eventful life of Jiang Weili--Winnie's Chinese name--as she

negotiates the difficult journey from a privileged childhood through an abusive marriage and

the tragedy of war, and ultimately to a secure life in the United States. The daughter of a

wealthy Shanghai merchant, Jiang Weili marries the dashing Wen Fu, only to discover after

the wedding that he has misrepresented his family's wealth and status. Worse yet, he turns

out to be an adulterer, abuser, and pathological liar. Forced to follow her pilot husband as he

is posted to different cities during the war, Weili tries to be a good wife and mother, laboring

to establish a home wherever they happen to be assigned. She must spend her dowry for

family expenses when Wen Fu gambles away his pay or squanders it on a mistress. After

silently enduring her miserable existence and the deaths of her two children, Winnie finally

escapes to America and a new life with Jimmy Louie.

Amy Tan opts for an ethnic identity, which is understood as “the individual level of

identification with a culturally defined collectivity,” the sense on the part of the individual

that she or he belongs to a particular cultural community. Amy Tan's novel is found to

accomodate the issue of the postcolonial subject whose Chinese-American identity is related

to cultural memory. 

A full migrant suffers, traditionally, a triple disruption: he loses his place, he enters

into an alien language, and he finds himself surrounded by beings whose social behavior and

code is very unlike and sometimes even offensive to, his own. And this is what makes

migrants such important figures: because roots, language and social norms have been three

of the most important parts of the definition of what it is to be a human being. The migrant,

denied all the three, is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of being

human.The novel explicates the feelings of the exile and the Diaspora, revealing characters

clutching to their roots, nostalgic for their homeland. The longing of the characters to revisit

their past exposes their deep love and nostalgia for the homeland and sets the themes-

longing, memory, homeland, nostalgia, diaspora and exile. Exploring the relationships

between self-community and identity, Amy Tan highlights the heterogeneity of identity

within community, as well as the traumas of changedue to pressures from outside. There are

ethical issues of massive proportions both in the time and the locale of the story, issues

which are alive and provocative even now.

Amy Tan presents the events and details of the characters’ struggles to find their

identities in the postcolonial world, along with the immigrants’ attempt to adapt to their new

worlds. Post colonialism represents an attempt at transcending the historical definition of its

primary object of study towards an extension of the historical and political notion of

‘colonizing’ to other forms of human exploitation, repression and dependency. The feeling of

being left out of the cultural mainstream is uniquely reflected in the way.

Amy Tan’s characters are displaced and consistently searching for a new identity,

whether through emigration or re-inventing themselves through enlightenment.The cultural

ambivalence of the character’s circumstances in the United States is conflictual and

oppositional. The novel traces their struggles to survive; the emergence, for an agonizingly

brief period, of a sense of community amongst them; and the eventual destruction of this

community in the face of the brutality of larger social forces.

          If the postcolonial novel is to be seen as a site of resistance in its ideological

positioning within cultural institutions, its material referent and its condition of production is

the postcolonial nation. Yet the postcolonial nation is neither unitary nor homogenous, but is

actually the stage on which the social contradictions of class, gender, race and ethnicity are

played out. Analogously, the world of the postcolonial novel is itself a radically fractured

space, where different social groups contend for power and control, both of their world and

of the narrative itself.

Postcolonial novel thus often highlights the contradictions inherent in the national

imaginary. Far from viewing displacement and marginality as subject, positions that enable

resistance, here marginality and resistance emerge as mutually exclusive terms. Through

their vicissitudes, they cling to memories of China and to fading traces of their ancestral

culture, and they eventually establish stable new lives for themselves. Amy Tan

demonstrates the universal theme of mother-daughter estrangement and reconciliation.  Her

fiction is more than a report of Chinese customs, and it speaks truths about relationships not

confined to a single culture.  The message of Tan's work lies not in analysis of each single

detail but in the broader narrative.  Like the mothers of her novels, Tan intrigues us with her

stories and shares with us her interpersonal wisdom. 

      "Through storytelling, the daughters come to accept their mothers' and their own race and

are willing to seek their ethnic and cultural roots" (242).  Just as Jing-Mei and Olivia learn

from Kwan and Suyuan's stories and the daughters put aside their criticism and close-minded

assumptions, we shall also learn when we put aside our attempts to label and limit Tan's

work as either cultural ambassadorship or misrepresentation.  When we read Tan's stories,

she leads us into a world where differences are resolved by listening to each other.  A real

artist portrays life during his inspired moments, when he can be equated with the lover and

the lunatic. In such moments writers are prophets. They present before us not only what has

happened or is happening to society, but also what might happen to it. For this reason Amy

Tan will retain her value even after centuries.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold, ed. Amy Tan. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000.

Cheung, King-Kok. An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. Cambridge,

England: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Cooperman, Jeannette Batz. The Broom Closet: Secret Meanings of Domesticity in

Postfeminist Novels by Louise Erdrich, Mary Gordan, Toni Morrison, Marge Piercy,

Jane Smiley, and Amy Tan. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

Huntley, E. D. Amy Tan: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon,

1990.                                                                                      

‘The Gone Corroboree’ - Colonial Trauma and Survival of Australian Aboriginals

in the poems of Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

Lisa Pavithran

Assistant Professor of English,

D B Pampa College, Parumala.

Aboriginal Australians are people whose ancestors were indigenous to the Australian

continent before British colonisation. The songs, legends, and stories of the Australian

aboriginals constituted a rich oral literature. In the 1970s Aboriginal people began to write in

English. David Unaipon is regarded as the first Aboriginal writer in Australia.

Before colonization, the Aboriginal people lived in tribes and were nomadic. Their

life style was based on the dreamtime beliefs and legends which are a set of parables and

stories about the creation of the earth and its inhabitants. These legends played an important

role in their treatment of land, behavior towards each other and their perception of the world.

They believed that the land was created for them by the supernatural beings known as

totemic ancestors who emerged from their eternal sleep underground. The land is inhabited

by these spirits and for this reason it has been so important for them.

The British colonisation began in 1788. The settlers took away land, natural food and

water resources and the order of a nomadic life from Aborigines. The colonizers started to

'civilise' them by replacing the traditional Aboriginal way of life with European ways. The

Aboriginal population was reduced considerably by the introduction of new diseases, loss of

land and loss of people. The Aboriginals were left with no place to live and nowhere to hunt

food. The British settlers also introduced alcohol to Aboriginal people. They were forced into

slavery, tribes died out and much of Aboriginal culture and history has been lost.

We get details about the lives and struggles of the Indigenous Australians through the

works of many eminent Aboriginal authors like Anita Heiss, Kevin Gilbert, Sally Morgan

etc. Of these Kath Walker, who was later known by her Aboriginal name Oodgeroo

Noonuccal, occupied a special position as a poet, political activist, and educator. Oodgeroo

was born in Stradbroke Island, the traditional land of the Noonuccal tribe. She was a

campaigner for Aboriginal rights and talked about the feelings of Aboriginal people in a way

that had not been done before.

Oodgeroo was the first Aboriginal poet to publish a book of verse; ‘We are Going:

Poems’. In 1988 she adopted her traditional name’ Oodgeroo’ meaning ‘paper bark tree’

recognising her Noonuccal ancestors. She died in 1993. Oodgeroo has won many literary

awards like the Fellowship of Australian Writers’ Award. The themes of her poetry include

the wrongs the white people committed against her people, and her longing for a world in

which those cruelties disappeared from the face of the earth.

‘We Are Going’ published in her first collection of poetry, gives an Aboriginal

perspective on colonisation in Australia. Oodgeroo comments on the fears of the Aborigines,

and creates a voice that expresses the trauma of dispossession.

The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter. 

The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone from this place. 

The bora ring is gone. 

The corroboree is gone. 

And we are going.

Oodgeroo laments over the loss of ceremonial grounds. Ceremony was central to

aboriginal life. Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, a spiritual aboriginal woman says, “In

the ceremonies we celebrate the awareness of our lives as sacred.” Stanner, an Australian

anthropologist talks about the cultural and spiritual beliefs and practices of the people as

‘uniting hearts and establishing order’. Oodgeroo has described the poem as a cry for help,

and the dispossession of the speakers of the poem is strongly communicated.  The poem

laments the whittling away of traditional Aboriginal ways, laws and legends. The tribal

people are without words: “They sit and are confused, they cannot say their thoughts”. ‘We

Are Going’ defines the Aboriginal connection with the land and laments that this link with

nature is becoming weaker. Everything is gone and now they have to leave. The poet

highlights the oppression experienced by the Indigenous population that resulted in a loss of

culture and life.

In the poem ‘Then and Now’ Oodgeroo gives a perspective on city life and how

it has affected her people. The poem describes the disappearance of the tribal way of life

with the advent of the different ‘machines’ of the colonizers. In the places of corroboree

there are factories and the playground is replaced by railway yards. Woomera and

boomerang have disappeared. The poem ends with her desire for the Aboriginal lifestyle to

be like it was before White colonisation. “Better when I had only a dillybag / Better when I

had nothing but happiness.”This poem shows the impact of the 'Assimilation Policy' on the

Aborigine's way of life, forcing them to change their culture and live apart from their

traditional ways which also affected their mental health.

In ‘Time is Running Out’, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, expresses her frustration and anger

at the loss of the land which she and the aboriginals so dearly love. The colonizer is

compared to a miner who is raping the heart of earth with his violent spade and stealing and

bottling her black blood for greedy trade. On his metal throne of destruction, with his greedy

lust for power, he destroys old nature’s will. Oodgeroo is exhorting the gentle black man to

show their strength and love of land.

In ‘The Unhappy Race’, the poet becomes the spokesperson for her own people as she

staunchly expresses her discontent for the colonizers and demands freedom they enjoyed in

the past. In ‘The Dispossessed’, Oodgeroo talks about the atrocities of the colonizers and the

plight of the tribal people. “Till white colonials stole your peace with rape and murder raid; /

They shot and poisoned and enslaved until, a scattered few, / Only a remnant now remains,

and the heart dies in you.”The white man claimed their hunting grounds and made them

work as menials for greedy private gain. The justice of the white man meant to deny justice

to the tribals. “A dying race you linger on, degraded and oppressed, / Outcasts in your own

native land, you are the dispossessed.”The last line, ‘Courage decays for want of hope, and

the heart dies in you.’ hints at the traumatic situation the aboriginals had to face as the

consequence of colonization.

A study conducted in Australia by the Department of Health and Ageing states that

the impact of history and the ongoing effects of colonization were seen as primary causes of

mental distress and contributing to mental ill health among aboriginal people. Associated

with this were socio-cultural dislocation and isolation. Grief, loss and trauma were seen as

major contributing factors.

Trauma theory is developed from the works of Sigmund Freud and Pierre Janet. Freud

describes ‘psychological trauma’ as the breaking up of the psyche’s protective shield.

Analysts after Freud were concerned with inter or trans- generational transmission of trauma,

whereby one who did not personally live through a traumatic event might nonetheless

manifest post- traumatic symptoms. Inter generational trauma may especially affect inmates

of survivors but it may also arise with those who live with fraught legacies like holocaust,

slavery or colonization.

In her book, Trauma Trails (2002), Judy Atkinson says that the layered trauma that

results from colonization is likely to be expressed in dysfunctional violent behavior at both

individual and large scale levels of human interaction. She says Aboriginal trauma is chronic,

cumulative and on-going. She records, from the 1980s, the increase in intra-family violence

re-traumatises the already traumatised, passing trauma on to those who have not experienced

colonisation directly. She examines the chaos that has evolved from colonial conquest noting

that many young Aboriginal people today are growing up in places of pain and disorder. The

older generations who experienced colonization have acted out their own rage and terror

within their families and communities because, ‘as members of a disempowered and

oppressed minority, they have been denied normal outlets’ (69). Present generations do not

have the same experience as their parents and elders. In fact, they have not been told of their

parents’ and grandparents’ traumatic experiences and therefore do not understand why they

are being subjected to violence from within their own families (225). They ‘have grown up

in situations where pent up rage, aided by alcohol consumption has been released into the

chaos of family and community dysfunction (236-37).’The violence is thus passed on from

generation to generation. Atkinson calls this ‘the traumatic transference of trauma’ (222).

She argues that continuing racism, traumatising in itself, compounds the distress of the

already suffering Indigenous people of Australia. Trauma disrupts and restructures

relationships between people.

Settler colonialism is an ongoing process in Australia. Australia relies on the ongoing

displacement and dispossession of Aboriginal people from their lands and cultures.  The

trauma of Indigenous Australians is effectively conveyed by a group of talented Aboriginal

writers, who are striving to shift their culture from the margins of Australian society to its

core through inspirational works that encapsulate the diverse and vibrant essence of

Aboriginal society in the twenty-first century.

Works Cited

Atkinson, Judy. Trauma Trails: Recreating song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of

Trauma in Indigenous Australia. Melbourne: Spinifex Press 2002. Print.

Heiss, Anita M. Dhuuluu-Yala- To Talk Straight: Publishing Indigenous Literature.

Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. 2003. Print.

Knudsen, Eva Rask. The Circle & the Spiral: A Study of Australian Aboriginal and New

Zealand Māori Literature. New York: Rodopi, 2004. Print.

Wake, Paul, Ed. The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory. New York: Routledge, 2006.

<http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/noonuccal-oodgeroo>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oodgeroo_Noonuccal>

<http://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-Mi-So/Noonuccal-Oodgeroo.html

Redefining the Immigrant Identity and the Metamorphosis of Self

in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine.

Maria Lisa Mathew, Research Scholar,

Central University of Pondicherry.

“There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we were so

we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dream” (Jasmine: 29).

Construction and re-construction of identities are the by products of a series of factors

like time, place and culture. As one’s surrounding environment changes, his/her perception

of himself/herself changes, there by resulting in a multiplicity of consciousness. Bharati

Mukherjee is an Indian-born American writer of immigrant sensibility. She calls her

narratives as “stories of broken identities and discarded languages”. Identity creation

emerges as a never ending process in her novels, as her protagonists are endowed with a

“self” that is fluid, and is constantly evolving. Her novel Jasmine traces the struggle for

identity of its female protagonist Jasmine and the psychological and physical violence that

she endures in becoming Jane (‘almost’) from the village girl Jyoti. The paper attempts to

explore Bharati Mukherjee’s vision of fluid identity and its metamorphosis through the series

of transformations of her protagonist Jasmine.

Bharati Mukherjee in her bildungsroman Jasmine portrays an odyssey of its heroine

Jasmine through a series of adventures from Punjab to California via Florida, New York and

Iowa. She has successfully initiated a discussion on subaltern migrant identity and the

exuberance of immigration through the multiple identity transformations of Jasmine in her

quest for self-empowerment and happiness. Change in nomenclature and geography

produces a sense of estrangement in Jasmine, an integral consequence of her fluid identities.

Jasmine is a saga on how an Indian immigrant woman in America by way of assimilation

and acculturation can create an identity that is constantly evolving, being open to change and

perpetual motion.

Jasmine’s tale begins in a small Punjabi village named Hasnapur in India, where she

is Jyoti, a very bright girl defiant in spirit. Jyoti marries Prakash at the age of fourteen and

being a modern progressive man he rechristens her as Jasmine to wipe out her feudal past.

Jasmine was shattered by the unexpected death of her husband due to a terrorist bullet. In

order to fulfil Prakash’s dream and to perform ‘Sati’ as a dutiful Indian wife, Jasmine

migrates to America which triggers her transition from a modern city girl in Jullundur to an

illegal immigrant in the US.

On reaching America, Jasmine was molested by Half-Face, the scarred white captain

of the ship in which she was smuggled into America. She kills her violator like Kali from the

Indian mythology. At this juncture the kind Quaker lady Lillian Gordan comes as her

saviour; she renames her as Jazzy and helps her adaptation into the new environment. In due

course Jasmine becomes Jase and falls in love with Taylor in New York where she is a nanny

to Duff. She leaves him in fear when she spots Prakash’s assassin Shikwinder, and on her

way encounters Mother Ripplemayer, the Iowa counterpart of Lillian Gordan. Jasmine got a

job in her son’s bank and in six months became his live in companion Jane with their

adopted son Du. The novel ends when Jasmine leaves Bud to joinTaylor on a Californian

adventure despite being pregnant with Bud’s child, “greedy with wants and reckless with

hope”(Jasmine: 241).

The performance of immigrant identity is mapped through violence and disintegration

in Jasmine. Jasmine regenerates through violence in the novel. The death of her father,

Masterjee and husband in India, her rape by Half-Face and her murder of him, meeting with

Shikwinder Singh while at Taylor’s place, the unexpected paralysis of Bud’s leg in a

shooting incident and Darrel’s suicide when she lives as Jane Ripplemayer, are all evidences

for the physical, psychic and emotional turmoil that she had undergone in her various

transformations.

The fluid identities portrayed in Jasmine are unfinished as the protagonist

metamorphoses her selves constantly, ferrying between multiple identities in different spaces

and at different times. Jasmine’s navigation through various locations influences her

formation of new identities, as she reinvents her identity from the multiplicity of

consciousness created out of these change in perceptions. Her change of name with the

change in location becomes the metaphor of an immigrant woman’s process of uprooting and

re-rooting. “How many more shapes are in me, how many more selves, how many more

husbands” (Jasmine: 215). What she becomes next remains uncertain as hers is not a world

of fixities and certainties. Jasmine takes several births and lives centuries of history in a life

time, as for her it is the journey of her inner self towards a higher plane.

Repercussions of the Gramscian idea of “complicity” can be seen in Mukherjee’s

Jasmine. Here colonial domination is being legitimised by the mutual consent of the

coloniser and the colonised and by instilling the feelings of shame and self-hatred in the

psyche of the colonised. Jasmine's choosing of the sophisticated American life over so called

“tyranny” of Indian feudalism demonstrates the same. Her transformations are her response

to the dominant culture as she enacts the expectations that others have for her and recreates

her selfhood in their image and fantasy. Jasmine subverts and participates in the hegemonic

notion of immigrant identity in attaining her selfhood.

Transition of Jasmine is from the old world ethics of submission, helplessness and

doom to the new ethics of adventure, risk and transformation. “I changed because I wanted

to…. I bloomed from a diffident alien with forged documents into adventurous Jase”

(Jasmine: 185). According to the critic Jennifer Drake, Mukherjee’s Jasmine undergoes a

“recolonial” process where she has to shuttle between identities and mimic the role of an

ideal immigrant to recast her identity (79).

Adrienne Rich perceives the violence of cultural assimilation in the following way,

“in their quest of a ‘middle-class standard life’, non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants are

conditioned to change your name, your accent, (not to) make trouble, defer to white men, and

be ashamed of what you are” (qutd in Gurleen Grewal, 191). It is true with Mukherjee’s

Jasmine as she passes through a series of incarnations, and in each birth there is a mixed

feeling of fear, anger and confusion.

From Jyoti the village girl in Hasnapur, to Jasmine the city woman, to Jazzy the

undocumented immigrant, to Jase the Manhattan nanny, to Jane the Iowan woman who

narrates the story, the ‘J’ will represent the element of continuity within transformation. As

Elizabeth Bronfen in her “A Sense of Strangeness: The Gender and Cultural Identity in

Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine” writes, “this ‘J’ serves as a signifier for the dialectic of a

progressive engendering of identities as these bar any already existing identities, putting

them under erasure without consuming them”(79). Jasmine creates a new identity for every

new situation; at the same time she juxtaposes in her memory each of her identities implying

that she evolves and revises her past in articulating her identities.

Like a Phoenix Jasmine invents and re-invents herself by taking new ideas, skills, and

habits and by transcending her origins. Her transformations are the fruition of the fluid

interaction between traditional values and modernity; and in procuring the same she sways

between her past and her present. Jyoti becomes self assured emancipated American woman

Jane through an array of traumatic experiences and each phase in her life takes her a step

closer towards the affirmation of selfhood. Cultural fusion proves beneficial in rebuilding

Jasmine’s self as she metamorphoses herself frequently escaping anchoring to a final

selfhood. So Mukherjee’s Jasmine is a true testimonial redefining the immigrant identity and

metamorphosis of self of its heroine Jasmine.

Works Cited

Akila, D. “Quest and Disappointment for Self-identity through Migration: A Study of Select

Novels of Bharati Mukherjee” in Voices of the Displaced Indian Immigrant Writers in

America. Ed. Madurai: The Madura College, 2011. Print.

Bronfen, Elizabeth. “A Sense of Strangeness: The Gender and Cultural Identity in Bharati

Mukherjee’s Jasmine”. Baetyl 2(1990): 79. Print.

Drake, Jennifer. “Looting American Culture: Bharati Mukherjee’s Immigrant Narratives”.

Contemporary literature 62(1999): 60-80. Print.

Grewal, Gurleen. “Born Again America: The Immigrant Consciousness in Jasmine” in

Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Emmanuel S Nelson. New York:

Garland, 1993. Print.

Mishra, Lata. “Representing Immigration through the Logic of Transformation: Bharati

Mukherjee’s Jasmine” in Critical Studies on Contemporary Indian English Women

Writers. Ed. K.V Dominic. New Delhi: Sarup Book Publishers, 2010. Print.

Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine. New York: Grove Press, 1989. Print

Nair, Rama. “The Concept of Identity in Indian Immigrant Women in America: A Literary

Perspective” in Studies in Post Colonial Literature. Ed. M.Q Khan and Bijay Kumar

Das. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2007. Print.

Ponzanesi, Sandra. “Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine: The Exuberance of Immigration, Feminist

Strategies and Multicultural Negotiations” in Studies in Indian Writing in English. Ed.

Rajeshwar Mittapalli and Pier Paolo Piciucco. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2001.

Print.

Vidhya, R and S Sangeetha. “ Socio-Realism in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine” in Studies in

Post Colonial Literature. Ed. M.Q Khan and Bijay Kumar Das. New Delhi: Atlantic

Publishers, 2007. Print.

Healing Through Creativity in a World of Hurt: The Traumatized Child in Dorothy

Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina

Rubeena S.

Associate Professor of English,

MSM College, Kayamkulam

Psychic trauma involves intense personal suffering which could affect human

consciousness. The symptomatic aftermath of trauma poses acute problems for

representation and understanding. Case histories of medical professionals are no longer the

only source of studying trauma. As literature lends itself to find new ways of exploring the

inaccessible and the incomprehensible, fictional narratives have taken an important place in

illuminating the personal and public aspects of trauma. Firsthand, comprehensive records of

trauma are pursued by trauma survivors themselves who have found previous discursive

strategies for containing trauma inadequate. These self-authored texts not only offer

individual internalized responses to traumatic conflicts but also the defensive strategies

adopted for survival.

An American writer, speaker, and member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers,

Dorothy Allison has declared her works to be self- representational where she strives to tell

her own story in a discourse that transcend generic distinctions. Issues of incest and rape,

salvation and redemption, and the emotional bond between mother and child form the main

themes of her work. The collection of essays she published between 1988 and 1995 records

instances of child hood sexual abuse suffered at the hands of her stepfather. InBastard Out of

Carolina (1992), Allison illustrates the trauma of incest and illegitimacy by fictionally

reconstructing the physical, emotional and sexual assault she had already referred to in her

non- fictional pieces.

For the survivor of childhood abuse, the response to overwhelming trauma in the form

of narrative is actually a sort of mental escape, therapeutically healing. Very often, The

victim is silenced by the thought that the revelation of the crime may become catastrophic for

self and others, which leads to the segregation of memories in the mind that believes that

articulation will never be possible.As Allison unravels the effects of abuse on the inner

psyche of a child, creativity is used as a means of healing, to speak out to the world of that

which had been hitherto hidden and to find solutions to prevent such tragedies. The book

offers itself as a testimony to the fact that child abuse, rape and molestation are not isolated

incidents to be hushed up, but demanding attention to a number of familial, social and

psychological issues at stake.

The conditions governing recollection and retelling of sexual trauma are related to

larger social and political circumstances because cultural models influence what is socially

possible to speak of and what must remain hidden and unacknowledged. Instances of

childhood abuse are often not exposed because they pose threat to current social and political

arrangements. The excessive importance given to conventional morality and family structure

and the belief that the family should be held together at whatever cost also have dissuaded

women and children from testifying against these crimes. The insensitivity of the police to

such crimes and the lack of enthusiasm to bring the perpetrators before the law have also

worked to dissuade the victims from seeking public redressal.However the rise of feminist

movements, the work of social activists, media presentations, shifts in public attitudes and

juridical practices have now become instrumental in encouraging victims to speak out and to

remove the stigma associated with abuse and rape.

The text of Bastard out of Carolina, as unfolded through the child narrator Ruth Anne

Boatwright, the illegitimate child of a fifteen year old waitress, powerfully describes the

feelings of an abused child by connecting incest and illegitimacy. Bone, as she is addressed

in the novel, struggles to hide the fact from her mother and other relatives, mainly because

she sympathizes with her mother who pines for love and a happy family life, after being

disowned by the man who fathered her child at fifteen and widowed by the man who legally

married her at nineteen. Recognizing Anney’s need to have Glen, “like a starving woman

needs meat between her teeth” (41), Bone states in the novel that, “more terrified of hurting

her than of anything that might happen to me, I would work as hard as he did to make sure

she never knew” (118). Her powerful feelings towards her mother give her the will to endure

her suffering, but as she reaches the age of ten, Daddy Glen’s abuse become too regular, that

she sincerely wishes her mother would leave him. “I did not know how to tell anyone what I

felt, what scared me and shamed me …” (109), aptly conveys the inability of the child to

comprehend what has occurred and the lack of appropriate language in her to report the

crime of incest. This gives a crushing blow to her identity and emotional development and

instills in her a deep sense of self-hatred and self-contempt. As trauma works to subvert the

‘self’ when the victim is silenced, Bone’s instincts to hide the abuse causes the fragmentation

of her personality.

Guided by the Boatwright family attitude that “men could do anything” (23), and that

women should tolerate, Bone develops the view that she should submit to the patriarchal

dictates of Daddy Glen. Glen, the stepfather, not only manipulates and controls her sexually

but also makes her a psychic hostage and leads her to believe that his acts are punishments

for wrongs she has committed. The shame of being born a bastard, attenuated by Glen’s

degradation of her and the mother’s failure to recognize the severity of abuse are factors that

work to a gradual loss of self- respect and emotional withdrawal in Bone. Analyzing the

effects of abuse on the state of mind of such children, psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman,

whose clinical work and research focus on victims of domestic and political trauma, observes

in her book Trauma and Recovery:

The child entrapped in this kind of horror develops the belief that she is somehow

responsible for the crimes of her abusers. Simply by virtue of her existence on earth,

she believes that she has driven the most powerful people in her world to do terrible

things. Surely, then, her nature must be thoroughly evil. The language of the self

becomes a language of abomination (105).

This is precisely what Bone feels when she confides, “I lived in a world of shame. I

hid my bruises as if they were evidences of crime I had committed. I knew I was a sick

disgusting person” (113). She blames herself for her victimization, experiences acute self-

hatred, shame and humiliation, and thinks of herself as a dumb and ugly white trash girl,

“born to shame and death” (206).

Studying the effect of shame on the stigmatized individual, shame theorist Michael

Lewis points out in his work, Shame: The Exposed Self, that children raised in a shame-filled

environment by shame-prone parents, “are likely to learn to experience shame through

empathic shame induction” (113). As a member of the disgraced and discredited Boatwright

family and the mother of an illegitimate child, Anney is marked as a socially undesirable,

tainted woman; her social stigma affects and infects her daughter. Bone is marked as the

embodiment of her mother’s shame by being designated as a certified bastard by the state of

South Carolina and the family stories about her father also representing her as white trash.

The term “trash” means “social waste and detritus” and invokes long standing stereotypes of

poor whites.

A study conducted by the Ministry of Women and Child Development in India finds

that mostly children on the street, at work, and in institutional care reported the highest

incidence of sexual assault. This goes in accordance with Judith Herman’s statement that

psychological trauma is an affliction of the poor. In Bastard out of Carolina, poverty

becomes a crucial element in the lives of both mother and daughter for the trauma they

endure. Openly admitting the fact, “We were trash” (29), Allison writes of herself in her

collection of essays titled,Skin:

I have known I was a lesbian since I was a teenager, and I have spent a good twenty

years making peace with the effects of incest and physical abuse. But what may be

the central fact of my life is that I was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina,

the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family, a girl who

had left the seventh grade the year before, worked as a waitress, and was just a

month past fifteen when she had me (14- 15).

As Bone finds herself being increasingly labelled as “trash” by Glen’s family, school

mates and others, the word tears at her and when her mother tells her not to make Daddy

Glen angry by being so stubborn, Bone reminiscences:

It was nothing I had done that made him beat me. It was just me, the fact of my life,

who I was in his eyes and mine. I was evil… of course I was. I admitted it to

myself, locked my fingers into my fists and shut my eyes to everything I did not

understand (110).

She considers herself as the family scapegoat and thinks that she is blameworthy, by

doing wrong and encouraging Daddy Glen to punish her. Extra- conscious of the shame she

carries with her, Bone perceives herself as evil, defiled, unworthy of love and affection and

develops thoughts of guilt, helplessness,all of which are indications of the traumatized

psyche.

Glen, who has been slighted in his own family has married Anney, just for shaming

his daddy and considers her bastard daughter as merely a “bone” in his hands. Bone’s body

bears ample proof of the stepfather’s attack as it carries wounds and bruises not likely to be

found in a child of her age. The mother, though is angry with Glen over the issue, believes

Glen’s words of love for her and how he has been provoked by Bone herself, hides the fact

from even immediate family members. This adversely affects Bone who does not want to

disclose it even to Aunt Ruth who asks her as explicitly as she can, or to the county doctor

and sheriff, whom she comprehends to be only replicas of Daddy Glen, who profess love but

act otherwise.

Familial abuse, as Laurence J.Kirmayer argues in the article, “Landscapes of

Memory: Trauma, Narrative and Dissociation”, presents the child with the added problem of

integrating contradictory images of the aggressing parent as also loving and kind and of the

non- aggressing parent as failing to protect and colluding with abuse. Dissociation provides a

strategy for managing the intense dissonance created by this contradiction (195). As Glen

strengthens and establishes his hold on the family by stating that Anney and the girls are all

“mine” (36), Bone’s trauma becomes all the more “unspeakable”. Terrified and unable to

speak of the crime of incest committed on her, she begins to encounter symptoms of

traumatization such as fragmentation of the self, feelings of anger, revenge,

uncertainties,disappointment and loss of emotional bond with even people closest to her.

Once when she sees Aunt Ruth and Uncle Earle hugging tightly, she wonders whether she

could do the same to Reese, her sister. The words, “It made me jealous, made me wish I was

part of that embrace, that generation, as quick to yell and curse as to cry and make up” (129-

30), reflect the intense craving for being loved and accepted in the family. This is reiterated

in her wanting “to be a gospel singer and be loved by the whole world” (141), which she

clearly knows to be nothing short of a miracle to happen.

Bone’s attempts to find redemption in religion and gospel music, her complex sexual

fantasies, bizarre tales of violence, fantasying alternate lives are all efforts to defend herself

and break out of the trauma. Her fantasies allow her to make up imaginary victories against

her stepfather. She fantasizes about fire, of taking revenge on Daddy Glen and wishes for the

apocalypse to come down on him. She particularly identifies with Shannon Pearl, a school

friend who is albino, hence ridiculed and isolated by other school mates and feels towards

her, “a fierce and protective love as if she were more my sister than Reese” (156). The

women in her stories break free of gender confinement and ride motorcycles, set fire to

houses, exemplifying the hidden wish in her to move out of the patriarchal authority and help

conquer the fears within her.

The mother’s passivity already adding to her sense of being betrayed, Bone is totally

devastated at the end of the novel when her mother decides to remain with the man who has

raped her even after witnessing the rape. The intensely moving declaration in Skin, “I knew

there was one story that would haunt me until I understand how to tell it- the complicated,

painful story of how my mama had and had not saved me as a girl” (34) is attempted

narration in Bastard Out of Carolina where Allison portrays Bone’s complete estrangement

from the mother in the closing pages of the novel. Here we come across one of the most

poignant and disturbing scenes in the whole novel for it falls below the preconceived notions

of motherhood and produces outright hatred in many readers. A child looks upon its mother

as saviour and protector, but in the case of Bone, the absence of maternal help aggravates the

trauma. Anney has been a good mother to Bone in all other aspects, even teaching her polite

manners, good behaviour and moral values.

Anney’s decision to remain with Glen even in the most extreme circumstances leads

us to connect it with other socio- economic factors that women find themselves entangled in

the ignominious attitude adopted towards unwed mothers, familial honour, economic

security and so on. The child living in an incestuous household finds no way but to silently

suffer abuse perpetrated from the family member. In the case of Bone’s family, Glen is more

dispossessed than Anney. He is a liability than a source of support. But Anney, though she

knows well that she has erred in marrying him, sticks on to Glen out of shame of bearing

Bone illegitimately. She believes that a husband can remove the taint of illegitimacy thrust

on her daughter. For Bone, on the other hand legitimacy as inscribed in the birth certificate

Anney finally gives her cannot compensate for the abandonment by the mother or the rape by

her stepfather. However the final rape also determines her fate to break away from the

mother and stay with Aunt Raylene which is important to her own healing. The words, “my

mama has abandoned me and that was the only thing that mattered,” (302) give the

impression of the rape to be less traumatizing than the mother’s betrayal.

The self-created horror stories that Bone tells herself and others not only help her to

reconnect socially but also as Laurie Vickroy observes in Trauma and Survival in

Contemporary Fiction,“represent a potential creative life that might arise out of trauma and

violence” (158). Taking her model from Aunt Raylene who acts as a surrogate mother to her,

Bone realizes that pursuing her creative abilities and transforming nightmares into narratives

could work in emotional survival and in the healing and displacement of trauma. Daddy

Glen, the object of trauma had so effectively immobilized the subject through shame and

terror that Bone says of her silence in the novel that “He never said “Don’t tell your mama”

He never had to say it. I did not know how to tell anyone what I felt, what scared me and

shamed me…” (108- 9).

Narrative has now given her the freedom to expose the child in her who suffered

silently and reconstitute the self diminished by loss. It offers a platform for the articulation of

painful truths, once repressed and found unspeakable, and of the anguish, uncertainties,

defenses, disorientation and terror accompanying trauma .When creativity lets out the truth,

the dissociated self could work towards a reconstitution and identification with those who

have silently endured abuse.

Karin C Meiselman in her work, “Resolving the Trauma of Incest: Re-integration

Therapy with Survivors,” reports that the increase in divorce and stepfathers in the present

times has heightened the risk of intra-familial sexual abuse of girls (16-17). The alarming

rise in divorce rates and co-habitational relationships becoming popular nowadays, there is a

growing number of families which include step parents, half- sisters or half- brothers, which

raises long standing questions of how women and children cope in such households. Women

face many barriers to uncovering the reality of abuse in family units. Narrative fiction has

certainly enlightened us in this respect.

A trauma narrative aims to represent the plight of a person struggling to make sense

of an overwhelming experience in a particular context.Allison’s text, while dealing with the

trauma of child abuse, goes beyond the task of presenting trauma as mere subject matter or in

characterization, but incorporates the very nature of the traumatic experience within the

structure of and consciousness of the text. It holds at its centre the re-constitution and

recuperation from the traumatic experience, thus becoming both personally and socially

reconstitutive. The sad fact remains that the United States is one of the three countries that

has signed, but not ratified the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Child, the

international treaty that legally obliges states to protect children’s rights. In our own country,

there were no specific laws on child abuse till theProtection of Children against Sexual

Offences Act, 2012 was passed in the Indian Parliament in May 2012.

Works Cited

Allison, Dorothy. Bastard Out of Carolina. New York: Penguin, 1992.

------. Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature. Ithaca, New York: Firebrand,1994.

Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: Basic Books: New York, 1992.

Kirmayer, Laurence. J, “Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative, and Dissociation.” In

TensePast: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory.Ed. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek.

NewYork: Routledge, 1996.

Lewis, Michael. Shame: The Exposed Self. New York: Free Press, Simon and Schuster,

1995.

Meiselman, Karin. C. Resolving the Trauma of Incest: Reintegration Therapy with Survivors.

San Francisco: Jossey, 1990.

Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Virginia: Univ of Virginia

Press, 2002.

Mysteries of Motherhood: A Reading on Kyung-Sook Shin’s Novel

Please Look After Mother

Harsha Viswanath

Assistant Professor of English,

M.S.M. College, Kayamkulam.

Korean Literature has a history of about 3,000years. The earlier works were in

‘Hanja’, that is a language using Chinese characters. Later, by 1440, a phonetic Korean

alphabet, ‘Hangul’ was created. Classical Korean literature had its root in traditional folk

beliefs and tales. Modern literature is often linked with the development of Hangul. Korea

was under the imperial Japanese rule from 1910. During this period, the Korean literature

was influenced by the Japanese literature. Literary magazines that appeared during1920s and

1930s laid a foundation to the modern Korean literature.

The strengthening of ideological coercion by the Japanese government led to

suppression of intellectual minds. Immediately after the II World War, at the Potsdam

Conference, the Allies decided to divide Korea. The Koreans were not consulted while

taking the decision. Finally the Korean War was waged between South Korea which was

supported by the United States, and North Korea supported by China and Soviet Union. The

Korean War led to the development of literature centered on the wounds and chaos of war

and tragedy. By1970s the influence of western modernism was evident due to rapid

industrialization. Until 1980s Korean literature was largely unknown outside the country.

Increased popularity of Korean films led to mass interest in Korean translated works.

Kyung –Sook Shin’s novel Please Look After Mother, reveals the emergence of a

post-war metropolitan society and the sobering account of a vanished past. It is a moving tale

of a family’s search for their mother Park So-nyo, a hard-working illiterate rural mom, who

goes missing amid the crowds of the Seoul station subway. She acts as a link between the

ghosts of the past and the conscience of the present. Through the piercing voices of a

daughter, son, husband and mother, the novel brings forth the multidimensional perspective

of Mother not only as a motherly figure but also as a wife, an aunt, a woman and a human.

Until her disappearance, Mother is taken for granted; her individuality is lost in the concerns

of others. She acts as a sieve for others. Her daughter Chi-hon reflects,

Mother was always Mother. It never occurred to you that she had once taken

her first step, or had once been three or twelve or twenty years old. Mother

was Mother. She was born as Mother. Until you saw her running to your uncle

like that, it hadn’t dawned on you that she was a human being who harboured

that exact same feeling you had for your own brothers, and this realization led

to the awareness that she, too, had had a childhood. From then on, you

sometimes thought of Mother as a child, as a girl, as a young woman, as a

newly-wed, as a mother who had just given birth to you. (27)

Park So-nyo is a mother with high expectations who spends her life feeding and

caring for her children and husband often at the expense of her own needs. Mother’s hands

were always busy sewing, tilling, and knitting, growing sesames, mulberry leaves and

cucumbers. She even bred silkworms and brewed malt. Poverty was the greatest enemy of a

generation torn apart by the Korean War, the basic necessity was sustenance.

When I went to the cellar to get rice for dinner and my scoop scraped the

bottom of the rice jar, my heart would sink: What am I going to feed my

babies tomorrow morning? (65)

Mother’s favourite child is Hyong-chol. He is the first from the family to migrate to

Seoul. Later his sister too joins him. Like the daughter in the novel, Shin too had left her

family behind in Jeolla Province to live in Seoul to earn for her education. The Seoul-bound

train symbolizes the migration of the younger generation. Though illiterate, Mother had a

clear notion about the need of education, she wanted her daughters to get educated and have

a better life. As Simone de Beauvoir points out in her book, The Second Sex, “The prostitute

sends her daughter to a convent, the ignorant woman has hers educated.” Mother’s greatest

expectation was her son, whom she always considered to be ‘important’. Hyong-chol recalls

Mother’s face was always crumpled with fatigue and worry, but when he

studied by reading out loud, the flesh around her eyes became brighter, as if

she had dabbed on powder. (95)

Whenever she visited Seoul, she carried his favourite food. “If she could have, Mom

would have come to see him with eggplants or pumpkins tied to her legs.” Her visits were

always short. Her real reason for leaving was that the children’s city quarters were too small

to accommodate her.

Mother didn’t always suffer in silence. When the irresponsible husband intoxicates

himself in the company of his girlfriend, she walks out of the house. But we find the

sensibility of this woman, when she comes back for the sake of her children and kicks out

her husband and girlfriend. It is the support and affection of Hyong-chol that encourages her.

Mother escapes from the claustrophobic environs by diverting her attention towards her

children. Later, her generous heart is reveled when she forgives him. Carl Jung in his book

Aspects of the Feminine, points out: “it is as though every individual had a specific gravity,

in accordance to which he either rises, or sinks down, to the level where he reaches his limit”

(78). After she goes missing, her husband says to himself, “Your wife, whom you’d

forgotten about fifty years, was present in your heart” (122).

Weeks after her disappearance, her husband discovers that for ten years she has been

giving a substantial amount of money to Hope House, an orphanage. Hong Tae-hee, an

intimate of the Hope House reveals that Syo-nyo donated 450,000 Won to the orphanage

every month. In addition to this, she bathed the children and tended their garden. Her

children sent her 600,000 Won every month, but she spent only for her necessities and

donated the rest. A person’s ethics and character is not tested in good times. It is only in bad

times that a person shows how steadfast she is to her ethics. Mother knows the value of

money as well as the trauma of being left alone and battered. Mother reflects on her

philosophy of life thus, “In my eyes, all the entrances and doors look the same, but everyone

manages to find their way home, even in the middle of the night.” (183)

Mother vehemently opposed the industrial society which she believed to have led to

artificiality and the ‘dehumanization of life and love’. Both her children –her business man

son and her writer daughter neglected her. The daughter remembers that she had only made a

few perfunctory phone calls to her mother; she was too busy with her city life. She

remembers with guilt how her mother had sold her only ring to pay for her tuitions. Mother’s

eyes are constantly compared to that of a cow’s –the silent animal which drains its blood to

benefit others. The compassion inside is reflected through its eyes. The daughter remembers

that Mom’s “dark eyes, which used to be as brilliant and round as that of the cow, about to

give birth,” grew dim with pain as Mom suffers from her splitting headache. It’s later

revealed that Mother suffered from cancer.

The disappearance of Mother eventually becomes a metaphor for the profound sense

of loss experienced by a society that chose to be transposed from an agrarian concreteness to

a hypercompetitive marsh. Shin constantly contrasts Mother’s rural, hands-on, family-centric

life with the modern, soulless urban life that her children have chosen. Shin puts forth a

contemplative question, “Does motherhood mean not being seen as an individual?” In Chi-

hon words, “Mother was the kitchen and the kitchen was Mother.” (58) And we find that,

“… there’s no beginning or end to kitchen work. You eat breakfast, then it’s lunch, and then

it’s dinner, and when it’s bright again it’s breakfast again.” (63)The world of mother circled

around the needs of the family. The most important thing in her life was “eating and

surviving.”(65)

The Korean War and the subsequent migration fueled South Korea’s industrialization,

but at the same time it changed the traditional concept of family life. Shin points out that the

ancestral rites that used to hold families together are neglected if they coincided with the

travel plans of the new fangled city lives. Even Mother is sad to see her children abandoning

the ancestral rites. In the novel, we find Mother making exquisite preparations for the Full

Moon Harvest, a festival in which Koreans traditionally returned to their family home to

honour their ancestors, but later we find her son commenting,

When people started to hold ancestral rites in time-share vacation homes, they

worried whether the ancestral spirits would be able to find them, but now

people just hop on planes. (100)

The children living in the competitive world have less time for their ageing parents.

Many feared taking vacations for the fear of being seen as disloyal to their employers. The

‘missing mother’ is the reflection of an elderly woman’s sense of helplessness at having been

effectively abandoned by their children. Until a generation ago, at least one adult child lived

with parents till their death. But now, there is a growing number of old people who live alone

in their rural villages or in old age homes that are springing across the country.

Late in the book, narrating in her own voice, the spirit of Mother watches her family

and voices her lifelong loneliness and depression and the one secret in her life –her

relationship with Lee Eun-gyu. It becomes evident that every woman transforms through the

unique psychological conflict of being a ‘woman’. Near the end of the book, the writer

daughter character recalls a dream in which her missing mom meets her own mother, i.e., the

protagonist’s grandmother, in the afterlife. She thinks to herself, “Did Mom know? That I,

too, needed her my entire life?”(252) The filial guilt that suffuses the novel is universal.

Works Cited

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Trans. H.M. Parshley. Great Britain: Vintage, 1997. Print.

Jung, Carl Gustav. Aspects of the Feminine. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. U.K: Routledge, 2009. Print.

“Korean War”. The Encyclopedia Americana. 1996 ed. Print.

Millet, Kate. Sexual Politics. New York, Illinois Paperback, 2000. Print.

Shin, Kyung-sook. Please Look After Mother. Trans. Chi-Young Kim. London: Orion, 2012.

Print.

Afghan Landay --- A Voice of Rebellion

Nada Rajan,

Assistant Professor of English,

M.S.M. College, Kayamkulam.

Afghanistan is one of the most patriarchal societies in the world.As in all patriarchal

societies, the women there are oppressed and silenced by the agents of fundamental

conservatism, the Taliban. They are restricted to the most traditional of roles - marrying,

bearing children and running a household - and are kept strictly out of public life. The few

women who dare to enter politics, medicine or other professions face routine assassination

attempts. This incessant misery and repression became evident in literature, primarily

through the medium of poetry.

Afghan ‘women’s poetry’ occupies a unique place in literature. It is one of the

strongest forces of Afghan culture. The major themes dwelt in it are displacement, healing,

and rebuilding. Consequently the poetry is fragmented. Pashtun poetry, a variant of Afghan

poetry, has long been a form of rebellion for Afghan women, belying the notion that they are

submissive or defeated. 

  Landai means “short, poisonous snake” in Pashto, a language spoken on both sides of

the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The word also refers to two-line folk poems that can be just

as lethal. They can, therefore, be called mirrors which reflect the sentiments and passions of

every sensitive pashtoon man and woman. Although men do recite them, almost all are cast

in the voices of women.

Afghan women mainly use the traditional folk form called the landai — couplet that

can “cut like a knife.”  Even shorter than the haiku, this form probably became popular

because of its ease of memorization — which makes sense in a culture where few are

schooled and women are forbidden to write or read poetry.  The women and girls share their

landai when they congregate for chores at the watering hole.

“Every inch of me is covered except my eyes

That way I can speak with more than my mouth”.

“I am shouting but you don’t answer — 

One day you’ll look for me and I’ll be gone from this world.”

“My heart is like a child; it cries,

and demands flowers from a stranger’s garden.”

These couplets, composed of plain, easily understood, yet fluent language, are totally

free of the influence of foreign languages. Although some pashto poems are based on Arabic

prosody, these couplets are not only unfettered by Arabic versification, but are based on a

syllabic-prosody of their own whereof the first line of the couplet has nine syllables and the

second thirteen.

Another exceptional quality of these couplets is that contrary to the general pattern of

poetry in most (landay) the woman addresses the man. This is so because compared to those

of the male the sentiments of the female are more tender, her sorrow more profound and he

voice more sweeter, and that is why the (landay) are more moving in their effects, and the

enjoyment is proportionately greater than that found in conventional pashto poetry.

Similarly every (Landay) couplet can be recited in different ways on different

occasions. To be more explicit, a landay couplet can be sung in different tunes and with

different musical notes on different occasions: in combat and rejoicing, while travelling,

whether inactive or dancing, in travail and happiness, in fact at all times and on all occasions.

This form can be compared to the confessional poetry that emerged in the late 1950s

and early 1960s and is associated with poets such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne

Sexton, and W.D. Snodgrass. The confessional poetry of the mid-twentieth century dealt

with subject matter that previously had not been openly discussed in American poetry.

Private experiences with and feelings about death, trauma, depression and relationships were

addressed in this type of poetry, often in an autobiographical manner. The confessional poets

were not merely recording their emotions on paper; craft and construction were extremely

important to their work. While their treatment of the poetic self may have been

groundbreaking and shocking to some readers, these poets maintained a high level of

craftsmanship through their careful attention to and use of prosody.

Mirman Baheer, Afghanistan’s largest women’s literary society is a contemporary

version of a Taliban-era literary network known as the Golden Needle. In Herat, women,

pretending to sew, gathered to talk about literature. In Kabul, Mirman Baheer has no need for

subterfuge. Its members, more than hundred in number, are drawn primarily from the Afghan

elite: professors, parliamentarians, journalists and scholars. They travel on city buses to their

Saturday meetings, their faces uncovered, wearing high-heeled boots and shearling coats.

But in the outlying provinces — Khost, Paktia, Maidan Wardak, Kunduz, Kandahar, Herat

and Farah — where the society’s membership remains below 300, Mirman Baheer functions

largely in secret. As members of parliament, radio and TV journalists, doctors, teachers and

students, the women of Mirman Baheer Association come from progressive families. All of

them are struggling for women rights and culture, the only means and hope to break the cycle

of poverty and wars that have been ravaging their country for decades. 

Mirman Baheer Association’s members meet every Friday on the last floor of the

Ministry of Culture in Kabul. Middle aged women and young girls meet together to read

their poems, eat cakes and sip tea. Even these relaxed meetings form part of the cultural

struggle that each one of them has to fight every day. Their poems talk about freedom, love

and life, their language is Pashto, the language of the Taliban, a dialect used in parts of

Pakistan and Afghanistan. Love is a sensitive issue in Afghanistan, it’s not always clear if the

poems talk about spiritual or earthly love, but some of these women suffer the consequences

of their transgression of norms and traditions. A girl from Kandahar burnt herself after her

mother discovered some of her poems, which revealed too many details about her

love. Despite the Old Persian tradition, women had been publically banned from poetry.

Most women use pen names to conceal their identity.

Meena, a member of the literary group, had already faced a lifetime of tragedy.

Her fiancée recently died when she was 17, and in accordance with Afghan tradition she

must marry one of his brothers. Writing poetry is the only way she can express her fear and

misery; it has also served as her only means of education since her father pulled her out of

school four years ago. Despite her evident skill, Meena can never share her poetry with her

family for fear of being beaten, and instead she reads it secretly over the phone to the

women's literary group Mirman Baheer. Meena does this at a high risk: if caught by her

family, they would assume she was reading the poems to a lover, and she would

be severely punished. This is a region where honor killings are still practiced.

Mirman Baheer has over 100 members and is Afghanistan's largest female literary

society. Members like Meena who live in rural regions have to participate in secrecy for their

own safety. In Kabul, women can attend without fear, especially since they tend to be

members of the elite, such as academics, politicians, and journalists. The women

share landai, poems of only two lines, which are usually written collectively. Love and grief

are common themes, but landai can be bawdy or tragic: for example, the miseries of marriage

to a much-older husband, or the unending series of wars that have wrecked their nation.   

        The most moving story of all, though, was that of a young woman named Zarmina, who

wrote under the pen name Rahila. Zarmina was being forced into a marriage to a much-older

man instead of the marriage to the young man she loved. Zarmina's family caught her

reading her poems to fellow Mirman Baheer members and assumed she had a lover. Her

brothers beat her and tore up her notebooks. A few days later, Zarmina locked herself in a

closet and set herself on fire, dying in a hospital a few days later. One of the leaders of

Mirman Baheer wrote this landai for her:

"Her memory will be a flower tucked into literature's turban. 

In her loneliness, every sister cries for her." 

      The most tragic aspect of this surrreptitious literary endeavour is that this fate is not

uncommon for young Afghani women. In a nation where 3 out of 4 women are forced into

marriage, and almost all women are married before 16, her story is not uncommon. Zarmina

is unique only in that she had the courage to put her suffering into words.

 The poems themselves are beautiful, but far more impressive is the courage it took to

speak or write those words. We hope that one day these young women will enjoy the

freedom and opportunities as we all do.

Precarious Exigency of the Self in David Barun Kumar Thomas’Rear Entrance.

Asha Balachandran,

Assistant Professor of English,

MSM College, Kayamkulam.

Identity is a multi-dimensional word. In psychology and sociology, identity is a person’s

conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations. The term comes from

the French word ‘identitie’ having linguistic roots in Latin meaning ’the same’. Theorist Eric

Erikson who coined the term identity crises described identity as a subjective sense and an

observable quality of personal sameness and continuity. The formation of one’s identity

occurs through influences and counter influences with significant others who bridle human

life. When the strains produced by them rise to a psychological level human beings suffer

thereby arousing the senses which were in a cloaked state. He starts questioning the futility

of creating nation states and the irrationality of drawing lines which capriciously divide

people when the memories remain united. Identity crises, a pivotal aspect in fiction, enjoys a

defining significance in the thematic framework of Indian fiction and the contemporary

novel has started designing newer identities which are basically fragmented, ruptured and

hyphenated in nature. And as Madalena Gorales rightly says, “the reader is left with an

uncomfortable portrait of identity formation as well as strong sense of instability both

generic and ontological”. This paper tries to bring forth a theoretical perspective upon which

it charts penetrating and captivating facets of identity.

David Barun Kumar Thomas’ debut novel Rear Entrance is knit around the lives and

circumstances of four Indians in Brussels, who visit the British Embassy to obtain visas for

visit, work or holiday in UK. The timeline of the book is two days that spans the interview, a

money laundering scheme, meeting for lunch, a big diplomatic party, the history and

motivations of these immigrants. They hail from different Indian backgrounds and

personalities and the story is weaved around their attempts to get visa, their relationships

with one another during this process which is peppered with a profuse draught of philosophy,

private politics and perspectives of home and West. The first applicant Seetha, a Mylapore

Tamil Iyer software professional, an amateur philosopher and ‘talented writer’ was sent to

Belgium on a work assignment and on the pretext of using the British immigration law which

allows artists and writers to visit Britain without work permit, has decided to return to her

first love, writing. She will try to convince the authority that for writing her first novel she

needs to be familiar with their life, manners, history, places and even look for publishers as

her subject is Britain. The second applicant is Harish, a resident of Belgium for last fourteen

years and along with his Pakistani partner Zulfikar owns an all-night grocery store. He

entered Belgium at the age of eighteen and since then has saved up little money to fulfill a

childhood dream of watching cricket at the Lords. The third applicant is Ratnesh, a

Berhaiyan Bihari, a buoyant incessant talker, who has relished Patna’s central jail and one

who calls himself “a mysterious Eastern rebel”. To experience riches he intends to go to

London as a tourist and later apply for asylum for which a fabricated refugee story of

oppression and misery will make him live forever in Britain. The last applicant Amit, son of

a Punjabi businessman and a nephew of Indian minister for external affairs is a Harvard B

school graduate and is currently on a mission of forming new business contacts. He wishes to

prove his business astuteness to his dogmatic father by coining profitable affairs in Europe.

The visa officer Doug Evans is an unsavory man in whose hands the fate of these

applicants lie. He considers himself the Emperor, the system as a lion and applicants as his

gladiators. The sixth character in the novel is the weighty document- the visa- which as the

author says is the one which “opens the world to you”. The book gives a glimpse of “how

westerners look at us, how we look at them and how we look at each other”. The subtitle as

all is fair in love, war and getting a visa claimed by Ratnesh validates the innumerable ways

people opt for procuring it. The title hints an important factual reality of all visa seekers, who

are desperate enough to experience the ‘Sylvan Paradise’. In the British Embassy front door

entrance is applicable only to British nationals and all other ‘dirty foreigners’ can use only

the rear entrance which implies that others are not welcomed heartily. Still these ‘misguided

souls’ are not deterred to visit and are inclined to gather their intelligence, understanding ,

presume a conduct suited to appeal, assert and appease for obtaining a visa which reinstates

the subtitle. People go to fulfill their dreams and aspirations but end up losing their self as

they scud between endless pains.

In a visa office, the hall would be crowded with worried visa seekers of all shapes, sizes,

hues and odours who are eager to encounter long lines, cold procedures, indifferent officials

and a long verification process. The interview would be conducted in a sound proof padded

cell so that the outside world is unaware of the anger, frustration and dilemma that a hapless

applicant undergoes. Even the washrooms are locked though all these ordeals make them

wait more in the ‘temple of justice’. The visa seekers are mostly Negroes and Indians who

are vexed with their spatial and temporal relationships and hence are willing to face

menacing disturbing snarls from the authorities resulting in identity crises.

Identities are too intricate to be seized by notions that depend on boundaries for allusions.

Instead they effuse over the boundaries thereby reminding the limits that these borders

invoke. According to Sylvia Seultermundl “such identities are not unified or stable but are

fluid entities which constantly push at the boundaries of the nation state thereby redefining

them and the nation state simultaneously”. They experience not only the impact of social and

material realities but also the choice of how a person imagines himself. The former gives an

account of the realities that result from existing power relations and their impositions on the

individual - referred as ascribed identity and the latter deals with the self determination and

agency of every individual. In the same way the protagonist Seetha also suffers unexpected

confusion as she is hopping dangerously between two personas- one mundane and the other

exotic – one ascribed and the other imagined with slivers of reality: One, the IT specialist

and the other a recognized philosophical writer. She admits that it is not easy to change

personas and often difficult to live a lie.

As M. Sarup rightly says that “identity is a process of identification and is constantly in

process” thereby making it a refined discourses between the self and the other. Man is driven

by cognizance of the self and an empathy with the other self which highlights recognition of

the distance between who you are and what you want to be. In this process identities cannot

be fixed and they start shifting, becoming plural and even contradictory. Like in times of

crises Seetha thinks of India when she walks on a deserted street looking for help though

hesitant but if in Madras she would ask without a second thought. Ratnesh admires the agile

Indians rather than slow European minds but hates the white collar jobs administered by the

higher castes prevailing in Bihar. He wants to marry a young girl from India though he

always maintains a “jaunty, cocky alley cat style” to impress western women.

Sylvia claims that fluid identities brings forth two modes of belonging- politics of motion

and politics of longing – which mutually inform each other and thus offer a sense of the

complexity of the politics of identity in a global context. At surface level the two modes refer

to diverse spaces of mobility one more vigorous and the other more static. This article

elucidates how they equally elicit the ongoing identity discussions the novel provides.

Let us examine the first mode- politics of motion. The author claims that for a migrant, to

adapt to and find a niche in his new country is his major concern. He has a composed

willingness for adjustments and humiliations in his devious expedition from business or

student visa to work permit to permanent resident to citizenship. With these experiences he

looks at home in a sense of pride and pity. Here in the novel we witness the characters

muster strangeness towards Indian mannerisms and compare it with sophisticated

Westerners. Seetha too appreciates the uninterested quick glances of the West rather than

Indian’s open mouthed deferential stares. She knows that Luc views India as exotic and other

worldly for its traditional activities with a vacuous craven experience while she herself is

apprehensive of the “dirt, squalor and desperative poverty” of India. Harish dislikes the way

Indian people watch cricket as they celebrate angrily. He prefers the Brits who enjoy in a

formal and polite manner. He dons a second hand overcoat discarded by Belgian bourgeois

and is always accustomed to using all mechanical options outside his house. Amit who

belongs to the cream of Indian diaspora laughs at the literal translation of English by Indians

when he is in company of polished and suave Indian friends.

The back home Indians’ chaotic dirty corrupt society is replaced by his clean and ordered

society. Though a Western tourist accepts the differences as part of the Indian experience, an

immigrant feels as an Indian and has a right to criticize. Ratnesh dislikes the burgeoning

middle class- thin slice if Indian IT professionals because they never help others unlike

working classes who are more helpful and welcoming. Being a victim of both vicious

ideologies- capitalism and Brahmanical ideology of India, he escaped from the most run

down state Bihar to experience the world.. Working class Indians do not socialize with

Westerners as compared to professionals. They live in Indian ghettoes and their interaction

with westerners is solely official. In the novel Ratnesh garners a special hatred for all

Pakistanis like most north Indians and dislikes Muslims whom he calls “circumcised men”.

An Indian immigrant shows an unabashed priority for whites rather than blacks. Negro or

Arab friends are definitely discouraged. We also notice that they have grey and uneven

complexities. Seetha reflexively moves from East Europeans and Third world or thirdness.

Though she is proud to be an Indian she wishes to settle down in the West. She also claims to

soak in England though she is upset with the “absurd visa rules, locked toilets, rear entrances

and pompous officers” at British Embassy. She is not ready to help those needy Indians

ready to take revenge on them.. She agrees that Europeans easily fall prey to mock plays of

Indian godman/godwoman their law was always “unforgetting and unforgiving” unlike India.

The second mode, politics of longing can be traced in all diasporic works. It is true that

one realizes the importance of identity only when it is in question or when it is different from

others and hence he wishes to assert it. In a foreign land one would affirm one’s identity in

one’s own community and one’s home, in food, music religious practices and even in

humour. We see Harish hiding the framed photo of Lord Hanuman from his customers in the

shop. Seetha too wishes to open a South Indian restaurant in Brussels after becoming a

famous writer where poets would read poetry on Friday, listen to live Carnatic music on

Saturdays and waitresses would be in kanjeevaram sarees. The cook of Deputy Chief

Mission of Indian embassy was once arrested for wearing a dhoti while going on a morning

walk and for ‘flashing’ in wind. One rightly says, some habits die hard and the West is

obsessive about their rules. In high profile parties Indians would be keen to listen to the

Indian classical music. Even Ratnesh thought that the Indian culture of taking care of parents

made lonely people a rarity in India which was however alien to the West. The diaspora

discern the West to be a man’s desirable place yet in conversations they would yearn about

India, its ardour, its colours, sights and smells, its pristine culture and its wisdom. Harish

misses the clamor, simmering summer heat, smell of fermenting sugarcane in crowded bus

stops of Haryana. Seetha misses the cool Chennai mornings and is also concerned with the

tiny Indian flag on her office table. Seetha and Amit have long conversations on Indian

philosophy and take keen interest in involving others too in their talk. The notions of

nostalgia for the nativeland and the interplay of relationships are moulded by the

protagonist’s cravings: “The need for homeliness is challenged by a complex array of issues

related to migration, roots and belonging”. It connects individual experiences of the

characters to broader portrayals of the communality of racial identity.

Due to globalization racism may not be that intractable but it has obviously increased the

problems of the inner human condition which still plague the diasporic community. Owing

its genesis to the ideological East-West conflict, the migrant becomes a victim of psychic

loneliness which sprouts from the mysticism of varied cultures. The notion of home and

family differs from culture to culture and this difference is not cardinal but superficial. The

climax of the novel exposes how loneliness reinvents the umbilical relation of Seetha to

home heedless of life abroad, which in turn has become a necessity. This sense of otherness

is a phenomenon of spasmodic routing steered by incidental and transitional situations. Such

subtle and unpredicted transitions redefine the identity of individual. The novel also projects

a discord between individualistic forces and societal expectations which make the characters

exist in nebulous borderland with quest for coherence. Hence they are poised between

compliance and defiance, passivity and dynamism. This instability contains a possibility of

change though comprehensive and constitutive transformation remains a distant dream.

However in a global platform these newer identities are creating a paradigmatic shift in

people’s understanding of individuality.

Works Cited

Thomas, David Barun Kumar. Rear Entrance. India: Hachette India, 2012. Print.

Schultermandl, Silvia. A fluid Sense of Self:The Politics of Transnational Identity. Berlin: Lit

Verlag Munster, 2010. Print.

Bronley, Royer. Narratives for a New Belonging:Diasporic CulturalFictions. London: edinburg University Press, 2010. Print.

Metamorphoses of the Self in Taslima Nasrin’s Autobiography

Wild Wind: My Stormy Youth

Asha K. Nair.Assistant Professor of English, M.S.M. College, Kayamkulam.

All art involves self projection in some measure. In literature, the writer who chooses

the objective form to create new worlds merges his self so thoroughly in the objective form

that the self is no longer discernible. Writings tend to be expositions of one’s own ego. No

matter what the form may be, the self inadvertently becomes the medium and the centre of

the work. Hence self- portraiture is inherent in all types of literature.

Taslima Nasrin stands out as a great rebel, poet, essayist and novelist of Bangladesh.

She is involved in women’s right movement, human rights movement, secular movement

and feminist movement. Her revolutionary, free atheist thinking has invited the wrath of

fundamentalists and extremists. She is arguably South Asia's most controversial writer who

has dared to speak out against the oppressiveness of the patriarchal system while living in

that society itself, without State or institutional sympathy. Indeed, Nasrin prefers to think of

herself primarily as a social activist, not simply a writer, who has been driven out of her

country because of her continuing protest against the exploitation of women in contemporary

patriarchal society. Her homepage on the Web quotes her as declaring: “Come what may, I

will continue my fight for equality and justice without any compromise until my death.

Come what may, I will never be silenced. My pen is my weapon.”

We get a glimpse of the making of her rebel self through her series of autobiography.

Nasrin voices her personal experiences with its specificities and its often uncomfortable

details. In her autobiography, she transgresses the norms of expression and representation of

the educated Bengali middle class and reveals what lies beneath the family values so clear to

the South Asian patriarchal, patrilineal, patrilocal ethos. She does not hesitate to name the

perpetrators, or to reveal family secrets about the less than perfect relationships within the

circle. By naming actual, living people instead of fictionalising and distancing herself from

her personal experiences, she has explicitly demanded her right to narrate herself into

existence, not simply as daughter, sister, wife, but as person and woman.

Nasrin’s tumultuous youth is delineated in Uttal Hawa (2002). It has been banned in

her own country, on grounds of blasphemy and pornography. Nandhini Guha translated it

into English as Wild Wind: My Stormy Youth (2006). She presents her thoughts in her

teenage days in a very lucid way. The conventional autobiography has a linear narrative that

follows a temporal sequence whose logic is retrospective. The autobiographer always tells

the story of a past, and within that past the linear development of her own existence, her

individual life and the history of her personality. But the narrative pattern of Wild Wind is a

looping one - shifting seamlessly in ever-widening circles between her own life and those of

her parents and those around her. There is no overt comment from the adult narrator, who

simultaneously relives the past and looks back at it with the cool detachment of an observer.

Nasrin had a sheltered existence. She had barriers and wire meshes all around her.

There were prohibitions at every step, denials at every stage. She acquired the strength and

courage to disobey these restrictions through words. Nasrin, like most other women writers

makes most out of her family history.She grew up with much fear, having to keep inside her

heart all her desire for freedom and curiosity for the outside world. She was not allowed to

step outside the house except to go to school or college. Throughout her autobiography she

shows women resisting their marginalization and victimization in all the ways of which they

were capable. Nasrin herself stole money from her brother's pockets to pay for her books and

magazines and for the letters she wrote to young fellow poets whose work she came across.

She in her narrative gives expression to her self, her growing up both as a woman and as a

creative writer. She describes herself as:

You ask me to write, there would be no one as garrulous as me. Come close,

and I would recoil in such a way that you would think the letter writer must be

someone else! I, too, sometimes felt that I the writer and I the living woman,

were two separate individuals. One spread her wings and flew in the sky,

while the other was chained physically and mentally to this earthly world, in

darkness and confined to a closed room. (140)

Poetry was in fact Nasrin’s discovery of her own voice, and the freedom it offered led

her inexorably to Rudra. She was moved by his poetry and began to write to him in secret.

She fell in love with him even before they met, and soon after they did she let herself be

emotionally blackmailed into a secret marriage with him, in spite of feeling no physical or

sexual attraction towards him. She loved Rudra for his words, for his poems, for the syllables

in his letters. Nasrin defied all conventions and got married to Rudra but she kept her

marriage as a secret for almost four years. She had no physical or sexual attraction towards

him. She was in fact unprepared for a sexual relationship at all, for she was enough of her

father's daughter to put her education and her career first. But once he had initiated her into

sex she was overwhelmed by the demands of her own sexual nature. She never hides the

experiences of herself as a female body, but rather celebrates it. Perhaps it was the frankness

of her admission in Wild Wind of her pleasure in her sexual experiences, which she describes

graphically, that made her opponents decide it was pornographic.

Her romantic dreams of love and understanding were rudely shattered by her

marriage. What she actually wanted from him was love and companionship. Nasrin

discovered to her horror that Rudra did not intend to remain faithful to her. In fact, he

repeatedly infected her with venereal disease. He was frequently drunk and drugged and,

above all, he demanded the same kind of control over her life, her money, her mind and her

body that she had seen in her father. She continued to love him, but to be true to herself she

had to break free of an abusive relationship that would in the end destroy her identity. The

pulls and pushes of cultural restrictions, family background and traditions of an orthodox

family have often shaped her feelings and ideas, often confusing, often outspoken, but never

timid and surrendering. She had discovered that her first duty was to herself.

Nasrin has publicly accepted all what she has said in the autobiography. A man/

woman is the byproduct of his/ her life experiences. Why a person acts the way he/ she does

can only be understood by investigating many factors like his/ her cultural, educational and

emotional life. These influences-- social, cultural, literary, political and others- which have

gone into the making of one’s personality must be fully brought out without any

exaggeration or minimalization. Despite the dark shadow cast by familial authority, class

hierarchies and religious bigotry, Nasrin’s memories are not dismal. Her canvas is peopled

with a diversity of colorful characters, anecdotes and passages of pleasure and desire.

Writing for many is a letting loose of their mental agony. Through her

autobiography, Nasrin subverts the conventions of a woman’s autobiography. She shows

how a woman constructed in accordance with the rigid codes of expectations of femininity

can yet deconstruct herself in order to reveal the constructedness of her self. Her fictions too

bear testimony to her rebellious self. The characters seem to be facets of her self. Her novels

– Lajja & Shroud are examples of it.

What has happened to Taslima Nasrin is just what can happen to anyone whose

ambitions have been thwarted by the dictates of religion, the demands of tradition and the

plain disregard forher feelings. Very seldom do we try to probe into the background of a

person and try to find out why he/ she behave this way or that. Such a probe very often

reveals the fact that the social conditions as much as other factors were responsible for his /

her turning into a social misfit. As all writers are looked upon as social misfits, it can be

concluded that all must have had unique experiences throughout their life. These rare

experiences combine with their high sensibility and creative bend of mind results in great

masterpieces which should be eye openers for the succeeding generation. Autobiographical

representation is an act of interpretation, where the lived experience is shaped, constrained

and transformed.

Works Cited

Harish, Ranjana. “My Story”. Women’s Writing: Text and Context. Ed. Jasbir Jain. Jaipur:

Rawat, 1996. 213- 222. Print.

Jain, Jasbir(ed). Women’s Writing: Text and Context. Jaipur: Rawat,

1996. Print.

Nasrin, Taslima. Wild Wind: My Stormy Youth. 2002.Trans. Nandhini

Guha. New Delhi: Sristhi, 2006. Print.

<http://taslimanasrin.com/ index2.html>

<http://www. tribuneindia.com/1999/99novl14/edit.html>

Renovation of female sensibility: Reading Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman

Grisha Anand,Assistant Professor,

M.S.M. College, Kayamkulam.

“A woman should be aware, self-controlled, strong willed, self-reliant and rational,

having faith in the inner strength of the womanhood. A meaningful change can be brought

only from within by being free in the deeper psychic sense”.

The dimensions of the man- woman relation have always been a masculine construct.

Man conveniently subsumes his gender consciousness to project his identity as an individual

and sneaks unabashed after hideous misdeeds. A woman’s life on the other includes multiple

selves that overlie and contradict each other. The mirrors in the male-dominated society

always remind woman about her positions and a thousand diverse relations from which she

gathers the bits and pieces to construct her own self. What distinguishes a female from a

male is her mind–set. A woman is expressive and she possesses an exclusive intuitive

sensibility which permits her to tackle life as it comes. She could succeed in resisting the act

of marginalization and break open the eyes of impassive patriarchal hegemony only through

her writing.The life of a woman is not an episode that could be separated from ‘his’ life. Her

experience does not exist without him. Consequently, when she starts lettering her story, it

turns out to be his story.

Very few female authors have uncovered their experience as females. One’s past

influences one’s experience and mind shapes those experiences. The female writers usually

don’t dare to disclose their experiences in its entirety, the cruelties and unresponsiveness of

their family and society towards them for fear of desolation and defamation. She sustains

many insults and negligence from her own relatives, most heartbreakingly from her parents,

husband, in-laws and children.Though gender bias still remains unsolved, the new age

women succeed in surviving the social power structures and carve an exclusive slot for her in

a male dominated world through creative writing. They make honest attempts to characterize

their identity saying “I am a woman. Manjukapur is an Indian woman writer who limns in

her language, the predicament of the female in a world of masculine hierarchies. An

overwhelming desire for liberated selves and exclusive identity is very much overt in her

women protagonists in this post- modern novel with a conventional thread. In the changing

economical, social, and political context, the question regarding the position of woman is not

restricted within the family or their rights to egalitarianism with men in various aspects of

life. Manju kapur converses about the fluidity of spaces reserved for modern woman in the

contemporary social system. Her female protagonists are educated but realise that their

wings are clipped to restrict movement by the orthodox society. Education strengthens their

liberated thinking but their family and society find them ill fitting to the traditional moulds

for a woman.

In A Married Women, woman is penned as aggressive and unregulated in attitude

towards suffering. The focal theme of this tale is the difficulty of being a woman in the

Indian society and the hassles in identifying genuine love.ManjuKapur is honest in not

offering a rosy picture of her protagonist, Astha, a Delhi-based young woman. Astha gains

her spouse through an arranged marriage. After her marriage, she is made to do the

household duties in the family but crave for emotional involvement. Her circumstances

become a prerequisite for asserting her substantive identity in deeds not in words. The novel

exposes an incorrigible marriage and consequential frustration in the backdrop of political

tumult triggered by the demolition of Babri Masjid. Astha as a married woman identifies

herself with an unpaid servant in the family. The thought of divorce invariably brings an

eclipse of her identity in the socio- economic spheres. She discovers herself only as “A

willing body at night, a willing pair of hands and feet in the day and an obedient mouth.”

Kapur endeavors to undo this conventional concept of women who are meant to get married

and be submissive to their husbands. Astha’s encounter with Peeplika, a social activist,

results in the loss of her faith in the institution of marriage. Driven by this influential

physical relationship, she risks her conventional marriage and safe family life. Astha is seen

as evolving from a cocoon of dependency, emerges as a powerful and strong willed woman

who becomes adept in dealing with a social system, which had once oppressed her. A woman

deserted by all men in her life, Astha remains lonely but strong. She fights her way through

the complexities of the repressive socio- economic tiers of the typical Indian social system.

Accordingly, A Married Woman investigates Astha’s yearning for a purpose in her life

beyond being a wife and a mother which harbours a message of the liberation of a woman

from the stereotypical burdens of the society. Astha is no longer the mother, the wife or the

daughter-in-law but the beloved of Peeplika. Consequently, Astha’s family and society

become intolerant of her and she gets sandwiched between tradition and modernity. This

novel hogs the limelight on the wilful liberation of a woman from the status of slavish

servitude. It becomes the saga of a woman bravely confronting the injustice towards

womenfolk perpetrated by the prevailing system; the genuine assertion of a woman about her

personality cult in the allegory of a bad married life.

Astha and Peeplika rediscover each other. The strength of the bond that exists

between them is great. Both these abandoned women are products of similar circumstances.

Loneliness and memories attach them together. While depicting the love affair between two

women, Kapur pays less attention to the historical and political context in which that

relationship develops but carves the sexual encounters without any literary embarrassments.

Her descriptions are demoralizing and passionate at the same time. The strong will displayed

by the two lonely women Astha and Peeplika, becomes Manju Kapur’s exclusive idiom

communicating that as long as woman has the will to survive and the capability to love she

will remain indomitable. The novel ends on a note of unconvincing compromise as the two

women find their own ways, knowing they cannot have a future together.Astha exhibits a

dedicated effort to mould an identity for herself as a refined woman in flawless surroundings.

Kapur’s protagonist is portrayed as a woman entrapped in the struggle between the passions

of flesh and a desire for political and intellectual interventions. Though gender bias seems

faded out, woman’s emancipation as a true female remains a myth and the battle for asserting

the self continues. The subtlety of a woman’s the inner self finds excellent verbal expression

withKapur who evinces a mature comprehension of the female psyche.

The Trauma of War in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins and Buchi Emecheta’s

Destination Biafra

Shaheen Ebrahimkutty.A.VResearch Scholar,

University of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram.The war has been written and rewritten from different ideological perspectives. War

time brutality and atrocity, such as mass killing, ethnic cleansing, torture, and rape, can also

be psychologically traumatic for both soldiers and the civilians who survive it. The victims

are denied an opportunity to achieve justice or heal their psychological and emotional

wounds. Meaningful recovery by a trauma survivor requires an escape from the private, self-

reflexive view of the traumatic event. But this kind of escape is merely impossible in the case

of African women or men who have been tormented by war.

War is brutal and devastating for both men and women. While men die in glory,

women face physical humiliation before death is meted out. Most often they have to survive

watching husbands die and children starve. Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra is an

attempt to show how a militaristic barrack culture is responsible for creating demeaning

images of women. Political and military power has replaced traditional patriarchy as the

most obvious way for men to exhibit masculinity and masochism. The novel exposes the

hegemony inhehrent in patriarchy and the denial of human status to women. Women bear the

brunt of deprivation and humiliation caused by war while men appropriate its spoils. Women

raise families amidst starvation, disease and death, make uniforms for the army, nurse and

cook for soldiers and get raped and brutalized by them. In the novel Debbie’s maltreatment

at the hands of the soldiers becomes a leit motif for the larger oppression that women are

subjected to in African society.

Trauma theory brings to postcolonialism a concern with denial and survival through

losses. The colonial regime provided Nigeria with training in the game of politics. Buchi

Emecheta depicts women in the traditionally patriarchal world of politics and war, as Debbie

Ogedemgbe, daughter of a corrupt and wealthy father, joins the military, and undertakes a

mission to reconcile two bitter enemies who have plunged Nigeria into a devastating and

brutal civil war. The Biafran war draws both men and women into the militia and the armed

forces, offering women the opportunity to express their androgyny. It is how Debbie and her

close friend Babs Teteku join the army. Their good friend Chijioke Abosi is the only man

who does not laugh at their desire to join the army. Later on when Debbie undertakes a

mission from the Nigerian government to travel to Biafra to persuade the rebel leader Abosi

to end the war, she is not singled out for this task because of her superior diplomatic skills.

She is chosen to negotiate with Abosi solely because he had been in love with her before she

became involved with her current lover, Alan Gray. Emecheta stresses through brutal

reminders, the sexist attitude of Nigeran men who only see Debbie and the likes of her as

objects of sex.

Buchi Emecheta is the most sustained and vigorous voice of direct feminist protest in

contemporary African literature. She explicitly and unequivocally denounces the sexual

status quo. Debbie like Emecheta’s other heroines is determined to overcome the fatal

handicap of the female. She is also the most vociferous and militant of them. Debbie’s

exposure to western education helps her to see beyond tribe and religion. But her country

men are, long divided and exploited by their colonial masters, blinded by the rhetoric of

sucession. Neo- colonial aspirations fuel the delicate ethnic situations and Ibos, Hausas and

Yorubas butcher each other. The political leaders are as corrupt as they come.

War is brutal and devastating for both men and women. Accosted by soldiers from the

Federal forces who don’t really care what her credentials are, except that she is a piece of

female flesh, Debbie is made to suffer physical rape and trauma. Gang- raped by burly

soldiers she also witnesses the inhuman murder of a pregnant woman. Debbie’s mother too

has been raped. Unable to ask her mother the humiliating question, she ironically resorts to

silence. Debbie knows that the traumatic experiences of the night will not be easy to forget.

She does not wish to live after that.

The natural balance between sexes is more disturbed during the wars, when thousands

of men are thrown into one sector of a country and hundreds of towns and villages are left to

women and children only. The permanent threat of death and the cheapened price of life

diminish the sanctity of human values, and at the same time engender a burning desire to

ensure the survival of human life by a crude response to the sex instinct.

Debbie’s commitment to her country and its people, overcomes all personal

considerations. As a soldier she is committed to complete her military task. The colonial

impact, far from liberating African women, only diminished their inalienable rights and

prerogatives. Committed to her mission, Debbie travels across war torn Nigeria. Anger,

suspicion, hatred and mindless vengeance stalk the country.

Debbie is a new kind of woman who does not get devastated by the thought of men

refusing to marry her. The fear of death haunted her Ibo companions and she was concerned

more for their welfare than ever the brutal loss of her chastity. She pleads with Lawal to

spare their lives, but the logic of military vengeance affords no mercy. Though kept out of

active combat, being the weaker sex, women are not spared the untold miseries and the

sufferings consequent of war. Untrained to face the psychological horrors of war, and

socially conditioned to rear children, these women have to take recourse to inner resources in

order to survive and keep their children alive.

For Debbie traumatic reactions occur when action is of no avail. When neither

resistance nor escape is possible, the human system of self- defense becomes overwhelmed

and disorganized. Each component of the ordinary response to danger, having lost its utility,

tends to persist in an altered and exaggerated state long after the actual danger is over.

Traumatic events produce profound and lasting changes in physiological arousal, emotion,

cognition, and memory. Traumatic events may sever the normally integrated functions from

one another. The traumatized person may experience intense emotion but without clear

memory of event or may remember everything in detail but without emotion. She may find

herself in a constant state of vigilance and irritability without knowing why. Traumatic

symptoms have a tendency to become disconnected from their source and to take on a life of

their own.

Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins deals with the genocidal terror of the war after

liberation from colonialism. The novel is distinctive in covering both pre- and post-

independence periods in Zimbabwe. Vera connects personal with collective violence in her

story. The novel graphically confronts the impact of the violent environment on individual

Zimbabweans, and especially on women, who are primarily targeted in atrocious acts of

torture. Vera brings out the terror of the war and the heavy price that women in her culture

have paid in the process. The novel tells of the destruction of a community through the

violation of its women, and how these women survivors find it difficult to get out of the

debilitating situation.

The novel depicts how women’s bodies are made to bear the brunt of national

struggles. During the violent period of Zimbabwe’s early independence, the two sisters

Thenjiwe and Nonceba are raped by an ex-guerrilla combatant, Sibaso. After killing

Thenjiwe Sibaso rapes and mutilates Nonceba, leaving her for dead as he retreats into the

hills of Gulati. That rape functions as a devastating weapon of war is made apparent in the

novel. The novel shows us that rape emerges as an effective political weapon out of a context

that sanctions the subjugation of women, even in times of peace, intensifying a woman’s

vulnerability under a system that does little to prevent it. Through Nonceba’s rape and

Thenjiwe’s murder the story discloses the abject psychological and physical suffering that

women have to endure after violation. Their sufferings are concealed by patriarchal tropes.

The novel does not end in pessimism but with Nonceba’s courageous struggle to find

a voice to speak about her trauma, to find the language for all victims. One witnesses her re-

integration into a social realm, despite her realization that everything has changed, gone, not

to be recovered. She can no longer enjoy the feeling of undifferentiated unity represented by

her bond with Thenjiwe, but must build her future independently. Vera does not claim for

Nonceba a unified subject-position after her trauma, but celebrates her courageous effort to

survive despite the wounds of war which no one can heal.

It is Cephas who brings about Nonceba’s recovery and helps her reintegration into

society. He takes Nonceba away from Kezi to the city of Bulawayo, where citizens are able

to enjoy their freedom. The relationship between Cephas and Nonceba has the promise of

growth and restoration. In the absence of a coercive masculinity, Nonceba is able to embrace

a future, despite the wounds of the past. In the end Cephas also acknowledges that Nonceba

will never completely recover from the traumas of her past. The novel does not give a

simpler alternative for traumas of violation, but it stresses the need for a nation to conceive

of female identity in different ways. It is through the ethical acknowledgement of women’s

brutalization and suffering, and in the respect for their autonomous identities, that Vera

imagines the possibility of both personal and national healing.

Works cited

Emecheta, Buchi. Destination Biafra. London: Allison and Busby,

1982.

Vera, Yvonne. The Stone Virgins. Toronto: Tsar, 2002.

Biswas, Chandrani. Women and War: A Study of the novels of

Emecheta, Ekwensi and Amadi. New Delhi: Books Plus, 1998.

Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.

Chodorow, Nancy. Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. New York:

Vintage, 1989.

Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New

York: Pergamon, 1985.

Emecheta, Buchi. “Feminism with a Small ‘f ”. Criticism and Ideology:

Second Writers’ Conference. Ed. Kristen Holst Petersen. Upsala: Stockholm, 1986.

Forsyth, Frederick. The Biafra Story: The Making of an African

Legend. UK: Pen and Sword, 2007.

Fotion, Nicholas. War and Ethics: A New Just War Theory. New York:

Continuum, 2008.

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence- From

Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic, 1992.

Kulkarni, Harihar. Black Feminist Fiction: A March Towards Liberation.

New Delhi: Creative, 1999.

Phillips, Charles and Alan Axelrod. Encyclopedia of Wars. New Delhi:

Viva, 2006.