Thapa 1

Tribhuvan University

Forgetting the Other: Forget Kathmandu and Palpasa Café in the Light of

Cultural Trauma

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science/ Department of

English, Central College, Tribhuvan University/ in partial fulfillment of requirement for the

Degree of Master of Philosophy (M.Phil.) in English.

By

Prem Thapa

Roll No 3

M. Phil. - III Semester

Department of English/ Central College, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu

July 2011

Thapa 2

Tribhuvan University

The undersigned members of the dissertation committee have approved this dissertation, entitled

Forgetting the Other: Forget Kathmandu and Palpasa Café in the Light of Cultural Trauma

submitted by Prem Thapa to the Department of English, Central College, Tribhuvan University.

Dr. Beerendra Pandey

(Supervisor)

Dr. Sanjiv Upreti

(External Examiner)

Dr. Amar Raj Joshi

(Head of the Deparment)

Department of English

Central College, Kirtipur

Kathmandu, Nepal

Date:

Thapa 3

Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge the critical supervision and inputs of my supervisor Dr.

Beerendra Pandey, who encouraged in choosing the topic and helped me with the

recommendation of reference texts. There is, however, another person, my classmate and friends

for long Mahabir Paudyal, who followed the first chapter and provided some insights during the

research. I am grateful to my supervisor Dr. Pandey and Mahabir for their inputs and insights. I

also wish to thank my friends Dominic Haffner, Gilles Gobbo and Sylvie Orange for sending me

the reference texts when I most needed. Above all, I owe the encouraging moments during

research to Mom, Dad and Brother Raj for asking me if I was ever going to finish the

dissertation.

Thapa 4

Table of Contents

Acknowledgement

Introduction: Books Born Out of War 1-13

Chapter 1. People’s War as Cultural Trauma 14-28

Chapter 2. Othering the Army: Forget Kathmandu 29-49

Chapter 3. Othering the Maoist: Palpasa Café 50-70

Conclusion: Forgetting the Other: Politics of Representation 71-78

Works Cited 79-84

Thapa 5

Introduction

1.1 Books Born Out of War

Every dawn precedes a phase of darkness in natural world. Same thing can be said about

a socio-political change, particularly, when people try to change existing system. A society may

go through a period of chaos, destruction, and uncertainty. Nepal, too, has gone through a period

of conflict before a couple of centuries old monarchy bowed down to the peoples‘ demands for a

republic state. The nation went through an acute pain and suffering material, as well as, cultural

loss. The result it brought is ‗New Nepal‘; the words often used referring to a political change in

2006. However, the nation has yet to promulgate the new constitution in order to institutionalize

New Nepal. In the first part of this chapter, I discuss the conflict scenario and outline some

widely read literary works that the period produced, and move on to the research problem I have

undertaken in this dissertation.

The period of conflict bore tremendous energy of creativity in Nepali writers writing in,

both, Nepali and English languages. A high flow of books swept through the post-conflict Nepal

in response to the suffering and the loss caused by the decade long political conflict with armed

forces backing it. In the year 2004, ―Ramesh Parajuli prepared a bibliography on the Maoist

movement listing over three hundred entries only in English. Numerous other works on the Civil

War have been produced since then‖ (Adhkari and Gautam 3). In order to recap the motivating

source of this huge literary output, I shall, briefly, answer the question: What was the scenario

that bore such an immense creative energy?

It is a well-accepted fact that Nepal have gone through an extreme situation since 1996,

which has left the Nepali society shattered, socially and psychologically, that it may never come

to terms with the loss. Between the year 1996 and 2006 ―about 15,000 people have lost their

Thapa 6

lives‖ (Baral ―Maoist Insurgency‖ 207) and the number of disappearances and the injuries

caused by the conflict has yet to be made public by the government. The rural countryside

suffered the most where the insurgents had their bases. The poor villagers were caught in the

cross-fire between the state security forces and the rebel forces. They were abducted and tortured

in the name of supporting either warring forces. Left with no choices ―the villagers could no

longer live in the villages and fled to safer areas within Nepal or went to India or abroad, seeking

employment‖ (Thapa and Sijapati 170). The countryside witnessed barren villages as mass

migration took place. The villages became empty of youths. There were, hardly, any able

working hands left in the villages. The women were left with little kids and duty to feed and care

them despite the destitution. Thus, women were forced to plough their fields, which until then,

was a cultural taboo. As the internal war escalated, the people suffered a vicious conflict trap as

double victims of the conflict. At first, they were direct victims of the state security forces as

relatives (wife, father, and mother) of the rebel. And, secondly, they had to offer hiding shelter

and food for the rebels at the cost of their own livelihood.

Apart from human loss and suffering, the material loss was immense during the conflict.

The nation‘s infrastructures, for example: bridge, government buildings, offices and industries,

were hit to an irreparable state. Observing the damage caused by the People‘s War, Thapa and

Sijapati, remark: ―The intensity of the violence has extracted a huge material loss for the

country‖ (170). Physical destruction exceeded as the conflict progressed. The survey undertook

by one of the national media houses reported that, by the year 2003 ―The cost of reconstruction

of the development infrastructure that was destroyed by Maoists is estimated at NRs 200 billion‖

(qtd. in Adhikari 61). Thus the people‘s lives were affected individually as well as collectively.

The countryside and its people lived through mayhem caused by the conflict, yet the turmoil

Thapa 7

went almost unnoticed to elites of the center and the world outside Nepal. The report of the

bloody war broke out now and then in newspapers that employed local journalists to report spicy

story of hunger, famine and child-marriage from the faraway hills and tarai. The elites at the

center read the exotic reports at their savory breakfast table. ―During this time, the Kathmandu

establishment did not experience what was happening in the countryside, and those who did have

first-hand experience had no voice in the establishment. Readers had to search hard to find any

reference to the war […]‖ (Thapa ―Future of Nepali Literature‖ 8). Apart from some oblique

news reports, the event remained in local geography and archives of warring forces –the rebels

and the state. It was only after the Royal Massacre in 2001 that the national and international

media came to learn about the deepening of conflict in faraway countryside of Nepal. Moreover,

―International attention on Nepal actually increased with the visit of Secretary of State Collin

Powell in January 2002- the first visit in thirty years of such a high-ranking official of the U.S.

government‖ (Riaz and Basu 154). The visit of the U.S. Secretary was followed by international

institutes, conflict experts and writers. Thus Nepal turned into a site of conflict and trauma for

national and international academics conducting researches. Adhikari and Gautam observe that

―International academia and INGOs working on conflict and development are drawn towards

studying this movement‖ (2), ever since.

It was only during and after the first negotiation period between warring forces that

writers and journalists made their journey to the conflict affected zones. The story began to

unfold at every tea table of literate class of Nepal. What the citizens outside the conflict zone

witnessed was the grotesque images of bloody violence splashed across the TV channels and on

the front page of the newspapers. The conflict continued, from bad to worse, and the texts on the

conflict began to flow in the reading circles. Who wrote about the conflicts were professionals

Thapa 8

and experts working in media house, human rights organization and academia. Some narrated the

story as a news reporter, the other wrote on the insurgency as a part of their research project. Yet,

because these projects are ―Frequently sponsored by donor communities, they have specific

objectives, and are often guided by a pre-existing framework on what to observe, and where.

Gaps thus remain in understanding Nepal‘s political and social problems‖ (Adhikari and Gautam

6).

To understand Nepal‘s political and social problems during the conflict we should look

into the independent works of writers, academics and artists living in the country during the

period, who strongly responded to the conflict through their writing, research papers and works

of art. However, I limit myself in outlining some of the widely discussed books and a play rather

than covering up all the texts produced during and in the post-conflict period.

Among the published works on the insurgency is an anthology of short story, Stories of

Conflict and War (2007), translated and edited by Govinda Raj Bhattarai, which covers stories

by old to young generation of Nepali writers that present the social milieu during conflict from

observers‘ perspective and from sufferers‘ perspective. Written along the same line of style is

Chhapamar ko Chhoro, a collection of short stories by Mahes Vikram Shah, which presents

social realities including the plight and state of society and the people during the insurgency.

Among the written texts Close Encounters (2010) stands apart as the collection prose on

traumatic experience that the author went through during the conflict whilst working for the

human rights issues. The book presents traumatic experiences of the ordinary people whilst

trying to get justice by identifying the perpetrators to the human rights workers. Manjushree

Thapa‘s Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy (2005), is mixture of memoir, history and

journals. It was published during the King‘s direct rule, and faced state censorship for her

Thapa 9

criticism of monarchy and the journal of her trip to conflict zone. First of its kind is, Kunda Dixit

edited, A People War: Images of the Nepal Conflict 1996-2006 (2007) which presents a decade

long conflict in photographs with descriptive and introductory text. The photo-text presents the

mayhem: deaths and destruction caused by the conflict. Among the fictions, Palpasa Café

(2005) by Narayan Wagle stands as having high numbers of readership which is based on

conflict in the Midwest of Nepal and Facing my Phantom (2010) by Sheeba Shan, presents

suffering elite family and changing political and social scenario of Nepal during the conflict.

Among other works, By the Way: Travels through Nepal’s Conflict (2008) is a collection of

travel journal published by Martin Chautari which presents village life from the field during the

conflict. Chhapamar Yubati ko Diary (2010) is also a memoirs by Tara Rai written during her

captive life in the army camp; Karnali Blues (2010), a fiction by Buddhi Sagar; Sapana ko

Sabiti, a play by C.K. Lal and performed at Gurukul, Kathmandu in 2009, in the direction of

Sunil Pokhrel.

These texts are, as mentioned earlier, among the most talked about and hyped works in

media, and in reading public in Nepal regardless of their critical value. The reason for high

number of readership, above all, is that they are based on the conflict or at least they touch the

events in fragments in their presentation. There is no divided view that these texts are the source

of knowledge about the conflict for those readers who did not have firsthand experience. The

knowledge of the event survived in the texts as a memory of those who had directly experienced

it; and those who came to know about it from different sources. As Larry Ray rightly points out,

―Knowledge now inheres not in ‗consciousness‘ but non-linear textuality, discourses, and

electronic archives, film and video‖ (137). Needless to say, text plays crucial role in

disseminating knowledge constructed out of past memory. In the context of media reportage and

Thapa 10

books written on People‘s War in Nepal, reporters and writers seemed to fail in understanding

the impacts of constructed memory in post-conflict society. Professor- philosopher Avishai

Margalit argues that ―Memory breathes revenge as often as it breathes reconciliation‖ (qtd. in

Ray 217). The impacts, they might be positive as well as negative, depend on how those

memories have been stored in texts, monument, and rituals. Any traumatic event, such as Nepal‘s

decade long conflict, that causes personal loss and cultural identity crisis leaves deep wound in

the social psyche. And these ―Personal loss

is shaped by and is located alongside textual memories adapted from school history and

literature‖ (Ray 146).

Yet there is another line of thought that questions the validity of textual construction of

the past memory. The argument is that ―We live in a time, of course, when issues to do with

representation are all the rage. For some, this stems from a postmodernist ‗certainty‘ everything

is just representation and that no judgments can be made about adequacy or inadequacy,

accuracy or inaccuracy, truth or falsity‖ (Livingstone 15). However, we cannot just dismiss the

role of textual knowledge in a society. We don‘t need to imagine an example of how rebels or

religious fighters recite line by line from the text they believe in to justify their violent act, for

they are alive and very much kicking in contemporary societies. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois

observe that ―Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for the mass violence and

genocide‖ (21). Writing on victims of the violence should be consciously checked, so that it is

―not so distance so as to objectify their suffering, and not so close that we turn the sufferer into

an object of pity, and contempt, or public spectacle. We need to avoid the aestheticization of

misery as much as descent into political rhetoric and polemics‖ (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois

26).

Thapa 11

As I have argued earlier the literary production in Nepal has surged up in recent years. It

is said that bad time produce good literature, the conflict in Nepal has certainly played major role

in recent literary output. As cultural critic Beerendra Pandey observes, ―The labor pain for the

birth of New Nepal has given a golden opportunity to the literature, history, and culture of this

country to move away from the focus on the myth(s) to a concentrated attention to the rhetoric‖

(―Towards Culture‖ 4). The recent growth of literature on the decade long conflict in Nepal is a

pointer to the shift away from myths to rhetoric. The recent literary work represents voice of the

people from different socio-political classes, from victims of the social discrimination to the

conflict victims. What is current and alive are the literatures of the rhetoric of pain, of trauma,

and of victimization. However, the pangs of traumatic experience remain, for the wound has not

yet healed. The society is yet to come to terms with the trauma, and no society can move away

from it. The only way to move ahead is to working-through traumatic past by ritualizing the

events, performing them in cultural and textual sphere. In the context of traumatic social milieu,

valorization or demonization of the perpetrators not only obstruct the process of reconciliation,

but also nurtures the germ for the further conflict. It is only through the discourse of pain, of

suffering and of victimhood in the balanced representation we can call for the responsibility from

the victimizers.

It is not an easy task for an author to pave a middle path and empathize with the suffering

of the victims and observe the traumatic event merely as a human being. Neil J. Smelser claims

that ―no traumatic story can be told without tracing the theme of suffering and blame‖ (282). I do

not fully agree with his argument. I share Smelser‘s idea that suffering cannot be avoided in a

traumatic story, but I have a reservation when it comes to blaming. It is possible to write

traumatic story without blaming or glorifying a group or an institution, if the narrator stand as a

Thapa 12

mere human being, resisting all his given identities. In an introduction to collections of Saddat

Hasan Manto‘s short stories, Bitter Fruit, Khalid Hasan points out very issue that in the stories

about partition ―none of the bloody participants is identified by religion because to Manto what

mattered was not what religion people professed, what ritual they followed or which gods they

worshipped, but where thy stood on a human level‖ (xviii). Unarguably, texts are as reliable a

memory store as any other manmade devices in disseminating a story of socio-political conflict

from one generation to the other. As Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois note, the authors writing on

violence should be aware of the fact that ―the text and images we present to the world are often

profoundly disturbing. When we report and write in an intimate way about the scenes of

violence, genocide, and extreme social suffering, our readers have the right to react with anger

[…]‖ (26).

Thus the crux of the matter for writers writing on conflict, as Scheper-Hughes and

Bourgois have rightly pointed out, is to create a middle space in text which is neither too intimate

to the victims, nor too distant from perpetrators. For the construction and mobilization of

collective memory determines the state of a post-conflict society. As Hyussen argues the issue

―is not whether to forget or to remember, but rather how to remember and how to handle

representation of the remembered past‖ (qtd. in Zehfuss 220).

1.2 Problematics

In this dissertation I argue that Forget Kathmandu (2005), and Palpasa Café (2005), the

literary output produced in the context of people‘s war, are contaminated with politics of

representation. While arguing my point, I show that the victims are not given enough space in the

text to speak out their painful stories from the site of cross-fire ensued in the violent insurgency

that had broken out in the country for a decade. While dealing with the textual representation I

Thapa 13

draw on Jenny Edkins‘ idea of speaker‘s ―refusal of distinction and the assumption of bare life‖

(112). According to Edkins ‗refusal of distinction ―entails a refusal to make any of the

distinctions between forms of life, or even between life and death that are constitutive of

sovereign authority‖; and ‗bare life‘ as ―mere life in all its vulnerability asserted in the face of

violence‖ (122). The problem I point out in the texts is that the speakers, instead of refusing to

make distinction between self and other or victims and perpetrators, participate in the discourse

of dividing and identifying one or the other group and institution without paying attention to the

people who suffer within the group or the institution.

In this dissertation I problematize the texts‘ language under my research with the

assumption that writers writing on conflict and violence generally draw on a world of mirrored,

manipulated, and mediated representation. Assuming the literatures on traumatic events are

inflected with mediated representation, I argue that Forget Kathmandu and Papasa Café are not

exceptional to this problem. My hypothesis is drawn from the idea that unless the literatures on

violence and war are aware of a manipulation and mediation in representing the inside story, they

fail to pave the middle ground where voice of the conflict victims is adequately given agency.

Bearing the idea in mind, in this dissertation, I look into the narrative language of the texts in the

light of the theory of cultural trauma. It is an extended part of trauma studies which is broader in

its application. It is a theory that looks into the question of memory, witness, and their

representation in the text. I discuss the theory in the following chapter with definition by

different theorists and its nature.

1.3 Review of the Literatures

A decade of insurgency led by the Maoist rebels left Nepal socially vulnerable and

politically unstable nation. The insurgency has radically changed the image of the country as a

Thapa 14

peaceful Himalayan Kingdom which has now turned into a myth; and social and political conflict

have deepened ever more. The writers who strongly responded to the crisis with their literary

creation vary as per the genres they adopted to pursue the events. Among the published works on

the crisis of Nepal Forget Kathmandu has been taken as a strong response to the crisis by critics.

An Indian diplomat and politician K.V. Rajan opines that the text ―is essentially a cri de coeur

from a sensitive young Nepalese as she watches her country slide downhill, as violence spreads,

governance fails, institutions collapse, politicians squabble, democracy is strangulated, values

disappear, hope fades. It is a well-written book—fast-paced, hard to put down, written with style

and sophistication, also honesty and emotion‖ (1). Similarly, Siddarth Varadarajan in The Hindu

writes that Forget Kathmandu is ―Written with a deep concern for the political future of Nepal

cornered by the authoritarian impulses of the monarchy, the grotesque factiousness of the

parliamentary parties and the anarchic violence of the Maoists, [it] is Thapa‘s lament for the

apparent impossibility of democracy in her country‖ (1). As for Islam, ―It was a clear-headed

tour through the tortuous maze of Nepalese power politics--including that Shakespearean palace

massacre that effectively was the death knoll of royal rule--that ended with an unforgettable

account of a hike through the remote, then-Maoist-controlled mountainous western region of

Nepal‖ (1).

Despite the critics‘ thematic opinion of the text, there are others who have observed the

text in the line of its writing style. One of them is Shakwa who finds Forget Kathmandu ―A

skillful mix of history, reportage, memoir and travelogue [that] reconstructs three centuries of

Nepali history as an elongated journey towards individualism and freedom.‖ (1). Summarizing

her essay she adds, ―It is at once a celebration of the power of the literary monologue and a cry

of outrage at the reality in which the present Nepali state and society are trapped‖ (ibid). More

Thapa 15

than a history and reportage the text is emotional response to the events taking place in the

country. It is ―a highly personal view of a country quite unlike any other, is intelligent and

challenging and deserves to be widely read, not just by those with an existing interest in Nepal‖

(Miller 1).

Similarly, Palpasa Café, among other works of literature, belongs to the category of the

literary creations in response to the conflict. The text has drawn widespread readers‘ attention to

this date. It is one of the most media hyped texts written surrounding the events of people‘s war.

Kunda Dixit claim, in Nepali Times‘ book review, goes as far as to say: ―Narayan Wagle‘s book

can be called an anti-war novel. It drags us to the edge and forces us to peer down at the abyss

below (2). He further adds, ―Not only is this novel as fresh as an open wound, the author‘s

imagination makes Nepal‘s real unfolding tragedy come alive with raw urgency‖ (2).

Chakravarti, in Outlook India, writes, ―Wagle‘s cutting observations of the two political

extremes, a light touch with words as well sexual attitude, and utterly courageous empathy with

the state of his nation, ensured major success for the novel‖ (1). And, a little further, opposing

Dixtit, he writes: ―I wouldn‘t call this an anti-war book, that‘s a quibble with an over-energetic

blurb, not the work‖ (1).

The text may or may not be an anti-war novel, I save this argument for the following

chapter, what we can claim is that it was certainly about the characters that live and die in

conflict ridden Nepal. Palpasa Café, as the author himself confesses, is the outcome of what he

went through as a journalist reporting from the conflict ridden rural parts of Nepal. As observed

in the reviews, the reviewers have fallen into surficial pattern of reading. They are far from

reading the texts from traumatic aspect upon which texts were based. The hype about the book in

the print media might have some bearings on the kinds of reading that blame one or the other

Thapa 16

warring parties. None of the reviewers have pointed out the characters‘ traumatic aspects in the

texts, nor have they raised the issue of adequate representation in the texts.

1.4 Objectives and Delimitations

The objective of this research is to prove that the politics of representation in the text

renders different meaning than that of what the critics in their review of the literatures came out

with. As it will be clear in the analysis, Thapa‘s deep concern for the political future of Nepal

contradicted in Forget Kathmandu when her representation of victims falls short of sympathy.

And Wagle‘s anti-war motive in Palpasa Cafe unconsciously leaves the pangs and the suffering

of the non-ruling class of the country by not giving the underprivileged sufferers a space to claim

their victimhood. However, reading these works of literature in the light of theory of cultural

trauma is a new beginning. The research will help to raise the question about the representation

of violence in the texts written so far.

In this dissertation I am dealing with the narratives Forget Kathmandu and Palpasa Café.

And I look into the problematic language in the texts. In order to back up my argument I borrow

incidents or ideas from other literary works written on the people‘s war, took place from 1996 to

2006. I might relate the story or events other than that of the period. In this context, my objective

of relating the story would be to make my argument clearer, or highlight the issue I have

undertaken in this research. This dissertation is based entirely on the textual analysis from the

perspective of cultural trauma.

1.5 Order of the Chapters

As earlier mentioned in the introduction, the first chapter, ―People‘s War as Trauma,‖

establishes a decade of the conflict as cultural trauma. I begin this chapter with the theoretical

aspects of cultural trauma. I redraw the definitions of cultural trauma as formulated by different

Thapa 17

theorists and critics. After the discussion of cultural trauma and its nature, I then answer the

question: why the period of People‘s War a Trauma? To answer this question I then present the

elements of cultural trauma in the context of People‘s War. I explore those theoretical elements

in the texts written during the conflict that make People‘s War a trauma. Thereafter I sum up the

chapter pointing to the texts that are under my speculation in this research text.

In the second chapter, ‗Othering the Army: Forget Kathmandu’, I discuss the issue of

representation in memoir and reportage. I explore the voices of the conflict victims in the text

and discuss about the agency given to them, if there‘s any. In doing so, I answer the question:

Why, in Forget Kathmandu, the writer has given very less agency to the victims? In this chapter

I point out how, consciously or unconsciously, the speaker in the text demonizes the state

security force by sympathizing with the rebels.

Third chapter, ‗Othering the Maoist: Palpasa Cafe’, deals with the representation in the

fiction. The novel runs around the subject of conflict. The conflict was led by the idea of

destroying the existing political, cultural and social system and create new one. The speaker

belongs to the culturally privileged class who is facing new cultural realities of underprivileged

caste as the leading voice in the text.

Finally, ‗Forgetting the Other: Politics of Representation‘, is my concluding chapter,

which sums up the argument discussed in the preceding chapters. Whilst summing up I restate

my claim giving them clearer light with the help of the arguments from preceding chapters. In

doing so, I answer the question why both the texts cannot be taken as a trauma literature in

positive sense. And I conclude the chapter with a suggestion for further research under the same

critical light.

Thapa 18

Chapter I

People’s War as Trauma

―Trauma‖, writes Avishai Margalitt, ―is a medical term that refers to a serious bodily

injury or shock from an accident or external act of violence‖ (125). The medical term for trauma

extends to ―medico-legal concept,‖ as mentioned by Paola Palladino, ―that is intimately involved

in the shaping of a distinctively late modern form of subjectivity‖ (qtd. in Pandey, ―Pedagogy‖

124). It may not be exaggerating to say that trauma is the invention of modern wars, particularly,

the World War I and II. Tracing the development of trauma studies, E. Ann Kaplan writes,

―Trauma studies originated in the context of research about the Holocaust‖ (1). Yet, its

development process can be traced back to Freud‘s works on war neurotics in soldiers after

World War I. Kaplan adds that Freud‘s ―most significant, and most complete discussion of

trauma occurs, not incidentally, at the end of his life, in Moses and Monotheism, when Freud was

forced to leave his homeland and takes up exile in England‖ (31).

Kaplan outlines the development of trauma studies in three different phases: ―1) the

1980s wave of books by psychologists responding to war injuries (Vietnam War) and to

increased awareness of child sexual abuse; 2) the unexpected turn of humanists to trauma in the

late 1980s […]; 3) the reaction to what rapidly was seen as a kind of ‗faddish‘ interest in trauma,

or a collapsing everything into trauma‖ (25). Despite the renewed interest in trauma there was no

theory, as such, for humanists to turn to. ―Understandably, humanists turned to the official

definition of trauma that could be found in the American Psychiatrist Association‘s Diagnosis

Manual. This manual, especially in the 1994 revised edition, stressed the phenomenon of

dissociation in trauma […]‖ (Kaplan 34). The site of trauma in this definition is confined to the

body. The psychological definition of trauma restrained itself within personal injury. It did not

Thapa 19

recognize the social, economic and political sphere as a site of trauma. In other words, the

emphasis on dissociation in trauma fell short to reach social and political aspects of trauma.

―This narrow focus on dissociation, together what seemed increasingly like a ‗faddish‘ aspect to

humanities trauma research soon produced strong reaction from some literary and film scholars

in the late 1990s‖ (Kaplan 34). It was Paul De Man‘s students at Yale, Cathy Caruth and

Shoshana Felman both trained in language of deconstruction, turn to trauma. Since high theory

became too abstract to engage the things happening in the world, for the both critics trauma

became welcoming field to connect a critique of representation and subjectivity with things that

happen in the world. As Kaplan notes, in the initial stage of the trauma studies:

Caruth and Felman were at Yale where Dori Laub and Geoffrey Hartman had

begun to interview Holocaust victims in a in a climate where renewed interest in

World War II and its sociopolitical meanings and personal suffering was on the

rise. Addressing the phenomena of trauma must have seemed one way for critics

to begin to link high theory with specific material events that were both personal

and which implicated history, memory, and culture generally. (35)

The research added a new psychological dimension to Holocaust studies through videotaped.

―The new dimension is reflected in Dori Laub‘s contribution to his volume, Testimony, coedited

with Shoshana Felman in 1992. This volume, together with Cathy Caruth‘s earlier Unclaimed

Experience (1986) and edited volume, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) initiated what

has become a growing field in the humanities‖ (Kaplan 33).

As a theory ―trauma studies tries to turn criticism back towards being an ethical,

responsible, purposive discourse, listening to the wounds of the other‖ (Luckhurst 506). In this

sense, trauma studies intersect with other critical vocabularies which problematize representation

Thapa 20

and attempt to confine the theoretical horizon. Trauma studies expanded its horizon linking

itself with studies of other social and cultural fields. In this regard Beerendra Pandey observes

that ―Since the mid-1990s, the medico-legal take on trauma has converged with the fields such as

psychology, sociology, history, political science, philosophy, ethics, literature, and aesthetics to

give rise to fast emerging critical category called ‗Trauma Theory‘[…]‖ (―Pedagogy‖ 124).

Amidst cultural theories, trauma theory, in particular, looks into the aspects of representations of

trauma in the texts, fictions and non-fiction, relating them to social history, socio-psychology,

aesthetic practices, philosophy, and national and international politics.

Trauma, for Cathy Caruth, occurs in an individual ―as the response to an unexpected or

overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in

repeated flash-backs, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena‖ (91). Trauma as affecting an

individual‘s life later on extended to new category affecting collective groups of a society. Such

a trauma has been theorized as cultural trauma by Alexander et al. in Cultural Trauma and

Collective Identity (2004). One of the coauthors of the text, Piotr Sztompka, argues that the

discourse of trauma prompted by rapid social change was first ―borrowed as a metaphor from

medicine and psychiatry and slowly acquiring new social and cultural meaning‖ (157). Thus,

culture and social contexts came under the critical investigation of the newly developed theory of

trauma. The trauma in this new category ―occurs when member of collectivity feel they have

been subjected to a horrendous events that leaves indelible mark upon their group consciousness,

marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and

irrevocable ways‖ (Alexander 1). Taking the similar line of definition, Smelser provides, rather,

a wider picture of cultural trauma in terms of virtue of memory: ―[…] a memory accepted and

publicly given credence by a relevant membership group and evoking and event or situation

Thapa 21

which is a) laden with negative affect, b) represented as indelible, and c) regarded as threatening

a society‘s existence or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural presuppositions‖ (44).

Moreover, as opposed to individual trauma, cultural trauma is described by Ron Eyerman

as ―[…] a tear in the social fabric affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of

cohesion‖ (―Cultural Trauma‖ 60). In cultural trauma, unlike psychological one, individuals in a

group continue with their life as before in the aftermath of the traumatic event. They are not

affected, personally, by the disaster. It is whilst living in communities as a member individuals

may afterward realize or told that they have been suffering as all the other members have. For

example, a suffering resulting from cultural humiliation, state apathy or other kinds, depending

on the nature of the events, that only as a member of a group can identify.

As Piotr Sztompka reminds us, ―Truly collective trauma, as distinct from massive

traumas, appear only when people start to be aware of the common plight, perceive the similarity

of their situation with that of others, define it a shared‖ (160). Hence, it is a social phenomenon

that shapes a group consciousness, therefore contributing towards identifying what happened in

the past as a loss or disruption of a social cohesion of the group. It is for this reason Jeffrey C.

Alexander opines that ―trauma is socially mediated attribution‖ (8). Neil J. Smelser, too,

maintains that trauma is a trauma so far as it is seen within a certain sociological and cultural

context which contributes towards constituting trauma. Before departing from psychological

trauma he observes that ―Freud was beginning a journey that would lead to the conclusion that a

trauma is not a thing in itself but becomes a thing by virtue of the context in which it is

implanted‖ (34). It is because we cannot think of an individual apart from a cultural context and

everything they come across has cultural or sociological influences, be they the state of mind

after the violent occurrence, or the life before that. A collective culture, thus, plays an important

Thapa 22

role in constructing, even, the psychological trauma in an individual, for ―cultural trauma for the

most part historically made, not born‖ (Smelser 37).

Since the cultural context plays a crucial role in a construction trauma, people living I

different cultural context they respond to the traumatic event differently. Writing about the site

of trauma, Hent de Vries reminds the fact that ―individual in different cultures, for example:

those with fatalistic religious traditions, may be less susceptible to traumas as they are

understood in western countries‖ (qtd. in Smelser 34). Therefore the culture of the trauma carrier

group plays very important role in shaping the dimension of historical trauma. For, ―Each culture

has its own concept of courage, victimization, dignity, and persecution as well as different

concepts and practices of bureaucracy. Whether, trauma victims understand their plight as

personal, or as part of a larger situation of political persecution is also culturally specific‖

(Shuman and Bohmer 402).

Trauma, like many other social conditions, is rooted in objective and subjective

phenomena. It is objective because trauma is, usually, based in actual occurrences; and

subjective, because it does not exist until it is defined in a particular way from a particular

location. For this reason it is said that ―All traumatic experiences are painful. But not all painful

experiences are traumatic‖ (Field 31). Beerendra Pande points out that ―The seminal event is not

naturally traumatic but that the cultural templates through which they are experienced turn into a

trauma (―Pedagogy‖ 126). As the society moves forward with some degree of cohesion, after the

overwhelming occurrence the experienced event, forms a story of that particular group that faced

it, the members of a society relate to each other by remembering the occurrence they shared as a

group. The act of remembering of the past event constructs the story which includes all the

affected members of a society. Ron Eyerman writes that ―As a cultural process, trauma is linked

Thapa 23

to the formation of collective identity and the construction of collective memory‖ (Cultural

Trauma 60). Because the memory of the traumatic events moves from individual memory to the

collective through the social process the diving lines between individual and collective memory

is very thin, even blurring. As Kaplan notes, because ―trauma produces new subject, that the

political-ideological context within which traumatic events occur shapes their impact, and it is

hard to separate individual and collective trauma‖ (1).

However, memory of an event is individual memory until it gets into the web of a social

construction as a story, rituals, monument, history and myth. This is where individual trauma and

collective trauma differ; for collective memory of a traumatic event never dies with the age of

the people who experienced it, but rather passes on to the generation to come. Therefore, the

societies maintain the memories of past events, whether in a form of individual story or as a

collective rituals and celebrations. Even the individual memories are shaped by the surroundings,

because we cannot think of an individual outside the socio-cultural context where memories are

constructed. It is because of the formation of collective memory in a society ―cultural traumas

are enduring, lingering; they may last over several generations‖ (Sztopmka 162).

Collective memories play important role in knowing one‘s cultural history and the roots

of new culture one is living, because ―[It] specifies the temporal parameters of past and future,

where we came from and where are going, and also why we are here now‖ (Eyerman, ―Cultural

Trauma‖ 66). Cultural trauma can be best understood in the lines by E. Ann Kaplan, drawn from

her experience in the aftermath of 9/11 in New York streets close to the Ground Zero:

―Everyone was in shock: people did not laugh out loud in the streets or in the

square; voices were muted. People‘s expressions were somber. I felt a connection

to strangers that I had never felt before. On the subway too, we looked at each

Thapa 24

other as if understanding what we all were facing. For at any moment, it seemed,

the subway could be blown up, gas might fill the tunnels. [...] Nowhere was safe,

just as nothing had been safe in war time England. We were in this together. (9)

As trauma creates void in individuals, and it does so in collectivity, too, by destroying existing

images or belief in the social system cultural values people lived with. It is almost always the

case with a community that has changed radically. It is a state of a community or nation where

old value and system is dead, and new has not yet born. This is the period when trauma process

moves along with respective carrier groups of affected community or nation. ―In this sense,

trauma can never be a purely individual event, in the same way as there cannot be a private

language, because it always already involves the community or the cultural setting in which

people are placed‖ (Edkins 106).

Trauma, as the theorists have it, occurs experiencing the event directly, and also by

learning about it afterwards. First type of trauma is called direct trauma and the second is called

indirect or vicarious. In most cases, cultural trauma occurs through indirect experience of the

traumatic events. In this type of trauma, a community or an individual affected through story

narrated by victims themselves; media coverage of the agonizing events in television channels,

documentary, newspaper et cetera. The following paragraph by human rights defender Shiva

Prasad Gaudel presents the both types of trauma. He narrates:

Dandapani showed us the wounds, scars and bruises that were all over his body

from head to foot and told us the story of his torture, weeping all the while. I

could not control myself as I heard him recounting how he was tortured at the

hands of the security forces. My eyes were filled with tears and, instead of

Thapa 25

consoling him; I took a handkerchief out of my pocket and pretend to wipe my

face, speechless with emotion. (76)

The trauma pertaining to Dandapani suffering occurred through direct experience of the physical

as well as cultural injury inflicted by the torture and humiliation at the hands of perpetrators.

And, the narrator in the paragraph is, also, traumatized, not directly experiencing the physical

injury, but by the story of the victim as he tells. It is worth quoting LaCapra at length to

understand the crux of the cultural trauma. He observes,

Everyone is subject to structural trauma. But, with respect to historical trauma and

its representation, the distinction among victims, perpetrators, and bystander is

crucial. ‗Victim‘ is not a psychological category. It is in variable ways, a social,

political, and ethical category. Victims of certain events will in all likelihood be

traumatized by them, and not being traumatized would itself call for explanation.

(Trauma, 723)

By the same token, the category ‗victim‘ in cultural trauma travel as far as the social, political,

and ethical carrier groups carry the memory on the events. Therefore the victim can as well be

trans-historical and trans-generational. As Avishai Margalit notes, ―A shared memory of

historical events that goes beyond the experience of anyone alive is a memory of memory, and

not necessarily a memory that, through the dimension of diachronic labor, ends up at an actual

event. This kind of memory reaches alleged memories of the past but not necessarily past events‖

(59). The cultural critics have claimed that when event itself is not traumatic, but the memory of

it may.

However, there are critics who have raised critical eyebrows about the notion of

collective memory. Susan Sontag is one among the critics challenging the claim of the trauma

Thapa 26

theorists, as she writes, ―strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory – part of

the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction. All

memory is individual, irreproducible – it dies with each person‖ (qtd. in Eyerman, ―Past in

Present‖ 162). Similarly, Susannah Radstone critiques the trauma theory as something that

replaces unconscious with memory. She claims, ―Trauma theory exorcises […] psychoanalysis‘

later insistence on the agency of the unconscious in the formation of memories‖ (qtd. in Kaplan

35). Radstone further adds, ―Trauma theorists associate trauma not with the effect of triggered

association but with the ontologically unbearable nature of the events itself‖ (qtd. in Kaplan 35).

However, amidst rising tides of criticism against cultural trauma David Becker suggests ―that in

each different social context people should create their own definition of trauma within a

framework, in which the basic focus is not so much on the symptoms of a person but on the

sequential development of the traumatic situation‖ (qtd. in Kaplan 39).

In the light of discussion of trauma theory thus far, cultural trauma occurs in sudden

event that tear the social fabric which is recognized by relevant member of public being as such;

though the affected member of a group may have lived with some sort of cohesion in the

aftermath of the event. From this definition the features of cultural trauma can be outlined as, a)

indelible, for it is scar in the spirit; b) travels as far as the memory of the events is carried by the

valid carrier; d) creates new subject or identity; e) can be direct and indirect or vicarious; and f)

the result occurring from trauma can be negative and positive.

Shoshana Felman, in her book The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Trauma in the

Twentieth Century (2002), writes, ―The twentieth century–an era of historical trials–was in effect

a century of traumas and (concurrently) a century of theories of trauma‖ (1). Felman has made

this claim in the context of the trials faced by Nazi perpetrators for the crime of Holocaust.

Thapa 27

Nevertheless, no critic can deny the urgency of the claim in the context of ongoing violent

episodes in the world today. However, following discussion of trauma is in the context of a

decade long conflict that has changed Nepal politically, socially and culturally.

A current debate in humanists‘ circles in Nepal, surrounding the event of People‘s War,

has been whether the event can be identified as a traumatic. As mentioned in literature review

journalist and writer Kunda Dixit noted the event as being traumatic. Govinda Raj Bhattarai is

among the writers and critics who follow this line of claim. In an introduction to Stories of

Conflict and War (2007), a collection of short stories, Bhattarai claims that the text ―presents the

horrors of the past decade which we survived and traumatic experience that we as a people

underwent‖ (7). A crucial question following the argument is: what are the ingredients that make

the Pople‘s War a historically traumatic event? What follows in this chapter is my answer to the

question in the light of the theory of cultural trauma.

Nepal, known worldwide as a Himalayan Kingdom, became a federal republic after a

decade of People‘s War. This event marked a fundamental change into people‘s future identity.

Once identified as the subjects of the King, the people of Nepal are to be called the citizens of a

federal republic. This new identity came not without a rupture in social system. ―The armed

violence has disrupted the social space [fabric] without which democratic order cannot be

restored‖ (Kumar 114). The war has changed the religious state into the secular one. The people

are no more identified as the citizens of the Hindu state. The country has been in transitional

phase since the declaration of Republic by the Interim Parliament. It is the stage where old

system is done for and new is yet to be born. ―But, at this juncture of history of Nepal, neither is

the state capable of continuing its traditional nature nor are the groups [social] bent on changing

the character of the state likely to be silenced‖ (Baral, ―Introduction‖ 8). Despite the fact that the

Thapa 28

event marked a new socio-cultural era, it has been laden with negative affect. Before the people‘s

war broke out most Nepalis believed Nepal to be a peaceful and only Hindu kingdom in the

world. During the war ―[the] country of Shangri-la image and characterized by serenity has

suddenly changed into one of the bloodiest theatres of the world‖ (Baral, ―Maoist Insurgency‖

185). The image of the people‘s war presented by national and international media played very

active role to establish the event as something horrendous in people‘s psyche. Jenny Edkin

writes, ―Trauma is often seen as an injury. First the word meant an injury to the body, but now it

is more commonly taken to mean an injury to the psyche, or even the community, the culture, or

the environment‖ (109).

The events that followed in the country during the people‘s war, for many, were

something beyond their imagination. For example, no one has ever thought that some village

youths turned into the guerrillas; and dare to fight the oversized well trained then Royal Nepal

Army. Professor of political science Lok Raj Baral notes: ―The nature, growth and dynamics of

PW [People‘s War] in Nepal are incomprehensible to many people including serious observers

of insurgencies across the world‖ (Baral 185). The Royal family massacre was another event

during this period of history that marked the events beyond comprehension. People were not

even ready to believe when they first heard about the massacre. Jhamak Ghimire1 records this

anguish in her autobiography: ―A kind of anxiety prevailed over the public in the aftermath of

that massacre. They said that after all there‘s no security anywhere; whole family is wiped out

even under the mighty security force‖ (184). The event of massacre came out as an extreme

surprise, as something unacceptable for the common thinking mind. For, ―[…] what we call

1 My own translation of the passage from Jiwan kanda ki Phool (Life, whether a thorn or a flower): Tyo hatya kanda

ghate pachhi maanchhe ma yek khal ko stabdhata chhayo/ Uniharu bhanthe aakhir surakshit thaun kahin

rahenachha, tyatro surakshya ko ghera bhitra baseka maanchhe ko bansa bina bhayo.

Thapa 29

traumatic is an event that cannot be placed within prior schemes or frameworks. It is a

confrontation with an occurrence that is not part of the symbolic order and hence that cannot be

predicted or accounted for: there‘s no language for it‖ (Edkins 107).

And, according to trauma theorist Cathy Caruth ―For history to be a history of trauma

means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; or to

put somewhat differently, that a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its

occurrence‖ (Possibility of History, 187). The event occurred in a way beyond normal state of

mind could grasp. The atmosphere flowed with anguished emotion that blocked the perceiving

mind. Thapa narrates her own physical and mental state after she learned about the massacre:

―Suddenly my hands began to tremble. Because Kathmandu was so small, everyone lived close

to the Narayanhiti palace; the massacre felt very close by‖ (Thapa, 11). Thapa‘s narration is no

less disturbing than Kaplan‘s state of mind and atmosphere of New York streets in the aftermath

of destruction of Twin Tower.

Kaplan has pointed out that ―People encounter trauma by being a bystander, by living

near to where a catastrophe happened, or by hearing about crisis from a friend. But most people

encounter trauma through the media, which is why focusing on so-called mediatized trauma is

important‖ (2). In the context of Nepal‘s conflict media presented images that were highly

disturbing. National newspapers reported the sorrowful plight of the conflict victims with the

spectacular photographs of dead bodies. National as well as international television channels

reported from death site, splashing the picture of blood stained bodies every now and then across

TV screens. It is worth noting the credence given by media to the Royal massacre as something

traumatic. On the day of the massacre ―None of the Nepali newspaper came that morning. The

private FM stations of which there were seven in Kathmandu –did not broadcast any morning

Thapa 30

news, and eventually they all halted transmission. [...] The state media offered no news: Radio

Nepal was playing dirges […] (Thapa, 12). After the palace massacre one segment of people felt

they are no more the subjects of the king, for the believed Father has been murdered. And the

other segment fighting to overthrow the monarchy has yet to claim their new identity.

Although the catastrophic events taken place during people‘s war have radically changed

the people‘s identity, it has also left deep mark in the people‘s psyche as something indelible.

The societies have been divisive along the ethnic lines, which resulted with the deaths of many in

revolt in Terai after the declaration of the country as a republic state. Because of a decade of

conflict ―Families have broken away, societies have been divided, and people still feel the shock

from the uprooting of the traditional value system. The trauma continues to prevail‖ (Pathak 7).

Situated at the crossfire between rebel force and state force during the conflict, the victims‘ hope

of being cared for is fading away as the leading political heads are tearing each other apart to be

the head of the post-conflict government. The people have lost hope, for the country is creeping

in transitional phase with no adequate measures of reconciliation among the victims and the

perpetrators. People of Nepal no more feel secure under the national security guards after the

events when protectors turned into perpetrators. ―It seems that trauma is more than a shock

encounter with brutality or death; in important sense, trauma is the betrayal of a promise or an

expectation […], what we call trauma takes place when the very power that we were convinced

will protect us and give us security becomes our tormentors […] or when our family is no longer

a source of refuge but a site of danger‖ (Edkins 109).

Nepal has entered into a vulnerable state with people stripped off of the old trust and

sense of pride as a subject of the Himalayan Kingdom; more so for the new identity has not yet

constructed. For trauma theorists this kind of state of vulnerability of the collectivity is very

Thapa 31

crucial. In this juncture government agencies opt for covering up the trauma with legal tag and

politics of representation, whereas victims strive for leaving the wounds open so as to claim the

identity of victimhood. Sean Field, in his essay on post-apartheid South Africa, examines the

tension in Truth and Reconciliation Commission‘s attempt to heal the past trauma by bringing

victims‘ and perpetrators‘ story to the commission. He observes,

The legal or political closure desired by lawyers and politicians is not equivalent

to the ongoing struggles of trauma survivors to at least reach a symbolic

emotional closure. But emotional closure in the complete sense is not possible.

The term ‗closure‘ evokes ahistorical fantasies that it is possible to emotionally

sever ‗bad‘ events or periods from people‘s lives. Rather central challenge faced

by survivors is how to tolerate and integrate memories of traumatic events. Some

survivors work through mourning their losses and ‗adapting‘ their lives, while

others lead their lives in ‗melancholic ways. (34)

As Smelser has pointed out, ―[…] the very effort to establish a cultural trauma is a

disputed process, as are debates and conflicts over preferred defenses. Perhaps, even more

divisive ingredients of the cultural-trauma complex are finger-pointing, mutual blame, and

demonization‖ (52). Amidst the disputes trauma theorists insist on leaving the wound open, for

―Trauma can never be ‗healed‘ in the sense of a return to now things were before a catastrophe;

but if the wound of trauma remains open, its pain may be worked through in the process of its

being ‗translated‘ via art‖ (Kaplan 19). It is in this open and vulnerable life without distinctions

an alternative measure of working-through trauma is possible. The affected community or

groups, at this juncture, stand at the crossroad of transition, where old socio-cultural bordering

lines are blurred and new is needed. As Bernhard Giesen, in his essay ―The Trauma of

Thapa 32

Perpetrators‖, postulates, ―the constitutive reference to triumph or trauma can be spoken or

silenced; it is always there, enabling us to represent and present the past as our history‖ (112).

The nature of traumatically affected memory is of the emerging type that cannot be silenced or

covered forever until and unless it is given an agency to identify with. ―The scar, the traumatic or

ecstatic memory trace, is never entirely erased and so becomes, whether we like it or not, the

foundation of our sense of reality‖ (Hartman 43).

What is crucial to note is that in the aftermath of traumatic event various affected groups

try to influence the representation of trauma for the formation of victimhood in their side as per

their groups‘ interest. Therefore, ―Cultural trauma always engages a meaning struggle, a

grappling with an event that involves identifying the nature of the pain and the nature of victim

and the attribution of responsibility‖ (Eyerman 62). Representation of affected community or

group in the social-political discourse of victimhood is the core element of identity formation in

a society torn by violent conflict or event.

The theory of cultural trauma explores the question about the nature and representation of

traumatic memory in the text. It focuses on systematic inquiry into the text that is a product of

traumatic phenomena and explores the possibility of resolving those traumas. There are different

ways of remembering the traumatic past, some help to decrease the traumas, whereas others

increase them. According to Ron Eyerman, ―Cultural Trauma calls attention to the negotiated

recollection of events and to the role of representation. There is power involved here as well, the

power of political elites for example, of mass media in selecting what will be represented, thus

affecting what will be forgotten as well as remembered‖ (―Past in Present‖ 163).

Therefore speculation of representation of the violence in literary work, art, and ritual

paves a way of understanding whether these genres assist to resolve the cultural trauma by giving

Thapa 33

an adequate agency to the victims‘ suffering in claiming their victimhood. Or, they help the state

authority to cover up the trauma of suffering community or groups with glorification and

demonization of the event and the actors who performed it. Thus, ―the articulating discourse

surrounding cultural trauma is a process of mediation involving alternative strategies and

alternative voices. It is a process that aim to reconstitute or reconfigure a collective identity as in

repairing a tear in the social fabric‖ (Eyerman 63). As pointed out earlier, representation of

trauma victims plays a crucial role in repairing the chasm resulted in the traumatic events. In

what follows I explore the issue of representation in the texts under my discussion in in the

research and critically analyze the language used by the respective narrators.

Thapa 34

Chapter II

Othering the Army: Forget Kathmandu

My concern in this chapter is with the narrative representation of the violent past of

Nepal‘s history in Forget Kathmandu (2005) by Manjushree Thapa. The insurgency known as

the People‘s War started by Maoist party and the counter-insurgency operation intensified by the

government are narrated in the text. I analyze the text‘s narrative aspect of representation in the

light of cultural trauma. In the first part of the analysis I focus on the text‘s nature of memoir.

My argument dwells on selective construction of the text in which the narrator presents a part of

the negative history of the monarchy and the Royal Army. The purpose of the memoir, as I shed

critical light in the later part of this chapter, is to back her claims. Thus, the memoir part

prepares a reader to accept the army as perpetrator presented in the second part. And in the

second part the focus is on the testimonial narrative. In this part of the text the author is not

writing a memoir, but recording testimonials by interviewing those who are affected by the

violent conflict. I examine the interviewer‘s deliberate selections of testimonies from the victims

of the insurgency and her input in those testimonial narratives as presented in the text. Lastly, I

conclude this chapter by shedding light on how she demonizes the security forces led by the

army.

Forget Kathmandu (2005) opens by remembering the result of violent past in which

inflections of trauma among Nepali public is foregrounded as a collective memory. The result of

the violence is one which narrator relates herself with the Nepalese who have shared the same

fate as the social harmony is disrupted by the insurgency. She writes:

We lost thousands of lives to a violent Maoist insurgency and repressive state

counter-insurgency. Thousands more were orphaned and widowed, hundreds of

Thapa 35

thousands were displaced from their towns and villages, and the count of

maiming, rape, unlawful detention, extortion, kidnapping, child conscription and

disappearances rose rapidly. Parliamentary democracy won late, in 1990—was

lost to a staggered coup that began in October 2002, and culminated with king

Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah‘s February 2005 military takeover. (1)

Although we are not told of traumatic events that the narrator have directly suffered on a

personal level, her narrative claim that the social surroundings has registered in her mind as

traumatic, and herself as a member of larger socio-cultural structure affected by the insurgency.

This is, as an integral part of the affected society that a member go through, what Alexander calls

a ―social process of trauma‖ where events are registered as traumatic in the aftermath of the

events, through literature, media, and the passing of story of the events by carrier group to the

larger public who have not been the direct victim of the violence2. The narrator has been through

such social process as she writes, ―I kept up with what was happening in the country as much as

any person, but watching the television news or reading the papers or listening to the radio left

me feeling defeated–personally, intimately, as though tragedy had struck me or someone I

loved‖ (Thapa Forget Kathmandu 137). From her expression we can infer that the social milieu

has made quite an impact in narrator‘s daily living, especially by the media images. She

confesses, ―I wrote this book in the thick of events, as a personal effort to work my way out of

this muddle‖ (Thapa Forget Kathmandu 4). The traumatic muddle she is living in has not come

out of her own experience of suffering the violence, but from the scene of violence in television

2 See page 1-30, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity in which Jeffrey C. Alexander postulates the social process

of cultural trauma. He explicates how trauma is not born-in-event, but constructed in the aftermath of the event.

And the process goes through making claim which is supported by carrier groups, such as a media, and constructed

in social narrative.

Thapa 36

clips and the story reported from the sites are imprinted in her mind as traumatic. Eyerman

postulates, ―for trauma is not something naturally existing; it is something constructed by

society‖ (―Cultural Trauma‖ 2). The trauma is even more visible when she writes, ―My dread

manifested itself as emotional malaise, a lagging in the heart. I would wake up, and before

starting my work I would read the newspaper and feel fatigued before my day‖ (Thapa 137).

We learn that the narrator, as a member of the violence affected society, is related to the

trauma of the society. Yet, what makes her position different from that of the suffering of the

real time victim is that she does not present the gesture which would relate her to the dead and

those who are suffering. Rather, like perpetrator of violence, she draws the lines in speaking of

violence and deviates from speaking of the pangs and pain of the marginalized victims. She

draws line between state security force and the rebel force as she writes: ―The impunity with

which the state security forces operated was enabled by the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-

evil spirit of Kathmandu‘s frightened bourgeoisie‖ (Thapa 166). The narrator‘s full-fledged

attack on state security forces casts shadows over the narration of suffering. It rather, further

intensifies the demonization of the security forces. She opines that ―[…] the army at home had

withered into a largely ceremonial body, good for adding pomp to state occasion. Of all

government branches, it was the least touched by democratic changes‖ (Thapa 162). What one

can gather from her opinion is that army is nothing but an organization of bunch of good-for-

nothing people who are frittering away national budget for their own pompous ceremonial game.

It is not difficult to point out the author‘s emotional outpouring in her redrawing of

Nepal‘s history that is intertwined with military-monarchy. E. Ann Kaplan notes, ―The main

thing about a memoir is the emotions that are remembered and the ways in which the writer

expresses them. Also important are the ways in which national/social codes and discourses shape

Thapa 37

both the impact of the trauma on the individual and how it is remembered‖ (43). In Forget

Kathmandu the author‘s emotion is linked with Army‘s past deeds which leads her, emotionally,

to blame the institution for what we call the trauma of the nation by helping the King. But what

she does forget in her emotional quandary that there are people in the organization whose family

have suffered from the violence as much as any Nepalis. They are in the organization not by

choice but by necessities created by economic condition of their families and thus have been the

victim of the insurgency just as any ordinary people. Yet in her narrative the state security forces

that are combating in the field for hand-to-mouth business are barely seen as underdog. This

creation of chasm between perpetrator and the victims as black and white is due to application of

professional model by the author whilst observing the state of violence in the state ruled by an

army King.

This polarizing binary is not new to the observers who are in the fields of violence, for

they are professionally motivated to record the events from their side. Veena Das, as an observer

in the field of violence, has discouraging experience whilst working with her co-workers. She

writes, ―Unfortunately though, there is still a tendency to work with models of clear binary

opposites in the understanding of violence–state versus civil society […], global versus locals

and so on‖ (295). Therefore, the narrator‘s model in drawing the lines should not surprise us

since she is related to the human rights organization. She is concerned more with human rights of

the people than any other rights, for example, economic rights, educational rights and so on.

Whilst the vast numbers of lower marginalized echelon have been struggling dying due to lack of

minimum medical care, the author moans that ―there were no more than three or four senior

advocates with the capacity–and inclination–to address legal and constitutional quandaries or

human rights issues‖ (Thapa, Forget 130). She is more anxious about having less number of

Thapa 38

legal experts in human rights issues than teachers, health assistants, agricultural assistants that

could actually lessen the woes of the suffering people.

However, it does not mean human rights issues are less important. They are equally

important in a democratic state. It is, rather, a matter of narrator giving more emphasis to rights

issues than actually amplifying the voices of victims is in suffering. And narrative functions in

mobilizing the collectives to give recognition to the narrated events and its affects. Regarding a

narrative‘s performativity Eyerman writes,

―Narratives are stories containing rhetorical devices, story lines, which link a

particular occurrence/experience to others, broadening their meaning beyond

situational, imposing a higher order of significance, thus orchestrating and

amplifying both the emotional experience and the meaning of the event, as

individuals fused into collective, with a purposive future and a meaningful past.

(―Performing Opposition‖ 196)

Indeed, a narrative has a power to change the environment, especially, in the aftermath of

violent event. It can call for responsibility by amplifying the suffering of the people inflicted by

in violent events; or point finger at the perpetrators in order to call for revenge which is not

recommended in trauma writing. When it comes to Thapa‘s narrative device, it is focused more

on professional side of her writing as a human rights record. To achieve her professional goal

she, through her memoir-style narrative, identifies herself as a part of the affected members of

Nepali society, which is partially true in collective level. And then she moves on with her

professional goal, that is, to count the number of human rights violation. As Frank Ankersmit

points out, ―Saying true things about the past is easy—anybody can do that—but saying right

things about the past is difficult‖ (qtd. in LaCapra Writing History 10). And Thapa in her memoir

Thapa 39

is all for recalling the violent past of the insurgency-ridden country; in other words, memorizing

the dark side of the army backed institution of Nepalese monarchy. Narrator obsessively recalls

the myth of army‘s two-hundred and forty-two years old past and notes that ―the more zealous of

the Prithvi Narayan Shah‘s soldiers cut off the noses of the local inhabitants after their victory‖

(Thapa, Forget Kathmandu 57). Such a harsh remembering of the history goes on

chronologically as writes to paint the Royal Army with criminal color heaping more information

that, ―Army troops arrested BP at an open air meeting at Tundikhel in the heart of Kathmandu‖

(Thapa, Forget Kathmandu 102). The detention of B.P Koirala, a democratic leader who is

revered as a great-man, by army troops, obviously, make the reader, who knows little bit of

Nepal‘s history, feel bitterly about the army and question their loyalty toward the nation. As she

writes about the past deeds of the military one gets the notion that monarchy and military is one

institution; and that‘s where the reader question the army‘s loyalty to the people and the nation.

Moreover, without mentioning the people‘s view of the monarchy in the contemporary

Nepali society the author toils up to show how historical texts were censored and people were

indoctrinated whilst a kid in school. She writes, ―The legacy of this censorship is still with us.

Our school texts books continue to teach old, discredited histories that glorify our rulers and

make no mention of our people‖ (Thapa Forget Kathmandu 2). It is true that history of Nepal is

history of oligarchic families that include the Shahs, the Ranas, Thapas and Pandeys. Yet the

author selects only Shahs in her memoir, despite the fact that the Ranas and the Thapas ruled

Nepal and the Army institution more than the members of Shahs family. It is an act of rewriting

history on the part of the author. In his book review essay, Dallas points out, ―[the author] turns

from novelist to journalist and historian‖ (Dallas 1). Yet the chapter 'History Exhibit' hardly

Thapa 40

speaks of the equally vibrant histories and cultures. She mentions Kirant, Licchavi, and Malla

periods, that do not exceed the space of more than two paragraphs, in the passing3.

The narrator‘s attack on monarchy from the perspective of a human rights activist

continues as she writes: ―On 1 February 2005 he further consolidated his rule when he effected a

full-scale military coup, appointing himself the ‗chairman‘ of a new right-wing cabinet and

suspending all civil liberties and most constitutional remedies‖ (3). She obsessively brings in the

army, though other branches of the state security force, too, were involved, in the front. She

remembers that ―[King] deployed the Royal Nepal Army to arrest and intimidated democratic

political activists, journalists, and human rights workers. And democratic institutions—such as

the private media—came under systematic attack‖ (3).

She suggests that Army do their duties only when they see their own benefit, in other

words, benefit to the Royal throne. The author makes strong claim that they do not abide by the

government‘s rule of law as she writes, ―Eight days after ordering the army into action, G.P.

Koirala abruptly resigned. He later cited the army‘s non-cooperation as his reason. Apparently,

the army brass had lied to him about having surrounded the Maoists. What exactly occurred in

Nuwa village remains unclear till today. But this much was obvious: the army would do as it

pleased if drawn into the counter-insurgency‖ (159). The readers are presented with the facts and

background information of the army‘s maneuvering during the period of counter-insurgency.

Thapa invests more ink writing about Royal-Army‘s history than actually writing about the

suffering people, including the members of rebels and the security forces whose voices were to

be written for what they have been through. The army‘s background information only provokes

3 See Forget Kathmandu where Thapa spares merely two paragraphs to the history of three important eras—

Kirant, Licchavi, and Malla—out of 31 pages (page 48-79).

Thapa 41

anger in people, and something that encourage venting anger is not desirable in trauma writing.

The other reason for questioning too much information is that it can evade the real issue at stake.

In the context of recording testimonial from Holocaust survivors, Geoffrey Hartman notes, ―This

greed for more and more information, for positivities, which has already accumulated and

extraordinary and melancholy records on Holocaust, has not yet yielded appreciable ethical

lessons. The heaping up a factual detail may even be an excuse to evade the issue of what can be

learned‖ (78).

Information the readers are given in Forget Kathmandu as a primary source not only

evade the issue a trauma literature looking over, to make the matter worse, the text becomes too

personal when she quotes a middle aged lady. The lady, who is petrified by the horror of the

palace massacre, as most people were, blatantly says, ―How can anyone stay at a time like this?

A brother-killer is trying to become our king. We‘ve got to stop him from entering the royal

palace‖ (Thapa Forget Kathmandu 20). This, as one finds, is taking too personally an event of a

highly serious and political in nature. But again, looking back at the time, one hardly disagrees

with the author, because the public mood had gathered up in sympathy for the dead and hatred

for the successor. Then, narrator catches up with the public mood by presenting what everyone

thinking –the king and his family were murdered. Then the narrator focuses in the royal massacre

in a way that gives her enough room to demonize the army. Indirectly the narrator blames army

as being responsible for the Royal massacre. About the massacre, she writes,

The Prime Minister did not know much about the massacre. By contrast, the chief

of the army staff, Prajjwal Sumshere Jung Bahadur Rana, had promptly arrived at

the hospital, conferred with the surviving members of the royal family, and

dispatched the helicopter to Pokhara. Curiously, he spent most of his interview

Thapa 42

with the investigation committee explaining that he was not responsible for

security in the grounds of the Narayanhiti palace. [He also explained that] the

palace security does not belong to the army. (Thapa Forget Kathmandu 45)

It does not take long for a reader to point finger at the army, actor behind the scene, after

reading this bits of information from the author about what happened soon after the massacre.

There is enough room for various interpretation of what actually took place in Kathmandu

surrounding the palace shootings. Yet, for an acclaimed author, like Thapa, to come out with

such a harsh generalization about the event is to fall prey to her sentimental feelings toward the

dead royal family members. Social philosopher Avishai Margalit opines, ―We should be even

more suspicious of those who pay attention only to what they feel towards others but are

incapable paying attention to others; in short, we should be suspicious of sentimentalist‖ (33).

Thus the author of Forget Kathmandu (2005) leaves enough room to question her memoir‘s

motive in the text.

It is even more so in Thapa‘s personalization of describing the scene involving an Army

Captain Rajib Shahi ―who was married to a niece of King Birendra, [and] had survived the

massacre. The press conference took place at the army hospital, where he was convalescing.

Shahi appeared before the camera wearing an intense, concentrated expression that suggested he

was still in shock‖ (Forget Kathmandu 31). Thapa paints the picture of the Captain as if he is a

beast of prey that ―His shaved head gave him a fiery look, as did his grey T-shirt with ‗Om‘

emblazoned across the chest‖ (Thapa, Forget Kathmandu, 31). Everyone related to the massacre

events are painted in either beastly or demoniac face. For example, the author presents the

Chairman of the Parliament Taranath Ranabhat as a gothic character when he appeared with the

investigation report on the palace shootings. She writes, ―As he began to read the investigation‘s

Thapa 43

summery report Ranabhat‘s face took on the look of an evil aunt telling ghost stories to terrified

children‖ (Thapa, Forget Kathmandu 35). The author‘s rage against the army and those who are

supporting the institution is not without a reason, for there is a feeling of shocking betrayal from,

―[…] the Royal Nepal Army whose first loyalties –many felt –were to the King and only then to

the country‖. And the deep seated fear that, ―If the army got involved, democracy would be lost‖

(Thapa, Forget Kathmandu 142). And yet, we find author emotional to the extent of

contradicting her own claim when she questions the army‘s refusal to get involved in the

insurgency as she writes:

The Prime Minister ordered deployment of the Armed Police Force and Army on

18 April 2001. Two days later, the Chief of the Army Staff General Prajjwal

Sumshere J.B. Rana publicly asked all the major political parties to reach a

national consensus on the deployment of the army. This was unheard of. Was he

questioning the Defense Council‘s order? (Thapa Forget Kathmandu 148)

To call Forget Kathmandu a history, Thapa writes, ―I have written too personally for that. […]

You could call it a book on bad politics (4). But for then power-holders it is a memoir of an

NGO worker who was criticized by, then King, Gyanendra Shah for making the human rights

issues the ―dollar-crop‖4. So it is not surprising that ―Weeks after the release of the first edition

[of Forget Kathmandu] came Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah‘s military coup of the February 2005,

with the revocation of all political, civil and human rights, including freedom of speech‖ (4).

Thus the first part of the text is, though written about and surrounding traumatic events of the

4 Gyanendra Shah, then Supreme Commander of Royal Army and king who plotted military coup in 2005, had come

heavily on the human rights activists for filing cases against the state security forces for violating human rights

during the counter insurgency. He had accused the rights activists for reaping ‘dollar-crop’ and served in the

interest of the terrorists, meaning Maoists, for their professional benefits and not for the national benefit. See

video footage, “Royal Proclamation”, February 17, 2005.

Thapa 44

country and people, an emotional journey of a very personal experience. To get better of a

memoir, it is worth quoting E.Ann Kaplan at length:

In a memoir, then, ‗truth‘ in regard to events is not, per se, at issue. The main

thing about memoir is the emotions that are remembered and the ways in which

the writer expresses them. Also important are the ways in which national/social

codes and discourses shape both the impact of the trauma on the individual and

how it is remembered. A possible difference between memoirs by male and by

female writers may emerge here because social codes of male and female

behavior differ. While no generalization hold, arguably authors of female

memoirs locate themselves within emotional relationships at stake in the past,

while male writers may focus more on institutional, historical, or sociopolitical

contexts. Yet, in both cases, personal and sociopolitical elements are involved. It

is matter of what the writer chooses to emphasize. (43)

However, in the case of Forget Kathmandu (2005) the author chooses to emphasize more

on questioning the army‘s morale and duty than on the suffering people. In fact, the memoir is

more about memorizing dead Royal members and the surroundings than remembering the woeful

plights of those who were alive and suffering from the national crisis. As Jiwan Subedi rightly

remarks: ―The Royal Nepal Army obviously is more comfortable with the security-centred

approach and less with being picked at for human rights abuses. It has whined about the

international community siding more with the Maoist‖ (149).

Even then the narrator identifies herself with the violence affected people, she visits the

sites of the violence, not as a victim, but as a human rights worker. Her position is clear from that

of the suffering people when she writes the purpose of her visit to the sites: ―My friend,

Thapa 45

Malcolm, […] was a British human rights expert interested in seeing whether the war had been,

as most independent reports had it, high in violations‖ (Thapa, Forget Kathmandu 171).

The narrator visits the sites as a human rights activist with an established image of the violence

as constructed by media and news reports prior to her visit. The report she cites is: ―International

and other human rights groups were saying that up to half of those killed by the security forces

were not Maoists engaging in combat, but unarmed Maoists and innocent civilians‖ (Thapa

Forget Kathmandu 201). Her journey to the war torn sites is not as much to reflect the agonies of

the survived as it is to confirm the idea she had of the human right violation. The testimonies

presented in the text confirm her idea of security forces being in the wrong side. One of the

testimonies given from the sites says, ―I was at home when the army came by on patrol. My

niece, a child of six, ran into the house in fear. They chased after her, firing at my house. […]

My mother was shot in the knee. My niece was shot near the stomach‖ (Thapa Forget

Kathmandu 212). The testimony of this kind is purely instrumental to support the human rights

records of violence. The narrator does not care to record a word of the plight of the victims that

who might have gone through dire situations ever since the event. In the text, readers do not

come across a voice representing people of Dunai as it is in the words of local poet Dhundiraj

Aryal. He writes,

By the Bheri river, Dunai weeps/ how long will it endure this pain and suffering?/

First food and then medicine are gone./ As though a plague of aberrant

consciousness swept/ in with breezes of Poush and Magh, Dunai begs alms./

Outside all seems well, but malice remains within./ Dunai – where pheasants used

to dance/ hearts now moan in bombs and gunpowder. (qtd. in Basnet 92)

Thapa 46

There‘s no sign of finger pointing and naming the perpetrator in the quoted poem. What

we see in the poem is immense suffering caused by evil forces. In the eyes of the suffering souls

evil has no other name, but evil. They have fallen from the human civilization to be named. As

for the poet it does not matter who they are or what ideology they followed, but where they stood

on a human level. On the contrary, the author of Forget Kathmandu (2005) is standing nowhere

near the poet of the above quoted poem, but on the opposite side of the empathic voice. There‘s

almost no record of what the narrator experienced in the sites regarding the collective wounds of

the victims in their voices. It is hard to believe that the agonies and pain did not surface, one way

or the other, whilst telling the disturbing cases of events. Author only focuses on the identified

perpetrator, such as the army, in her text as she records, ―The army raped [women] when they

came to search their houses. How could they save themselves?‖ (Thapa 213). So, the text gives

readers no time to empathize with the raped victims, for the author has placed the perpetrator

with a clear identification card in the front. Before one could even think about the victims, the

anger rises in the readers against army. Thus, the readers are dependent on the narrator‘s

judgment about the events, for she has not left the space for readers to ponder over the traumatic

events.

The authenticity of testimonies presented in the text is open to questions, since what is

seen in the site is absent. In the reporting of testimony of the violence Veena Das recommends

that the, ―Testimony of the survivors as those who spoke because victim could not, was best

conceptualized […] not through the metaphor of writing, but rather through the contrast between

saying and showing‖ (300). Unlike Das‘s recommendation, Forget Kathmandu (2005) is a report

of only of what the locals said, and not what the reporter saw in the site of the violence. It is

saying alone that dominates the narrative. In fact, there is not a single word in the text on the part

Thapa 47

of showing of what we can take for sign of suffering of widow or mourning members of the

deceased that reader could compare with that of the testimony of the villagers. One may ask, why

does the narrator of the text forget to show owes of the countrymen? The answer lies in her

privileged position as a human rights worker who is reporting from a safe site. She does not

accept the vulnerable position of a victim, but secured and privileged one; very opposite from the

position of the suffering people whose life is helpless at the face of violence. She admits the

denial of her as a vulnerable victim when she writes, ―I left Nepal so that I might continue to

write without fear‖ (Thapa, Forget Kathmandu 5). The moment she feels her privileged position

being threatened by the state censorship she avoids the site of violence, for she can afford

choose. She returns when her safety is assured by her status as a human rights worker. Her fear

of state turns into hatred that is what encourages her to draw the lines between the good and evil,

in other words, the rebel force and the state security force. Speaking about possibility of

resistance to violence, Jenny Edkins reminds us, ―It is only with abandonment of the drawing of

lines and assumption of bare life [vulnerable at the face of violence] that responsibility and

political engagement [resistance to violence] is possible‖ (114).

The drawing of lines not only makes the resistance impossible, but demands the

narrator‘s effort to prove her demonization of the state security force. It is this effort that drags

narrator along the lines of presenting statistics of dead bodies instead of the survivors‘ pangs and

pains. When she passes by the Kotabada airport of Kalikot with her team what she remembers

the dead in terms of is the number. She digs into her memory-bank and produce the data that,

―[…] on 24 February 2002, the security forces had shot dead more than 34 workers, including

17 who had come here all the way from Dhading District, near Kathmandu, to find work‖

(Thapa, Forget Kathmandu 220). The incident had been reported in the newspaper. It was not

Thapa 48

something hidden that the narrator had to remind the readers. One might ask, for what the reason

Thapa is repeating the story which is already known to the people through media sources. Does

this kind of retelling of the story help the reconciliation among affected? Or, does it make

situation more vulnerable to further conflict? And who need this kind of information and for

what reason? It may look impressive in a statistic book of human rights violation; but not in the

context where survivors are in need of empathy, and the nation is calling for reconciliation.

Gobodo-Madikizela asserts that ―The narratives of trauma told by victims and survivors are not

simply about facts. They are primarily about the impact of those facts on victims‘ lives and about

the painful continuities created by violence in their lives‖ (qtd. in Kaplan 42).

Contrary to a trauma narration, Thapa has invested more time in counting corpses than

empathizing with those who survived the traumatic events and have been traumatized. The half

of the text [pages 121 -251] is heavily dominated by narrative on death statistics. She counts,

―On the first day of the state of emergency, 34 people, including army men, were killed in a

clash between the Maoist and the army in Solukhumbu District. The next day, four policemen

and 12 alleged Maoists were killed in Darchula District‖ (Thapa, Forget Kathmandu 162).

Similarly, she writes, ―On 2 April, more than 500 Maoists armed with rifles, bombs and grenades

attacked two police outposts in Rukum and Dolakha Districts, killing 35 policemen and

abducting 24 more. Seven Maoists were also killed in the battle‖ (Thapa Forget Kathmandu

146). Then, in other instances Thapa informs the readers which sides of the forces killed more

people statistically. She writes:

Tellingly, only five of the 147 killings here [in Kalikot] had been perpetrated by

the Maoists. Of the 142 people killed by the State security forces, all were alleged

to be Maoist killed in the combat. Amnesty International and other human rights

Thapa 49

groups were saying that up to half of those killed by the security forces were not

Maoists engaging in combat, but unarmed Maoists and innocent civilians. (Forget

Kathmandu 200-201).

After reading the narrative one gets the notion, as if one side of the killers can be tagged

as more evil than that of the other side by counting the numbers of dead in their respective sides.

This mode of representation raise question about authenticity of the narration. Thus, David N.

Livingstone questions, ―How, then, do we come to the view that certain representations are less

authentic than others, that they bear false witness to what is to be human? Only, [Livingstone

thinks] when we feel the claim of human suffering or experience what is repugnant about

injustice. It cannot be done with some naturalistic, utilitarian calculus that would suppress the

language of strong evaluation‖ (17). Similarly, Dominick LaCapra notes, ―Being responsive to

the traumatic experience of others, notably of victims, implies not the appropriation of their

experience but what I would call empathic unsettlement, which should have stylistic effects or,

more broadly, effects in writing which cannot be reduced to formulas or rules of method‖

(Writing History 41).

Despite the critics‘ rallying against the statistical method of responding to victims‘

suffering, the narrative in Forget Kathmandu has been ever more focused in counting the dead

and dividing the responsibility for the death into two different camps, as per the ratio and

percentage. Among many, one example how Thapa compares the death toll in her narrative

before and after the state of emergency: ―[…] earlier the number of people killed by the Maoists

equaled the number of alleged Maoists killed by the state, now the ratio became one to four, with

the state security forces responsible for 80 percent of the killings. Of the alleged Maoists they

killed, up to 40 percent were innocent civilians, said human rights worker‖ (Forget Kathmandu

Thapa 50

162). The statistics presented, here, shows stark objectified facts and figures that are nowhere

near victims‘ ongoing sorrowful plights and pangs they are bearing in silence. It is well

established argument that ―objectification, […] in its unmitigated form, may also impede

empathy and affective response in general, thereby putting investigator in the untenable or at

least questionable position of the bystander if not fully knowledgeable subject‖ (LaCapra History

70). Instead of effacing the questionable position, Thapa, rather, moves on positioning herself

clearly on one side as she writes, ―Given the nature of Nepal‘s army, these statistics are not

surprising. […] Of all government branches it was the least touched by democratic changes.

Even after 1950, it was headed mostly by members of the Rana family, as had been the case

since Jung Bahadur Kunwar Rana‘s time, over a century and a half ago‖ (Forget Kathmandu

162). Furthermore, she claims, ―More than 100 journalists were jailed during the state of

emergency, making Nepal the most repressive state against the media‖ (Thapa Forget

Kathmandu 165). From her categorical emphasis on linking army‘s hundred years past with the

2001 state of emergency, it is not hard to conclude that the author‘s narrative stand is on the

opposite side of the army; and much more closer to Maoists.

Therefore, the narrative of Forget Kathmandu lacks the quality of a moral witness of the

People‘s War. For a moral witness, as Margalit postulates, ―He or she should witness—indeed,

they should experience—suffering inflicted by an unmitigated evil regime. Thus, to become a

moral witness one has to witness the combination of evil and the suffering it produces:

witnessing only evil or only suffering is not enough‖ (148). Moreover, ―The moral witness

should himself be at personal risk whether he [she] is a sufferer or just an observer of the

suffering that comes evil-doing. An utterly sheltered witness is no moral witness‖ (Margalit

150). Because the narrator in Forget Kathmandu is sheltered and in no way near a personal risk,

Thapa 51

for she bears the privileged position of a human rights activist accompanying a foreign journalist.

It is because of her privileged position as the rights worker she invests more words in counting

dead bodies and scrutinizes their numbers in ratio and percentage to justify her dividing lines

between victim of the army and victim of Maoists. But by numbers of the dead she finds the

army more evil. Therefore, her proceeding accounts of death perpetrated by the state security

forces gives finishing touch to her project of demonizing army.

The representation without prejudice and biases invoke moral sympathy toward the

victims and call upon the moral responsibility of the perpetrator. It is possible only where the

narration is focused more on suffering and minimum space given to the description of the violent

act of the perpetrator itself. What arouses sympathy in perpetrators and the public, who are not

traumatized, is not the description of violence and the numbers of dead bodies resulted in

violence, but the representation of collective suffering of the survived in whose wounds and

woes the death is reflected. As Eyerman suggests, ―Resolving cultural trauma can involve the

articulation of collective identity and collective memory, as individual story meld into collective

history through forms and processes of collective representation. Collective identity refers to a

process of ‗we formation‘, a process both historically rooted and rooted in history‖ (―Cultural

Trauma‖ 74). In the case of insurgency, the identity formation should move towards the

formation of collective victimhood as victims in the People‘s War, so that the victims from all

sides stand under one identity, but not as the victims of the army atrocities as such. But the

narratives in Forget Kathmandu lacks this very quality of ‗we formation‘; on the contrary, they

widen the chasm, among suffering people, created by the conflict between the rebel forces and

the state forces, for the narrator herself has taken the side.

Thapa 52

Talking about testimonies and confessions of those affected by violence Gobodo-

Madikizela asserts: ―The narratives of trauma told by victims and survivors are not simply about

facts. They are primarily about the impact of those facts on victims‘ lives and about the painful

continuities created by violence in their lives‖ (qtd. in Kaplan 42). But, rather than asking how

the people are faring in the face of violent insurgency, Thapa asks a teenage boy for information

about what happened in the past:

We asked him to tell us what happened here [at haudi Villge]. He sat down beside

us, and began to talk in low, intent voice: ‗last year they shot the ward chairman,

Dilli Prasad Achraya. He wasn‘t even a Maoist. He was in the UML. It was three

in the afternoon, and he was washing his hands at his house before having a

snack. It was this kind of courtyard‘. The boy pointed around him. The other men

had fallen silent to listen to him. ‗the army shot him‘, the boy said. ‗He died on

the spot‘. ‗His wife was pregnant‘, one of the older men added. ‗She gave birth to

their son three days after‘. (Forget Kathmandu 208-9)

Above the testimony is focused more on identity of the dead as a political activist than as a

victim of the insurgency. This general categorization of the dead resists the empathic process for

a victim to come under collective representation of victimhood. Dominick LaCapra, remarks:

―Without implying a rash generalization of trauma, empathic unsettlement should, in my

judgment, affect the mode of representation in different, non-legislated ways, but still in a

fashion that inhibits or prevents extreme objectification and harmonizing narrative‖ (Writing

History 103).

Indeed, the rash generalization of the plight of the victims ignores the representation of

positive voice in a narrative. As the saying goes, that there is always a silver lining in the cloud,

Thapa 53

there‘s always a palliative sides in the traumatic events which opens a door for reconciliation.

Even during the insurgency, one comes across a security officer who says, ―We maintained good

relations during the peace talks. We used to walk and eat together, and we went to listen to their

speeches. We ran into a few Maoist cadres two days after the talks broke down, but we did not

attack or arrest them. […] We have not met directly since then, but we correspond informally

and agree to communicate and not fight‖ (Basnet 95). But one never gets to read such a voice in

the narratives of Forget Kathmandu. The positive representation of those affected by the

insurgency is something the author selectively ignores, but not completely. There is an occasion

where Thapa pays attention to the reconciled voice. She writes, ―According to Comrade Sandesh,

the Captain from Manma had come to Ratadab village for a few days; the army and the Maoists

spent two days talking. [Sandesh said], ‗the Captain asked us: what is an interim government,

what is a constituent assembly, why were we negotiating with King and not with the democratic

government‖ (Forget Kathmandu 234).

Indeed, a Maoist rebel talking about the army in a friendly manner is, itself, a strong

statement against the popular narrative view that Maoist and Army cannot get along with each

other. After all, they, too, are victims of the events, who have lost friends and relatives in the

war. Though a very rare sight in Forget Kathmandu, Thapa, at a moment, does see suffering soul

in the army as she writes, ―Away from loved-one and safety, two hundred men –from families of

ordinary means –were daily fighting to save the government, but more immediately, their own

lives. They were no richer than the Maoists. They were only doing their jobs. The Captain was

responsible for them‖ (224). And, at another moment one finds Thapa moving away from

balanced narrator when she gives a finishing touch to the narrative. She writes, ―If I had grown

up in one of these villages, and were young, uneducated, unqualified for employment of any

Thapa 54

kind, and as a female, denied basic equality with men–hell, I would have joined the Maoists, too.

[…] Join the Maoist is what any spirited girl would do‖ (Thapa Forget Kathmandu 248).

These last lines show that the narrator until the end of the narration does not take

departure from the dividing line; rather, she invests all her effort to establish the wall between

perpetrators in which she takes the side of the rebel. Trauma narratives, as Janice Haaken notes,

pretty ―Much like other raw materials, [they] are open to a wide range of interpretations and

social uses, including exploitive one‖ (455). And, whilst narrating Forget Kathmandu, the author

seem to be unaware of the fact that there are those who might exploit the testimonies, presented

in the text, in inflaming violence for their own political interests. It is not a simple task to

accommodate victims‘ voice in the text, for there is no clearly defined way of representation.

―Historians have not yet worked out altogether acceptable ways of ‗using‘ testimonies, and their

task is further complicated by the marked difference between the conditions and experiences of

victims‖ (Field 38). It is in this context, whilst narrating traumatic experiences and victim‘s

voices, an author should pave the middle path. Yet, the narrative in Forget Kathmandu use clear-

cut method of drawing the lines, Maoists versus the Army and she herself posts on the rebels‘

side.

Whilst spending her words on Othering the army she forgets to highlight the suffering of

the victims in collectivity, who survived the cross-fire ensued in the violent insurgency. Lack of

representation of the victims‘ suffering the text fails to provoke moral responsibility in both sides

of the perpetrators towards those who have suffered most from the violence. As Andrea Hyussen

points out, the issue in the literature of trauma ―is not whether to forget or to remember but rather

how to remember and how to handle the representations of the remembered past‖ (qtd. in

Zehfuss 220). Observed, in the light of theory of cultural trauma, the text which lacks the

Thapa 55

representation of the actual suffering of the victims, the real Other, fails to alleviate the trauma,

but, rather increase the trauma which encourages the further violence in a society. As I have

discussed in preceding paragraphs, the text creates ‗us versus them‘ gulf in remembering of the

violence which encourages publics to take sides. The violence sites where publics are divided in

terms of remembering the past can arouse bitterness, rather than palliating the trauma of violence

ridden society.

Finally, the narrative representation of Forget Kathmandu develops demonizing the

Army, thus deviates from recognizing the true victims of the insurgency. By the same token, it

does not help resolve traumatic conflict, because the author forgets to represent the wounds and

the woes of the conflict victims, thus ignores the call for claiming responsibility. Therefore, it

may be an excellent statistical account of the ‗unlawful‘ killings to present at the High

Commission of Human Rights Organization, so that the case can be filed against the army for

violating the human rights. This kind of representation rather intensifies the rupturing of the

social bonds. Particularly, in the aftermath of armed conflict, as Avishai Margalitt notes,

―memory breathes revenge as often as it breathes reconciliation‖ (qtd. in Zehfuss 217). In present

case, the army is sure to step ahead to defend the institution, and not claim the responsibility

towards the suffering. Thus, trauma narratives should work towards creating an environment for

perpetrators to have sense of guilt leading to claim responsibility towards the perpetrated; and

not rashly demonize one side which resist the very process of guilt feeling on the part of the

perpetrator.

Thapa 56

Chapter III

Othering the Maoist: Palpasa Cafe

In this chapter I scrutinize the narrative representations of characters and events of

Palpasa Café in the context of the insurgency and counter-insurgency events during People‘s

War. My argument is directed by the question: Do the narratives in the text pave the middle path

by presenting victim‘s voice of suffering in the forefront of narrative device? As the chapter title

suggests, my answer is, no. This chapter argues that the narrative representation is focused more

on demonizing the Maoist rebels resisting agency to the victims‘ voices. Thus text is engaged

more on amplifying the anger and sense of revenge of perpetrators; and deviates from giving

agency to the victim‘s suffering voice that they are not given space in the text so as to claim their

victimhood. The whole chapter revolves around elucidating the argument.

The chapter is divided into two parts. First part of the text examines the author‘s

narratives presented in prologue and epilogue to begin my argument with. In this part the

analysis looks into author‘s narrative position as presented in the text reflecting in the light of

narratives of the events and surroundings of violence ridden nation. Wagle, in the prologue to his

novel Palpasa Café, sets out creating platform aimed at presenting the Maoists rebels as the

perpetrator. He reports the Maoists‘ atrocities to the public in safe capital of the conflict ridden

country. The first part of the analysis sheds lights on the second part of the analysis by clearing

the blurred lines between the author and the protagonist of the novel. I move on to second part

where I state that author‘s voice is one with the protagonist‘s and both of them come to stand on

the same side, for the narrative is not from two different persons . For, one appears in the text

whilst the other is absent, with similar tone of narratives. So, it is not difficult to establish a point

that they are but one voice in demonizing the Maoist rebels.

Thapa 57

Second part this chapter focuses in the narrative of the major character, Drishya who

carries Wagle‘s argument forward until the author comes to replace him with the epilogue. The

protagonist carries the author‘s narratives forward in his absence. The narrative representations

of the events and testimonies, examined in the second part of the analysis, is aimed at gathering

evidence to endorse author‘s intention in presenting Maoists rebel as evil. The protagonist‘s story

is one-sided in which he posits the Maoists rebel in the forefront of his target of demonization.

The very narrative aspects of finger-pointing and demonizing lead the protagonist to observe

only one side of the conflict, which is, inflicting side. Even in the inflicting sides, the other

warring party, the security force is spared.

However, before stepping into the text‘s narrative aspects, it is worth poring over where

the author is standing in the social milieu. First of all, Narayan Wagle is a journalist, an editor to

one of the most popular daily, only after that he is a novelist. He says, ―I‘d stopped writing my

weekly column ‗Coffee Guff‘ in the Kantipur daily newspaper to make time to finish a novel.

One of my colleagues joked, ‗You‘re a newspaper editor. What makes you think you can write?‘

Another chided me, ‗A journalist shouldn‘t write fiction‘‖ (Wagle 1). As a journalist Wagle has

been reporting the events that took place during the insurgency for a decade, before he thought

about writing a novel on the same issue. The author‘s colleague who chides him may be right

that a journalist, like Wagle, in Nepal should limit themselves to their profession rather than

venturing a project like writing a novel with the narratives of conflict events and issues. It is not

that a journalist cannot or should not write, but, as Yadav Bastola has it, ―Media in Nepal

disseminates a large quantity of popular prejudices about armed and political group‖ (6).

Writing a novel by threading traumatic events into it is not a simple task where a whole

country is going through a painful phase of social and political transformation. Moreover, trauma

Thapa 58

theorists claim that memoirs, biography and fiction are taken as an alternative method accessible

to the voices of the victim of traumatic events. ―Because history by definition silences the victim,

the reality of degradation and of suffering—the facts of victimhood and of abuse—are

intrinsically inaccessible to history‖ (Felman 126). Describing the social atmosphere during

which he ventured writing the novel, Wagle records, ―Even events in my country seemed to be

conspiring against my novel. A sense of shocking incidents had occurred at breathtaking speed in

the lives of my countrymen and in the life of my protagonist. The line between fact and fiction

was blurring‖ (1-2). Cultural critics and theorists often emphasize on the nature of trauma as an

after effect of an event that erodes the conventional distinctions. In his speculation of trauma

narratives Jay winter writes, ―At times, the boundaries between truth and fiction become blurred

in such storytelling, whether, its setting is a public forum or an individual memoir‖ (66).

Therefore, Palpasa Café, in its narrative form, without having to argue any further, is a

novel evolving as a trauma literature. The conflict in the novel‘s settings escalated up to the

unbelievable stage where long established sense of belief was challenged by the events that were

taking place in the country. What people thought as a fictional story, something that took place in

the realm of imagination, was now taking place in people‘s own courtyard. The sense of severe

shock prevailed over the whole social atmosphere. So, there is almost no distinction between

what happens in the novel and what was happening in the country in which the text is set. And to

write a work of fiction weaving the real time traumatic events is to write about the trauma of that

society. As Jay Winter notes, ―Fiction and fictionalized memoirs have also been important

vectors for the dissemination of notions of traumatic memory‖ (71).

Thus, the author‘s position in narrating the events plays a crucial role in disseminating

the traumatic memories into public spheres. Even more so, when writer is a popular journalist

Thapa 59

like Wagle who has been in the minds of people as someone who reports what is true and right.

If an author weaves the traumatic events into his work out of prejudice, as Yadab Bastola has

noted in the preceding paragraph; the work of fiction can provoke violence rather than help in

resolving it. Because, a work of literature plays an important role in shaping public opinion,

specially, when a nation is going through insurgency because of the conflicting ideologies of

different social and political groups. Moreover, a work of literature is highly regarded among the

socio-politically aware publics in terms of its dynamics of dealing with traumatic memories.

Dominick LaCapra writes, ―The apparent implication is that literature in its very excess can

somehow get at trauma in a manner unavailable to theory—that it writes (speaks or even cries)

trauma in excess of theory‖ (Writing History 183).

Yet, an author may have his own reason for writing the novel on as sensitive topic as an

insurgency despite the knowledge of what the work can do when it is amidst the reading public.

And again, as Freud notes, ―[that] the creative power of an author does not, alas, always follow

his good will‖ (qtd. in Kaplan 45). It is mainly because ―The yearning for purity, lost or about to

be lost, for dedication, for truth that lodges elsewhere […] can lead to the adoption of a

transgressive, even outlaw identity. Instead of impassiveness or trivial pursuit, an exalted,

visionary sense of purpose takes over; popular fiction is full of avengers and purifiers of that

kind‖ (Hartman 233). Wagle‘s novel is the case in the point in which he longs for truth and

transgresses his position as a fiction writer when he writes, ―I wanted one last interview with

[Drishya] before finishing my book‘ [Palpasa Café]. It was based on his story, after all, and I

needed a few more details to make it as true as possible. The novel was portrait of his world‖ (2).

The author‘s longing for what is true about insurgency deviates the novel‘s narrative

representation from what is right pictures of suffering for readers in the context of traumatic

Thapa 60

setting. Wagle‘s journey as a writer intermingles with his profession as a journalist as he

proceeds with the story; and the latter replaces the first one when he writes, ―Drishya was like a

painting to me and I, his enraptured viewer. I‘d written my novel in such a way that readers

could mistake his story for my own‖ (2-3).

Thus, the journalist Wagle dissolves into his novel‘s character Drishya, as a reporter in

the conflict ridden countryside of Nepal where future is a dream without image. Of Drishya the

dreamer, or of himself, Wagle writes, ―I wasn‘t sure the situation in the country was conducive

to the realization of his dream. How, I wondered, could Drishya find the strength to face all the

uncertainties? His determination impressed me, especially because I thought that the country had

already raised its hand in surrender, defeating his dream. He alone was standing defiant‖ (3).

There is no argument about Nepal‘s history was going through severe political and social change

during which period the novel was set. Yet, by no mean can it be called surrender as Wagle has

done, deliberately. To whom the country raised its hand in surrendered? The author does not find

it necessary to answer. But he points the finger at the Maoist rebels as the Other who were

defeating Drishya‘s dreams. Yet, the reporter is defiant, for he is responsible for reporting the

picture of gruesome bloodsheds to the public from the field that was taking place.

Traumatic experiences are usually ineffable in terms of a verbal expression. The author

should find a way to express the radical evil, for the character as a victim cannot directly express

what they went through. How to put the expression in the character‘s words is a crucial issue in a

trauma fiction. ―One-way of expressing the ineffable is by recourse to describing the-moment-

before and to the- moment-after the real horror takes place, but avoiding the moment of horror

itself‖ (Margalit 168). But in the case of Palpasa Café harsh details is preferred to the imagined

alternative picture of the events; and the author is describing them as they are taking place. And

Thapa 61

this is where a reader finds the author more of a journalist than a novelist as he writes, ―What

[sic] timing! I picked up a napkin to jot down the story: ‗A patrol of the unified command lost

contact with district headquarters after being ambushed by Maoists this morning about eight

kilometres to the east [….]‘‖ (Wagle 6). Instead of reporting the events in details as they are

taking place, the author could have adopted other narrative alternatives. ―Because imaginative

solutions have been adopted in many cases, rather than addressing the harsh specificities of the

past, there is a strong seam of reworked and re-imagined pasts that run through these new

narratives of nationalism‖ for the sake of resolving the conflict (Meskell 160).

And the author‘s intention for not adopting the indirect method of reporting is, as I have

pointed in preceding paragraph, to present the country has surrendered itself to the Other, the

Maoist rebels. Wagle‘s deliberate presentation of the Maoist as destructive force against the

government‘s security force, transgress the ethics of witness in a literature of trauma. ―One of the

main characteristics of the witnessing position as formulated by Dori Laub is the deliberate

refusal of an identification with the specificity of the individuals involved—a deliberate

distancing from the subject to enable the interviewer [in this case a reader] to take in and respond

to the traumatic situation‖ (Kaplan 124-125).

So, as we are told, one of the major features of trauma narratives is to avoid finger

pointing at the individual, or at the institution involved in the narrated events of conflict. But,

first thing Wagle does in his novel is to identify the Maoist Party as a perpetrator without qualm

as he writes, ―The Maoists had looted and bombed a bus‖ (4). The very act of naming just one

side of the perpetrators draws the lines between author and the state security forces as Self and

the Maoist as the Other. Therefore, the author‘s narratives posit him as against the morals of

trauma narratives. The authors clearly calls for the confrontation against the Maoists in his

Thapa 62

narratives which is not, even, recommended in journalism, leave aside the trauma literature. As

opposed to the author‘s approach to reporting a conflict event, journalist Yadab Bastola writes,

―Conflict sensitive journalism is the practice of writing news stories about conflict in a way that

does not aggravate or identify the discord. It presents a wide range of opinions, avoids

inflammatory language and experience ways in which the confrontation can be resolved‖ (6).

Among the characters in Palpasa Café, the author has given a little space to just one

character from socially and economically underprivileged class, a Tharu girl, Phoolan, from

Mid-west of Nepal. Even this girl is presented against the Maoists as he writes, ―I was still in

touch with Phoolan but she‘d changed. She lost her smile the day Drishya was taken away. […]

If Drishya doesn‘t come back soon, Phoolan might have to go back to her village. And there, she

might have to join the Maoists. They‘re asking for one recruit from each household. (Wagle

232). The girl‘s social and economic background is left untouched. Phoolan is almost a mute girl

in the novel, who is rescued by a painter from mid-hill ruling class background. Whilst reading

the passage we come to know that the author has presented only one side of insurgency, which is

the infliction caused by the Maoist. So, the narrative is more like a ruling classes‘ political

propaganda than being a truthful, for the author evades the other side, the infliction caused by the

ruling class and the state security forces among the underprivileged people.

And yet, what we find in the narrative is the author‘s relentless claim for novel‘s

truthfulness when he writes, ―[Drishya] said, ‗I want you to write truth. I‘ll help you. If I lied to

you or left things out, your writing wouldn‘t be honest. I‘ll be completely open with you‖ (Wagle

231). It is in his prologue Wagle the author claims the truthfulness of his novel, the claim he does

not leave to the narrative itself to speak, but takes upon himself to carry it until the end. When an

American girl, Gemini, asked how the author knew about Palpasa‘s death, he replies, ―I will give

Thapa 63

you a book, [meaning Palpasa Café]. It has all the details‖ (238). He further adds, it is truthful,

because ―I wrote it‖ (239). It is true story because Narayan Wagle wrote it. What an interesting

way of justifying the truthfulness of the novel one writes, in which the representation of the

suffering of the actual victims of the insurgency, whether they be from the Maoist‘s side, or from

the state security forces, is being overshadowed by the narratives of one eyed witnessing. As

Jeffrey C. Alexander and Jason L. Mast point out, ―[that] we are ‗condemned‘ to live out our

lives in age of artifice, a world of mirrored, manipulated, and mediated representation. But the

constructed character of symbols does not make them less real‖ (7).

Therefore, the danger of trauma narrative lies in the real setting of the story which can be

easily taken for granted by the reader, particularly, when a society is experiencing traumatic

phase in the history. And this is where a writer, such as Wagle, has an important role to play by

giving agency to the victim‘s suffering. Urging writers to be more responsible about trauma

narratives, Shoshana Felman writes, ―The task of the [writer] of today is to avoid collaboration

with a criminal regime and with the discourse of fascism. Similarly, the [writer] of tomorrow

will have to be watchful to avoid complicity with history‘s barbarism and with culture‘s latent

crimes‖ (33). But in the case of Narayan Wagle‘s novel, one side of the barbarity is foreclosed

whilst the other is completely covered. And, at times, in the narrative, the readers smell the reeks

of author‘s collaboration with the forces of the autocratic regime. In what follows, I shall be

exploring on that part of his deliberate Othering of the Maoist rebels. In her study of affects of

trauma E. Ann Kaplan notes, ―It seems to me that in certain ways trauma also produces an

‗other‘ world; in trauma as in trance, one is outside one‘s body‖ (126).

The narrative atmosphere in Palpasa Cafe is deeply traumatic, filled with fears and

uncertainty of lives. A sense of deepening anxiety overwhelms the social setting of the

Thapa 64

narratives, as if something horrendous is just about to take place any time. This angst is felt in

the life of protagonist as he narrates, ―A bomb might explode in the city, claiming one of their

lives. Or the man might get caught in crossfire while travelling outside the capital. His car might

be ambushed. Anything, anything could happen to deprive the couple of another afternoon like

this‖ (Wagle 36). In an attempt to understand the effect of the traumatic events in peoples‘ lives

Amy Shuman and Carol Bohmer writes, ―[When] an ordinary life has been disrupted, and at the

moment of disruption, the cause is often unclear. Each dimension of experience—of ordinary

life, persecution, and the journey—creates a different sense of self and follows different cultural

conventions for representing experience‖ (406).

And, what a reader finds in the protagonist is not a secured citizen of Nepal, but a man

perpetually haunted by the image of death and destruction of his long lived values. Therefore, he

perceives the people and surroundings in terms of their resistance to the destructive forces. As

Janice Hanken notes, ―By definition, traumatic events overwhelm existing meaning systems. But

this very disruption of normalcy invites story telling as people attempt to make sense of what has

happened. The hypnotic power of the images—bombings, corpses, the palpable horror of those

on the scene—may blind us to the psychological and political processes shaping the construction

of the story‖ (456). The over whelming effect of trauma is discernible among the people belong

to feudal structure of Nepal society, particularly, after the event of the Royal Palace massacre.

The voice over the phone call to Drishya declares, ―The country‘s been plunged into darkness.

Everything‘s finished and you are still sleeping‖ (Wagle 71). The shock is audible in this voice

over the phone that informs the protagonist about the Royal Massacre. The massacre of the

Royals, the epitome of the feudal regime in the country, comes as a threat to the existing cultural

values and system in the backdrop the Maoist war against the old regime. The Maoist has been

Thapa 65

waging war against the regime by mobilizing ethnic nationalities that were suppressed by the

monarchy. Riaz and Basu notes, ―As the monarchical state claimed Nepal to be a monolithic

Hindu nation, different social entities marginalized within the constructed Hindu hierarchy

transformed their diverse ascribed identities into characteristics of indigenous nationalities in

order to claim Nepal as a multinational state (69). Now, the suppressed nationalities were rising

to claim back their long lost cultural heritage and identities. It is in this socio-political context

that Drishya finds his values been threatened by the Maoist for the palace massacre at times

appear to make their revolutionary path easy.

In her study of affects of trauma E. Ann Kaplan notes, ―It seems to me that in certain

ways trauma also produces an ‗other‘ world; in trauma as in trance, one is outside one‘s body‖

(126). For a student of Cultural Trauma it does not come as a surprise when Drishya creates

Other out of the Maoist, but not the state security forces, because he belongs to the socio-

political echelon of the feudal ruling class that is being threatened. Yug Pathak writes, ―The

decade-long insurgency [known as People‘s War] significantly changed power structures

vertically and horizontally. The old order of a handful of people enjoying privileges was

threatened by this movement. When a big chunk of a subjugated population shouldered the gun,

the roots of a feudal power order were shaken‖ (6). Thus, in the fiction, a reader comes face to

face with the narrator who is traumatized, for he feels threatened by the new emerging, so far

marginalized, classes of his society.

Drishya in the novel finds peaceful and harmonious countryside ravaged with war. More

than that it is the absence of dominating mid-hill Brahmin culture and feudal system that he

perceives as a loss, for the countryside has fallen under the rebels‘ rule of law. In the absence of

the state, Drishya narrates, ―He [a rebel commander Siddhartha] and his comrades were trying to

Thapa 66

place a gun in the hand of a girl who was just a budding flower. They were trying to motivate

other village youngsters to join up as well. They were emptying the village of its youth and it

upset me‖ (Wagle 91). As LaCapra has pointed out ―In converting absence into loss, one

assumes that there was (or at least could be) some original unity, wholeness, security, or identity

which others have ruined, polluted, or contaminated and thus made ‗us‘ lose‖ (707). And, in an

attempt to justify the war, the rebel commander says, ―Most of the people who‘re being killed are

representatives of the old power elite‖ (Wagle 76). The old power holders could no longer

maintain their rules of law in the presence of the rebels, and thus, they were compelled to desert

the countryside.

Drishya vents anger at Siddhartha who is responsible for his perceived loss. Then he

blames Siddartha and his party destroying the very root of the system. Pointing at a sketch he

once drawn of his village school, Drishya says to Sidhhartha, ‗This school had absolutely

nothing. There wasn‘t even glass in the windows. But now even this little school‘s been

destroyed. Whenever I look at this picture, I am reminded of the way things are in our country

these days‖ (Wagle 76). And Siddhartha in his turn replies, ―I‘m sorry. I understand I‘m partly to

blame but, the ultimate blame rests with the old power center‖ (Wagle 76). Thus the narratives of

blaming and pointing finger proceeds in the novel. There is no room left for empathy towards the

suffering other, the victims of the conflict. There have been victims from both sides, the family

members of the rebels and the state security force fighting the rebels. And because they are

divided in the conflict ridden milieu as the Maoists and the Police or Army, there hardly any

room left for readers to feel their pangs and agonies. Sudhir Kakar notes, ―Empathy with

members of the other group, even when considered the enemy, defends the Other from the

Thapa 67

untrammelled aggression which can so easily be let loose against all those considered

subhuman‖ (180).

Because there is no space for empathy in the narratives of the text, all we find is one

defending the one‘s violent act in the course of brushing off the blames. Drishya‘s entire

conversation with Siddhartha is spent in pursuit of former trying to paint the violent demon on

the face of the latter. And Siddhartha has no other choice but defend his cause for what he is

doing. He says, ―True, some innocent people are getting caught in the cross fire[sic]. But

consider how the crisis first arose. Wasn‘t it the state which drew first blood? Didn‘t the state

first arrest, torture and killed unarmed people?‖ (Wagle 82). But Drishya is adamant to his point

and says ―What if I told you I have no faith in you people? That I don‘t think you offer any hope

for the future?‖ (Wagle 81). And Siddartha in his turn blame Drishya as conformist to old elite

class values who is against the growth, when he says, ―You have finally come to the point, dear

artist, you want to paint real character but you can‘t accept that real people change and grow.

You‘re scared of their growth‖ (Wagle 82). From the preceding conversation, a reader easily

finds that the narrative space given to the perpetrator is immense. The protagonist, a middle class

who supports status-quo in the society and spends hours arguing with the rebel commander who

holds onto principle that is against the conformist. Amidst their heated arguments the actual

sufferings of the conflict victims have been suppressed. The arguments are based upon the

characters‘ political affiliation to different warring parties, but not on the moral ground as

someone affected by the traumatic infliction of the society as a whole.

When the acts of violence is give a political dimension, then moral act of opposing

violence lose its ground, for ―in many situations of political persecution, violence becomes

normalized‖ (Shuman and Bohmer 401). By the same token, Siddhartha‘s persecution by the

Thapa 68

state army is normalized in Drishya‘s narration of the event. In his view, ―Siddhartha had chosen

to walk on the edge of a knife but he‘d also made the hills into a knife. So many young people

had followed him mindlessly and taken up arms without understanding the consequences. They

were exhilarated by the power guns gave them. But such power brought nothing but devastation‖

(Wagle 169). It is interesting parenthesis in which readers are not given a moment to ponder over

Siddhartha‘s death, for the protagonist step-in justifying the death before a reader could think, as

he narrates, ―I‘d been haunted by my own thoughts as I climbed that hill. I‘d been surrounded by

images of widows, orphans and old people who‘d lost their children. I was falling apart‖ (Wagle

170). And it is not hard to deduce that the intervention from Drishya points at Siddhartha being

responsible for the haunting images of the hills.

So, what is lacking in the narratives is its denial to tread middle course with use of

indirect way of representation other than stark and crude way of depiction of the events and

feelings produced by the horror of the violence. Elzbieta Halas writes, ―In the cultural

understanding of trauma, a key question is its symbolic representation and communicated

meanings, which is associated with other constitutive dimensions of cultural memory—

axionormativity, affectivity, and reflexivity‖ (6). It is well accentuated by the trauma theorists

that the balanced narrative without pointing a finger to any parties involved in the conflict

provides enough space for reflexivity.

Though, it is rare in Palpasa Café, at one point we find fine balance in the narrative when

Drisyah records, ―I heard the girl tell the porters, ‗the school closed after the teacher was killed.

The children don‘t go to school anymore. They herd cattle now‖ (Wagle 102). In this passage the

perpetrator is not identified, only the victim‘s suffering is being narrated; and the reader finds

oneself close to the sufferers. This kind of amplification of victim‘s suffering without blaming

Thapa 69

the parties involved goes unnoticed when the narratives of ‗us versus them‘ follow it. For

example, the distinction is made clear in the way Drishya amplifies an old-man‘s anti-Maoist

gesture as he narrates, ―He glanced around, then came close to me and whispered, ‗Take care my

son. I hear a big group‘s coming today. They take away anyone who‘s young and strong. They

don‘t give old folk like me much trouble. We just have to give them food, cooking utensils and

plates‖ (Wagle 112).

Furthermore, the old-man‘s gesture is supported by the way Drishya portrays

encountering a rebel girl as he writes, ―The barrel of her gun was pointing, inadvertently, at my

cheek. So what if there was a flower in the barrel, I thought. It‘s still could loaded. It could still

off‖ (Wagle 122). The author is unaware of the problem in the narrative representation that may

result in negative effect in the context of conflict divided public. And as Hartman notes, ―We

may not know what to do with those images of violence and wretchedness, but we cannot not be

aware of them. There is a reservoir of guilt ready to be exploited in almost all who live

comfortably in their own skin‖ (219). The author‘s lack of awareness of the positive voice of the

people, including the rebels and the security force, trapped in the conflict has rendered the text

questionable. Because, nowhere in the entire text do we come across a narrative where a security

officer sounds more insightful when he says, ―This political problem cannot be resolved by

fighting. We won‘t stop war or finish the Maoists by killing ten of them; neither can they win the

war by killing ten of us. We live with this understanding. The Maoists are also Nepali. Change

has to come by giving them what they have been demanding. Should the state always run by a

single person?‖ (Basnet 95).

So, the question arise, has the author been honest with his work as the anti-war protest as

Kunda Dixit has noted? Or does he like to provoke the war further between the warring parties

Thapa 70

by blaming one side and not calling the both sides for the responsibility? What one gets from

Drsihya are mere factual details of atrocities caused by only one side of the warring parties as

they take place. Walter Benjamin, in the context of Holocaust, notes, ―It is not the objective of

the story to convey a happening per se, which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds it

in the life of the story teller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening‖ (qtd. in Felman

47).

However, Palpasa Café is more for objective information than for passing the story as an

experience to the readers that the protagonist has lived through. It is because the narrative is

overtly glossed with the author‘s intervention as the protagonist rather than letting the victims to

speak for themselves. For example, when Drishya reaches a village where he sees a woman

wiping her tears showing at the shoe on her doorsteps. He does not let the silence of the woman

prevail as it would in trauma literature, but he goes onto identifying the people behind it, as he

narrates, ―Finally, a boy came over and explained that the shoe was a message from the

guerrillas, ordering the family to send someone to join their ranks. The woman had seen it [a

shoe] outside her house that morning. After that, she hadn‘t drank [sic] a drop of water or eaten

morsel a [sic] food all day. She‘d just sat there weeping‖ (Wagle 126). Thus the reader‘s

attention is driven towards the Maoist, rather than focusing on the weeping woman. Once the

identity of the inflicting group established, then Drishya let the weeping woman vent her anger at

the Moaist, as she says, ―Did my husband go to work in India just to feed these greedy pigs?‖

(Wagle 127).

The author could, as well, have let the woman speak first, and without pointing the finger

at the Maoist; then listener or even the perpetrator would have empathize with the woman, and

take the responsibility without having to defend their cause for the pain they inflicted in the

Thapa 71

woman. Once the institution or a group is identified as perpetrators they no longer remain

human, so as, to be able to empathize with the victim. It is by virtue of being a human that one

feels the pain of the other; and stripped of off the human face they are only capable of inflicting

more pain. Therefore, a conflict sensitive trauma literature calls for responsibility of the

perpetrator not by dehumanizing them, but by showing the wounds they have caused on the

victim.

And, in order to display the wounds and woes of conflict victims a narrative has to be

more skeletal, but not thick with description5. This is, yet another point, where Palpasa Café

goes against the current of trauma literature. The victims‘ affliction is presented by the narrator‘s

description the painting, rather than letting the painting speak for itself, when it reads, ―The

picture showed the old woman walking towards her district‘s headquarters after the Maoist‘

People‘s Court had ordered her to leave her village‖ (Wagle 224). Even on the picture, the

narrator does not spare the Maoists with their tainted image, though the old woman, with anguish

in her face, is on the way and the court is absent in the picture. But still, the narrator does not

leave it for readers to judge cause of her plight focusing only on the picture, despite the fact that

one can barely be blind to the people‘s plight during the insurgency. Moreover, the narrator, a

painter, is blind to the irony of the descriptive text when he opines, ―If an artist starts bringing

politics onto his canvas, there‘ll be no difference between him and a politician. The two should

remain separate. Art shouldn‘t become mere propaganda‖ (Wagle 85). The politics is absent in

the painting itself; it only intervenes as the caption that reads below the painting as a title. A

5For skeletal trauma narratives please read Saddat Hasan Manto’s collection of short stories, Bitter Fruit (2008),

Translated by Khalid Hasan.

Thapa 72

question arises, could he not do without the caption? Yes, he could. But, again that would not

have suited the author‘s objective of demonizing the Maoists.

Despite the protagonist‘s explicit dominance over the narration, at times readers come

across the text where the sufferers speak. No blaming finger pointed at the perpetrator when a

retired British army tells a sorry story of a village flute-player Krishna Lal: ‗He can‘t walk‘, he

said. ‗They took the bullet out of his leg but it didn‘t help. He was caught in crossfire,‘ he

explained. He was wandering around playing flute, and didn‘t hear the firing when it started‘‖

(Wagle 114). In this narrative readers are left to imagine the experience the flute player had lived

through, without a leg to stand on. In this narrative no overt description of blaming and

defending involved. What we see is a bare life of a poor man, open to vulnerability that anything

can happen to him anytime in that particular situation. The man is not in a privilege position as

the protagonist to make distinction between self and the other; he lives in the zone of in

distinction as oppose to the protagonist who is politically on the side of the sovereign power. As

Jenny Edkins, in her essay ―Trauma Time and Politics‖ notes, ―In an apparent contradiction,

sovereign power has relied since its beginning on making distinction between bare or naked life

(the life of the home) and politically qualified life (the life of public sphere)‖ (111). And equally

vulnerable are the state security forces once the sovereign power is absent in the battle ground;

so are those rebels who are fighting against the sovereign power agent. In deaths and wounds

humans are bare and naked, all the distinctions collapse. For example, after the battle of all night

between the rebels and the state force, Drishya in morning witnesses: ―One of the policemen

resting against the wall stretched his legs and saw an unexploded bomb. He looked anxious but

didn‘t move. Beside him, two police officers lay dead, spread like drunkards with their faces to

the ground‖ (Wagle 134-35). There could have been the Maoists‘ dead body as well but the

Thapa 73

narrator does not include those other dead in his description. Even, when they are dead, Drishya

makes distinction by identifying the police.

This power of making distinction posits Drishya in a position of privileged one, though,

ironically enough, he says, ―I was in danger from both sides‖ (Wagle 176). Yet, there‘s not a

single incident where the Maoists threatened him with his life, leave alone the state security

force, for the army did not even question him when he led them to identify Siddhartha who was

shot by the army. And still he solicits with reader for sympathy as if he is the one who is

victimized. Despite the author‘s attempt to present Drishya as a balanced story teller, the

narrative happens to come out a total failure, in this regard. He exaggerates a an ordinary

situation where a rebel asked him to draw a picture, as any village youth would have asked him

out of curiosity. Owing to this incident he become paranoiac and says, ―Would they shoot me?

Would anything happen to me while I slept? I‘d told them I didn‘t agree with their ideology. I‘d

even refused to make a sketch of their Chairman‖ (Wagle 180). Drishya cultivates clear

antagonism between himself and the Maoist throughout the narratives. One such antagonistic

attitude is that he blames only the rebels for what is happening in the life of the countrymen, not

the state and its fighting forces when he questions, ―Where was Siddhartha now? What had he

been doing all this time? How could he bear being responsible for these widowed hills? How

could he stand to see these innocent people being turned into widows or orphans or losing their

children? Or was he only thinking about the next attack on a district headquarters?‖ (Wagle 161).

There is, yet, another such an antagonistic narrative when he is led by a rebel girl, when he

narrates, ―I followed her in dutiful silence, as if I were in a mediation [sic] centre where all

conversation was banned. But then I began to think: whole villages are in mourning, hundreds of

houses have been abandoned, and thousands of people face an uncertain future. And this girl‘s

Thapa 74

pointing a gun at me. Who does she think she is? Does she have the courage or the culpability to

solve our nation‘s problem and create a prosperous future for us? No. All she had was a gun, and

she was using that gun to intimidate me‖ (Wagle 164). Drishya‘s narrative of presenting the

Maoist as the Other reach the climax when, in an exactly the same situation as in preceding

passage, the army, though he prefer not to recognize them, abduct the rebel girl and gaged her

mouth and blindfolded him. This time, he does not feel threatened, nor does he think about the

callousness of the army‘s behavior; rather, he appears romantic, yet not without being a sarcastic

towards the rebels, as he narrates, ―At one point I could tell we were walking uphill. When my

blindfold was lifted, I found myself in a stunningly beautiful valley. I was surprised to see the

girl beside me with a gag in her mouth. Were her comrades punishing her for some reason?‖

(Wagle 165).

Drishya, despite being a country-lad once, stands against the rebels who, once were his

mates and grew up with them. The reason behind this fierce opposition is not that Maoists alone

are responsible for the deaths and destruction, but they are the one to bring about fall of

suppressive feudal rulers in the countryside. All what is old, suppressive and hierarchic in nature

have been despised and fought against by the Maoist which has threatened the cultural roots of

privileged class. In their research book on the decade long insurgency Thapa and Sijapati note,

―Along with the development of the Peope‘s War a new consciousness for fighting for their own

right and liberation is spreading amongst many oppressed nationalities of the country such as

Magars, Gurungs, Tamangs, Newars, Tharus, Rais, Limbus and Madhises [sic]. (105)

In his return to the village Drishya finds sweeping change has taken, where was born and

grew up as a lad. People from the untouchable caste group are serving tea to the highest

Brahmins caste. It is the lowest class of people who are ruling the countryside with support from

Thapa 75

the rebels. The whole countryside changed with the impact of the insurgency and Drishya returns

with the picture of the old and romantic country with obedient village folks among whom he

once lived during the feudal regime. For not being able to embrace the change and detach

himself from old mid-hill Brahmin cultural identity, Drishya finds himself against it, when he

says, ―No one here believed I was neutral. I‘d become a stranger in my own home district. Who

was I? My identity linked to my profession but who‘d respect my profession here? What had my

paintings done to these hills? No one knew my art. My identity as an artist wouldn‘t win

anyone‘s trust‖ (Wagle 152). He is already mourning for the loss of his identity and yet, not able

to embrace or create the new one. Relating the traumatic affect in Drishy‘s life it is worth

quoting psycho analyst Sudhir Kakar at length. He writes,

Psychologists report and novelists describe the feelings of bereavement and states

of withdrawal among those mourning for old attachment and suspicious of

creating new ones. These tendencies are not only harmful for individuals but also

hinder the birth of new social structures and forms while they rob community life

of much of its vitality and therefore its capacity for counteracting the sense of

helplessness. (185)

Wagle‘s Palpasa Café, other than a fiction, is, also, a personal testimony of a countryman

who witnessed the damage, psychological and cultural, caused by conflict in the lives of people

and the society at large. Owing its story to the sensitive events of the insurgency, it is normal that

reader expect the text to be on the side of those who are suffering, thus the medium for the

reconciliation among the warring parties. Underscoring the intrinsic feature of trauma narrative

Ruth Leys, writes ―It is because personal testimony concerning past is inherently political and

collective that the narration of the remembered trauma is so important‖ (qtd. in Kaplan 121). Yet,

Thapa 76

in the narratives of Palpasa Café the collectivity has been overshadowed by the story‘s dividing

lines, as it occupies most part of the text demonizing and antagonizing the Maoist rather than

focusing on the collective suffering of the victims from all sides. The narrative is filled with the

details of the events occurred as the narrator is told by the people he meets, and glosses the story

with his own impression. And, ―especially with controversial topics, nothing is more misleading

for a reader than the impression that an account simply relates the facts or explains a problem

without having a formative and ideologically weighted relation to other accounts‖ (LaCapra

Representing 40). The dividing lines run through narrative from beginning to the end of the text.

One such example comes from Palpasa as she says, ―Maoists have made the villagers their

prisoners! No one can go anywhere without their permission. It‘s simply a dictatorship. It shows

how they‘d run the country if they ever came to power. And that could only be achieved at the

barrel of a gun, not with the support of the people‖ (Wagle 184).

Despite the thick description against the Maoist, and none at all against the state security

force, Drishya goes on reiterating his innocence as being a neutral and thus belonged to the

collectivity. He says, ―People who felt as I did could be targeted by either side because we

opposed both. I‘d protested against both warring sides in these paintings, my colours showing

my support for the third camp. This was my strength. But would I be safe in choosing this path?‖

(Wagle 213). In the preceding pages I have pointed out the statement Drishya has made about his

being a neutral. He has been saying the same thing in his attempt to convince the listeners (and in

the case of the author the readers), but never care about showing it in his narrative. Therefore he

has not been genuine in what he says about the third camp. In order to belong to the third camp,

in as vulnerable situation as in the decade long conflict, lives ravaged by hatred and horror, one

has to accept the vulnerability of life coming out of the secured zone. As, in the context of the

Thapa 77

Holocaust, Victor Klemperer says, ―Where there‘s no human being, be one‖ (qtd. in Margalit

157). It applies, also, with the narrative of a text composed of the victim‘s testimonies and the

experiences they have in the violent conflict. Because, to listen to the voice of the victims

imbued with suffering in the situation dominated by the evil is to claim the responsibility as

human. As an author, one should claim this responsibility of listening to the victims in that

situation; and only with the responsibility s/he belongs to third camp, the camp of the collective

solidarity against the violence and amplifies the victims‘ voices.

In the situation where the darkness of the extreme suffering invade the narrative whilst

amplifying victim‘s voice, humor can be used. A trauma narrative without humor is a story

without life. The sense of humor shed light in the darkness of the trauma narrative. It is the

humor that helps the victims come to terms with the most bitter and painful situation. ―The

attempt to come to terms with extremely traumatizing events involves the work of mourning.

[…] Certain rituals teach us that this work does not exclude forms of humor, and gallows humor

has been an important response to extreme situations on the part of victims themselves. Needless

to say, the employment of humor is one of the most delicate and complicated issues in the light

(or darkness) of certain events‖ (LaCapra Representing 65). In the respect of use humor, Palpasa

Café remains hollow, imbued with factual darkness without light to guide the future of the

victims. The author has an utterly failed in trying to create humor in the dark situation of the

victims‘ of the insurgency, as he writes, ―Walking behind the widow was an elderly man. He was

on his way to claim his son‘s body. His sighs had become the signs of the hills. He was leaning

on a walking stick but it was hard to tell whether the stick was supporting him or he was

supporting the stick.‖ (Wagle 159). Rather than light laugher, a reader finds narrative mocking

about the condition of the old man, though the author intends to make a reader laugh.

Thapa 78

Conclusion

Forgetting the Other: Politics of Representation

Among the literary works produced by Nepali writers, writing on the conflict in Nepal,

Forget Kathmandu and Palpasa Café stand apart as having the high number of readership. Both

the texts is about conflict narrative despite their difference in genre, the first is mixture of

memoir and journal, whilst the latter is a fiction, ‗more real than the fact‘ as Kunda Dixit termed

it. By sheer coincidence, as one may like to say, both of these texts were published in the same

year. Above all, both the texts are inflected with the traumatic stories of people of Nepal who

lived through the crossfire between the warring forces; and the trauma of the nation at large, for

the change the conflict brought about caused a tear in the socio-cultural beliefs and hitherto lived

values. Yet, the texts are pole apart in their narrative construction of the traumatic events and

stories, despite having been written in the same context, the Maoist composed People‘s War

against the ‗old regime‘ and the state orchestrated counter-insurgency to crush the Maoist‘s

revolution.

As I have discussed in the preceding chapters, the narrative in Forget Kathmandu is

heavily loaded in demonizing the army institution for their service to the nation throughout

history and about their counter insurgency tactics against the rebel. And the narrative in Palpasa

Café, as oppose to Forget Kathmandu, is very thick with descriptive details of the conflict events

antagonistic to that of the Maoist version of revolt to free the people of oppressed classes and

castes. However both the texts meet at one point that they fail to listen to the real Other, the

victims of the conflict, for the cacophony of blaming and finger pointing the army and the

Maoist, or rather focused on Othering both the warring parties renders the voice of the suffering

Thapa 79

victims inaudible. The author should focus on the conflict victim with the sense of responsibility.

The trauma literatures are ―concerned with the issue of responsibility, that is, with finding ways

to enable us [Nepali] to be responsible. To do this, one has to learn to take the Other‘s

subjectivity as a starting point, not as a something to be ignored or denied‖ (Kaplan 123). The

responsibility to work for what is to come, in the near future, collective identity for

reconciliation, for example; and not with the statistical details of what happened and the

gruesome facts of the violence. Since the text ―both personal memoirs and biographies have

come to be looked at as an instructive and expressive literature rather than strictly historical

(‗factographic‘) documents. A biographer, it has been said is a novelist under oath‖ (Hartman

26). So, it is natural that a reader might expect the written on conflict about suffering of the

people to be rather palliative, but not provocative.

Yet Thapa and Wagle appear to be unaware of this instructive aspect of the text written

about the sensitive issue of the insurgency; and more than the awareness, they have infused

politics in the narrative to meet their own objectives. Because, as Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois

note, ―Focusing exclusively on the physical aspects of torture, terror, violence misses the point

and transforms the project into a clinical, literary, or artistic exercise, which runs the risk of

degenerating into a theatre or pornography of violence in which the voyeuristic impulse subverts

the larger project of witnessing, critiquing, and writing against violence, injustice, and suffering‖

(1). The texts, other than critiquing the violence through representation of suffering victims,

represent each of the warring parties. The politics of representation in the narrative of traumatic

memory resist the call for responsibility, but rather encourage wide range of interpretation

against collective solidarity of the public. It is because, ―Cultural memory is historically variable

and shifting. An analysis of this sociocultural process requires taking into account both the

Thapa 80

symbolic actions that construct the memory of trauma and the interactions of social subjects

which respond variously to the claims of memory‖ (Halas 7). In the case of the texts under my

topic, as I have explained, the memory can only be claimed either as the victims at the hands of

the army; or, as the victims at the hands of the Maoist, but not as the victims of the decade long

insurgency. Therefore, the narratives of demonization of the army and the Moaists keep the rest

from moral responsibility. The Holocaust narrative is the case in point about which Bernhard

Giesen argues, ―Demonization of Nazi rule removed the nation from the realm of moral

responsibility and culpability. Intoxication, seduction, and blindness allowed Germans even to

regard the German nation as the true victim of Nazism‖ (120). And, in the context of People‘s

War, it is not surprising that the ruling class elites are presenting themselves as the victims of

conflict and asking for compensation with the republic government.

The problem, solely, arise in the very construction of memory in the narrative where

Thapa and Wagle invest more energy in digging the statistical and factual details of the events

took place during the conflict; and in their bid to blame the warring parties they forget to pay

attention to the actual Other of the conflict who suffered at the hand of the rebels, the army, and

the state‘s elite culture as a whole. As, Livingstone aptly points out, that ―If we do not adopt the

posture of courtesy [of listening], we remain out off from the very possibility of experiencing the

real presence behind representation. Without that real presence, there is nothing to which

representation is answerable‖ (Livingstone 17-18). Because, both the narratives are built upon

the selected story of the victimized people and the atrocities that are politically inflected, there is

no real presence of the neutral human voice. It is not as important to question whether the

politically detached voices existed among the traumatized victims, as it is to question the

authors‘ intention for not giving those voices the proper agency. Because, as Sudhir Kakar has it,

Thapa 81

―We must note that there are always some individuals whose personal identity is not

overwhelmed by their religious or cultural group, [or political] identity even in the worst phases

of violent conflict. These are the persons capable of acts of compassion and self-sacrifice, such

as saving members of the ‗enemy‘ group from the fury of a rampaging mob event at considerable

danger to their own physical safety‖ (Kakar 244). So, the concerned authors‘ fail in representing

voice and acts of the compassionate individuals who stood at a human level putting their lives in

danger, whilst facing the violence and, as Edkins would have it, accepting the vulnerability of

bare life.

The texts, such as Forget Kathmandu and Palpasa Café, that are for counting the dead

and recording the details of that deadly event, and do not provide narrative space in representing

the apolitical individuals‘ action or their stories, rather pave the excuse for trauma victims

avenging the death of their dear and near one in the name of justice. For, ―In particular, the

collective memory of trauma, of counting the dead and the construction of a narrative

community with the dead, can invest collective memories with pathos that under certain

circumstances legitimate expiatory violence‖ (Ray 153). So, it is crucial that trauma narratives

take note of what is to come in the aftermath of the violent conflict. And Thapa and Wagle have

failed in this aspect of trauma narrative, too; for their narratives are concerned only with the past

and present dimension of the trauma. ―Thus, trauma understood as a cultural process is not

restricted only to the experience ‗here and now‘, but consists in interaction and communication,

where a blow dealt to the community is defined, victims are identified, responsibility is ascribed

and future consequences of the experiences ‗there and then‘ are determined. A crucial

component of this process is the way of presenting trauma, its images, in other words—

symbolization that influences the constitution and changes of collective identity‖ (Halas 7).

Thapa 82

In the context of People‘s War, as Nepali sociologists have pointed out, the conflict has

been rooted in the traumatic events that indigenous people underwent in the past during the

unification period, and caste hierarchy imposed by Rana regime in 1854. Instead of leaving the

wounds of loss open and working it through, the oligarch covered the wounds by writing new

history of Nepal as a homogenous culture. Chaitnya Subba notes, ―Historical documents and

other relevant evidences and living collective memories of the common past of the nationalities

sustained by words of mouth (oral tradition) reveal that military oppression, political exclusion,

cultural destruction and economic marginalization invariably led to their low human

development‖ (32). Historically oppressed groups have been double victim of historical trauma

caused by oppressive monarchical state. First, the groups suffered culturally, socially and

economically in the hands of the state government. Second, the victims of the oppression were

not allowed to claim their victimhood; in other words, they were not given agency to speak of

their wounds. The working-through trauma by mourning their loss had been closed by the state.

As I noted earlier, the root of People‘s War lies in the closure of traumatic history of

Nepal. Without adequate working-through the trauma of cultural loss and indignation inflicted in

the indigenous communities may have deepened as melancholia which erupted in violent as well

as peaceful revolt against the state, time and again. One of many examples, ―Limbu revolt

against language suppression and Far Kirant execution of Phakosek Limbu, expulsion of many

others [in 1778]‖ (Subba 39). And ―Tamang peasant revolt against high caste exploitation and

suppression of local people [in 1951]‖ (Subba 40). Yet, people of Nepal are unaware of these

historical revolts ever taking place. It is because in the process of closure, as Avishai Margalit

points out, ―Mythmakers, epic poets, and chroniclers of the royal court are kept busy trying to

provide legitimacy for regimes whose entitlement to govern is anchored in events of the dire

Thapa 83

past. Hence, the urgent need and ardent desire of authoritarian, traditional, and theocratic

regimes to control collective memory, because by doing so they exercise monopoly on all

sources of legitimacy‖ (11).

And, it is the texts like Forget Kathmandu and Palpasa Café that help legitimizing the

suppression of the victims‘ voice by deliberately forgetting to record them in the national

narratives of victimhood. It is easy for them to do so, because they do not belong to the realm of

the victims. As E. Ann Kaplan, commenting on Sarah Kofman‘s and Marguerite Duras‘s trauma

narrative, who were both the victims of the Holocaust in different situations, writes, ―These

victims of parallel but different traumatic situations put their experiences in writing, I believe, for

several reasons: to organize pain into a narrative that gives it shape for the purposes of self-

understanding (working their trauma through), or with the aim of being heard, that is,

constructing a witness where there was none before‖ (20). But, in the cases of both Thapa and

Wagle it is different, for they were not the direct victims of the violence of people's war. Nor

they construct the witness for working through purposes. That‘s where both the texts differ from

trauma narrative and invest more ink blaming and finger-pointing at the party involved in the

conflict, and ignoring the suffering of the real Other.

And, to blame the whole institution, as the case in the narratives under my topic, for the

crime committed in the people‘s war, is to limit those individuals, who within the institution

resisted the violence and have been victims themselves, to the category of the evil and digress

from taking the responsibility as collective whole. Critiquing the narrative of blaming and

scapegoating in the context of representation of the Holocaust, Marguerite Duras argues, ―The

only possible answer to this crime is to turn it into a crime committed by everyone, to share it.

Thapa 84

Just like the idea of equality and fraternity. In order to bear it, to tolerate the idea of it, we must

share the crime‖ (qtd. in Kaplan 53).

For the most part, as the ethnic scholars argue, People‘s War has been waged by

historically traumatized nationalities and gender in order to reclaim their loss and right to

victimhood and communal mourning. The Maoist party only provided them, afterward, with

political cover to fight their way through to be heard and listened to, because the national

narrative put closure to their suffering and did not give agency to enable them to claim their

victimhood. In this respect, keeping the wounds open in the form of narrative, art, and

performance is very crucial in the aftermath of traumatic events. Thomas Laquer notes, ―Nations,

like individuals, sustain trauma, mourn and recover. And like individuals, they survive by

making sense of what has befallen them, by constructing narrative of loss and redemption‖ (qtd.

in Kaplan 136). A decade of people war has disclosed the past wounds and created new. In this

sense trauma has revisited history by offering an opportunity to mourn the loss.

Unfortunate though, in the aftermath of violent conflict in Nepal, government agencies

and political parties promoted, encouraged, and writers in some cases argued for the closure of

the conflict wounds. The parties involved in the conflict are still blaming each other, which has

delayed the formation of a commission of truth and reconciliation. Even after the reconciliation

Nepal will be forever wounded or nonetheless scarred; yet, as trauma theorists claim, trauma can

be both creative and destructive. It all depends upon the how the national narrative presents the

trauma in the public sphere. Therefore, writing about or writing on People‘s War, we cannot miss

the factors that contributed to the Maoist early rise in power through war. The trauma of being

deprived of their political, social and cultural agency, the marginalized groups of different

nationalities found People‘s War a way to make their voice heard. ―But at least the residue of the

Thapa 85

trauma that perhaps lay beneath the conflicts and tensions of rebuilding may be lessening. We

have begun to translate the trauma into a language of acceptance while deliberately keeping the

wound open; we [ought to be] learning to mourn what happened, bear witness to it, and yet move

forward‖ (Kaplan 147).

It is well accepted notion that the literature influence people in a society to cultivate

harmony or conflict, the literatures of trauma demand the author‘s moral responsibility. When an

author deviates from taking the moral stand whilst writing on violence, the literature might turn

out to be the seeds of further violence in future. Being a conflict victim himself, diasporic writer

Karahasan has a lot to say about literature on violence. Nevertheless, I shall limit myself to one

line where he says, ―I come from a destroyed country. Bad literature or misuse of literary craft is

responsible for that‖ (72). Therefore, the works of literature on conflict should channel the

memories of violence towards reconciliation and not toward dividing the public into ‗for‘ and

‗against‘, who are affected, because ―the traumatic memory reaches back to an act of violence

that breaks down and reconstructs the social bond‖ (Giesen 113). In this sense traumatic memory

if channeled wisely help in reconstructing the social bond, as it did among the American after the

events of 9/11; and if inflected with politics of representation, the memory can trigger the further

conflict, as it has been going on between India and Pakistan after the partition of 1947.

However, in the context of literary representation of a decade long insurgency in Forget

Kathmandu and Palpasa Café; the first one might help the human rights organization, as old

regime would choose to put, for its statistical record of the number of illegitimate killings by the

state; and the latter might please the elite of the old regime, as the Maoist would choose to put,

for its story of the Maoists atrocities and justification of the state orchestrated violence against

the people in the pretext of the rebel forces. Thus, as I have argued, both the texts fail to appeal

Thapa 86

the collective identity of the conflict victims under the one term ‗victimhood‘. As texts are far

from giving victims the agency than demonizing the warring parties, the texts utterly fail to stand

apart as literature of trauma, against the reader‘s expectation of palliative texts. I would like to

suggest the negative image of India among Nepalis can be, yet, another topic for research from

the perspective of cultural trauma. One may find interesting to note that the construction of

Nepali history has functioned as the closure of trauma of defeat and loss in Anglo-Nepal War.

Thapa 87

Works Cited

Adhikari, Jagannath, and Bhasker Gaumtam. ―Introduction: Writing on Armed Insurgency‖.

Ajit Baral et al., By the Way: Travels through Nepal’s Conflict. Kathmandu: Martin

Chautari, 2008. 1-17.

Adhikari, Indra. ―Women in Conflict: The Gender Perspective in Maoist Insurgency‖. Ed.

Lok Raj Baral. Nepal: Facets of Maoist Insurgency. New Delhi: Adroit Publishers,

2006. 60-84.

Alexander, Jeffrey C. ―Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma‖. Jeffrey Alexander et al.

Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley and London: University of California,

Press, 2009. 1-30.

---, and Jason L. Mast, eds. ―Introduction: Symbolic Action in Theory and Practice: the

Cultural Pragmatics of Symbolic Action‖. Ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. Social

Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual. Cambridge: CUP, 200

2006. 1-28.

Baral, Lok Raj, ed. ―Maoist Insurgency: A Prognostic Analysis‖. Nepal: Facets of Maoist

Insurgency. New Delhi: Adroit Publishers, 2006. 185-209.

---, ed. ―Introduction: New Frontiers of Restructuring of State‖. Nepal: New Frontiers of

Restructuring of State. New Delhi: Adroit Publishers, 2008.

Basnet, Purna. Dolpa: after the tempest‖. Ajit Baral et al., By the Way: Travels through

Nepal’s Conflict. Kathmandu: Martin Chautari, 2008. 89-103.

Bastola, Yadab. ―Recording a Conflict‖. The Kathmandu Post. January 10, 2011. P- 6.

Beardsley, C. Monroe. ―Fiction as Representation‖. Syntheses. 46.3, The Richard

Rudner Memorial Issue, (March 1981). 291-313.

Thapa 88

Bhattrai, Govinda, ed. ―A Glimpse into the Stories of Conflict and War‖. Stories of Conflict

and War. Kathmandu: Modern Books, 2007.

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

London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Chakravarti, Sudeep. ―Palpasa Café: A Book that focuses on the civil war that plagued Nepal

For years‖. Outlook India: Travel. July, 2010. 04/09/2010.

<http://travel.outlookindia.com/ article.aspx?266060>.

Dallas, Alastair. ―Inside a People‘s War‖. Socialist Review (2005). <http://www.socialist-

review.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9366>.

Das, Veena. ―Trauma and Testimony: Implication for Political Community‖. Anthropological

Theory. (2003). 293-307.

Dixit, Kunda. ―Fiction More Real than the Fact‖. Nepa-Laya. 2005. <http://www.nepa-

laya.com-/publications/pulpasa_cafe.htm>.

Edkins, Jenny. ―Remembering Relationality: Trauma Time and Politics‖. Ed. Duncan Bell.

Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflection on the Relationship Between Past

and Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 99-115.

Eyerman, Ron. ―The Past in the Present: Culture and the Transmission of Memory‖. Acta

Sociologica. 47.2, (2004). 159-169.

---. ―Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity‖. Eds.Jeffrey

Alexander et al. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley and London:

University of California Press, 2009. 60-111.

Felman, Shoshana. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Thapa 89

Field, Sean. ―Beyond Healing: Trauma, Oral History and Regeneration‖. Oral History. 34.1,

Oral History and ‗Healing‘?, (Spring 2006). 31-42.

Giesen, Bernhard. ―The Trauma of Perpetrators: The Holocaust as the Traumatic Reference

of German National Identity‖. Eds. Jeffrey Alexander et al. Cultural Trauma and

Collective Identity. Berkeley and London: University of California, 2009. 112-154.

Haaken, Janice. ―Cultural Amnesia: Memory, Trauma, and War‖. Signs. 28. 1. 455-457.

Halas, Elzbeita. ―Time and Memory: a Cultural Perspective‖. The Free Library. December 1,

2010. 1-17. Trames. <http://thefreelibrary.com/Time+and

+memory%3a+a+cultural+perspective.-a0243958016>.

Hartman, Geoffrey. Scars of the Spirit: the Struggle Against Inauthenticity. New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Hasan, Khalid. ―Introduction‖. Bitter Fruit: The Very Best of Saadat Hasan Manto. trans.

Khalid Hasan. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2008

Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: the Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature.

New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

Islam, Khademul. ―Stories from Nepal‖. The Daily Star. 2008. Literature.

<http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=60139>.

Karahasan, Dzevad. ―Understanding War‖. Sarajevo, Exodus of a City. Trans. Slobodan

Drakulic. New York and London: Kodansha International, 1994. 59-86.

Kumar, Jeevan. ―The Indian Federal Experience‖. Ed. Lok Raj Baral. Nepal: New Frontiers

of Restructuring of State. New Delhi: Adroit Publishers, 2008.

LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore and London: The Johns

Hopkins Univeristy Press, 2001.

Thapa 90

---. History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory. Ithaca and London: Cornell

University Press, 2004.

---. Representing Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994). Ithaca and London: Cornell

University Press, 1996.

---. ―Trauma, Absence, Loss‖. Critical Inquiry. 25. 4, (Summer 1999). pp. 696-727.

University of Chicago Press.

Livingstone, David N. ―Reproduction, Representation and Authenticity: A Rereading‖.

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 1998. 23. 1, New Series,

(1998). pp. 13-19. Blackwell Publishing. 05/09/2010. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/

623154>.

Luckhurst, Roger. ―Mixing memory and desire: psychoanalysis, psychology and trauma

theory‖. Ed. Patricia Waugh. Literary Theory and Criticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.

497-507.

Margalit. Avishai. The Ethics of Memory. Massachusetts and London: Harvard UP, 2002.

Meskell, Lynn. ―Trauma Culture: Remembering and Forgetting in the New South Africa‖.

Ed. Duncan Bell. Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflection on the Relationship

Between Past and Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 157-175

Miller, Sam. ―Cry, My Beloved Country‖. India Today. 2005. 04/09/2010.

<http://www.indiatoday.com/itoday/20050207/books2.shtml&SET=T>.

Pandey, Beerendra. ―Pedagogy of Indian Partition Literature in the Light of Trauma Theory‖.

Ed. Sumnya Satpadhy. Southern Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 2009. p 124.

---. ―Towards Culture of Rhetoric(s)‖. The Kathmandu Post. March 10, 2007. p 4.

Panta, DR. ―Far Western Village in Conflict‖. Ajit Baral et al., By the Way: Travels through

Thapa 91

Nepal’s Conflict. Kathmandu: Martin Chautari, 2008. pp. 63-70.

Pathak, Kamal Raj. ―Nightmares‖. Ed. Barbara Weyermann. Close Encounter: Stories

From the Frontline of Human Rights Work in Nepal. Kathmandu: Himal Books, 2010.

pp. 192-194.

Pathak, Yug. ―Welcoming New Power Order‖. The Kathmandu Post. January 1, 2011. 6-7.

Rajan, K.V. ―Pauper at the Banquet‖. Outlook India. 2005. Book Review. 04/09/2010.

<http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?226468>.

Riaz, Ali, and Subho Basu. Paradise Lost: State Failure in Nepal. New Delhi: Adarsh Books,

2007.

Sakhwa, Asthi. ―Post-February firs Postmodern Democracy‖. Nepali Times. 2005.

<http://www.nepalitimes.com.np/issue/2005/03/04/Review/1123>.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Philippe Bourgois. ―Introduction: Making sense of Violence‖.

Ed. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois. Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology.

Oxford And Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Sen, Amartya. The Idea of Justice. London: Penguin Books, 2009.

---. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. London and New York: Penguin Books,

2006.

Shuman, Amy, and Carol Bohmer. ―Representing Trauma: Political Asylum Narrative‖.

The Journal of American Folklore. 117. 466, (Autumn 2004). pp.394-414.

University of Ilinois Press.

Smelser, Neil J. ―Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma‖. Jeffrey Alexander et al.

Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley and London: University of

California Press, 2009. 31-59.

Thapa 92

---. ―September 11, 2001, as Cultural Trauma‖. Jeffrey Alexander et al. Cultural Trauma and

Collective Identity. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2009. pp. 264-

282.

Subba, Chaitanya. ―The Ethnic Dimension of the Maoist Conflict: Dreams and Design of

Liberation of Oppressed Nationalities‖. Ed. Lok Raj Baral. Nepal: Facets

of Maoist Insurgency. New Delhi: Adroit Publishers, 2006

Subedi, Jiwan. ―Insurgency and State: External Dimension‖. Ed. Lok Raj Baral. Nepal:

Facets of Maoist Insurgency. New Delhi: Adroit Publishers, 2006. pp. 134-163.

Sztompka, Piotr. ―The Trauma of Social Change: A Case of Postmodernist Societies‖.

Jeffrey Alexander et al. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley and London:

University of California Press, 2009. 155-195.

Thapa, Deepak, and Bandita Sijapati. A Kingdom Under Siege: Nepal Maoist Insurgency,

1996 To 2004, (2003). Kathmandu: The Printhouse, 2007.

Thapa, Majushree. Forget Kathmandu (2005). New Delhi: Penguin Books India, Rev.ed.,

2007.

---. ―The Future of Nepali Literature‖. The Kathmandu Post. January 1, 2011. pp. 8-9

Wagle, Narayan. Palpasa Café (2005). trans. Bikash Sangruala. Kathmandu: Nepalaya, 2008.

Weyermann, Barbara, ed. ―Family Troubles‖. Ed. Barbara Weyermann. Close Encounter:

Stories From the Frontline of Human Rights Work in Nepal. Kathmandu: Himal

Books, 2010. pp. 200-207.

Winter, Jay. ―Notes on the Memory Boom: War, Remembrance and the Uses of the Past‖.

Ed. Duncan Bell. Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflection on the Relationship

Between Past and Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 54-73.

Thapa 93

Zehfuss, Maja. ―Remembering to Forget, Forgetting to Remember‖. Ed. Duncan Bell.

Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflection on the Relationship Between Past

and Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 213-230.