Maarij

Elif Shafak’s novel, The Island of Missing Trees meticulously highlights human and non-human trauma resulting out of political oppression, displacement, uprootedness during Cypris Civil war. Her novel embodies a non-human entity- a Fig tree as an agentic narrator, defying that agency is limited to humans only. In her novel, human and non-human layers are enfolded and sedimented in each other. Human’s trauma is transferred to the fig tree since they exist in a similar environment. Recent studies have often focused on the damaging aspect of human activities on the natural world, instead of analyzing the non-human trauma caused by political oppression. To contest the limited study of trauma as a human phenomenon, the following research analyzes non-human trauma of a Fig tree and proves it as an agentic ‘nobject’ a concept given by Peter Sloterdijk. The Fig tree and human characters are explored as co-existing entities, affected by war, and haunted by the past. The recent studies have not investigated the concept of trauma in terms of the natural world. Therefore, the research focuses on non-human trauma, the symbiotic relationship between human and non-human world and how it is narrated to create meaning in the world. The research thus proves that human and non-human entities are enmeshed together, and they function as historical archives often narrating stories of oppression.

Non-human Trauma and Agency Embodied in The Island of Missing Trees, 2021

Elif Shafak’s novel, The Island of Missing Trees meticulously highlights human and non-human trauma resulting out of political oppression, displacement, uprootedness during Cypris Civil war. Her novel embodies a non-human entity- a Fig tree as an agentic narrator, defying that agency is limited to humans only. In her novel, human and non-human layers are enfolded and sedimented in each other. Human’s trauma is transferred to the fig tree since they exist in a similar environment. Recent studies have often focused on the damaging aspect of human activities on the natural world, instead of analyzing the non-human trauma caused by political oppression. To contest the limited study of trauma as a human phenomenon, the following research analyzes non-human trauma of a Fig tree and proves it as an agentic ‘nobject’ a concept given by Peter Sloterdijk. The Fig tree and human characters are explored as co-existing entities, affected by war, and haunted by the past. The recent studies have not investigated the concept of trauma in terms of the natural world. Therefore, the research focuses on non-human trauma, the symbiotic relationship between human and non-human world and how it is narrated to create meaning in the world. The research thus proves that human and non-human entities are enmeshed together, and they function as historical archives often narrating stories of oppression.

Trauma studies in literature examines the complex psychological and social aspects that affect the victims' perception of traumatic experience, as well as the ways in which such an experience is reflected in language. The God of Small Things attempts to accurately reflect the traumas experienced by the characters. In this novel, many individuals have been exposed to various traumas. These traumas that individuals are exposed to have either destroyed their lives or caused their deaths. The constant repetition of traumas in this novel led me to refer to Freud's theory of trauma. According to Freud, trauma victims experience events similar to the traumas they have experienced in the past, the situation or events they complain about do not change. According to Freud, repressed traumatic experiences are then relived in similar ways All individuals from different socioeconomic classes in the novel unite at a common point. This point is their traumatic experience. Drawing on Freud's trauma studies, I associated the traumas of the characters with the common social trauma of British colonialism. As a matter of fact, it has been seen that both social and individual reflections of mass traumas are discussed in other trauma studies. In this article, a detailed analysis is made for the various forms of individual and mass traumas in the novel God of Small Things. Set in Ayemenem, the novel chronicles the terrible downfall of a family whose members suffer severely as a result of a lack of love and compassion. The novel is told from the perspective of the twins, Rahel and Estha. The story explores several facets of life, including religion, love, anger, misery, ambition, temptation, and sex. In addition to this, the story touches on some modern-day difficulties that lead to more troubles for the Ipe family. The aim of this study is to examine the novel in the light of trauma theory and to examine the situations such as gender, social class difference, caste system, colonial history that cause the traumas of the character in the novel.

Anbar University Journal of Languages & Literature

University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series, 2020

The present article examines trauma in the multicultural context of India based on an interdisciplinary and comparative study drawing on theories from psychology, neuroscience, genetics, comparative literature, arts and cultural studies. The focus is on various forms of trauma – psychological, physical, individual, collective – and the way they shape distinct worldviews, problematic identities and conflictual selves rooted in the dialectic union of tradition and modernity that characterizes South Asian cultures in varied degrees. It is argued that these traumas get integrated into the self through a series of negotiations, emotional reverberations and transactions, yet constantly carry within them the potential of implosion/ explosion in certain situations; they lead to creative and critical subversions of social norms, to the deconstruction of language and the everyday, the emergence of new discourses, as well as to processes of restructuring the self (and psyche) through dialogica...

Boletin De Literatura Oral - The Literary Journal, 2023

For a long period, the Eurocentric and American exclusivity superseded a universal appeal to trauma studies. Most of the studies carried out in the past several years had this framework in consideration. To address the trauma accounts emerging from the Global South, this paper intends to examine the psychological and physical pain of people of Kashmir, a conflicttrodden region, sandwiched between third-world Asian countries. Since the Indian subcontinent was divided in 1947, Jammu and Kashmir have been one of the areas of contention and disputed territory between India and Pakistan. For several decades the Kashmiri population has become listless and vulnerable to traumatic events as a result of the political turmoil, militarization and decades-long armed insurgency. Despite the seriousness of the traumatic experiences of the Kashmiri people, as reflected in its literature, less scholarly attention has been paid to it. This paper attempts to highlight that "The Book of Gold leaves" by journalist-turned writer Mirza Waheed, narrates the personal and collective trauma of the Kashmiri people caught amidst the perpetual conflict using the theoretical framework of trauma study, which includes personal trauma as well as collective trauma.

SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH

Memory is a complex phenomenon that reaches out to far beyond what normally constitutes a historian's archives, for memory is much more than what the mind can remember or what objects can help us document about the past. There are then two aspects to this memory that concern us here: the sentiment of nostalgia and the sense of trauma, and their contradictory relationship to the question of the past. A traumatised memory has a narrative structure which works on a principle opposite to that of any historical narrative. At the same time, however, this memory, in order to be the memory of a trauma, has to place the Event - the cause of the trauma, in this case, Partition of 1947 in the context of Tripura-within a past that gives force to the claim of the victim. This has to be a shared past between the narrator of the traumatic experience and the addressee of the narration. Yet it cannot be a historicist version of the past, one that aims to diffuse the shock of the traumatic by exp...

South Asian Review , 2017

There is much debate within the field of traumatology about the danger of ignoring cultural differences in understanding trauma, and of assessing and intervening in cross-cultural experiences of trauma. Nancy Dubrow and Kathleen Nader, in Honoring Differences, argue that recognizing and understanding the cultural context aids in a more specific treatment of loss and trauma that honors the obvious differences between cultures (2-3). This encourages a perspective that is beyond the dominant conceptual framework of trauma as global phenomena, one that is guided by Western-based conceptions on traumatology; it allows for nuanced understandings. This perspective accounts for historical and political stressors; local issues; and, allows for personal and communal narratives on trauma to emerge. Diverse cultures have different understandings and expressions of trauma, victimhood and survival; this diversity is often expressed in literature as means of narration and expression, and means to ...

International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 2021

The present study aims to scrutinize the concept of trauma in Laleh khadivi’s work entitled, The Walking. The objective of the study is to examine how Khadivi’s work can be read through theories of trauma. The Freudian notion of trauma focuses on the remaining psychological wounds on subjects’ identity while Alexander’s concept, cultural trauma, concentrates on the cultural outcome of a horrendous event at the collective level. Traumas are not solely private psychological experiences and are restricted to one solitude individual as they can expose themselves as collective experiences. Literary works are valuable properties picturing the results and outcomes of trauma both at its individual and collective level. In the current paper, concepts related to traumas will be defined to examine the characters in Khadivi’s novel. The novel provides a set of chronological events that happened to a minority group during the Iranian revolution. The author chooses her characters of Iranians of K...

Review of the book "Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity" by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, Neil Smelser, Piotr Sztompka. 2004. Berkeley, the University of California Press, 2004.