Memory and Trauma: Experiences of Three Women Anglophone Kashmiri Writers

Résumé fourni par la source

The paper seeks to analyse aspects of trauma and memory in three works by Anglophone women writers from Kashmir, namely, Sudha Koul's The Tiger Ladies: A Memoir of Kashmir (2002), Asiya Zahoor's Serpents Under My Veil (2019) and Farah Bashir's Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir (2021).These writers seek to represent, through their personal experiences, the conflict in the valley as lived by a section of women far removed from the centre of action and experiencing a form of trauma that does not necessarily result from expressly catastrophic events in their own personal lives.Rather, their trauma draws from persistently disrupted lives, a sense of constant apprehension and departure from normalcy that such a context must necessarily involve.While it is common to discuss and theorise on the more explicit forms of violence that occur in conflict zones, the paper argues, through tools of trauma and memory studies, that a specifically gendered form of trauma arises in female subjects through this forced erosion of normalcy and prolonged domestic confinement.