ISSN 2320-1452 Symposium Loss, Anxiety and Separation in Literature

Journal of the Department of English (Peer Reviewed) St. Paul’s Cathedral Mission College, Kolkata

Editor Dr. Anasuya Bhar Associate Professor in Englsih

December, 2020 Symposium Volume 11, Year 2020

Editor: Dr. Anasuya Bhar Associate Professor in English

ISSN 2320-1452 © Individual Authors Published : December, 2020 The Department of English

Published by : St. Paul’s Cathedral Mission College 33/1, Raja Ram Mohan Roy Sarani, Kolkata - 700009

Cover : Internet

Printed at: Rohini Nandan 19/2, Radhanath Mallick Lane, Kolkata - 700 012 Mail to: [email protected] Ph: 9231508276 | (033) 7963 5719 Advisory Editorial Board

Dr. Sanjukta Das Lady Brabourne College Kolkata

Dr. Ajanta Paul Principal, Women’s Christian College

Dr. Jolly Das Department of English, Vidyasagar University

Dr. Vishnupriya Sengupta Independent Scholar and Researcher

Dr. Tania Chakravertty Dean of Students’ Welfare, Diamond Harbour Women’s University

Dr. Rudrashis Datta Pritilata Waddedar Mahavidyalaya, Nadia C O N T E N T S

Pain, Loss, Anxiety and Separation 9 Anasuya Bhar

Poetry as Testimony: Afghan Women’s Poetry 15 Nishi Pulugurtha

Women’s Autobiographical Writing and Feminist Traumatology: A Postcolonial Perspective 25 Saptaparna Roy

Goats, Separation and Death: Reading Goat Days by Benyami 37 Chaitali Maitra

Death in an Alien Land: The Poetry of Mortality in British Colonial India 43 Sarottama Majumdar

“There is always the other side”: Revisiting Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea through the Postcolonial Lens of Trauma Theory 50 Uma Biswas

Victim versus Victimizer: An Analysis of the Theme of Destruction in Wuthering Heights 64 Tamali Roy Chowdhury

Life in Pandemic: Looking at Covid-19 78 Anindita Chatterjee F O R E W O R D

The year 2020, has been a traumatic one, to say the least. With the Covid pandemic almost paralysing the world, on all fronts by chiefly regulating physical movement and advising personal caution, there is, perhaps, a need to contemplate on other crises resulting from this, as well as, epidemic/pandemic situations of the past. The evils of the plague, the Spanish flu, the typhoid fever or cholera, and also Covid 19, have not only taken lives, but have also caused extensive loss – personal, economic and political. Pain, loss, trauma, separation, have also been a consequence of other serious causes like displacement, migration, political borders, international negotiations, which have affected thousands, even millions, of lives across the world. The Covid pandemic has, inadvertently, unleashed speculation on all kinds of losses and, most importantly, on how the resilience of the human race has finally triumphed over death and separation, with the indomitable spirit of life. Literature, the other arts and all forms of aesthetic expressions articulate the pain through its many voices and media. We present the eleventh volume of Symposium, on this reverberating theme of ‘Loss, Anxiety and Separation in Literature’. There are seven research articles and one full length Editorial on the theme. We are fortunate to have received our essays from established and renowned academics for this volume. Our Advisory Editorial Board has been outstanding in extending all their support and encouragement. This year we are proud and fortunate to have among us Dr. Ajanta Paul, Principal, Women’s Christian College, in the Advisory Editorial Board. We also extend our wholehearted thanks to our printer Rohini Nandan, without whom this volume would not have seen the light of day.

Dr. Anasuya Bhar [email protected] Pain, Loss, Anxiety and Separation 9

E D I T O R I A L

Pain, Loss, Anxiety and Separation Anasuya Bhar

Less than a quarter into itself, the year 2020 saw remarkable changes that were unprecedented in recent human history, on a worldwide basis. With the outbreak of the Corona Virus (Covid 19) pandemic, the world was stunned and withdrew into a shell shocked silence, into what would be, increasingly, the familiar phenomenon of the ‘lockdown’. The beginnings were uncertain and tentative, sometimes even ludicrous, in its far-fetched and projected reality within the television screen and the newsprint; it also seemed surreal in certain cases, with every other human-populated place wearing the look of desertion, and while the non-human world of other animals and nature, flourished in its newfound peace and freedom. We were conscious of the reality through other effects; closure of all academic institutions, the evolution and near-perfection of online teaching and examination, the characteristic work-from-home ethics, the underdressing, the sharing of family commitments and space with that of work, the homely concerns of cooking, cleaning and washing taking priority along the side of simultaneous ‘office’ work. Working hours got stretched within family hours, and there was hardly any observable leisure time. In fact, in the absence of a distinct ‘local habitation’ of work-space, there were no boundaries and no observable separations between office and home commitments. The above were, however, the corporatisation of a global pandemic. In minutiae and on a local footing, what one noticed were several other and affiliated problems. The first manifestation of a forthcoming pandemic among the Indians was fear: fear of contagion and the consequent fear of death. Gradually the fear penetrated into the souls of people, the lockdown brought in consequent problems of an economic standstill, of unemployment and interestingly enough, that of social unacceptance. One saw the helpless journeying of migrant labourers from one part of the country to another without 10 Symposium any public transport. Covid was of the least concern to them. Their chief concern was survival from hunger and fatigue, and to reach the destination of ‘home’. They fell prey to the bad planning and mismanagement of the entire machinery. More than Covid, the initial worry was the fate of these migrant labourers. They brought back images of pain, loss and anxiety that have ravaged humankind in the past, through displacement, war and other political insurgencies like the partition of India in the late forties and early fifties of the last century. One could detect the same and widespread suffering, gruesome images of death, and general and public apathy towards a particular sector of the society. The first wave of the covid infection in India claimed many of her actors, artists and statesmen as well as ordinary people, mostly senior citizens. Covid found ubiquitous attention in all media, both print and the audio visual. Apart from the body of considerable literature, covid has also spawned endless symposia and academic writing. The noted philosopher Slavoj Žižek has also published his views in Pandemic! Covid 19 Shakes the World (2020). Our concern in this volume of Symposium, is the fabric of pain and anxiety, in general, which may or may not be the bitter aftermath of an epidemic or a pandemic, but, which are, nevertheless, endemic to human society and human nature alike. Death and separation, trauma and anxiety can be both personal as well as political. Literature often chronicles such human tragedies, it also becomes the agent of expression for loss. Our essays in this edition of Symposium deal with several aspects and nuances of pain that get reflected in poetry and other forms of literature. We have papers that comment on how literature becomes the repository and the refuge of emotional trauma, how it documents the ills and de-humanization of migration and displacement, and how it often becomes the conduit of all kinds of pain, and finally on how Covid 19 has become the issue for an entirely different kind of lifestyle, even while keeping its many casualties at bay. All grief and pain, in the beginning, seems to be personal and private. Pain, anxiety, separation, are all private emotions until they get exteriorised in literature or the other arts. An abstraction, pain finds body in loss, separation and trauma, consequent of disease, death, displacement, migration, homelessness et al. It is not easy to articulate pain: in fact it takes years, sometimes lifetimes to simply come to terms with loss and grief, it is only at a rare point of detachment that one can exteriorise it. What prompts pain to be expressed in art? What are, for instance, the aesthetics of pain? Pain, Loss, Anxiety and Separation 11

Grief and intense pain, most often, are the prime movers behind creativity and expression, which are nothing but exteriorisations, exhalations. Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts – said the poet. If one looks for a philosophy or aesthetic of pain, one may be reminded of Edmund Burke’s (1729 – 1797) concept of the ‘sublime’. Burke arrives at the concept of the sublime through the three tier discussion of ‘indifference’, ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’, where these entities are not causally linked but are identified as three distinct stages of the mind. Burke also speaks of ‘positive pain’, which necessarily, must be in the realms of the spiritual, rather than the physical. The sublime, according to Burke is, as follows Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. (Burke, 36) The sublime became a highly influential literary trope in the eighteenth and the nineteenth century British literature. In fact, the literary foundations of Romantic poetry, along with its adjacent peculiarities of the pleasure-pain dichotomy, and its political radicalism has somewhere in them, the aesthetics of the Burkean sublime. My own reading of the literature of these contemporary times, particularly, that of the Gothic variety, would also place its aesthetics into that of the sublime – the explorations of the violence, the terror and the horror, which later dissipate themselves into the other ancillary genres of spy thrillers and detective fiction in future literary history. The ‘personal’ grief, in certain cases, also engages in the ‘political’. The pain that is one’s own sometimes occurs and results into the political and the collective. In the process, the personal gets diminished, diluted. Incidents of mass migration, displacement, partition of lands into newer borders, homelessness etcetera, may be taken to be examples of collective grief - the personal being politicised, and the political, on the other hand, having a personal component in minutiae. These may or may not have any archival record, but they usually constitute memories and rarely, only occasionally, find place in art and in literature. Sometimes in personal memoirs and sometimes through narration. The angst and the anguish reveal themselves. One such major instance is that of the Partition of the Indian sub-continent 12 Symposium into the nations of India and Pakistan, which is the ironical counterpart of its Independence from British colonial rule. Whether South Asian history must sing paeans of Indian independence, or whether it should pour salve to the wounded minds of the millions ‘partitioned’ is a matter of conflict, more political than personal. Nevertheless, efforts such as that undertaken in the writing of a separate genre of ‘Partition literature in English’ and other regional languages, has managed to give a personal voice to the generality and broad impersonality of History. Literature is the narrative of the people, taking into consideration the joys and the sorrows, the losses and the gains, the aspirations and disappointments that condition the life of the people in particular. It lacks the broader sweep of political narratology of history, which seems to put everything into very neat and predictive categories. This latter conditioning might fail to overlook the shifting uncertainties of life, the people’s success and failures, the transitory and the permanent aspects of their loves and their hatreds, and above all, the transitory nature of facts and ‘truth’ itself. A reality that is often ‘represented’ may or may not convey the whole truth. Events of mass involvement like Revolutions, or the Great War, the Holocaust consequent to the Second World War or the nuclear explosions have affected humans not only collectively, but have, perhaps altered the course of civilizations. The same may be said about diseases – epidemics and pandemics. Literature has, not only registered these events, but has given it a palpability that is quite real and tangible. Where personal memory has given place to something that belongs to all and that needs to be remembered by all. One cannot, perhaps, evade discussing Albert Camus’ novel The Plague (1947) in any study of pandemic-literature: one rehearses the repetitive patterns of fear, isolation, uncertainty and death, and the occasional bouts of breathers, of respite and brief liberation, which, perhaps do not promise a return to one’s known reality, but creates a newer one. These bouts of experiences find new life in the midst of a real pandemic and re-inforces the terror and panic associated with the disease. In the case of a contagious viral ailment like the Corona Virus Disease the need for isolation renders people so selfish that one is ready to ignore humane feelings just to safeguard one’s own life. The disease also severs intimate ties – parents cannot be visited, even intimate gestures like shaking of hands are prohibited. One is forced to inhabit a ‘bubble’, as it were. The pangs of separation and anxiety take on new meanings here. In most instances, the finality of death is reached without any communication with family or loved ones – the family is not given the responsibilities of performing the last rites. These, and other horrors of isolation inhabit the incumbent’s mind and perhaps, Pain, Loss, Anxiety and Separation 13 plunge him into a pathetic depression of a totally different kind. Others inhabit an uncertain period of disquiet and nervous anxiety, as if waiting for the final summons. The successive waves of the pandemic and the misfortunes arising even after the administration of the Covid 19 vaccine, only help to perpetuate the anxieties which began at the start of 2020. The uncertainties and panic spiral in self-perpetuating and vicious circles, which seem to have no end when viewed in perspective. The last paper in our collection here, by Dr. Anindita Chatterjee, comments exactly on these aspects of the continuing pandemic. Notwithstanding the immediacy of this paper, we have kept it at the end of our journal because we have neither reached the end nor the finality of this ongoing nightmare. What lies ahead is still a matter of conjecture and what will come of it, only time can tell. The last essay merely marks yet another beginning for many of us. We have, instead, concerned ourselves with pain, in its manifold capacity – pain that is being re-enacted, refreshed and remembered in the wake of this pandemic. We begin our collection with Dr. Nishi Pulugurtha’s essay on Afghan poetry, which is almost a revelation in its variety and diversity, written and published even, at times, by the Afghan diaspora. Our next essay by Saptaparna Roy, is yet another study on Afghanistan. She concentrates on the gaze of a Bengali wife in Afghanistan and recounts her trauma and anxieties, being caged in a foreign land through the study of autobiography. We initiate the trials and tribulations of migration labourers with Chaitali Maitra’s essay on the novel Goat Days (1979), by Bahrain based Indian novelist Benyamin. It is a poignant and classic study of dehumanisation of migrant labourers at the hand of the extortionist masters. Following up on the trope of migration is Dr. Sarottama Majumdar’s unique paper on the ‘poetry of mortality’ written by the British migrants in colonial India. The paper is remarkable, as it illuminates a little known aspect – the fates of the migrant British individual who leaves home and hearth for an uncertain journey in an alien land where, for all he knew, ‘death’ could be the only eventuality. This is yet another perspective offered to the much nuanced trope of the colonizer- colonized binary in a hegemonic setting. The postcolonial study on Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, inspired by Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, is a very nuanced and thorough study on essentially both the novels, although the former spells the afterlife of the latter, by Uma Biswas. The essay is a thorough study on the trauma of isolation and estrangement, that is endemic to the eponymous women in both the novels. 14 Symposium

The writer has done wholehearted justice to the complexities enmeshed in both works. Commenting on the sufferings of both the ‘victim’ and ‘victimizer’ is Tamali Roy Chowdhury’s paper on Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. A thoroughly nuanced study of a canonical text, her paper brings us back to the theme of close analytical study of a text in hand, to our great gratification. Our last paper, as mentioned earlier, by Dr. Anindita Chatterjee, brings us back to the present and the contemporary world of pain, anxiety and separation. In a unique manner, it contextualizes and justifies the theme of the journal as a raison d’etre for a study in pain. Nevertheless, the study remains incomplete. We are yet to feel the full impact of this pandemic. Literature and the other arts will have to, perhaps, wait to feel its whole impact on the course of human civilization. Adaptive as we are, some positives may also emerge out of this confinement. The bitter falls of the human civilization have only strengthened mankind who has risen resilient, to face newer struggles for survival. Let us be in hope for a better tomorrow.

Works Cited Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Oxford World’s Classics: Oxford University Press, 1990. Originally published, 1757. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. Pandemic: Covid 19 Shakes the World. New York, London: Or Books, 2020. Web.

Dr. Anasuya Bhar, Associate Professor of English and Dean of Postgraduate Studies in St. Paul’s Cathedral Mission College, is also the Editor of Symposium since its beginning in 2010. She has many publications of her own both at the national and international level. She may be contacted at [email protected] Poetry as Testimony: Afghan Women’s Poetry 15

Poetry as Testimony: Afghan Women’s Poetry Nishi Pulugurtha

When and how does suffering … become a source from which poetry can spring? – Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman1

Writing began for me as an escape from my burqa, an escape from my most painful moments. - Pari2 In a country that has been so much, and for so long ravaged by war and strife, almost all of what is written, in all genres, is closely and intimately linked to politics, war and suffering. Contemporary Afghan Literature, like much literature around the world, traces its roots and influence to a rich heritage of both oral and written traditions. What is interesting is that much of contemporary Afghan literature is characterized by a great degree of responsiveness and immediacy. War and violence in Afghanistan has destroyed much of social life. Women, in particular, have been at the receiving end of the strife and violence with rapes and abductions rampant. The strife has left many widows, vulnerable and in abject poverty. Two important periods have shaped and affected the position of women in Afghanistan. One was the period of the reign of Amanullah in 1923. This period saw rapid reforms in the status of women and in their position in the family and society. They were met with protests and came to an end with the end of Amanullah’s reign. The other period occurred during the time of the Communist supported Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). The PDPA agenda to empower women led to a long war between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union and also resulted in the rise of the Mujahideen which led to a fall in the status of women in Afghanistan. Rugged in topography, Afghanistan is populated by various ethnic, religious and tribal groups. Of a total population of about 31 million, 42% of that are Pashtun, 27% Tajik, 9% Hazara, 9% Uzbek, 4% Aimak, 3% Turkmen, 2% 16 Symposium

Baloch and 4% fall into an unspecified other groups.3 It is this ethnic diversity that has made it difficult to create a sense of nationalism in Afghanistan. Continued interference by other countries have added to further fragmentation. In spite of random attempts to bring the various tribes together, in most cases, however, it did not work.4 On the contrary, rival ethnic groups have fought to capture Kabul and create their own autonomy. This has resulted in fractured cultures and its impact on women has been harsh. Moghadam refers to the fact that the issue of women’s rights in Afghanistan has been historically constrained by two factors. One, the patriarchal nature of gender and social relations that are deeply embedded in traditional communities and two, the existence of a weak central state, that has not been able to implement any programme to counteract tribal feudalism in Afghanistan.5 The tradition of women writing poetry in Afghanistan has a long history and has always been a form of rebellion for women. Afghan women’s poetry deals predominantly with themes of displacement, healing and rebuilding. As a consequence of the strife in Afghanistan, a sizeable amount of poets and writers are now based outside the country. This paper will examine the poetry written in English by Afghan women poets writing from outside the country and based abroad, mostly in the United States of America. It will also be looking at the Afghan Women’s Writing Project founded in 2009 in order to examine the way in which the reality of the Afghan way of life is reflected in the poetry written in English by Afghan women. For Afghan refugee poets, poetry is a way of making a statement about their pain and suffering and also about the possibility of speaking on behalf of those not able to voices their experiences. The poems are also, often a personal cry of pain, reflecting individual and personal experiences. Hence, the poems are both testimony and therapy and are marked by fragmentation that is representative of the nation and its state. Postcolonial feminist theory has often recognized that the Western representation of third world women in need of help by the West is not always benevolent.6 The status of women as objects is something that is an accepted norm as they are seen as not having power to articulate their selves. Violence against women – assault, rape, murder, is a manifestation of patriarchal structures. Women in Afghanistan had been subject to all kinds of violence before and during the Taliban regime. It is to be noted that women’s lived experience as revealed in the poetry has often Afghan women’s agency as subjects. It is important that critical attention needs to be focussed to the material experience of women not just to bring to the fore issues of violence against women but Poetry as Testimony: Afghan Women’s Poetry 17 also to bring into purview the diversity of women’s experiences. Poetry is one of the strongest forces of Afghan culture. One of the kinds of poetry written in Afghanistan, by women, and extremely popular is called the Landai. Landai means “short, poisonous snake” in Pashto, a language that spoken in Afghanistan and in Pakistan as well, mostly in the border areas between the two countries.7 The word also refers to two-line folk poems that are very powerful and hard hitting. Landai are also at times funny, bawdy, irreverent, angry, sad and melancholic. It is safe to recite landai because they are collective. It does not belong to just one person. The writer is unknown, and they are shared, revised and edited as they are recited. Although men do recite them too, they are mostly in the voices of women. Most of the landai are anonymous and that is the reason why they are safe to recite. They speak of various issues and themes – love, longing, separation, desire, anger, lust, pride, nationalism, pain and hurt. The sentiments voiced and the emotions each deal with resonate with all women. They speak of the oppression of Pashtun women and they also speak of women’s experiences. What they speak of resonates with much postcolonial women’s writing. Feelings of nationalism – fostered in resistance to occupation and imperialism, critiques of patriarchy and ideas of gender figure in the poems. Here is an example of one: You sold me to an old man, father. May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.8 Despite all the writing about Afghanistan in the West – the journalism, the policy papers, the political pronouncements – these poems remind us of the voices that are shut out of the halls of power. The lines suggest deep and often bitter feelings about the U.S., the Taliban, and the years of war and foreign occupation. One landai dating back to the nineteenth century used to be about a British soldier, but today it has changed: My lover is fair as an American soldier can be. To him I looked dark as a Talib, so he martyred me.9 Many of these poems are political and speak with rage about loss and destruction. As Elizabeth Griswold notes, These poems are about war, they are about love, they are about drones, they are about American soldiers, they are about sex, they are about the size of a husband’s manhood – they don’t hold back. … They show a side of the life of Afghan women that is otherwise left hidden and no one 18 Symposium

would ever dare to try and reveal. You could call these a protest but they are more than that because they show these women using their feminine power to shame men.10 While oppressive restrictions on women prevent most from being able to openly voice opinions on sex and lust, on men, on their family and oppression and suffering, the landai have become powerful outlets for their emotions and anger. Griswold further notes: “One of the great gifts about this poetry is that it allows us to look out at the world through Afghan eyes, as much as that’s possible. So we’re not looking at them, we’re looking at the world they choose to describe and how they see it.”11 One of the first female Persian poets, Rabia Balkhi, was killed hundreds of years ago for falling in love with a slave and daring to write poetry. Women of modern-day Afghanistan still face violence. In late 2016, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission investigated 5,575 cases of violent crimes against women, noting that most cases go unreported. Founded in 2013 by Afghan activists Noorjahan Akbar and Batul Moradi, along with many other writers, students and activists, Free Women Writers hopes to improve women’s lives by simply telling their stories, in their own words. Free Women Writers has helped more than 140 women publish poems, memoirs and articles, with hundreds of these having been translated into English by 15 volunteers. Kabul- based Mirman Baheer is a pioneering female literary group which helps women to share landais. Its members span professional women working in government to young girls in remote villages who contribute in secret. The Afghan Women’s Writing Project (AWWP) was founded in 2009 in honour of Zarmeena who was brutally executed by the Taliban in 1999 without being able to tell her story. Afghan diasporic writers play an important role for a troubled and often broken Afghan society. There is a connection between the state of exile and the need for poetic expression. Afghan women’s poetry is about displacement, healing, and rebuilding. As a result the poetry is fragmented. Dari words float within the English lines. For many of the poets, English has been a second language. Located abroad, it becomes the language in which they express themselves. Their poetry has a profound sense of longing, of looking out from windows, of gazing out. The poetry is also characterized by hope. There are anticipations of returning to heal the war-ravaged land, and a sense of sadness and guilt of having left many behind. Living in the diaspora gives these women poets a creative space to voice Poetry as Testimony: Afghan Women’s Poetry 19 their feelings, something that their counterparts in Afghanistan do not have. These are what a few Afghan Women poets wrote about the Afghan Women’s Writing Project (AWWP) - I took my pen to write and at first I was afraid: what to write? about what? But this was a project to write about everything, and I took the pen; I didn’t write from outside of my heart, I began to write about whatever was in my heart… The writing project gave me a voice, the project gave me courage to appear as a woman, to tell about my life, to share my pains and experiences. I wonder how big the change in my destiny is because of your work and this project. Who would trust an online class, a writing project, to change a destiny and a faith? AWWP gave me the power to feel I am not only a woman; it gave me a title, an Afghan woman “writer.” … I took the pen and I wrote and everything changed. I learned if I stand, everyone will stand, other women in my country will stand. —Roya12 It is freedom of speech into action! We can speak out about our way of life, our desires and the things we regret or like in our culture, without fear of getting in trouble. It gives people the real picture of what it takes to be an Afghan. It helps the outside world understand Afghan society far better than just hearing the news. It is the voice of Afghanistan. We women in the program are lucky. —B. Fatima A.13 These testimonies by the poets voice an important aspect of the writing – that it is about personal experiences. They also speak of the freedom to be able to express what they feel is an important aspect of this project. In a poem titled “In My Country” published as part of the Afghan Women’s Writers Project (AWWP), June 15, 2016, Shakiba N. speaks of the sufferings of women in her homeland, women who are usually unseen and unheard. The images of caged animals, of women as shadows, as “non-beings” speak poignantly of the lived experience of women. In my country Women are denied freedom Confined like animals to cages In my country Women are shadows Silent and unseen In my country Women are shrouded non-beings14 20 Symposium

“Let you and Me” by Sitara (AWWP July 2016) voices hope for better times, there is a sense of looking forward to in spite of all the suffering and destruction: Let us grab the angel’s happiness Make a new decision For a new life Open all the eyes See another face of life Let you and me Let us make a new world15 The poem, “Dream Tree” by Farida (AWWP, January 31, 2018) also hints at a sense of hope amid all the ravages. Under the dream tree In this quiet space Their wounds will heal My dream tree will hold anyone Looking for dreams16 “Hear My Cry” – is a poem by Zahra W. who was a 16 year student abroad when she wrote it. (AWWP, June 15, 2016) There is a great sense of anguish in the lines, which seem to tear at the very heart strings. Hear my cry for my girls For women and mothers Sisters and children My cry for myself Hear my cry for my people For my government For Afghan immigrants I will shout with bloody eyes Against discrimination in Iran And attacks in Afghanistan Listen to me and speak to me I demand to stand against injustice I write and write17 Poetry as Testimony: Afghan Women’s Poetry 21

Afghanistan is referred to in many of these poems as a symbolic space and not a physical space to live in. It is home in the sense that it speaks of a sense of belonging and identity, a place where they all trace their roots to, a homeland that evokes nostalgia. As Sorenson notes of exile, A fundamental aspect of exile is the remembrance of one’s homeland and the idea of return; indeed, the very notion of a powerful myth of return can be identified as one of the defining tendencies of diasporic populations. This myth maintains that at some future point refugee and immigrant groups will repatriate to that homeland from which they were expelled or migrated”.18 The myth refers to the idea that all displaced people wish to return to where they came from, ‘home’. Criticism has challenged this idea of the return and notes that it does not hold true for all displaced people, for all diaspora. William Safran argues that many people in diaspora have no desire to return ‘home’.19 Some of the displaced people, for instance, the Ismailis, do not even have a home, a country that they belonged to. That the diaspora is about an attempt to be part of the host country on one’s own terms and not a lost physical space has been pointed out by James Clifford (1997) and Paul Gilroy (1987).20 Many diasporic communities work at creating a space within their adopted country. As Avtar Brah notes that although a desire for home, the country they belonged to exists, it is not the same as a longing for a ‘homeland. Brah notes a difference between “feeling at home” and declaring a place as home.21 As Tamim Ansary notes so well - In their own ways, all these Afghans had selves as fractured as mine. The world is full of such Afghans now, as I’ve learned since September 11. Afghanistan itself, or at least the one I knew, is like a glass vase pounded by rocks for twenty-three years. For all of us, surrendering to diversity is probably the only plausible path left to attaining unity. The international community is supposedly committed to helping the country rebuild, but the lost world will not be reconstituted. Whatever rises from the rubble will be something new, and I suspect I may not have to decide who I am in order to take some part in this impending Afghanistan, because I am a kaleidoscope of parts now – and so is Afghanistan. So is the world, when you get right down to it.22 For Afghan women poets, poetry is a way of making a statement about collective suffering and speaking on behalf of others less able to raise their voices. But it was also frequently a personal cry of pain: it often mirrored profoundly negative affects experienced on the individual level. 22 Symposium

Endnotes 1. Das, Veena and Arthur Kleinman. “Introduction” in Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery, edited by Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, 1–30. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001. p. 7. 2. http://awwproject.org/page/9/ 3. https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/afghanistan-population/ 4. Moghadam, Valentine M. “Nationalist Agendas and Women’s Rights: Conflicts in Afghanistan in the Twentieth Century” in West, Lois A. (ed). Feminist Nationalism. Routledge, New York, 1997. 5. Moghadam, Valentine M. “Nationalist Agendas and Women’s Rights: Conflicts in Afghanistan in the Twentieth Century” in West, Lois A. (ed). Feminist Nationalism. Routledge, New York, 1997. 6. Mohanty, 1991b, 72. 7. http://www.radicalwhispers.org/what-is-a-landai.html 8. https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/pulling-back-burka-glimpse-afghan-life- through-poetry 9. https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/pulling-back-burka-glimpse-afghan-life- through-poetry 10. https://english.alarabiya.net/en/life-style/art-and-culture/2015/06/06/Afghan- women-share-poems-on-love-sex-and-war-at-London-festival 11. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/06/love-poetry-and-war-the- afghan-women-risking-all-for-verse 12. http://awwproject.org/help-our-women-writers/what-awwp-means-our-writers- speak/ 13. http://awwproject.org/help-our-women-writers/what-awwp-means-our-writers- speak/ 14. http://awwproject.org/2016/06/in-my-country-2/ 15. http://awwproject.org/2016/07/let-you-and-me/ 16. http://awwproject.org/2018/01/dream-tree/ 17. http://awwproject.org/2016/06/hear-my-cry/ 18. Sorenson, John (1992) “Essence and Contingency in the Construction of Nationhood: Transformations of Identity in Ethiopia and Its Diasporas,” in: Diaspora 2(2): 201-227. Poetry as Testimony: Afghan Women’s Poetry 23

19. Safran, William. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora 1.1 (Spring 1991): 83-99. 20. Pattie, Susan P. (1999) ‘Longing and Belonging: Issues of Homeland in the Armenian Diaspora,” in: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 22(2): 80-92. 21. Cartographies of Diaspora. Routledge, London and New York, 1996. 22. Tamim Ansary, West of Kabul, East of New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, (2002: 284-285)

Works Cited Ansary, Tamim. West of Kabul, East of New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2002. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora. Routledge, London and New York, 1996. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Harvard University Press, 1997. Das, Veena and Arthur Kleinman. “Introduction” in Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery, edited by Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001, 1-30. Gilroy, Paul. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Griswold, Elizabeth. I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2014. Moghadam, Valentine M. “Nationalist Agendas and Women’s Rights: Conflicts in Afghanistan in the Twentieth Century” in West, Lois A. (ed). Feminist Nationalism. Routledge, New York, 1997. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, eds. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1991, 1-47. Pattie, Susan P. “Longing and Belonging: Issues of Homeland in the Armenian Diaspora,” in Political and Legal Anthropology Review 22(2), 1999, 80-92. Safran, William. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora (Spring 1991): 83-99 Sorenson, John (1992) “Essence and Contingency in the Construction of Nationhood: 24 Symposium

Transformations of Identity in Ethiopia and Its Diasporas,” in Diaspora 2(2): 201-227.

Dr. Nishi Pulugurtha is Associate Professor, Department of English, Brahmananda Keshab Chandra College, Kolkata, and is Guest Faculty in the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Calcutta. A UGC Research Fellow at the University of Calcutta, she earned her Ph.D on Coleridge’s poetry. She has completed three UGC Minor Research projects –on poetry written in English in Bengali in the nineteenth century, on diaspora poetry and a third on Telugu films and the diaspora. She has been awarded an Associateship at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Her areas of interest are British Romantic literature, Indian writing in English, the diaspora, Shakespeare and film. She has presented papers at national and international conferences in India and abroad. Dr. Pulugurtha has published in refereed international and national journals – in the Coleridge Bulletin, The Encylopaedia of Postcolonial Studies (Blackwell Publishing) and Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas Local Habitations edited by Poonam Trivedi and Paramita Chakravarti (Routledge, London, 2019) among others. She has a monograph on Derozio and a collection of travel essays, Out in the Open. Her recent book is an edited volume of essays on travel, Across and Beyond. She is a creative writer and writes on travel, film, short stories, poetry and on Alzheimer’s Disease. Women’s Autobiographical Writing and...

Women’s Autobiographical Writing and... 25

Women’s Autobiographical Writing and Feminist Traumatology: A Postcolonial Perspective Saptaparna Roy

Trauma Studies having its provenance in the research around the two World Wars and the Holocaust must diversify as a discipline to incorporate and represent the other histories that have been denied voice so far. Western scholarship, predominantly Euro-centric, has defined and classified trauma in consonance with Western experiences of the war and violence, relegating the Other world to oblivion. The colonised, the Other, the Third World and the Asian too in their own concentrations need representation in this very hegemonic trauma-scape to construct a counter discourse that can redefine trauma. Since the 1990s psychoanalytic criticism has given it an impetus by endowing a clinical dimension to trauma studies. The critical question under review is why trauma emanating from loss, displacement, expatriation or migration should receive such primacy in recent times and become the locus of attention among all disciplines. In the last two decades Dalit narratives and Partition Literature, apart from African writings have challenged the politicisation of Trauma studies that has ignored individual voices, particularly from postcolonial locations. Interestingly, the impossibility of the representation of trauma is undermined by autobiography as a genre that allows for the transformation of trauma as well as the subject through the act of writing. Sushmita Bandyopadhyay’s Kabuliwalar Bangali Bau (1998), a unique autobiographical narrative of a Bengali woman subjected to exile in Afghanistan after her marriage with a kabuliwala, is not simply an account of personal grief but the tale of resistance against violence, representation of Bengali women’s lives in Afghanistan, chronicle of Afghan life, culture and politics, social activism even in the face of death, defiance against fatwa issued by the Taliban, forcible conversion to Islam and daring return to India. Later she re-visits the country, a suicidal attempt to continue her documentation on Afghan life, leading to her death. This paper will analyse Sushmita’s autobiographical writing in the light of trauma theory and justify its legitimate claim within the discourse. 26 Symposium

Three significant texts – Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996), Kali Tal’s Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (1996) and Dominick La Capra’s Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994) can be identified as ‘transformatives’ in the meaning and conception of trauma. In her Introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), Cathy Caruth explains the origin of trauma as a fragmented discourse in reaction to the Vietnam War and its consequent codification as PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. Surprisingly, the epistemology has called for a diffusion of boundaries between disciplines, thereby problematising pathology and the cure of trauma rather than providing a complete scientific discourse. This disruption can be attributed to the very nature of trauma experience that eludes a simple definition as well as a catalogue of symptoms and locations of the phenomenon. Hence psychiatry, psychology, sociology, historiography and literature are being summoned afresh to look through the fissures in the study of trauma. Clinical definitions of trauma have excluded the individual and the more local experiences, witnessing and testimonies of trauma, thus denying representation and thereby doubling the trauma through voicelessness. Interestingly, the individual becomes a space where the intersectional forces of gender, class, caste, religion, culture and nationality intertwine to create new histories of identity formation.

Sushmita’s Autobiographical Writing The politicisation of trauma theory in locating trauma needs to be interrogated through indigenous frameworks that can appreciate and canonise individual trauma stories as valid testimonies. This paper will examine trauma through negotiation, confrontation, sublimation and return in the autobiographical writing of a Bengali woman in the Asian context. Sushmita Bandyopadhyay (2nd December, 1959 - 5th September, 2013) born in a Bengali Hindu family in Khulna, Bangladesh and raised in Kolkata, married an Afghan Jaanbaz Khan and documented her experience of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in Kabuliwalar Bangali Bau (A Kabuliwala’s Bengali Wife) (1998). Taliban Afghan o Ami (2000) (Taliban, Afghan and I), Ek Bornou Mittha Noy (2001) (Not a Word is a Lie), Mullah Omar, Taliban o Ami (2002) (Mullah Omar, Taliban and I), Amlashole Na Afghanistan (2005) (Amlashole or Afghanistan), Sabhyatar Sesh Punyabani (The Swansong of Civilisation) and Talibani Atyachar—Deshe o Bideshe (Taliban’s Atrocities in Afghanistan and Abroad) are her other autobiographical works. Newspaper Women’s Autobiographical Writing and...

Women’s Autobiographical Writing and... 27 reports stated that she was shot by the Taliban for her literary and social activism. Much controversy hovered over her death, but surprisingly, there is inadequate research on her contribution as a writer-activist in Asia. Her best-selling autobiography, Kabuliwalar Bangali Bau testifies to the violence perpetuated on women by fundamentalists in a foreign land and her singular attempt to resist. The tragic potential of Sushmita’s abortive efforts to flee and her dramatic escape in 1995 has been captured in the Bollywood film, Escape from Taliban (2003). Sushmita renamed as Sahib Kamal (‘sahib-ka-mal’ meaning property of the sahib) by her in-laws was issued a fatwa and a house arrest following her non- subjugation to Taliban codification of conduct for women in Afghanistan. She served as a healthcare worker at her dispensary to alleviate the poor medical facilities for women and children. Incidentally, her testimony runs counter to the image of the ‘Kabuliwala’ in the Bengali consciousness familiarised by Rabindranath Tagore in his short story with the same title. The familiar home- grown image of the kabuliwala, Rahmat from Afghanistan that Tagore had carved in the Bengali psyche is belied by the reality of Sushmita’s kabuliwala, Jaanbaz Khan who abandoned her after marriage and left for India to pursue his business. In Tagore’s story the compassionate Rahmat who had a small daughter back in Kabul considered Mini, a five year old Bengali girl in Kolkata, to be a counterpart and showered his fatherly affection on her. The mystery around the man from an unknown land, a kabuliwala from the far off Afghanistan, is realised with terror by Sushmita who had read Tagore voraciously in her childhood. Sushmita’s experience of violence and violation of her rights as a wife, daughter-in-law and an Indian citizen in a foreign land is exemplified through the incoherence and disruptions in the narrative punctuated by ellipses. Her narrativisation of trauma is an effort at assembling the pieces of her identity and attaining stability, integrity and peace. Her national, cultural, religious, linguistic and even familial identity is reconstituted in her exilic existence and the remnants of the change continue to effect even after her return to India. The pain generated by the feeling of loss from severance from the motherland, the mother tongue and the mother throbs throughout the narrative. She voices her incarceration thus, “I am not in Andaman’s jail, but subjected to penal servitude in a familial prison in Afghanistan. But what is my sin that I have not known. Throughout the day I have to act with every person. I must hide my pain and show the smile on my face.” (Kabuliwalar Bangali Bau, 59) (Trans. mine). Trauma studies must be decolonised to investigate the presence of the Other within patriarchal structures and postcolonial locations in the Asian 28 Symposium experience and legitimise the claim of the marginalised through parameters beyond the West. Trauma writing connects the link between the past and the present and situates a personal narrative within a grand politico-historical narrative and the private memory within the broader public consciousness. Afghanistan, after the Soviet years, witnessed the tussle between Pakistan and the Taliban to hold the reins of power and the worst combination of feudalism and fundamentalism became prevalent. This paper will interrogate the act of autobiographical writing by a Bengali woman to preserve her testimony while at the same time negotiating the trauma experienced through re-enactment. Akin to the ramifying history of trauma theory itself Sushmita’s text is non- linear, non-chronological and marked by spacio-temporal shifts representing the discontinuities in her own life and the makings of her memory. Feminist traumatology will be engaged as a suitable theoretical premise to appreciate the complex relationship between women, autobiographical writing and trauma. Latifa Shekeba Hachemi’s My Forbidden Face: Growing Up Under the Taliban: A Young Woman’s Story (2003), Saira Shah’s The Storyteller’s Daughter: One Woman’s Return to Her Lost Homeland (2004), Nelofer Pazira’s A Bed of Red Flowers: In Search of My Afghanistan (2006), Malalai Joya’s A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice (2009), Fawzia Koofi’s Favored Daughter (2013), and Phyllis Chesler’s An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir (2013)1 are intriguing personal accounts of women from Afghanistan. Sushmita’s autobiographical works have not been researched upon exhaustively, probably because of the inaccessibility of Afghanistan as a field of research and may be due to the literary quality of her writing. Her autobiographical writing that has emerged from her diary written in the home of her in-laws in Kabul is a private enterprise to write through trauma as well as a documentation that encapsulates the narrative of an Indian woman marooned in a foreign land in a somewhat solitary confinement. She was constantly seeking her ‘identity’ in the midst of transacting with relational identities: “I exist. I have no one. I have a heart but it is not excited. Desire is there, satisfaction is not there. There is enough madness but it is not quenched. I exist. I have no one. I am a lost woman.” (Kabuliwalar Bangali Bau 16) (Trans. mine). As such the importance of her work cannot be judged solely on the quality of her writing as it historicises an individual’s survival story in a given period of time, upholding the socio- cultural realities of an otherwise impenetrable land. The scripting of her trauma is as much personal as it is political. The Women’s Autobiographical Writing and...

Women’s Autobiographical Writing and... 29 abandonment by her husband, the feeling of inadequacy because of childlessness, physical abuse by her in-laws, scarcity of food and other resources, and confinement comprised her personal trauma. Sushmita wanted to explore a new land where her in-laws lived, as a musafir or traveller, but her planned short- term trip extended into a lifelong incarceration terminating in death. In her endeavour to return to India she had approached the Indian embassy in Pakistan but she received an indecent proposal and returned feeling humiliated. From an individual’s struggle for survival and a good life, Sushmita’s narrative rises to the politics of borders and conflicting national identities. In Afghanistan, she was the Other, the Outsider who did not fit into their culture. From culinary practices to the language Pashto, she had to learn the Afghan customs in order to acclimatise herself in a foreign land. A postcolonial reading of Sushmita’s autobiographical writing is necessary and possible in view of a Third world woman surviving within a completely different context in Asia where the infiltration of the West to champion the cause of liberty, equality and justice has been a prolonged historic process. The monolithic trauma discourse that was instituted on the premise of the West and the Rest by Western scholarship must be re-configured. The book Gender, Politics, and Islam (2002) edited by Therese Saliba, Carolyn Allen and Judith A. Howard explores the condition of women within Muslim societies of the orient. From Taslima Nasrin2 to Malala Yousufzai3, we have observed the West’s “civilising mission” to rescue women from religious oppression, especially of Islam. Sushmita’s case did not receive as much limelight as the other two and was more of an individual’s crusade until her death when the Indian state’s intervention claiming her body back to Kolkata came to the forefront4.

Piecing Together of Identity To curb Islamic fundamentalism and the Taliban’s extremism, the US had sustained a seventeen year long war in Afghanistan. The 9/11 terrorist attack on US by Al Qaeda was followed by Osama Bin Laden’s killing by US forces in 2011. Sushmita’s murder by the Taliban in 2013 preceded by the series of events in conflict-ridden Afghanistan if made to sit in a frame will throw light on the troubled international politics in the country. A woman, Bengali, Hindu/kafer, Indian/ Hindustani, Asian, Afghan wife, social activist, and writer – all these ‘intersectionalities’ inform Sushmita’s identity. As readers we compulsively become historical witnesses to her trauma that is both unique and collective. Sushmita’s life and narrative intertwines the lives of many other Bengali women such as Kakali who has been stranded in Afghanistan through 30 Symposium marriage. In each of their stories there is an element of surprise but at the same time an intimacy of suffering emerges that connects the narratives as a continuum. For instance, Kakali had to spend the first night of her marriage with her husband along with his co-wife in the very same room, the narration of which shocked Sushmita. Sushmita’s texts have a postmodernist assemblage due to the rugged structure of her narrative with flashbacks and futuristic leaps that defy any expectation of chronology as in an autobiography. Since she was not a writer by profession at the outset, her first text reflects a coarseness which reduces gradually in subsequent writings. Her present is the referential point through which she looks at the past – a life of peace, pleasure and protection in the midst of her own family in her homeland. She dreams of a free Afghanistan even as she is conscious of its sheer impossibility. While dates, months and years intersperse her writing, time is presented as one continuum until the sudden, though to an extent expected, ending of her own life occurs. The veracity of her writing is tragically established through her death by the Taliban. For the reader whom she addresses right at the beginning of her first text, the truth of her tale becomes more real than reality as the tell-tale signs of her death and the death of her writing correspondingly can be apprehended. Sushmita too was aware of her approaching end since she had near-death experiences quite a few times. Her writing is a way to lend life to her experiences for the present as well as for the future generations. Apart from her seven autobiographical texts, Sushmita was working on a documentary where she wanted to record the lives and miseries of women in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, she was unable to complete her work. But she had clicked photographs of the places and people in Afghanistan and these precede her texts making the genre of her writing more diverse. From songs, letters, dialogues to actions, Sushmita’s writing moves breathtakingly. Her narrative maps the gradual transformation in her identity from an educated Bengali girl to an Afghan wife to a writer-activist. Sushmita made several attempts to escape Afghanistan in 1995 and finally managed to return to India. But her irresistible desire to revisit Afghanistan, its violence and the lack of peace was viewed as a disastrous decision. Interestingly, Freud in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1990) observes that there is a cycle of trauma within which certain individuals repeat their suffering. Quite strangely, catastrophic episodes recur for those who have survived it once. In Sushmita’s case the series of sufferings that she was subjected to was initiated by her own acts of defiance and even retaliation. She refused to follow the Taliban code of conduct and those familial norms stipulated by her in-laws. Women’s Autobiographical Writing and...

Women’s Autobiographical Writing and... 31

She dressed like a Punjabi in salwar kameez and did not wear the Afghan women’s dress that was quite heavy to carry. Her return to Afghanistan – the unknowability of this traumatic re-enactment, a ‘traumatic neurosis’ as Freud would term it, exhibits the impossibility of withdrawal from trauma. What is significant here is that the wounding on Sushmita has caused her to inevitably voice her suffering. Probably against her will she moves through the repetition of trauma, reconnects to her past and to a truth that she too could not fully grapple with. A forensic or anthropological research into Sushmita’s life in Afghanistan could throw up evidences to corroborate the truth in her tale. In Sushmita’s narrative we find the tension between knowing and not knowing that is sustained throughout. Sushmita had built a dispensary in her in-laws home where women and children received medicines and advice from her. Sushmita could listen to the bodily experiences of Afghan women as well as Bengali girls married to Afghan men. She was much revered as a lady doctor in the village and the sisterhood she had established with the women in her in-law’s family and with other local women was one way to assuage her own trauma. She and her husband had adopted a girl named Tinni from her brother-in-law in front of the community and she loved to spent time in teaching the child. The Taliban had destroyed her dispensary and deprived her of the only recourse to a meaningful existence. In fact, they had tugged and torn her clothes and ruthlessly assaulted her to force her into wearing a burqa. Even her in-laws would beat her frequently scarring her mind as well as her body. Incidentally, the etymology of trauma lying in the root word ‘wound’ implies both bodily and mental wounding. For Sushmita the affliction on her mind far supersedes that on her body and the trauma is not available to her consciousness unless she re-lives a similar experience by repeating her act, hence she enters the loop of re-enactment. Sushmita lived in a state of exile and was subjected to domestic violence in the absence of her husband. From verbal abuse to battering, she had to endure it all, primarily because of her religion (Hinduism), nationality (Indian) and language (Bengali). Feminist researchers on trauma have focused on domestic violence perpetrated on women on the grounds of class, caste, ethnicity, sexuality, religion and race. The fact that Sushmita was childless compounded her suffering; more so because in Afghanistan a woman who does not have children has no respect and is denied property rights. But when she decided to depart from Afghanistan Tinni was taken away from her which further aggravated her trauma. Physical separation from Jaanbaz who had almost abandoned her in the pursuit of business in India was an excruciating 32 Symposium experience of betrayal and consequent loss of faith. Sushmita’s dilemma can be explained through what Cathy Caruth states in Unclaimed Experience (1996): “... a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival.” (7).

Postcolonial Criticism and Trauma Postcolonial scholarship on trauma theory, especially in the Asian context is imperative to appreciate the complications of the specificities of location. The politics in Asia and the differences within the Asian experience to consider what can constitute trauma demands this re-visiting. Since the 1990s critics have worked on defining and simultaneously expanding the realm of trauma studies but it is only as recent as 2008 with the publication of Roger Luckhurst’s The Trauma Question (2008) that certain moot interrogations have been raised regarding the particularity and applicability of the discourse. A major concern is whether the paradigm of trauma theory can address the history of violence in postcolonial nations. The hegemony that is inherent in the present framework that is precisely Euro-American cannot accommodate the Asian experience or for that matter a larger postcolonial context. Postcolonial critics of trauma theory such as Jill Bennett, Roseanne Kennedy and Michael Rothberg have widened the scope of the field by highlighting the multiculturalism of contemporary societies that needs to be addressed in trauma research. Stef Craps in his seminal work, Postcolonial Witnessing (2013) states: “Unlike structural trauma, racism is historically specific; yet, unlike historical trauma, it is not related to a particular event, with a before and an after. Understanding racism as a historical trauma, which can be worked through, would be to obscure the fact that it continues to cause damage in the present” (32). In this way trauma induced on the basis of race embedded in practices of colonialism and neo-colonialism creates a new framework as opposed to the Eurocentric model poised on a singular event. Sushmita who was born in Khulna, Bangladesh but was brought up in Kolkata, India has endured multiple layers of trauma that implicitly lay in the backdrop of her writing. India’s partitions in 1947 and 1971 lay in the collective memory as a legacy of trauma, torture and tearing apart within Sushmita. Her case is an instance to reflect on how trauma studies needs to be broadened to encompass the experiences of an individual and not simply an event. The hierarchy innate to the complex relation between the perpetrator and the victim continue into the present in the postcolonial context while it is a fact of the past Women’s Autobiographical Writing and...

Women’s Autobiographical Writing and... 33 like the holocaust within the Euro-American psyche. Hence the complications of variegated historico-cultural contexts can be brought within the fold of trauma theory. Now the contention here is not to overwhelm one with the other but to place the histories of trauma of the colonised and the coloniser next to each other, dismantling the hierarchy to achieve a balanced and holistic trauma research. Incidentally, Memory Studies has worked towards an inclusive model for decolonising trauma theory. Michael Rothberg in his conceptualisation of ‘multidirectional memory’ raises a significant question in his essay “From Gaza to Warsaw” (2011), “What happens when different histories of extreme violence confront each other in the public sphere?” (523) and establishes that “Collective memories of seemingly distinct histories—such as those of slavery, the Holocaust, and colonialism—are not so easily separable.” (524). On the one hand, the Afghans have endured instability in governance along with the violence of terrorism and on the other, the Indian woman Sushmita has borne the collective memory of colonialism and partition with herself to Afghanistan. With time, Sushmita adopted the Afghan lifestyle and culture and associated with its history. Nonetheless, she points to the need for an uprising in Afghanistan to resist fundamentalism, having proudly inherited the legacy of women’s participation in the nationalist movement in India.

Writing through Trauma From Freudian psychoanalysis to Caruth’s Freudian approach, trauma theory has come a long way. Freud’s outlook towards history as an indirect referential point needs to be reviewed within complicated formulations between history and experience, and the collective and the individual. In Caruth’s analysis there is a post-traumatic melancholia and a sustained post-traumatic state that forecloses any possibility of revival. In her later work, Literature in the Ashes of History (2013), Caruth withdraws her earlier stance where she considered trauma-induced melancholia as an inescapable consequence but now she theorises trauma as a return to life, an “imperative to live” (xi). Additionally, Dominick La Capra contributed to traumatology through her explanation on the ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ trauma which to some extent suggested avenues of a positive outcome of suffering. Postcolonial configurations of trauma need to explore virgin grounds, focusing on the potential of trauma as positive rather than pathologically negative. In fact, victimhood necessarily implies passivity but narratives of trauma have reflected the agency of the survivor to re-live life. Interestingly, narratives of trauma attest to the possibility of bouncing back 34 Symposium and the process of narrativizing is in itself a way of healing. In fact, in Freud we find the seeds of this drive for life wherein the survivor bears “witness to the past by turning toward the future” (Caruth xi). Moreover, Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery (1994) establishes how narratives of trauma form a therapeutic methodology to cure victims as an “organized, detailed, verbal account, oriented in time and historical content” results in healing and revitalization (177). Trauma remains embedded in memory for a sustained period of time and narrative allows the teller to endow some sort of a structure to chaos, enacting healing in the process. Moreover, literature and trauma studies amalgamating into a research rubric offers a new perspective on narrative that documents wounding. More precisely, feminist traumatology helps relieve the double traumatisation wherein the legacy of colonial wounding as well as women’s experience as Other are addressed. Sushmita’s story is one of her own personal survival along with her cultural survival in a fundamentalist and extremist context and as such the telling has empowered her as well as the other survivors back in Afghanistan then and even now. Sushmita runs herself through the same cycle of trauma with the desire to know her trauma fully in its belated impact. Consequently, her story is not an escape from reality or from death but a turn to life. A double telling constitutes the narrative as her story of death in reality is also a story of Sushmita’s life. Her repeated plea for peace and ‘salaam’ to Afghanistan is a reminder of the possibility of trauma and peace working together in the violence of existence.

Notes 1. Incidentally, Phyllis Chesler in her memoir, An American Bride in Kabul portrays the cultural shock faced in Afghanistan in 1961 after her marriage with Abdul-Kareem causing intense trauma: “The psychotherapist in me knows that I am resisting. I do not want to be overwhelmed again by a clash of cultures, one that was unanticipated and for which I was totally unprepared.” (19). Chesler managed to return with a rich repository of material necessary for a writer and productively transformed herself into a writer-activist. 2. Taslima Nasrin in her autobiography Nirbashan (2012) unfolds the trauma originating in the continual displacement during her forced exile- the dissociation from her motherland, mother and home. She was issued a fatwa by a group of fundamentalists in Bangladesh for allegedly striking communal disharmony through her writing and was under house arrest before she had to finally leave the country in 1994, Women’s Autobiographical Writing and...

Women’s Autobiographical Writing and... 35

entering into a homeless existence across different countries such as Sweden, the US, parts of Europe and India. 3. Malala Yousafzai in her fascinating autobiographical book, I am Malala recounts the tale of her survival after being shot by the Taliban in her school bus in Pakistan, capturing her passage from death to life and harping on the hope of change through child right for education: “...I wanted to reach all people living in poverty, those children forced to work and those who suffer from terrorism or lack of education. Deep in my heart I hoped to reach every child who could take courage from my words and stand up for his or her rights.” (153) 4. Newspaper reports on Sushmita’s death highlight conflicting facts regarding the motive of the murder, the identity of the militants, the role of her husband and in-laws and her own plans in life ahead.

Works Cited American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 3rd ed., American Psychiatric Association, 1980. Bandyopadhyay, Sushmita. Kabuliwalar Bangali Bau. Bhasha o Sahitya, 1998. ---. Taliban Afghan o Ami. Patra Bharati, 2000. ---. Ek Bornou Mittha Noy. Bhasha o Sahitya, 2001. ---. Mullah Omar, Taliban o Ami. Bhasha o Sahitya, 2002. ---. Amlashole Na Afghanistan. Bhasha o Sahitya, 2005. Caruth, Cathy. Literature in the Ashes of History. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. ---. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Chesler, Phyllis. An American Bride in Kabul. St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2013. Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Escape from Taliban (Hindi). Directed by Ujjal Chattopadhyaya, performances by Manisha Koirala and Nawab Shah, ESC Films, 2003. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. W. W. Norton & Company, 1990. Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Pandora, 1994. 36 Symposium

LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. Routledge, 2008. Nasrin, Taslima. Nirbasan. People’s Book Society, 2012. Rothberg, Michael. “Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response.” Studies in the Novel, No. 40, 2008, pp. 224–34. ---. “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping multidirectional memory.” Criticism, No.53, 2011, pp. 523-48. Saliba, Therese, Carolyn Allen, and Judith A. Howard, editors. Gender, Politics, and Islam. University of Chicago Press, 2002. Yousafzai, Malala and Christina Lamb. I AM MALALA The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2013.

Smt Saptaparna Roy (M.A., C.U., UGC- NET, Ph.D ongoing, C.U.) is, at present, working as an Assistant Professor of English and Departmental Co-ordinator with the Dept. of Humanities at Heritage Institute of Technology- Kolkata. She has more than 13 years of teaching experience across esteemed business schools and engineering institutions in Kolkata. She is also a widely travelled Pedagogy Trainer, translator, poet and poetry performer. She is engaged in doctoral research on Bengali women’s autobiographical writings from the Women’s Studies Research Centre, University of Calcutta and has contributed to Critical Gender Studies as a scholar with several national and international publications and projects to her credit. Goats, Separation and Death: Reading Goat Days by Benyami 37

Goats, Separation and Death: Reading Goat Days by Benyami Chaitali Maitra

Migrant workers, form a considerably big part of the population in many parts of today’s globalised world, addressing class identities and cultures. Centered on them and their troubled predicament, revolve uncountable political issues, debates, moves, perspectives and decisions. Going back to the basic question of ‘why’ is a migrant laborer born, encompasses multifarious issues and the question is far from being answered, or even conjectured. The contribution of the migrants to the economy of the country where they work, and the facilities in that country, strike an apparent balance of give and take; but more of this becomes a theoretical premise if the life most of them lead is taken into account. For instance, the context of better wages in oil-rich countries compared to the rural wages in developing countries, initiates migrant workers to find jobs with brighter economic prospects. The economic disparities between the country of origin of the migrant workers sharply contrast with the country of their destination. Hence the rural-urban economic preferences to migrate become evident. As posited by the Harris-Todaro migration model, The distinctive concept in the model is that the rate of migration flow from rural (agricultural) areas to urban (industrial) areas is determined by the difference between expected urban wages and rural population (Todaro 235:2014). Problems of the international migrant workers, hence, become tiered – first of all, comes the issues of shelter, healthcare, food and clothing followed by the concerns of the family which can often include separation, anxiety and fear: this can lead to mistrust from local community to which they belong, leading to the most challenged issue of an uncertain homecoming. The International Labor Organization (ILO), founded under the League of Nations in 1919, and based in Geneva, tries to ensure fair conditions of work 38 Symposium which should protect the freedom of the individual. There was a convention signed in December 2008, entitled ‘Social Justice for a Fair Globalization’, which ensures decent work parameters for all. It estimates that about 214 million migrant workers cross the Indian border to get a foothold in the middle- east. A multi-layered framework has been suggested to enable labor-migration in a globalised world. The promise, however, is far from being fulfilled and the inside story of the ‘low-income group’ workers often border on mental torture and physical abuse. In trying to portray the truth, even partially, most migrant fictions reiterate the themes of loss, and separation allied with fear and death. The novels of Luis Alberto Urrea like The House of Broken Angels uphold the migrants’ plight in the Mexican border. The predicament of the powerless and the voiceless are represented in novels like Only in London by Hanan Al- Shaykh and A Land Without Jasmine by Wajdi Al-Ahdal. Research carried on regarding the condition of women who decide to leave home and families to earn better wages, (usually from the poorer classes in India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and the other neighbouring places), reveal regular physical torture and exploitation, which is documented in the website www.pulitzercenter.org. The brutality and deprivation which gets documented in this research, shows that the conditions are similar to the age-old issues of slavery. This paper tries to probe the award-winning novel, Goat Days (1979) by the Bahrain based Indian novelist Benyamin, (Benny Daniel) in which the appalling working conditions of the migrant workers are juxtaposed with the scintillating economy and embellishments of the privileged in the middle East. The novel shows two South Indian young men (Hakeem and Najeeb) who bribe the agent (kafaal) – the system of sponsorship operational in Gulf Co-operation Council Member States, to find secure and financially promising jobs in Riyadh. They did not belong to very poor classes in their homeland, but did not have enough to thrive in the modern, competitive world. This situation enhances the bitterness of their totality of experience. Their journey begins, in which, separation befalls them in three ways – they are separated from their strongly bonded families – which results in physical as well as emotional separation; once they reach the Promised Land, (Riyadh) they get separated from each other with their place of work being two separate masaras (a place where the goats are kept for various reasons) and finally they experience extreme sense of separation and loneliness in a desert, amidst an animal-world to which they are exiled. Therefore the human, as a socially constructed category, is diminished Goats, Separation and Death: Reading Goat Days by Benyami 39 and reduced to being just animate objects. This objectification occurs due to exploitation, resulting in separation and loneliness; so this discourse on the human and the idea of ‘otherness’, (more radical than the socially constructed one) presented by the animal-other and desert landscape as opposed to the imagined cityscape, prepares the reader for the need of a more humane and understanding view of the world. Thomas Nagel’s essay ‘What is it like to be a Bat ?’ can be a premise to discuss the novel from this perspective. Nagel describes consciousness as ‘what it is like to be something’ and argues that consciousness is not only human but is present in other animals (Nagel’s example is the bat, a mammal). The motif of ‘subjective character of experience’ as suggested by Nagel refers to the conscious mental states of organisms. The physicalism presented in Goat Days is also used to show reductionism, at its extreme. The arbab’s killing only certain goats for meat, having the same, and forcing Najeeb to do so, the vomiting which makes Najeeb give up mutton forever, the arbab leaving him locked up in the masara, unfed, for two days and finally Najeeb freeing himself for sustenance by drinking water meant for the goats and wheat grains, link the death-throes of the goats and the present living condition of Najeeb: In the next container, there were some wheat grains left uneaten by the goats. I gathered them up and ate greedily. Raw wheat. Unhusked. I ate the wheat with the salt. It was on that day I realized uncooked wheat could be tasty… I slept in the masara with the goats (Benyamin153:2012). In humans, consciousness is defined as sentience, awareness, subjectivity and qualities which lead to selfhood. Once Najeeb and Hakeem are separated, their lives become tortuous. The marginalization and reduction of Najeeb is shown through cruelty and non-communication (he cannot understand the language spoken by the Arabs) and in time he becomes the ‘other’. Therefore, his world is more aligned to the ‘goat-world’ and there is an upliftment of his selfhood though he feels that he is reduced to a goat. Animal cognition which encompasses the mental capacities of non-human animals invites the study of behavioral ecology to a certain extent. Many chapters in the novel end with the statement which reinforces this – I slept in the masara with the goats. By then I had indeed become a goat. (150:2012) My body had become a pest reserve. Lice and bugs formed a crust on my skin. The goats were cleaner than I was. (160:2012) This is not just Nejeeb’s story, it is real life. A goat’s life. (255:2014) 40 Symposium

Literature can act as an ethical and epistemological liberation and can show a critical awareness of understanding life. The novel upholds a human- centered culture which posits a theoretical shift to a wide range of moral issues which assumes not just enormous political implications, but also invites the emancipation of every form of otherness. This first gets reinforced with the loneliness that Najeeb experiences – ‘I was alone. My bag was my pillow’ and ‘I was learning to face life alone, to train myself in jobs I have never performed before, to try out a new way to life, to get accustomed to an uncommon situation’. (Benyamin104:2012). This prolonged loneliness instills in his mind a keen sense of animal- awareness; reaching in the extreme degree of toleration during his stay in the masara, tending the goats, thoroughly deprived to food, water (the masara is in a desert), every blessing that is endowed with water like cleaning and bathing, accepting the stench and the whiplashing of his boss (the arbab), he reaches a point when he identifies his consciousness with the animals. He calls them with human names which are associative of a positive feeling – Marymaimuna, Jagathy, Mohanlal, Ramani among others and starts developing a kinship with them. The linguistic binary created in doing so, creates a spatial zone, in which ‘the various catharses’ (Kristeva 87:1890) get absorbed. During these torturous days, he helps a goat deliver a kid; and a filial bond is created between them. This helps Najeeb to cling to his degraded existence – he runs to the kid (calls it Nabeel) whenever he can and remembers his pregnant wife Sainu (Chapter 16). Rather soon, Nabeel is castrated mercilessly; the demonic anger of the arbab’s and painful cry of the goat who ‘lost his maleness’ creates a zone of identification for Najeeb. Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘abjection’, “ the one by whom the abject exists” or “the deject” can be mentioned to analyse the predicament of Najeeb to describe his state of being marginalized and exploited in the workplace which is under an institutional body, (here the employers of both Hameed and Najeeb). The metaphor of the ‘abject’ is the bleeding kid which threatens a breakdown for Najeeb, for whom in witnessing the cruelty, the borderline between the self and the other is lost. To quote Kristeva, On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me, no matter what the sociohistorical conditions might be on the fragile border, (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object etc.) do not exist or barely do – double, fuzzy, heterogenous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject (Powers 217:1980). Goats, Separation and Death: Reading Goat Days by Benyami 41

The theme of separation, loss and death takes the course of the novel through three landscapes. In the beginning the precincts of Mumbai where the friends travel to meet the middleman and get the visa; the references to the village life of the protagonists, with their respective families become a memory with their landing in Riyadh. The journey which takes them to their respective masaras is the point that separates them as friends. The pain associated with separation is the main thread of the novel which gives it the central force. Interestingly, death in the novel has a fundamental and an existential connect; after a prolonged suffering and amidst separation, they plan an escape. The freedom which is the aim of the escape (as contrasted to the first section of the novel - ‘prison’), changes in the trajectory, resulting in types of death – psychological death for Najeeb, the Sudanese saviour Ibrahim Khadiri who is lost mysteriously, signifying his death and the agonizing, physical death for Hameed. Hence death is discussed through characterization, projections, metaphors and images. Death is not used to advance the plot but is made to appear as events which happen during the narrative course. The novel ends with the city scape of the Arab city where there is a banyan tree, a symbol of shelter. Although it is here that Najeeb gets back to normal social life, he has to finally hand himself to the police. After another three months of a gruelling and tedious time, he gets a ‘free out pass’ to India, and boards the aircraft with a fractured mind and knowledge of his mother’s death which befell due to the anguish over the loss of her son. The seventh chapter of Powers of Horror, entitled ‘Suffering and Horror’ begins with the context of Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s novel, Journey to the end of the Night; the initial part discusses the importance of narrative with the following words: THE NARRATIVE AS CACHE FOR SUFFERING Suffering as the place of the subject. Where it emerges, where it is differentiated from chaos. An incandescent, unbearable limit between inside and outside, ego and other. The initial, fleeting grasp: “suffering,” “fear,” ultimate words sighting the crest where sense topples over into the senses, the “intimate” into “nerves.” Being as ill-being. Celine’s narrative is a narrative of suffering and horror, not only because the “themes” are there, as such, but because his whole narrative stance seems controlled by the necessity of going through abjection, whose intimate side is suffering and horror its public feature (Kristeva144:1980). 42 Symposium

Keeping in mind the ‘narrative’ used by Benyamin, in the first person narration by Najeeb, it could be suggested that his suffering brought into his being a psychological death, after which, the ‘pass’ to go back ‘home’ loses all its glory. As he was made to ‘walk toward the plane’ (reminiscent of the goats being taken to the masara), his inability to thank his friend who helped him to come back to a normal life, the unbearable identity of the narrator Najeeb, the reduction suffered even with the possibility of going back ‘home’, projects Najeeb as a universal voice and yields to the concept of ‘boundary- subjectivity’, leading to the theme of suffering-horror.

Works Cited Benyamin. Goat Days. Penguin, 2012. Celine, Louis-Ferdinand. Journey To the End of the Night. Marks, John (Trans.),New Directions, 1960. Iyer, K. Gopal. Migrant Labour in India: Key Human Rights Issues. Kanishka Publishers, 2004. Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press, New York,1980. Nagel, Thomas. Mortal Questions. Cambridge University Press,1991 Stark O, Katz E. ‘Labour Migration and Risk Aversion in Less Developed Countries’. Journal of Labour Economics, 1986 journals.uchicago.edu accessed 12.11.20 at 10 pm. Todaro, Michael P. Economic Development. Pearson Education, 2014. Tumbe, Chinmay. India Moving; A history of Migration. India Viking, 2018.

Smt. Chaitali Maitra has been associated with teaching for the last three decades. At present, she is Guest lecturer in St. Paul’s Cathedral Mission College, Bethune College and Sanskrit University. She has published a book on American poetry and several articles in magazines, books and periodicals in English and Bengali. She is currently working on travel - writings of nineteenth century America. Death in an Alien Land: The Poetry of Mortality in British Colonial India 43

Death in an Alien Land: The Poetry of Mortality in British Colonial India Sarottama Majumdar

British men and women who came to India in considerable numbers from the end of the eighteenth century were expected to negotiate two absolutes. They planned a brief, but profitable stay in India eventually to return ‘home’ prosperous, healthy and still in their prime, while the establishment they served, namely, the British East India Company, in contrast, had plans for permanent presence in this country. There was also the necessity of acknowledging that mortality rates for Europeans in India was high, and children, especially newly born or the young, very often did not thrive. Thus none of those who sailed for India from different parts of Britain to seek fortunes in employment or marriage were sanguine of returning; they knew that their remains might be buried in this alien land. Since the policy followed by the Company and the state of Britain, which after 1777 (when the passing of the Regulation Act in the British Parliament gave the Government power to oversee the Company’s actions in India), discouraged immigration or permanent re-location, Britain remained forever ‘home’ both spiritually and metaphorically to the expatriate British population. This brought added poignancy to the conventional imagery of parting on departure as returning was fraught with uncertainty and death. It is with these concerns in mind that the fiction emerging from colonial British India in the period must be approached. Anglo Indian literary output in the early decades of the nineteenth century is full of the poetry of regret, fear, mourning and nostalgia for the ‘home’ and family from whom disease and sudden death were separating so many. When Kipling warned British residents of India, that the country especially Calcutta the capital was a ‘packed and pestilential’ place where death looked down almost constantly and that white men and women in the rest of India, too, in summer risked death from “sickness of the noontide’, he was drawing upon rhetoric that had gained currency among the British inhabitants of Calcutta from its inception in 1699. (153, Sussex Edition) Nor was the reputation 44 Symposium undeserved. The records of St John’s Church the first Anglican Protestant ecclesiastical establishment in Calcutta as well as the obituary notices, epitaphs and grave inscriptions were printed in ‘Bengal Obituary’, a work published by a firm of undertakers support the ideas. This book contains the only extant records of British Anglican mortality in the first half of the nineteenth century. It contains ample evidence of the extraordinarily high rates of mortality among British arrivals to Calcutta. (Nair) However, Calcutta, the best known and most important city of British India in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, was not the only place in the country with this morbid reputation. The British incomer felt threatened by the idea of mortality in India, Calcutta as the most thriving community and its ever burgeoning cemeteries bore the greatest evidence not only of the fact that the fear was justified but also the reason why it did not deter people from coming. Kipling again elucidates. Me the sea-captain loved, the river built, Wealth sought and kings adventured life to hold. Hail England! I am Asia, power on silt, Death in my hands, but gold! (326, Cambridge Edition) These lines illustrate the two main themes of eighteenth century colonial discourse regarding Eastern India; the idea of early death and of fabulous fortune, earned through privateering, acceptance of bribes, gifts in exchange for political favours and other (arguably) corrupt practices, which eighteenth century England relentlessly criticized inside the Parliament; and outside it in the popular press (the wealthy company servants who returned to enjoy their fortune in England were derisively called ‘nabobs’ (Lawson &Phillips). Victor Jaquemont, a French visitor, a traveller and itinerant diarist whose shrewd and observant gaze is that of an outsider’s (being French), to Calcutta between 1828 and 1831 noted that “people do not come here to live, they come…in order to gain something to enjoy life elsewhere”, however also noting that “for a truly small number of Europeans, there are journals without number, both political and literary… .” Of the journals mentioned ‘The Asiatic Miscellany’, ‘The Asiatic Journal’, ‘Calcutta Journal’ all carried an assorted variety of literary offerings by amateur poets, essayists, satirists, parodists and political commentators who were professional soldiers, merchants lawyers and civil servants of various professional societies brought together by the East India Company due to the shared proximity while in residence and shared fear of death in exile. (84) For amateur poets of British origin, young, newly estranged from familiar Death in an Alien Land: The Poetry of Mortality in British Colonial India 45 people, scenes and customs in the Indian residence necessitated an enforced sense of communal identity, and the cultural points of reference, for people from different corners of Britain, were metropolitan London and the familiar topography of rural England and Scotland. As they struggled to infuse their writings with the manifold anxieties and challenges of life away from the centre, by freedom from stringent societal norms of the metropolis, but also possibly fear of being considered déclassé by association with corrupt practices for which the East India Company had been tainted in domestic British perspective after the successive trials of Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, by differing degrees of sexual frustration and finally with the constant presence of untimely death; a body of work was created in which ‘Romantic Orientalism’ reworks itself to aid the exiled poet’s search for identity in various permutations of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ (Schwab, 52). Nigel Leask, Margot Finn and others who study amateur poetry in colonial India in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century agree that the poetry of William Jones, linguist, poet, classicist and Indologist, while influential in changing British metropolitan poetic style was remarkably different in theme to that which followed it in India. This poetry, the chief practitioners of which were John Leyden, Thomas Medwin, Charles D’Oyly and Bishop Heber is characterized by its reworking of metropolitan styles where the contemporary poetic creed was that of the subjectivist idiom of sensibility in response to its colonial context, influenced by Asiatic poetry but in significantly different ways (which Leask discusses in detail) from ‘Orientalist poetry’ being written at the same time in metropolitan Britain. A new element is visible in Anglo Indian poetry: regret and nostalgia for lost innocence, equated with the virtues of the home, most often conflated with the homeland. The topographical and climactic difference between the clean, cold dampness of the country left behind and the fierce heat and humidity of the new land feeds the despair of the newly arrived traveller doomed to ennui, disease, uncertain fortune and probably, early death. For British young men, going to India seemed to be the zenith of ambition fuelled both by a sense of the exotic, the dangerous and the lure of plenty. Young new recruits to India regularly composed both poetic and prose fiction. Henry Meredith Parker who came to India, in the early 1820s and retained, therefore, in his poetic satires, some of the initial confusions about the young civil servant’s response to the expectations of and from the Orient, in another satirical poem, reiterated the dream and the inevitable disillusionment that follows, a frequently 46 Symposium repeated lament in British poetry on India until the middle of the nineteenth century: …As for myself, my fate was doomed, As soon as I could totter, By tales of golden realms perfumed With cinnamon trees and ottar…( 208-209) The vocabulary of the East Indian fiction is rich in allusions to places and ideas which, though repetitious, were becoming identifiable tropes. The romantic expectation of the picturesque operating on sensual extremes, both magnificent and grotesque, was satisfied in the overwhelming first impression on reaching India. The genre chosen in such circumstances, given the extreme youth of the amateur poets, the training and background of the overwhelming majority of young immigrants in classical literature and the literary fashion in England at the turn of the century, was socio-political satire and the tone was both urbane and detached. The acceptance that a whole generation of men and women had been duped by collective delusion from achievements of a previous generation is analysed perceptively in a manner that makes the demarcation between the two separate generations clear. …And woe is us! The Rupee tree, With all its jingling glories, Has now no more reality Than Scheherazade’s stories (Parker, 213). Thus, if the fantasy which invited Britons to travel to India was of “Lands rich in mines, and rivers streaming gold,” the expectation from residence in such a place was predetermined and served a practical end, “Whence twelve short years in Luxury’s lap beguiled / Would bear me homeward. Fortune’s favourite child” (“Calcutta: a Poem”, 303). That this span represented the general ambition of young men who came to India is borne out by Phoebe Gibbs’ novel Hartley House whose heroine claimed that “those who stay for only ten or twelve years fare better.” ( Gibbs, 85 ) The truth is that many faced conditions in India in complete contrast to their fantasies, leaving them to regret the decision that made them victims of “The bitter torments of a wretched fate...” (Calcutta – A Poem). Poetry originating in British India specialised in descriptions of nostalgia for home and regret in exile. Often longing for home was segued with the love for a quintessentially British woman, and exile is similarly denoted in the protagonist’s surrender to the lures of Indian temptresses. For John Leyden, one of the better known Anglo- Death in an Alien Land: The Poetry of Mortality in British Colonial India 47

Indian poets, self-castigation and nostalgia become enmeshed as he drew contrasts not only between descriptions of his pre-lapserian boyhood among the hills of Teviotdale in Scotland and the degeneration of character occasioned by experiences in the East, but he specifically accused the pursuit of ‘Indian Gold’ as responsible for his moral turpitude and losing his true love. Leyden’s “Ode to an Indian Gold Coin” is probably the best known example of a fairly common comparison being drawn by young poets writing in and about India in the 1790s and 1810s, between lost British innocence symbolized in the pure love of a virtuous British woman who was left behind for corrupt Indian wealth and vicious Indian temptresses. The fear of death or permanent parting from all things familiar, and the stark difference between the reassuring and the alien, is evidence of the remarkable longevity of an obsession found in some measure in nearly all British Indian literary works in this period. There are endless permutations upon the same set of absolutes. These constitute a combination of fear about untimely death, disgust at self-enforced exile, disillusionment at arrival and self-castigation at the perceived greed responsible for the subject’s downfall. Disgust directed towards the self at falling prey to gold in India is a particularly persistent trope echoed here by the writer of “Calcutta: a Poem” who took the complaint a step further and declared that the prospect of wealth was as much of an illusion as the fantasies of adventures in picturesque locales, stripping the ideas ensconced in oriental metaphors in European literary texts of glamour, calling them nothing more than “The rude creation of a thoughtless brain!” Thus, the poet accused the claims for eastern magnificence as deliberate ploys, “a visionary image, formed to shun / The melting gaze of India’s fervid sun,” to detract attention for a more prosaic reality that awaited most people who endured “twelve tedious years to burn / Nor dare the vast expenses of return,” only to find, on retirement, that a ruined constitution and a family fractured by death were the personal price they paid for the coveted legacy of Indian gold. Poets, novelists and playwrights writing in English about India at the end of the eighteenth century often were amateur practitioners exploring their own predicament, anxieties, hopes and aspirations as individuals with no understanding about the physical or ethnographic features of India and few previous acquaintances from among residents in British Indian cities of their own race. The average age of residents was low, not many stayed longer than absolutely necessary for professional reasons. Working within defined parameters, Anglo Indian fiction fashioned a body of fictional work sourced 48 Symposium from lifestyle features and a stoic acceptance of sudden death made by British residents in the course of their (often brief) stay in India. Fictional confirmation of strategies in communal identity formation are contributions which reinforce and corroborate evidence from other contemporary textual sources about a community which created and sustained itself by combining characteristics of the centre and exigencies of the margin: longing for the former while grappling with the latter.

Works Cited “Calcutta: a Poem,” The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register, vol. XXV London: Parbury, Allen & Co., 1828 The article in which the poem appears mentions that it was written many years earlier. It appears also in Theodore Douglas Dunn, ed., Poets of John Company,dated 1811, en.m.wikisource.org>wiki>Calcutta.) Death and the Nabob: Imperialism and Commemoration in Eighteenth-CenturyIndia Robert TraversPast & Present, Number 196, August 2007, pp. 83-124 (Article) Finn, Margot “Colonial Gifts: Family Politics and the Exchange of Goods in British India, c. 1780-1820”Source: Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Feb., 2006), pp. 203-231 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3876605 Accessed: 13/01/2014 02:53) Gibbs, Phoebe. Hartley House. Dublin: William Jones, 1789 Jaquemont, Victor. Lettersfrom India 1829-1832: Being a Selection from the Correspondence of Victor Jaquemont,2Vols.vol I, Macmillan, 1936. Lawson, Philip and Phillips, Jim. “Our Execrable Banditti”: Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain Author(s): Philip Lawson and Jim Phillips Source: Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Autumn,1984), pp. 225-241Published by: The North American Conference on British Studies Leask, Nigel. “Towardsan Anglo-Indian poetry: The Colonial muse in the writings of John Leyden, Thomas Medwin and Charles D’Oyly” Writing India 1757- 1990.ed. Bart Moore- Gilbert. Manchester U P, 1996. Nair, Thankappan P.( reprinted with intro), The Bengal Obituary Or A Record to Perpetuate of the Memory of Dear Departed Worth(originally 1848, Holmes &Co: Calcutta), Calcutta: Punthi Pustak,1991 Parker, Henry Meredith.Bole Ponjis, vol. 2, 208-209.) “Orientalisms,” in Bole Ponjis: Containing the Tale of the Buccaneer, a Bottle of Red Ink, the Decline and Fall of Ghosts, and other Ingredients, 2 vols., vol 2, Thacker and Co.,1851. Published by Oxford University Press Death in an Alien Land: The Poetry of Mortality in British Colonial India 49

Schwab, Raymond. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1680-1880. Columbia U P, 1984 The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling,(ed) Thomas Pinney Cambridge University Press, 2013 -The Song of the -The Tale of Two Cities Vetch, John. ed., and Preface, The Poetical Works of Dr.John Leyden, 197

Dr. Sarottama Majumdar is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Sarsuna College, affiliated to the University of Calcutta. Her research interests include cultural history of urban colonial spaces in India, rhetoric of identity formation and historiography. She has published and presented her findings in journals as well as books. She is a member of several literary associations in the city and country. 50 Symposium

“There is always the other side”: Revisiting Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea through the Postcolonial Lens of Trauma Theory Uma Biswas

In his essay, ‘Concept of the Caribbean’, George Lamming observes, that the Caribbean is “an area of the world that began with an almost unprecedented act of genocide.” (Lamming 2) The geographical territory of the Caribbean Islands has been one of the sites that had witnessed some of the most violent and worst aspects of European imperial history—extermination of indigenous people, enslavement, forced transportation of labourers, piracy, rape and territorial appropriation, to name a few. The Emancipation Act of 1833, that decreed the abolition of slavery in all of the British colonies, eventually led to racial conflicts and social and economic turmoil surrounding it. With large number of indentured labourers brought over from Asia, the Caribbean Islands was a land with a composite nature of its people who were forced through a cross-cultural process that put its inhabitants on an eternal quest for their selfhood and identity. Caught up in the trauma of sudden and painful transitions, the migrant occupies a displaced position, for the migrant always remains suspended in an ongoing repetitive process of a to-and-fro movement. Zadie Smith, in her first novel, White Teeth, uses the term “original trauma” to describe the migrants’ experience of diaspora. She writes, Immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition—it’s something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you’re still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There is no proper term for it—original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better. A trauma is something one repeats and repeats.” (Smith, White Teeth 161) The experience of migration thus constitutes a fundamental shattering of identity and a threat to selfhood. However, until recent times, little attention has been drawn to the trauma of the diasporic subjects. “There is always the other side”: Revisiting Jean ...

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Postcolonial studies have often been resourced by concepts taken from many other critical practices which seek better ways of accounting for its prevailing, manifold subject matter and myriad reading strategies. One such recent area of critical enquiry had been the field of ‘trauma studies’, which has been identified by Herrero and Baelo-Allu`e as “an important sub-strand of ‘ethical criticism’, whose most defining feature was an intense concern with the demands of otherness” (Herrero and Baelo-Allue`, ix). Such a reading offers a challenge to the hegemonic event-based model of trauma in favour of what Maria Root defined as insidious trauma, that which “refers to the traumatogenic effects of oppression that are not necessarily overtly violent or threatening to bodily well-being at the given moment but that do violence to the soul and spirit.” (Root, 229) Similarly, Mengel and Borzaga have argued that trauma is deeply connected to political and economic issues and insist on perceiving trauma “not only as a result of an identifiable event but as the consequence of a condition that came about historically” (Mengel and Borzaga, ix). However, the common conception of trauma is inherently Eurocentric and event based. It is premised on the Western notion of the self which perceives a psychologically healthy subject to be a unified, integrated and whole entity which is liable to fracturing and a division of identity caused by an extremely disturbing event; but since the self has an inherent ability to heal back so the removal of the traumatic incident would restore the self back to its original integrated whole. This hegemonic understanding of trauma has, according to postcolonial critics, led to a systematic denial and exclusion of those narratives from the canon that gives us an insightful perception about the significant relationship between trauma, colonialism and racism. Recent studies have drawn our attention to postcolonial narratives that interrogate the Western model of the unified, centred and stable self and point towards the micro-aggressions and the insidious attitude of the neo-liberal Western societies to acknowledge the fact that situations that Westerners may regard as traumatic are the everyday reality for many subjects who are permanently caught in a state of in-betweenness and can only hope for a balanced relationship between the two fractured halves of their self, which from the perspective of trauma theory can thus be traumatogenic. The evolution of Caribbean literature had a difficult and complex beginning. Generally, all ex-colonial literatures of the world were preoccupied with various ways in their quest for self-definition and re-presentations of themselves as opposed to the prejudiced projections of their identity from European 52 Symposium constructs. This is particularly so in the Caribbean context. With everything that was indigenous being destroyed, the Caribbean writer was faced with a dilemma of portraying a disconcerting society with a mixed culture that came into existence due to arbitrary transitions. Left with a traumatic immediate past that is best forgotten and an authentic past that was subjected to the worst kind of erasure, the Caribbean literature refuses to surrender to the centrality of British literary traditions and attempts to portray the censored, diminished traumatic experiences of its subjects. Wide Sargasso Sea comes as the culmination of Rhys’s concern to re-write the hidden agenda in colonial constructs, zeroing in on the canonised text Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Rhys wanted to revisit Bronte’s text with the much-felt need of pitting the two cultures against each other. Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, points out that, trauma was indeed believed to be able to provide a bridge across cultures which may thus acknowledge others’ suffering ethically. However, some critics have challenged of late the prevalence of trauma theories and their adequateness to some contexts, namely non-Western and postcolonial ones, thus questioning its potential bridging qualities. In pitting the two cultures against each other, Rhys wants to exactly point out the fact that Bronte’s Western perspective and Euro-centric concepts had restricted her to sympathise and even made her fail to realise the insidious trauma that the Creole is subjected to in her narrative thereby leaving her only as a dehumanised subject, a marginalised figure vis-a vis the protagonist, Jane. In a letter to Selma Vaz Dias, Rhys wrote— I’ve read and re-read “Jane Eyre” of course and I am sure that the character must be built-up: I wrote you about that. The Creole in Charlotte Bronte’s novel is a lay-figure, repulsive, which does not matter and not once alive, which does. She’s necessary to the plot but always she shrieks, howls, laughs horribly, attacks all the sundry off stage. For me (and for you I hope) she must be right on stage. She must be at least plausible with a past, the reason why Mr. Rochester treats her so abominably and feels justified, the reason he thinks she is mad and why of course she goes mad, even the reason why she tries to set everything on fire, and eventually succeeds. ... I do not see how Charlotte Bronte’s madwoman could possibly convey all this. It might be done but it would not be convincing. At least I doubt it. Another ‘I’ must talk, two others perhaps. Then the Creole’s ‘I’ will come to life....At last I decided on a possible way showing the start and the Creole speaking. Lastly: Her end—I want it in a way triumphant!... That unfortunate death of a Creole! I’m fighting mad to write her story. (Rhys Letters 154) “There is always the other side”: Revisiting Jean ...

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Rhys’s letter points out two significant observations. First, it points out that Bronte’s novel shows that telling one’s story is a way of appropriating a narrative that other, ostensibly more powerful, individuals may have presumed to write on our behalf. Jane Eyre’s autobiographical dimension aims precisely at making the dispossessed heroine speak in her own voice as an autonomous author. Nevertheless, the ownership of a voice and of the right to tell tends to benefit its owner to everybody else’s disadvantage. Hence the appropriation of an independent narrative voice by Bronte’s heroine still leaves plenty of other narratives and tribulations untold. Secondly, Rhys does not intend to change the tragic ending for her Creole heroine but to provide her with a dignified standing. Rhys is thus not just giving us an alternative story but attempts to provide a voice of her own to the peripheral figure of Bertha Mason in Bronte’s text who had been ‘silenced’ by the dominant discourse. Rhys thus finds an alternative entry into Bronte’s text and reworks the colonial Caribbean past from the Creole’s point of view by linking history to her personal consciousness. It order to comprehend the discourse of trauma, alienation and a sense of isolation in Wide Sargasso Sea, it would be worthwhile to have a look at Rhys’s own position as an outsider. As a Third World Writer and as a woman in exile in Paris, Rhys has been identified by Shari Benstock in her study,Women of the Left Bank: 1900-1940 as “an outsider among outsiders” (Benstock 448) She experienced exile differently by virtue of her colonial background. Rhys was born on the island of Dominica in the West Indies in 1890. Her father, a doctor, was a Welsh and her mother was from a Scottish family that had lived in Dominica for generations and the family had owned slaves before the Emancipation Act in 1833. However, she never felt truly at home on her native island because of her status as a white Creole woman. Elizabeth Nunez- Harrell in The Paradoxes of Belonging: The White West Indian Woman in Fiction has described this status as that of “an outcast, a sort of freak rejected by both Europe and England, whose blood she shares, and by the black West Indian people whose culture and home have been hers for two generations or more.” (Harrell 1-2) Thus, the white Creole experience is in some ways is a quintessential aspect of Caribbean experience, the marginality of living in between cultures. Expressing the pain of this division, Derek Walcott, asks in A Far Cry from Africa, “Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?” (Walcott 243) Walcott speaks about the black West Indians, whose search for a lost identity in Africa becomes complicated. However there is a fundamental difference. The educated black West Indian, admires the English language and culture but detests the British colonial rule; on the other hand, his homeland Africa 54 Symposium increasingly becomes distant by the current realities which is not personally known to him but is made into a metaphor or as Louis James puts it, “an area of the mind.” (James 8) He thus becomes the ‘marginal man’: “one who is poised in psychological uncertainty between two (or more) social worlds; reflecting in his soul the discords and harmonies, repulsions and attractions of these worlds, one of which is often ‘dominant’ over the other.” (Stonequist 8) The West Indian writers, who are thus caught up between the two cultures of Europe and Africa, gets a moment of self-discovery and achieves a victory when they reject possession by either. In their simultaneous acknowledgement and repulsion, the black West Indian forms a new identity unique to its own location, history and cultural hybridity. However, unlike the black West Indian, the white Creole fails to achieve this assurance precisely because they are divided within the islands’ history and culture. They descend from a class that no longer exists and whose past history is notorious and morally shameful. They feel close to the black culture of which they can never be a part of and can only have resentment for them; while on the other hand, they may still look to a “mother” country which has long ago abandoned them and still considers them inferior. Helen Tiffin in Mirror and Mask: Colonial Motifs in the Novels of Jean Rhys, explaining the dubious status of the Creole, observes—“The white Creole is, as a double outsider, condemned to self-consciousness, a sense of inescapable difference and even deformity in the two societies, by whose judgements she always condemns herself.” (Tiffin 328) She further points out that following the African-American and Caribbean writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, cultural marginality divides the psyche, makes it Other to itself, and permits no unified—even if illusory—sense of self. In other words, such traumatogenic effects of cultural marginalisation that result not from any particular identifiable event but as the consequence of a condition that came about historically causes more damage to the soul and spirit resulting in an enduring fragmentation of the self, the burden of which the victim has to carry perpetually within him/her self. Trauma theory and the fragmented self are thus central to Rhys’s novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. In many ways, the novel is a fictional re-telling of the childhood experiences of Rhys and employs fragmentation, split personality and excessive intertextuality, among other techniques which have been recurrent in trauma narratives. The plot structure reveals that the narrative is divided into three distinct parts. Parts I and II are set in the Caribbean islands while part III is set in England. The first and the third parts are narrated through the consciousness of Antoinette while the second part is largely narrated by “There is always the other side”: Revisiting Jean ...

“There is always the other side”: Revisiting Jean ... 55 an unnamed narrator whom the readers identify with Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre. The first part consists of Antoinette’s memories, a fretting consciousness struggling to exorcise the ghosts of the past while she herself is already confined in her English attic room. The opening pages records Antoinette’s childhood days with her widowed mother, Annette in a large house in Coulibri, in Jamaica just after the Emancipation Act formally ended slavery. Antoinette’s memories of childhood are beset with both beauty and danger. From the very opening lines, the novel establishes some of the major historical forces at play that eventually places the mother-daughter duo as ‘outsiders’. Talking about her mother, Antoinette says, She was my father’s second wife, far too young for him they thought, and, worse still, a Martinique girl. When I asked her why so few people came to see us, she told me that the road from Spanish Town to Coulibri Estate where we lived was very bad and that road repairing was now a thing of the past. (My father, visitors, horses, feeling safe in bed—all belonged to the past). (Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea 9). The general disposition is one of change, decline, decay and danger, heightened by a horrible sense of isolation. The setting is Jamaica, an English colony, but Annette’s Martinique origin as well as her young widowed status excludes her from the white ranks. Similarly, her family’s past history of being slave-owners makes her equally detestable to the black community. She now thus occupies a ‘no man’s land’ reducing her to an object of stare and sarcasm. The family’s prosperity, safety, security and the father figure are associated with the bygone era—a past that ironically turns out to be traumatic. In the hope of improving the condition, Annette remarries but her second husband, Mr. Mason’s arrival does not improve the scenario. His open scorn for the Jamaicans only helped to worsen the case so much so that Antoinette gets confronted by a little girl singing a scornful song, “White cockroach, go away, go away. Nobody want you. Go away.” (Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea 13) Mr. Mason, with his English consciousness and event-based model understanding of ‘trauma’ of course fails to realise the violence caused, Annette, be reasonable. You were the widow of a slave-owner, the daughter of a slave-owner, and you had been living here alone, with two children, for nearly five years when we met. Things were at their worst then. But you were never molested, never harmed.” And Annette’s reply, “How do you know that I was not harmed? ... They are more alive than you are, lazy or not, and they can be dangerous and cruel for reasons you wouldn’t understand. (Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea 19) 56 Symposium

Mr. Mason’s failure to comprehend Annette’s apprehension and anxiety stems from the Eurocentric notions of trauma and fails to acknowledge what Stef Craps refers to the trauma of everyday that calls attention to the structural violence that results in daily micro-aggressions which can build to create intense traumatic impact. Eventually, the house at Coulibri is set on fire and Antoinette confronts her childhood friend, Tia, thinking that she will live with her and be like her. But the violence with which her wish is met disillusions her, “When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it. I did not feel it either, only something wet, running down my face. I looked at her and I saw her face crumple up and she began to cry. We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass. (Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea 27) With her younger, ailing brother dead and her mother having succumbed to lunacy, Antoinette is sent to a convent school. Even at the convent, she can only envy the well-adjusted de Plana sisters, especially Hѐlѐne and can only learn how ill-fitted she is to enter life beyond the convent. Being fragmented to the very core, Antoinette fails to receive a shield against reality and has to carry on the surface the ineradicable marks of her past experience. Part I ends with a brief intimation that her step- father is about to arrange her marriage to an Englishman. One cannot fail but notice the striking similarity and yet a crucial difference between Jane Eyre and Antoinette. Both the heroines go through the same kind of ordeal when they are sent to the convent. But whereas Jane enjoys a more supportive environment and draws inspiration from the saintly Helen Burns and finds herself anew, empowered with the strong armour of Christian morals and principles that makes her more equipped to resist later misfortunes and temptations, Antoinette does not receive any such consolation. She can only dream of Hell and the menacing male figure who draws her into darkness. Unsupported by any other-worldly concerns Antoinette goes to meet her fate with Edward (the Rochester figure of Bronte’s text). The readers might expect Rhys treating Edward in a manner that might redress Bronte’s biased treatment of Bertha. But instead we are given a peep into Edward’s consciousness which opens up yet another dimension of the myriad narrative. Part II gives a more complex, inward account that counterpoints against many aspects of our prior insight into Antoinette’s warped existence. Rhys’s novel could have stood on its own without the intertexual referentiality. But the framework serves to point out a crucial crux in Rhys’s aesthetics. By allowing Edward to have a voice, Rhys effectively decolonises trauma studies that one “There is always the other side”: Revisiting Jean ...

“There is always the other side”: Revisiting Jean ... 57 finds in colonial texts like Jane Eyre. Bronte’s Rochester is a formidable figure in comparison to Rhys’s Edward. In Bronte’s narrative, Rochester’s marriage to Bertha had been the outcome of his father’s financial dealings. Since the Rochester family fortune was to pass to the eldest son, Rowland, to provide for the future of Edward, his father secured his marriage to Bertha, the daughter of a planter and merchant living in Jamaica. Bertha was a Creole (an individual of mixed parentage in Western discourse) and after their marriage Rochester learns that his wife is a lunatic. Bronte thus connects Bertha’s lunacy directly to her Creole identity or racial contamination and the impact of the ‘hellish’ West Indian location. In Jane Eyre, Rochester while describing a “fiery West Indian night” says, Being unable to sleep in bed, I got up and opened the window. The air was like sulphur-steams-I could find no refreshment anywhere. Mosquitoes came buzzing in and hummed sullenly round the room; the sea, which I could hear from thence, rumbled dull like an earthquake- black clouds were casting over it; the moon was setting in the waves, broad and red, like a hot canon-ball-she threw a last bloody glance over a world quivering with the ferment of tempest. I was physically influenced by the atmosphere and scene, and my ears were filled with the curses the maniac still shrieked out. (Bronte Jane Eyre 271-72) Rochester thus depicts the Jamaican topography not only in terms of a satanic and apocalyptic location but also suggests that the demoniac nature of the landscape gets into the being of those unfortunate enough to live there. Rochester’s trauma is thus event-based, namely, his discovery of his wife’s lunacy and his enforced stay in Jamaica. The impact is so violent and threatening that he momentarily contemplates suicide. However the crisis and overwhelming sense of despair soon passes as “A wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through the open casement: the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed, and the air grew pure.” (Bronte Jane Eyre 272) Bronte’s Rochester with his stern European consciousness is thus always proof against the West Indian ‘Hell’; one whose reason never fails. This is corroborated in the text by the fact that when the blind Rochester hearing Jane’s voice thinks it to be a ‘sweet madness’, Jane herself assures Rochester that “No delusion - no madness: your mind, sir, is too strong for delusion, your health too sound for frenzy.” (Bronte Jane Eyre 384) Bronte’s notions of trauma once again consolidates the Western notion of the self which might get traumatised by being exposed to an extremely disturbing event but the trauma can be easily overcome and a psychologically healthy and integrated self can be achieved by 58 Symposium a healing process that consists of overcoming the fragmentation. Fortunately, for Rochester, the regeneration laid in a simple physical, emotional and psychological ‘return back’ to the English landscape. The sweet wind from Europe was still whispering in the refreshed leaves, and the Atlantic was thundering in glorious liberty; my heart, dried up and scorched for a long time, swelled to the tone, and filled with living blood – my being longed for renewal – my soul thirsted for a pure draught. I saw hope revive – and felt regeneration possible. (Bronte Jane Eyre 272) Contrasted to this highly biased and self-exonerating account of his hapless marriage to Bertha, Rhys’s Edward gives us a more sympathetic insight into the relationship. Rhys presents Edward, who finds himself alien to the West Indian sensibility. Antoinette and Edward’s mutual incomprehension in fact rests upon a closer identity of personal experience than they themselves realise. While riding towards Granbois, their honeymoon house, Edward broods over his unpleasant situation. In one of the mentally composed letters to his father he says, “I have sold my soul or you have sold it, and after all is it such a bad bargain? (Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea 41) Edward’s dubious bought ‘security’ is counterpointed by the song that Amѐlie sings about Antoinette, “The white cockroach she buy young man” (Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea 60). Edward’s alienated existence, his inferior position in his family, his exile from his familiar surroundings and the fever that gripped him on his arrival to Jamaica leave him groping for some sure ground for his self. He is as sceptical of a promising life as Antoinette is sceptical of happiness. He reflects, “As for my confused impressions they will never be written. There are blanks in my mind that cannot be filled up.” (Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea 45) Edward’s ‘blank spaces’ corresponds to Antoinette’s ‘divided position’ between the two cultures. Rhys thus presents Edward not only as a young, hapless scapegoat but also as an emotionally crippled man. In doing so, Rhys builds up on Bronte’s Rochester who in Jane Eyre expressed his resentment against his ‘avaricious father’, “When I left college, I was sent out to Jamaica, to espouse a bride already courted for me.” (Bronte Jane Eyre 269) As Michael Thorpe in his essay, The Other Side: Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre, observes that Edward and Antoinette’s, “shared desire for peace is disabling, for each demands it of the other, neither can accept the unfamiliar as real.” (Thorpe 108) Their mutual dependence is terminated by their deep sense of vulnerability regarding their ‘void’ within which Antoinette exposes and Edward conceals. Edward muses, “How old was I when I learned to hide what I felt? A very small boy. Six, five, even earlier. It was necessary, I was told, “There is always the other side”: Revisiting Jean ...

“There is always the other side”: Revisiting Jean ... 59 and that view I have always accepted.” (Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea 61) Edward’s Eurocentric notions of selfhood and a willed morality thus makes him proof and hostile to a more spontaneous, authentic and passionate acceptance of the reality. Edward and Antoinette’s perception of trauma and their contrasting response to it is thematically brought out in their varied rejoinder to the Granbois landscape. Reflecting on Antoinette’s bathing pool by the riverside, Edward finds that , “It was a beautiful place — wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret I’d find myself thinking, ‘What I see is nothing—I want what it hides—that is not nothing.’ ” (Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea 51-52) Edward’s prospect of a meaningful marriage with Antoinette is thus as fragile as his sense of self. On the other hand, Antoinette, who internalises the warm sun of Granbois recalls Coulibri and the garden where she had been ‘happy’. Their shared vulnerability and yet intrinsic difference in perception leads to a failed relationship. Daniel Cosway’s malicious gossip about Antoinette’s mother’s madness or Antoinette’s own past relationship with her half-caste cousin, Sandi, were issues that were less responsible in causing their relationship to fall apart; more importantly, it was Edward’s Western gaze that fails to perceive Antoinette’s ‘otherness’. Rhys’s literary strategy of placing Edward’s narrative between the two narratives of Antoinette recalls Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” that implies the juxtaposition of two or more disturbing memories that work dialogically to bring together different histories of suffering, and is based on an “ethics of comparison that can distinguish politically productive forms of memory from those that lead to competition, appropriation and trivialization.” (Rothberg 523-48) Whereas Bronte had completely ‘silenced’ Bertha’s history, Rhys provides a narrative voice to Edward in order to decolonise the hegemony of colonial discourse but at the same time shows the different reactions to traumatic experience and exposes the fact that how context-specific trauma can be. It also confirms that for non-Western subjects, traumatic experience is something that is usual, while Westerners insist on claiming some distance from such incidents, no matter how theorised they may have been. This is evident from their different understanding of the song about the ‘white cockroach’ sung by Amlie. Antoinette, used to such verbal assaults, quickly perceives that the song was about her. She says, It was a song about a white cockroach. That’s me. That’s what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I’ve heard English women call us white niggers. So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and 60 Symposium

where do I belong and why was I ever born at all. (Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea 61) Edward, with his own racial, cultural and psychological background, of course fails to realise either its significance or its violent impact on Antoinette’s mind and soul and passes it off as simply melodrama of his disoriented wife. Alienated and victimised by racial isolation and patriarchal oppression, Antoinette’s integrated selfhood gradually disintegrates and Rhys by presenting both the perspectives gives us a glimpse of her developing lunacy both from inside and outside. Given the cultural history of the Caribbean islands, the West Indian subject is politically been manipulated to enact a role that has been assigned to him/her by other cultures through the ages, a role that has been uncritically assumed. The West Indian thus becomes a ‘mimic man.’ Caught up in the painful trauma of transitions that were historically brought about, their condition was that of people literally shipwrecked on the islands, desperate in their search for symbolic life-boats and viable moorings. The West Indies, as George Lamming and Samuel Selvon have observed, is an abstract concept that has meaning only outside the West Indies. The result is an escape into hallucinations in which ‘home’ is constructed on some dubious model outside the cultural/ actual landscape of West Indies. In this sense, the West Indian’s gaze is filmed with hopes of departure either to North America, Europe, Asia or Africa. This dangerous illusion, in the West Indian sensibility, that ‘home’ lies in any direction away from the region, invokes a journey, a passage, which acts as a metaphor in postcolonial studies. However, ironically, such ‘return’ to the ‘mother country’ only aggravates the trauma. This fact is brought out by Rhys in the third and final part of the novel. For Antoinette, who had constantly been traumatised for not having enjoyed the security of an integrated family (being constantly passed from one guardian to another), the stability of familial relations represented by the title of the dining room picture, “The Miller’s Daughter” is an attractive alternative to the disintegrated childhood experiences that she had. England, with all its dreamy landscape thus stands as Antoinette’s idealisation for the colonial dream. This is seen in her frequent questioning about England to Edward. She often questioned me about England and listened attentively to my answers, but I was certain that nothing I said made much difference. Her mind was already made up. Some romantic novel, a stray remark never forgotten, a sketch, a picture, a song, a waltz, some note of music, “There is always the other side”: Revisiting Jean ...

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and her ideas were fixed. About England and about Europe. (Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea 56) Antoinette’s ‘knowledge’ of England is thus based on her colonial education that has very little to do with her actual lived experience. England thus remains a mythical entity in the mindscape of the West Indian who can only guess about it by comparing it to the known landscape of the Caribbean. In contrast to this confusion of Antoinette, the ‘Miller’s Daughter’ seems to be quite at home in this mythical world. Antoinette’s identification with ‘The Miller’s Daughter’ and finding her English double in the figure thus expresses her feeling of inauthenticity and cultural doubleness experienced by those inculcated with the imperial dream. As Judith Raiskin in her essay, ‘Snow on the Cane Fields: Women’s Writings and Creole Subjectivity’ says, For Antoinette, the colonial, England is a troubling double image—the exotic yet comforting England she learns about in school and identifies with as a white person and a place where her dream of violence, one she simultaneously struggles to suppress and to discover, will be enacted. (Raiskin 148) Antoinette thus finds that her place of salvation is also her place of confinement. Each time she dreams of England, the place of idyllic beauty gives way to images of violence and destruction. Eventually her dream reveals England to be a strange and foreign place and not a ‘home’ for the Jamaican Creole. Raiskin further observes, “This shifting dream of England and of her place in it is Antoinette’s coherent psychological (and later her political) answer to her loss of agency as she is exchanged between English men.” (Riaskin 149) Antoinette might not recognise the menacing place in her first dream to be England but the readers can at once identify it with Thornfield Hall of Bronte’s text. Hence although unconsciously, she knows that England can never help her overcome her trauma and restore back her integrated self and that she eventually has to confront her destiny “at the top” of Thornfield Hall, she consciously cannot accept that fact as is evident when in her delirious talk to Grace Poole Antoinette says, “That afternoon we went to England. There was grass and olive-green water and tall trees looking into the water. This, I thought, is England. If I could be here I’d get well again and the sound in my head would stop.” (Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea109) But instead she finds herself imprisoned in a cardboard world “where everything is coloured brown or dark red or yellow that has no light in it.” (Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea 107) Antoinette’s final act of rebellion and destruction is thus an attempt to destroy that violent, brutal political reality that threatens her identity as a Creole. 62 Symposium

Unlike Bronte’s ending, Rhys’s novel ends moments before the actual burning. In the final scene, Antoinette, as if in strange recall of her oscillation between the red sky symbolising Coulibri and the picture of ‘The Miller’s Daughter’ symbolising England, in her vague memory of her adherence to one cultural imperative or the other says, “Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do.” (Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea 112) Her anticipated act of setting Thornfield Hall into flames is her destroying the polarised and static romanticised vision of her ancestral past—a vision which had itself arisen out of Antoinette’s obsession with whiteness. Europe ‘discovers’ the West Indies, and the child constantly gives birth to the mother. Yet this illusion is real in the sense that Antoinette’s obsession is a real one. As she walks down the dark passage in the final scene, her dream fades and she realises that the conflicts wrought from the multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-lingual milieu of the West Indies create a complex heterogeneous socio-cultural body. For Antoinette, home is the Caribbean, fragmented but potent and which lives in a manifestly splintered presence within the oceanic layers of her psyche. However, sadly, for subjects like Antoinette, such homecoming is never actually possible and the only viable escape from the perpetual trauma lies in her self-annihilation.

Works Cited Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940. University of Texas Press, 1986, pp. 448. Print. Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre, ed. Novy Kapadia. Worldview Publication. 2003. Print. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. The John Hopkins University Press, 1996. Print. Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. Harrero, Dolores and Sonia Baelo-Allu`e. The Splintered Glass: Facets of Trauma in the Post-Colony and Beyond. Rodopi, 2011, pp. ix. Print. James, Louis. ‘Introduction’ in The Islands in Between, ed. Louis James. Oxford University Press, 1968, pp.8. Print. Lamming, George. ‘Concept of the Caribbean’. Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English. ed. Frank Birbal Singh, Macmillan, 1996, pp.1-14. Print. Mengel, Ewald and Michela Borzaga. Trauma, Memory and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel: Essays. Rodopi, 2012, pp.ix-xi. Print. Nunez-Harrell, Elizabeth. ‘The Paradoxes of Belonging: The White West Indian “There is always the other side”: Revisiting Jean ...

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Woman in Fiction’, Modern Fiction. Studies 3; no.2, Summer 1985, pp. 1-2. Print. Raiskin, Judith. Snow on the Cane Fields: Women’s Writings and Creole Subjectivity. University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp.144-52. Print. Rhys, Jean. Letters 1911-1966. eds. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly Andre Deutsch, Penguin, 1985. Print. ... Wide Sargasso Sea. ed. Judith L. Raiskin, W. W. Norton & Company Inc. 1999. Print. Root, Maria. ‘Reconstructing the Impact of Trauma on Personality’ in Personality and Psychopathology : Feminist Reappraisals. ed. by Laura S. Brown and Mary Ballou, Guildford Press, 1992, pp.229-65. Print. Rothberg, Michael. ‘From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory’. Criticism 53, 2011, pp. 523-48. Print. Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. Penguin, 2000 pp.161. Print. Stonequist, Everett V. The Marginal Man. Scribners, 1937, pp.8. Print. Thorpe, Michael. ‘The Other Side: Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre’. Ariel 8.3, 1977, pp. 99-110. Tiffin, Helen. ‘Mirror and Mask: Colonial Motifs in the Novels of Jean Rhys’ World Literature Written in English. 17 April 1978, pp. 328. Print. Walcott, Derek. ‘A Far Cry from Africa’ in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English. ed. Paula Burnett, pp.243.

Smt. Uma Biswas (M.A. M.Phil. presently pursuing Ph.D in the Department of English, Rabindra Bharati University) is an Assistant Professor (Contractual) in the Department of English, St. Paul’s Cathedral Mission College, Kolkata, India. She is also a Guest Faculty in the Post Graduate Section of Lady Brabourne College and a former Guest Faculty of Basanti Devi College, East Calcutta Girls’ College and Mrinalini Devi Mahavidyapith, Kolkata. An alumnus of Lady Brabourne College and University of Calcutta, she obtained her M.Phil from Rabindra Bharati University. Her area of specialization is D.H. Lawrence and Gothic Literature. She has published academic papers in national journals and has presented research papers in national and international seminars. Her areas of interest include, but not restricted to, the works of D.H. Lawrence and the Modern age, Gothic Literature and Feminism. 64 Symposium

Victim versus Victimizer: An Analysis of the Theme of Destruction in Wuthering Heights Tamali Roy Chowdhury

Human beings are a unique creation whose lives are rooted in contradictions and uncertainties. Throughout their lives, they labour and toil in order to achieve everlasting happiness. For them, happiness is more an existence bereft of pain and suffering, rather than a state of mind. All their actions and decisions are preoccupied with the desire of a state of tranquillity and contentment. But life is not a bed of roses where people receive happiness like an unsolicited gift, rather they have to struggle relentlessly through many hardships and obstacles that come their way. Overcoming these obstacles might not always reap fruitful results, but often these efforts end up in a series of rejections. And from this repeated unfulfilment of desires, spring their potential for destruction and subsequent misery. Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights is one such tale, which is replete with disturbing contradictions. On one level it is one of the greatest love stories ever written in English fiction, and on another level it is also one of the most brutal narratives of intergenerational violence. Bronte, although being very reclusive in nature was a meticulous observer of society. The reviewer of the politically liberated paper The Examiner, acknowledged her “considerable power” as a fiction writer but regretted her willingness to “drag into the light” everything “coarse and loathsome” (Examiner 287). The reviewers of Athenaeum similarly recognized her “power and cleverness” but condemned her engagement with the “mean and bitterly painful and degrading” (Chorley 281). Bronte, however, did not have any interest to dissolve the anomalies present in her fiction or alter her narrative in order to elicit positive response from the audience, because she was not writing for publicity at all. In one of her French essays titled ‘The Butterfly’, which she had written as a student at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels, 1842, she characteristically framed her arguments on creation and destruction by working through a sequence of antitheses. She wrote: Victim versus Victimizer: An Analysis of ...

Victim versus Victimizer: An Analysis of ... 65

All creation is equally mad. Behold those flies playing above the brook; the swallows and fish diminish their number every minute. These will become, in their turn, the prey of some tyrant of the air or water; and man for his amusement or his needs will kill their murderers. Nature is an inexplicable problem; it exists on a principle of destruction. Every being must be the tireless instrument of death to others, or itself must cease to live. (Bronte 265) It is through this ‘principle of destruction’ that this paper aims to develop its analysis on the paradoxes of human condition reflected in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The novel is not only a tale of love, but also one of exploitation which questions the human perception of happiness – a state of bliss which must be achieved at the cost of someone else’s suffering. Bronte weaves a story of pain, love, loss, anxiety, separation and death but often challenges the conventional definitions attached on the surface of these concepts. She makes it pertinent throughout her narrative that pain and suffering are integral to a person’s existence, where he survives the conflicts through an interplay of dual roles – being the victim and playing the victimizer; the role reversal takes place according to the situations he is entrapped in. Bronte presents her story in terms of dual narration, what is commonly known as the ‘Chinese box’ structure. The events of the story are presented to the readers with the help of Mr. Lockwood, who is the tenant of Thrushcross Grange. He records all the details of the events that he hears from Nelly Dean, an old servant of Wuthering Heights. Rather than witnessing these events first hand, the reader only learns them after they have been filtered through the views of two peripheral characters; Lockwood manipulates Nelly’s views who herself has further modified it by assimilating information from a variety of other sources. Nelly Dean begins narrating the story of the Earnshaws like every other family story. It starts with the arrival of a child, whom Mr. Earnshaw picks up from the streets of Liverpool because he was “starving and houseless” and brings him to his Yorkshire residence (Bronte 29). He refers to this child as “a gift of God, though its as dark almost as if it came from the devil” (Bronte 29). He expects everyone to heartily accept the poor orphan child as a natural addition to the family but unfortunately, all the family members vehemently object to this unexpected “gift” (Bronte 29). Mrs. Earnshaw is readily about to “fling it out of doors” and lashes out at her husband for burdening her with another mouth to feed (Bronte 29). Catherine and Hindley, Mr. Earnshaw’s biological children spit at “it” and start crying when Hindley gets to know his fiddle is broken by this clumsy child on their way back home (Bronte 29). Nelly 66 Symposium

Dean responds to the situation by abandoning the fatherless child at the staircase, expecting that “it might be gone on the morrow” (Bronte 30). After a few days, the family christens him Heathcliff naming him after an Earnshaw son who died in his infancy. The initial hostility towards Heathcliff, echoes the struggles faced by Jane, the titular protagonist of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Jane’s position in the Reed family is similar to that of Heathcliff – both are orphans taken in by the patriarchal figure, against the wishes of their wives. They are viewed as a burden who are only meant to exploit the family’s resources, “an uncongenial alien permanently intruded on her own family group” (Bronte 13). Their existence is reduced to that of “a heterogeneous thing, hardly human” (Lamonica 98). Heathcliff even lacks the knowledge of his family’s language, he speaks only “some gibberish that nobody could understand” (Bronte 29). This ‘lack’ of language and Nelly’s repeated use of the impersonal pronoun “it” emphasizes his apparent distinction and supposed inferiority from the natural family (Bronte 29). However, the tension in the family begins to heat up when Heathcliff finds a paternal figure in Mr. Earnshaw who acts as his guardian and protector, thereby aiding him in reinforcing his position in the family. Mr. Earnshaw’s favoritism and his initial safeguarding of the child, alters the existing dynamics of relationships and results in sibling rivalry. Hindley Earnshaw, the elder son resorts to brutal animosity against Heathcliff and regards his father as “an oppressor rather than a friend” (Bronte 31). Catherine behaves badly all day only to elicit attention from her father. Nelly confirms Catherine “was never so happy as when we were all scolding her at once” (Bronte 34). By studying the interactions between Mr. Earnshaw, Hindley and Catherine, once can deduce that there is a huge gulf of misunderstanding existing between them. Mr. Earnshaw is an authoritative figure who does not understand jokes from his children. He refuses to forgive them for their mistakes and rebukes Catherine by saying “I cannot love thee; thou’rt worse than thy brother. Go, say thy prayers child, and ask God’s pardon. I doubt that thy mother and I must rue that we ever reared thee!” (Bronte 34). Mr. Earnshaw’s unforgiving nature once again comes to the fore in his interaction with Hindley. Hindley cannot accept his new brother and considers him “a usurper of his parent’s affections and his privileges” (Bronte 31). Whenever Hindley shows any signs of derision, Mr. Earnshaw reaches for his cane to punish him. His final resolution to counter Hindley’s abuse is to send him off to college. These incidents highlight how a lack of healthy communication between children and parents can leave a deep psychological impact on the minds of the children. Mr. Earnshaw’s unmerciful nature and his acute inability to explain his favoritism towards Heathcliff leaves Victim versus Victimizer: An Analysis of ...

Victim versus Victimizer: An Analysis of ... 67 the family severely dismembered and creates an emotional divide between them. When Hindley comes back from college and takes ownership of the Heights, he banishes Heathcliff from the family quarters and reduces him to the menial position of a farmhand. After Mr. Earnshaw’s death, the Heights gets divided into two groups - Hindley and his wife Frances against Catherine and Heathcliff who by now have become “very thick” (Bronte 30). Nelly Dean’s role in the sibling drama is often neglected as she is found shifting her alliances back and forth but it is to be noted that her actions are not without prejudices. When she begins her narrative about the Heights, she confesses her contempt for Heathcliff to Mr. Lockwood “Hindley hated him, and to say the truth I did the same; and we plagued and went on with him shamefully, for I wasn’t reasonable enough to feel my injustice, and the mistress never put in a word on his behalf, when she saw him wronged” (Bronte 30). Recalling her early days with the Earnshaws, she claims how her mother nursed Hindley and that she too was a constant companion of the children throughout their childhood. When Mr. Earnshaw left for Liverpool, he promised to bring her a gift of apples and pears along with the gifts he had promised his own children. Nelly later calls herself Hindley’s foster sister and Stevie Davies refers to her as Hindley’s “twin” identifying a parallel between Catherine and Heathcliff’s sibling identification (103). Nelly is, therefore, a desirable third sibling, a child not related by blood, nevertheless adopted and treated as a member of the Earnshaw family. Her decision to leave the poor orphan child on the landing of the staircase is not a senseless decision, but “clearly a self-protective measure, an attempt to avoid being replaced by the new child” (Lamonica 99). As Hindley takes on his role of being the family’s new patriarch, his incessant maltreatment of Heathcliff isolates him from his sister. Catherine feels deeply hurt and separates herself from her brother’s company. Nelly confirms that Heathcliff’s persistent abuse at the hands of “her master” “was enough to make a fiend of a saint” (Bronte 51). Emily Bronte thus paints a picture of child abuse that resonates with the sufferings of children in Blake’s poems. Through the images of childhood, Blake reveals the conflict between nature and social order, between innocence and the pressures of social experience. In his poem ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, Blake highlights the plight of poor orphaned children who are exploited by corrupt social organizations to achieve their own selfish ends: Because I was happy upon the heath, And smil’d among the winter’s snow, 68 Symposium

They clothed me in the clothes of death, And taught me to sing the notes of Woe. And because I am happy and dance and sing, They think they have done me no injury, And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King, Who made up a heaven of our misery. (Blake 27) Tension is further maintained in the novel by the enforced separation of Catherine and Heathcliff. Nelly recalls how Catherine was “much too fond of Heathcliff. The greatest punishment we could invent for her was to keep her separate from him” (Bronte 33). Their first separation occurs when both of them are forbidden by Hindley to sleep on the same bed. However, their literal separation occurs when Catherine is bitten by Edgar Linton’s dog and she stays with his family so that they can nurse her back to good health. During this time, Catherine undergoes an overall transformation in her appearance and behaviour which baffles everyone around her. When she returns to the Heights, her manners are no longer like “a wild, hatless little savage” but she is “quite a beauty” and seems like a “very dignified person” (Bronte 41). This is the first moment when Heathcliff feels he is getting distanced from her bit by bit because she has “converted into a stranger by her grand dress” (Bronte 44). This initial difference in her demeanor marks the origin of resentment in Heathcliff, the first sign of their friendship being hampered by the presence of the Lintons. However, life then takes a crooked turn for Hindley Earnshaw, whose wife Frances dies of consumption leaving behind their family heir Hareton, the last of the Earnshaws. Following the death of his wife, Hindley becomes a raging alcoholic and gives himself up “to reckless dissipation” (Bronte 51). Hindley then ends up becoming a victim of his own tragedy - he spirals further into despair, abandons his fatherly duties for Hareton and adopts a tyrannical stance towards all the inhabitants of the Heights. It is likely that Emily Bronte has conjured the character of Hindley Earnshaw from her late brother Branwell Bronte who gave himself up to drink and despair when he was expelled from his service at the Robinsons on account of grave misconduct. As the narrative propels forward, the most crucial turning point in the novel occurs in Chapter IX, when Catherine goes into the kitchen to have a private discussion with Nelly Dean. Catherine approaches Nelly who is rocking little Hareton to sleep. She confides in her that she has accepted the marriage proposal from Edgar Linton, being totally unaware of Heathcliff’s presence, who was sitting on a bench hidden from her view. The reasons she Victim versus Victimizer: An Analysis of ...

Victim versus Victimizer: An Analysis of ... 69 cites for her affirmative response to the proposal exemplifies her ambition to be “the greatest woman of the neighbourhood” (Bronte 61). When Nelly enquires of the reasons for her self-doubt and supposed unhappiness, she replies “In whichever place the soul lives, - in my soul and in my heart, I’m convinced I’m wrong” (Bronte 62). She tries to explain her mental agony by describing one of her strange dreams. In the dream, she finds herself in heaven which does not feel like her home. She weeps bitterly to come back to earth when the angry angels fling her out of heaven and she lands in the middle of the heath, on the top of the Heights, sobbing tears of joy. It is through this example that Catherine reveals her inner dilemma to Nelly: I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn’t have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire. (Bronte 63) Catherine’s ardent confession of love for Heathcliff and her failure to enact it in her actions alters the course of their relationship. Catherine’s refusal to marry him for his lack of social station drives him out of the house for a mysterious period of three years. It is not to be overlooked that Nelly’s failure to alert Catherine of Heathcliff’s presence during a conversation which is supposed to be a private one, is also one of the reasons for this catastrophe to occur. Tom Winnifirth says “It is natural that Catherine should confide in Nelly, but Nelly seems to both know too much and do too little” (54). Later on in the novel, she contemplates her own actions “I seated myself in a chair, and rocked, to and fro, passing harsh judgement on my many derelictions of duty; from which, it struck me then, all the misfortunes of all my employers sprang” (Bronte 211). Catherine’s conscious decision to choose Edgar Linton over Heathcliff thus leads to multiple interpretations. On one hand, she manages to liberate herself from the tyrannical grip of her brother by moving from a “disorderly comfortless home to a wealthy, respectable one” (Bronte 62). On the other hand, such a liberation cannot take place unless she betrays her heart and her love for Heathcliff. Catherine, in this context, then ends up becoming both a victim and a victimizer. She is a victim of social mores which do not permit her the choice of marrying the person she loves, because such a match would be inappropriate in the eyes of society. In order to maintain such propriety, she 70 Symposium also ends up becoming a victimizer, for her ambition of social prominence can only be achieved at the cost of deserting Heathcliff. Nevertheless, by deciding to abandon Heathcliff for Edgar, she also fulfils the ultimate wish of her ‘wicked’ brother who considers that a marital alliance with the Lintons would bring honour upon their family. Hence, it is difficult to discern how her choice of marriage ends up doing any good to her, for in the later part of the novel we find how such an exchange demands a terrible price from her and those related to her by marriage. Although it is Catherine who is partly responsible for Heathcliff’s removal from the Heights, it also cannot be ignored that Heathcliff’s own decision to separate himself from Catherine was rooted in his pride. “Proud people breed sad sorrows”– out of this pride sprang a decision which cemented Catherine’s prospect of marriage to Edgar (Bronte 44). By abandoning her that very moment and never attempting to contact her in three years, Heathcliff destroyed his own chance to present himself as a suitor and potential husband for marriage. However, the most amusing part of Catherine’s marriage is that she never intended to separate herself from Heathcliff, “I shouldn’t be Mrs. Linton were such a price demanded! He’ll be as much to me as he has been all his lifetime” (Bronte 64). Nelly is baffled by such claims as she infers that either Catherine is ignorant of the duties of a married woman or that she is a “wicked, unprincipled girl” (Bronte 65). Drew Lamonica views this decision of Catherine as being “determined to maintain relationships with both men, to hold her two loves and two identities together, despite their differences. She wants Edgar’s ‘frost’ and Heathcliff’s ‘fire’ and she takes no warning from their obvious incompatibility” (106). Her decision to stick to both and maintain both identities at the same time ultimately splits her between the two houses and the two men. The storm that follows Heathcliff’s self-imposed exile splits a tree at the corner of the Heights and damages a part of the house foreshadowing Catherine’s divided self and her absolute inability to retain dual identities in future. The storm also signifies the destruction that will follow in the lives of Mrs. Catherine Linton and that of the second generation of Earnshaws and Lintons upon the arrival of Heathcliff. As Heathcliff returns unexpectedly to the neighbourhood after a prolonged absence of three years, Catherine’s idea of Thrushcross Grange as her “new heaven and a new earth” begins to fade away (Bronte 265). With the passage of time, the momentary happiness of being the lady of the household turns into a feeling of resentment. Her disappointment further aggravates when Edgar shows no intention of befriending Heathcliff and vice-versa. Although Heathcliff Victim versus Victimizer: An Analysis of ...

Victim versus Victimizer: An Analysis of ... 71 returns as a wealthy, prosperous merchant in the neighbourhood, his financial status does not give him what he desires. Edgar Linton still recognizes him as a gypsy brat and reprimands Catherine for “welcoming a runaway servant as a brother” (Bronte 75). When she tries to lock them up in the kitchen to force some kind of a reconciliation, it proves disastrous since their confrontation ends up in violence. Edgar then forces the choice that Catherine has previously never intended to make, “Will you give up Heathcliff hereafter, or will you give up me? It is impossible for you to be my friend and his at the same time; and I absolutely require to know which you choose” (Bronte 93). Choosing to forsake Heathcliff is an impossibility for Catherine and this choice turns her marriage into an obligation, a confinement which shatters her soul. Drew Lamonica remarks, “To be forced to choose is to be forced to accept a limited selfhood - to be denied access to Heathcliff is to be denied that part of herself that is beyond herself” (108). Rather than making a choice, Catherine then plots a self-destructive revenge that she thinks will devastate both men “I’ll try to break their hearts by breaking my own. That will be a prompt way of finishing all” (Bronte 92). Catherine’s tragedy therefore, solely rests upon her inability to choose between her ‘three’ identities: Catherine Earnshaw-Heathcliff-Linton. Once she has exchanged her identity of Earnshaw-Heathcliff for Linton, she can never go back to them, no matter how much she desires to be a girl again. Thus, her catastrophic end occurs because of her inability to retain all her three identities together, “to be all Catherines at once” (Lamonica 113). While Catherine is at her deathbed due to her self-imposed isolation, she completely loses her grip on reality as well as on herself. Nelly remarks “Exhaustion of body had entirely subdued her spirit; our fiery Catherine was no better than a wailing child!” (Bronte 97). Soon her feverish bewilderments turn to madness as she violently destroys her bed pillows with her teeth. Her mental agony elevates to such an extent that she begins hallucinating. Unable to recognize her own face in the mirror, she shrieks out like a wild beast signifying she has “no command of tongue or brain” (Bronte 98). However, even after the frequent bouts of anxiety have subsided, for once she doesn’t mention the painful thought of having to separate from her unborn child. As an expectant mother, she is absolutely bereft of any motherly instincts for she doesn’t want to revive her health for the sake of her child. Her only concern during her illness is to escape her confinement in marriage and also to shatter the prison of a body that confines her soul. Death, which is the most painful of all separations doesn’t seem to bother her for she yearns to die. Death, instead of being a punishment, ends up being an emancipator for her. Young Catherine, 72 Symposium thus, is an “unwelcomed infant”, “neglected” at birth, who “might have wailed out of life, and nobody cared a morsel, during those first hours of existence” (Bronte 128). Isabella too, as an expectant mother doesn’t like children and asks Nelly to “put poor Catherine’s baby away” because she doesn’t “like to see it” (Bronte 133). After Catherine succumbs to her delirium, Heathcliff’s misery has no bounds. He would rather have Catherine’s ghost haunt him, than not have her at all. Enraged and resentful, he vows to repeat one prayer until his tongue stiffens - “Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” (Bronte 130). Emily Bronte in her novel does not reduce her villainous characters to utter words of sentimentality, rather she makes their speeches and actions reverberate like a passionate outburst of a grief stricken lover. Heathcliff unable to contain the excruciating pain of losing Catherine, dashes his head against the knotted trunk and howls like a “savage beast getting goaded to death with knives and spears” (Bronte130). Death of Catherine means losing a part of himself, losing a part of his soul for their love is based on absolute identification “I am Heathcliff” (Bronte 64). Catherine’s death signifies that life for Heathcliff would turn into a living hell, his existence without her would be bereft of any meaning. Even after days have passed, Heathcliff’s desperation to be with her is beyond acceptable limits for he ends up exhuming Catherine’s corpse from her grave, only to have one glimpse of her face. On this account, Helen Small comments, “however fiercely Cathy and Heathcliff claim that death cannot divide them, Heathcliff’s experience of living on after Catherine’s death is that death does divide, so that he must long either to be haunted by her or to crumble into dust with her in the grave - and only the conviction that her ghost deliberately haunts him will prevent him for suicide” (xiii). Edgar, on the other hand, resorts to social withdrawal. He locks himself up in his library for his grief transforms him into a “complete hermit” (Bronte 142). He refuses to attend church, restricts his movements to the Thrushcross Park and refrains from visiting any places where he is likely to see or hear of Heathcliff. Emily Bronte, thus, presents a scenario of death in which every individual reacts to the loss of a beloved in a different way. Her refusal to pass moral judgements on human behaviour is a result of her innate understanding of human nature. Her narrative illustrates how there is not one correct or normal way to respond to the loss of an individual. Every person reacts in a different way, owing to the kind of relationship they had with the deceased person. Edgar’s relation to his wife and Heathcliff’s relationship Victim versus Victimizer: An Analysis of ...

Victim versus Victimizer: An Analysis of ... 73 to his companion is as different as “frost” from “fire” (Bronte 63). Therefore, both of them aren’t just mourning the loss of Catherine, but also mourning for the loss of that specific relationship which they shared with her. With Catherine’s untimely demise, the potential for disaster in the narrative doubles. Heathcliff becomes a vengeful sadist, bent on ruining the lives of the two families who had ill-treated him in his youth. He marries Isabella only because he is well aware of the fact that marriage is the quickest way to usurp a woman’s position in the line of inheritance, thereby easing his chances to gain control of the Grange. Isabella, too delusional than rational, considers Heathcliff a hero of romance even though she has been repeatedly warned of his vindictiveness. She becomes a victim of unspeakable cruelty, including a fare proportion of sexual cruelty which Heathcliff shamelessly acknowledges to Nelly Dean “I keep strictly within the limits of the law” (Bronte 118). However, unlike Catherine who allows her confinement to consume her, Isabella releases herself from her victimhood by actively contriving an escape. When she flees from the Heights and ends up at her home temporarily, the first thing she does is discard her wedding ring which is a symbol of her marriage and subsequent enslavement. Her act of freeing herself from the clutches of a loveless marriage and further journey to London, pregnant and alone, exemplifies a great deal of courage and perseverance on her part. While Heathcliff doesn’t pursue Isabella any further, the reader might be misguided into believing that this fiendish, wolfish man has had a change of heart. Nelly in her narration hastily skips the thirteen years following Isabella’s escape. And after this point revenge seems worthless because Edgar and Hindley are both emotionally broken men. However, with the introduction of Heathcliff’s son Linton, one comes to understand that Heathcliff is inhumanly bent on revenge. Linton, his son by Isabella has been termed by modern critics as one of the most loathsome characters of English fiction. Whining, sickly, peevish and utterly without compassion for others, Linton becomes an accomplice in physically abducting Young Catherine when her father is at death’s door. His forced marriage to Young Catherine serves as a parody against his own parent’s marriage. Heathcliff doesn’t even spare to use his own son to exact revenge upon the Lintons even though he is well aware that his son is at a terminal stage of consumption. Linton too, doesn’t leave the opportunity to victimize his own wife, at his father’s command thereby losing absolute sympathy from the readers. As expected, Linton perishes soon after marriage, giving away all the rights of Thrushcross Grange to his father, thereby dispossessing his own wife of her inheritance. After Linton dies, Heathcliff shows no signs of 74 Symposium misery, he would rather be glad to have got rid of a burden. Heathcliff doesn’t even show any signs of remorse upon the death of his wife Isabella. Instances like these expose the paradox of human relationships, where one’s initiation into a family through adoption, birth or marriage doesn’t necessarily guarantee one’s acceptance into it. In childhood, Heathcliff is considered as an outsider, never fully accepted by his foster family. Elder Catherine feels like an outcast, a stranger in her marital abode and cannot accept her transition into wifehood. When Young Catherine is born, she is neglected by her father who was too steeped into his own grief to spare a little thought on his daughter during her initial hours of existence. Hareton’s father Hindley almost ends up killing his own son when Hareton falls from the staircase only to be saved by Heathcliff. Hareton also lives in his own house like a servant, for the power dynamics in his family have altered everyone’s position. The concept of blood being thicker than water is thus subverted in these cases. Towards the end of the novel, the absurdity of human condition becomes even more glaring. No matter how much pain Heathcliff inflicts on Hareton and Young Catherine, he is the only one who ends up being more miserable. His material acquisitions -Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange provide no compensation for his loss. Even though he ends up becoming the richest man in the neighbourhood, none of his possessions are enough to bring back Catherine. He explains his bitterest anguish to Nelly in these words, “The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!” (Bronte 247). It is his memory of Catherine that drives him to wreak animosity on those who dared to separate them. Memory is what makes it difficult for him to look at Hareton’s eyes which resemble Catherine’s. Memory of his own degradation prevents him from physically ill-treating Hareton in his youth. Memory also pushes him to torment Young Catherine for she reminds Heathcliff of his lover who died in childbirth. As J. Hillis Miller comments, “Everything in the world is a sign indicating Catherine, but also indicating, by its existence, his failure to possess her and the fact that she is dead” (373). Heathcliff, therefore, struggling to cope with his loss, is bent upon destroying everything that reminds him of her absence - the two scions of the ancient households and the two mansions as well. To destroy them, is to be left with nothing, thus obliterating the memory of Catherine’s existence and absence from earth. But this ‘everything’ must also include himself, for his own features, even his own face constantly reminds him of her absence. Heathcliff after eighteen years of incessant struggle finally comes to realize this fact that unless he destroys his own existence, Catherine stays “incomparably beyond Victim versus Victimizer: An Analysis of ...

Victim versus Victimizer: An Analysis of ... 75 and above” him (Bronte 125). It is only through death that he can aim to unify with her and find contentment in his life. Only death can allow him to rise above his own suffering and relieve him from the bitter truth of Catherine’s demise. Once his perception of life and eternal happiness takes a turn for good, he abandons his feelings of rage and destruction. By giving up violence, he thwarts not only his own objective of revenge but also liberates himself from the clutches of a body that holds him captive. The image of the human body as a prison from which the soul must be liberated, isn’t unique to Wuthering Heights, but this concept also surfaces in one of Emily Bronte’s early poems: High waving heather, ‘neath stormy blasts bending, Midnight and moonlight and bright shining stars; Darkness and glory rejoicingly blending, Earth rising to heaven and heaven descending, Man’s spirit away from its drear dongeon sending, Bursting the fetters and breaking the bars. (Hatfield 31) With Heathcliff’s death, the story of the second generation concludes on a note of tranquillity. By thwarting his own revenge, Heathcliff makes it possible for Hareton and Young Catherine to unify in a bond of love. Although many critics have argued that by dispossessing both the cousins of their ancestral property, Heathcliff lost his authority to bend them according to his will. Once they were dispossessed, there was no fear of degradation to keep them apart. However, it is also true that even if Heathcliff had desired to make them suffer, there was nobody alive to forbid him. Therefore, it is difficult to discern if ending of the novel depicts a triumph of good over evil- Hareton and Catherine’s victory of Heathcliff, since it is partly Heathcliff who is responsible for their love to thrive. On this account, the distinction between the two houses- Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange is of paramount importance in the narrative. While it is easy to categorize Thurshcross Grange as a haven of peace and civility and Wuthering heights as a wild, savage abode with Heathcliff as its perpetrator, nevertheless all the appalling scenes of Catherine’s death occur at Thrushcross Grange whereas Heathcliff and Catherine form their companionship at Wuthering Heights, followed by Hareton and Young Catherine whose love begins to blossom there as well. Isabella, on the other hand, feels suffocated at her marital residence similarly like Catherine who feels entrapped in her marriage to Edgar. Both of them long to return ‘home’- a place where they share a feeling of belongingness. This blurring of distinction between the two houses enables the reader to understand the moral ambiguities embedded in the narrative- how different characters at various points in their life end up 76 Symposium becoming a victim of their circumstances. According to Charlotte Bronte, Heathcliff stays unredeemed. His only connection to humanity isn’t his “fierce and inhuman” love for Catherine but his “rudely confessed regard for Hareton Earnshaw- the young man whom he has ruined” (Bronte 309). Hareton is the only person who mourns him after his demise. Nelly confirms, “Poor Hareton, the most wronged, was the only one that really suffered much. He sat by the corpse all night, weeping in bitter earnest. He pressed its hand, and kissed the sarcastic, savage face that everyone else shrank from contemplating; and bemoaned him with that strong grief which springs naturally from a generous heart, though it be tough as tempered steel”. (Bronte 256) Emily Bronte’s inherent tendency to view the world in terms of opposites frequently surfaces throughout the narrative, even at the end of the novel. Regular readers are taken to believing that Hareton and Young Catherine are able to rise above their situation in order to achieve their happy ending, unlike their ancestors who can only yearn for fulfilment in death. Although a part of it is true, Hareton’s response to his master’s death also exemplifies the far- reaching consequences of oppression. Hareton’s mourning for Heathcliff in his subjugated state of mind is a clear indication that he remains unaware of the injustices done to him. His grief signifies the victory of his oppressor- that is the victory of Heathcliff. It is the final triumph of a system of domination where the victim starts defending and worshipping his victimizer, thus losing absolute control over his own state of mind.

Works Cited Blake, William. “The Chimney Sweeper.” Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Guildford: The Astolaf Press, 1891. 24 Nov 2020. Web. Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Richard J. Dunn. United States of America: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1971. Print. Bronte, Charlotte. “Editor’s Preface to the New Edition of Wuthering Heights.” Wuthering Heights: Oxford World’s Classics. Ed. Ian Jack. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 1976. Print. Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Richard J. Dunn. United States of America: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2003. Print. Bronte, Emily. “The Butterfly.” Wuthering Heights: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Richard J. Dunn. United States of America: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2003. Print. Victim versus Victimizer: An Analysis of ...

Victim versus Victimizer: An Analysis of ... 77

Bronte, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Bronte. Ed. C.W. Hatfield. New York: Columbia University Press, 1941. Print. Chorley, H.F. “The Athenaeum.” Wuthering Heights: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Richard J. Dunn. United States of America: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2003. Print. Davies, Stevie. Emily Bronte: Key Women Writers Series. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988. 24 Nov 2020. Web. Lamonica, Drew. We Are Three Sisters: Self and Family in the Writing of the Brontes. United States of America: University of Missouri Press, 1973. 24 Nov 2020. Web. Miller, J. Hillis. “Wuthering Heights: Repetition and the Uncanny.” Wuthering Heights: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Richard J. Dunn. United States of America: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2003. Print. Small, Helen. “Introduction.” Wuthering Heights: Oxford World’s Classics. Ed. Ian Jack. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 1995. Print. “The Examiner”. Wuthering Heights: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Richard J. Dunn. United States of America: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2003. Print. Winnifirth, Tom. The Brontes: Masters of World Literature. Ed. Louis Kronenberger. London and Basingtoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1977. Print.

Smt. Tamali Roy Chowdhury is Guest Lecturer at the PG Department of English, St. Paul’s Cathedral Mission College, Kolkata. She is a young and promising scholar and an alumnus of Bethune College Kolkata. 78 Symposium

Life in Pandemic: Looking at Covid-19 Anindita Chatterjee

Being a spectator of calamities taking place in an--L/ other country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists…Information about what is happening elsewhere, called ‘news’ features conflict, [suffering], and violence— ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ runs the venerable guideline of tabloids and twenty-four- hour headline news shows—to which the response is compassion, or indignation, or titillation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view. (Sontag, 18). This journalistic (including photographic and televisual) spectacularization of the tragedies [of humanity] is commonly referred to as [the] “9/11” syndrome. (Ramazani, 2). The critics in the late 1990s pointed to our contemporary “wound culture’s” pathological fixation on violence, fear, pain, trauma and anxiety and, in academic circles, there was an advent of the institutionalized field of “trauma studies” which gradually went on to reach a state of saturation. It was against this backdrop that the pandemic of 2020 struck the world. A pandemic as we all know is simply an epidemic that occurs on a wide geographical scale, perhaps worldwide, or at least affecting a large area of the world and hence it is natural that such a worldwide phenomenon would result in mass reaction. Novel Coronavirus as we all know now is a new strain of flu that has devastated the planet resulting in severe respiratory illness in people, killing millions of individuals across the world. It is being compared to the largest pandemic in history, the Spanish flu of 1918 which infected a third of the world’s population. But this was expected – In the last couple of years, after the SARS and Ebola epidemics, we were told again and again that a new much stronger epidemic was just a matter of time, that the question was not IF but WHEN. Although we were convinced of the truth of these dire predictions, we somehow didn’t take them seriously and were reluctant to act and engage in serious preparations. (Zizek, 46) Life in Pandemic: Looking at Covid-19 79

‘The truth is that serious perils to the existence of humanity have become a fact of contemporary life. The threat of mass death, environmental devastation, and even human extinction is an alarming reality.” (Wuthnow, 8) Needless to say, the Coronavirus pandemic brought forth a graphic scenario of trauma, agony, victimization and suffering whose sentimental and clinical perception by the media led to the development of fear, panic, depression, anxiety and need for social isolation. Television and social media started to depict the different images of pain associated with the new disease, as government issued orders on travel ban and social distancing to combat the contamination, there was rise of panic, dread and concern in people that intensified the social impact of the deadly disease. There were continuous rounds of rumours and fake news that started to spread like wildfire which further aggravated the distress and mental anguish of the people. The flurry of images of dead bodies on screen, and clinical details reported in news media further accentuated the fear factor. Roland Barthes on Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography observed how “the Photograph” has the power to reproduce an event to infinity. (Barthes, 4) Media kept bombarding the viewers with news about the rising curve and piling death figures which severely affected the people. Social media was replete with misinformation of all sorts. As the world still continues to race to find a vaccine for the deadly disease Covid-19, there is seemingly no antidote in sight for the burgeoning outbreak of coronavirus conspiracy theories, hoaxes, anti-mask myths and sham cures that are being dished out to us. Facebook, Twitter and other platforms, have been accused of spreading misinformation. American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene claimed that due to misinformation about the coronavirus at least some 800 people and possibly more died. The following is a very interesting find: From losing their eyesight to the loss of life, the spread of rumors, stigma and conspiracy theories exacerbated the suffering of thousands of citizens across the globe. A team of international scientists from various countries, such as Australia, Japan and Thailand, looked at data compiled between December 2019 and April 2020 as part of the study revealed that around 800 people died from drinking highly-concentrated alcohol in the hope of disinfecting their bodies, while 5,900 citizens were hospitalized after consuming methanol, with 60 people going blind as a result. According to the University of Central Florida psychology professor Chrysalis Wright, who studies misinformation, ‘That’s not surprising, at all’. 1 80 Symposium

COVID-19-related rumors, stigma, and conspiracy theories circulating online in websites, Facebook, Twitter, and online newspapers, deeply impacted public health. The Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry states how in order to understand the psychological and psychiatric repercussions of a pandemic, the emotions of fear and anger associated with it, must be considered and observed carefully. “Fear is an adaptive animal defense mechanism that is fundamental for survival and involves several biological processes of preparation for a response to potentially threatening events. However, when it is chronic or disproportionate, it becomes harmful and can be a key component in the development of various psychiatric disorders.” (Ornell, 11) During a pandemic, fear increases unease and tension levels in healthy individuals as well, besides affecting them who suffer from chronic mental problems. Studies have revealed how patients infected with COVID-19 (or suspected of being infected) have undergone and are undergoing intense emotional and behavioral reactions, such as fear, boredom, loneliness, anxiety, insomnia or anger. Psychiatrists claim that such conditions might advance into chronic mental disorders, and can even lead to suicide. These conditions have been found prevalent in quarantined patients; whose psychological distress tends to be higher than those staying within the comfortable spaces of home. In some cases, uncertainty about the infection and impending death or dread about infecting family and friends too result in distressed mental states. Slavoj Zizek in his study of the Covid 19 Pandemic goes on to mention how Li Wenliang, the doctor who first discovered the ongoing coronavirus epidemic said that “there should be more than one voice in a healthy society, from his hospital bed just prior to his death.” (Zizek, 13) But he emphasized that this urgent need for other voices to be heard does not necessarily signify an idea similar to Western-style multiparty democracy, but it just demands an open space for citizens’ critical reactions to circulate. Dr Li’s words became prophetic in the long run, there was, indeed, an emergence of various voices apart from the state machinery that provided information about the ongoing pandemic, whereas some of them were helpful, many created adverse impact on people. Some platforms in media started projecting the horrors of pandemic in its most lurid details and its severe emotional impact was felt on humanity in drastic ways. Visual images of dead bodies wrapped in polythene covers being shocked the world. Some individuals floated videos in the name of cure in order to make business out of the situation. As people frantically searched for Life in Pandemic: Looking at Covid-19 81 immunity boosters and therapeutic relief, they became gullible victims to these traps. Furthermore, reports about the scarcity of hospital beds to accommodate patients, paucity of space in morgues, images of mass burials, sensational depiction of people unable to see their loved ones one last time before burial or cremation caused severe anxieties in people worldwide. The loss of jobs and financial instability that came along with it, restriction of physical movement during lockdown deeply affected human minds. It is true that the world was not prepared for the pandemic on this scale, and the existing medical infrastructure failed to combat with the immensity and the intensity of the crisis and even after a year we are still trying to overcome the situation. With the sudden rise in the death figures and rising infection curve since March 2020, people across the world started panicking for never before had they seen such an overwhelming incident. There was an overabundance of information in Social media related to the virus and many of them were false and potentially harmful. Since inaccurate information spreads wide and fast it became increasingly difficult for common public to ascertain the veracity of the news. In order to curb the spread of such fake news WHO was impelled to launch websites to stop the spread of phony news and curb the growth of meaningless fear and anxiety regarding the disease that practically crippled the world. It is not that epidemic had struck for the first time in human history. There had been several epidemic attacks over the centuries. In the summer of 430 B.C.E., a violent epidemic struck the Greek city of Athens. It was reported by the contemporary Athenian historian Thucydides (who himself suffered from the disease). Malaria was a frequent malady in the ancient Roman world. It enormously increased mortality levels and sharply reduced life expectancy at all ages. In 735 (C.E.) smallpox epidemic, began in the seaport region on the north coast of the Japan. Leprosy was very widespread in medieval Europe. In many Italian cities the last surge of these epidemics like plague and pox occurred between 1629 and 1633. In 1721 a major smallpox epidemic struck city of Boston. A sweeping influenza pandemic passed through Europe in late 1781 and 1782. In 1817 cholera began spreading in the areas of Bengal and the Ganges river delta. Typhoid became an important endemic problem in American and European cities in 19th Century. When the plague struck London in 1665, Londoners lost their minds. They consulted astrologers, quacks, the Bible. They searched their bodies for signs of the disease: lumps, blisters, black spots. They begged for prophecies and paid for predictions. Defoe’s A Journal 82 Symposium of the Plague Year (1722) mentions how people prayed and yelled in fear when the plague struck. The government, tried to contain the panic, and according to Daniel Defoe, Government had to ‘suppress the Printing of such Books as terrify’d the People’. (Defore, 17) Literature has always described pandemic in its most deadly and graphic terms. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, a novel set in the twenty-first century, is the first major novel that provides a fictional account of the extinction of the human race by way of a global pandemic. Edgar Allan Poe’s 1842 tale “The Masque of the Red Death” is set in a medieval world plagued by a contagious disease that kills nearly instantly. The sensationalisation of fear and anxiety is not something novel or unknown to man and fear has a special place in the aesthetic pleasure offered by literature. Covid 19 turned every piece of imagination into reality. Zizek’s study claims how “From a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster, epidemic does not greatly differ from one period in history to another. But from a political and moral point of view, it does. It cannot be denied that the pandemic of 2020 was an exception in many ways.” (Zizek, 14) The disease had a greater impact for the virus multiplied and travelled worldwide much faster as an impact of the globalization. The notion of the mobile human carrier travelling across borders made the impact of the Coronavirus disease more deadly. The impact of globalization implied that no one was immune to its threat. The word virus became associated with the word “attack” and thereby the term acquired a military connotation. The identification of the disease as a ‘military attack’ by US President, Donald Trump made us realise that the virus was a phenomenal enemy who could dismantle all human endeavours in science and medicine and break through all defense mechanisms of man thereby wreaking havoc in personal, economic and political spheres of life. The virus was perceived as a foreign entity and the state apparatuses were employed to deal with it. Media started to project the virus as an invisible enemy coming from outside, like immigrants or terrorists and media advised on how to stay calm and combat with it. The more there was the call for calm, the more the public panic intensified. People became paranoid about the virus that simultaneously affected several people across numerous nations and nationalities. Children suffered from mental stress and with no schools or friends to go to or physical activity to alleviate their tension they started to panic and fear. Media was inundated with explicit and gory images of the pandemic. At the same time there were WhatsApp forwards of messages and videos urging people to stay connected as a society and abide by safety protocols in order to collectively deal with the growing threat made Life in Pandemic: Looking at Covid-19 83 everyone realize that the enemy was very near. There were pleas to build up collective strength by sharing messages on survival strategies. There was growing mutual distrust among people and instances of how society started harassing medical personnel, in the form of acts like preventing them from entering their own homes or letting them share common premises. Fear started to spread its tentacles deep as people resorted to various acts of inhumanity and selfishness. The pandemic resulted in mass hysteria and panic buying from departmental stores in US and Britain in apprehension of further crisis. In India one could hear constant pleas made in recorded voice preceding telephone calls urging people to treat those affected with the disease with compassion and kindness and not to ill-treat the care givers of the society who were the front runners in the combat against the deadly virus. The virus was presented as an external agent and people were advised that in order to keep themselves safe and immune, they had to practice social distancing yet at the same time stay united together in spirit as a global family. The coronavirus threat was like a spectral fantasy. Created by Kang Dae- Sun, a South Korean Series called My Secret Terrius released in 2018, had mentioned about a virus that gets mutated in the form of a biological weapon. In the final episode of series 1 the conversation mentions about the existence of a deadly Corona Virus and the discussion revolves around how the virus was powerful enough to attack the lungs directly within just five minutes of being exposed. The series follows the story of a woman named Go Ae Rin who lost her husband and eventually went on to discover that he was a part of a huge conspiracy. The infection allegedly had no cure and in a later scene we also get to see how children are being taught to wash hands effectively to help prevent the spread. The scene becomes eerie and uncanny when we see it against the backdrop of the current scenario. The virus was not present in 2018, so the reel expression almost become prophetic in a sense. It is almost like a déjà vu. Films on pandemic became widely popular worldwide in 2020. Contagion (2011) and Virus (2019) were the most watched movies of the year. Stuck at home during lockdown people identified with the elements of melodrama, paranoia, fear, panic and suspense about the transmission, spread and rise of the illness that were depicted in those movies. These disaster films dealing with pandemic deaths did not merely deal with depiction of ordinary lives. They expand in scope and gradually go on to show how when the virus becomes the main driving force everything else fades into the background. It is as if nobody was prepared for the outbreak and then suddenly, they were caught in the eye of the storm. Most of these films which were produced long before the actual 84 Symposium pandemic struck the world ended on a hopeful asserting the resilience and power of humanity to rise above all catastrophe. People identified with these narratives for they too deal with the darkest fears of mankind and also tell how all of us would like the present crisis to come to an end. Though most cinematic depictions of the pandemic come in the form of thriller or suspense drama yet the depiction of suffering is always sensitive and humane. This accounted for their renewed popularity as people empathized with the reel life characters. The films also depict how rumours are integral parts of epidemics and how people begin to panic and behave when they are faced in critical situations such as this. Jude Law in the movie Contagion is an internet blogger who tries to reap benefit selling homely remedies and concoction in a way that reminds us of the situation we are living in in 2020. The role played by media and social networking sites become vital for in our real life too every other day we get to know about easy cures, wellness drugs, antidotes and curative measures likely to boost the immunity system against the virus infection and in many cases such information often prove to be misleading and false. The loss of human lives becomes lesson in humanity because they tell us how despite being divided by geographical barriers and time zone we are still connected in the world in our pain and anxiety for wellbeing. Zizek in his work Covid 19 Pandemic goes on to write “I doubt the epidemic will make us any wiser. The only thing that is clear is that the virus will shatter the very foundations of our lives, causing not only an immense amount of suffering but also economic havoc conceivably worse than the Great Recession”. (Zizek, 19) The uncertainty of the availability of vaccines, the scale of the worldwide catastrophe, and the inability to comprehend the enormity of the tragedy and how we were caught unprepared to deal with the situation is surely going to remain a source of profound apprehension and discussion in the years to come. It is certainly a cause of distress to know that death awaits each of us individually, “to contemplate the possibility of human extinction on such a scale that survival itself may no longer be welcome is quite another. Those who mourn the passing of a relative or friend find comfort in considering that person’s progeny and contributions and in knowing that his or her memory will live. The possibility of no progeny and no world in which the evanescent contributions of a life, or indeed of all life, would matter is nearly unthinkable.” (Wuthnow, 8) It is for this reason that people affected by the disease so intensely, yet at the same time the disease has made all of us stronger and firmer. Many people have already started accepting the new ‘normal’ and reconstruct their lives on the ruins of their old lives which tells us about the Life in Pandemic: Looking at Covid-19 85 indomitable human spirit which triumphs over death and suffering. People have already started going back to life and work embracing the new normal since the unlock process was initiated. It will not be adequate to consider the Covid- 19 pandemic as a simple ill-fated event, and there is no point in thinking that that one day we will get rid of its dire consequences and return to the smooth functioning of the old way of doing things, after including some adjustments to our present healthcare arrangements. It tells that calamity might come time and again and halt our lives temporarily, it will test our strength and integrity, it will shatter our immunity system and dismantle our faith in science and medicine but at the end of it all we will stand up and fight and thus life will continue to move on.

Note 1. The news was published in DW (deutschewellenews) as “Spread of coronavirus fake news causes hundreds of deaths” and accessed from https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-misinformation. The content was taken from German News Service once a week.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York; Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1981. Print. Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year, London; OUP, 2010. Print. Lepore, Jill “What our Contagion Fables are really all about?” Annals of Culture, The New Yorker, March 23rd, 2020 Accessed from https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2020/03/30/what-our-contagion-fables-are-really-about on 6.1.2020 Ornell, Felipe, “Pandemic fear” and COVID-19: mental health burden and strategies”, Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry vol.42 no.3 Ramazni, Vaheed. Writing in Pain: Literature, History and the Culture of Denial, New York; Palgrave, 2007 SãoPaulo May/June 2020 Epub Apr 03, 2020. Web. Sharma, Saumya. “Covid-19: Misinformation, fake news on coronavirus is proving to be contagious”, Hindusthan Times, July 30, 2020 Accessed from https://www. hindustantimes.com/more-lifestyle/covid-19. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Picador, 2003 Wuthnow, Robert. Be Very Afraid The Cultural Response To Terror, Pandemics, 86 Symposium

Environmental Devastation, Nuclear Annihilation, And Other Threats, New York: OUP, 2010. Print. Zizek, Slavoj, Pandemic: COVID-19 19 Shakes the World, New York and London; OR Books, 2020. Web.

Dr. Anindita Chatterjee is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Durgapur Government College. She has done her Phd on “John Clare: Poetry of Madness” from Jadavpur University in 2010. She has co-edited a book entitled Re-theorising the Indian Subcontinental Diaspora: Old and New Directions, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2020. She was recently awarded M.R.P by ICSSR entitled Sari Story: Dressing the Indian Woman through History, ‘Tracing the Origin, Growth and Evolution of the Traditional Indian Wear.” She has presented research papers in several national and international seminars across India. Her areas of interest include British Literature of the Romantic and the Victorian Period, Indian Writing in English, Films, Gender Studies and Popular Culture. Life in Pandemic: Looking at Covid-19 87

Submission Guidelines All details of submitting articles, the style-sheet to be followed, as well as the CFP for the forthcoming issue of Symposium is to be found in the college website for St. Paul’s Cathedral Mission College Kolkata. The link is given below: http://www.spcmc.ac.in/departmental-magazine/symposium/ The above page also holds a history of the journal along with the milestones that it has achieved. We look forward to your participation. Dr. Anasuya Bhar Editor