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Topography of Trauma chapter 8 Writing Trauma, Writing Modern: Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil and Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone Gen’ichiro Itakura Abstract Post- 9/ 11 literature is a contested field. Once represented in fiction, trauma and suf- fering in post- 9/ 11 Afghanistan are necessarily experienced individually and collec- tively across the globe. Local languages of victims and the cultural baggage behind those languages are translated, in most cases, into global languages of the literary market and professional psychiatry so that trauma and suffering are intelligible to a global readership. Such cultural translation often involves commodification of trau- ma and suffering as well as silencing of experiences irrelevant to narratives sanc- tioned by the dominant discourse of the global market. Novelists – especially those neither white middle- class nor native speakers of ‘global’ languages like English and French – are invariably caught in a dilemma of prioritising or sacrificing readability. Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008) and Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone (Syn- gué sabour, 2008) seek to resolve this dilemma by their ecclesiastic use of modernist techniques. This chapter explores literary representation of trauma in the context of post- 9/ 11 Afghanistan through analysis of these two texts. Set in post- 9/ 11 Afghan- istan, both novels choose to represent the protagonists’ trauma and its locality or time- specific nature paradoxically by appropriating European modernists’ textual strategies. In The Wasted Vigil, Aslam creates disruptions and displacements in the text like Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot and others to represent the kind of trauma and suffering rarely narrated. In The Patience Stone, Atiq Rahimi achieves this by his mixing- up of interior and exterior monologues and use of fragmented prose à la Im- agists. By updating European modernist strategies, those writers extend the scope of post- 9/ 11 literature and the possibility of literary representation of trauma and suffering. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004407947_010 Gen’ichiro Itakura - 9789004407947 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 07:08:56PM via free access 154 Itakura Keywords post- 9/ 11 fiction – literary representation of trauma – Nadeem Aslam – Atiq Rahimi – modernism – Afghanistan – war on terror 1 Introduction ‘About suffering they were never wrong’, writes W. H. Auden, ‘The Old Masters’.1 This apparently Euro- centric observation points to the ironical truth of our understanding of trauma. No matter where they take place or who experience them, suffering and trauma are recognised, evaluated or even ‘ranked’ accord- ing to the extent to which Western specialists identify with victims or over- come their – racial, ethnic, pathological – otherness.2 Even if their sufferings survive this selection, they are rarely communicated directly to a wider audi- ence. Suffering and trauma are more likely understood in the light of Western theory than in any other way and therefore translated into more ‘universal’ languages of psychiatry, sociology and politics than vernacular languages in which they are originally experienced and narrated.3 Cathy Caruth’s anal- ysis of Alain Renais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959) exemplifies this trend. As Stef Craps points out, Caruth seeks to ‘gloss over the lop- sided quality of the cross- cultural dialogue established in Hiroshima mon amour’ when she argues that Renais’ film helps Western spectators go beyond cultural differences and comprehend untold stories of Japanese, as a traumatised French woman and a traumatised Japanese man achieve a certain level of intimacy.4 Nothing more than a narrative function, the Japanese man allows the French woman to nar- rate her own story. The Japanese man’s untold story is somehow equated with 1 W. H. Auden, ‘Musée des Beaux- Arts’, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (Lon- don: Faber, 1976), 146. 2 Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, tr. Rachel Gomme, 282 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 282; Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 13. 3 Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das and Margaret Lock, ‘Introduction’, in Social Suffering, eds. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das and Margaret Lock, x (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). 4 Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing, 18; Stef Craps, ‘Beyond Eurocentrism: Trauma Theory in the Global Age’, in The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, eds. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone (London: Routledge, 2014), 47; cf. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 56. Gen’ichiro Itakura - 9789004407947 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 07:08:56PM via free access Writing Trauma, Writing Modern 155 the French woman’s, or a typical Euro- American trauma narrative of a young woman coming to terms with her own personal loss. His individual unique- ness, as well as the tremendous impact of the atomic bombings on Japanese people’s collective memory, is dismissed as trivial or irrelevant. Caruth strives to demonstrate the validity of Western trauma theory by silencing or ‘revising’ non- Western experiences. In this respect, canons of trauma theory were ‘never wrong’ because all the ‘irrelevant’ experiences have been excluded or trans- formed into something more ‘relevant’. However, recent research has challenged this trend. In Postcolonial Witness- ing: Trauma Out of Bounds (2012), Stef Craps criticises Caruth, Dominick LaCa- pra and other theorists for their Eurocentric bias in their reliance on a particu- lar model and aesthetics. He interrogates a certain tendency among cultural theorists to use the individual and event-based model uncritically, even though psychologists have already begun to question it.5 Instead, he turns to hitherto disregarded kinds of trauma or psychological pain suffered by silenced, disen- franchised non- Western people. In the colonial/ postcolonial context in par- ticular, he argues, trauma does not always result from ‘a single, extraordinary, catastrophic event’, but is experienced through ongoing, ‘ordinary’ forms of traumatising violence, persecution and oppression such as state violence and institutional racism.6 Furthermore, Craps challenges trauma theorists’ over- reliance on Western modernist aesthetics as a mere cultural construct. Given the similarities between modernist strategies and the psychic experience of trauma, he warns that other narrative forms and strategies – non- Western as well as Western lowbrow aesthetics – must not be automatically dismissed as insignificant or irrelevant.7 This chapter then investigates how contemporary literature has respond- ed to hitherto underrepresented kinds of trauma in the non- Western, post- colonial, ‘post- 9/ 11’ context. I will explore textual strategies representing trauma in Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008) and Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone (Syngué sabour, 2008). Hailing from Pakistan and Afghani- stan, Aslam and Rahimi may well be classified as ‘new’, ‘postcolonial’ writ- ers who have chosen to write in English and French respectively.8 These two texts are set in post-9/ 11 Afghanistan, the main theatre of great power game in the time of global civil war. Interestingly, both Aslam and Rahi- mi seek to appropriate textual strategies of Western modernists to varying Postcolonial Witnessing 5 Craps, , 24– 28. 6 Ibid., 4– 5, 52. 7 Ibid., 41. 8 Their first languages are Urdu and Persian (or to be more precise, Dari) respectively. Gen’ichiro Itakura - 9789004407947 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 07:08:56PM via free access 156 Itakura degrees. Indeed, neither Urdu nor Persian literary tradition has been im- mune to Westernisation. The ‘Progressive Movement’ of the 1930s has had a huge impact on Urdu- speaking intellectuals on the Indian subcontinent.9 Saadat Hasan Manto, for instance, not only translated European novels into Urdu but also expanded the scope of Urdu literature.10 Urdu intellectuals have known about appropriation of Western literary idioms long before the rise of new Pakistani literature in English characterised by its cosmopolitan outlook.11 Modernism in Persian literature is perhaps familiar to a wider readership. Sadegh Hedayat’s most influential work, The Blind Owl (Boof- e koor, 1936), praised by his contemporary Western writers such as André Bre- ton, borrows and appropriates themes and aesthetics from European liter- ature and cinema – E.T.A. Hoffmann’s motif of the ‘double’, Robert Wiene’s and F.W. Murnau’s macabre fantasy and James Joyce’s interior monologue.12 Nevertheless, these two writers’ use of modernist textual strategies war- rants critical attention, as, given the immense impact of Western modernist aesthetics on medical and cultural discourses of trauma, they may end up formatting and commodifying their singular, non- Western narratives in a rather conventional way. This chapter is divided into two parts. In the first two sections, I will an- alyse representation of trauma in The Wasted Vigil in relation to modernist aesthetics. Aslam represents his protagonists’ – especially Marcus Caldwell’s – trauma mainly in two ways: disruption and displacement. Marcus, an elderly 9 For further discussion, see Sobia Kiran, ‘Modernism and the Progressive Movement in Urdu Literature’, American International Journal of Contemporary Research 2.3 (2012): 179– 181. 10 Manto
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