Literary Testimonies of War and Conflict of Twentieth-Century British and Pakistani Women Writers

Supervisor Prof. dr. Elke D’hoker Decaan Prof. dr. Johan Tollebeek Rector Prof. dr. Luc Sels The cover-image is a painting from M. F. Hussain, Untitled, 1973, oil on canvas, 182 x 122cm. © Courtesy the Pundole Family Collection. KU Leuven Faculteit Letteren Literary Testimonies of War and Conflict of Twentieth-Century British and Pakistani Women Writers Ana Ashraf Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of “Doctor in de Letterkunde” 2019 Acknowledgments Many people need to be thanked for the successful completion of this dissertation. First and foremost, I am grateful to my supervisor, Elke D’hoker, for her kindness, support and guidance which have kept me motivated throughout the past four years. Her consistent feedback has contributed immensely to the writing process of this dissertation. I am also thankful for the constructive comments by the members of the doctoral committee, Ortwin de Graef and Kate McLoughlin. I have been fortunate as well to be part of the MDRN research group where I attended some fascinating lectures on various subjects related to modernism. The feedback from the members of MDRN about my research has been particularly helpful in bringing this dissertation to a good end. Many friends and colleagues have contributed in making my work experience in Belgium a beautiful and memorable phase of my life. I thank Emma and Matthias who offered their valuable time and showed me different aspects of Belgian culture. I am also grateful for the joyful company and support of Anasthasia, Phyllis, Aude, Bieke, Fatima, Hira, Lena, Yasir. A very special thanks to colleague and fellow office-mate Tom Chadwick for proofreading this dissertation. Back in Lahore, my friends Ammarah, Shehreen, Rizwana and Qasim ensured me that what is out of sight need not always be out of mind. Of course, I thank my four brothers, my sisters-in-law and their children for the support and love while I was abroad. I am also grateful to Isaak’s family, particularly Jacque and Marleen, who provided me a family here in Belgium. More than anything else, my mother’s unconditional love and faith in me has been a strong foundation not just in my PhD but in my entire life. This PhD is first and foremost a dedication to her, as well as in loving memory of my father. Finally, while being away from home, I found home not in a place, but in the love and kindness of my beloved partner, Isaak. I truly appreciate your patience, encouragement and continuing support throughout my writing process. With your steadfastness to stand by me through thick and thin, I am encouraged to look forward to a joyful future together. v Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Authenticity in The Return of the Soldier and Testament of Youth 15 Chapter 2 Witnessing the Second World War in The Heat of the Day and Among You Taking Notes 47 Chapter 3 Witnesses of Partition in The Heart Divided and Cracking India 79 Chapter 4 Postmemory Witnesses of Pakistan in Meatless Days and Songs of Blood and Sword 115 Conclusion 149 Bibliography 157 Introduction I may, if I am lucky, tap the deep pathos that pertains to all authentic art because of the breach between its eternal values and the sufferings of a muddled world.1 This dissertation studies some of the literary responses of British and Pakistani women writers to war as examples of literary testimony. Bearing witness to some of the major conflicts of the twentieth century, these literary texts evoke the tensions between a witness’ experiences and the literary techniques to render these experiences into narration. These tensions, which accompany any attempt to represent subjective experiences within a historical context, inform both the content and the style of these narratives. As I will elaborate further in the sections below, this dissertation is situated at the crossroads of theories about the role of testimony and critical debates about gender and literature of war and conflict. Against this critical background, I will analyse eight literary texts by women writers, which respond to the Great War, the Second World War, Indian Partition, and Pakistani conflicts, and are written between 1918 and 2010. These texts are Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) and Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933), with regard to WWI; Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948) and Naomi Mitchison’s Among You Taking Notes (1985), with regard to WWII; Mumtaz Shahnawaz’s The Heart Divided (1957) and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988), with regard to the Partition of India; Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days (1989) and Fatima Bhutto’s Songs of Blood and Sword (2010) with regard to regional conflicts in Pakistan since Partition. I have chosen these texts since all the selected writers were themselves witnesses of the historical events they subsequently describe in their literary texts. The experiences of the witnesses in these texts and the views on war and conflict reflected in the narratives are informed by the authors’ gendered perspective. Both the British and the Pakistani women writers selected for this study write in English and participate in a shared literary tradition. In analysing their texts, I will seek to answer such questions as: how do these narratives represent the experiences of a witness? How does the use of different literary techniques facilitate the representation of a witness in these narratives? How does the testimonial dimension of these 1 Fredson Bower, ed., Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian Literature (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981), 2. texts problematize the acts and modes of storytelling? To what extent do the texts challenge the traditional representations of war and conflict in terms of ideology, chronology and perspective? How does the gender of the author and/or narrator determine the representation of war in these texts? Since in all eight case studies, a war or conflict is witnessed by and presented through a female perspective, I will analyse how the testimonies are shaped by gendered perspectives and experiences. In addition, the characters and narrators are of course also circumscribed by social contexts determined by race, religion, class, and ideology. Far from rendering their testimonies unreliable or false, these specific contextual frames make their narratives into unique representations of war and conflict. At the same time, bringing these different testimonies together in my dissertation will allow me to highlight shared contexts and trace common textual characteristics in their works. In this way, this study will situate British and Pakistani Anglophone literatures of war and conflict within a larger framework of witness and testimony in order to show how both literatures share the same tradition of dissent and resistance in the context of violence. My close textual analyses focus on three dimensions: the representation of the experiences of a witness, the literary techniques used to evoke the acts of witnessing, and the contextualisation of these acts of witnessing within different contexts. By looking at these three different dimensions of literary testimony, I will show, first, that the selected texts, despite their temporal and geographical differences, show certain common concerns and, second, that the framework of testimony can usefully be expanded from the historical contexts of the Holocaust, the Latin American testimonio, and the atomic bombings in which it has predominantly been used, to other contexts of war and violence. Thus, I define literary testimony as a narrative which bears witness to a historical event through the experience of a character or the perspective of a narrator. Because the literary and the historical are intertwined, a literary testimony represents the tensions between the historical events that are represented and the literary means of representation. Indeed, as this dissertation hopes to show, these literary texts highlight issues of authority, authenticity, credibility, and literary influence as their protagonists and first-person narrators bear witness to war and conflict. Furthermore, I will analyse how acts of witnessing often necessitate the use of literary experimentation when disruptive experiences defy the traditional forms of storytelling and narration. This dissertation is divided into four chapters. Each chapter deals with the literary representations of one violent and disruptive historical event by two female authors. In all the chapters, I focus on the narrator or characters engaged in the act of witnessing through memories and other sources. In order to understand the complexity of their voices, the chapters pay due attention to different textual strategies such as metafictionality, intertextuality, non- linear narration, and polyvocality used either by the characters and narrators or employed within the narrative. In line with these textual strategies, the contextual frameworks are also highlighted such as gender, class, socio-political alignments, literary traditions, publication- process, all of which come to circumscribe their testimonies. Introducing the selected texts, each chapter provides a brief historical overview of the events of war and conflict that are 2 represented in the texts. In addition, I give a brief survey of other literary responses to these historical events, in particular in fiction. The main objective of these brief overviews is to contextualize the selected works within the historical and literary milieu in which they were produced. In chapter one, I will analyse Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier and Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth since both present female witnesses whose gendered experiences of the Great War come to shape their testimonies. Jenny, the first-person narrator in the novel, and Brittain, the first-person authorial narrator in the memoir, seek to construct authentic narratives about their experiences of the Great War by mediating between past and present, between their own memories and the information received by other sources.

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