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.