Representation of Trauma in Post-9/11 Fiction: Revisiting Reminiscences in Mohsen Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (original) (raw)
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GLOBAL SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW , 2023
The trauma of 9/11 makes individuals nostalgic and leaves indelible marks on their psyches. Their personal and political worlds are shattered. Rediscovery is an extravagant problem for them. 9/11 changed their definition of self. The paper analyses changes in their behaviour due to hysteria and its effects on their societal relations. Their distress and anxiety change their healthy relationships with each other into an unhealthy state. Now every individual is disturbed, feeling desperation on mental as well as physical level, having cracking headaches, and so on. This paper tries to study how the mental landscape of individuals changed due to catastrophic events. Mental health disturbance is equal in both Americans and Pakistanis, both the novels show us a story of traumatized people and how they become nostalgic.
Mewar Univeristy, 2021
PREFACE This dissertation argues that white American novelistic response to the events of 9/11 places the spotlight on the domestic lives of the majority, while invoking nationalism and prose of otherness against other cultures and religions. In this predominantly WASP-cultural response, living togetherness in a multicultural society has been a far cry. Post-9/11 white American fiction deals with the nation’s trauma, and it tries to patch up the tear in the WASP cultural fabric overplaying American nationalism on the one hand, and on the other, by a prose of otherness against the Muslims. This dissertation posits such a response as the cultural trauma of the Americans. The first among the four novels under study for the dissertation—Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close—evoke ethics, melancholia, and traumatic solidarity of the Americans with the Jews, which invariably make the translation of trauma cultural—what Jeffrey Alexander calls cultural trauma. Don DeLillo’s The Falling Man, too, dramatizes the trauma of 9/11 as cultural trauma which finds its entry into the novel in the form of the novelist’s discourse of us vs. them syndrome. John Updike’s Terrorist comes out as a perfect example of cultural trauma since it others the Muslims as terrorists, while deploys a clear-cut territorial divide between Western and Eastern spaces in order to envision a unified American space. A welcome departure from the above three novels has been Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, which tires to come to terms with the trauma of 9/11 by building up cosmopolitan echoes for a peaceful multicultural living in America. Taking a cue from Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland as a literature of trauma of a higher order, this study uses it as a touchstone to comparatively evaluate the other three novels in terms of the representation of the trauma of 9/11 and finds them failing to match the quality of Netherland. What the examination of the representation of terrorism and the discourse of trauma in the above novels reveals is how American authors, with the exception of O’Neill, have not been able to free themselves from xenophobic media representations of 9/11. It has also aimed at raising questions about the patriotic tendency behind the canonization of the above novels of violence. Texts like Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and John Updike’s Terrorist present 9/11 as cultural trauma which is sought to be repaired through an appeal to an intensified prose of otherness which comes about due to these novelists’ attempt to understand the terrorist incident as the conflict between two contrasting frames of reference—the Orientalist stereotypes and the self-trumpeting civilized West. The prose of otherness in DeLillo and Foer is, however, not as brazen as that of Updike who resorts to an Orientalist discourse to malign the Muslim Other and reinforce stereotypes about Islam and Muslims, thus contributing to antagonism.
VFAST Transactions on Education and Social Sciences, 2022
The incident of 9/11 on account of its projection in media and political agents attempted to register the incident of 9/11 as cultural trauma. They (media and political leaders) have had been successful in this attempt as well. But later on, both American and Pakistani fiction writers focused on the theme of unburdening the cultural trauma. For this research project, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and The Submission by Amy Waldman had been analyzed in the light of J.C.Alexander’s model of cultural trauma (2013). In the light of the analyzed data we are able to establish that both the novels attempted to unburden the cultural trauma of 9/11. Apparently, the major characters of the both of the novels seem the victim of the prevailing situation of cultural trauma. Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Mo in The Submission had to suffer the situation of social discrimination and hatred on account of their Muslim identity. But interestingly, Mo and Changez both forget what they had to suffer. They long for a world which should be more civic and unprejudiced. The character of both Mo and Changez develop as ambassador of humanity rather as agents of nationalism. Both the novels suggest universal nationalism and unburdening of the cultural trauma of 9/11. Characters of the both novels suggest America to look the humanity beyond Americans sense of nationalism.
Trauma Narrative in Reluctant Fundamentalist
Research, 2019
11 sep, everything turns upside down fir him as well as for all his fellow Eastern Muslims who were living in America. They are subjected to harsh and scornful attitude. The Muslims are tagged with the label of being terrorists, and are declared ass an outsiders. In this regard , the Muslims like Changez who are the lovers of America get badly hurt. As thee plot of the novel is based on the past experiences of the protagonist with occasional references to the present, he reconsiders and reminds all those sweet and bitter memories of the past that has traumatized him psychologically. This dissertation will try to explain that what is the relation between mental trauma and the event of 9/11, and why Changez is so eager to share his experiences in US with the American, and also to describe what are the possible factors that raised Changez's mental trauma to its peak due to which he compels to vent out all his traumatic feelings that he suffers from. For this purpose, the work is based on Trauma Narrative theory in which the traumatized character (patient) is allowed to speak out all those past experiences that still hurt him psychologically. So, the thesis highlights all those possible factors and events that has mentally tortured the protagonist; Changez, and will apply the principles of Trauma Narrative theory on the style of narrating the past experiences of Changez that still hurts him mentally.
Postcolonial Text, 2021
Nadeem Aslam’s latest novels bring the politics of post-9/11 terror to the fore by exploring various manifestations of trauma and vulnerability in the wake of 9/11. In The Blind Man’s Garden (2013) and The Golden Legend (2017), the British Pakistani author combines vulnerability with empathy to build up postcolonial narratives where the state of contemporary global terror is juxtaposed to empathic responses in intricate plotlines where Islamic culture and Islamophobia overlap. Thus, Aslam novels analysed here can be read as studies in vulnerability and empathy, and this is what the article aims to demonstrate. To do so, my essay will focus on such formal features as shifting focalisation, narrative gaps, and disjointed temporal structure, to show how empathic connections can be aroused. By embracing wounds and loss, the novel therefore favours an ethical model predicated on a practice of a dialogic structure between self and other.
Refracting Postcolonial Terror: Trauma and Empathy in Nadeem Aslam’s Post-9/11 Fiction
Postcolonial Text, 2021
On 8 May 2019, an explosion, claimed by a terrorist organization belonging to the Pakistani Taliban, killed nine people outside the shrine of Data Darbar in Lahore, Punjab. The holy place, which was built in the eleventh century, holds the remains of a much-worshipped Muslim saint, Abul Hassan Ali Hajveri (1009-1077), a mystic and a preacher who is considered the father of Sufism in the Islamic world. The act was only one of the most recent intimidations in a longstanding campaign of terror in the area. In July 2010, two suicide bombers had killed fifty and injured approximately two hundred visitors to the Sufi shrine. Sufis represent the mystical side of Islam and, like other minorities, tend to be targeted by extremists because of the perceived unorthodoxy in their practice of Islamic principles. As these attacks showcase, the reductive cultural logic of the "us and them" binary-which was championed by the political rhetoric of the George W. Bush administration following the attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 9/11-can be seen in the intolerance and disorder which has made post-9/11 violence in Pakistan seem so prevalent. As we confront fears of resurgent global terrorism, like the recent attacks in France, Austria and Pakistan, hesitations, ambivalence and complexities still present a challenge to the simple equation of Islam with terror. This basic association, as Sankaran Krishna argues, is based on feelings of "religious fundamentalism," a passe-partout term denoting "the refusal of Americans to listen to the outrage of Muslims everywhere about what is happening to civilians in places like Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan" (151). As we approach the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, literary writing has interrogated the rhetoric of stark binaries, engaging with the complex reality of a world where no pure binaries seem to remain. If 9/11 has marked a turning point in human history, several Anglophone novels have offered readers a nuanced critique of global suspicion and anti-Muslim prejudice. In this respect, my article explores Nadeem Aslam's most recent fiction that makes the post-9/11 experience its central concern. Among postcolonial authors engaging with terror after 9/11, the British Pakistani author's narratives seek to depict the wide communal nature of war, offering a meditation on the
War Memory, Psychological Trauma, and Literary Witnessing: Afghan Cultural Production in Focus
SAGE Open
As non-literary accounts of post-traumatic stress disorder victims depict, and contribute to, history and memory, the present study uses the theoretical underpinnings of the psychological trauma theory to reflect on the flashbacks of Afghan trauma survivors, portrayed in the selected Afghan Anglophone fiction. The research project attempts to see how far the flashbacks of the traumatic memories of these characters contribute to the oft-quoted factual history. Borrowing from Caruth, Herman, Tal and LaCapra for the analysis, the study investigates the selected literary text to see how cultural productions from this war-torn country keep a record of the traumatic memories of the war that the Afghans were faced with during the Soviet invasion from 1979 to 1989. This trauma analysis of Atiq Rahimi’s Earth and Ashes (2002) shows that analyses of trauma-induced flashbacks in literary portrayals of traumatized characters may, simultaneously, contribute to the officially recorded history of ...
The mechanisms of trauma in post-9/11 literature
2018
The terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 was a momentous event that marked contemporary history. For many people it was the ultimate traumatic event, and as such it was able to arouse representation, in addition to bring to mind memories and fears, which were believed to be forgotten or related to distant moments of our history. During the following decade, the account of the events of Ground Zero was such an emotional literary topos for many Anglo-American writers that critics coined the term post-9/11 literature to indicate a series of novels that, directly or indirectly, describe the feeling of loss, terror and catastrophe ascribable to the event. Taken as a whole, as a single narrative corpus , in the progression of works that make up this new literary genre one can identify an analogy with the reactions that gradually manifest themselves in a person who has suffered a trauma or a loss. The narrative representations of the destruction of the Twin Towers seem to follow the same ...