IAFOR Journal of Arts and Humanities: Volume 11 – Issue 1

The IAFOR Journal of Arts & Humanities Volume 11 – Issue – 1

IAFOR Publications

IAFOR Journal of Arts & Humanities

Editor

Dr Alfonso J. García-Osuna Hofstra University, New York, USA

Editorial Board

Dr Anna Hamling, University of New Brunswick, Canada

Dr Sabine Loucif, Hofstra University, USA

Dr Margarita Esther Sánchez Cuervo, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain

Dr Minni Sawhney, University of Delhi, India

Dr Er-Win Tan, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Korea

Dr Nour Seblini, Wayne State University, USA

Published by The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan

Executive Editor: Joseph Haldane

IAFOR Publications Assistant: Mark Kenneth Camiling Publications Manager: Nick Potts

IAFOR Publications

Sakae 1-16-26 – 201, Naka Ward, Aichi, Japan 460-0008

IAFOR Journal of Arts & Humanities Volume 11 – Issue 1 – 2024

IAFOR Publications © Copyright 2024

ISSN: 2187-0616 Online: ijah.iafor.org

Cover Image: Paul Morley, Unsplash

IAFOR Journal of Arts & Humanities

Volume 11 – Issue 1 – 2024

Edited by Alfonso J. García-Osuna

Table of Contents

From the Editor 1

Alfonso J. García-Osuna

Ideological Conflict and Perpetrators’ Trauma in the Works of 9

Haruki Murakami

Anisur Rahman

Voicing Palestinian Outrage in Rafeef Ziadah’s “We Teach Life, Sir” 25

Basila Maisoon

Hashmina Habeeb

Decoding Sense of Place and Contested Cultural Landscapes in Select 37

Manipuri Poems

Remya R

“Let Me In”: Analyzing the Firefly Funhouse Match (2020) 51

Kunal Debnath

Reading through the “Coloured Canvas”: Unveiling Cultural Graphics in 65 Indian Mythological Graphic Novels

Raveena Prakasan

M G Priya

Writings from Under the Mushroom Cloud: Atomic Bomb Literature as a 77 Literature of Atrocity

Atisha Rai

Subverting the Gendered Narratives: Defiance in Mary Kom’s 91 Unbreakable: An Autobiography

Abish Jebeshy

A Selvam

Narrating Physical Diseases in the Malayan Landscape: Hugh Clifford’s 103 “A Daughter of the Muhammadans”

Tejash Kumar Singh

Memory Dynamics in Small Acts of Freedom: A Hermannian Approach 115 to Indian Female Sagas

Swethal Ramchandran

Absence as Resistance in Palestinian Speculative Fiction 127

Netty Mattar

Dear readers,

I am delighted to present this issue of the IAFOR Journal of Arts and Humanities, a publication intended to serve as a forum for outstanding research in the humanities. While we interpret the term in the broadest possible sense of the word, IJAH has always endeavoured to publish exceptional studies that address contemporary issues within the scope of its mission. Moreover, the journal’s editorial process is strenuous, as demanded by a top scholarly journal.

A new and important part of our mission is to disseminate an innovative idea of the praxis of humanism as a practical undertaking. Perhaps never in history have the ideas and ethical standards proposed by humanists been more essential to the wellbeing of society than in the present. Now that our planet is roasting while we continue to shoot at each other, we as humanists must enter the battlefield in the name of reason, assuming control over those spaces where science has been unable to improve the prospects for our collective future.

Ever since the advent of the Scientific Revolution, science has been narrowing the scope of its efforts, focusing on the overarching, though limiting question of truth, truth as observed and demonstrated through sustained, reproducible results. Increasingly set aside in scientific thought have been questions of a moral or ethical complexion, questions whose abstract nature disallowed experimental scrutiny. Such questions were better left for magicians or religious charlatans. This scientific disregard for the ethical value of consequences came to a climax during preparations for the Trinity Test, an experiment that produced the first atomic bomb explosion (July 16, 1945). It is common knowledge that its scientists were offering wagers on whether the bomb would ignite the planet’s atmosphere.

This radical objectivity has created a vacuum in human affairs that is best filled by humanist thought, but humanists have either not rushed in or have not been taken seriously. This is a profit-driven world, and nobody has ever seen a poet use quantum technology to improve financial modelling. But that type of reasoning should not have a prominent place in our collective thinking. I am reminded of the Spanish stoic philosopher Seneca, who made the distinction between sapientia and sagacitas, that is to say, between wisdom and ingenuity. Ingenuity allowed man to know and control his physical environment (science), while sapientia (wisdom) allowed him to do it with an ethical purpose (Epistle 90.7-13, especially 11). For the Roman thinker Cicero, man’s ability to know and change his environment should not be separated from dignitas, or ignity, the underlying essence of his moral constitution (De natura deorum 2.50).

Perhaps it is high time that we stopped, took a good look at our sweltering, battle-scarred, overexploited planet, and read the philosophers of the past as they linked human activities with the ethical value of their consequences. We might find that, sometimes, looking back is the best way to move forward.

The articles included in this volume of the IAFOR Journal of Arts and Humanities demonstrate that sense of urgency that is needed to develop a transformational vision of the humanities’ goals.

In “Ideological Conflict and Perpetrators’ Trauma in the Works of Haruki Murakami”, Anisur Rahman analyses PITS (Perpetration-induced Trauma Stress) or perpetrator trauma as a form

of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that is a subject of debate in trauma discourse, where it is regarded as an unwelcome ghost that carries a heavy load of moral and ethical ambiguity. The author explains that the issue arises from the question of how one can experience traumatic stress when one wilfully commits immoral or unlawful acts.

In “Voicing Palestinian Outrage in Rafeef Ziadah’s ‘We Teach Life, Sir’”, Basila Maisoon and Hashmina Habeeb draw upon insights from Stef Craps’s “Decolonisation of Trauma” studies and Stuart Hall’s concept of “oppositional code” in an attempt to explain how Rafeef Ziadah’s poem “We Teach Life, Sir'”, serves as a powerful counter-narrative by delivering emotional and creative expressions that challenge and vehemently oppose the mainstream media’s often biased portrayals of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In “Decoding Sense of Place and Contested Cultural Landscapes in Select Manipuri Poems”, Remya R states that scholarly analyses of Manipuri poetry have focused on the aesthetics of this poetry’s consistent engagement with the physical landscape, but in the wake of Manipur’s on-going ethno-territorial and ethno-nationalistic conflicts, revisiting Manipuri poetry from a revisionist perspective becomes germane. It is now more pertinent than ever to analyse Manipuri history and its infamous hill-valley divide through its poetry by adopting a spatial lens, as the notion of “homeland” itself is a contested construct. An exclusive focus on the aesthetics of the physical landscape is no longer relevant in this poetry’s case.

Kunal Debnath examines the Firefly Funhouse Match as a unique pro wrestling match that incorporates various postmodern elements such as intertextuality, non-linear storytelling, blurring of reality and fiction, and parody. It deconstructs the notion of a traditional wrestling match by challenging clichés in professional wrestling and providing a novel, unique, and postmodern outlook. Debnath aims to show how the match digs deeper into the unconscious layer of the wrestlers’ psyche and breaks down the superficial façade of the individuals involved. It is a psychodrama in which various characters, events, and scenarios symbolically represent aspects of the human psyche. It also parodies the superhuman saviortype babyface gimmicks of the past, taking into consideration the condition of the postmodern man living in a fragmented world where the grand narrative of the American Dream has collapsed.

Raveena Prakasan and M G Priya study cultural graphics in Indian mythological graphic narratives, analysing how images play a crucial role in the process of creating meaning in the novels’ cultural context. As graphic novels that retell mythology, written by women authors fromtheperspectiveofwomencharacters,theordinaryreadingofthenovelsthroughafeminist lens is now obsolete as far as the new academia is concerned. By bringing in concepts related to cultural graphics in the study of the selected works, the meaning in the novels is enhanced.

Atisha Rai in “Writings from Under the Mushroom Cloud: Atomic Bomb Literature as a Literature of Atrocity”, states that atomic bomb literature comprises texts that emerged out of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Almost all these writings deal directly or indirectly with the singular experience of the world’s first nuclear attacks. A-bomb literature has long been pushed to the margins of Japanese literature, often dismissed as testimonial writing or even history, and excluded from writings about violence. Rai’s argument is based on Lawrence Langer’s proposition that a literature of atrocity deals with the disintegration of the human image in the face of inappropriate death. A literature of atrocity strips death of its romantic dress and reveals man’s fragile existence and the vulnerability of the flesh. In short, it deals with “inappropriate death.”

In Subverting “Gendered Narratives: Defiance in Mary Kom’s Unbreakable: An Autobiography”, Abish Jebeshi and A Selvam explain that dissonance between the body, culture, and identity is distinctly observed in sport, a traditionally masculine and genderbifurcated arena. Through Mary Kom’s autobiography, the study investigates the way in which Mary and other female athletes defy the hegemonic masculine culture that prevails in Indian society.

In “Narrating Physical Diseases in the Malayan Landscape: Hugh Clifford’s ‘A Daughter of the Muhammadans’”, Tejash Kumar Singh investigates Hugh Clifford’s (1866-1941), experiences in Malaya as portrayed in his short stories, wherein the British Resident and Governor of Malaya constructed particular ontological realities regarding Malayan subjects for his European audiences. Singh also examines how Clifford promoted a fabricated perception of their “difference”. In his short story “A Daughter of the Muhammadans”, published in his 1916 collection The Further Side of Silence, Clifford investigates the visually striking corruption of leprosy, juxtaposed against the wholesome, affectionate nature of Minah, the female Malayan subject. Based on the context of medicinal advancements, Singh proposes that Clifford’s physical and psychological depictions of the Malayan body’s diseases led to its constructed “othering”, especially through the furtherance of stereotypes of the Malayan subject.

Swethal Ramchandran writes, in “Memory Dynamics in Small Acts of Freedom: A Hermannian Approach to Indian Female Sagas”, that saga fiction, when viewed from the framework of temporality and collective memory, provides women with an avenue to identify, articulate and reconstruct the past within the scope of the present. Further, it widens the scope for the construction of a memory-based female genealogy through the retrieval and sharing of memories.

In “Absence as Resistance in Palestinian Speculative Fiction”, Netty Mattar analyses works of speculative fiction that tackle the issues of Palestinian identity and portray the Palestinians’ battles as symbolic of the struggle against elimination, against becoming absent. Mattar states that the pervasive use of social media today has been pivotal in revealing this struggle by enabling the direct and unrestricted sharing of Palestinian suffering in the face of unremitting destruction and displacement.

It is hoped that these articles and viewpoints will offer new insights, promote intellectual discussion and inspire new avenues of research.

Dr Alfonso J. García-Osuna Editor

Notes on Contributors

Article 1:

Ideological Conflict and Perpetrators’ Trauma in the Works of Haruki Murakami

Anisur Rahman

Anisur Rahman is an M.A. in English and a PhD Scholar in the Department of English at Gauhati University, Assam (India). He is currently pursuing his doctoral research on the role of historical memory in the works of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. In addition to his devotion to his doctoral research, he is also an Assistant Teacher who teaches English to secondary-level students.

Email: ansrhmn123@gmail.com

Article 2:

Voicing Palestinian Outrage in Rafeef Ziadah’s “We Teach Life, Sir”

Basila Maisoon

Basila Maisoon is a doctoral student of English specializing in spiritual autobiographies at the Centre for Advanced Studies and Research in English Language and Literature, Farook College (Autonomous), University of Calicut, India. She is a literary enthusiast whose scholarly interests span human relations with religion, spirituality, and ontology in quest narratives, as well as postcolonial studies and literature. She earned her Master’s degree from the Department of English, University of Calicut, India, focusing on travelogues and Orientalism in her dissertation.

Email: basila@farookcollege.ac.in

Dr Hashmina Habeeb

Dr Hashmina Habeeb is an Assistant Professor of English at the Centre for Advanced Studies and Research in English Language and Literature, Farook College (Autonomous), University of Calicut, India. She specializes in film studies and cultural criticism and has presented papers at various conferences. She has published articles in both national and international journals. A gifted poet, her poetry has been featured in international magazines.

Article 3:

Decoding Sense of Place and Contested Cultural Landscapes in SelectManipuri Poems

Remya R

Remya R is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the Department of English and Cultural Studies, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bangalore, Karnataka, India. Her research interest stems from her fascination with ways of representing the cultural geography of a place through written as well as audio-visual texts. She has three years of teaching experience in colleges affiliated with the University of Calicut, Kerala, India. Apart from academic writing, she also has a penchant for creative writing, especially poetry.

Email: remya.r@res.christuniversity.in

Article 4:

“Let me in”: Analyzing the Firefly Funhouse Match (2020)

Kunal Debnath

Kunal Debnath is a Doctoral Research Scholar of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India. He completed his MA in English from Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma University in 2019. His research interests include Anime & Manga Studies, Myth & Archetypal Criticism, Postmodernism, and Popular Culture. He has presented papers at international conferences organized by IAFOR, VIT Chennai, and ICFAI University (Tripura).

Email: kunal_d@hs.iitr.ac.in

Dr Nagendra Kumar

Nagendra Kumar is a Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India. He completed his PhD in English from Banaras Hindu University in 1998. He is currently working on the project “Surrogate Women,” which is funded by the National Commission for Women. He received the “Outstanding Teacher Award” from IIT Roorkee in 2015. His research interests include Diaspora Studies, South Asian Literature and Culture, Contemporary Fiction, Dalit Studies, Soft Skills, Modern Literature, Myth & Archetypal Criticism, Posthumanism, Graphic Novel, and Postcolonial Literature. He has published research papers in Partial Answers, Neohelicon, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and many other reputed journals.

Article 5:

Reading through the “Coloured Canvas”: Unveiling Cultural Graphics in Indian Mythological Graphic Novels

Raveena Prakasan

Raveena Prakasan is currently pursuing PhD at the Department of English Language and Literature, Amrita School of Arts, Humanities and Commerce, Amrita Vishwa Vidhyapeetham, Edappally, Kochi. Her area of interest is Graphic novels, Indian Literature, Culture studies and Mythology.

Email: raveenaprakasan@gmail.com

Dr M G Priya

Dr M G Priya currently serves as Asst. Professor (SG) at the Department of English Language and Literature, Amrita School of Arts, Humanities and Commerce, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Edappally, Kochi. Her topic of research was “The Concept of Divine Love in Select Poems of Tagore and Kabir”. Her areas of interest include – Indian Writing in English, Poetry, Bhakti and Spiritual Literature, Linguistics, Ethnography, Cultural and Food Studies. She has a teaching experience of over 18 years and has many publications in National and International (including SCOPUS indexed) Journals.

Email: mgpriya@.kh.amrita.edu

Article 6:

Writings from Under the Mushroom Cloud: Atomic Bomb Literature as a Literature of Atrocity

Dr Atisha Rai

Dr Atisha Rai is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation, Bowrampet, Hyderabad, India. She holds a PhD in Indian and World Literature from The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Her research focused on atomic bomb narratives and postwar Japanese literature, examining A-bomb literature as narratives of violence. Her scholarly interests include literature of atrocity, war literature, and the cultural representations of conflict.

Email: atisha.rai31@gmail.com

Article 7:

Subverting the Gendered Narratives: Defiance in Mary Kom’s Unbreakable: An Autobiography

Abish Jebeshy R

Abish Jebeshy R is a research scholar at the Central University of Tamil Nadu, Thiruvarur, India. Her area of research is interdisciplinary as it focuses on sports, gender and culture, and is currently researching on the life narratives of Indian sportswomen. She has presented research papers at conferences both inside and outside India in her area of research and has published articles in nationally reputed journals. She is a professional cricketer and a badminton player who represents both these games at the university level.

Email: abishjebeshy101@gmail.com

Dr A Selvam

Dr A Selvam is a distinguished Professor in the Department of English Studies at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Central University of Tamil Nadu, Thiruvarur, India where he also holds the position of Dean of Students’ Welfare. With 31 years of academic experience, he specializes in Comparative Literature, Dalit Literature, Canadian Literature, AfricanAmerican Literature, and Indian Literatures in English. He has published several research papers in reputed journals, authored two books and presented research papers at conferences both in India and abroad in his areas of expertise.

Article 8:

Narrating Physical Diseases in the Malayan Landscape: Hugh Clifford’s “A Daughter of the Muhammadans”

Tejash Kumar Singh

Tejash Kumar Singh is a full-time lecturer at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He received his Master of Arts in English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and PhD is in King's College London. He also pioneered the first dedicated English & Literature centre in Singapore (The Arts & Humanities Tuition Services). His research interests

include 19th century colonial literature, interstitial narratives, and the study of psychological/physical diseases’ manifestations. He also has a keen, developing interest in modern Singaporean literature and has reviewed works of Asian authors.

Email: tejash.singh@ntu.edu.sg

Article 9:

Memory Dynamics in Small Acts of Freedom: A Hermannian Approach to Indian Female Sagas

Swethal Ramchandran

Swethal Ramchandran is currently Assistant Professor of English at Yuvakshetra College, Palakkad, Kerala. Her interdisciplinary Doctoral research in English-Women Studies is on Indian English Female Saga Narratives. She has previously served as Teaching cum Research Fellow at University of Madras and as English Faculty at a private college in Kerala. Her research interests include Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Modern Critical Theory and Indian Writing. She has published various research articles and book chapters in reputed academic journals as well as pieces of poetry in online poetry slams. She has also presented research papers in various International & National Conferences. She is actively engaged in online tutoring, creative writing, proof reading, copy editing, translations and anchoring.

Email: lahtews@yahoo.co.in

Article 10:

Absence as Resistance in Palestinian Speculative Fiction

Dr Nettty Mattar

Netty Mattar holds a PhD in English Literature from the National University of Singapore, where she currently teaches. Her research focuses on the intersections among speculative literature, science, and technoculture, with a particular interest in issues related to warfare, colonial trauma, memory, and posthumanism. She is also interested in representations of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and is currently exploring the instabilities of various AI imaginaries. Email: netster@mac.com

Ideological Conflict and Perpetrators’ Trauma in the Works of Haruki Murakami

Gauhati University, India

Anisur Rahman

Abstract

PITS (Perpetration-induced Trauma Stress) or perpetrator trauma is a form of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and a subject of debate in trauma discourse, where it is regarded as an unwelcome ghost that carries a heavy load of moral and ethical ambiguity. The issue arises from the question of how one can experience traumatic stress when one wilfully commits immoral or unlawful acts. In this sense, it must be remembered that perpetrators are not always willful murderers, especially in the case of a war when young men are drafted against their will. The Japanese invasion of China is one such example where a large number of Japanese undergrad students were unwilling draftees, conscripted to advance the state’s militaristic ideology. In his fiction, Haruki Murakami tackles this particular issue by introducing characters like the innocent Japanese youths who were forced to join the war and commit mass atrocities. Because they were not seduced by imperial ideology and its violent ethos, they were unwilling perpetrators of horrific crimes that would come to haunt them upon their return home, causing deep psychological traumas. Their condition was aggravated all the more when their society did not acknowledge their trauma and considered it a weakness. What’s more, those who revealed their psychological condition were regarded as traitors to the nation, thus becoming victims in their own right. This paper analyses the perpetrators’ victim/victimiser duality that brings about the PITS condition. For this purpose, the paper shall analyse the fiction of Haruki Murakami, with special reference to two of his novels: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1994) and Killing Commendatore (2017).

Keywords: ideology, perpetrators, trauma, war, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Killing Commendatore

It took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes.

Michael Herr, Dispatches

Trauma is often defined as an “affliction of the powerless” that stems from “threats to life, bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death. These threats confront human beings with the extremes of helplessness and terror, and evoke the responses of catastrophe” (Hermann, 1992, p. 33), which is symbolic of death. In trauma discourse, linguistic mechanisms disclose the speaker’s assessment of their traumatic experience. It predominates in narratives of an “escape from a death” that leads to belated recollection (Caruth, 1996). This belated recollection, according to Andreasen, is of “intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and threat of annihilation” (Hermann, 1992, p. 33). The definitions of psychological trauma by Hermann and others tend to focus on and limit the trauma discourse to the victim-oriented narrative in which those who are victims are studied. As Sarah Mohamed (2015) states, “psychological trauma is an experience that belongs to victims” (p. 1157). Victim-centred trauma, in other words, has become a “normative trauma paradigm” (Erin McGlothin, 2020, p. 100) into which the perpetrator trauma does not fit.

Perpetrator trauma is, as Raya Morag used the term in Waltzing with Bashir (2013), a “subgenre” (p. 3) of trauma, “an unwelcome ghost” (p. 4) because the “post-traumatic account [of the perpetrators] stands as a profound challenge and hurdle for the society at whose behest s/he was sent” (p. 4). The traumatized perpetrators live in the same society that pushed them into the war and accepting “perpetrator trauma by the same society that caused it shall mean mourning for those who were previously conceived as ungrievable” (p. 6). It stands as a challenge for society because, as Anderson in Perpetrating Genocide (2018) has noted, “the act of perpetration is itself morally repugnant, and thus it seems dissonant to consider the trauma suffered by some perpetrators as being worthy of concern” (p. 226).

Scholars of trauma studies often tend to deny the validity of scholarly debate on perpetrator trauma due to its moral ambiguity. E. Leake opined that “We […] empathize with those who are seen as most deserving of our empathy” (qtd. in Davis and Meretoja, 2020, p. 100).

However, if we talk about trauma as a “psychological affliction”, we must also take into account the psychological condition of those who are not victims but perpetrators, the ones who committed the crimes. In her study on the movie “The Act of Killing” in Of Monsters and Men: Perpetrators Trauma and Mass Atrocity (2015), Sarah Mahamed has noted that “the person who chooses to kill—brutally and even gleefully—may also be haunted by his acts and that the world must—like it or not—also reckon with the meaning of trauma” (p. 1163). She further added that “Perpetrators trauma does exist, and that on its own should make it a worthy field of inquiry” (p. 1163). MacNair (2010), who used the term “Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress”, has said that “Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress also suggests that the human mind, contrary to genocidal ideology, is not well set up for killing” (p. 281). Raul Hilberg in The Politics of Memory: The Path of a Holocaust Historian (1996) substantiates

Sarah Mahamed’s view and says that “[w]ithout an insight into the actions of the perpetrators, one could not grasp history in its full dimensions’’ (p. 61). These arguments, unlike the prevailing notion that perpetrators’ trauma is “morally repugnant” or that the perpetrators are “ungrievable”, makes it a viable field of study.

The trauma of perpetration is also a significant branch of study because of the ideological implications that often make the perpetrators victims. Scholars who propose to study perpetrators’ trauma do so on the premise that the crimes instigated by the ideologies of the state may not be imputed to individuals. The ideology of the state in this regard plays a very crucial part in the perpetration of crimes. Anderson (2018) said,

“Ideology conveys the perpetrators’ place in history, it ennobles them, and allows the mortal self to associate with the eternal… Ideology can provide a powerful justification for atrocity, as individuals come to feel they are acting in conformity with a collective belief” (p. 74).

Successful injection of ideology into the narrative helps to achieve a different goal. First, it reduces the risks of bystander paradox, and second, it singles out opposition. Those who choose non-conformity become social outcasts and subjects of ridicule, whereas any punishment on them by the state becomes collectively acceptable.

Case in Point: The Japanese Exemplar

Haruki Murakami’s novels show an ideological conflict wherein individuals are forced to commit crimes despite their disaffection. In their expeditions beyond Japan they commit mass atrocities, always acting on Imperial orders. Their own acts of killing people ruthlessly cause what is known as traumatic memories.

Japan was one of the aggressors in the Second World War that, in step with Western ideals of colonialism, ruthlessly invaded its neighbouring countries. In China their invasion is infamously known for the Nanking massacre and for biological experiments by Unit 731 in Manchuria, in Korea for the use of Korean girls as comfort women. On their path through the Chinese mainland, they massacred, raped, and looted in numerous Chinese villages. They were, in other words, perpetrators of crimes. Many Japanese soldiers actively took part in the killing spree and can even be seen laughing and giggling upon recollection of the events. This raises the question of whether we should label all the Japanese soldiers as perpetrators of crimes.

Historically speaking, Japanese soldiers were undoubtedly perpetrators. However, within this standard understanding of Japanese soldiers, Murakami presents a nuanced point of view where his characters, who are certainly perpetrators, are also victims in their own right. His characters represent the ambiguous question of whether the crimes instigated by the state should be imputed to individuals who were forced to participate in the war. In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Killing Commendatore, there is a clear demarcation between those who are the victims of a forced ideology and those who willingly participated in the war effort. As it appears, those who were victims of a forced ideology imposed by the state, upon return, suffer

from traumatic experiences mainly because their atrocities were committed against their will. They found them repulsive, unprovoked, and unjustifiable.

In Killing Commendatore (2017) and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1994), Murakami depicts characters who had taken part in the Japanese “just war” narrative and forced victims of the invasion where they were forced to kill ordinary Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers because they were ordered to do so. However, when they return to their homeland, guilt and recollection of those haunting memories overtake them so much that they suffer from trauma. They, however, fail to seek any help due to the existing social taboo that those who feel guilty betray the nation.

Collective Misrecognition and the Ideological Conflict of the Perpetrators

Raya Morag, in Waltzing with Bashir, has called perpetrator trauma a “collective misrecognition” (p. 2), which resembles an “unwelcome ghost” (p. 4) in the sense that a society will not recognise the validity of perpetrator trauma because recognising it would be tantamount to accepting the crime. As a result, the perpetrator society remains silent on the psychological condition of those who returned from the war. This, in a way, “others” the ones who returned from the warzone with a guilty conscience. This othering of the perpetrators seems like a political strategy crafted to maintain the ideological validity of the aggression.

This othering was so extreme that when Japanese soldiers returned from Chinese or Russian prisons to rejoin the Imperial Japanese Army, “their officers encouraged them to commit suicide” (Kuehn, 2014, p. 200). This is perhaps why Japanese society, as Murakami claimed, did not apologize merely to maintain their ideological supremacy, but more so because apologizing meant accepting guilt. And since the Japanese state considers it as an act of “just war”, perpetrator trauma defeats the nation’s purpose and is criminalized. In other words, feeling remorse for a just act is invalid. Murakami through the characters of Lt. Mamiya (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle), Tomohiko Amada and Tsuguhiko Amada (Killing Commendatore), presents a moral dilemma wherein these characters, having returned from the war, experience clinical trauma, but their experience is complicated by the problem of their awkward acceptance back into society. Because perpetrator trauma goes largely unrecognized in a society that engages in aggression, trauma is a form of betrayal.

In Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001), Dominick LaCapra points to one of the theoretical problems of trauma recognition: “unreadability of the unsymbolizable “real” (p. xi). However, perpetrator trauma is not just about unreadability or the unsymbolizable “real”, it is also about the silence of the affected. The social practice of shaming condemns the affected to silence, leading to a gradual psychological decline. To quote LaCapra again, “In societies or nations, a collectively experienced trauma may obscure the significance of other collective traumas, and a later founding myth may supplement or even displace an earlier one” (p. XIII).

Both these contexts are widely applicable in the Japanese context and are reflected in Murakami’s works. In Japan, the “collectively experienced trauma” may be recognized as the twin bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that devastated the nation, whereas the latter may

be categorized as those soldiers who returned from the war. In fact, postwar Japan tried to supplant or replace its memories of invasion with the American bombing by playing the victim card, which allowed them to delegitimize or criminalize the guilty feelings of those who returned from the war.

In this context, the case of Lt. Mamiya in the novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is crucial. His is a textbook case of victim trauma because he faced what is called in the traumatic discourse “near-death experiences”. When he was engaged in the survey in the Mongolian desert near the Khalkha River along with Corporals Honda and Yamamoto, they were caught by Russian troops. Yamamoto was skinned alive in front of him, whereas, he was thrown into a deep well without food or any other life support. He stayed there in the dark for days praying for death. He was later rescued by Honda, who had escaped. Though he was rescued, he felt that something inside of him was already dead and he was living just like an empty shell. He says, “Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it may go on. The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell” (p. 171).

Upon his rescue, he is not returned home but is sent into combat in the Chinese mainland. When he came back home after twelve years, he was devastated to find that all the members of his family had died in the Hiroshima bombing and his wife, presuming him to be dead, had married another man. All that was left for him was a cemetery of sorts: “I felt truly empty, and knew that I should not have come back there… I became a social studies teacher and taught geography in high school, but I was not in the true sense of the word, alive” (p. 171).

He spent his remaining days being haunted by the traumatizing event of Yamamoto being skinned alive. He always dreamt of “slowly rotting away, alive, in the bottom of the well” (p. 171). These memories keep recurring in a loop, but what is significant here is his inability to express his feelings in society. He returned at a time when Japan was defeated and the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had devastated the nation. At this juncture, individual losses or trauma amount to nothing. To reiterate Dominick LaCapra, “a collectively experienced trauma may obscure the significance of other collective traumas” (p. xiii). Thus, his trauma remains unrecognized. The reason for his trauma is that his initial assignments in China and then in Russia were the result of an Imperial expansion policy with which he did not agree. He shared his fear in the early part of his story, which he tells to the narrator. He states, “Most Japanese realized that the war with China would turn into a muddy swamp from which we could never extricate ourselves—or at least any Japanese with a brain in his head realized this” (p. 136).

His fellow soldier, Sergeant Hamano, said that

“I don’t mind fighting. I am a soldier. And I don’t mind dying in battle for my country, because that’s my job. But this war we are fighting now, Lieutenant—well, it’s just not right. It’s not a real war…I can’t believe killing these people (unarmed Chinese soldiers or civilians) for no reason at all is going to do Japan one bit of good” (p. 143).

As it appears, both soldiers share their aversion towards the Imperial policy and ideology, yet they were compelled to take part in the expedition to conquer lands. In this process they had to “kill a lot of innocent people in the name of flushing out ‘renegades’ or ‘remnant troops’… steal their food…kill [our] prisoners” (p. 143).

Both Hamano and Lt. Mamiya commit these crimes with a guilty conscience. Deserting was not an option in the Imperial Army. In the military it was either kill the enemy or be killed by the Imperial army itself. Though Sergeant Hamano dies in the Mongolian desert at the hands of a Russian soldier, Murakami twists Mamiya’s narrative. Corporal Honda prophesied that Mamiya would live through the war and die at home, whereas Boris the Manskinner, a Russian soldier, curses him to live a life without love. Both the prophecies come true, and they seem like the inevitable outcome of a perpetrator who does not accept a contradictory life. When he returns home, as mentioned above, all he found was his own cemetery. He was all but a living shell, alive but with memories that tormented him:

“I would close my eyes and see Yamamoto being skinned alive. I dreamt about it over and over. Again and again I watched them peel the skin off and turn him into a lump of flesh. I could hear his heartrending screams. I also had dreams of myself slowly rotting away, alive, in the bottom of the well” (p. 171).

These memories kept haunting him constantly. He adds, “As you know, the war ended a very long time ago, and memory naturally degenerates as the years go by. Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade” (p. 207). The story of Mamiya vaguely resembles the plot of Gerusalemme Liberata (1581) that Freud cited in the third chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In this work Freud noted that Tancred’s trauma or traumatic neuroses stem from the re-enactment of his memories. Though in the case of Tancred, the re-enactments mostly took place in the form of hallucinations, for Mamiya, it was mostly re-enactments of the memory. He says,

“Even now I can recall each tiny detail with such terrible clarity, I feel I am remembering events that happened yesterday. I can hold the sand and the grass in my hands; I can even smell them. I can see the shapes of the clouds in the sky. I can feel the dry, sandy wind against my cheeks” (p. 207).

Murakami, here dichotomises and complicates Lt. Mamiya’s case in the sense that his initial near-death experience is that of a victim, when Russian soldiers throw him into the well, but the very fact that he was sent to assess and map the Mongolian desert was charged with the motivation to invade which essentially makes him a perpetrator. His perpetration is also evident in his journey into the Chinese mainland, where he was sent as a frontline soldier to die, so that he’d not carry his Russian memories back to his homeland. His victimhood is also two-layered. Whereas he was a victim of the Russian troops on two different occasions, he was also sent to the Chinese mainland to die. Lt. Mamiya was not a soldier in practice but a student who was drafted against his will. Thus, he becomes a victim of Imperial policy as well as perpetrator of the atrocities of the war.

However, as perpetrator trauma is not accepted by society, Mamiya could not share his feelings with anyone. As he says,

“Up to and including this very day, I have never told any of these things to anyone but you, Mr. Okada. To most people, these stories of mine would sound like the most intricate fabrications. The majority of people dismiss those things that lie beyond the bounds of their own understanding as absurd and not worth thinking about” (p. 207).

In an article on how a nation deals with perpetrator trauma, Kyotaru Tsutsui has noted seven types of responses to perpetrator trauma. In the third he says,

“A nation might also partially accept the guilt, but evade the trauma of perpetration by shifting the focus to its own victimhood. This third framing strategy, evasion, emphasizes how the nationals suffered, while ignoring or downplaying the suffering inflicted by the nation” (p. 1392).

This fits well in the context of both Tsuguhiko Amada and Lt. Mamiya. Society was not willing to accept the trauma of perpetration because it would basically mean demonising the nation. The guilt of perpetration was unacceptable since it was believed that they were fighting for a just cause, and it would also mean failing its citizens. That is why both Tsuguhiko Amada and Lt. Mamiya had to isolate themselves from society, locked within, suffering their agony on their own. Tsuguhiko will eventually succumb to it.

Murakami here differentiates between the soldiers who were the astute followers of the Imperial ideology and those who did not find any underpinning logic or rationality in it. To continue with Kjel Anderson’s observation, “Ideology also has imperialistic tendencies: the true believer in an ideology will try to implement, proselytize, and impose it… ideology simultaneously justifies and exonerates individual acts of perpetration” (p. 74–75). The Imperial Army who proselytises imperial ideology and implements its doctrines generates true followers, but Mamiya and Hamano, in The wind-Up Bird Chronicles, and Tsuguhiko Amada in Killing Commendatore, are the victims of this ideology. These characters do not find any justification in their acts of killing Chinese civilians and thus they feel that they themselves are the victims here. That is why they live in remorse and a guilty conscience that eventually leads to trauma.

The key problem in perpetrator trauma is its duality. It is assumed that, since the perpetrators are assumed to have volunteered for these expeditions, they should not have remorse for their actions, but yet the soldiers feel that they are victims. This problematizes the emotional response of the trauma victim further. Guilt overtakes them. Murakami deals with this further in the novel Killing Commendatore. Tsuguhiko Amada was a student at Tokyo Music School and, as an undergrad, he was not supposed to be drafted into a war for which he was not mentally prepared. However, due to some document mismanagement which seemed like an official plot at that time, he was drafted and sent to fight one of the fiercest and most notorious battles in the Chinese theatre, Nanking. In the name of training, the “proselytising” officers asked Tsuguhiko to chop off the head of a Chinese prisoner who may or may not have been a

soldier. This, Masahiko says, was done to train the newcomers to kill people, to get accustomed to killing. For Tsuguhiko, this was not a battle between him and the Chinese prisoner, rather, it was a battle between the Imperial Army and him in which he was but “a cog in the gigantic machine of war” (Freud, 1920, p. 275) and he was entirely powerless.

He had no choice but to kill, because “an order from an Imperial Army was an order from the Emperor himself” (p. 399). His ideological affiliation was not to an empire but to humanity and basic human values. So he sympathised with the unarmed prisoners and refused to kill them. But his ideological affiliation was neither respected nor even acknowledged, and he was forced to kill the prisoner. After beheading the prisoner while fearing his own life, he was ordered to kill more as a practice and to get “accustomed to cutting off people’s heads” (p. 399). Later, his regiment in the battle of Nanking fought a fierce battle, “leaving a trail of murder and plunder in their wake” (396). Those events left “deep emotional scars” that “ruined his nerves, and wrecked him psychologically” (p. 396-397). The bloodbath that he had witnessed in Nanking, says Masahiko, the one who narrates his story, leaves him with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

What is similar about Mamiya and Tsuguhiko is that they both suffered from traumatic experiences but neither of them could express or share their emotional turbulence in their society. It was simply not accepted and was considered a weakness. “In war-time Japan, such ‘weakness’ was neither understood nor accepted” (p. 397), and was rather dismissed as “lacking courage, or patriotism, or strength of character” (p. 397). Even the report of his death was hidden from the public. Menshiki said,

“The manner of his death was concealed, though, to protect the family’s honour. Kumamoto’s 6th Division was celebrated as a band of fearless warriors. If word had gotten out that their son had returned from the battlefield bathed in glory only to turn around and kill himself, they could not have faced the world” (p. 388).

Whereas Lt. Mamiya, due to the narrative necessity, lives with his haunting memories, Tsuguhiko fails to live through them, but in both cases the society considers their trauma as a weakness.

In both cases, they were the unwelcomed ghosts in the society where they were treated as stains on the cloth of patriotism – weakness. Here the narrator of Killing Commendatore asks an important question: “Are some people born to chop off heads?” (p. 399). The reply by Masahiko is a reiteration of what Anderson said, “I can’t answer that but I do know there must be quite a few who are able to get used to it. People can become accustomed to almost anything, especially when they are pushed to the limit… Or when they’re given justification for their actions (p. 399). The justification here: the “just war narrative” as Hamano said in The Windup Bird Chroncle, and “patriotism”, as Masahiko said in Killing Commendatore. People like Mamiya and Tsuguhiko are the embodiment of the objector “other”, who despite being traumatised, seek to find a way out. Whereas Tsuguhiko gives up his life, Mamiya finds a way to pass on his memory to Toru, which for him serves as a means to unburden himself of a heavy load.

A Soldier’s Rite of Passage:

Rationalizing Perpetration

One of the significant events in the history of the Japanese invasion of China is the Mukden Incident (1931), also known as the Manchurian Incident. In this incident, a railway track near the city of Mukden was destroyed by an explosion. The Japanese soldiers had put the blame on the Chinese troops and declared this as an act of war against Japan. Under this pretext, the Japanese army invaded and seized Manchuria and established Manchukuo. However, later it turned out that the Mukden incident was rather a Japanese plot to invade and seize Manchuria and establish a puppet regime there. Murakami depicts this in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, where he shows how Japan uses a false flag to rationalize the perpetration of violence in the Chinese mainland. Murakami casually presents the event with the presence of the actual historical figure of Kanji Ishiwara, who directed the false flag event. The narration of the event simply says that Kanji Ishiwara was a leader and “staged a Chinese attack on Japanese troops also known as the “Manchurian Incident”, the event that had enabled Japan to turn Manchuria into Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet regime, and that later would prove to have been the first act in fifteen years of war” (p. 495).

Here, Murakami blends fact with fiction through the character of Yoshitaka Wataya, who was in close touch with Kanji Ishiwara. Yoshitaka presents an alternative narrative for the Japanese Army to exert its dominance over China. He justifies the invasion as a necessity to avoid Western hegemony. He says, “Japan was now the only Asian nation with the capability of fighting the coming war against the West (or, as he called it, the “Final War”) and that the other countries had the duty to cooperate with Japan for their own liberation from the West” (p. 496). This anti-west narrative often served as one of the defining reasons and motivation for Japan to invade China. In fact, the narrative that Japan publicised for the invasion and mass atrocities was that if Japan did not control Asia, the West would. Basically, they were trying to present themselves as the saviours of the neighbouring countries, giving themselves the right to invade if opposed.

In Killing Commendatore, on the other hand, Murakami places Japanese rationalization of their perpetration of violence in parallel with the Nazi invasion of Austria and the assassination of Vom Rath, a Nazi party member, by a Jewish teenager. In Germany this served as an excuse to cause mass riots against the Jews, and a parallel to the massacre in Nanjing is established. In these cases, it is obvious that both the states were planning to commit the atrocities and were just waiting for an excuse to do so. In Nanjing, the Chinese soldiers were ordered to vacate the town, an order they refused, resulting in the sudden, massive attack by the Imperial Army. Reports on the number of deaths in Nanjing vary between 40,000-300,000, whereas the Nazi atrocities on the Jews need no elucidation. In this novel, Murakami compares the Nazi invasion and means of attack with the Japanese invasion and means of attack. Both countries used manipulation and false flags to motivate their citizens and soldiers alike and justify their acts of aggression.

This was the argument that was used to manipulate the Japanese soldiers to commit the crimes. They were made to believe that they were fighting a “just war” against the aggression of the West. Under this banner, Japan staged numerous atrocities in the neighbouring countries,

especially China, Mongolia, and Korea. It was not uncommon among the belligerent nations of that period to maintain a sane and pure picture among the masses both at home and abroad. In this process, soldiers who returned home were considered to be heroes with a moral victory and, thus, they were not supposed to experience any post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or Post-Traumatic Induced Stress (PITS).

Noted anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki has put forward a detailed note in Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms (2004) on the veterans who returned from war but were forced to repress their traumatic experience to maintain the “holy war” narrative and resume their niche in the collective. The soldiers who were drafted into the war were mostly university graduates and many among them were students. Significantly, most of these students disagreed with the political ideologies underpinning the war effort. However, these students were sent with the guiding principle pro patria mori (to die for one’s country) and their spirits were allegorised as the blossoms of chrysanthemum that would fall to make their land fertile. Notably, a significant number of them did espouse that belief and went to fight and die for their nation. That is why events such as the Nanking Massacre could take place.

In a widely available video documentary, the several soldiers who took part in the Nanking Massacre could be seen laughing and giggling while recounting their experiences in the massacre. They evidently bought into the imperial ideology of the perpetrator. Other soldiers had been obviously compelled to partake in the crusade and commit brutalities at the order of their superiors. These are the soldiers that, upon returning home, suffered from this acute trauma which was not known as PTSD at that moment in history. Again, the stigmatization associated with the expression of guilt or trauma prevented them from expressing themselves in public.

Socially, during and after the war, it was believed that the soldiers were sent to the war to die for the nation and that this death was a holy act symbolized by the purity and innocence of the chrysanthemum blossom. Because the chrysanthemum narrative controlled society’s collective mindset, the Imperial administration did its best to disparage the expression of guilt and trauma at the social and political arenas. This had resulted in numerous suicides—a common outcome for the war veterans who returned home.

It is pertinent here to note the findings of Alan Gibbs regarding American soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Citing Lambèr Royakkers and Rinie van Est, he states that “almost twenty percent of the soldiers returning from Iraq or Afghanistan have post-traumatic stress disorder or suffer from depression . . . causing a wave of suicide” (p. 163).

As combatants, they had to undergo military conditioning, or in Murakami’s terms, a “rite of passage” from femininity to manhood. The students who were drafted into the war lacked the courage to kill innocent civilians or unarmed soldiers. They also showed a significant amount of sympathy and empathy towards their enemy. This attitude of the student soldiers was mocked and was considered to be feminine. However, if one analyses Murakami’s student soldiers’ point of view, one finds ample qualities of “sympathy and empathy”. That needed to be “repaired” by the enforcers of the Imperial Armed Forces, for, as Alan Gibbs observes in

the context of the Iraq war in Contemporary American Trauma Narrative (2014), “empathy and passivity are diametrically opposed to the masculine aggression demanded of soldiers” (p. 180). This is why the military tried every means to masculinise the soldiers and “colonize the soldier’s gendered identity to develop a militarized body that must be permanently hard and function with mechanical efficiency” (Jarvis, 137). This masculinisation process is the process in which the soldiers are taught to get accustomed to killing people, be they guilty or innocent. This process in the novels of Haruki Murakami is called “soldiers’ rite of passage”. The experiences of Lt. Mamiya in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Tsuguhiko Amada in Killing Commendatore, and Murakami’s actual father, are to a large extent identical. In Killing Commendatore this process is best explained in the context of Tsuguhiko Amada, when he, despite being a student, was drafted and sent to war. However, as he was not a soldier and had no training, he showed signs of weakness when killing unarmed Chinese soldiers and hesitated when ordered to kill them. But as Tomohiko Amada’s son Masahiko notes, “In that deeply militaristic society, people like my uncle were dismissed as lacking courage, or patriotism, or strength of character.” In wartime Japan, such weaknesses were not welcome. That is why when Tsuguhiko Amada failed to decapitate the unarmed Chinese soldier with a sword and started puking, “The officer called him a “pitiful excuse for a soldier” and kicked him hard in the side with his army boots. No one sympathized” (p. 399). Such weakness had to be driven away through military conditioning and that is why he was trained to kill.

The experience of Tsuguhiko Amada is worth mentioning because it resembles the experiences of Lt. Mamiya and Murakami’s father and many others who were drafted into the war. Tsuguhiko, when he was drafted, was ordered to kill an unarmed Chinese soldier with a sword. The man who had never picked up a sword but only played with piano keys was asked to kill. It was a process that is called “A soldier’s rite of passage, it was thought. Participating in such carnage made a man a ‘true warrior’” (p. 399). In this “soldier’s rite of passage” (p. 399), Chinese civilians were brought in to practice on. Interestingly, the Chinese soldiers were distinguished from civilians based on the softness of their palms. If their palms were soft, they were considered soldiers and were executed without any trial and no arguments were entertained. “Arguing the sentence was a waste of breath” (p. 398).

Civilians were also brought in to be killed as a form of practice. Tsuguhiko writes about these experiences to his brother, letters in which his “sympathy and passivity”, attributes that Alan Gibbs termed as “feminine”, are overtly visible. That is why he was a subject of ridicule. Moreover, when he returned from the war, the social scene was no different from the war nor was it different for his family members as he committed suicide. His suicide could not have been revealed in public because that would have discouraged other soldiers from joining the war and painted a negative picture of the Imperial adventure. That is why “The fact that he had killed himself was kept a deep, dark secret. To the world, the official cause of death was heart failure or something like that” (p. 396). It goes in line with what Judith Herman observed regarding the battle casualties in the context of the British soldiers who faced or witnessed death: “One of the many casualties of the war’s devastation was the illusion of manly honour and glory in battle” (p. 22), but that had to be protected at any cost. She further says, “Military authorities attempted to suppress reports of psychiatric casualties because of their demoralizing effect on the public” (p. 22). To prevent this demoralizing effect the death of Tsuguhiko was

kept a secret. Nor could his family members share this with others due to the social stigmatization it entailed.

The killing of the unarmed Chinese by Tsuguhiko is a repetition of an episode from The Windup Bird Chronicle in which four Chinese soldiers were caught and killed by Japanese soldiers. Unlike Killing Commendatore, they were of Chinese origin but were engaged in the Manchukuo Army, a part of the Japanese Army, and were asked to take part in the defence of Hsin-Chin. This came as an order by the Japanese authority, against which these soldiers revolted and eventually killed two Japanese officers with a baseball bat. They then attempted to flee wearing their baseball uniforms. These soldiers happened to be excellent baseball players, but were forced to join the Manchukuo Army. The interesting point here is that these are Chinese people who were compelled to fight against the Chinese, just like Lt. Mamiya and Tsuguhiko Amada. Unlike Tsuguhiko and Mamiya, they naturally revolted against the Imperial edict. As a result, they were executed rather brutally.

Their execution like the one in Killing Commendatore is done through the use of a bayonet and the leader is killed with the same baseball bat with which he had killed the Japanese officers. Significantly, the Japanese commander does not need to justify the killing of the Chinese, taking it for granted that this is what naturally needs to happen, but he does justify the killing with the use of a bayonet and a baseball bat; shooting them would be a mere waste of bullets. Death is death but the statement that bullets would be merely wasted and resorting to butchering is fundamentally an act of dehumanization. Again here, young Japanese soldiers are used to bayonet the Chinese. When they were given the bayonet and lined up in front of the Chinese, they “looked paler than the men they were about to kill” (p. 515). Before the execution, they were even asked to practice right in front of the Chinese. The lieutenant even coaches them on how to kill people using a baseball bat. This is their “rite of passage”.

Through these characters Murakami challenges the narrative of Japanese masculinity inherited from its rich samurai culture and its role in the formation of the national character, a characteristic Japan’s soldiers need in this “holy war” into East Asia. What is important in Murakami’s treatment of trauma is that the author converges psychological trauma with perpetrators’ trauma. Japanese soldiers in China are inherently perpetrators, but many of them who did not commit to the mainstream political ideology fall victim to psychological trauma.

Referring back to Judith Herman’s definition of psychological trauma, which she called “an affliction of the powerless”, we find that it basically defines the traumatic experiences of the “powerless” upon whom atrocities were committed. However, Japanese soldiers in China also committed the atrocities that traumatised many of them, so they are perpetrators as well as victims. In PTSD discourse, the concept of perpetrators’ trauma is highly debatable due to its contradictory nature, as an act of perpetration is seen as a voluntary work in which those they kill are the victims and not the other way around. But, given the strenuous exercise of its political ideology and the overpowering force of the Japanese High Command, many Japanese soldiers, especially the student soldiers, became victims of their own nation and its narratives. Tsuguhiko Amada and Lt. Mamiya are the best examples of soldiers who did not want to join the war nor kill unarmed civilians, but they were compelled to do it by the overpowering

authority of mainstream ideology. In short, they suffer from both guilt and trauma at the same time.

Conclusion

It is important to note that the postwar authoritarian Japanese state sought to control and manipulate war memories and reproduce events from an elitist perspective that would suit the ideology of the state. In this context, it remains up to individuals to fight their guilt and trauma on an individual level. Murakami revisiting the Battle of Nomonhan where Yamamoto is skinned alive, Lt. Mamiya passing on the stories to Toru Okada, Tsuguhiko Amada committing suicide, and Tomohiko Amada painting “Killing Commendatore” are all efforts to deal with their sense of guilt and find an escape from their traumatic experiences. That is why Masahiko Amada said, on the suicide of Tsuguhiko Amada, that “Only by taking his life was my uncle able to recover his humanity” (p. 395). As is the case, to quote Judith Herman again, “When the truth [of the traumatic events] is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom” (p. 1). Lt. Mamiya telling his story to Toru also functions in the same way. The prolonged suspension and suppression of truth by Tsuguhiko or Tomohiko on the other hand cost them their life.

His novels thus present an alternative reading of perpetrator trauma by contrasting the experiences of an ordinary soldier with authoritarian forces. In this process, he humanises the experiences of ordinary soldiers and sees them as humans who are victims of some bigger ideological forces. This is a reiteration of the argument with which this paper has been introduced, that is, it is not entirely appropriate to attribute the responsibilities of crimes committed by an individual singularly upon the individuals when they are victims of ideological forces. Deviating from the ideological mainstream results in trauma—the trauma of the perpetration.

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Corresponding author: Anisur Rahman

Email: ansrhmn123@gmail.com

Voicing Palestinian Outrage in Rafeef Ziadah’s “We Teach Life, Sir”

Basila Maisoon

Farook College (Autonomous), University of Calicut, India

Hashmina Habeeb

Farook College (Autonomous), University of Calicut, India

Abstract

Historically, protest has found its way into cultural domains through various genres of literature. Because of its naturally persuasive power, performance poetry or spoken word poetry has been widely employed to communicate instantly and compellingly to vast audiences. Compared to printed works, it has performative dimensions that allow the delivery of the message through emotionally charged intonation, dramatic performance, and rhythm, generating as a consequence a heightened empathic response from audiences. Rafeef Ziadah, the Palestinian-Canadian poet and ardent advocate for human rights, uses performance poetry to express her outrage against what she sees as institutionalised Zionist discrimination based specifically on the grounds of religion and race, an injustice that has resulted in the expulsion of Palestinians from their lands. Drawing insights from Stef Craps’s Decolonisation of Trauma studies and Stuart Hall’s concept of “oppositional code”, the paper is an attempt to explain how Rafeef Ziadah’s poem “We Teach Life, Sir'”, serves as a powerful counter-narrative by delivering emotional and creative expressions that challenge and vehemently oppose the mainstream media’s often biassed portrayals. As a performance poem, it contributes to the “Poetry of Resistance” genre by not only expressing the poet’s strong disapproval of Israeli actions, but also by exposing the mainstream media’s biassed coverage of them. Because of the media’s narrative, and despite strenuous efforts to “fit” into society and abide by UN resolutions, the poet maintains that Palestinians receive tags like propagators of terrorism and hate. Those mainstream views expressed by a journalist at a press meeting with Ziadah led to the birth of the poem “We Teach Life, Sir”. It also echoes Nakba and Intifada poetry in its embodiment of Palestinian outrage.

Keywords: performance poetry, Palestine, Nakba/Trauma, ziadah, decolonisation of trauma, decoding

Art and literature describe human relationships by portraying their intricacies in various contexts, be they personal or social. They have also been instrumental in describing unequal power relations and in voicing resistance to oppression and human rights violations. Performance poetry, alternatively called spoken word poetry, is a type of poetry that is performed on a live stage. Its focus on performance makes it a widely used method to communicate with immediate and profound effects. In this sense, it can be linked to slam poetry, rap music and jazz. Intonation, rhythm and pitch are crucial aspects of these genres, as the speaker’s voice needs to come across as the authentic narrative of those groups that are typically underrepresented or misrepresented in the mainstream media. This genre, then, provides alternative perspectives that challenge dominant narratives through a pathos that is not available to the mainstream media’s message.

Performance poetry has a capacity to engage emotions and create an immediate, visceral impact that can foster empathy and encourage opposition to injustice. Several Black artists across Western countries have been using this mode to disseminate their views on racial discrimination. Artists like Kat François and Gilbert Scott-Heron have exploited this mode with their poignant presentations. In her article “Performing Black British Memory”, Novak (2020) maintains that by combining aesthetic values with oral performance, spoken-word poets have reinforced the “sonic roots” (p. 324) of poetry and brought various social and political issues to the audience’s attention. This model has also gained popularity through slam poetry competitions.

Another factor that enhances the popularity of performance poetry is that it is not confined to academic and literary circles, but proliferates in places like cafes, clubs and other open spaces. The ability to create an intimate rapport with listeners is one of the main features of this type of poetry.

Palestinians have been struggling to preserve their dignity and freedom since the birth of the state of Israel in 1948. After the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the establishment of Israel, many Palestinians were forced to go into exile or suffer a diminished existence in their homeland. Various methods were employed to resist this colonisation, including armed insurrections and marches. They also expanded their protest through “creative resistance” (Santos, 2015. p. ii), using mediums like music, poetry, fiction, and paintings. Thus, many in their homeland as well as in exile have had a tangible effect in literature through poignant presentations of their memories, and their continuing desire to fight for their cause.

The recitation of poetry has been an effective tool in the furtherance of Palestinian resistance, and this fact has not been lost on Israeli authorities. Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), for example, was jailed in the 1960s for reciting poetry in public and confined to house arrest when his poem “Identity Card” became a popular protest song. In spite of the challenges, performance poetry has been on the rise as a mode of expression among Palestinians, as it doesn’t need props and has immediate effect on listeners. Additionally, social media has been instrumental in bringing this poetry and Palestine’s plight to the world’s attention. Poets like Suheir Hammad, Mohammed Moussa, Wali Shah as well as Rafeef Ziadah have taken

advantage of this medium to widen the reach of their performance poetry and give a stronger voice to their dissent.

Rafeef Ziadah

The well-known Palestinian activist and spoken word artist Rafeef Ziadah uses her words to fight against institutionalised discrimination as well as the biases propagated by some mainstream media outlets. She is one among those whose parents have gone into exile after the invasion and has never seen the homeland. Currently based in London, she is also a representative of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and currently teaches at the Department of International Development, King’s College, London. She is a voice of unheard Palestinians through spoken word poetry. Her passion-filled poems are eye-openers to the world by delving deep into the sufferings of the oppressed and occupied people in the world. Along with spoken word poems, she has contributed to academia through her research in politics and gender, especially in the Middle East. Academia, according to Ziadah, needs to be more involved in fighting apartheid and other injustices. Her poems are mostly based on real incidents experienced by her, by Palestinians in the homeland, and Palestinian refugees (Ramadan, 2016). Her first music album “Hadeel” was a great success. For her, Palestine is an embodiment of long-lost memories of golden times, lost after the Israeli occupation that she poignantly presents in her works. Spoken word poetry, for her, is a cathartic medium that registers her protest while simultaneously soothing those wounded by injustice. Her works also express the nostalgia for Palestine that she has heard from her elders. In an interview with “Women’s Views on News”, Ziadah describes the strange feeling of missing a place that she doesn't even know and of which she does not have a first-hand experience (Farooq, 2012).

Analysing Egyptian performance poetry in the wake of the Arab uprising in 2011, Muhammad (2017) maintains that compared to older generations, the younger generation is “more courageous” in their outright “rejection of persecution, destitution, sickness” as well as “other catastrophic consequences of the regime’s corruption and tyranny”. Because they perform their poems using social media, social clubs, and cultural centres, they attract more audiences. Their relentless activism helps to promote opposition among the already angry citizens” (p. 829). This parallels protest poetry in Palestinian literature and helps us understand the genesis and impact of Rafeef Ziadah’s performance poems. Her performances provide a language of resistance and resilience by questioning colonial Zionist narratives of Israeli occupation, so common in the mainstream media.

Memory is an important tool in survival and protest literature. It encourages readers to think about past glories and instils a connection with one’s heritage and culture. Despite not being to her homeland even once in her life, Ziadah experiences its murmurs, its vibrant rhythms and its pain through her elders and those who are immediate victims, acting as their loud voice through her poems. In them, she describes the way mass media desensitises consumers of news by focusing on its entertainment value, cropping reality, anesthetising it and containing it within apposite parameters. In “We teach Life, Sir,” she says:

Today, my body was a TV’d massacre. Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits. Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits filled enough with statistics to counter measured response.

Moreover, the mainstream media’s narrative is presented as a pitiless counterweight to the poetic expression of people’s plight:

But still, he asked me, Ms. Ziadah, don’t you think that everything would be resolved if you would just stop teaching so much hatred to your children? (sternchenproductions, 2011, 01:29)

[...] We just want to tell people about you and your people so give us a human story. Don’t mention that word “apartheid” and “occupation”. (sternchenproductions, 2011, 02:20)

Memory of disastrous events is quintessential in resistance narratives and in the fight against apartheid. Ziadah’s “We Teach Life Sir” reflects Nakba poetry as it brings together the Palestinian pain and protest through emotive words.

So, I give them UN resolutions and statistics and we condemn and we deplore and we reject.

And these are not two equal sides: occupier and occupied.

And a hundred dead, two hundred dead, and a thousand dead.

And between that, war crime and massacre, I vent out words and smile “not exotic”, “not terrorist”.

And I recount, I recount a hundred dead, a thousand dead. Is anyone out there?

Will anyone listen?

I wish I could wail over their bodies.

I wish I could just run barefoot in every refugee camp and hold every child, cover their ears so they wouldn’t have to hear the sound of bombing for the rest of their life the way I do. (sternchenproductions, 2011, 02:24)

The word “Nakba” is an Arabic term for “catastrophe” and is a major theme in Palestinian poetry. It refers “specifically to the Israeli declaration of independence on 14 May 1948” and is commemorated as “Nakba Day” (Farag, 2017, p.18). Poets like Darwish focused on the Palestine issue and the need for peace between Israel and Palestine. Nakba poetry contrasts the long-lost memories of peaceful Palestine with its present turbulent atmosphere filled with bombings, shootings and pitiful cries for mercy. Intifada means “shaking off” and was characterised in Palestine’s history by protests and marches that erupted from 1987 onwards (Farag, 2017, p.137). Ziadah draws insights from Nakba and Intifada poetry to voice her dissent and her identity in this world.

Stef Craps’s concept of decolonisation of trauma studies and Stuart Hall’s “oppositional code” (p. 517) concept help analyse how counter-narratives become artistic resistances against apartheid through performance poems.

In his influential work Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (2013), Craps talks about the necessity of a postcolonial framework and cross-cultural affiliation that goes beyond the Western trauma narratives. He maintains that despite arguments for contributing to crosscultural solidarity, the founding texts of trauma studies fail this promise by marginalising the “traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority cultures” and “tend to take for granted the universal validity of definitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of the history of Western modernity” (p. 2). The majority of research in the field of trauma theory has focused on incidents that happened in Europe or the US, particularly the Holocaust and, more recently, 9/11. The Nazi genocide has especially catalyzed much of the contemporary theorization regarding trauma and representation. Craps, hence, opines that the theory’s inadequate recognition of minority trauma “sits uneasily with the field’s ethical aspirations” (p. 3).

Accepting the role of Holocaust trauma in recognising other atrocities or injustices, Craps (2013) argues that “to claim that Holocaust memory has become a harbinger of a universal human-rights culture is to overlook vast amounts of evidence of Holocaust comparisons serving dubious and questionable purposes” (p. 78). Such a purpose is evident in the case of Israel, which exploits the Holocaust as a collective memory for legitimising its existence and occupation of Palestine. The Euro-American conceptualisation of mainstream trauma studies thus excluded postcolonial subjects like the indigenous groups or other colonised subjects and the historicity of their trauma. Apartheid and subsequent occupation are not traumatic stories for the media that controls the representation process. These de-politicising and dehistoricizing definitions tend to surpass violence or atrocities in the postcolonial world. Craps (2013) maintains that the trauma of a particular community or country has to be analysed based on the social, political and historical dimensions of that context rather than resorting to Western notions of trauma as predominantly personal and event-based. Hence, post-colonial trauma studies encompass aspects which the Western definitions have excluded.

This trauma of the postcolonial subject due to the Nakba and its existing aftermath is reflected in Ziadah’s “We Teach Life, Sir”. She has brilliantly employed spoken word to talk about the plight of Palestinians and their struggle to defend their rights. She voices her rage against mainstream media hypocrisy when it comes to Palestinian suffering, for it is the trauma of a non-Western subject. Despite following U.N. resolutions regarding their struggle, they are tagged as terrorists with crazy violent ideas “So, I give them UN resolutions and statistics and we condemn and we deplore and we reject”. (sternchenproductions, 2011, 02:20)

It is also a shocking fact that, except for a few outlets, the mass media plays a pivotal role in such tagging. The pangs of exile and humiliation at the hands of Zionists and their supporting media flow out through this spoken word. Ziadah strongly condemns mainstream media for feigning ignorance about the conflicts and labelling Palestinians as terrorists and propagators of violence. The impetus for this poem was an incident that happened while Ziadah was at a UN press meeting as the spokesperson of a coalition when she was quizzed by a journalist:

“Ms. Ziadah, don’t you think that everything would be resolved if you would just stop teaching so much hatred to your children?” (sternchenproductions, 2011, 01:22). Even though she maintained silence at that time, she bursts out at such nonsensical questions throughout this poem. She satirises the media for their inability to focus on the prime concern by depicting the journalist’s indifferent attitude towards the sufferings of specific people:

We just want to tell people about you and your people so give us a human story. Don't mention that word "apartheid" and "occupation".

This is not political.

You have to help me as a journalist to help you tell your story which is not a political story. (sternchenproductions, 2011, 02:17)

For him, these sufferings are not traumatic human stories that can catch the world’s attention. This particular journalist is a representation of the media industry that sensitises issues of their interests and almost ignores the oppressed and their suffering when it finds them “not important” for their news, as these are the postcolonial subjects who had not endured the Holocaust. Ziadah criticises the dehumanising double standards of the West regarding the Palestine issue. Some sufferings mean a lot to the West -including the US- while some mean nothing to them. The outcry of Palestinians is “not heard” by the mainstream media. It tells the suppressed not to mention words like “apartheid” and “occupation”. All it wants is a depoliticised Palestine issue. Thus, their bodies become a “TV’d massacre”, says Ziadah. The use of puns is dominant in the refrain “we teach life, sir” and the words “TV'd massacre”, “sound-bite” and “word limits”. The massacre of Palestinians fits into mere sound-bites for the media. It is the journalist who instructs Ziadah on what to talk about and the word limit. He felt “sorry for the cattle over Gaza” and wanted Ziadah to give him “a story of a woman in Gaza who needs medication” as a sensitive story, thereby hiding the causes of such traumatic experiences. The trauma of experiencing the atrocities coupled with not being listened to is reflected in the performance when Ziadah says:

And I recount, I recount a hundred dead, a thousand dead. Is anyone out there?

Will anyone listen?

I wish I could wail over their bodies.

I wish I could just run barefoot in every refugee camp and hold every child, cover their ears so they wouldn’t have to hear the sound of bombing for the rest of their life the way I do. (sternchenproductions, 2011, 3:30)

Stuart Hall (1973) underscores the role of cultural representations in shaping identities and the varied ways in which these representations are decoded. His encoding/decoding model is seminal in analysing the relationship between media representations and identity. He suggests that media representations play a crucial role in shaping individuals' sense of self and their understanding of their place within society. Moreover, he underscores how representations can both reinforce existing identities and challenge or reshape them, depending on how audiences decode and engage with media texts. The encoding or production of a message puts forth “preferred readings” that “have the institutional/political/ideological order imprinted in them,

and have themselves become institutionalised” (Hall, 1973, p. 513). Various beliefs, everyday knowledge, power relations, legality, and sanctions amongst other factors influence this encoding process. Hall (1973) further talks about the three hypothetical positions of decoding the encoded message, namely “dominant-hegemonic code”, “negotiated code” and “oppositional code” (p. 516-517). The oppositional code decodes the message contrary to the preferred or negotiated framework of the producer, thereby resulting in an oppositional meaning. Here, the person “detotalises the message in the preferred code in order to retotalise the message within some alternative framework of reference” (p. 517).

Ziadah’s “We Teach Life, Sir” is an oppositional decoding of media narratives that propagate Zionist attitudes on the Israeli occupation. She questions the journalist’s de-politicizing attempts of not referring to Israel’s existence as apartheid and occupation. The de-humanising of Palestine trauma is evident when the journalist asks Ziadah to give him the list of dead Palestinians within “one thousand two hundred word limits” (sternchenproductions, 2011, 2:47). This journalist is a representation of the outcome of media apparatuses that influence the production of the mainstream message (narrative) on Palestinians. The 75-year-long Israel occupation of Palestine is justified by unwarranted claims of the promised land for the Jews and a “solution” to the trauma suffered by Jews in the Holocaust. She counters such attempts with the line “we teach life, sir” thereby subverting the Western or colonial interpretations of Arabs as unwanted postcolonial subjects and troublemakers. Her counter-narrative through this performance questions the hegemonic discourses on Palestinians and their lands.

Ziadah flings artistic resistance and decolonising energies at mainstream narratives. She questions the journalist’s ‘request’ for her to be a part of the mainstream narrative on Palestine. While answering the journalist, she assures herself about her identity: “And between that, war crime and massacre, I vent out words and smile “not exotic”, “not terrorist”’ (sternchenproductions, 2011, 3:18). Palestinian plight is a political issue that cannot be fit into mere sound-bites and word limits. It has to be openly discussed and solved rather than being distorted and silenced, says Ziadah. Thus, she identifies herself with Palestinians and their struggle for justice through this counter-narrative.

Beyond brutality, Palestinians have to face negligence from the mainstream media. If ever it talks about them, there is a good chance that it will give them a “terrorist” label. On the one hand, it preaches equality and justice, while on the other, it feigns ignorance about the brutality of dominant countries like the USA and Israel. Palestinians have been suffering for decades but their plight has made the front news only in recent years owing to social media activism and counter-narratives criticising Israeli occupation. The death of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in an attack by the Israeli armed forces also fuelled worldwide protest resulting in increased coverage of the Palestinian plight. Ziadah is frustrated at the stark reality of daily, simultaneous demolition and occupation, but a quick browse of mainstream news makes one think that the world does not care. It takes thousands of deaths for the world to protest and the media to televise it. She wishes that her words “could stop” such atrocities and “transform to light, to protection” and soothe others (Ziadah, 2016).

The latest events in 2023 have triggered ongoing debates and discussions about the plight of Palestinians, especially in the social media. Despite threats, shadow banning and other militant measures, the ongoing protests related to this issue have been on the rise all over the world. South Africa filed a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) of the United Nations against Israel for its atrocities in Palestine that violated the 1948 Genocide Convention, while countries like Brazil, Colombia, Turkey, Malaysia and some from the Middle East backed this case and further sanctions. Despite such measures and the protests within the country, Israel continues its traditional politics with the support of wealthy countries.

Even children and other innocent people are targeted by Israeli soldiers to instil fear and push them to the margins. It is out of a necessity for survival that Palestinians started their resistance against Israeli occupation. Thus, they start learning and teaching life, not terrorism, to their children: “We Palestinians teach life after they have occupied the last sky” (sternchenproductions, 2011, 1:50). These verses reflect Palestinians’ struggle to question and deconstruct Israel’s narratives while revealing the uncouth relations between Israel and the proIsrael mainstream media. Analysing various artistic resistances in the Palestine struggle, Santos (2015) opines that Ziadah’s creative narratives and performances contribute to “alternative discourses” that deconstruct “Israel’s dominant myths of biblical renaissance and liberal democracy (p. 156)”, thereby providing discourses of subversion and resistance. Santos also considers the poet’s works as anti-colonial in their effort to “disrupt Zionist narratives” (p. 156) and thus perform an oppositional decoding of the hegemonic narratives. Hence, these works exhibit similarities with anti-colonial works all over the world. Ziadah maintains that the “occupier” and “occupied” are not the same. In the Opinion page of The Guardian, Ziadah stresses the fact that tension between Israel and Palestine is “not a war between two equal sides. It is an onslaught by a powerful military state, armed and supported by the West, against an impoverished, besieged and displaced people” (2014). This is not merely a conflict between two countries but discrimination and bias against Palestinians backed by the West’s media and its military establishment.

Ziadah’s performance of “We Teach Life Sir” empathetically describes mental suffering due to the media’s distortion of the Israel-Palestine issue. She poignantly presents the image of the Palestinian who simultaneously suffers at the hands of both the oppressors and mass media. It is with a strong sense of protest that Ziadah mentions the journalist’s command to talk about a non-political story and not to mention words like “apartheid” and “occupation”. But she cannot forget the still expanding list of innocent people killed. Her rage is brilliantly evident while performing the last lines:

No matter how good my English gets, no sound-bite, no sound-bite, no sound-bite, no sound-bite will bring them back to life. No soundbite will fix this.

We teach life, sir!

We teach life, sir!

We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life, sir! (sternchenproductions, 2011, 4:02)

The therapeutic and resilient methods of narratives are also of prime importance in postcolonial trauma studies as these focus not only on the melancholia and darkness of trauma but also on the recuperative ways of tackling such experiences. For Ziadah, artistic resistances contribute in many ways to resilience and strength. Her affirmation towards the end of the performance highlights both the resilience and hope of Palestinians despite the harsh conditions of genocide while simultaneously serving as a brilliant example of performance poetry. Her assertion of her identity as a Palestinian despite being in exile is reflected in the last line of this poem. Drawing upon the Palestinian writer and activist Gassan Kanafani’s insights about resistance literature, Mir (2013) analyses the impetus behind the emergence of resistance poetry in Palestinian literature. People realised the need to “counterbalance the colonial threat” to their land by asserting their roles in Palestine’s history and its socio-cultural aspects. He maintains that the “poetry that emerges in Palestine at this juncture has been described as “Poetry of Resistance” (p. 110). Poets like Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al Qasim have effectively employed poetry to voice the Palestinian’s “conscious identity out of the oppression they experienced since 1948” (p. 110) by questioning the oppressor’s motives behind Israel’s establishment as a nation.

Such modes of “creative resistance” together with other artistic representations have successfully provided Palestinians the courage to voice their protest and question religious and racial discrimination. This has also led them to question the double stance maintained by mainstream media when it comes to Palestine coverage. Ziadah’s performance poetry is a major contribution to the “Poetry of Resistance” (Mir, 2013, p. 110) genre in Palestinian literature and a counter-narrative as a result of the decoding of the hegemonic narrative. Upon hearing the journalist’s absurd question, she looked “inside of [her] for strength to be patient but patience is not at the tip of [her] tongue as the bombs drop over Gaza”/ Patience has just escaped [her]” (sternchenproductions, 2011, 1:22). Her brilliant use of stress, intonation and voice specifically towards the end of this performance poem adds to the assurance that they will be resilient and survive these storms. She is not the one to be silenced by threats or abusive remarks; she is the one to fight back through her performance poems as these “advance a creative critique of the Zionist national imaginary” (Santos, 2015, p. 160). As a Palestinian refugee, Ziadah gathers enough vigour to question her imposed exile and that of many Palestinians as well as the genocide of those remaining in the homeland. Thus, her poetry has a major place in Nakba and Intifada poetry.

Poetry is Ziadah’s survival technique that asserts her national identity as a Palestinian woman in the resistance against discrimination. Ziadah’s affirmation of her identity as a Palestinian woman resisting Israeli apartheid is reflected in “Shades of Anger” as well when she hits out at the sensual and orientalist stereotypes of Arab women: “Did I forget to be your every orientalist dream, genie in the bottle, belly dancer, harem girl, soft spoken Arab woman?” … “I am an Arab woman of colour and we come in all shades of anger” (Ziadah, 2013, 2:17). She reminds the world that women have the power to resist and carry on that courage to later generations. Palestinian women are not merely the portrayed images of those in Gaza who cry for mercy and aid, in fact, they intellectually represent women of resistance and resilience who have the power to voice their dissent against oppressive regimes.

The dehumanising nature of the dominant discourses surrounding Israel's occupation of Palestine is decoded by Ziadah in “We Teach Life, Sir”. The tagging of Palestinians as terrorists and perpetrators of hate and conflict is decoded when Ziadah says that the occupied and the occupied are not two equal sides. She asserts the dignity and the right of Palestinians to live freely. The mainstream attempts at identity-making for Palestinians as troublemakers and the resultant cultural representations in mass media are also questioned by Ziadah through this poem. Her performances add to the collective identity of being a Palestinian opposing hegemony, apartheid and genocide. Resistance can limit the consequences of power and Ziadah uses the act of spoken word performances for the same.

Conclusion

Performance is a creative act of artistic resistance for Ziadah. Her poetry performances throw a critical light on the atrocities committed against Palestinians while scathingly criticising the oppressors. By contextualising her words and even employing her mother tongue in performances, she helps to build the identity of a Palestinian forced into exile who shows the power of resilience and who reinforces the idea of returning to the homeland. Her performances are passion-filled with her love for Palestine and combined with varied tones or rhythms, thereby simultaneously catering to the audience’s different senses. She is not ready to be silenced, and performance poetry acts as her medium for voicing Palestinian rage. The poem “We Teach Life, Sir” is symptomatic of such a rage through the depiction of a Palestinian and, specifically, a Palestinian woman who rises out of the perils of oppression to register her protest. This performance contributes to her oeuvre of artistic counter-narratives by decolonising the traditional notions of traumatic experiences and biassed media coverage. She is the voice of Palestinians. Hers is the image of resilience despite harsh times- not just of Palestine, but of the world.

References

Craps, S. (2013). Postcolonial witnessing: Trauma out of bounds. Palgrave Macmillan. Farag, J. R. (2017). Politics and Palestinian literature in exile: Gender, aesthetics and resistance in the short story. I. B. Tauris.

Farooq, A. (2012, May 14). An Interview with Palestinian ooet, Rafeef Ziadah. Women’s Views on News, https://www.womensviewsonnews.org/2012/05/an-interview-withpalestinian-poet-rafeef-ziadah/

Hall, S. (1973). Encoding, decoding. In S. During (Ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader (pp. 507–517). Routledge.

Mir, S. (2013). Palestinian literature: occupation and exile. Arab Studies Quarterly, 35(2), 110-129. https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.35.2.0110

Muhammad, M. A. H. (2017). Arabic performance poetry: A new mode of resistance. Arab Studies Quarterly, 39(2), 815–841. https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.39.2.0815

Novak, J. (2020). Performing black British memory: Kat François’s spoken-word show raising Lazarus as embodied auto/biography. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 56(3), 324–341. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2020.1737184

Ramadan, M. (2016, March 20). Rafeef Ziadah: ‘Make a Pariah State of Israel’. Al Jazeera, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2016/3/20/rafeef-ziadah-make-a-pariah-state-ofisrael

Santos, M. (2015). Circulating texts: Challenging Zionist myths through narratives of creative Palestinian resistance and solidarity [Doctoral dissertation, Carleton University]. Carleton University Repository. https://doi.org/10.22215/etd/2015-11027 sternchenproductions (2011, November 13). Rafeef Ziadah- ‘We Teach Life Sir!’ London. 12.11.11 [Video]. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKucPh9xHtM

Ziadah, R. (2011, November 17). Rafeef Ziadah – We Teach Life, Sir. Text-TranscriptionLyrics-Words of Poem. [Poem transcript]. Blissonature. https://blissonature.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/rafeef-ziadah-we-teach-life-sir-texttranscription-lyrics-words-of-poem/

Ziadah, R. (2014, July 28). As the Gaza Crisis Deepens, Boycotts Can Raise the Price of Israel’s Impunity. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/28/gaza-crisis-boycotts-israelimpunity-apartheid

Ziadah, R. (2016, October 20). Rafeef Ziadah - If My Words [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thVPpbpqVbo

Ziadah, R. (2017, March 8). RAFEEF ZIADAH 'SHADES OF ANGER' at the Abbey Theatre Dublin [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2WuQHCBh4o

Corresponding author: Basila Maisoon

Email: basila@farookcollege.ac.in

Decoding Sense of Place and Contested Cultural Landscapes in Select Manipuri Poems

Remya R CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bangalore, Karnataka, India

Abstract

More often than not, a foregrounded physical landscape has the effect, intended or not, of concealing the reality of people who inhabit it. This is especially true of the idealised landscape descriptions one finds in Manipuri poetry. Scholarly analyses have focused on the aesthetics of this poetry’s consistent engagement with the physical landscape, but in the wake of Manipur’s ongoing ethno-territorial and ethno-nationalistic conflicts, revisiting Manipuri poetry from a revisionist perspective becomes germane. It is now more pertinent than ever to analyse Manipuri history and its infamous hill-valley divide through its poetry by adopting a spatial lens, as the notion of “homeland” itself is a contested construct. An exclusive focus on the aesthetics of the physical landscape is no longer relevant and, moreover, undermines the phenomenological underpinnings that these works bear. This paper, perforce, challenges the fundamental orientations that have dominated the analyses of landscape in poetry, a trend established in large part by the idealist traditions of the XVIII and XIX centuries. This will result in a problematization of the concept of “landscape,” shifting the focus from Manipur’s natural landscape to its cultural landscape. It further posits that landscape is, essentially, contested geography. Through the use of humanistic geography, this paper dovetails history, geography, spatiality and poetic language to decode the sense of place that emerges from selected poems of Rajkumar Bhubonsana, Saratchand Thiyam and Arambam Ongbi Memchoubi. It is hoped that this article will engender a novel perspective with which to appreciate and understand Manipuri poetry.

Keywords: Manipuri poetry, contested cultural landscape, humanistic geography, ethnonationalism, sense of place

A foregrounded picturesque physical landscape can often hide people’s lived realities. This statement especially holds true in the case of Manipuri poetry, one largely filled with descriptions of the land’s beautiful landscape. Traditionally cloaked under the blanket phrase ‘literature from North-East India’, Manipuri poetry has recently started to gain a separate niche with the growing attention given it by scholars. The critical eye has been largely focused on its depiction of physical landscape and its ecocritical underpinnings (see, Anupama, 2014; Bargohain, R., & Mokashi-Punekar, R., 2020; Bhattacharyya, 2017; Chandra, N. D. R., & Das, N. 2007). But in the wake of more than half a century of ethnic conflict, territorial tensions and disputes that peaked with ethnic violence in May 2023, a revisiting Manipuri poetry becomes indispensable. This paper, perforce, builds upon, but diverges from, existing literature on Manipuri poetry. It will adopt a revisionist vantage point and, in turn, attempt to unearth elements of spatial anxiety embedded within poetic descriptions of the landscape. By problematising the concept of landscape, this paper shifts the focus from the natural landscape, inviting critical attention to be directed at Manipur’s cultural landscape as portrayed in the selected poems. It also posits that, because of the ongoing tensions, it is essentially a contested landscape. Thus, revisiting Manipuri poetry through a spatial lens becomes germane, as the place itself is torn due to conflicting territorial claims that are based on differences in ethnicity (Piang, 2015). Through the use of humanistic geography, this paper dovetails history, geography, spatiality and poetic language to decode the sense of place that emerges from the selected poems of Rajkumar Bhubonsana, Saratchand Thiyam and Arambam Ongbi Memchoubi, engendering a novel perspective from which to appreciate Manipuri poetry.

The

Poems

While Manipur’s breathtaking scenic beauty has found profuse expression in its poetry, these works also reveal the quotidian experiences of natives who live in socio-spatial isolation within its landscape. Yeung observes the relevance of studying the geocritical elements of a poem to understand the nuances of the spatiality of the place represented in it: “the phenomena of voice in poetry and of poetic language, and their intimate relationship with the production of poetic self and poetic topos, are foundational in the production of a spatial, or geocritical, understanding of the poem” (2015, p. 6). The poems chosen for analysis in this paper are Rajkumar Bhubonsana’s “Should Light be Put Out or Mind Kept in Dark” (Translated from Manipuri by Tayenjam Bijoykumar Singh), Saratchand Thiyam’s “Hillworld” and “Hill” (both translated from Manipuri by Robin S. Ngangom), and Arambam Ongi Memchoubi’s “Red Chingthrao” (Translated from Manipuri by Tayenjam Bijoykymar Singh). These poems have Manipur’s ethno-territorial conflicts flowing as an undercurrent through the descriptions of the natural landscape. Additionally, they make reference to specific as well as general events in the place’s socio-political as well as developmental history, calling attention to the love-hate relationship that the poets have with their homeland. In many cases the landscape’s poetic portraits are marred by violence, destruction and displacement. References to Manipur’s sociopolitical issues and history, not always unconcealed, reveal valuable information about its cultural landscape.

The Theory of Cultural Landscape

Described by Carl O. Sauer (2008) as the product of the union between physical or natural environment and human culture, the cultural landscape of a place is imbued with socio-cultural markers that form determinants of inclusion and exclusion, possession and dispossession, as well as emplacement and displacement. Sauer maintained that Cultural Landscape is “subject to change either by the development of a culture or by a replacement of cultures” (p. 100).

The ongoing violence in Manipur among various ethnic communities, each fighting to have their ideas of a separate homeland materialise in a physical area of land, is clearly forecasting destruction, displacement and the imminent replacement of one culture by a more dominant one, as Sauer put it. In such a scenario, unearthing elements of a contested cultural landscape from Manipuri poems raises questions about the nature of the relation between the Manipuri poets and their native land. Although this relationship might appear to be positive, owing to the proliferating, glorified descriptions of the landscape, portraying it in affectionate tones is deceptively simple and fraught with tension.

Developing a positive bond with one’s land is identified as developing a “sense of place.” Humanist geographer Yi Fu Tuan (1979) described the notion of “sense of place” as an “affective bond” (p. 418) that develops between a place and its people. Subsequently, Robert Tally, a leading scholar of geocriticism, critiqued this notion by pointing out that understanding the concept of sense of place as an affective bond that is loaded with positive and pleasant feelings of connection would be a superficial way of defining and analysing people’s relation with their place, as it does not account for the feelings of fear and anxiety one may experience in that place for various reasons. He thus put forth the concept of “topophrenia” to account for the negative feelings that a person develops with regard to a place. It is described as a “placemindedness,” which is a relation between writers and the place they write about, one whose defining characteristics would be “unease, anxiety or discontent” (Tally, 2018, p. 34).

Developing an affective bond with a bloodshot native land that is torn with internal ethnic strife would surely be challenging. This becomes evident in the words of eminent Manipuri poet Robin S. Ngangom (2005): “if anyone should ask now why my poems do not speak of my land’s breathtaking landscape; … I can only think of Neruda’s answer: ‘Come and see the blood in the streets’” (p. 171). In this declaration, one can see the poet shifting his focus from a natural landscape to a cultural landscape.

The Conflicts

Described as an “ethnically sensitive society” (Kipgen, 2013, p. 21), Manipur has ethnic conflicts at multiple levels: on one hand, there is strife amongst the natives of the land based on their ethnic identities and associated differences, and on the other hand, there is the struggle with the external intervention of the armed forces sent in by the Indian Government with special powers to combat the insurgents and militants in Manipur. The internal strife between the main indigenous ethnic communities, namely the Meitei and Kuki, is also reflected in Manipur’s

topography, resulting in the hill-valley divide. Therein, the Meitei populace occupy the valley areas in Manipur, with the Kuki inhabiting the hilly areas.

There is also tension between indigenous communities and migrant communities who settled in Manipur, of which the Naga tribal community is dominant (McDuie-Ra, 2014). Each community wants a separate “homeland” or state based on their ethnicity, a homeland whose ideological and territorial claims overlap and contend with the others. While the militant factions of the Meitei community have as an objective the separate sovereign nation of Manipur, one that would cover the present territorial boundaries of Manipur, the Kuki armed forces’ agenda aims to create their own state, “Kukiland” based on their ethnic identity. Similarly, the Naga ethno-nationalist movement aims to create a separate state, “Nagalim,” by conjoining all Naga-inhabited areas of Manipur, Assam, and Arunachal Pradesh (Kom, 2015).

The existing ethno-territorial and ethno-nationalistic faultlines in Manipur compel a reading of its cultural landscape. The bloodshot streets of Manipur that Ngangom talked about is essentially an aftermath of human actions superimposed on the landscape, and therefore, it is quintessential to revisit Manipuri poetry by diverting critical attention away from the physical landscape and directing it towards the cultural landscape. This paper has selected poems as representatives of the cultural landscapes in both Kuki inhabited hill areas and Meitei inhabited valleys in Manipur, with their respective historicity. These poems show the various forms of struggle and violence that the Manipuri population experience amongst themselves, as well as their ongoing battle with the Government of India.

The Valley and Development-Induced Institutionalised Violence

The permeating presence of nature and landscape in these poems demand the dual task of identifying the transition from natural to cultural landscape, as well as from spaces of scenic beauty to those of terror and violence. In the poems, the natural and cultural landscapes are connected by causality to human actions and interventions, driven either by developmental issues or by ethno-territorial differences. Therefore, analysing these poems in the light of spatiality requires the interlinking of history and geography.

Traditionally, most of the government’s developmental initiatives have been implemented, in the valley regions of Manipur, which account for only 20% of the total geographical area of the state, leaving 80% of the land underdeveloped or undeveloped (Kumar, 2016). That 80% of the area constitutes hills occupied predominantly by Kuki and Naga tribes who form the minority population in Manipur. The majority Meiteis from the valley, along with non-tribal communities who do not belong in India’s Scheduled Tribes list, are barred from buying land and settling in hill areas, while the hill tribes who do belong to the list are not bound by any such land jurisprudence (Oinam, 2003).

Both sides of the hill-valley divide are equally plagued with institutionalised violence. Rajkumar Bhubonsana, in his poem “Should Light be Put Out or Mind Kept in Dark,” pillories Government policies and tactics that keep the Manipur public in a Catch-22 situation. Therein he talks about circumstances that have been ongoing for decades, keeping people literally as

well as figuratively in the dark. Bhubonsana refers to the erratic and sometimes notional power supply that plagues the life of people in Manipur. A close scrutiny of the poem reveals a reference to a specific incident in the history of Manipur. The mention of “Loktak Project” (Bhubonsana, 2011) in the latter half of the poem is an overt reference to the Loktak Hydroelectric Project that was commissioned in 1983 in Manipur, with the aim of generating power supply as well as ushering in industrial and agricultural prosperity (Samom, 2020). Conversely, the aftermath of the project proved to be a failure and a threat to people as well as to Nature.

The Loktak river flows through the Valley regions of Manipur, namely the Imphal West, Bisnupur and Thoubal districts (Samom 2020). General ruination has been visited on the valley region due to development-induced projects put forward by the government. Bhubonsana opens the poem by presenting how the government placed the people of Manipur in a stalemate: they could either choose to live in literal darkness without electricity, or to live in figurative darkness without knowledge. He proceeds to talk about how the Government manipulates people’s opinions and contorts public will to achieve its end through violence and manufactured consent. He relates, ironically, how different age groups (representing different times as the Project continued operation despite public opposition) reacted to the government’s proposition. In the poem, the octogenarians prefer to keep the mind alight, and consequently, “the place is kept in darkness/ Load-shedding is imposed regularly” (Bhubonsana, 2011, p. 36). Using a biting sarcasm, Bhubonsana remarks that the government was not “resorting to cheating” (p. 36) since keeping the place in darkness was the public will. These lines are testaments to the “year-long power failure and load shedding in the state” (Kumar, 2016, p. 620) that was a result of inefficient plans of action associated with the Loktak Project that turned out to be an economic failure as well (Kumar 2016).

The poem continues to show how the middle-aged population of Manipur responded to the Project. They hold meetings and say that “since the olden days it has always been dark” (Bhubonsana, 2011, p. 36) and it is still “dark regularly” (p. 36). The minds have been kept “in dark since the day (they) were born” (p. 37) and that in spending the remainder of their lives “with the mind in dark/ There won’t be any harm” (p. 37). Thus, the Government, honouring their opinion, decided to take up “Many new special/ Schemes of blacking out the mind” (p. 37) of Manipuri society. It can be inferred from the poem that in the guise of providing for the common good, the Government continued the operation of Loktak Project whilst plunging Manipur further into dark times. The poem talks about the results of such Government schemes to keep the public in the dark:

Without Rice from Guwahati, Rice for Manipur had been transported Without the mechanical parts, from outside Electrical generators had been purchased Those entrusted to catch thieves Were made to smuggle goods Ministers and MLAs By crossing the floors often

Have been creating chaos in the state (Bhubonsana, 2022, p. 37)

These lines attest to the disastrous aftermath of the Loktak project, which altered not only the natural landscape, topography and ecosystem, but also the living culture of Manipur. The construction in 1983 of the artificial reservoir of the Ithai Barrage, intended to ensure enough volume in Loktak lake to generate electricity, brought with it monumental changes in the cultural landscape of Manipur. The disruption to the river and its tributaries’ natural water levels caused flooding in low lying areas. Thousands of hectares of farm lands were destroyed in flash floods that occurred throughout the year, forcing many people to give up farming and take up other jobs (Samom, 2020). These issues still persist. Thus, Manipur, which once used to be self-sufficient with its varied agricultural produce, suddenly became mainly a consumer of rice (Samom 2020). In the wake of the Loktak Project, the cultural landscape of Manipur thus witnessed changes that penetrated to the grassroot levels of ordinary lives.

The poem then goes on to speak about how the youth responded to the Loktak project:

Even after commissioning of the Loktak Project

There is still no light

On the other hand

Loktak Project wastes paddy fields and fishes Causes submergence under water Takes away homesteads (Bhubonsana, 2011, p. 38)

These lines refer to how the Project and its associated Ithai Barrage changed and blocked the natural migratory pathways of many fish that were once abundantly found in Loktak lake, resulting in a scarcity of fish in the area (Samom, 2020). Additionally, the Project also displaced many people from their original places of inhabitancy. Manipur is well-known for phumdis that are exclusive to Loktak lake in the state. They are floating islands of soil, biomass and different forms and stages of vegetation, on which people build houses called phumsangs. A large number of phumdis were destroyed as part of the Loktak project (Krishna, 2020), making hundreds of phum-dwellers homeless and jobless, as many of them did not own land or a house in the mainland and were illiterate, unable to do any job other than fishing (Samom, 2020).

The youth in the poem weigh the odds and remark on how money is required not only to obtain an education and get their minds out of darkness, but also “for buying jobs” (Bhubonsana, 2011, p. 38). Sarcastically, the poem talks of how education cannot do good in the land of Manipur, because if people’s minds are brightened, they will recognize wrong-doings and raise their voices against malfeasance, for which they would end up beaten: “If the wrongs are made public, in our place/ One gets bashed up, hip broken” (p. 39). The youth thus decide that “In the place where light is not there and mind is in dark” (p. 39), they have no use of their face, and request the authorities to bash them up so they lose their teeth. Through crafty use of irony and sarcasm, Bhubonsana says that the Government took young people’s demands into consideration:

So the Government as a compulsion

Has made the generators of Loktak fail

To enable the mind to remain in the dark

Load-shedding programme has been imposed (Bhubonsana, 2011, p. 39)

And, in the attempt to bring to fruition the wish of the youngsters to lose their teeth, the government arrests and beats them up when they protest and hold strikes. Through this poem, Bhubonsana vividly captures the cultural landscape of Manipur and shows how the mindless and haphazard developmental policies adopted blindly by the government destroy environment, lives and livelihoods. This poem serves to show that “the valley dwelling communities are neither able to enjoy the fruits of development programmes nor able to take an active role in the development process of the state” (Kumar, 2016, p. 617). Even though the hilly terrains are overlooked in terms of development in Manipur, the hill tribes also suffer from institutionalised violence. The select Manipuri poems reveal elements of terror and spatial anxiety in their descriptions of the hills.

The Hills and Militarized Quotidian Spaces

The landscape in Saratchand Thiyam’s “Hillworld”, “Hill”, and Memchoubi’s “Red Chingthrao”, showcase the Manipuri hills as a life force; as a being, but they are portrayed as a stoic figure that is a mute witness to the violations being done to their people. The emotions elicited by the landscape in these poems range from disillusionment, dejection and fear to sympathy and helplessness. The task of identifying happiness, love and admiration for the landscape becomes awkward. The Hill in Thiyam’s “Hillworld” is towering, appearing to touch the sky, but “remains asleep though.” (Thiyam, 2011, p. 50). Children are playing and having a quality time at its foot, and the girls are peacefully bathing, but the peace is suddenly broken by the roar of a landing helicopter, which sends the children and the girls running to their homes, terrified. This sudden appearance of a helicopter, a man-made device’s intrusive entry in to the otherwise peaceful landscape is representative of the sudden shift of focus from the natural landscape to the cultural landscape, and it indicates the irruption of the special armed forces into Manipur territory, which has become more frequent with time. Moreover, such intrusions have come to inform the everyday/quotidian lived spaces of the Manipuri people. The killings of Manipuri people -alleged to be insurgents and rebels- by the army under the Armed Force Special Powers Act (AFSPA) of 1958 and imposed by the Indian Government on Manipur in 1981 (Subramanian, 2022), escalated to an unprecedented level. As a consequence, uprisings against unbridled governmental power and extra-judicial killings increased, culminating in the Public Interest Litigation submitted to the Supreme Court in 2016. The verdict that came in favour of Human Rights curtailed the abuse of power by the army (Meitei, 2017).

The long-standing prevalence of ASPFA in Manipur saw respite in 2022 (Singh, 2023) and further in 2023 (Karishma, 2023). The following verses bear attestation to the militarisation of quotidian life in Manipur, marking its cultural landscape with terror and fear for life: “The hillworld’s mothers stand/ Holding torches throughout the night” (Thiyam, 2011, p. 50). These poignant lines show how the lived spaces of the Manipuri community are contested. Thiyam

concludes the poem with the line: “The hill remains asleep though” (p. 50). This line forms a refrain in the poem, indicating the poet’s sense of dejection with the land as well as the indifference that has dawned upon it due to years of violence and bloodshed. Thiyam portrays the landscape as a stoic entity, in which the stoicism is a direct result of the violence-ridden cultural landscape of Manipur, and this idea is extended in his poem “Hill” as well, where he addresses the hill:

You remain standing and Don’t speak at all.

You can suffer too, neither denying nor affirming, Wearing a shawl of fire, you can stand quietly. (Thiyam, 2011, p. 51)

These lines refer to the ethno-territorial fights that colour the landscapes of Manipur red with blood. The conflict between the Meitis and the Kuki ethnic communities regarding territorial boundaries and land ownership led to the formation of separatist factions and armed insurgent groups from either side. Both sides dismissed the idea of Manipur’s union with India, but their individual demands for a separate homeland were at odds (Kom, 2010), resulting in violent fights that led to the declaration of Manipur as an “area of disturbance” in 1980. This was followed by the dawn of an era of violence and unrest with the advent of the AFSPA in the land (Singh, 2018). The following lines from “Hill” show the extent of violence and bloodshed that has been plaguing the hills of Manipur and the attempts of each community to establish their dominance and victory:

The hill tracks that go bursting through Amidst forest once green

Are gradually becoming red

With a group of people

Searching for a crown of laurel leaves. (Thiyam, 2011, p. 51)

Here, the act of “searching for a crown of laurel leaves” indicates each militant insurgent group attempting to materialise their specific goal of establishing their own ethnic homeland. The idea of such conflicts between tribes and the resultant socio-political unrest is further reflected in the poem “Red Chingthrao” by Memchoubi. The poem, just like Thiyam’s select poems in this article, appears to be strewn with the landscape’s natural beauty, but on closer inspection it reveals details of deep-seated tensions that are beset with not only ethnic, but religious hues as well, thereby showing the nuances of the conflict that afflicts the cultural landscape of Manipur. The poem begins thus:

On Echai bank stood benumbed

An empty church, its doors shut And the bells tolled for no one.

Standing secluded and hushed

The deserted village’s

Little scorched bamboo huts’ courtyards

Are bestrewn with red roses. (Memchoubi, 2011, p. 54)

The reference to an “empty church” and a “deserted village” indicates the outcomes of religious strife in Manipur. Although “Sanamahi” was the original religious culture of Manipur, Vaishnava Hinduist culture was established as the official religion by King Garib Nivas in the 18th century, and it continued to be the religion of the majoritarian Meitei community of the valleys (Haokip, 2014). The introduction of Vaishnava Hinduism as the new religion caused the society to be caste-ridden, and led the high caste Meiteis to look down upon the hill tribes, including Nagas and Kukis, as lowly communities, thereby widening the social gap between them.

Haokip traces Manipuri history to the advent of Colonialism, when missionary activities spread across the land. He notes that the missionaries were unable to spread their influence in the valley regions where Hinduism had a strong hold, and consequently, they focused on the hill tribes and successfully converted the majority of the hill tribes to Christianity. Thus, with the added dimension of difference in religion and associated linguistic variations, the tension between the ethnic communities worsened. Burning of churches and villages of the Kuki and Naga tribes by the majoritarian Hindu Meiteis were not uncommon, and still continues to happen, as evident in the recent arson and vandalism meted out in June 2023 to Churches and villages mainly in the Kuki inhabited Churachandpur region, which is a hill area (“Manipur”, 2023). Memchoubi’s poem paints a verbal picture of a village after such an attack. The “echai bank” mentioned in the poem could mean the river bank in Ichai Lamlan region, also known as Saikho village in the Kuki inhabited hilly terrain of Sadar hills in the Senapati district in Manipur. In Memchoubi’s poem, the red petals of roses and of the Chingthrao flower are symbolic of violence and bloodshed. The image of freshly bloomed and smiling Chingthrao flowers that “fell on the ground one by one suddenly/ Without number, all in red” (Memchoubi, 2011, p. 55) indicates the loss of lives of youngsters, who were reduced to puddles of blood. Just as in Thiyam’s poems, here too, the hills are silent onlookers of violence:

The charred hillocks in the surrounding Stood sorrowfully with their heads bowed

Unable to console their beloved Echai. (Memchoubi, 2011, p. 55)

These poems show how a binding terror underscores the natural landscape as a result of the ethno-territorial quagmire that has come to characterise the cultural landscape of Manipur. Through subtle as well as overt references to socio-political and historical events, and deft use of language, sarcasm, and imagery, the poets have used the landscape as a tool to etch the social realities of their homeland. Through such a convergence of physical and cultural landscape, a complex sense of place that the poets feel towards their landscape is clearly projected. The analysis thus far indicates a complex relationship that the poets have towards their native land. This relation is clearly fraught with tension and disallows easy characterisation, and can be best explained with Tally’s concept of Topophrenia.

Conclusion

The role of Literature in creating social awareness, as well as holding a mirror up to the realities of society, becomes apparent in literary works from and about contested spaces in disturbed and violence-prone regions. Even though the selected poems have profuse descriptions of natural landscape, it becomes evident that these descriptions do not convey the feeling of an affective bond between the writers and those landscapes. This is because the natural landscape cannot be considered in isolation from its human factors and interventions that essentially turn it into a cultural landscape with its own idiosyncrasies and faultlines. In the case of these selected Manipuri poems, the landscape becomes a mute spectator as human actions and interventions wreak havoc on the land. In a land where the notion of “homeland” is contested, its cultural landscape is also contested. Having a positive Sense of Place in such a contested cultural landscape is unlikely, and nearly impossible. The selected poets have a tense and complicated relation with their land, which is symptomatic of topophrenia, a sentiment marked by spatial anxiety, unease and fear. In all the selected poems, there is an evident obsession with the natural or physical landscape, apparent in the abundant imagery used to portray it, which indicates the poets’ “placemindedness”. Yet, what accompanies these images are references to Manipur’s violence-ridden cultural landscape.

The landscape is thus fettered with a streak of violence, making it difficult to associate “beauty” with it. Such a juxtaposition of natural landscape and cultural landscape leads one to conceive of the poets’ relation to Manipur as marked with unease and is rather unsettling. This observation falls in line with Tally’s statement that “more permanent and less easy to express are feelings one has towards a place because it is home, a locus of memories” (Tally, 2018, p. 19). This accounts for the oxymoronic juxtaposition of a beautiful natural landscape with a fearsome cultural landscape. Topophrenia, is the “uneasy “placemindedness” that characterises a subject’s interaction with his or her environment… broadly conceived as to include the lived space of any given personal experience” (Tally, 2018, p. 1). True to this notion, the personal experiences of the poets who are natives of Manipur translates into poems that produce an affective geography that involves “less salutary or utopian visions of [...] place” (Tally, 2018, p. 9) The analysis of the poems thus far leads to the observation that the complex sense of place that the selected poets have towards their native land can be characterised as Topophrenia.

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Correponding author: Remya R

Email: remya.r@res.christuniversity.in

“Let Me In”: Analyzing the Firefly Funhouse Match (2020)

Kunal Debnath

Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India

Abstract

The Firefly Funhouse Match is a professional wrestling match between WWE wrestlers John Cena and (the late) “The Fiend” Bray Wyatt at WWE’s Wrestlemania 36 (2020). The present paper attempts to critically analyze the “Firefly Funhouse Match” from a variety of theoretical angles. The match is in essence a dive into the unconscious. Mikhail Bakhtin used the term “carnivalesque” to characterize writing that aims to destabilize the hierarchical status quo. In this sense the Firefly Funhouse Match is carnivalesque because it mocks the dominant/traditional forms of professional wrestling. In a conventional wrestling match, there will be a fixed ring, a referee, a dedicated time-slot, a certain geographical location, and so on. But all these notions are subverted in the Firefly Funhouse match: there is no referee, no linear temporal progression, no fixed ring, no concrete geographical location, and we have frequent changes of time-space. The match turns the hierarchical scale on its head. We also find interconnected chronotopes in the match. The wrestling match explores the differences between grandiose epic heroism and the fragmented postmodern man. The match parodies established character archetypes in professional wrestling, urging us to question the face value of scripted roles. It also contains many postmodern elements, such as intertextuality, magic realism, unpredictability, nonlinear storytelling, deconstruction of a fixed identity, fragmentation and irony.

Keywords: firefly funhouse match, professional wrestling, popular culture, carnivalesque, postmodernism

The Firefly Funhouse Match is a professional wrestling match between WWE wrestlers John Cena and “The Fiend” Bray Wyatt at WWE’s Wrestlemania 36 (2020). As the name suggests, the match takes place inside the Firefly Funhouse, a surreal place that is presented as a type of children’s amusement park. However, although it is portrayed as a funhouse, there are elements of horror mixed with the more pleasant external aspects (March, 2021). The Firefly Funhouse Match was not a traditional wrestling match by any definition and shocked the viewers. It was a cinematic match similar to the Boneyard Match or the Swamp Match, enacted as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic (Greenberg, 2022) by allowing the storytelling to proceed in a controlled environment. It also showed WWE’s attempt to enact unique storytelling strategies. Thus, the match parodies established character archetypes in professional wrestling, urging us to question the scripted roles at face value. Cena’s entire career is shown in an ironic light. The match is sprinkled with meta elements where reality and fiction overlap, showcasing theories of simulation and hyperreality.

In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the Firefly Funhouse Match, it is imperative to conduct a critical analysis. After conducting the literature review, it has been found that very few studies (Greenberg, 2022; March, 2021) have been conducted on the match. Thus, the present paper attempts to fill that research gap by critically analyzing the Firefly Funhouse Match from a variety of theoretical angles, such as Jungian psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and the carnivalesque.

Characters

i. John Cena

ii. Bray Wyatt

iii. The Fiend

iv. The Boss (a devil-like representation of the WWE Chairman, Vince McMahon)

v. Ramblin’ Rabbit

vi. Mercy the Buzzard

vii. Huskus the pig (a shot at Husky Harris, Bray Wyatt’s previous persona)

viii. Abby the Witch

A Journey into the Unconscious

Our unconscious mind contains thoughts, feelings, memories, and urges that we are not consciously aware of (Freud, 1955; Cherry, 2023). Towards the beginning of the match, Bray Wyatt says, “There’s another world that exists beyond our realm of comprehension…a world where our darkest urges are no longer kept secret...Who are we really and why do we do the things we do? Hey John, let’s take a real deep look at who you really are…you’re about to face the most dangerous opponent yet— yourself! Welcome to the Firefly Funhouse!” (WWE, 2023). So, the match is digging into the unconscious. Indeed, the match feels like a dream that takes us into the unconscious minds of both John Cena and Bray Wyatt. As a result, the match unravels the darker aspects of Cena’s career. In a narrative angle that is unsympathetic to his traditional babyface character, Cena’s career is shown in a darker, negative light. While Cena

never accepted his heel character, his shadow1, Bray Wyatt gleefully accepts “The Fiend,” his shadow, and emerges as a transformed character.

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung popularized the term “archetype” (Jung, 2010). An archetype is a recurrent pattern, motif, event, symbol, or character that appears in myths, stories, folktales, legends, literature, and popular culture (Harrison, 2016; Jung, 1980). Cuddon (2014) observes that an archetype is “a basic model from which copies are made, therefore a prototype. In general terms, the abstract idea of a class of things which represents the most typical and essential characteristics shared by the class; thus a paradigm or exemplar” (p. 51).

In Jungian psychology, there are four primary archetypes (Jung, 1980). First is the ego or the conscious mind; this includes all the experiences we are aware of. Second is the shadow, “the unconscious aspect of the psyche which the ego tends to reject or ignore, usually symbolized in dreams by a figure of the same sex as the ego” (Coupe, 1997, p. 85). The ego must face and integrate the power of the shadow if it wants to develop. Third is the anima/animus. The anima is “the unconscious, feminine side of a male personality” (Coupe, 1997, p. 85); moreover, the animus is “the unconscious, male side of a woman’s personality” (Coupe, 1997, p. 85). If the anima/animus is a positive image, it may help the ego to undertake the journey through the shadow’s realm and allow it to move beyond it. Fourth is the self: “the central archetype, that of the fulfillment of potential and the integration of personality. Frequently symbolized by a mandala or magic circle, it is the psychic totality towards which all life moves. Indeed, we may infer that the very journey from ego to self is circular, involving descent into the darkness of shadow and ascent towards the light of self” (Coupe, 1997, p. 85). For example, in Tite Kubo’s Bleach, Ichigo Kurosaki is initially baffled by the violent urges lurking in his unconscious. A hollow2 inside him often takes control over him during fights. It is the shadow inside him. However, as the story progresses, Ichigo gradually begins to accept that hollow as a part of himself. Zangetsu, the personification of his sword, is the animus who helps him integrate his shadow aspects. At the same time, Orihime and Rukia are anima figures who help him overcome his internal and external demons. Finally, after accepting his hollow persona, Ichigo becomes an integrated self who is neither perturbed nor overcome by his shadow.

In Bray Wyatt’s case, the ego is Wyatt himself, that is, his conscious mind; the shadow is The Fiend; and the anima is Sister Abigail. During the promo of the match, Wyatt says, “One day I…I stopped fighting the voices, and I started listening to him…You broke me John. But the Fiend…he put me back together” (WWE, 2020). Here, it refers to Wyatt’s assimilation of The Fiend’s power – integration of the shadow with the ego. Throughout his career, he has spoken of Sister Abigail as a guiding spirit – guidance by the anima. Finally, he found the self through Abigail’s help and assimilating the power of The Fiend.

1 The repressed darker aspect of the psyche that lurks in the unconscious mind of an individual (Jung, 1972)

2 A hollow is a monstrous spirit-like entity that is born when a soul is consumed by negative emotions

Carnivalesque

The term “carnivalesque” denotes a mode of writing that is characterized by the destabilization of the hierarchical status quo, albeit temporarily, as seen in traditional forms of carnival (Bakhtin, 1984). Mikhail Bakhtin (1999) used the term “carnival” to denote any cultural phenomenon that “is opposed to that one-sided and gloomy official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change, which seeks to absolutize a given condition of existence or a given social order” (p. 160). Buchanan (2018) observes, “Although this may take the form of writing about, or otherwise representing (in film, painting, sculpture, etc.), actual or imagined carnivals, for Bakhtin it was important that the work itself should come to embody the spirit of carnival too” (p. 80). For Bakhtin, the element of carnival subverts authority and introduces us to alternate perspectives. Cuddon (2014) writes, “It is a kind of liberating influence and he sees it as part of the subversion of the sacred word in Renaissance culture” (p. 104). For example, we can talk about the irreverent humor of two famous manga series: Hideaki Sorachi’s Gintama and Eiji Nonaka’s Cromartie High School. The two manga are known for their parody of popular shonen 3 tropes and character archetypes. They play with the expectations of their readers with no regard for modesty and/or morality.

The Firefly Funhouse Match is carnivalesque because it mocks the dominant/traditional form of professional wrestling. In a conventional pro wrestling match, there will be a fixed ring, a referee, a dedicated time slot, a certain geographical location, etc. (Barthes, 1991; Cejudo, 2012). However, all these notions are subverted in the Firefly Funhouse Match. There is no referee and no linear temporal progression. We find frequent changes in time-space. We have no fixed ring. No concrete geographical location can be surmised. So, it is a formless match, and it disrupts the fixed definition of a wrestling match. Thus, it is creating an alternative style of wrestling. Moreover, it is also carnivalesque content-wise. Wyatt says the Firefly Funhouse is “a world where gods, monsters, angels and demons are neighbors” (WWE, 2023). Traditionally speaking, gods, monsters, and demons cannot be neighbors. However, the Firefly Funhouse defies this notion. It defies tradition and disrupts the sacred. Moreover, the character of John Cena as a superheroic Messianic babyface is also questioned throughout the match. The match turns upside down the hierarchical scale. For example, Mr. McMahon, the chairman of WWE who represents authority, is parodied by the grotesque demon-like puppet called “The Boss.” He is shown sitting with Mercy the Buzzard doing commentary. So, a highly powerful authoritarian figure is ridiculed and shown as having the same status as a bird!

Interconnected Chronotopes

The term “chronotope” was introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin (Bakhtin, 1981). It refers to “the co-ordinates of time and space invoked by a given narrative; in other words to the ‘setting,’ considered as a spatio-temporal whole” (Baldick, 2015, p. 60). In simple words, the term refers to the way space and time are represented in a given text and how their interrelationship is woven into the narrative. In the Firefly Funhouse Match, we find the following chronotopes –

3 Manga aimed at the teenage male demographic (Brenner, 2007)

a. Cena’s Debut in 2002: John Cena debuted on 27th June 2002 during a SmackDown episode. Kurt Angle issues an open challenge: “I am issuing a challenge to anyone in that locker room that I’ve never wrestled before to come down here and face Kurt Angle!” (WWE, 2013). John Cena arrives and accepts Kurt’s Challenge. In the Firefly Funhouse Match, Bray Wyatt parodically mimics the entire segment.

b. WWE in the 80s: During the Golden Era (1982-1993), WWE was dominated by largerthan-life characters such as Hulk Hogan and The Ultimate Warrior (Beekman, 2006). Hogan was the face of the WWE then. His character had many similarities with Cena. Both of them are exceptionally popular among the children in their respective timelines and are infamously known for rarely losing matches. However, both are also hated by grown-ups who are tired of their superhuman feats and cheesy catchphrases. In the Firefly Funhouse Match, Wyatt parodies the insane consecutive wins of these two by calling it “egomania.”

c. The Doctor of Thuganomics: During 2002-03, John Cena assumed a rapper gimmick and started calling himself “The Doctor of Thuganomics” (Hamilton, 2006). This decision actually saved his wrestling career from drowning (Mahanty, 2022). The match features Cena mimicking his rapper gimmick but in a parodic way.

d. Wrestlemania 30 (2014): Cena fought against Wyatt at Wrestlemania 30. Cena won the match against Wyatt. However, his victory is shown in a negative light. Wyatt was a rising star in 2014. Logically speaking, it should have been Wyatt and not Cena who won the match.

e. The nWo Faction in WCW: During the mid-1990s to late 1990s, WCW was dominated by the heel4 faction “nWo” or “New World Order” (Alvarez & Reynolds, 2014). Hulk Hogan appeared as a heel character in this faction (Baker, 2011). In the match, Cena copies Hogan’s mannerisms and dresses in a similar attire. This is a jab at Cena’s evergreen babyface gimmick. It is a ridicule of WWE’s refusal to turn Cena into a heel (Greenberg, 2022).

f. Wrestlemania 36 (2020): Finally, we have the chronotope of the Firefly Funhouse Match between John Cena and The Fiend.

Interestingly, the chronotopes from a to f are interconnected and give the match an intertextual element. They are also fused with the present timeline of the match because the original characters are replaced by Cena and Wyatt. It creates a surreal experience for the viewers.

4 A wrestler portraying a villain character (Foley, 2000)

Postmodern Elements

Intertextuality

Julia Kristeva coined the term “intertextuality”. Kristeva’s notion of the term means how a specific text is influenced, interrelated, or is an amalgamation of previous texts (Kristeva, 2024). As Macey (2001) observes, “The basic premise of the theory of intertextuality is that any text is essentially a mosaic of references to or quotations from other texts” (p. 203). There are different types of intertextuality, such as adaptation, appropriation, parody, pastiche, tribute, remake, allusion, and so on (Genette, 1997). Throughout the Firefly Funhouse Match, we find references to past eras of wrestling promotions such as The Golden Era of WWE (19821993), the nWo era of WCW, the Ruthless Aggression Era of WWE (2002-08), and Cena’s past matches. These events have a vital pastiche-like influence on the development of the atmosphere of the match, which gives it an intertextual angle.

Magic Realism

The term “magic realism” was coined by Franz Roh (Roh, 1925) to denote a type of art that portrayed the supernatural in everyday life and brought into notice the uncanniness of modern society in a realistic way. In literary studies, the term denotes writings that “weave, in an evershifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and fairy tales” (Abrams & Harpham, 2009, p. 232). The Firefly Funhouse Match blurs the boundary between reality and fantasy. It has some realistic elements, but it also has some fantastical elements. The match feels like a dream where anything is possible and reason has been suspended. We have Cena and Wyatt as real people, but we also have puppets who do commentary. There is a monstrous persona called The Fiend. Puppets are also characters in the match. Wrestling moments from the past are enmeshed with the present. The real lives of John Felix Anthony Cena and Windham Rotunda have overlapped with their fictional characters, John Cena and Bray Wyatt. For example, John Cena’s real-life breakup with Nikki Garcia is hinted at when Wyatt trolls Cena by singing a parody of Nikki Bella’s theme.

Hyperreality

Hyperreality means the inability to differentiate between reality and simulation (Zompetti and Moffitt, 2009). As Barry (2017) observes, “Within postmodernism, the distinction between what is real and what is simulated collapses” (pp. 85-86). According to Klages (2012), “Hyperreality creates events and environments that are so “life-like” the observer cannot tell the difference between the creation and the actual world” (p. 40). The Firefly Funhouse Match blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction. In the match, fictional characters and storylines take on a life of their own. The match features various callbacks to the respective careers of Cena and Wyatt. Cena’s real-life breakup with Nikki Garcia is also incorporated into the match’s storyline. Both wrestlers often break the fourth wall, thereby self-consciously hinting at the fictional nature of professional wrestling. The match thus plays with the audience’s expectations. It deconstructs the traditional format of a wrestling match by taking

place in a surreal fantasy landscape. Time and space are constantly manipulated during the match, which disrupts the audience’s perception of reality.

Nonlinear Storytelling

As already mentioned, there are multiple chronotopes at work in the Firefly Funhouse Match, and linearity is missing. At one moment, we are in the present, while in another moment, we are transported to the past. Additionally, there is no fixed location. It is as if the match thrives on whimsicality. The match starts with Cena at the entrance, but suddenly the camera transports us to the Firefly Funhouse. Then, it becomes a whirlwind – a pastiche of references from the past melded into the present. The match is a prime example of non-linear storytelling.

Questioning of Fixed Identity

A vital trait of postmodernism is “an identity, consciousness or ego which is deferred, displaced, fragmented” (Woods, 1999, p. 5). Towards the beginning of the match, Wyatt says, “Hey John, let’s take a real deep look at who you really are…you’re about to face the most dangerous opponent yet— yourself!” (WWE, 2023). The sequence of actions that follow shows us that Cena’s character is a repression of his shadow, his heel persona, which he never accepted until the match. Towards the end, it is shown that Cena indeed accepts his heel as he dresses in nWo attire and attacks Bray. So, his seemingly constant babyface gimmick is presented as an example of hypocrisy. On the other hand, Windham’s (Wyatt’s real surname) wrestling personae are the epitome of a volatile identity. His several personae are all mentioned in the match. He switches between Wyatt and The Fiend towards the end of the match.

Irony

A notable trait of postmodern storytelling is irony (Kramer, 2016). During the match promo, Cena says, “This Wrestlemania match is going to accomplish what should have happened six years ago—ending the existence of the most overhyped, overvalued, overprivileged WWE superstar” (WWE, 2020). Cena is referring to Wyatt here. Ironically, towards the end of the match, we hear this same line being echoed. However, this time, it refers to John Cena. Cena has always been portrayed as a babyface heroic wrestler. However, Wyatt says otherwise: “But you’re not a hero, John. You’re a bully. You’re a horrible person. You take the weaknesses of others and then you turn them into jokes. You do anything for fame, John” (WWE, 2023). So here we find the reversal of roles.

Parody

According to Linda Hutcheon (1989), “Parody— often called ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation, or intertextuality— is usually considered central to postmodernism” (p. 93). The match parodies previous wrestlers’ gimmicks and careers. For example, Wyatt parodies Hulk Hogan’s larger-than-life character by hilariously mimicking his attire and accent. The WCW faction nWo is also parodied when John Cena mimics the Hollywood Hulk Hogan character.

Unpredictability

The match thrives on unpredictability. There is no fixed chronotope. Moreover, traditional elements are missing. Most importantly, it is the first-ever wrestling match of its kind, and the audience is at a loss regarding what to expect from it. There is no linear progression to make any sense of what is happening.

No Fixed Definition

Ever since the match aired, no pertinent definition has been given of the match. Some people call it a fantasy show, while others are still confused. Even the wrestling critics are not sure how to define the match. As Wyatt says, it is a match “where anything goes and the fun never ends” (WWE, 2020). So, the signifier “Firefly Funhouse Match” has no fixed signified. The term is open-ended in that anyone can explain or define the match the way she/he wants.

Epic Hero vs. Postmodern Man

A hero of an epic is always larger than life (Gray, 2011). The elements of heroism and grandeur pervade their world. Epic heroes also lack dynamicity and are mostly black-and-white. Like an epic hero, John Cena has mostly been a fixed and static character throughout his career, with little character development in the storylines. In the storylines from 2006-14, he is portrayed as a Superman-type wrestler who wins matches continuously, has abnormal muscles and strength, gives grandiose speeches about duty and hard work, and so on (Dixon et al., 2016). Thus, he is given the nickname “Super Cena”.

On the other hand, the late Windham Rotunda’s Bray Wyatt character is comparatively very complex. He has gone through various character transformations in his career. Rotunda’s early persona was known as “Husky Harris”. Then he assumed the character of Bray Wyatt, and during 2019-20, he had an alter-ego called “The Fiend”. Rotunda’s numerous character transformations remind us of the postmodern tendency “to reject the universal validity of such principles as hierarchy, binary opposition, categorization, and stable identity” (Houghton Mifflin, 2016, p. 1377). He has gone through character transformations from a goofy simpleton (Harris) to a mystical character (Wyatt) with a dual persona (The Fiend). As a character, Bray Wyatt symbolizes the postmodern man’s non-fixity. During the Firefly Funhouse Match, he mocks the black-and-white view of seeing the world; he says: “I was the color red in a world full of black and white” (WWE, 2023). His journey in WWE represents the plight of every contemporary individual, where there is no guarantee that hard work will lead to success, as opposed to Cena’s theory of success. Wyatt shows us the failure of the American Dream of success. During the match, Cena mocked Wyatt about his failures; in response, Wyatt said: “Chances? How dare you talk to me about chances, John Cena? I have adorned everything I have been ever given in life and still they are taken from me! But you! You are the Golden Goose, John! Your chances…they’re unlimited. You are untouchable! But you’re not a hero, John…You’re a horrible person” (WWE, 2023).

Conclusion

To conclude, the Firefly Funhouse Match is a unique pro wrestling match that incorporates various postmodern elements such as intertextuality, non-linear storytelling, blurring of reality and fiction, parody, and so on. It deconstructs the notion of a traditional wrestling match. It challenges cliches in professional wrestling and provides a novel, unique, and postmodern outlook. The match digs deeper into the unconscious layer of the wrestlers’ psyche and breaks down the superficial façade of the individuals involved. It is a psychodrama in which various characters, events, and scenarios symbolically represent aspects of the human psyche. The blurring of the wrestlers’ real life and fictional gimmicks provides a touch of meta elements, thereby creating a hyperreal scenario. The postmodern aspects create a surreal atmosphere that challenges the viewer’s cliched expectations of a regular wrestling match. The wild transitions in chronotopes disorient the audience’s viewing experience. It is also carnivalesque in its irreverent humor and anti-hierarchical themes. It parodies the superhuman savior-type babyface gimmicks of the past, taking into consideration the condition of the postmodern man living in a fragmented world where the grand narrative of the American Dream has collapsed.

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Corresponding author: Kunal Debnath

Email: kunal_d@hs.iitr.ac.in

Reading through the “Coloured Canvas”: Unveiling Cultural Graphics in Indian Mythological Graphic Novels

Raveena Prakasan

Amrita School of Arts, Humanities and Commerce, Amrita Vishwa Vidhyapeetham, Edappally, Kochi, India

M G Priya

Amrita School of Arts, Humanities and Commerce, Amrita Vishwa Vidhyapeetham, Edappally, Kochi, India

Abstract

This study has one central objective, which is to examine the main problems of interpretation raised by Indian graphic novels that recount mythological stories. Through the work of selected authors with dissimilar styles of writing, this inquiry will focus on the many ways in which the genre engages with history, analysing the concept of nation they propose and its attendant cultural identity patterns. To reach a pertinent interpretation of these narratives’ mythological content requires the analytical tools of visual culture. With them, an explanation of how meaning and identity are understood and proposed by the authors will be feasible. This study, then, will aim to place these graphic novels within the social circumstances of their production, dissemination, and consumption, all the while using Pramod K Nayar’s book The Indian Graphic Novel: Nation, History and Critique as an essential resource. This work provides novel insights into the genre of graphic novels in India, especially in its chapter titled “Cultural Graphics.” Cultural graphics probe into the many ways visual elements and artistic innovations transmit features of a specific culture or cultural identity. In this light, this paper studies the selected narratives as examples of cultural graphics, analysing their iconography and symbols with special attention to their traditional art style and storytelling techniques. The paper will also identify Nayar’s core ideas of cultural instance, tableau vivant, and parergon as seen in the selected works.

Keywords: graphic narratives, cultural graphics, tableau vivant, parergon, cultural instance

Myth is a common element in literature. From early literary rumblings to the Latin American “Boom” of the XX century and Murakami’s contemporary novels, myth has assumed different configurations for any number of reasons. As a consequence, the word “myth” can embrace a variety of cultural productions. Modern times lay bare far-reaching transformations where myth is still a critical element, not only in the fields literature and cultural studies, but even those of science and technology. Traditional forms of literature now coexist with new genres such as Graphic narratives, where we find that pictures and words together make critical contributions to the end product.

Graphic novels in India have gained critical attention as they began to deal with contemporary issues and engage in a re-reading of history. The history of Indian graphic novels started with the 1994 publication of Orijit Sen’s River of Stories, a work that presented a vivid portrayal of Narmada Bachao Andolan, or “Save the Narmada River Movement”. Towards the twenty-first century, the genre became more popular following the publication of Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor (2004), which explores urban life in contemporary India.

The selected mythological graphic novels are Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean and Sauptik: Blood and Flower by Amruta Patil, Sita’s Ramayana by Samhita Arni and Moyna Chitrakar, Sita: Daughter of the Earth and Draupati: The Fire-Born Princess by Saraswati Nagpal. Amruta Patil’s work Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean has been explored by Varsha Singh and Mini Chandran through their article “Reading a Retelling: Mahabharata in the Graphic Novel Form”, with an emphasis in its newfangled retelling of the epic. A counter cultural and feminist reading of the work Sita’s Ramayana has been undertaken by Rajkhowa Sonali through her thesis “Contemporary Indian Graphic Fiction and Counter Culture of the New Narrative Reading the Works of Sarnath Banerjee, Parismita Singh and Samhita Arni”. Through her research work, Sonali attempts to prove that graphic narrative emerges as an emphatic form of counter culture to traditional narratives. This paper aims to study these novels through the lens of “cultural graphics” while projecting an image of Indian culture through analysing visual elements as well as narrative style. The paper also addresses questions likewhat is cultural graphics and its role in Indian mythological graphic novels? as well as how the selected graphic novels become an authentic narrative of Indian culture with the aid of cultural graphics?

Methodology and Theoretical Framework

The proposed paper is an in-depth analysis of the selected mythological graphic novels by Indian women authors. For a cultural analysis of the selected works, Pramod K Nayar’s essay “Cultural Graphics” from his book The Indian Graphic Novel: Nation, History and Critique, is used. As Nayar says in his third chapter of the book, “This chapter builds on the foundations laid in the preceding ones in order to investigate how markers of cultural identity are introduced into the visual vocabulary of graphic novels” (Nayar, 79). The first chapters in the book give a detailed analysis of graphic history and urban graphics. The particular chapter on cultural graphics unveils cultural markers that can be considered as authentic representation of a specific culture. Through these cultural markers, the paper attempts to prove that the cultural

graphics identified in the selected graphic novels are specific to Indian culture and literary tradition.

Discussion

“Graphic novels serve as a kaleidoscope of culture, allowing readers to see the world through the lens of art and narrative”, says Art Spiegelman. Being a blend of pictures and words, graphic novels can be seen as the holistic representation of a specific culture. The graphic novels selected for study are thematically situated in specific domains of Indian culture, as they deal with mythological stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Unlike other graphic novels that deal with contemporary societal issues, these novels specifically showcase the traditions and culture of ancient India. As works that portray mythological stories through images and words, the novels of Amruta Patil, Samhita Arni and Saraswati Nagpal stand out from the conventional rendering of mythical stories. Recent studies on these graphic novels include feminist analysis of these works, since it is written by women writers from the perspectives of women characters in the mythology.

To study the works in terms of cultural graphics, first, one has to understand what “cultural graphics” is. “Cultural Graphics” may denote those cultural markers/symbols that signify a specific culture in any work of art. Cultural graphics in graphic novels can refer to iconography, traditional art styles, clothing and fashion, architecture and environment, cultural events and rituals, language and typography, colour palette, storytelling techniques, and so on. Through his essay, Pramod K Nayar gives alternative terms to encompass all the above said elements along with authentic concepts where one can incorporate the complete idea of cultural graphics. He identifies these cultural markers as instances for comprehending the culture. For Nayar, graphic novels represent cultural instances that denote icons/ images and cultural conditions/ characteristics “which [are] reproducible and communicable” (Nayar, 80). In short, cultural instance can be any symbol/icon or event that invites readers’ interpretation and their identification with a particular culture.

Amruta Patil’s Parva Duology, which consists of Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean and Sauptik: Blood and Flower, is a relevant example of cultural graphics. As the story of the Mahabharata unfolds, the readers witness the epic narrative through a bevy of cultural instances from India. The graphic novels which retell Indian mythology will obviously exhibit the cultural markers of the respective culture; this paper hopes to uncover the functional justification for said markers. The cultural instances that Nayar talks about in his book can be identified in the duology, since it is a long narrative that deals with the wide canvas of the Mahabharata.

To begin with, the author/artist uses the traditional “narrative technique” of the Sutradhaar tradition. Sutradhaar is a Sanskrit term that means “string holder”, “narrator” or “story teller”, one who plays a role in connecting and narrating stories. This tradition of narration has its roots in ancient Indian culture, particularly in the context of classical Sanskrit theatre and literature. In her duology, Patil employs two Sutradhaars for each work in order to unfold the story. In the first book Adi Parva, she anthropomorphised the river Ganga and made it the narrator.

Ganga narrates the story from the beginning of the universe (as per Vishnu Purana) up to the death of King Pandu of Hastinapur. In between, the readers witness many other stories like the Paalazhimadana1 stories of Dhruv, Yayati, Shakuntala, etc., in non-linear narrative. Adi Parva ends by replacing Ganga with Ashwatthaama. Ganga explains her departure by saying:

It is time for me to leave the skein in the hands of the next sutradhaar. Steady now, find your bearings. Reconsider everything you think you know. If you don’t recognize the landscape, keep your hand on the thread of the story. You will be led. (Adi Parva, 257)

The Ganga’s words give the readers a sense of participation as listeners, which can be considered a cultural instance from ancient India. As most ancient Indian storytelling was transmitted orally, this instance with a Sutradhaar narrating the story could be seen as a cultural instance.

Patil’s second book in the duology, Sauptik: Blood and Flower, also follows the same pattern of narration, but in a different mood, with the storytelling done by a “cursed” Sutradhaar. The people who had listened to Ganga in the previous book are now found to be impatient, prejudiced and disgusted at the new Sutradhaar for his appearance and his manner of narration. The contrast between the two Sutradhaars of the duology and the listeners’ approach to them leads to another cultural instance, the “clothing and fashion” of India. The Sutradhaar Ganga is seen to be wearing a white saree, which she wears in a manner that the native/tribal people in ancient India used to wear. In contrast to Ganga’s clothing and her way of carrying herself, Ashwatthaama is seen to be clad in dirty rags and his uncouth appearance makes the listeners disrespectful and critical. Dirty rags, dreadlocks, wounds, and the lean body of Ashwatthaama signify the stereotype of an Indian beggar. The clothing and fashion of the ladies and gentlemen who listen to the sutradhaars is also notable. Most of the women listeners in the narrative cover their chest with a stole/ scarf, which is a significant feature of Indian dress. On the other hand, most of the men are not wearing shirts, and some are completely covered with a turban on their heads. The inclusion of these diversely clad characters invokes a typical rural Indian village setting in the minds of the readers.

The clothing and fashion of other women characters in the narrative like Sathyavati, Ganga, Amba, Ambika, Ambalika, Kunti and Madri are faithful representations of Indian clothing, with which the readers are familiar through the television series, with Gandhari’s clothing being an exception. Gandhari is portrayed in a different costume, since Gandhara refers to a region which was a part of ancient India and is now situated in present-day northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. Evidently, Patil incorporates clothing styles from that culture as well. As a result, Gandhari is presented before the readers wearing a Kaftan/ Salwar, with braided hair on two sides, along with hair and ear accessories which were not so common in Indian culture. The colour Patil chooses for the kaftan is not as vibrant as the colours she attributes to Indian clothing.

1 Paalazhimadana: Samudra Manthana or Churning of the ocean is a major episode in Vishnu Purana. It explains the origin of the elixir of eternal life, Amrit.

Another instance that denotes Indian culture is produced by the “architecture and environment” in the images. Patil’s duology has numerous depictions of inner courtyards and objects that one can find in the palaces of ancient India. In page number 145 of Adi Parva, one can see an artwork that denotes a palace which has close resemblance to ancient Islamic art. In the following pages, the same artwork is spread in two pages and the transcripts on the art talk about Yayati, a legendary figure in Hindu mythology, who was cursed with premature old age. Later, the king granted a boon by his son Puru, allowing him to exchange his old age with someone willing to take it on. This particular tale explores themes of desire, consequences, and filial duty. Nonetheless, the connection between the story of Yayati and Islamic art is unknown and it may be defined as the author’s aesthetic choice. The carpets found in the painting could be assumed to be Mughal carpets with floral patterns which also connect it to Islamic art.

The palace of Hastinapur is presented with antique architecture with curved doors, ornate ceilings, and huge ceiling lamps that reflect the gaudiness prevalent in the kingdom. Also, the inclusion of the carpets in the palace cannot be ignored as it is seen on different occasions. In Indian cultural contexts as well as in artistic expressions, carpets often signify luxury, wealth, status and royalty. On the other hand, what a reader finds in the palace of Gandhara is quite distinct from the architecture depicting India and its culture. The palace of Gandhara is seen to be decorated with various textile arts which seem to be a blend of kalamkari, Kashmiri embroidery, Ikat weaving, etc. Here too, one can find carpets of different colours and designs decorating the floor.

While Patil follows her own free style of art for presenting mythology, on the other hand Samhita Arni and Moyna Chitrakar incorporate the traditional art style of West Bengal in their graphic novel Sita’s Ramayana. Patua Art, also known as Patachitra, is a scroll painting practised by the Patua community in West Bengal. This artistic style, which denotes the culture and practices of a particular community, can be considered as one of the cultural instances that Nayar discusses. Patua art is not limited to its visual manifestation, as it is intimately linked with Indian storytelling traditions. The art is a unique medium for preserving and spreading the mythological stories of India. In Sita’s Ramayana, the reader finds the epic story of the Ramayana from Sita’s perspective, which is filtered through Patua art, thus creating a cultural fusion. The art, the artist and the narrator/author, together make the work not only vibrant but meaningful as well.

Another instance that Nayar mentions is the tableau vivant. Tableau vivant refers to “a formation of silent, still performers, used since medieval times to represent religious or artistic scenes” (Chambers, 2010). It can be defined as a silent live performance in which actors create living pictures through their position/poses. According to Nayar:

The tableau vivant might be described as ‘short narrative sequences… in which the “real life” hidden beyond the still image is exposed’ (Gomes and Peuckert 2010:123).

Citing Barthes, Gomes and Peuckert add: ‘Such tableaux do not represent scenes picked out randomly from a chain of events, but rather particular “pregnant moments” [Barthes’ phrase] in which past, present and future are condensed’ (123). (Nayar 87)

By “pregnant moments”, Nayar emphasises that those moments are the result of seeing “the visual as embodying an intensity of events” (Nayar 87), which “are meant to point to a particular moment” (Nayar 87). The “pregnant moments” can be the visual depiction in which one may find all the heightened emotions and expressions in a single frame. To capture and comprise all the feelings from a chain of events, intensively in a single image, is a challenging endeavour for the artists, and it also entices the audience/readers to put as much imagination into it as the artists themselves. As far as the graphic novels are concerned, the instances of tableau vivant that mark a particular culture are countless. In the case of Indian graphic novels, one can find these “pregnant moments”, in which the culture of India is well inscribed.

The two graphic novels, Sita: Daughter of the Earth and Draupadi: The Fire-born Princess by Saraswati Nagpal are the retellings of the mythological stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, respectively. Both the novels follow similar illustrations to narrate the story along with the transcripts. The narration is from the perspectives of Sita and Draupadi, which place the novels under the heading of “feminist retellings”. Nagpal constructs the two novels similarly: the events and the introduction of the protagonists in both novels share several similarities. Along with this, the characters’ facial features are also relatively similar.

In Sita: Daughter of the Earth, the narration starts with the introduction of Sita in a full page, with five captions surrounding Sita’s image. The graphic novel also ends with the same image of Sita in a full page surrounding four captions/speech bubbles. Both these images can be considered an example of what Nayar calls as tableau vivant. The first image gives the clue of Sita’s divine origin by her way of sitting, the posture of her hands and the grace on her face. The captions summarise the misfortunes that she is going to face sooner or later. “It was an age of magical powers and potent prayers used by forces of good and evil. It was a time when wonderful miracles or terrible misfortune could change a man’s life in the blink of an eye” (Sita: Daughter of the Earth, 5). The image of Sita, along with the caption, undoubtedly can be seen as a “pregnant moment”, where almost every incident in the tale is summarised. Hence the frame forms a tableau vivant.

The second image of Sita which is included at the end of the novel also stands as an example of tableau vivant. In it, the image of Sita remains the same, but the background and the captions have changed. The first image has a background of forts, whereas in the second image the forts are replaced by images similar to underground caves. Through the speech bubbles, Sita tells the readers about her past, present and the future, which is also a seminal feature of tableau vivant. Her past unfolds when she says, “[...] I live on in the hearts of the people of Ayodhya, and memories of me as princess and queen will be passed on from generation to generation” (Nagpal, 2011, p 91). Her present unfolds when she says, “the story of my life ends here, in my true home, where I will immortally remain, a daughter of the earth” (Nagpal, 2011, p 91). Her future comes into view as she says, “I know my Rama will never marry another woman, but will keep a golden statue of me on his throne. For him, I will be the only Queen of Ayodhya” (Sita: Daughter of the Earth,91).

The second novel by Nagpal, Draupadi: The Fire-born Princess, also has a full-page image of the protagonist, Draupadi, at the opening of the novel. Unlike Sita’s image, Draupadi is

portrayed with the expressions like that of a warrior. The colour of the background is a mixture of yellow, orange and red that denotes fire. In the lower left corner of the page sits Maharishi Vyasa, writing with his quill, and surrounding the image of Draupadi are armed men fighting each other. Without any caption, a reader can understand that this is the story about the life of Draupadi, where war plays a prominent place, and of Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata, who records the events for the future. The captions arranged in a downward sequence give the readers an idea of the age in which the story is taking place and who the protagonist of the story will be. Hence the image is considered to be an instance of tableau vivant, where so many details of the story are “condensed” and captured.

Parergon is another instance which Nayar discusses, referencing Jaques Derrida’s seminal essay The Parergon (1979). In Derrida’s words, parergon is “against, beside and above and beyond the ergon, the work accomplished. But it is not incidental: it is connected to, cooperates in its operation from the outside” (Derrida, 20). Nayar explains it further as:

The Parergon adds something extra: it intervenes with the inside only because the inside lacks something. Thus, although the parergon is supposedly exterior, it affects and is required by the interior or inside work to supply a lack. So, in short, it cannot be merely extrinsic. (Nayar, 89)

The idea of Parergon as something additional that supplements meaning to a work is seminal in the context of cultural graphics. Thus, mythological graphic novels are considered novels that unravel the tradition of a specific culture. It could be the cover art of a particular work, that typically exists outside the main narrative but serves as a visual representation and invitation to the story within. Inserts and extras, which are additional materials, such as notes, bonus artworks, maps, etc., are included in the graphic novels but not considered inevitable to the main narrative. They can also be considered parergons. Author/ Artist commentary, alongside or as endnotes to the graphic novels can also be considered parergons.

An absolute example of the instance of Parergon in the selected mythological graphic novels can be seen in Amruta Patil’s duology. The cover art of both novels serves as parergon by providing the reader with valuable insights regarding the works’ content. The front cover of Adi Parva is the image of Ananthashayanam2, which is the sleeping pose of Lord Vishnu, on his celestial snake Anant, in the ocean. Its image is associated with the ocean, which is a reference to the infiniteness of the ocean; it references as well the cosmic tale which is going to unfold in the work. The back cover of Adi Parva is the picture of Amrit kumbh3 , which signifies the immortality of the cosmic tale. Both Lord Vishnu and Amrit are the origin and cause of the story that Patil narrates. The second book, Sauptik, has a front cover with the image of a lady who is facing backwards. The lady is assumed to be Draupadi, whose saree’s pallu4 extended to the back cover where it surrounds the image of Vajra5, one of the most

2 Ananthashayanam: Lord Vishnu’s sleeping on the serpent Anantha is typically called ananthashayanam.

3 Kumbh: literally means urn or pitcher. Here an urn which has the elixir of eternal life, that is, Amrit.

4 Pallu: the loose end of a sari, worn over one shoulder or the head

5 Vajra: the weapon of Indra.

powerful weapons in the universe. As an instance of Parergon, this front and back cover of the work denotes the role of Draupadi and her undressing before the public that paved the way for the utter destruction of the Kaurava clan. Hence, both the cover images stand as an invitation to and summary of the narrative.

Another instance of parergon, as Nayar opines, is the descriptions that stand outside of the narratives and serve as parergons, infusing the narrative with a deeper meaning. According to Nayar:

It is possible to see the parergon, the seemingly unimportant object in the margins, as offering us a way of interpreting the scene unfolding. But they also contribute a form of cultural commentary enabling a cultural literacy connected to the main narrative being portrayed at the centre or the foreground of the visual narrative. (Nayar, 91)

Amruta Patil’s Sauptik: Blood and Flower, opens with the sign of “Soundarya Lahari”6 verse no. 2, printed on a single page. As this particular book narrates the story of the Mahabharata with emphasis given to the Kurukshetra war, the significance of this sign could be considered an instance of parergon. The sign denotes the infinite and incomparable power of Shakti, the goddess. The literal meaning of the verse is that, it is by collecting the dust particles from the feet of Shakti that Brahma made the whole universe. There is here an insult to Draupadi, a woman who was given seminal importance in the narrative, and the readers witness the absolute destruction of those who participated in the insult. The sign that denotes “soundarya lahari” stands separate from the narrative, but has deep meanings that add to the central narrative. One could find more instances like this in this particular novel with and without the intervention of the sutradhaar Ashwatthaama. These inserts or extras in the narrative are particularly given as separate pages along with the visual narrative. What sets these “extras” apart from the core narration is the background colour, that is, the skin colour with a fine and smooth texture of paper. Through these inserts and extras, the author often directly addresses the readers and shares thoughts which are highly philosophical. These philosophical thoughts have an absolute connection to the content presented in the graphic novel.

In Draupadi: The Fire-born Princess, the page before the narrative starts stands as a parergon to the novel. The inclusion of “The Kuru Family Tree” in full-page serves as an introduction to the characters in the novel. Towards the end, the book also includes notes on Draupadi and her story as legend. As endnotes to the novel, the author includes a brief description of significant characters (Karna and Shikhandi) and of rituals (Yajna, Niyoga, Swayamvara etc), which add to the reader’s understanding. All of these components in the making of a graphic novel could be seen as instances of parergon.

6 Soundarya Lahari: A composition of 100 verses. The verses are believed to be composed by Shiva and Adi Shakaracharya.

Conclusion

Cultural graphics in Indian mythological graphic narratives play a crucial role in the process of creating meaning in the novels’ cultural context. As graphic novels that retell mythology, written by women authors from the perspective of women characters, the ordinary reading of the novels through a feminist lens is quite outdated as far as the new academia is concerned. By bringing in concepts related to cultural graphics in the study of the selected works, the meaning in the novels is enhanced. The selected graphic novels by the three women writers highlight Indian culture. The concepts/features of cultural instances, tableau vivant and parergon, that were put forward by Pramod K Nayar, through his essay, has now become a part of the “visual vocabulary of the graphic narrative” (Nayar, 79). The need for analysing Indian mythological graphic novels in terms of cultural graphics is essential, since the subject it deals with is so close to Indian traditions. By incorporating the ideas of cultural graphics to the traditional yet modern narrative, there occurs a symbiotic dynamics where tradition and modernity converge.

References

Arni, S. & Chitrakar, M. (2011). Sita’s Ramayana. Tara Books. Chambers, C. (2010). The continuum companion to twentieth century theatre. Oxford Reference.

Derrida, J. & Owens, C. (1979). The Parergon, October, 9, 3–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/778319

Nagpal, S. (2011). Sita: Daughter of the Earth. Kalyani Navyug Media. Nagpal, S. (2012). Draupati: The fire-born princess. Kalyani Navyug Media.

Nayar, P. K. (2016). The Indian graphic novel: Nation, history and critique. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315659435

Patil, A. (2012). Adi Parva: Churning of the ocean. HarperCollins. Patil, A. (2016). Sauptik: Blood and flowers. HarperCollins.

Rajkhowa, S. (2019). Contemporary Indian graphic fiction and counter culture of the New Narrative Reading the Works of Sarnath Banerjee, Parismita Singh and Samhita Arni”. [Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation]. Gauhati University.

Corresponding author: Raveena Prakasan

Email: raveenaprakasan@gmail.com

Writings from Under the Mushroom Cloud: Atomic Bomb Literature as a Literature of Atrocity

Atisha Rai Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation, Bowrampet, Hyderabad, India

Erratum

Thia paper was re-uploaded, September 2, 2024, to correct an omission in the author's affiliation on page 77.

Abstract

Atomic bomb literature comprises texts that emerged out of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Almost all these writings deal directly or indirectly with the singular experience of the world’s first nuclear attacks. A-bomb literature has long been pushed to the margins of Japanese literature, often dismissed as testimonial writing or even history, and excluded from writings about violence. Moreover, the appropriation of the Hiroshima experience by peace and anti-nuclear movements has limited our understanding of the atomic bombings and framed it within the anti-nuclear discourse. This has had the effect of limiting the “subversive potential of Hiroshima.” Hiroshima as a historic event in world history has become part of a much larger humanist narrative which collectivises and universalises the atomic bombing. These narratives portray the atomic holocaust as a universal offence against humanity and not as crimes against the people of one country. The popular and dominant narratives of Hiroshima have failed to acknowledge the atomic bombing as an atrocity. This paper will argue that atomic bomb literature must be read, and interpreted, as a literature of atrocity. My argument is based on Lawrence Langer’s proposition that a literature of atrocity deals with the disintegration of the human image in the face of inappropriate death. A literature of atrocity strips death of its romantic dress and reveals man’s fragile existence and the vulnerability of the flesh. In short, it deals with “inappropriate death.”

Keywords: atomic bomb literature, atomic bombings, Hiroshima, literature of atrocity, Japanese post-war literature

Before Hiroshima, even before the first atomic bomb experiment, there was a type of fiction that predicted the development of such a weapon. As early as 1914, H.G. Wells predicted the atom bomb in his novel The World Set Free. This earliest vision of atomic energy was as a source of power that could light up cities for a whole year and power battleships (Wells, 1914, p. 26). The discovery of the power of the atom had a profound social impact and was often compared to the discovery of fire. Thus, the advent of radioactivity unveiled the “possibility of an entirely new civilization.” This “new civilization” was to be a utopia marked by plenty, an Eden (Wells, 1914, p. 28). Years later, these same ideas were echoed by President Truman while announcing the world’s first atomic bomb attack. The dream of an Eden that the novelist imagined in The World Set Free, however, was short-lived. The atomic power first brought progress and then war, the “last war.” As he wrote in The Last War, the world had entered a “monstrous phase of destruction” as the “the unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs” roared (Wells, 1914, p. 137). The bombs incinerated institutions – financial, industrial, political, and social – that held human society together: “Most of the capital cities of the world were burning; millions of people had already perished, and over great areas government was at an end” (Wells, 1914, p. 137).

Wells’ work not only predicted the bomb but may have inspired it; it may also have foreseen the literature that would be borne out of the nuclear ruins of the future. Wells’ remark that “no complete contemporary account of the explosion of the atomic bombs survives” (p. 202) is eerily familiar to John Whittier Treat’s comment, from his book Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, about Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “Everything one first reads of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is revealed to be incorrect somehow” (p. 84). Since the power of the bomb lay not just in disrupting human society but also in fragmenting narrative, time, and memory, it was only fitting that atomic bomb literature replicated this fragmentation. If literature predicted the bomb, then it is to literature we must turn to understand Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Atomic bomb literature must begin first by acknowledging the violence of the bomb and by recognizing the event as an atrocity. In the seven decades since the world’s first atomic bomb, nuclear weapons one thousand times more powerful than “Little Boy” have proliferated, introducing into our everyday vocabulary terms like thermonuclear and megadeath. The first atom bomb now seems banal; its power miniscule compared to the newer weapons of mass annihilation. According to Yuki Miyamoto, violence becomes banal when the act of violence is normalised and when representations of such acts fail to reveal the real horrors of the violence (p. 125).

The atomic bomb narratives that emerged from the ruins of Hiroshima have failed to stir the imagination of the public and reveal the true horrors of atomic warfare. One of the dominant narratives of the atomic bombing was one forwarded by the Americans that propagated the idea that the bombings were necessary to end the war. The first American atomic bomb narrative (a statement by the President of the United States) introduced three key points: (i) in the “race” against the Germans, the Allied powers had won the “battle of the laboratories” by developing the atom bomb before their enemies; (ii) atomic energy could one day be used as a power

source; (iii) and atomic power could be used to maintain peace in the world. This narrative of Hiroshima was one of technological triumph and peace, one that propelled the world into the nuclear age, with the United States at the helm.

Meanwhile, in Japan the post-war Japanese national identity was reconfigured by reconstructing and restructuring the collective memory of the atomic bombings, which was employed to invent the myth of Japanese victimhood. In the shadow of the atomic bomb, it was convenient for Japan to forget its wartime transgressions that came to be seen as “conventional” forms of war as against the unconventional might of nuclear power (Orr, 2001, p. 44). Since Japan did not, nor did it plan to, possess nuclear weapons, it could fully embrace the role of the victim in the postwar period. The atomic narratives that thus emerged were narratives of peace, redemption, and transformation. They tried to ascribe meaning to the tragedy and incorporate them into a familiar history. This narrative also influenced the commemoration practices in Hiroshima that were guided by the ideology of peace, demonstrating that its discourse of peace and transformation was the dominant manner in which the city of Hiroshima explained and remembered the bomb. The spatial reorganisation of Hiroshima has structured the topography of remembrance by containing the memories of the atomic bomb within certain sites like the Atomic Bomb Dome and the Peace Memorial Park and Museum. In reconstructing Hiroshima, the city sought not just to erase the past but to imbue the past with new meanings. Atomic bomb literature, then, emerged as a counter-narrative to these dominant narratives that saw the event as a homogeneous experience and dismissed alternative forms of remembrance.

This paper argues that atomic bomb literature countered the official narratives in two ways –first, by moving away from the sites of memory and official spaces of memorialisation, and second, by reclaiming the violence of the bombs, i.e. by functioning as a literature of atrocity. As a literature of atrocity – which was an outcome of modern violence, the violence of the gas chambers and the nuclear bombs – a-bomb literature deals with the disintegration of the human image in the face of inappropriate death. According to Edwin Shneidman (2007), a “good death” (p. 245) (appropriate death) is one which a person might choose for himself had he an option. An inappropriate death, therefore, is a sudden and discontinuous experience that threatens to reduce life to a “cruel and random event.” A literature of atrocity strips death of its romantic attire and reveals man’s fragile existence and the vulnerability of the flesh. The key characteristic of the literature of atrocity is the “perpetual obsession with premature or inappropriate death” (Langer, 1978, p. 65), the dehumanisation of the body, and the image of complete annihilation – of the self and the world. In the age of atrocity, writes Lawrence Langer, the image of private individual deaths has been replaced by an image of general destruction and annihilation.

Inappropriate Death in the Age of Atrocity

Nuclear weapons make individual death impossible by depriving death of its meaning, by reducing humans to radioactive ash, indistinguishable from the ashes of his home. According to Morgenthau (1961), this total annihilation of human bodies and social structures – families and societies – makes “both society and history impossible” (n.p.). Mass deaths or the

simultaneous destruction of men emphasises the quantity – the number of people killed (the more the better) – and in their final moments, turning human beings into animals who are slaughtered, their deaths rendered meaningless. The death of a hero becomes meaningful only when his death serves a purpose. For Morgenthau, the idea of an honourable death is impossible in the nuclear age because the concept of honour is valid only within a society, within a social space where the individual has membership. Nuclear weapons threaten the very existence of civilization. They make a good and honourable death impossible, so there emerges the risk of inappropriate death.

A “good death” is described as one that is appropriate not just for the person dying but also for those affected by the person’s death. It is a death the survivors can “live with”, one that will keep intact, or not violate, the image of the dead person. A good death is quick, painless, with no prolonged suffering, and if it happens during a heroic act, it’s even better (Shneidman, 1983, p. 28). Accordingly, Shneidman’s (1983) idea of an appropriate death is one that is “appropriate to the individual’s time of life, to his style of life, to his situation in life…and it is appropriate to the significant others in his life” (p. 29). In the case of an appropriate death, the dying person comes to terms with his death, acknowledges it, and deals with it realistically. While Shneidman (1983) is generally referring to deaths due to sickness, his view of a good death is humane. Noting the dual and paradoxical nature of death, Shneidman (1983) states that one can only experience the death of another, never his own. In this way, our experience of death is always indirect or second-hand.

Death then has two phenomenological aspects – a private one and a public one, that is, death that one anticipates for oneself and the experience of someone else’s death. Since a person can neither experience his own birth nor his death introspectively, life and death are not events; they are events only for others who are witnessing them (Shneidman, 1983, p. 56). In case of a sudden death, the pain and grief are borne by the survivor; when death is preceded by a prolonged suffering, it is the dying who has to bear the anguish (Shneidman, 1983, p. 65). In wartime Japan, the most prominent image of an appropriate (honourable) death was that of the young kamikaze pilots crashing their planes into enemy warships crying “Banzai” before dying for their emperor and country. This concept of the “noble” death was a remnant of the samurai ritual suicide called seppuku that was seen as heroic. However, in an age of atrocity, appropriate or heroic death was no longer an option.

In atomic bomb literature, the image of private death is replaced by images of mass destruction and annihilation. This new view of sudden violent death strained man’s imagination as he looked for a new language to describe and give meaning to his mortality. The myths of sacrifice and martyrdom had become laughable in the face of mass death, and resistance was either impossible or futile. In the absence of a visible, easily identifiable enemy against whom victims could channel their anger and hate, the hibakushas (survivors of the atomic bomb) had nothing to fight against; instead, they chose to fight “for” peace in a nuclear-free world. This activism validated the inappropriate deaths of the original victims – those instantly obliterated by the bomb – by endowing their deaths with meaning. In Hiroshima, the looming shadow of death made the victims numb, a condition Robert Lifton (1967) called “psychic numbing.” Such

paralysis of emotions and senses threatened to make the survivors less than human. Traditional symbols and images were, therefore, inadequate to represent death in the age of atrocity. In Masuji Ibuse’s short story “The Crazy Iris”, old symbols take on new meanings and the flowers that were once a symbol of honourable, even a preferred death, become a grotesque symbol of absurd death in the atomic age.

Events in Ibuse’s story take place after Hiroshima and far from that bombed city, but the consequences of the bomb are made to transcend time and space. One morning, a woman’s dead body is found floating in a pond. Beside the body is a cluster of irises. Later, it is discovered that the dead woman, who had been in Hiroshima on the day of the bombing, had witnessed the air raid in Fukuyama. Traumatised by the second event, she “went clean off the rocker” (Ibuse, 1985, p. 34). The events leading to her death can only be guessed, never confirmed.

Perhaps, they said, the victim had been terrified by the air raid and in a fit of hysteria ran headlong from the town. Overcome by emotion, she may have leaped into the pond. Their examination of the body had revealed a burn on the cheek, which obviously lent credence to this theory (p. 33).

The death may or may not have been a delayed result of the bomb. The weapon had snapped the link that provided a clear line of progression from life to death, making the girl’s death random. In the post-Hiroshima world, the iris blooming out of season becomes symbolic of a life that is snuffed out young. The “twisted stem with its belated, purple flowers” (p. 34) appears unnatural, pointing to the disruption of not only the social rhythms of life but also the natural order. The blooming of the iris is as mysterious as the girl’s death. When the narrator asks his friend “Do you think that iris was frightened into bloom?” the friend answers, “It must have gone crazy!” (p. 34). The crazy iris seems an apt symbol for a death that is crazy. The sight of the flowers brings another death and another blooming iris to the narrator’s mind. The setting of this other death is almost indistinguishable from the first: a house that looks out onto a pond and in the pond, a woman’s body and beside it, a cluster of blooming irises.

One morning, a writer opens his window to find another girl’s body floating on the pond. This girl’s death is a sharp contrast to the “crazy iris” girl. The latter was found in an “old nightgown tied with a red sash,” while the other girl was wearing “a beautiful kimono whose sleeves hovered on the surface of the water like the fins of a goldfish” (pp. 33–34). The kimono works as a symbol of an honourable death. An unmarried pregnant girl dying by suicide, though tragic, does not seem absurd; it even seems fitting. Her death, though its manner violent, is also gentle, but this gentleness comes from her brother’s actions that turn her death into an appropriate one. His actions validate hers and suggest that dying was the only, and the right, option left to her. Ibuse Masuji’s description of her death is also poignant:

When the cabinetmaker found his sister, he knelt down by the pond and stretched out his hand to her body. He took one of her arms and gently placed it over her swollen stomach; then he took her other arm and placed it on her stomach in the same way so

that one hand lay ceremoniously over the other and the wide sleeved covered her body. (p. 34)

His actions evoke a ritual of mourning, of gently letting go of the dead; in contrast, the “crazy iris” girl is not allowed this rite. The vision of that earlier death is already receding from the narrator’s mind who cannot remember if it had been a real event (“something I had once heard”) or fiction (“perhaps a part of a story”) (p. 34). The two deaths represent what Hoffman calls a realistic and idealistic death – the first dominated by images of decay and the other seen as an act of transcendence, dominated by the views of eternity and immortality. The two irises in Ibuse’s story represent the two images of death. Iris, in Japanese culture, traditionally represented protection and the warrior spirit. Ibuse subverts this traditional symbol, suggesting a discontinuity with the past.

This disjunction is further evident in the breakdown of law and order and familial ties in the aftermath of the bombings. Institutional authority, embodied by the Japanese Kempei military police, disintegrates following the country’s defeat; their uniforms, once a symbol of power, are rendered meaningless as they fail to prevent people from stealing and instead turn a blind eye, pretending not to see anything. The breakdown of familial relationships is symbolised by the vermilion Imbe-ware water jar. The landlady refuses to part with the jar despite the narrator’s several attempts to buy it off her because it had been in the woman’s family since her father’s days and hence was imbued with personal memories. Meanwhile, the jar is also an important relic from the narrator’s childhood: “I remembered this jar standing in the same place ever since my school days” (p. 19). So, when the jar is destroyed, the landlady and the narrator both lose their ties with a past that was embodied in the water jar. The image of the jar continues to haunt the narrator, and in its loss, he sees the transient nature of beauty.

Rituals and rites that gave meaning to individual deaths were either denied, as in the case of mass deaths, or made redundant. Ceremonies and rituals give survivors closure; it assures them of the formal end of the dead person’s life and the beginning of another journey by guaranteeing the possibility of spiritual transcendence. When this ritual is disrupted, survivors are left with the image of death as a random event devoid of meaning. In Hiroko Takenishi’s short story “The Rite,” a hibakusha woman seeks the “rite” that would enable her friends killed in the bombing to rest in peace. Death rituals allow families to gently and appropriately sever the ties with the deceased. It allows them to mourn the dead and reaffirm their own lives by reasserting their social ties. Yohko Tsuji notes that Japanese funeral rituals serve as “rites of passage to ancestorhood” (2011, p. 30). They guide the dead in their journey from “spirit” to “ancestor,” and their deaths are commemorated by the future generations through the ritual of ancestor worship. In this way, the past and the future are linked by ritual mourning and commemoration. When this process is disturbed, the survivors are prevented from properly grieving the dead and reasserting their own survival. In “The Rite,” Aki cannot perform the rites for her friends because she has never seen their dead bodies and hence, cannot confirm their deaths:

Aki has never seen Kazue’s dead body. Nor Emiko’s dead body.

No, nor Ikuko’s.

Nor has she ever come across anyone else who witnessed their end or verified the deaths of Junko or Kiyoko or Kazue or Yayoi. (p. 182)

This absence and lack of information prevents Aki from mourning them and moving on with her own life. Aki’s narrative that switches between the past of Hiroshima and her present is indicative of her state of mind as she continues to revisit her past in search of answers. Takenishi suggests that the failure to recognize individual deaths has disrupted the process of grieving. Aki’s friends have been buried under a “mound of black earth” with all the other dead, making their deaths indistinguishable from all those “other deaths” (p. 183). Aki notes that there are rites that are appropriate for the various ways of dying and those that befit the status of the deceased. There are funeral rites involving caskets, hearses, and funeral processions; some bury their dead in “secluded tombs,” others mark the graves with rocks. Rites for the dead are performed in palaces, in tin-roofed huts, and under the stars: “There are all kinds of rites to go with death” (p. 180). Aki imagines the funeral of an Egyptian nobleman after seeing a picture of his funeral urn in a magazine.

His loved ones left behind would have assembled before him to mourn this dead man. Some would have prayed, some would have waved incense censers, some would have made funeral offerings of great price. The lid of the alabaster urn would then have been removed and his internal organs gently placed within…There without a doubt was a fitting way to start out on death’s journey, with the dead well tended and watched over by the living (p. 173).

Aki realises that there was a “secure and reassuring way to die” (p. 173). The nobleman had entrusted a part of himself (his organs kept inside the urn) to the living, and the living had, by performing the funeral rites, solemnised their link with the dead. Even Aki’s friend Tomiko’s unborn miscarried children had been laid to rest in small jars buried under a heap of flowers. Aki also imagines a rite for her sick friend Setsuko. After her death, there will be “the casket, the cremation, the solemn chanting of the sutras, the funeral flowers…” (p. 180). Through such ritualised activities, Setsuko will be laid to rest and once the mourners leave, life will continue. She imagines:

In the deserted place of mourning there will be no sign of life until the garbageman appears, his hand towel round his head. He will come from the doorway and approach the altar and begin to clear away the funeral flower-wreaths (p. 180).

The lives that were disrupted by a person’s death are restored to their normal rhythm and the survivors return to the land of the living. But Kazue, Emiko, and Ikuko’s deaths are not “fully accomplished” because the appropriate rites of mourning have not been performed for them (p. 183). Denied the right to mourn her friends, Aki’s vision of life is permeated by images of death and her encounter with it. The absent deaths of her friends reveal not only the violence

of the event, but Aki’s trauma borne out of having survived the bombing, which is exacerbated by the absence of her friends and her “great anger and deep hate” that cannot find an outlet.

Cathy Caruth (1996) notes that trauma is not the story of an escape from death but its impact on the lives of the survivors. Trauma is not “known” to the survivor until it is imposed again. In its “delayed appearance,” trauma reveals what was until then unknown. Trauma, hence, is a belated experience of the violence. Stories of trauma, Caruth says, oscillate between “the unbearable nature of an event” and the “unbearable nature of its survival” (p. 7). In its belatedness, trauma reveals its unique nature – the traumatic experience is not repeated after it is forgotten but it is through forgetting that it is first experienced (p. 17). Trauma resists language and memory and cannot be known except through its recurrence. This “latency” inherent in the traumatic experience creates a temporal gap and the mind recognizes the threat too little too late so that “the survivor is forced, continually, to confront it over and over again” (p. 62). Survival, then, is not the successful passage of trauma but its endless repetition.

In her flashbacks, Aki keeps revisiting the day of the bombing and the last memories of her friends. Gazing at the “vast multitude of dead”, Aki tells herself this is only a “temporary phenomenon” (p. 192). The place will regain its original appearance and her friends will return, she assures herself. But the city has lost its familiarity and has become a strange place where something seems to have ended (p. 193). Takenishi reveals the tension in survivor’s testimonies between absence and presence and between knowing and not knowing. In “The Rite”, the collapse of traditional symbols and rituals and the structure of meaning they represented make life and death insignificant, and that is its own kind of violence. It also indicates that the peace ceremonies and commemorative practices do not offer survivors the proper channel to grieve and mourn the dead. Atomic bomb literature draws the reader’s attention to images of inappropriate death, and in doing so, reveals not just the scale of destruction but the inhuman nature of death in the atomic age.

The Real Hiroshima: Unmapped Spaces of Survivors

On 6 August, Nakamura Sugimatsu was in Hiroshima constructing a fire lane when the bomb knocked him down and buried him under the debris of a building. He survived but never recovered. For years, he continued to suffer from atomic bomb disease. Life in postwar Japan was hard, food was scarce, and Sugimatsu and his six children had to rely on welfare and small jobs to survive. Sugimatsu’s health was fragile; he had violent fits, and he would thrash around, crying. Several times, he tried to end his life and once, even thought of killing himself and the children. No one had answers for his baffling disease and the doctors could neither find a reason for his illness nor a cure. For over eight years (1953–1960), photographer Fukushima Kikujiro documented the life of Nakamura Sugimatsu and his family. Sugimatsu wanted Kikujiro to record every detail of his life and show to the world the pain a hibakusha had to live through day after day (Yuki, 2011). The photos are an intimate portrayal of the despair of a sick man and the gradual disintegration of a family. One photo shows Sugimatsu, his ribs protruding out of his thin body, only wearing a loincloth and squatting on his futon. Another shows him, his back turned to the camera, scratching a wooden fence as he waits for the pain to subside. A

photo of him suffering a violent fit while his daughter runs out of the room, and another one of him leaning out of a window, in despair, are deeply personal images of private moments of pain and anguish. Kikujiro photographed Sugimatsu sick at home, his body distorted by pain and marked by scars from wounds he had inflicted on himself. These images contradict the images of the safe spaces in official commemorative sites at the Hiroshima Peace Park. This is done by locating hibakusha bodies within their lived spaces that are often filled with anguish and desperation.

After the bombing, the reclaiming of the city was important for the symbolic rebirth of the survivors and their reintegration into society. Critical to this rebirth was the process of forging human bonds and reasserting human relations that had been severed by the bomb (Lifton, 1967, p. 90). Survivors who had fled the city in the aftermath of the bombing returned to reclaim their territory and reaffirm the ties between “self and dwelling place” (p. 92). But their return, Lifton notes, was also tied to their unwillingness to abandon the dead. In the physical space of Hiroshima, survivors battled with their death guilt and anxiety. Rumours that Hiroshima would be unliveable for seventy-five years due to radiation were proved wrong as shanties quickly mushroomed in the atomic ruins within months of the bombing. According to Francesco Comotti (2017), the transformation of the human environment from a safe space to one of violence was paralleled in the body and the psyche of the survivor. The survivor’s life became so intertwined with images of death that it was impossible for them to leave the place where trauma was continuously reenacted (p. 271).

Writer Yoko Ota keeps returning to her city, where she witnessed the bomb, and with every visit the city keeps changing into a strange, alien place. A “strange landscape” was emerging out of the ruins and anything that was out of place in this new urban space, like the “miserable roadside stands”, were pushed to the margins (1989, p. 67). There is a tension between personal and public spaces in Ota’s fiction. In her short story “Fireflies,” Ota juxtaposes the new Hiroshima, inhabited by men and women full of vitality, with the dreary homes of sick hibakushas. The hibakushas inhabit a liminal place and exist in makeshift shacks and huts, spaces situated on the margins. Ota’s “Fireflies” (1985) and “Residues of Squalor” (1989) are both located in the makeshift shacks that were built on the former military parade ground. The shacks were home to atomic bomb survivors, expatriates, and former soldiers – all of them living on the margins.

Ota’s sister Teiko and her family lived in one of these shacks that could neither be called a home nor a temporary place of residence. The shack was “temporary”, yet Teiko had been living there for seven years. No inhabitant had managed to move out of the shacks, suggesting not only postwar economic hardship but perhaps also the association of survivors with sites of trauma. Ota (1985) remarks on the unusual nature of the place:

The place she lived in was not what you would normally call a “house”. I don’t know the right word for it a shack, a barrack, some kind of little living unit appropriate to this devastated city (p. 88)

The location of these dwellings, the former military parade ground, also illustrates the entrapment of survivors – whether voluntary or involuntary – in the past, indicating that their lives were never freed from the memories of the bombing. The place was at once an area of renewal and a site of limbo, with the survivors forever caught between the history of the place and their own present. The temporary nature of these dwellings contests the very idea of “home” as the stability they provide is only transient. This is in sharp contrast to the fixed and sacred space of the Hiroshima Peace Park that provides a structure of meaning to the divergent memories and experiences of survivors. The narrative of transformation and renewal that are embodied in these official memorial spaces find no place in the domestic spaces of hibakushas. Their homes provide no haven from their traumatic memories which, like the slugs that infest their shacks, threaten to invade their homes; the slugs then become a metaphor for the atomic memories:

A bunch of blood relations was asleep scrunched up under one mosquito net, each shouldering a misfortune that was unthinkable in normal situations; on that net a group of slugs, also unthinkable in normal times, was creeping around (1989, p. 56)

The houses had little protection from the rain and winds and during the rainy season, slugs bred under the rotting floors. In an attempt to get rid of the slugs, Ota’s mother and sister dropped them in salt water, but their melted bodies looked like “human beings heaped up in a mound of death, half burnt but not completely melted” (1989, p. 57). Ota, unable to bear the sight, sprinkled DDT around the house to prevent the slugs from entering – “The slugs would run away, I thought” – but this proved to be a more cruel solution than salt water as the DDT melted the “soft bodies of the slugs” (1989, p. 58). Looking at their melting and glistening bodies, Ota immediately returns to the day of the bombing: “I had to forget the presence of the slugs as quickly as possible. It was because I recalled the groups of humans massacred seven years ago” (p. 58). At this moment, she takes on the role of both the victim (of the bomb) and the victimizer, indicating survivors’ guilt and death anxiety. DDT was one of the tools the Americans used to sanitise Japanese bodies. After the war, acute food shortage and lack of medical infrastructure led to rampant spread of disease in the Japanese countryside. To prevent epidemics, the American occupying forces launched vaccination programs and resorted to using DDT. The Japanese were sprayed with the powder at schools, hospitals, and other public places; it was often a humiliating experience (Igarashi, 2000, p. 67). For many, DDT became an enduring symbol of Japan’s defeat. Ota’s use of DDT then takes on a symbolic meaning as she uses the tool of the victor to get rid of the slugs that invade her domestic space. The sight of the melting slugs, however, make her nauseous and she covers their slimy bodies with a newspaper, thus averting her gaze from the massacre she has caused. But even as she turns away, memories of the bombing, nudged by the sight of the melting slugs, resurface. To Ota, the slugs seem to represent the souls of dead soldiers killed in the parade ground.

The “home” is also located in a site of trauma, a place where hundreds had died while fleeing the bomb. The bones of the dead buried on the parade ground threaten to come out and confront the survivors, indicating that the memories of the bomb lie just underneath the surface. Ota’s

younger brother Tetsuji was among those killed at the present site where the homes for the bombed had cropped up. But his death was never discussed in the family.

We did not want to wake the wailing that had sunk to the bottom of our hearts. Even among blood relatives, people refrained from talking about their grief and shed unbearable tears, perhaps in bed, when the world was quietly asleep. (1989, p. 60)

The silence of the survivors reveals their attempt to distance themselves from the event.

Conclusion

Despite claims of the universality of nuclear victimhood, the hibakushas have suffered alone, shedding “unbearable tears” in their beds while the world slept. Even those who had witnessed the bombing together were divided by their grief. It is the most private space – the bed – that becomes the site of personal grieving, suggesting that the official sites of commemoration do not offer survivors the space to heal and grieve; it only aids the process of remembering the bombing. In Ota’s stories, the readers view Hiroshima through the eyes of a victim, and in doing so, the city takes on a new meaning, one that is divorced from the peace narrative enshrined in the cityscape. Like photographer Kikujiro’s deeply personal photos of Sugimatsu, these stories are intimate portrayals of the private spaces of the hibakushas, ones imbued by the personal memories of the bomb.

References

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Corresponding author: Atisha Rai

Email: atisha.rai31@gmail.com

Subverting the Gendered Narratives: Defiance in Mary Kom’s Unbreakable: An Autobiography

Abish Jebeshy

Central University of Tamil Nadu, India

A Selvam

Central University of Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

Sport studies often examine the association between sports and society, education, gender, nation, and class. Among these, gender is deeply ingrained in sports, highlighting both biological and physical processes as well as representing the gendered cultural norms of society. Sports that emphasize strength, endurance, and risk are perceived by society as more masculine, whereas sports that require aesthetics are seen as feminine. This is a result of “gender typing”, which is a process in the social practice of gender that influences the segregation of sports. In this regard, women are considered unsuitable for sports that require muscular strength. Sport contributes to the establishment and maintenance of a masculine hegemonic order in society, where men hold positions of authority and masculinity is valued more than femininity (Dworkin & Messner, 2002). Social ostracism faced by women who play sports such as boxing, wrestling, football, and bullfighting is formidable. Indian women are no exception to this and have to resist socially constructed barriers such as familial pressure, societal norms, religious myths, cultural practices, and so on. Dissonance between the body, culture, and identity is continuously and distinctly observed in sport, a traditionally masculinist and gender-bifurcated arena. The study intends to investigate the defiance shown by female athletes to the aforementioned hegemonic masculine culture prevailing in Indian society through the autobiography of Mary Kom, one of the most prominent figures of Indian sports, and her defiance as resistance against her family, society, culture, and the masculine aura attached with boxing as a sport.

Keywords: hegemonic masculinity, Indian athletes, social prejudices, sports narratives, resistance

As physical activities and sports are traditionally associated with men and masculinity, and as such, women historically have been considered invaders in the realm of sport. “Woman. Sport. These two words rest curiously next to each other like unrelated, detached strangers” (Boutilier & San Giovanni, 1983, p. 93). Sport is believed to be a medium that binds people together irrespective of their background, class, race, and gender and can help lessen the cultural divide. In reality, sport is considered a male domain, and women are forbidden from participating in sports activities for a longer period. Even when women strive to participate in sports, they are allowed only to take up so-called feminine sports like gymnastics, and skating. Therefore, it is not the skill of a person, but rather their gender that decides which sport he/she should play. Hence, gender is ingrained in sports, highlighting both biological and physical processes as well as representing the gendered cultural norms of society. The current paper employs a poststructuralist feminist methodology to address the situation of female athletes in India and the micro-resistance of a single woman against all odds on her road to the ring. Walter (2005) states that the most trustworthy information about these topics is women’s lived experiences; thus, an autobiography is taken for analysis. This paper attempts to highlight the defiance shown by Mary Kom through a textual analysis of her autobiography, “Unbreakable: An Autobiography” (2013).

As a subset of feminism, post-structural feminism advances the study of gender in sports by looking at ways in which societies construct masculinity and femininity and how these notions change over time and within societies, particularly in relation to language. It explains how dominant discourses place restrictions on girls and describes how girls challenge these discourses by questioning and persevering. Social constructs advance claims about women’s bodies that exclude women from certain physical activities. As the feminine body is defined through reproductive descriptions, the body can become a site of resistance and agency when it refuses to comply with the traditional practices of a feminine gendered body. Women’s participation in so-called masculine sports can challenge traditional male-driven narratives. Sports could be important in the efforts to change the distinctly patriarchal social order. Sports can offer a point of resistance (Hall, 1996). Inspired by the methodological and epistemological issues brought up in feminist and cultural post-structuralist literature, this study aims to highlight the subversive strategies that Indian woman boxer Mary Kom used to develop her career and how she defied socio-cultural ideas linked with women and boxing.

The below mentioned papers collectively highlight the subversion of gendered narratives in boxing by women boxers. Schneider (2020) discusses how female boxers from low to middleincome countries challenge gender norms and disrupt patriarchal communities, contesting gender hierarchies in the sport. Kim (2015) explores the inclusion of women’s boxing in the Olympic Games as a step towards gender equity and the growing significance of women’s boxing as an institutionally legitimated activity. Smart (2021) examines the lived experiences of women participating in recreational boxing, highlighting the challenges they face in navigating a masculine space while increasing their strength, skills, and self-confidence. Gems (2014) focuses on the historical context, discussing how women boxers in the USA challenged the gender order and presented physical performances that defied societal restrictions through their participation in saloons, vaudeville theatres, and the prize ring. Mitra (2009) discusses how Muslim women boxers in Kolkata prioritize their national identity over their Muslim

identity, using boxing as a means of empowerment against societal challenges. Chaudhuri (2012) examines the emergence and success of Indian women boxers like Mary Kom, highlighting their achievements against a backdrop of deprivation and neglect in the sport. In summary, these papers collectively demonstrate how women boxers are subverting gendered narratives in boxing by challenging norms, contesting hierarchies, and increasing their empowerment within the sport. Together, they shed light on the ways in which female boxers like Mary Kom challenge and transcend gendered narratives in the sport. All these works show how female athletes subvert the gendered narratives through hard core resistance, but this paper deals specifically with Mary Kom’s defiance.

Sports and Gender

Sports can be understood as a relevant domain for studying and understanding gender. Biological justifications often limit women from participating in several events. Menstruation, reproduction, and suckling the young pave the way for a defined biological role assignment of women. They are primarily aligned with their roles as caregivers, mothers, and housewives. These phenomena are named “moral physiology” by Patricia A. Vertinsky (1976), who postulated a connection between morality, physical well-being, and the natural order of society. Hence, women’s physical weakness is seen as the source of their oppression. As sport requires stamina, speed, competitiveness, and staunchness, it rejects or disqualifies those who do not possess such qualities. These qualities are correlative to masculine traits; therefore, men naturally have an advantage in sports over women. Women are considered not tough enough to survive in the sporting world (McKay, 1997). But even though biology plays a part, it is cultural norms that have greater part, from what Ryle (2015) describes as a “strong social constructionist” position, and this positions men as hierarchically superior to women.

Socialization in schools and families instills the belief that women should limit their participation in sports to non-competitive games because sports is masculine. Sport is public practice that “crucially privileges males and inferiorizes females”, (Bryson, 1987) which affects the positioning of men and women in public practices. Through media representation, the division between male and female events in the sports world is exposed. Men’s sports, for instance, receive more media attention and have a higher viewership than women’s sports. In addition, there is a difference in the kinds of sports that men and women typically play. Women’s sports, like swimming, tennis, and figure skating, are more individualized and less/non-aggressive than men’s sports, which are typically combative, coordinated, and confrontational, like rugby and wrestling. Body-contact confrontational sports function as an endlessly renewed symbol of masculinity (Messner & Sabo, 1990). Women who play sports that are traditionally associated with men experience gender identity conflict; the same is true for men who play sports that are traditionally associated with women. By reproducing steep hierarchies, hegemonic masculinity is enacted in professional sports.

Women and Combat Sports

Through symbolic presentation, sports as a male-dominated system continuously reconstruct hegemonic masculinity (Evert & Cynthia, 2001). The advent of women in the field of sports,

especially combat sports, represented fresh ways for women to challenge the traditional roles that the dominant male society had set for them. A combat sport, or fighting sport, is a competitive contact sport in which two persons fight with adherence to rule. The winner should either have more points than the opponent or knockout the opponent. Combat sports and martial arts have a link with each other historically and technically. Boxing, wrestling, mixed martial arts, and taekwondo are some combat sports. Boxing (also known as “Western boxing” or “pugilism”) is a combat sport in which two people throw punches at each other for a given amount of time in a ring, usually wearing protective gloves, helmet, hand wraps and mouthguards. The notion of women participating in combat sports as fighters has been contested and met with significant resistance from both cultural and institutional quarters. This is because combat sport is associated with specific violent and aggressive behaviours as well as specific masculinity narratives (Hargreaves, 1994). Boyle and Haynes (2000, p. 137) claim that “nowhere is the metaphor of the male body as weapon or fighting machine more evident than in the sport of boxing”. Boxing is a sport infused with ideas about masculinity, power, race, and social class.

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, according to Hargreaves, conservative patriarchal ideologies neglected women of all classes. The status of women in sports began to rise in the early 1900s, but participation by women in sports has always been on men’s terms and has been perceived as a “male preserve”. When sport was made available to women, they faced discrimination, resistance, and obstacles that hindered their participation. Women are largely kept out of combat sports as it is believed to cause injuries and affect their reproductive ability. Women boxers are viewed as less skilled than men because the sport is largely regarded as “female inappropriate” (Matteo, 1986). Despite the fact that women have been involved in boxing for almost as long as the sport has existed, until recently female fights were essentially prohibited, as official bans prevented the issue of licenses to female boxers.

Even though women entered the boxing ring in the first half of the 18th century, it did not become an Olympic sport until 2012. Lindner (2012, p. 464) argues that “boxing has been the last bastion of masculinity within the Olympic content”. The International Olympic Committee first approved the inclusion of women’s boxing in 2009. This paved the way for female pugilists to enter the boxing ring for the first time during the Summer Olympics in London in 2012. During this Olympics, the world witnessed the defiance of a small, frail girl from India who refused to give up. It was Mary Kom.

Gendered Narratives of Indian Women

Mary Kom, a six-time World Amateur Boxing champion and a celebrated boxer in India, had to face many obstacles to reach her current status. Her life and achievements often motivate and instill confidence in young girls to take the road less travelled by women. Her biographical film titled “Mary Kom” (2014) received accolades for portraying Mary’s mental toughness. Her autobiography, Unbelievable: An Autobiography (2013) details Mary’s challenging childhood and how she became the face of Indian boxing. Besides, her autobiography also brings out the experience and embodiment of Mary as an Indian woman in a male-dominated

sport. This was a social and political coup: As Sherwin (1989) states, feminist methodology urges us to seek the political relevance of human experience.

As India is a patrilineal society, parents always hope for a son rather than a daughter. Even Mary’s mother felt disappointed when Mary was born: “[l]ike most expecting mothers in India, she (Mary’s mother) had hoped for a son. A daughter, she believed, would be more of a burden than a help. Would she be able to toil in the fields alongside her father as a son would?” (p. 6). This issue stems from the cultural norms in Indian society, which assign sons the responsibility of caring for their parents financially and emotionally, particularly as they age; sons contribute to the family’s wealth and property while daughters deplete it through dowries; sons carry on the family lineage while daughters deplete it through marriage; sons take on significant religious responsibilities, and sons exercise or defend the family’s power while daughters must be shielded and protected, thereby perceivably burdening the household. Even “[I]n the Kom society of those days, boys were given preference when it came to education. Most people believed that, since a girl would get married and go away to her husband’s home, there was little point in spending money educating them” (p. 12).

Such normative expectations placed on the lives of men and women are structured in oppositional, binary, and two-sided relationships. Social constructions of masculinity and femininity are hierarchical, where the qualities associated with men are more socially valued than those associated with women. Society values men’s actions more highly in terms of rationality, even when women accomplish the same task. Women are socially subordinate to men in almost every sphere, but Mary opposed subordination through her deeds. In this respect, Mary is more like a boy to her family, becoming her father’s right-hand woman, as she “helped her father in the fields, even in ploughing the fields – a task that required immense strength, because the bullocks were not easy to control. The menfolk would stand and gape, seeing me drive the animals” (p. 13).

One of the most important concerns of Indian parents about their daughters’ choice of sports, especially combat sports like boxing, is marriage. Right from birth, girl children are indoctrinated into the virtues of marriage, which demands them to be polite, homely, obedient, and possess other feminine qualities. In India, a girl’s actions are repeatedly questioned and she faces constant scrutiny. As Mary hails from a very remote region in Manipur, she faced these challenges. Mary’s father is disappointed to read the newspaper and find that his daughter has won a gold medal in women’s boxing. “Why? But why are you interested in boxing?” (p. 41) is his first question to Mary, “I do not like it at all. Stop it before it’s too late” (p. 41). That is the common mindset in India regarding women boxers. Ideas, images, fantasies, desires, and expectations that are specific to men and women are structured by society through patterns of social and political relations, cultural values, traditions, and language (Burke, 2001).

“The biggest challenge in India is its society. There is no escaping the judgments that you constantly battle. Once a girl hits puberty, it is considered inappropriate for her to be seen jumping around outside, especially in rural areas. Parents worry that girls who get bruised and tanned won’t be ‘marriageable’”, (Mathur, 2019, para. 15) says Atita Verghese, India’s first professional skateboarder. Mary Kom’s father said the same: “You are a girl. One day, you

will get married” (p. 41), which plainly shows that he was more worried about her marriage than about her career. Stubborn Mary politely refuted it by saying, “I like boxing, and will not stop. Please understand, Apa” (p. 41).

Defiance as a Strategy

Participating in sports offers a unique perspective on how society creates the social bodies of men and women and how we attribute traits of femininity and masculinity to those bodies (Hardin & Whiteside, 2009). The discourse surrounding the biological differences between genders is influenced by culture. Boxers learn boxing strategy and fight tactics to counterattack their opponents in the ring. Both offensive and defensive skills are necessary in boxing as it can be used as per the requirement of the moment. Defence techniques protect boxers from receiving blows when they move to deliver punches. Blocking, parrying, rolling, and slipping are some of the defensive boxing techniques. Defiance resembles defence in boxing, as it is generally a silent and spontaneous mode of resistance performed by an individual. Rejection of authority by tackling domination is defiance against a particular hegemony.

The sexing of bodies, ideas, and practices through discourse is a phenomenon that is increasingly evident in the sports world. “What is a girl doing in a men’s world?” (p. 109), “Why do you want to join boxing?” (p. 31), “You are a small, frail girl. With your gold earring, you don’t even look like a boxer. Boxing is for young boys” (p. 31) and “You are getting into boxing; this is crazy!” (p. 109) were the remarks when she took up boxing as her sport. These are references to boxing as a masculine hegemonic sport. The prevailing male perspective in the participation discourse could be a significant consideration when examining the efficacy of the liberal legislative paradigm intended to ensure equal opportunities for female athletes. In many ways, the structure of a society is embodied through its sporting activities. Gender is a critical element in this structure, a structure whose buttressing discourse women in sports must work to change.

The body can become a site of agency and resistance when it defies the normative practices of a feminine gendered body because the feminine body is associated with particular definitions and habits (Jennings, 2015). Endurance determines how long a boxer can be effective. In real life, endurance is how long a person can sustain or remain in a particular situation. Mary’s childhood life in the village prepared her body for the endurance training essential to boxing. In addition to this, Mary had to endure constant taunts from her society until she proved herself to the world. “I will prove all of you wrong one day” (p. 109), is Mary’s response to the aforementioned taunts. Mary Kom’s gender and environment contributed little to shape her as a legendary boxer. Passive resistance intermixed with active defiance in Mary’s words shows how as a boxer she overcame the taboo attached to women boxing.

Defying the Cultural Myth

Boxing and women are like two distinct islands. While boxing requires ruthlessness and is unforgiving, women are naturally compassionate and merciful. “In the process they (opponents) get hurt and start bleeding. I feel very bad. More often than not, in such case, after

the bout, I go to them and enquire about their condition. Sometimes I feel bad … but then this is an inherent part of boxing” (p. 101). This shows Mary’s soft side along with her acceptance of reality. Boxers are purportedly feisty, muscular and tall. Mary is shorter than most of her opponents in the ring. This is supposed to be at a disadvantage in her sport. “Sometimes I wonder how I sustained my passion, given that I had neither exposure to the possibilities nor opportunities” (p. 25), says Mary Kom. Even though everything is against her becoming a boxer, it is her grit and resilience that paved the way for her to become a successful boxer. Defiance is her defining trait.

Boxing, according to Hargreaves (2003), blurs the lines between traditional male and female roles and is at conflict with the so-called “essence” of femininity. Women are trained to be vulnerable, timid, and non-aggressive, while women boxers, according to Hargreaves (2003, p. 219), “are empowering themselves by appropriating male symbols of physical capital and shifting gender relations of power.” At the time when Mary got married, she was already called the “Queen of Boxing” and “Magnificent Mary” with her hat-trick of World Championship wins. Marriage is considered one of the greatest barriers in the career of female athletes, as it often blocks women from pursuing their career, but it is not so for male athletes. According to Burke’s (2001) analysis of sport, men’s control over their wives, daughters, and girlfriends who want to play sports may restrict women’s access to sports. Mary was always concerned about her boxing after marriage, which facilitated her choosing a partner of her own choice against the will of others. Yet again, her defiance paved the way for Mary Kom marrying Onler, at the peak of her career: “he (Onler) is the reason my medal hauls continued after the marriage, putting an end to doomsday predictions about the end of my career” (p. 70). Childbirth is yet another blockade, and that Caesarean delivery marks the end of a female athlete’s sporting career. Mary expressed it thus, “I was very worried at the thought of an operation. I wanted to continue boxing after my children were born and an operation might put an end to my chances. Even at that movement, my thoughts were on boxing” (p. 79).

This reminds us that female athletes are situated very differently from male athletes. Men continue to play without such natural biological complications until retirement. Once again people attempted to keep Mary from boxing, mentioning the medical complications she would face in the future. Her father said, “Sanahen, now that you’re a mother, it’s enough. You will be tired. Stop boxing. You have won so much, earned enough, and you have a job. You have achieved enough” (p. 82). He added “[w]hat if the stitches open and cause complications?” (p. 83) These “medical myths” are false, but they remain culturally acceptable. Mary broke this ‘cultural myth’ of her society by entering the ring one more time. Even after giving birth to twins in her first pregnancy through C-section, Mary managed to resume competing after a two-year break and started winning.

One might wonder how Mary Kom managed to choose boxing as her career and reach this level. It was the hardships she underwent that made her persevere. Mary is from Manipur, a northeastern state in India, which is well-known for producing boxers. The state dominated women’s boxing for more than a decade. The history of the state and the story of its women are full of resilience and resistance. “Mary Kom is a strong Manipuri woman and in her case

boxing became the medium to channelize her angst against the problems and situations she confronted in the different periods of her life” (Dubey, et al, 2019, p. 111).

Her background is another reason: “the hardship I faced in my formative years is the foundation of my strength. I am tough because of my background. They made me who I am today. They gave me the strength to keep fighting. Indeed, they made me want to fight in the first place” (p. 3). Mary, as a child, used to work in the field, carry home the straw, fetch water, and go up the hills with her father to collect firewood. “But looking back, it was that sustained toil that prepared my body for boxing. My strength and stamina continue to be my strong points even when I fight bigger opponents in the ring” (p. 14). Mary, even after proving herself on the international stage, has to struggle with the internal politics within the sports federation of India. She also has to face marginalization in terms of regional bias by the selectors. “I don’t like talking about the Indian women’s boxing scenario in terms of state teams, but that is the reality of how things operate on the ground. Even during training, I was often neglected and not given enough attention by the coaches” (p. 105). As this is prevailing in almost every field now, what stands out in Mary’s case is her ability to overcome such things through her performances: “When coaches and other boxing officials favoured their own state players, the only way I could fight back was in the ring, and by aiming higher and higher” (p. 105).

David as a Symbol of Defiance

Mary Kom’s defiance can be compared with the defiance of the great Biblical hero “David”. Like David refused to obey his brothers and decided to fight Goliath, Mary disobeyed her father and continued to box. Mary herself says: “[T]he Biblical story of David and Goliath has been a constant inspiration for me–an identification deepened by my own diminutive size” (p. 19). Even though both Mary and David are small in size, they choose to fight against Goliath. In Mary’s case, the conventional gendered narratives regarding women and boxing in India are her Goliath. On their road to overcome Goliath, not even their family members believed in them, but it was their defiance that overpowered the giant. In addition to this, the way in which David overcame Goliath should be noticed here. David kills Goliath with a slingshot and a little pebble in the absence of any sophisticated weapons. In the same way, Mary didn’t take any conventional way of breaking barriers; rather she chose the most underrated defiance as her tool to subvert the gendered narratives. “I single-handedly fought my way through these hurdles. I had no one to favour me so I proved my worth through my performances alone” (p. 38).

The hurdles mentioned in these lines are the internal conflict between two sporting authorities in India and its consequences Mary faced in terms of training and selection. Mary overcame these things with her grit and determination by proving herself in the ring, likewise David represented the whole nation and overcame Goliath with mere grit and determination. In her own words Mary remarked, “[A]ll I wanted to do was prove that being young, a girl and smallstatured would not keep me back” (p. 32). Mary Kom, as an Indian woman, proved herself to the world as the best boxer through her performances by counter punching the conventional gendered narratives about women and boxing, in a similar way how David proved himself as

a warrior to his nation. The main climax is their victory over obstacles to attain their full potential.

Conclusion

The discursive practices of society, family and peers uphold patriarchal ideology and wanted Mary not to pursue boxing, but she refused, resisted and created a counter narrative merely by defying it. Hence, this paper highlights that defiance can also pave the way for active resistance against male dominance in sports. “Women’s boxing was at a nascent stage and was yet to attract fans and critics” (p. 52) in India until Mary Kom’s rise. Women are active participants in the processes that lead to the accreditation of women’s sports, which are best understood as processes involving conflicts and struggles. Women’s progress in sports is never smooth, but eventually it is athletes like Mary Kom, who led the process in India. It is their resistance to the structures of society that paved the way for younger generations to travel this path without much hindrance. Although gender-related sports issues still affect women today, female athletes from this generation offer a counterbalance to the notions of male dominance and female subjugation. Like Bryson (2001) suggests women must adopt various techniques to resist male power in sport, Mary determined defiance as her technique to resist gendering in sports and in society as she refuses to obey her family, society, and her own biological limitations. It allows other young girls to follow their passion irrespective of social barriers by keeping Mary Kom as a role model, it also questions the structured settings of society and the myth behind women doing extensive physical activity after adolescence and childbirth. Her struggle against patriarchy, gender norms, and the patriarchal state through defiance has paved the way for the next generation.

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Corresponding author: Abish Jebeshy

Email: abishjebeshy101@gmail.com

Narrating Physical Diseases in the Malayan Landscape: Hugh Clifford’s “A Daughter of the Muhammadans”

Tejash Kumar Singh Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Abstract

Diseases such as SARS, Ebola, Covid-19, and many others have swept across the world recently at pandemic and epidemic levels. These have impacted people regardless of ethnicity, while at the same time exposing glaring inequalities in treatment, separating those who can afford medical attention from those who cannot. These inequalities are due, in the main, to social and economic factors that were abundantly laid bare in mass media coverage. In the early 20th century, by contrast, disease and its treatment served to promote the colonialist agenda, with writers using physical and psychological depictions of the colonised body’s diseases in order to advance its fabricated “othering”. Among such colonial writers was Hugh Clifford (1866-1941), Resident and Governor in Malaya during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Documenting his experiences in Malaya in his short stories, Clifford constructed particular ontological realities regarding Malayan subjects for his European audiences, promoting a fabricated perception of their “difference”. In his short story “A Daughter of the Muhammadans”, published in his 1916 collection The Further Side of Silence, Clifford investigates the visually striking corruption of leprosy, juxtaposed against the wholesome, affectionate nature of Minah, the female Malayan subject. Based on the context of medicinal advancements, I will be proposing that Clifford’s physical and psychological depictions of the Malayan body’s diseases led to its constructed “othering”, especially through the furtherance of stereotypes of the Malayan subject that are inherent in his work.

Keywords: bodies, colonialism, diseases, Hugh Clifford, medicine

With the “Forward Movement” in the late nineteenth-century, British colonialists in the Malayan peninsula began expanding the colonial body to encompass the governance of the Federated Malay States (FMS) and Straits Settlements. The Movement had the practical objective of streamlining governance for British possessions in the area and led to the coalescence that formed British Malaya. Susan Morgan notes that this marked a much-needed transition from “heroic adventure … into successful administration” (Morgan, 1996, p. 155), a stabilisation of governance which could be indicated ideologically by the Resident via public policy through transforming “the masculine …into the feminine” (Morgan, 1996, p. 155) through increased care for Malayan subjects.

This meant that British governance should be mindful of the welfare and social well-being of the colonial subjects. Morgan also proposes that now Residents should conform to what “in Victorian England were normatively considered the more feminine virtues, those used in raising a family and running a home: familiarity, understanding, kindness, and persuasion” (Morgan, 1996, p. 155). Morgan’s point is indicative of how the domestic eventually becomes public, and how the colony becomes symbolic of a home that required feminine virtues such as coercion, belonging, and a sense of togetherness to meet the demands of family, with the head of the domestic space (the Resident colonial official) being benevolently disposed towards those below him. One salient element in the project was the medicinal treatment of Malayan bodies with Western medicine.

Context

According to Frantz Fanon in his Studies in a Dying Colonialism, visits to various colonial administrators are extensions of colonial governance, considering how “see[ing] the doctor, the administrator, the constable or the mayor are [all] identical moves” (Fanon, 1965, p. 139). Interactions between the diseased Malayan body and the colonial official therefore became a power play, one in which the insidiousness of colonialism was often masked. David Arnold (1988) proposes that, for European audiences, the growing interest in Westernised medicine as superior forms of treatment began in the late 18th century (p. 12) and had its rationalisation in medical successes such as the English physician Edward Jenner’s devising of the smallpox vaccine, an advancement the likes of which had never been seen.

Confidence in Western medicine and colonialism was based on a sense of superiority relative to native bodies. This was seen especially in colonial writers’ renderings of native bodies, which often lacked access to such medicinal advancements. Complex nineteenth century medicinal advancements, reserved primarily for Europeans, furthered the view of native bodies such as the Malayan subject as an “other”. Associating diseases with the Malayan “other” provoked segregation within the colony, especially when it came to allocating areas of habitation in the cities. Only towards the end of the nineteenth century was there a conscious movement to treat the Malayan body equitably by providing Malayans with the same medical treatment that had been available to Europeans for decades. This was a “rapid transition from white man's medicine to public health” (Fanon, 1965, p. 13).

Europeans often lived separately and enjoyed added resources. Clifford is a case in point. He was immersed in Malayan culture and had a firsthand acquaintance with the populace, but he also had considerably greater healthcare resources at his disposal. For example, when his health deteriorated in 1926 after an unsuccessful second tour of duty culminated due to his ill health, he was able to leave his post and seek a cure back home. Clifford believed that the tropical climate itself had detrimental effects upon Europeans’ bodily constitution, a belief probably buttressed by experience: Clifford had two significant periods of illness between October 1888 to January 1890, before another one only a year later that lasted a similar period, from October 1901 to September 1903.

In the context of colonial doctrine, medicine was a preferred subject of ideological manipulation in late nineteenth-century Malaya, as it promoted the view that Europeans treated maladies and improved the condition of the Malayan subject. Clifford’s stories reflect this colonial concern of improving the condition of the British colony of Malaya. But he decried the lethargy-inducing effects that he believed the Malayan climate had upon Malayan bodies. Clifford also chose to school his children in England, stating his concerns in a 1906 letter to his friend Henry Clodd for their health being affected by the “contagion of this mental inertia and the unwholesome [lack of incitement] to discipline [that] are characteristic of this place” (Clifford to Henry Clodd, 1906). Additionally, Clifford’s concern with improving the state of both European and Malayan bodies within a modernising Malayan landscape were reflected in his 1894 and 1896 annual reports on Pahang. In his 1894 report, Clifford criticises the limited effectiveness of deeply entrenched Malay medicinal practices, especially when the Malayan subject’s life is at stake, implying the unnecessary loss of life through the Malayan subject’s societally conditioned blind belief in faith:

In cases of severe illness, however, these simple remedies are absolutely powerless to render any assistance, and the medicine-men then fall back upon charms, spells, incantations and exceedingly noisy devil-dances, which only serve to aggravate the malady they pretend to allay. The magic practices are, for the most part, relics of pre Muhammadan days, and among the male population a feeling of doubt in their efficacy is daily spreading. Among the women, however, the roots of superstition are very deeply implanted, and so strong is their faith in the magic practices, which have been handed down from one generation to another, that even the most skeptical of men are driven by the importunities of their women into employing devil-doctors when serious illness occurs in their houses. This state of things is not without its analogy in modern Europe. (Holden, 2000, p. 90)

An excessively negative focus on the Malayan body's ineffective participation in “noisy devildances” and the invitation of “devil-doctors” into the Malayan domestic space, clearly delineates the “othering” of the Malayan body. Reason and irrationality operate on a binary in the Malayan domestic space, with otherworldly, non-scientific practices unceremoniously rendered comical. Additionally, such “magic practices” terminology reflects Clifford's own fascination with these practices, as he collectively portrays them immediately as pre-religion and pre-science based, being “relics of pre-Muhammadan days”. He suggests that Their

obsolescence is affecting their current progress, causing a disjuncture in modern Malayan identity, in people for whom “a feeling of doubt in their efficacy is daily spreading”.

What is being subtly implied here is that the spread of modernity through British imperialism has led to a distancing and aversion from such practices, generating the template for a more reasonable Malayan “other”. However, this comes with its caveats, as the Malayan women are depicted to be intrinsically affected by such intergenerationally edified beliefs. These beliefs affect the functioning of the Malayan domestic space, with women's traditional beliefs implicitly holding back the progress of the Malayan man.

In his 1896 report, Clifford was enthusiastic about the Malayan dependence upon European medicine even while there was an outbreak of cholera. Clifford’s relatively happy tone in the midst of the sombre occurrences around him are befuddling, noting how “in time of panic and distress, the natives of this State now turn instinctively to the European officers for guidance and aid” (Holden, 2000, p. 90). The term “instinctively” suggests an enforced change in the psychological makeup of the Malayan populace, one that has been made successfully by British imperialism’s policing of the Malayan body, a desired objective that overlooks the cholera outbreak and the plight of the suffering Malayan body.

As such, Malayan bodies that seek to treat themselves proactively by discarding outdated traditional notions that form a part of their Malayan identity, are viewed more favourably by Clifford, whose sense of paternalism extends to only those who do not eschew the assistance rendered through European medicine. The importance of such medicinal advancements was equated to economic progress and the success of other civil institutions such as education.

In this paper, the prevalence and significance of physical diseases such as leprosy, and psychological malaises such as running “amok” and “latah” of the Malayan body in Clifford’s colonial fiction will be analysed. Through his story “A Daughter of the Muhammadans”, and based on the context of medicinal advancements, it will be proposing that both physical and psychological depictions of the Malayan body’s diseases led to its constructed “othering”, especially through the consolidation of prevalent stereotypes with which the colonial mind earmarked the Malayan subject.

According to Manderson, during the nineteenth century European doctors worked under essentialist assumptions, as they “had little understanding of disease causation” and subscribed to environmental explanations, supplemented by ideas of immunity based not upon acquired resistance but upon race and heredity (p. 7). Such approaches may have inadvertently ended up reifying concepts of certain bodies as being more or less vulnerable to disease. Subtly Darwinian in nature, interventions took the form of cleansing and teaching hygienic practices to the native body, which was thought to be a “carrier” (p. 8) of diseases that Europeans wished to avoid. These practices reinforced the general wellbeing and health campaigns in nineteenthcentury colonial Malaya, indicating that there was an ideological change “from the Taylorism of the late nineteenth century to the moralism (of individual behaviour and government policy) voiced in the late 1930s” (p. 242).

In Malaya, the treatment of leprosy-stricken bodies functioned as an indicator of colonialism’s effectiveness in improving the conditions of Malayan subjects. It is important to note that, despite scientists assuaging concerns about leprosy’s infectiousness, the spectacle of leprosyridden bodies received limited forbearance from Europeans in Malayan society. In the Straits Settlements, growing moral consciousness regarding the social exclusion of leprosy-stricken bodies was premised upon the leprosy-stricken subject being kept away from sight, but not excluded wholly (Straits Settlements Vol. 144, No. 139). Despite the development of hospitals dedicated to leprosy in states such as Malacca and Penang, efforts to establish such hospitals came with their own set of challenges, with Europeans raising objections to the placement of such institutions near them (Lees, 2009, p. 268).

Such campaigns focused on concealing the diseased Malayan subject, as its presence suggested the colonial authorities’ failure to improve conditions. Europeans were appalled at the “corporeality of the colonial subject spilling into colonial streets and streams” (Manderson, 1996, p. 105). Controlling the visibility of the Malayan subject became paramount, with interventions into the domestic lives of the Malayan subject being normalised. Malayan domestic lives “matters for public scrutiny and state intervention, and health risks were defined in the course of this incursion” (Manderson, 1996, p. 231). Seemingly benign, however, these incursions had the effect of spurring proactivity on the part of Malayan subjects to care for their health according to Western medicinal standards, while germinating new forms of thinking about medicinal interactions should these subjects ever become independent from empire.

Among the Malayan subjects in the nineteenth century, the disease of leprosy was a particularly appalling disease that disgusted the European public due to its striking visibility. Regarded as a “tropical disease” by pioneers of tropical medicine such as Sir Patrick Manson, the social impact of tarnished skin also imbued fear among Europeans regarding its contagiousness. Devastating to British colonies, it also served as a socio-historical reminder of how this very same disease had impacted British towns all too recently. On 16 January 1859, an article titled “Health of Singapore” was published in the Straits Times citing how leprosy had ravaged towns “in Great Britain as in many eastern countries at the present. [There was] scarcely a town in England or Scotland where there do not yet exist the remains of hospitals which were exclusively devoted to the reception of lepers” (Lees, 2009, p. 270). The term “reception” and “devoted”, portraying the British approach as benign and paternalistic, juxtaposes against the reality of the socially nullifying effects of constraining lepers within a particular space. Antiquated biblical notions of leprosy as indicative of the individual’s sinful nature, overlapped with scientific advancements in the nineteenth century, but nevertheless medicine itself offered little reprieve from the socially isolating effects of the disfigurement leprosy left behind.

Hugh Clifford’s “A Daughter of the Muhammadans”

Given the conspicuousness of their disease, a societal effort was required to combat the natural aversion to lepers. Vaughan adds to this conversation by noting that religious factors contribute to spreading a sense of disgust towards disfigured bodies, stating that “The fear of leprosy and stigmatization of its victims was to be combated with Christian compassion … acts of great individual heroism were performed against this background of 'natural' fear and abhorrence”

(Vaughan, 1989, p. 80). I’d suggest that Clifford’s paternalistic attitude towards his characters -such as Minah in “A Daughter of the Muhammadans”- reflects this compassionate Western drive to nurture the colonised subject, imbuing the narrative with religious undertones that increase its moral stature. The Malayan subject is nurtured while being governed; this process will guide it upwards from the bottom of an entrenched social hierarchy while leading it to “salvation”.

Clifford’s condescending attitude towards the colonised body is evident from the first lines of his text, where a comparison is established between the elders who have not studied in British schools and the youngsters who have:

The sunset hour had come as I passed up the narrow track that skirted the river-bank, with a mob of villagers at my heels,- old men who had seen many strange things in the wild days before the coming of the white men, dull peasants who seemed to stolid and stupid to have seen anything at all, and swaggering youngsters, grown learned in the mysteries of reading and writing, fresh from our schools, and prepared at a moment’s notice to teach the wisest of the village elders… (Clifford, 1899, p. 250)

Situated in a tiny village along the Jelai river, near the town of Pahang where British incursions had already begun, Clifford’s narrator sees Minah carrying a body. He is subsequently informed that it is her leprosy-stricken husband and is warned to not go near Minah, as she must also be afflicted by “the sickness that is not good – the evil sickness” (1899, p. 256) that affects others that come close to the afflicted. Clifford sardonically notes that the white man’s propensity to dismiss native narratives often lands him in trouble, so he conceives a more culturally homogeneous narrator sensitive to the truth behind their tales.

The instinct of the white man always bids him promptly disregard every warning that a native might give to him, and act in a manner diametrically opposed to that which a native may advise. This propensity has added considerably to the figures that represent the European death-rate throughout Asia (1899, p. 251).

Choosing to follow the “instinct of the white man” (p. 251) instead of the empirical “acquired experience or common sense” (p. 251) of his Malayan subjects, Clifford rejects Malayan society’s primal aversion towards Minah. Instead, he chooses to focus on her “glory of womanly tenderness and devotion” (p. 250), elaborating upon Minah’s servitude to her husband as indicative of the potential for a more nurturing colony.

Clifford’s praise for Minah is juxtaposed with his implicit disgust for the leper body, as there is little to no mention of the pain and struggle of those affected. He thus limits his gaze to the ravages of leprosy upon the Malayan body. Mamat, who is revealed to be Minah’s husband, functions as the graphic description of the leper-stricken native body. Clifford’s defamiliarization of the diseased individual is evident in his focus on the sensational shock produced by the blighted body. Only much later does he identify the actual medical affliction. Initially describing him as a “shapeless thing, wrapped in an old cloth, soiled and tattered and horribly stained, which was slung over the woman’s left shoulder, across her breast, and under

her right armpit” (1899, p. 251). Clifford’s gaze skims a surface, eventually saying that the filthy thing is actually a person, with “a head, gray-white in colour, hairless, sightless, featureless, formless” (1899, p. 251). Clifford’s listing of the attributes of the leper body here traverses both physical features such as “hairless, sightless…” and eventually slides into the “formless”, indicating the narratological difficulty encountered when describing leper bodies, suggesting their unfamiliarity to the colonial gaze. Despite noticing the human within the leper, and occasionally indicating it to be worthy of pity, Clifford’s narrative constantly slips into dehumanising descriptions.

The narrative moves steadily towards an objectification that projects the colonised body through a negative, sensationalist lens, calling it “an object of horror and repulsion” (1899, p. 251). For this he utilises a dissecting, analysing gaze, moving across the body’s extremities in morbid fascination towards “limbs that showed a sickly grayish colour …ended in five white patches where the toes should have been … a leper far gone in the disease whom the woman was carrying riverwards” (1899, p. 251). The leper’s body, couched in infant-like terms in order to extol Minah’s selflessness, is still dehumanised.

Clifford’s initial shock manifests itself through incredulousness, talk of the rarity of lepers surviving, and the expression of diverse emotions, astonishment and repulsion. This is revelatory of British myopia towards Malayan bodies, purposely shunned and relegated to the peripheries, outside British fields of vision.

Anxiety about leprosy affects both Malayan subjects and Malayan medicine men. Malayan medicine men’s terminology regarding leprosy substantially revolves around quasi-scientific practices, intermixed with religiousness, an “evil sickness” (1899, p. 250) ineffectually treated by the shaman for Mamat. The helplessness of the medicine-man is centred on religion, and the medicine man can do “nought to aid this man of thine, for the devil of this sickness is a very strong devil” (1899, p. 250). Leprosy’s religious connotations are reflected in the constant associations with devils, an implicit reminder to European audiences of the ineffectiveness of this simplistic medical/religious practice and of the need for colonial intervention. While the Malayan subjects never mention leprosy by name, Clifford repeatedly does so, in clear juxtaposition with how “no one in Malaya ever names leprosy” (1899, p. 257). In Malaya, the malady is circumnavigated with “all manner of euphemisms” (1899, p. 257). This indirectness of speech makes leprosy a medically and socially divisive condition from which Malayan medicine is depicted to shrink: it also delays the diagnosis of leprosy, with the medicine-man waiting for weeks before informing Minah of Mamat’s condition.

Clifford (1899) extols Minah’s selfless virtues in the care of her husband, giving him a way to overlap his own society’s professed morality with that of the Malayans. Advised to stay away from Mamat and to seek a divorce, Minah’s first “conscious feeling was a throb of relief, almost of joy:

No woman would be found to wed with him; no co-wife would come into her life to separate her from her husband; barren and childless though she be, the man she loved

would be hers for all his days and no one would arise to dispute her right, her sole right, to love and tend and cherish him (p. 257).

Clifford turns his narrative away from the leprosy of the male Malayan body and focuses on Minah’s infertility, lowering both of their social statuses: the male cannot care for himself; the female reverts to her idealistic raison d'etre, which is caring for needy or sickly bodies. Her own “othered” body, due to her inability to give birth, is deemed to be as non-productive as Mamat’s own slowly degenerating physical body.

Even as Clifford describes her grieving for her leprosy-stricken husband, Minah is rendered as a “natural man, the savage, that ordinarily rises to the surface, through no matter what superimposed strata of conventionalism, in moments of strong emotion” (1899, p. 257). The primacy of her grieving must be witnessed first by European readers, who read about her visceral emotions as she is “tearing at the lush grass and stifling her lamentations” (1899, p. 257). This seems to be a metaphorical description of her heart being a “fountain of willing selfimmolation and unutterable tenderness, the heart of a woman who loves” (1899, p. 257).

Minah’s many sacrifices -rejecting a potentially elevated social status if she divorces Mamat, spending her youth caring for Mamat, and the strong possibility that she’ll catch the diseasebecome differentiating personal features that put her in a higher ethical plane, away from the isolating, callous Malayan society that the author describes with subdued outrage. As Minah passes by carrying Mamat he notices a group of Malay men behind him:

Of the group of the men behind me, some laughed, one or two uttered a few words of cheap jeer and taunt, every one of them turned aside to spit solemnly in token of some unclean thing had been at hand… (Clifford, 1899, p. 251)

In line with the meaning strategies of colonial narratives, as a member of Malayan society, Minah must be unaware of the goodness of her actions, being “quite blind to the nobility of her own devotion, for thoughts of self played but a small part in the consciousness of this daughter of the Muhammadans” (1899, p. 260). Thus, Minah’s obliviousness must manifest itself repeatedly and consistently, without any hesitation on her part. This consistent and selfsacrificial wifely performance, without considering anything else but her duty, is suggested to be positively transformative for her, as it gave her “a deep content that transformed the squalor of her life into a thing of wonder and beauty” (1899, p. 260). Minah’s performance allows Clifford’s (1917) comparison of European women with Minah, stating that… the daughter of the Muhammedans has learned to believe from her heart that man is indeed fashioned in a mould more honourable that in which the folk of her own sex are cast. She subscribes generally to the Malay theory that “it is not fitting” that women should question the doings of men, and she has no share in the quasi maternal, very tolerant, yet half-contemptuous attitude which women in Europe are apt to assume toward the men whom they love but are accustomed to regard in the light of more or less helpless and irresponsible children (p. 195).

Towards the end of Clifford’s story, British laws begin mandating leprosy-stricken individuals to be confined away from their family in specialised treatment centres. Clifford’s sudden shift

away from Minah and Mamat transforms the narration into a generalised observation of Asiatic society, turning it into a repository of pithy adages and dictums. In this sense, Clifford (1917) notes that “most Asiatic women of the better sort find the role of mother more naturally congenial than that of wife” (p. 207). This extrapolation from a singular tale premised upon Minah is fascinating and yet simplifying: it frames the female Malayan subject as being a mother in one way or the other, her identity being incomplete unless she finds someone, or something to mother. Yet interestingly, he also suggests that in relation to leprosy in Malaya the surrogate motherhood of the state is inadequate to replace native care for native body, exemplified by Minah. Her repetitive questioning of “why should the white folk covet her man … scheme to rob her of him, seeing that he was all she had, and they could have no need of him … in his defence she would cast aside all fear and fight for him, as a tigress fights for her cubs” (Clifford, 1917, p. 209).

Nevertheless, this tigress is toothless in the face of British governance, as she seeks out Clifford, falling submissively at his feet, naming him in the same breath as “Allah, Tuan” (1917, p. 211), as she begs him to allow her to keep her man. The conflation of “Allah” and “Tuan” here, being a Malay term for “sir”, reflects the reverence and power that Clifford commands in effecting change for the disenfranchised Malayan leprosy-caregiver. This becomes a reminder to readers of the benevolence of colonial policies relating to the isolation of leprosy-stricken people.

Late in the story, Clifford enquires about Minah’s situation with the locals, determining that Minah’s presence has been constant prior and during her husband’s affliction of leprosy. The unfailing nurturing care by the Malayan woman belies her ability to steadfastly remain committed to Mamat, her deformed husband. Miraculously free of the disease despite constantly carrying Mamat on her back, Minah’s devotion projects an image of Clifford’s idealised Malayan woman, all the while indicating his own narratological anxiety about the changes in law regarding those stricken with leprosy and how they might affect the young woman.

Bashford notes that “the control of leprosy became entangled with spatial governance of indigenous people throughout the British Empire” (Bashford, 2004, p. 81). Colonial laws are also shown to govern the Malayan “other” by minimising the lepers’ communal relations and controlling their movements, all of which threatens to disrupt Minah’s relational dynamics with Mamat. Having heard about colonial laws that would institutionalise Mamat, Minah visits Clifford, afraid that these laws would rob her of her gladly embraced raison d'etre. Upon Clifford’s reassurance that such laws would not be instituted in Pahang -at the moment-, Minah holds Clifford’s feet in happiness, marking her femininity as a dutiful Malayan wife. Clifford is shocked and immediately separates himself from the Malayan “other”, re-establishing the hierarchy between himself and his Malayan subjects through distance and portraying himself as the saviour of Malayan ways of life, endeavouring to introduce a non-disruptive modernity.

Conclusion

While in “A Daughter of the Muhammadans” there is a necessary compromise that lepers should be kept away from healthy bodies, Mina’s stirring acts of Malayan self-sacrifice posits

to European readers that perhaps an alternative approach, centred on sensitivity and compromise to the plight of the Malayan body, is imperative for an effective, benevolent administration of the colony. Clifford’s compassion establishes a relation of sympathetic dependency, one where the Malayan social domain is gratefully beholden to him as administrator. As such, he proposes that British judgment can bring out the Malayans’ better selves, justifying colonial administration by its actions in the face of horrific physical diseases like leprosy.

Nevertheless, his is an interpellating gaze, one that sensationalises the Malayan’s unique characteristics in order to attract readers’ attention. Clifford, whose life straddles the European and Malayan worlds, must constantly arbitrate his narrative, as he is a product of British society that has been acculturated into Malayan society. The reader is constantly reminded of the polarity that characterises their entanglements.

References

Arnold, D. (1988). Introduction: Disease, Medicine, and Empire. In D. Arnold (Ed.), Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies. Manchester University Press. https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526123664.00004

Bashford, A. (2004). Leprosy: Segregation and Imperial Hygiene. In Imperial Hygiene (pp. 81–114). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230508187_5

Clifford, Hugh. (February 22, 1907). [Letter from Hugh Clifford to Edward Clodd, 1907]. Retrieved from https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/N13763922

Clifford, H. (1899, January-June). A Daughter of the Muhammedans. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 165, 250–263.

Clifford, H. (1917). The Further Side of Silence. Doubleday Books.

Fanon, F. (1965). Studies in a Dying Colonialism (H. Chevalier, Trans.). Monthly Review Press.

Holden, P. (2000). Modern Subjects/Colonial Texts. ELT.

Lees, L. H. (2009). Being British in Malaya, 1890-1940. Journal of British Studies, 48(1), 76101. https://doi.org/10.1086/592446

Manderson, L. (1996). Sickness and the State: Health and Illness in Colonial Malaya, 18701940. Cambridge University Press.

Morgan, S. (1996). Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian Women's Travel Books about Southeast Asia. Rutgers University Press.

Straits Settlements: Original Correspondence with the Colonial Office, CO 273, Vol. 144, No. 139. Governor Sir Frederick Weld to Sir H. T. Holland, Colonial Secretary, 16th April 1887. Retrieved from https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/private_records/record-details/2469e10247e7-11e6-b4c5-0050568939ad

Vaughan, J. D. (1989). Notes on the Malays of Pinang and Province Wellesley. Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia, 2, 143.

Corresponding author: Tejash Kumar Singh

Email: tejash.singh@ntu.edu.sg

Memory Dynamics in Small Acts of Freedom: A Hermannian Approach to Indian Female Sagas

Swethal Ramchandran Yuvakshetra Institute of Management Studies, India

Abstract

In literature, saga narratives stand out as a genre that closely follows the trajectories of various characters and families, navigating through stories that span ages, generations, and diverse regions. By centering on female protagonists, this genre delves into the lives of women across different generations, skillfully interconnecting their experiences. Most often, memory becomes a key tool to weave together histories of women across generations. Pernille Hermann in Saga Literature, Cultural Memory, and Storage (2013) examines the ways in which sagas narrate, represent and mediate memories. Hermann primarily distinguishes between the memory of literature, memory in literature and literature as a medium of collective memory. This study is an attempt to identify and outline the phases of memory dynamics in the recent Indian English female saga narrative namely, Small Acts of Freedom (2018) by Gurmehar Kaur. The study will substantiate the argument through a critical content analysis of the text through Hermann’s theoretical framework. The present study contends that saga fiction, when viewed from the framework of temporality and collective memory, provides women an avenue to identify, articulate and to reconstruct or reorganise the past within the scope of the present. Further, it widens the scope for the construction of a memory-based female genealogy through the retrieval and sharing of memories.

Keywords: female collectivity, female sagas, genealogy, mediation, memory, narration

The origins of Saga as a genre can be traced back to the mediaeval Icelandic literature in Old Norse, where epic tales of families, historical events and associated heroes were recorded. It was in the 20th century that sagas were brought into the ambit of Life Writing and were defined as extensive stories that follow a multitude of characters across time periods, generations and geographical regions. It must be noted that the available compendium of literature on sagas is primarily built around male sagas and there has always been a tendency to universalize them. Male saga narratives have a well-established tradition and explore patterns associated with carrying forward legacies in families through power and success. Women characters serve secondary positions within the plot of male sagas, as they are portrayed as wives, mothers, sisters, or daughters whose basic role is to support and nurture the male hero, both emotionally and domestically. In stark contrast to male saga narratives, female sagas do not have a wellestablished history or tradition because of the stereotypical insignificance attributed to the documentation of women’s life stories.

Female saga narratives encompass the life trajectories of a multitude of female characters across generations and regions. A general pattern to be found in most of these texts is that they deal with the life stories of a minimum of three generations of women, such as that of the grandmother-grand-daughter trio. While intergenerational sagas focus on the relationships and interactions between different generations within a family or community, transgenerational sagas look into the transmission of traits and legacies across multiple generations, often exploring how past events or decisions continue to influence later generations. Multigenerational female saga narratives involve multiple generations and focus on familial relationships, as well as broader historical contexts that span across generations. They are engaging because they generally follow interconnected story lines of female protagonists strewn across various ages and contexts.

Within the scope of female sagas, memory often becomes a key tool to weave together experiences of women across generations. Pernille Hermann’s seminal study on Saga Literature, Cultural Memory, and Storage (2013) probes into the ways in which sagas narrate, represent and mediate memories. Hermann distinguishes between the memory of literature, memory in literature and literature as a medium of collective memory. In doing so, he has highlighted the importance of memory to store and retrieve knowledge, as well as to reconstruct or reorganize the past. Adapting Hermann’s framework, this study primarily aims to identify and outline the narration, representation and mediation of memories in the recent Indian English female saga narrative, Small Acts of Freedom (2018) by Gurmehar Kaur.

Small Acts of Freedom is a poignant memoir that chronicles young author Gurmehar’s personal journey and activism, exploring themes of social justice, endurance and the shaping of one’s own identity. The memoir centres around Gurmehar and her mother Raji, as well as her grandmother, Amarjeet, both single women who have played a significant role in imparting strength and shaping Kaur's life and identity. The narrative unfolds events in the life of Amarjeet, who arrived in India from Pakistan after the partition. She leads a life of comfort in Vizag with her husband Ajeet and daughters Pammi and Raji. Ajeet meets with an accident at his workplace and passes away, leaving Amarjeet as a young widow who struggles and provides the best education for their children. Years later, Raji marries Harry. After the birth

of their second daughter, Bani, Harry goes on to fight in the Kargil war and becomes a martyr. Raji goes back to her mother after being widowed, following her path and struggles and raising her daughters well, providing them with a good education. The narrative ends with the sixteenyear-old Kaur visiting Srinagar for Harry’s unit’s raising day function and presents a letter that she has written for him, where she details incidents of her daily life with her grandmother, mother and sister, and reiterates that she misses him, strives to grow up to be like him and prays for belonging in a world filled with humanitarian values and happiness.

It is interesting to note that the narrative is built upon the perspective of the third-generation protagonist, with recurrent shifts in time. Incorporating the aspect of temporality adds to the role of memories in building upon the intergenerational narrative transmission of socio-cultural experiences, developing the sense of belonging, making challenges more intelligible and so on. In light of this, the study is warranted. The study will support these assertions through a critical content analysis of the narrative, employing Hermann’s theoretical framework. The study argues that saga narratives, when examined through the lens of collective memory, offer female protagonists an avenue to identify, articulate and reconstruct the past through a female lens and with hindsight, forging an image of the present through the retrieval and sharing of memories.

Brief Exploration of Existing Literature

The existing scholarship on sagas and transmission of memories is mainly centred around Icelandic saga literature. Hermann (2013) in Saga Literature, Cultural Memory, and Storage distinguishes between the memory of literature, memory in literature and literature as a medium of collective memory. The memory of literature includes aspects such as intertextuality, which is both manifest and latent, dynamic dimensions of sagas and re-construction of ideas in new texts. Whereas memory in literature includes different types of memories that are represented across literature using various techniques and the choice in the selection of memories. The study of saga literature as a medium of collective memory looks at how texts transmit and disseminate forms of cultural memories. Hermann is also of the opinion that saga themselves are mediated memories. On the whole, the importance of memory to store and retrieve knowledge, as well as to reconstruct or reorganise the past is focused upon. But in doing so, Hermann (2013) has excluded other forms of memory and hence there is a potential gap, as each type of memory is mediated and represented in a different way and needs to be studied differently.

In Founding Narratives and the Representation of Memory in Saga Literature, Hermann (2010) points to the ongoing debate on whether saga incorporates historical truth or fiction or is a blend of both. Hermann (2010) refers back to Jan Assman’s concept of saga as “founding narratives” with an important role to play in mediating memories. The workings of memory include both representation of memory and memory as representation. The representation of memory is generally carried through schemata and by merging the past with contemporary patterns. When it comes to memory as representation we are concerned with the working of memory in a temporal continuum. The framework of now/then is established using genealogy. In the process there can be both continuous or oriented sagas as well as discontinuous or disoriented sagas. By bringing in ideas of theorists like Paul Ricoeur and Jurg Glauser,

Hermann (2010) establishes the fact that sagas either include or exclude memories, incorporate multiple narrative instances and re-enacted schemes.

In Concepts of Memory and Approaches to the Past in Mediaeval Icelandic Literature, Hermann (2009) analyses two concepts of memory found in Icelandic sagas, namely memory as a storehouse of experiences of the past and cultural memory. The idea of memory as a storehouse of experiences is similar to the concept of ‘lived memory’ of Maurice Halbwachs. Hermann (2009) is of the opinion that with the passing of time, lived experiences can be forgotten and hence, for preservation, they need to be written down. This aids the passing down of memories across generations. Writing was also considered to be a potential tool of the historiographic tradition. When memory is viewed as a storehouse, it is viewed as static, whereas cultural memory is understood in terms of its dynamic and diachronic nature and is inherent in all forms of sagas. Cultural memories found at different points in history can be compiled together to arrive at the clear picture of the history of a nation. Hermann (2009) establishes the co-existence of both memory as a storehouse as well as cultural memory, in relation to the example of the Snorra Edda Saga. Hermann (2009) states that both models supplement each other in the Snorra Edda Saga to make it a blend of history and fiction. He is supportive of this technique, but he also raises the question of the choice of selection of memories and the interplay of remembering and forgetting. Thus, he favours the model of cultural memory, as it is more efficient in providing nuanced insights about sagas.

Memory, History and Narrative: Shifts of Meaning when (Re)constructing the Past (Luna & Rosa, 2012) is an attempt to analyse the role of memory and narratives in the reconstruction of past events. Many a time, events are mediated through language, narrative forms, templates and genres. The process of narrativization of the past is what shapes events. For constructing a narrative, selection of events and their placement in the right order does not suffice. The event has to be constituted within the narrative in terms of a triangulation between signs/symbols, the theme and the narration of the event. When done so, the past can exist in the present in a plausible manner and it can also point to the nature of the future. Mapping individual memory with social and collective memory also becomes a major element here. Other factors which influence the construction of the past include the explanatory purpose of the author and the cultural milieu in which the narrative was spurned. Yet another major factor is the positioning of the author with regard to an event. Hence, it becomes important to acknowledge the polyvocal character of reconstructions of the past such as the saga, as the positioning of each individual with respect to history, truth and representation varies.

Exposition of Narration, Representation and Mediation of Memories

Memory in Literature

To conceptualise the fundamental idea of memory in Literature one must take into account the various types of memories -personal, historical, cultural, traumatic, selective- using multiple techniques in our analyses. A question that arises after the identification of the different types of memories concerns selection and techniques for representation that depend on the authors’ subjective attitude towards the material. In the words of Hermann, “the concept of “memory in

literature” deals with the relationship between text and context and with synchronic relations between literature and the number of text-external memory discourses to which it is indebted” (Hermann, 2013, p. 341).

Personal memories of an individual are crucial in shaping their identities across various stages of life. It encompasses vivid aspects such as episodic memories regarding specific events, emotional memories, unconscious memories pertaining to skill and behavioural developments and prospective memories oriented towards actions or plans for the future. Historical memories are a broader spectrum that include collective ways in which individuals, as members of communities, remember and interpret past events. Historical memories are an ensemble of collective memories, socio-cultural memories and memories associated with national events. Traumatic memories delve into instances of psychological distress, violence, loss, displacement etc. Many times they are invoked involuntarily due to triggers arising from external stimuli. Traumatic memories are complex in nature due to the form they take which can be fragmented; they also impact individuals by causing physiological and psychological reactions. Selective memories are regarded as ones that, for any number of reasons, can be emotional, biassed, restrained, or distorted; they can also be chosen to either remember or forget.

In the selected narratives, there is a judicious combination of all of these kinds of memories on a single plane. For instance, in Small Acts of Freedom, Gurmehar recounts her personal experiences of growing up in India, particularly the impact of conflict and loss on her family. To achieve her goals, she uses vivid sensory details in instances like narrating her father’s death, where “with a sea of mourning people and men in uniform, he comes back. He comes back sleeping in a wooden box, with a bandage on his chest—on the same spot where I used to lean my tiny head against and sleep, listening to the rhythm of his heartbeat. My father is finally home” (Kaur, 2018, p. 12). In another instance, “What are the pictures that come to your mind when I take his name?’ she asks. I start recounting all my memories—images of him on his bike, images of him playing with the dog, images of him driving us to the amusement park. She tells me everything she remembers and together we start putting pieces of him back together in the hope of bringing him to life” (Kaur, 2018, p. 47). There is an introspective reflection in such a case, allowing readers to empathise with her journey.

Throughout the memoir, Kaur interweaves memories of historical events and associated sociopolitical contexts that have shaped her grandmother’s identity and worldview. She clearly refers to the battle of 1704 between the Mughals and her ancestors including Guru Gobindji. By contextualising their personal narratives within the broader historical framework of Partition and other religious conflicts, she not only highlights the interconnectedness of individual lives with larger societal forces but also underscores the significance of historical memory in shaping collective consciousness.

Kaur also draws upon cultural symbols and traditions to explore themes of identity, belonging, and resistance. She reflects on her Sikh heritage by pointing to the visits to the Gurudwara, familial traditions on Guru Purab, addressing her ancestors as warriors, symbols of Guru Gobind Singh’s Khalsa Panth etc. In doing so, she is in fact utilising instances of cultural

memories as a lens through which to understand her own place in the community and navigate complex social dynamics.

The entire memoir is structured based on a non-linear narrative style that moves freely between the past and the present. While such a technique is used in an unconventional manner, in certain instances it also serves the purpose of conveying the fragmented nature of traumatic memory. That is why Kaur, rooted in her current generation, goes back in time and refers to the memory of her father’s death and funeral, when she was three years old:

I don’t understand the chaos. The house is full of people, some whom I know and some whom I don’t… But today they are not happy. No one is laughing. The elders in the house told me that Papa would come home today. Yet, I can see everybody in the house but him. I look for him… He is there, in front of me, his face calm despite all the chaos around him. I stare at his face for the last time. I have to remember this image. I take in his hair, which I used to tug at whenever he gave me piggyback rides; his closed eyes, which he taught me how to kiss before saying goodnight; his nose, which he told me looked similar to mine; and his lips which were curled into a Mona Lisa smile. I remember it (Kaur, 2018, pp. 12-14).

Calling to mind traumatic memory with all its minute details intact, not only informs the present, but is also a sign of the lasting impact the past has on individuals and communities, even after many years.

A further analysis also reveals the fact that over and above identification of memories, there is also scope for intersections between them. For example, memories of Partition (1947) and the Kargil war (May–July 1999) cut across the personal histories of the first and second-generation protagonists. While Amarjeet’s family is torn from her due to the Partition, a young Raji loses her husband to the Kargil war. While the personal memories of Amarjeet and Raji are part of the collective memories of young widows in their community, who have to cope with sustaining and raising their children on their own. The personal memories of Raji and Gurmehar are part of the collective memories of single parent children, who have to stand on their own to build a life for themselves and also face condescending sympathy from everyone. Thus, Raji’s personal memories become intersectional, as she has gone through both the phases of being a single parent child as well as a young widow, circumstances explained by the historical memory.

In order to relate her various experiences, the author chooses to use the flashback technique with specific events or instances recalled through memory. Multiple shifts in time or temporal jumps becomes a recurring strategy used by saga authors to bring in the past or the future into the scope of the present.

Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger, in Third-generation Holocaust Representation Trauma, History, and Memory, are of the opinion that:

Every act of memory is also an act of narrative…from the very moment we begin the activity of remembering, we place some kind of editorial framework, some principle of selection –no matter how simple, how neutral or how unconscious– around the events of the past…a faithful and yet inevitably incomplete representation of actual events (Aarons and Berger, 2017, p. 47).

As shown above, the invoking of selective memory, which is either lived through or acquired, is crucial to intergenerational transmission of thoughts and experiences. This happens when the flashback technique is introduced from the vantage point of the third-generation protagonists, because they face:

The tension of knowing and not knowing, direct and indirect witnessing, in the tenuous transfer of memory… they enter the stage of history on the sidelines, initially as observers, and then as interpreters of the past. No longer there in front of them, the past must be searched for, summoned from afar, stories wrested from obscurity, no longer something to be recalled from a distance (Aarons and Berger, 2017, p. 63).

The problem of what is chosen to remember, how much of it and how it further impacts subsequent actions and decisions is what confounds the younger generation protagonist. Thus, by engaging with temporality and memory, the scope of the present is shown as co-existing with the past (both immediate and distant) as well as the future.

Memory of Literature & Sagas as a Medium of Collective Memory

The memory of literature is put forward through the aspect of intertextuality and the reconstruction of ideas. Hermann avers that, “when intertextuality is combined with memory, and when each new text in the textual culture is considered as a mnemonic act, which reinserts aspects of earlier texts in new contexts, intertextuality fulfils memory’s most evident function: It is a method of reconstruction” (Hermann, 2013, p. 338). In tandem with this aspect, Kaur draws upon a variety of historical references to shape the narrative and convey her ideas. In doing so, there is a constant engagement with the literary tradition of memoir and autobiography. She situates her personal story within the broader context of Indian history, politics, and social issues, which not only adds layers of meaning to her own story but also invites readers to reflect on the universal aspects of human experience. The interplay of diverse cultural and ideological influences is also seen, because as a young woman navigating her identity in the complex socio-political landscape of contemporary India, she grapples with questions of nationalism, feminism, and communalism, drawing upon a range of cultural references—from Bollywood movies to revolutionary poetry.

The text is also a site of the reconstruction of ideas as Kaur reflects on her experiences and reinterprets them in the light of her evolving understanding of herself and the world around her. There is a process of introspection and self-discovery, revisiting past events and imbuing them with new meanings and interpretations.

Saga literature as a medium of collective memory transmits various forms of cultural memories. Hermann is of the opinion that:

[t]he word “saga” (i.e., “narrative”) itself draws attention to this specific way of artificial organisation, which clearly indicates that in the mediaeval period, it was fully accepted that memories could be mediated in narrative form. This implies that the devices that shaped the sagas were considered as an integral part of the transmission of memory (Hermann, 2009, p. 344).

In line with the above, the narrative is spurned from the vantage point of the third-generation protagonist as she looks back to her immediate and distant past. Further, when Gurmehar engages with memory through visual tools such as an old passport, photographs, anecdotes and letters, it aids the process of introspection and self-discovery. Many times such tools become crucial tangible links to the familial past and help in bringing together long-lost connections between women. This may also lead to certain instances of epiphany where it is felt that protagonists from different generations have an underlying common thought process, which is hitherto undiscovered. Hence,

Gurmehar narrates instances in the lives of her grandmother, the mother and herself that weave into a portrait of the family. Each instance is a snippet of this larger canvas and follows an unusual but effective flow. It’s as though three parallel stories are moving forward together, and yet they remain incomplete without each other. We’ve probably read of the loss of adults in some form or the other, but reading of loss from a child’s perspective remains the core of this story, tugging at heartstrings and echoing within you in a primal way (Small Acts of Freedom, 2019, para. 4).

In the words of Barbro Werkmaster, “photography and other technology-dependent media are so far the best artforms to represent time” (Makela, 2003, p. 538). Here both the photograph and the passport turn to be sources of visual autobiographical material which is crucial in filling the gaps in familial history.

It is the passport that sets in motion a conflict between the grandmother and the granddaughter and further leads to a scenario of intergenerational convergence. In spite of always having lived with her grandmother, Gurmehar was unaware of her roots and the backdrop of Partition that divided her ancestors into two nations. With Gurmehar’s mother unveiling the past, the scenario turns amicable and in the name of humanity, the mindsets of three generations of women converge. Here it is the mid-generation mother who bridges the gap between her past and future generations. Thus, within the narrative space, time and memory are two major tools through which the generational interlocking of trajectories is achieved.

The multidimensional nature of sagas is enriched through the juxtaposition of different moments in time and across different phases of life. Nevertheless, it must also be noted that interlocking trajectories through time and memory and achieving a sense of collectiveness does not in any way mask the significance of individual roles or the contributions of protagonists of different generations to their families and societies.

A comprehensive understanding of the usage of temporality in select narratives, takes us to another vital aspect to be studied, which is the construction of a female genealogy. Saga narratives, when viewed generically, are significant for the fact that they highlight how certain patterns of female genealogies are incrementally crafted through intergenerational relationships, temporality, inheritance patterns, historical contexts, narrative continuity, power dynamics and so on. In most cases, genealogy is generally assumed to be biological in nature, while there can be other types of genealogies existing around geographies, professions, sociocultural patterns of communities and so on. Small Acts of Freedom depicts one genealogy of women, with different challenges experienced and the varied strategies for coping. The narrative is strengthened through the representation and mediation of memories.

Conclusion

The present study has attempted to contextualise the female saga narrative named Small Acts of Freedom by Gurmehar Kaur within the broader framework of collective memory. By adapting Pernille Hermann’s framework of saga literature as mediated memory, the study has analysed how aspects such as memory in and of literature has been utilised by the author. The major findings point to the fact that saga narratives open the scope for presenting multiple memories and associated perspectives in the text and their interplay results in new ways of perceiving different realities. Socio-cultural and historical memories also establish the fact that women’s lives are not only situated in their personal identities, but also in the larger sociocultural and historical milieu. Within the narrative, different female trajectories are laid out as a composite set of interlocking pathways that contributes to a more comprehensive and collective exploration of memory dynamics. This further gives rise to the gradual emergence of a memory-wise genealogy. The adaptation of a framework for interpretation, where insights from Hermann (Cultural and Memory Studies) is applied to the select narrative (Indian English Literature), serves the purpose of providing insights into the nature and role of memories in discerning a collective trajectory for women’s lives across generations, thereby enhancing the broader spectrum of re-interpretation.

References

Aarons, V., Berger, A. L. (2017). Third-generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory. Northwestern University Press. https://doi.org/10.26530/OAPEN_628783

Brescó De Luna, I., & Rosa Rivero, A. (2012). Memory, History and Narrative: Shifts of Meaning when (Re)constructing the Past. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 8(2), 300–310. https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.v8i2.460

Hermann, P. (2009). Concepts of memory and approaches to the past in medieval Icelandic literature. Scandinavian Studies, 81(3), 287–308.

Hermann, P. (2010). Founding Narratives and the Representation of Memory in Saga Literature. ARV, 66, 69–87.

Hermann, P. (2013). Saga Literature, Cultural Memory, and Storage. Scandinavian Studies, 85(3), 332–354. https://doi.org/10.5406/scanstud.85.3.0332

Kaur, G. (2018). Small Acts of Freedom. Penguin Random House India.

Makela, M. (2003). Constructing Female Genealogy: Autobiographical Female Representations as Means for Identity Work. Qualitative Inquiry, 9(4), 535–553. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800403254221

Small Acts of Freedom by Gurmehar Kaur: Review. (2019, May 29). The Free Press Journal. Retrieved from https://www.freepressjournal.in/weekend/small-acts-offreedom-by-gurmehar-kaur

Corresponding author: Swethal Ramchandran

Email: lahtews@yahoo.co.in

Absence as Resistance in Palestinian Speculative Fiction

Netty Mattar

National University of Singapore

Abstract

Palestinian identity is symbolic of the struggle against elimination, against becoming absent. The pervasive use of social media today has been pivotal in revealing this struggle, enabling the direct and unrestricted sharing of Palestinian suffering in the face of unremitting destruction and displacement. Across the globe, people bear witness to Palestinians fighting for survival amidst the mass bombings, field executions, and engineered famine in Israel’s current military operation in the Gaza Strip. This campaign, which began as a response to Hamas’ attack on October 7th 2023, has led to the extermination of Palestinian people at a level and pace that likely exceeds any conflict in modern history. Consequently, many experts consider this military operation a plausible genocide. Yet, despite its shocking and unfiltered nature, this recent incursion is only the latest example in a series of violent aggressions against Palestinians that have lasted nearly a century. This article aims to analyse works of speculative fiction that tackle these issues.

Keywords: Palestine, speculative fiction, Nakba, absence, identity

Historic Palestine – the region bordering Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and the Mediterranean Sea – was a diverse land where different faiths and cultures coexisted peacefully (Masalha, 2018, pp. 268–269). After World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine became a British colony, and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 saw Britain commit to establishing “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine (Balfour, 1917). This was incorporated into the British Mandate for Palestine, where Britain facilitated the immigration of European Jews into Palestine, paving the way for the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 (Schoenman, 1988, p. 41; Awad & Levin, 2020). That year, Jewish militia groups carried out raids and executions throughout Palestine for the purpose of ethnic cleansing (Awad & Levin, 2020, pp. 14–15; Hazkani, 2021, pp. 17–18) and to establish an “exclusively Jewish presence in Palestine” (Pappé, 2006, p. 7). Over six months in 1948, more than half the native population of Palestine were killed or internally displaced, with more than 750,000 people driven from over 500 towns and villages (Pappé, 2006, pp. 6-7). Almost overnight, Palestinians were relegated to the state of Arab “refugee” (see Flapan, 1987, pp. 22–23, for example), “exile[d] within their own homeland” (Benvenisti, 2002, p. 209). This was the Nakba, literally, “the catastrophe” with which every personal and collective Palestinian account of violence and loss is entangled.1

As a result of the Nakba, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to settle in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Palestinians were prevented from returning by subsequently passed property laws (Schulz, 2005, pp. 73–73).2 Landmarks, both natural and man-made, were systematically renamed to create a new Hebrew map of the country (Barclay, 2020, p.179). At the same time, Palestinian material culture was destroyed, historical buildings were demolished, newspapers were shut down, and cinemas and theatres were razed. Literary nationalism that had flourished before came to a halt (Abujidi, 2014, pp. 66–67; King, 2021). The resulting “map of absence” (to use Mahmoud Darwish’s phrase) would keep the Palestinians in their “nonplace” and justify the Zionist claim of “a land without people for a people without land” (Said, 1980, p. 82). In addition to cultural erasure, Palestinians in Gaza experience periodic, state-sanctioned violence, euphemistically referred to by the Israeli government as “mowing the lawn.” This is a “patient military strategy of attrition”, designed to collectively punish and kill hundreds and thousands of Palestinians every few years (Inbar & Shamir, 2013, p. 4). Even today, and facilitated by escalating settler violence, Palestinians experience ongoing land confiscation and expulsion in the West Bank and other occupied territories. Discrimination against Palestinians in occupied territories has become so pervasive and habitual that many experts consider it apartheid (Israel’s apartheid, 2023; Shakir, 2023).

Israeli historian Ilan Pappé highlights the “bewildering” fact that the dispossession of Palestinians by the Israelis in 1948 has been “systematically denied, not even recognized as historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted, politically or

1 Recent investigations have uncovered the Israeli government’s suppression of official documents related to the systematic depopulation of Palestinian villages by Zionist forces, amounting to the erasure of the Nakba from Israel’s archives (Anziska, 2019).

2 The Absentees’ Property Law of 1950 transferred the rights to refugees’ property to the Custodian for Absentees’ Property, who is only allowed to sell it to the Development Authority. Land that had been abandoned was acquired by the Israeli government through the Land Acquisition Law of 1953 (Schulz, 2005, p. 75).

morally”, and has been “almost entirely eradicated from the collective global memory and erased from the world’s conscience”, despite its significance in the modern history of the region (Pappé, 2006, p. 8). Similarly, Palestinian voices have been routinely excluded from Western mainstream media narratives (Peteet, 2016; Tamimi & Suárez, 2024). Today, social network companies are accused of enabling such erasure (Qannam & Abu Eisheh, 2023). Also notable is the fact that Palestinian experience has been largely excluded from the “trauma genre”, a genre that claims universality, but which conspicuously overlooks Palestinian testimonies (Sayigh, 2013). This calls attention to what David Morris has identified as inherently racialized frameworks that decide “whose suffering matters” (Morris, 1997, p. 25). The exclusion of the Nakba and Palestinian voices from cultural memory de-historicizes the Palestinian experience, while reflecting and reinforcing a racial logic of elimination and dispossession, which “produce[s] iconic versions of populations who are eminently grievable, and others whose loss is no loss, and who remain ungrievable” (Butler, 2009, p. 24). This psychological negation, along with cultural removal, territorial dislocation, and direct extermination, constitute a multifaceted and continuing ontological erasure. But the Nakba has not ended: it proceeds in new forms.

Making the Other Absent

Erasure occurs with the denial of one’s ontological presence. This assumes a priori understanding, based on Western metaphysics, of presence and absence as two antonymic categories. Presence implies the notion of being, “to have or occupy a place” somewhere “among existing things” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2007). The tangible world around us is understood as having presence and thus being real That which is material, what there is tangible evidence for, is considered to have authenticity, significance, actuality. Absence, by this binary logic, does not have a place among existing things. It is constituted by lack and is considered tenuous and unknowable. This is not a neutral opposition, as such dualisms devalue one side of the binary (absence) to bring the other side (presence) to a focus. This binary framework has been used to enforce notions of spatiality, determining what is “inside” and “outside” to deny certain groups’ claims to spaces and their participation within them (Cohen, 1986). According to this logic, the outsider – the absentee, the refugee – is reduced to the status of non-being. The outsider only exists in the condition of absence, rather than as a complete, political subject endowed with the right to speak using their own voice.

Settler colonialism functions through this logic. Settler colonialism eliminates (makes absent) all traces of indigenous life and replaces it with settler presence so that the settler-colonial state becomes naturalised (Wolfe, 2006, p. 387). This has been at the core of Israel’s project.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, the movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine writes: “If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct” (Herzl, 1941, p. 38). The settler-colonial Zionist state imposes this spatial logic of elimination not simply through land theft, blockades, and urbicide,3 but through legislation (Zureik, 2016). For example, after the Nakba of 1948, displaced Palestinians were labelled

3 This refers to the systematic destruction of urban areas (cities and their infrastructure).

“absentees” and their land deemed “absentee property”, even if they only left their land briefly.4 Such ontological framing is built into Israeli law to keep native Palestinians in their “nonplace” (Said, 1980, p. 29). This demonstrates how the Israeli government has sought to render Palestinians invisible, recasting them as outsiders with no identity or nation, with no right to exist on their land, in Judith Butler’s words, “excluded from an ontology of the real” (Butler, 2004, p. 33).

Absence Matters

The conception of absence as non-being, however, is problematic because for the Palestinians, absence does matter. Generations of Palestinians have been born in a state of exile, growing up in the diaspora. Absence is a common “state of mind” (Dominika Blachnicka-Ciacek, 2017) uniting those who have been internally displaced (symbolically absent) with their exiled countrymen, as well as diaspora Palestinians who have inherited this status.

Moreover, absence has affective power. Today, we see absence generate new identity spaces. For young diaspora Palestinians, for example, absence materialises into political action, which in turn reinforces communal narratives. In addition to this, the ongoing excision of the Palestinians has become emblematic of the Indigenous struggle against the Oppressor, mobilising solidarity groups, including the masses of university students across the world today, to advocate for the Palestinian cause (see also Haugbolle & Olsen, 2023). This transcultural solidarity is not merely symbolic, but has the effect of centring the material connections between settler colonial projects, bolstering grassroots resistance and divestment campaigns, resulting in substantial military and economic consequences (Collins, 2020). For the Palestinians, absence indeed exceeds colonising logic, pointing to an urgent need for its reframing.

Speculative Fiction and Redefining Absence

I argue that Palestinian writers have turned to Speculative Fiction (SF)5 because of its potential to redefine absence. In broad terms, SF is the literature of estrangement: SF worlds involve radical disruptions of “newness” that estrange it from the world we know, but which are at the same time plausible, and thus rooted in the “real”. This disruption can come through extrapolation of present realities into the future, or through defamiliarization (alternative histories, never-before-seen technologies, or neologisms, for example), which facilitate critical evaluation of the present. An emergent genre in Palestine, SF is taking its place within

4 These Palestinians are designated the status of “absentee” even if they remain in Israel. Those objecting this imposed status of “absentee” must bear the burden of proving they are not absentees, an endeavour that is often unsuccessful (Sabbagh-Khoury, 2011, 41).

5 The term ‘speculative fiction’ is term that arose in the 1960s to accommodate the broadening aesthetic domain of science fiction, which, at the time was saddled by arguments about the defining limits of the genre (Luckhurst, 2005, p. 147-148). My preference for this term reflects my view that the genre continues to evolve, and in recent years has become more diverse and inclusive of different of non-naturalist modes and styles; however, I use the term more or less interchangeably with “science fiction.”

revolutionary resistance literature (Aysha, 2020; El Shakry, 2021). Prominent writer and activist Ghassan Kanafani coined the phrase “resistance literature” to refer to Palestinian writing under colonial occupation that responds to political and cultural domination by the occupier, and is also committed to political liberation (Harlow, 1987, pp. 2–3). In the past, Palestinian resistance literature was defined by spare realism. Writers of the 1960s and 1970s moved away from the optimistic romanticism of writing produced before the Nakba to mirror and confront the horror and despair of the Arab defeat of 1948 (Selim, 2003, p. 110). For writers such as Kanafani and Mahmoud Darwish, their work became part of an emancipatory project that involved “establish[ing] Palestinian presence on the land” (al-Shaikh, 2010, p. 483). In this struggle for presence, writers used Palestinian folklore or stories about life before the Nakba to establish an authentic history, to counter assertions of originary absence, and to stake a claim to Palestinian territory, while still maintaining the binary absence/ presence paradigm.

Contemporary Palestinian literature signals several shifts. While still committed to establishing counter-narratives, writers now reflect the experiences of subsequent generations that did not directly experience the Nakba, but who lived in the aftermath of expulsion. Rather than simply expressing concern about the political reality within historic Palestine, writers such as Liana Badr, Naji Al-Naji, and Ibtissam Abu Sada, are attentive to changing borders and the ways in which these further complicate experiences of displacement. These shifts in perspective are accompanied by the aesthetic shift from realism to modernism, a style that aptly conveys isolation and immobility (Farag, 2017, pp. 13, 92–93).

In recent years, SF has become an increasingly popular mode amongst Palestinian writers and artists, perhaps due to how alienating worlds of SF can articulate intense feelings of detachment, while circumventing accusations of antisemitism (Ghalayini, 2021, pp. 8-9). Importantly, SF’s openness to alterity has allowed artists to break away from old paradigms and to approach the past in very different ways. Artists such as Larissa Sansour, Ibtisam Azem, and the contributors to the recent SF short story anthology, Palestine +100, for example, use SF conventions to escape the contentious political language bound up with the Palestine-Israel conflict, and to “create [their] own world and [their] own vocabulary in which [they] can address the same issues” of the past from their own perspectives (Sansour, qtd. in Chaves, 2019). In view of this, I am interested in how Palestinian writers engage SF as a new form of resistance writing that disrupts the ontological assumptions that undergird Western notions of absence and presence, and thereby disrupt the identities imposed upon them.

Reading Palestinian SF

While the imaginative freedom that SF offers has the potential to re-define identity, we are in danger of replicating Western paradigms if we are not mindful of our ways of reading. Literary interpretation, especially if based on Western values, can have the effect of absorbing difference and creating a Eurocentric literary “monoculture” (Apter, 2013, p. 10). For instance, scholars have often read dystopian images in Palestinian SF as simply reflecting the nightmarish reality of everyday life in Palestine (Ghalayini, 2019; Gil Hochberg 2018). This way of reading directly applies the fictional to “real” life, collapsing the distance between the “real” and representation. This is potentially problematic as it can oversimplify complex

realities Palestinians experience by re-inscribing them within pre-existing frames of reference that do not completely fit. For instance, Dystopia as a Western genre is understood through established frames that identify a specific visual syntax centred on traditional oppositions between “us” (the good ones) and “them” (the evil tyrants/ invaders), which is a binary of colonial rule (Berlatsky, 2014). This way of reading “only displaces the same elsewhere”, to use the words of Donna Haraway (1997, p. 16), leaving out narratives of liberation, which is at the core of the Palestinian struggle, and overlooking the question of the relationship between aesthetic choice and resistance.

An alternative approach reads Palestinian SF as a hybrid genre that operates through “double estrangement” (Campbell, 2018, pp. 9–10). This approach sees Arabic SF as broadening the scope of SF as established in the West and relating it to specific Arab identities. Arabic SF writers are understood as using estrangement to respond to Western “modernity” as well as for political critique (Labanieh, 2021, p. 10). In this view, SF becomes a hybrid domain of negotiation, engaged in dual processes of “affiliative” and “antagonistic” engagements with Western culture, creating an in-between space of opportunity that can facilitate cultural transformation (Bhabha, 1994, p. 2). However, as Simon During (1998) has argued, notions of hybridity often imply the integration of the colonised into Western colonising cultures, and a volatilization of difference, which can be more “reconciliatory than a critical, anticolonialist” strategy (31).

I offer a different way of reading that avoids reading Palestinian SF as merely derivative of Western SF. SF is a literary mode of interference that disrupts established systems of signification because of its contingency on absence. As Marc Angenot explains, SF presupposes an “absent paradigm” that has no direct relation with the empirical world and is “by definition void of referent” (Angenot, 2017). The reader is compelled to reconstruct the parameters of this void through semantic clues, and by comparing structures taken from the empirical world with the world of the text, thereby materialising the alien SF world through analogy, inversion or approximation. In this way, meaning becomes thoroughly entangled with, and dependent on, absence (what is not-present, “other”, or “outside”). Hierarchies of presence and absence are transformed into networks of relations. In effect, SF disrupts the colonial frames that order presence and absence; absence is de-linked from erasure and non-being. As I will show, this is a crucial disruption that allows for the articulation of new complex states of being outside of Western ontological frames and is a powerful means of reclaiming Palestinian identity that has been defined for so long by absence. I will explore this speculative resistance in my analysis of two works, a short story by Saleem Haddad, “Song of the Birds”, and Ibtisam Azem’s novel, The Book of Disappearance.

“Song

of the Birds”: The Presence of Absence

Saleem Haddad’s short story “Song of the Birds” (2020) is taken from the SF anthology Palestine +100, which asks what Palestine might look like a century after the Nakba. As Ronan McDonald (2005) observes, the short story form is inherently political, because “expressive gaps or silences” necessary to its form can be “powerful indicators of muteness” that “work against dominant discourse” (p. 250). Joseph R. Farag (2017) highlights that the short story has

played an important role in Palestinian literary production due to its capacity to respond to the many disruptions that continue to take place in Palestinian experience (p. 9).

Haddad’s story, at a basic level, addresses the violent control of Palestinians through Israeli war technology in the Gaza Strip. However, I propose that, at a deeper level, the story is a radical re-framing of absence. The story opens with a dedication to Mohanned Younis, a young Gazan writer, whose death by suicide in 2017 stunned the community (Haddad, 2021, p. 8). A note to readers links this dedication to an article “A Suicide in Gaza,” published in The Guardian in 2018, elaborating on how Younis’ death brought attention to the spate of suicides occurring in Gaza (Helm, 2018). These suicides have been attributed to the long, ongoing siege of Gaza, the consequent unemployment and the lack of necessities, like water and electricity, needed for a decent life. The article tells us that the young people of Gaza have lost hope in the possibility of freedom. The reader feels compelled to read Haddad’s story through this narrative of hopelessness and death. The story is thus framed by an absence: Younis’ death. This absence is thereby transformed into a spectral presence in the reader’s mind that haunts our reading of the story. The question of the relationship between presence and absence is raised from the outset.

“Song of the Birds” takes place in a futuristic Gaza, a world filled with holographic displays and advanced biotechnologies that conforms to the Western idea of techno-utopian progress. This Gaza is also filled with beachfront hotels and quaint cafés (Haddad, 2021, p. 14), where people are free to enjoy “cheesy music blasting from the drone speakers in the sky” (p. 8). The reader knows that this place does not exist in empirical reality. This is not because it is a utopia (literally, “no-place”). Rather, it is because the reader is painfully aware that this future is an impossibility: every effort to build this future has been violently undermined, as foreordained by “settler colonial apocalyptic logics” (Sturm, 2021, p. 2), the sabotage facilitated by technoutopian technologies (Loewenstein, 2024; Kwet, 2024). Haddad’s imaginary Gaza is therefore necessarily read through the reality of its destruction. This results in an uncanny landscape. Freud defines the uncanny as both “homely” (familiar) and “unhomely” (unfamiliar) and describes how the uncanny is tied to uneasiness about the instability of boundaries (Masschelein 2011, pp. 1–2). Here, the unfamiliar future Gaza is haunted by the familiarity of its foreclosure, becoming an uncanny, slippery, in-between space. For example, the early description of “screaming children” running across the Gaza beach (Haddad, 2021, p. 9) evokes both exuberance and horror, as we can only read this description through our knowledge of the fatal screams of the four boys bombed on the Gaza beach while playing football in 2014 (Sengupta, 2014). The presence of Palestine in this story is always already imbued with its absence.

This interference of absence and presence is literalized in the story. In Haddad’s fictional city, teen suicides have also increased rapidly. Ziad, the brother of protagonist, Aya, is amongst those who have taken their lives. At this point, the story shifts from speculation to reality, with the fictional world starting to more closely resemble the actual situation in Gaza. This shift culminates in the appearance of the departed Ziad in the fictional space, an appearance that transforms his absence into what seems to be a momentary presence. Ziad appears in Aya’s dreams, but his appearances are not simply the ephemeral reflections of subconscious desire.

He tells Aya that his death “[was]n’t really dying”, instead, he is now “outside of things” (Haddad, 2021, p. 13). Here, the dichotomy between reality and fiction starts to break down. This is aided by the fact that Ziad is a character clearly based on Mohanned Younis. They are both writers of the same age, who die under the same circumstances. Indeed, Ziad is a metonymy of Younis, a metonymy of presence in absence, transferring the presence of Younis into the story while Younis himself remains absent. The breakdown in the opposition between absence and presence constitutes a disruption of normative ontological structures.

Ziad reveals to Aya that the peaceful idyll she lives in is a technological simulation. This “digital image of Palestine” (17) is constructed from the older generation’s “rose-tinted memories” (15) of Palestine before the Nakba, which have been passed down orally from generation to generation. Although these nostalgic memories have “help[ed] keep Palestine alive”, they are also used by the Israeli state to “imprison” Palestinians (14), pacifying them by concealing the actual devastation of Gaza. This literalizes the idea of nostalgia as an intoxicating stasis, presenting a construct of belonging that necessarily erases the complexities and pain that lie on the edges of these memories. Haddad suggests that the immense psychological suffering and anger of the youth is conveniently left out in the construction of nostalgia. However, this suppressed “rage”, so “dark” and overwhelming, cannot be contained and eventually “seep[s] in”, shattering the romantic idealisation (14–15), emphasising the fragility of this simulation. Moreover, nostalgic memories lull Palestinians into a state of inaction, thus preventing change or political growth. Those living in the simulation are “absentminded” and passive (12), a “nation of cripples” (20), which frustrates Ziad and motivates him to exit the simulation. The story implies that nostalgia, the yearning for something irrecoverable, places Palestinians in the position of powerlessness because it reaffirms the destruction of paradise by the oppressor, indeed asserting the superiority of the oppressor. By keeping what is absent in the past, and by obscuring the afterlife of violent erasure, nostalgia is revealed to reinforce colonial hierarchies, a point underscored in the story by its weaponization. We understand that nostalgia is a form of misremembering that does little to fix the present realities, realities that nevertheless haunt these memories until they collapse under their own weight. As Aya becomes aware of this, her picturesque world becomes viscerally disturbed: when she brushes her teeth she registers “the gritty sensation of dirt and the taste of soil on her tongue” (14); watching teenagers in a field playing, she starts to see “limbless young boys hobbled on makeshift crutches” (19). The uncanny merging and splitting apart of the two worlds, the real and unreal, and the constant interaction between the absent and the present, makes the reader aware of the disjunction between cherished communal memories of the past and the haunting presence of the painful circumstances surrounding them.

Through the formal characteristics of SF, namely its absent paradigm, the relationship between the fictional space of the story and present-day Gaza becomes fluid and pliable. The reader becomes aware of how textual meaning needs to be constantly renegotiated, depending on the different ways the two spaces interact. This dynamic doubling produces a new speculative space that disrupts colonial structures that would keep absence separate from presence. Haddad’s story reveals that absence is not a lack, nor is it presence’s banished other, for absence inhabits presence. In light of this, Palestinian identity becomes un-fixed. We understand that Palestinian identity is not an essence but rather continually reconfigured through shifting

entanglements of present experiences and absent lives, communal memories and absent histories. Absence is transformed from a state of being into a dynamic process to which identity constantly returns and through which it is re-shaped. Through her encounters with absence, Aya feels herself transforming, although into what “she could not yet put into words” (16). Absence, Haddad suggests, through death or loss of power does not equate to erasure. Ziad tells Aya that death “[is] more like waking up” (12). In the end, Haddad inflects the tragedy of Mohanned Younis’ death, and the oppressive reality of Gaza, with a sense of hope.

The Book of Disappearance: The Power of Absence

Absence is also at the centre of Ibtisam Azem’s 2014 novel, The Book of Disappearance (translated by Sinan Anton in 2019). The book is premised upon the central question: what if all Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared? The absent Palestinian is a negative image and the central estranging device Azem uses to question the relationship between Palestinian and Israeli subjectivities. The negative image (a denial of the existence of something, rather than a positive affirmation of an alternative) is significant in that it induces a certain experience of reading. To comprehend a denial, a reader must first comprehend and acknowledge that which is denied. For a reader to reject the existence of Palestinians and accept their “disappearance”, the reader first needs to acknowledge the existence of Palestinians in their imagination. Through this negative image, Azem subverts apparently commonsense relations that govern colonial ontologies, namely the separation of the sovereign subject from everything “outside” of it, whether it be the absent or denied subject (the abject, the stranger, the outsider), or the environment, non-human entities, or the past. Within the colonial paradigm, the sovereign subject is at the centre, free to exert their will over everything “outside” it. Accordingly, all that are “outside” – here, the Palestinians – are assumed to be faceless and passive, left on the margins and hidden from view. However, in our experience of reading the novel, and in our paradoxical affirmation of Palestinian presence throughout, what is “outside”, denied sovereignty and hidden from view, nevertheless has power to affect what is “inside”, in radical and unexpected ways. As I will show, Azem suggests that this relationship between the sovereign subject and what is “outside” is material (embodied) and unknowable, rather than separate and asymmetrical, thus dismantling the colonial ontologies and allowing for reconsideration of Palestinian subjectivity.

Negation as Affirmation

The novel takes us through the aftermath of the disappearance of the Palestinians. For the most part, the novel follows Ariel, an Israeli journalist and liberal Zionist, who investigates the disappearance of the Palestinians. Informing his investigation is a journal he finds and claims, left behind by a Palestinian, Alaa, whom Ariel considered a “friend” (Azem, 2019, p. 25). The novel is mostly made up of chapters that alternate between Alaa’s perspectives (as presented in his journal entries), and Ariel’s perspective as he attempts to make sense of the journal entries and what is happening around him.

Alaa’s journal entries convey intimate reflections on the pain of losing his grandmother and are documents of his memories of her. He records her stories about Palestine and her home in

Jaffa (upon which Tel Aviv was built) before the Nakba. Through these reflections, Alaa contemplates the meaning of place and identity. Alaa’s often painful reflections are countered by Ariel’s accounts, which essentially represent the attempt to “control” (p. 106) Alaa’s narrative. Ariel’s perspective includes articles he writes in the aftermath of the disappearance, summarising Israeli responses to it. Responses range from accusations against Palestinians for starting a “general strike” (108), to calls to punish them with a deadline for return (p. 222), to thoughts about “highly unlikely” Israeli military involvement (p. 106), to elation surrounding the “divine miracle” that has solved Israel’s problems (p. 107). All Israeli responses reflect how “the great majority of Israelis are not interested in the daily lives of Palestinians” considering them abject subjects only to be understood in relation to their “chief concern”, that is, “security” (p. 107), a permanent threat to the colonial order. Through this alternating structure, Azem ensures that the world in which Palestinians have disappeared is constantly interrupted by the preceding world in which they existed.

Significantly, Ariel is only interested in Alaa’s journal as an object to be appropriated. His wish to edit and publish Alaa’s words without consent (p. 225) is an example of cultural commodification in which “colonialism appropriates both knowledge and material being from the colonised” (Clary-Lemon & Grant, 2022, p. 10). Azem therefore reveals the colonial logic that works to erase indigenous presence. Alaa’s journal entries are subjective accounts that the colonial entity attempts to relegate to the past, replacing it with official narratives, or repackaging it in terms not defined by the native. For example, in one journal entry, Alaa recounts walking through Rothschild Street decrying the erasure of Jaffa’s street names and how its “buildings and houses [were now] washed in whiteness”. He daydreams about “wip[ing] the whiteness off the facades of buildings... afraid that the white memory will possess him” (Azem, 2019, 114–116). Later, Ariel walks through the same street admiring the progress of his nation and he cannot help but recall Alaa’s thoughts. He responds by attempting to diminish Alaa’s views, asking himself, “Why all this thinking about the past? …Why couldn’t Alaa just enjoy living in a modern state with all this freedom anyway?” (p. 173). The word “modern” suggests the absence of, and opposition to, the pre-modern and uncivilised, and signals how the coloniser’s imposition of a temporal frame has the effect of painting indigenous Palestinians and their thinking as backward and extinct. We see similar examples of this later, where Ariel expresses that he is “tired of reading Alaa’s stories of the past and the endless talk about the place and its memory”, dismissing this as “tales of the defeated about the myths of the past” (p. 190). However, the very fact that, to think about his nation’s present, Ariel must actively imagine the ideas and histories under erasure, emphasises how what is absent has not been consigned to the past, but rather must be actively challenged and negotiated in, indeed inhabits, the present. Past indigenous experiences, no matter how the coloniser tries to control the narrative, exceed colonial, European linear time.

Colonial logic does not just involve the imposition of linear time, but also attempts to rationalise primitive passions, as seen in Ariel’s dismissal of Alaa’s anger as delusional fixation. However, despite this rationalising, Alaa’s passions are not defused. In fact, they drive action. Alaa’s journal entries are subjective and emotional accounts that convey inner psychological states, and yet Ariel takes from them to fuel his own journalistic writing, which lacks substance. At the end of the novel, we see Ariel appropriating Alaa’s experiences and

translating them into Hebrew so that he can publish and profit from a book about the Palestinian disappearance (p. 225–226). Significantly, the journal entries not only hold Alaa’s voice, but also his grandmother’s voice, which Alaa narrates. He recounts numerous moments when she talked about her home and Jaffa, pre-1948. The journal form therefore holds memory in a way that allows for the different generational voices to move through time, allowing all who are absent to tell their stories and convey their histories in their own voices, speaking to us directly without narrative judgement that might be subsequently imposed. It is through his memories of his grandmother, Alaa writes, that he has become reconnected to the land, “rediscovered Jaffa” and “learned to love it again” and “see its beauty” (p. 232). Alaa and his grandmother, living again though Alaa’s memories, and again in Ariel’s mind and the reader’s imagination, constitutes a collective affective force that disrupts colonial divisions of Self and Other, as well as colonial notions of linear time, in other words, interrupting colonial ways of understanding the world.

The sovereign subject is no longer the coherent, rational self, as established by the Enlightenment, in control of himself or his environment, driven only by self-interest. Nor is this sovereign subject in control of the inferior “other”. Instead, the memories of those others, others who are now absent, inevitably affect one’s understanding of place. Walking through Tel Aviv, for example, Ariel at first admires the street names he encounters, such as “Feierberg, Melchett, Ayn Fered, and Straus”, which “honor[ed] the persons who brought this city into being from nothing” (p. 174), a thought that echoes the Zionist narrative of a land without a people for a people without a land. However, this understanding is soon altered by Alaa’s feelings associated with this same space, which Ariel cannot shut out despite Alaa’s absence. He recalls Alaa’s anger walking down these same streets (p. 173) and that Alaa had “memorised the map by heart without names, so he wouldn’t look at street signs” because they represented the erasure of Palestine street names used before the occupation (p. 173). Although these are sentiments of someone who is absent, they have the power to move Ariel, inadvertently transforming his relationship with the land: recalling Alaa’s thoughts, he walks past the streets “as if leafing through pages in a book” (p. 174), aware on some level that his relationship with the place is mediated and fabricated rather than authentic. Although he tries to rationalise these notions (“Many cities are destroyed and rebuilt” [p. 175]), he can’t help but feel unsettled, allowing himself to question “[if] the Palestinians [might] have developed the place like this” if they had their own state (p. 177), ultimately empathising with the absent other. Azem’s thus presents an alternative understanding of subjectivity, outside of colonial self-determination. Relationality with the “outside” creates a new domain for understanding knowledge and subjectivity. The memories and feelings of those absent, Azem suggests, surface when one enters a space, changing one’s consciousness and experience therein. Places are haunted by the emotional traces of what has disappeared and cannot be contained by colonial logic. Material erasure is not absolute.

This idea of haunting is literalized towards the end of the novel. Ariel realizes that Alaa will not return and is “odd[ly]… relieved” by this (p. 224), his apathy revealing how he does not regard his Palestinian “friend” as someone “grievable”. Ariel proceeds to take over Alaa’s apartment (even though, absurdly, he lives a few floors away) mirroring the illegal squatting occurring in the West Bank (Makdisi, 2010, p. 12) and signifying his complicity in settler

colonial systems. This positionality is emphasized by the fact that Ariel is a descendent of an original Israeli settler (Azem, 2019, p. 76), and had enlisted in the army and was complicit in war crimes (p. 140). In this “temporary apartment,” as he calls it,” Ariel tries to feel “somewhat at home as he wait[s] for the unknown”, placing food in Alaa’s fridge and re-arranging the toiletries in Alaa’s bathroom, appropriating Alaa’s things as his own (p. 204). This charade eases the nagging “anx[iety]” in him (p. 206) as he struggles to keep his thoughts of Palestinian return at bay: “What if the Palestinians return before 3 a.m., he thought? What if they return before the deadline we set for them? What if they didn’t adhere to our times and chose the time themselves?” (p. 206). Ariel reflects what Philip Deloria (2022) suggests about settlers appropriating indigenous identity to imagine complete control over occupied lands and gain a sense of “authentic” belonging, to quiet the constant “anxiety” that reminds settlers that they do not belong (p. 142). Despite Ariel’s possession of space, he starts hearing noises coming from outside, “rattle[s]”, then “whispers” (Azem, 2019, pp. 218, 234–235), for which there is no apparent source. He remembers “his English grandmother”, an original settler, “always complain[ing] about… whispers at night” (p. 210). The novel ends abruptly with Ariel planning to change the door lock to keep the whispers out.

Azem suggests what is no longer materially present, what has been denied presence and history, nevertheless has material consequence and power. Azem suggests that this power is a ghostly presence (the presence of absence) that exists alongside what is ‘real’. More than that, it is an absence experienced corporeally, and brought into being through the corporeality of the people who experience the absence, even if it is in the context of enacting the erasure. In other words, both Ariel and his grandmother are complicit in the erasure of the Palestinians, and this erasure plays out in their organisation of their everyday life and appropriation of Palestinian culture. Absence also plays out on a psychic level, where the emotional effects –whether guilt, fear or paranoia – have visceral and corporeal consequence, compelling them, for example, to “chang[e] the door lock. Chang[e] the door lock …to change the door lock. That sentence was pecking [Ariel’s] dream” (235). This embodied absence that moves across generations is unknowable and therefore fearsome, leaving everything “in a state of anticipation” (234). This constitutes an insidious and unrelenting form of resistance. As Judith Butler theorises, “If violence is done against those who are unreal… it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and must be negated again (and again)” (Butler, 2004, pp. 33-34). Through the central estrangement device of the disappearance of the Palestinians, Azem de-links absence from erasure. Rather, absence haunts, leaves its traces in things, in texts, in thoughts, in actions, and thus is embodied, breaching the boundaries of the immaterial, imaginary world of memory and the past, and imprinting itself on the concrete world in the present, in ways that cannot be fully known or controlled. Using SF as a way to make this absence seen and heard, Azem therefore offers us an alternative to settler colonial epistemologies, an alternative that is borne in elimination, but which gains its power and force from that trauma.

Conclusion

All Palestinian narratives about absence are concerned with the past and the way it is invariably connected to the Nakba, which represents the most significant loss. This loss is expressed in

the resistance literature written after 1948, where writers revealed the personal impact of the Nakba, and the alienation and anguish of displacement and exile. Along with this is often a nostalgic longing for a pre-Nakba Palestine, a place of safety and happiness, preserved in the memories of indigenous Palestinians who hoped to return to it. It is interesting that recent works, including the two texts analysed in this paper, criticise such nostalgia. As shown earlier, Haddad’s story is an indictment of nostalgia and how it imprisons the mind by concealing the pain of the Nakba and its aftermath, thereby functioning to reinstate colonial power structures. In Azem’s novel, we find a similar critique of nostalgia that focuses on the disconnect between the generations. While Alaa’s grandmother remembers the beauty and comfort of pre-Nakba Jaffa, Alaa does not share her memories or sentiments. Born after the Nakba, Alaa remembers Jaffa only as a place “full of fear, poverty, ignorance, and racism” (Azem, 2019, p. 123), a place where tourists would “come and watch [them], as if [they] were monkeys in a zoo” (p. 124). However, he learns to love Palestine “in [his] own way” (p. 123), to “see its beauty” and not lose hope (p. 232) even as he endures the pain of the ongoing Nakba. Both texts criticise nostalgia’s universal narrative, indicating that it writes over more complicated and varied realities that subsequent generations grapple with. These texts therefore represent a shift that focuses on the acceptance of the painful present, rather than escaping to the past, and the redefinition of Palestinian identity grounded in loss but not defined by erasure. “[W]e are still here”, Alaa writes in the final journal entry, repeating his grandmother’s words. “I don’t forget its memory, but, nevertheless, I see its beauty… Oh, how beautiful is Palestine” (pp. 232–233).

The absent paradigm of SF, and the resulting openness to alterity, allows for fixed notions, such as those related to subjectivity, to be estranged, deconstructed, and re-signified, in ways not possible with other genres. Haddad and Azem capitalise on the genre’s central absence to subvert assumptions about ontological presence as defined by colonial frameworks. Using SF strategies of estrangement, both writers make visible to readers how absence is not synonymous with erasure, and therefore is not a “lack”. In both texts, the inseparability of absence and presence reveal that absence is not presence’s expelled other, for absence always haunts the centre, troubling and shifting binaries, and exceeding attempts to control it; it always already has agency. In this way, Haddad and Azem can reshape the contours of Palestinian subjectivity.

For previous generations of Palestinian writers, resistance meant reasserting ontological presence, taking back power by fighting on the coloniser’s terms. For later generations of younger writers then, resistance is being re-thought beyond the structures of mastery. Writers like Haddad and Azem express an alternative form of resistance that involves the redefinition of the coloniser’s terms and deconstructing the processes of representation built on those terms. This type of resistance is future-oriented, interested in exploring how new, imaginative conceptions of reality might destabilise dominant or reified narratives. And this opening up to the future, and openness to alterity, constitutes a powerful form of resistance.

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Corresponding author: Netty Mattar

Email: netster@mac.com