Psychological Ramifications of Trauma in Women as Represented in Shahnaz Bashir’s The Half Mother

Trauma is a subjective and extensive term with its diverse implications on individuals and consequently on the societies. Also the heterogeneity of traumatic experiences, cannot be over-simplified by putting them under one blanket term or generalising all of them into one bracket. Since nineteen nineties, owing to several reasons, the term trauma has picked up an impetus, and various studies in this area of discourse are being carried out. Recently only however homogenising of all the traumatic experience into the countable postulates of Literary Trauma Theory is being challenged by the scholars and academicians across the world. In this paper, trauma of an individual (who is a single mother) and a society (of Kashmir) through the reading of Shahnaz Bashir’s The Half Mother is explored. This paper shall try to map the mindscape of the protagonist Haleema and parallelly observe the cultural ramifications of the same.


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Introduction: The colour of everything is sorrow the colour of the moon is sorrow the colour of the streets is sorrow and the colour of memories is sorrow The colour of my heart, in its own heart, is sorrow.

The colour of my breath is sorrow, the colour of sorrow is sorrow
The above lines from The Half Mother (Bashir 5) reflect on the ramifications of loss and trauma that an individual suffers. Be it the heavenly world i.e. the "moon" or this world i.e. the "streets" or inside of the person i.e. the "memories" , "heart" and "breath" , the sorrow in the life of sufferer, Haleema, is three dimensional as depicted in above quoted lines. All the things seem to be coloured in one hue-that is of a perpetual sorrow. An all-encompassing pain engulfs the life of the victims and witnesses of traumatic event. This paper is an attempt to study the narrative of trauma and its psychological ramifications in Shahnaz Bashir's The Half Mother. The novel will be explored on two levels, one individual and another collective i.e. the society. Through this novel the agony and trauma of distressed individuals like Haleema and cracked social fabric of Kashmir will be studied. The novel along with depicting stress and pain in individuals especially women, also is an example of the transformative shift in literary as well as cultural scene of Kashmir. From writing and celebrating the beauty and richness of the beautiful vale to a trauma-ridden and psychologically stressed out society is evident. Consequently the contemporary Kashmiri literary scene is majorly now a chronicle of pain and trauma. These novels depict individual as well as collective nature of trauma. The trauma of victims flows across the cultures and majority of the sufferers share almost similar fate as we see in these novels. Also it is In a social and cultural set up where a woman anchors her existence to her husband and her children, understandably the loss of both proves to be detrimental to her on both levels-personal and social. In the very first chapter titled'A reverie in retrospect' Haleema is seen as a person who hates herself. "She woke up hating herself … She hated the moon now"(3), these sentences point toward a grave psychological crisis where a woman starts disliking everything so much so that she begins despising herself. Yet Haleema relentlessly struggles against all odds. Her eyes are the eyes of a mother as"her eyes did not leave her wooden gate" (4), she remains sombrely hopeful for the return of her disappeared son, Imran, while running pillar to post to find him. Perpetually, "her head was filled with flashing visions and buzzing memories", which added to her woes. The "Pathogenic memories" ( Breuer and Freud 40)keep haunting her day and night and keep coming back to prick her gaping wounds in sudden but repetitive flashes.
Haleema's pain is an ongoing pain and an everyday struggle. One thing may be noted here about the conflict zones is that the similar happenings in the surroundings amplify the pain of an individual as he/she finds similitude of hopelessness and despair in their own suffering and that of the others. Shahnaz Bashir has represented this collective social and cultural crisis through the story of Haleema. The never-ending search for the loved ones especially, fathers, husbands, brothers and sons, has become a special case of Kashmir specific trauma that has impacted its women in the most detrimental way. They often spend remaining lives hopelessly searching for their missing men. Along with emotional bereavement, women suffer financial crisis because men, the bread-earners of the family, are of her dead father Ab Jaan and her disappeared son Imran. These memories kept coming back to her and rendered her wounds more fresh and agonising than before. These 'pathogenic memories' wrecked her every night and visited her when, "She laid out the utensils to serve herself dinner, she ladled the rice onto two plates . . . she stopped … She began to sob, followed by a low wail that reverberated in the empty house"(108-109). She was always alerted, "when someone knocked at the door, she would quickly feel her heart sank. Her brain would blow over and over, It is him, maybe it is him. She would get weak in the knees; her hands would tremble" (112 145 anticipation, defines the existence of many of the characters in the novels"(Zutshi np) as the memories were link between mother and her son, "separated by long years of separation" (111), Haleema sometimes also recalled how "her childhood and that of her son in their house encircled by a plum orchard, listening to stories told by her father, or playing with chickens in the courtyard"(Zutshi np) was beautiful and joyous, but soon she was engulfed by the same trauma-ironically full of void.
Such trauma involves much more pain than a single traumatic event or experience, as every day memories of the trauma without any closure, cause an agonising negative consequences which are worse than death for Haleema. Imran is not dead but has 'disappeared'. The traumatic memory of the fateful day when Imran was snatched away from her, the questions regarding his current whereabouts and condition and the everyday struggles of finding and dealing with obnoxious politicians aggravate the psychological stress and trauma. This kind of trauma is " much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche" (Caruth 4). Haleema becomes silent and paranoid in the end, as such " radically disorienting experience of trauma often involves a dissociation between cognition and affect" (Stef Craps and Lucy Bonds 77).
Haleema's Psychological Trauma: An Agonising Never-ending Wait The helplessness, silence and voicelessness of the victims like Haleema, their psychological and emotional rupture and their circumstantial stand stillness, leads to a detrimental and irrecoverable psychosis. The story of Haleema is an epitomic literary representation of women in a disintegrated society. Such trauma is seen not only as representing "historical wounds" for particular communities, but rather it unfolds in the aftermath of the events, and is traumatic precisely in its inability to be captured and recorded. The narratives are thus replete with the impossibility of writing trauma and thereby 146 of possessing it, and ultimately, of the impossibility of accessing the traumatized self itself"(Zutshi np). Bashir's novel is representative of the trauma that is inexpressible, it leads to overall ill psychological health of women and hence the whole Kashmiri social fabric. The symptoms "like stress, depression and trauma" are common and there is an increased "number of cases related to abortion and miscarriages among women" (Mir & Somasundran134 . This trauma is passed onto the next generations and seeps into the familial unit of the society. The cultural response, the family ties, the rituals, the religious cohesion have women in the centre in the societal structure of Kashmir, therefore, "intergenerational and collective trauma deserve greater focus in the context of protracted conflicts"(Housen, T., Lenglet, A., Shah, S. et al).
As cited in WMC, "50 percent of women (compared to 37 percent of men) suffered from probable depression; 36 percent of women (compared to 21 percent of men) had a probable anxiety disorder; and 22 percent of women (compared to 18 percent of men) suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)" (Mir Shoaib Mir & ParthuVenkatashnp).
Prolonged exposure to tragic and horrific incidents led to psychological effects which are profound and lifelong. The victimhood of women leads to crumbling down of social structures and their trauma seeps silently into the societies and generations. Though (un)speakability and silence of Kashmiri women find voice through the narratives of Kashmiri writers, but the unexplainable and deeply inflicted psychological wounds of the ongoing and perpetual trauma can't be fully expressed ever. Nevertheless, literature becomes the mouthpiece for the victims like Haleema and has a cathartic effect too for the shared pain