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

Abstract

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.