Bodies Like Rivers: Seeking for a Space for Body Memory in the Discourse of Trauma

Abstract

The article questions trauma theory’s fixation on anti-narrative techniques of aporia and fragmentation as the only appropriate means of encapsulating and transmitting trauma, since such a tendency largely marginalises alternative ways of exploring trauma. The author discusses Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) to illustrate that literary writing conforming to a narrative poetics endorsed by trauma theory can indeed be powerful. Nevertheless, in an endeavour to highlight the need for seeking other poetics and modes of remembering, the author concentrates on the analysis of two short stories by Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, included in a collection entitled Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition (1997), and on Canadian novelist Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers (1999). Although all three authors engage with the way texts and bodies infiltrate each other’s porous boundaries, it is only in Manto’s and Baldwin’s type of embodied narrative that corporeal experience and memory are depicted as thoroughly intertwined in the way individuals and societies remember. Their stories reveal subjectivity as a complex biological, historical and social amalgam that seeks narration, but not necessarily through telling.