Engaging with Women's Words and their Silences

Abstract

In studying the 1984 pogrom and its aftermath, I have attempted to capture the voices of women of succeeding generations of the victim families and to gauge some sense of the arduous path which these women have had to tread on. In the present paper, I have examined and assessed the ways and means which women survivors of the 1984 pogrom have relied on to cope with their sense of trauma and hurt, and to negotiate everyday existence. In accounts seeking to document and map the experiences of trauma survivors, the themes which they raise and the issues that they speak of are taken into cognisance, while the gaps in their speech often remain unnoticed and unexplained. But these silences and gaps need to be recognised and highlighted as much as the speech of the survivors. Women survivors of 1984 also do not speak of their own agency, leaving it mostly unarticulated in words. Gauging a sense of this requires going beyond the words that are spoken and attempting, even if tentatively, to unravel and interpret the silences.