People's War, Trauma, and Its Consequences in Rebel

Abstract

Between February 1996 and the first half of 2006, Nepal had been in the midst of a devastating crisis that increasingly threatened to tear the country apart, taking the lives of more than seventeen thousand people from both sides – rebels and security forces. The excesses by the rebels and the security forces in the pre-contexts of the People’s War instigated by the Nepal Communist Party (Maoists Centre) are consequently traumatic. Tortures, extortions, rapes, arbitrary arrests, unlawful killings, disappearances, etc., characterized the bloody landscape of violence. However, the conflict and its results have become a subtle area for writing narratives of different genres, that is, short stories and dramas. The narratives written about the traumatic experiences of the victims help the reader access trauma, which has become very important among diverse artistic, scholarly, and testimonial representations in bringing out the personal and public aspects of trauma. This chapter seeks to depict how Rebel, a collection of short stories written by various Nepali writers who have broadly depicted traumatic situations of contemporary Nepali society, brings out the horrible past from which each Nepali wanted to escape, but their painful memories wouldn’t let them come out. Time and again, they find themselves brooding over the past and experiencing the traumatic past. By applying cultural and psychological aspects of trauma theory propagated by Cathy Caruth, Jeffrey C. Alexander, E. Ann Kaplan, Jenny Edkins, etc., this chapter depicts how the conflict that caused huge destruction in the country has left the Nepali society in a painful condition, from which even today, after about 15 years, they haven’t gotten relief.