Trauma and Maturation in Women's War Narratives: The Eye of the Mirror and Cracking India

Abstract

Research Article| November 01 2006 Trauma and Maturation in Women’s War Narratives: The Eye of the Mirror and Cracking India Kamran Rastegar Kamran Rastegar Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Middle East Women's Studies (2006) 2 (3): 22–47. https://doi.org/10.2979/MEW.2006.2.3.22 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Kamran Rastegar; Trauma and Maturation in Women’s War Narratives: The Eye of the Mirror and Cracking India. Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 1 November 2006; 2 (3): 22–47. doi: https://doi.org/10.2979/MEW.2006.2.3.22 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsJournal of Middle East Women's Studies Search Advanced Search A comparative study of Liana Badr’s The Eye of the Mirror and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India shows that these two novels present intriguingly similar feminist frameworks through which the traumas of war and communal violence may be addressed. They do so by erasing the distinction between literary work and critical social history, producing what we may term counterhistories of the Lebanese Civil War and the Partition of India. In both of these novels, a girl upon the verge of sexual maturation sees the eruption of violence in the society around her to be fundamentally analogous to the inherent violence that accompanies the new social role she is being thrust into as a woman—this is achieved through the presentation of the narrative from the character’s “naïve perspective.” These and the other literary strategies in the texts destabilize what is anticipated in the predominant war narrative, by linking the political, oft en nationalist violence of these stories to the intimate violence sustaining the structures of patriarchal social institutions within which the characters exist. The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2006 Association for Middle East Women’s Studies2006 You do not currently have access to this content.