Silences and Narrativisation: A Study of Trauma in Nagaland: Dr. Pravin Lulekar

Introduction

This paper studies the impact of the trauma and traumatic silences caused by the armed conflict in Nagaland, particularly during the 1950s. It argues that – a) for the subaltern, processing and narrativising trauma is a political act, and b) the narratives produced highlight and challenge the hierarchies in the “mainstream” narratives of the nation. This is based on the theoretical framework which suggests that narrativising memories (and hence, literature) plays an important role in processing trauma. The primary text studied is the short story An Old Man Remembers from the collection These Hills Called Home (2006) by Temsula Ao.

One of the mainstays of Nagaland’s political history in the 20th century has been its people’s nationalistic aspirations. From 1929 till 1953, aspirations for an independent nation were expressed in non-violent, bureaucratic measures by organisations like the Naga Club and the Naga National Council (NNC) (Sanyu 129-30, Misra 619-20). As part of these measures, in March 1953, a public meeting of the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was successfully boycotted in Kohima. After this, the Indian government launched a police action. The NNC then went underground and adopted violent measures (Means and Means 292-293; Misra 620). Following this, the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) was imposed in the region (then the Naga Hills Tuensang Area) in 1958. 

As hostilities broke out, the masses were caught in the cross fire. The Nagas were subjected to violence by the Indian army (Sundar). While “many Nagas, if not most” supported the nationalist ambitions of the underground, they also “expressed exasperation” over their violence (Means-Means 296).  The movement also suffered from factionalism and violence within (ibid.). The imprints of fear, violence, trauma and traumatic silences were left on the people’s psyche. Its narrativization is seen in the written literature by Naga writers. 

Theoretical Framework

Theoretically, the paper derives from four concepts – splitting of ego (Freud), the “unassimilated nature” of trauma and hence its unspeakability (Freud; Caruth), the role of narrativisation (Freud ;Caruth) and Postmemory (Hirsh). Further, the theoretical framework developed from these concepts is placed in the discourse of nationalism with the help of critical observations by Dolly Kikon. 

The first two of these concepts help in understanding the silence generated by trauma. When faced with trauma, the ego is caught between instinctively denying, not remembering the reality (the trauma-inducing event) and wanting to remember and know that reality (Freud, “AOOP” 232). The ego thus splits. Interestingly, this happens in two cases. First, when one is the victim of a traumatic event. In traumatic neurosis, the illness is not caused by a physical injury, but is the effect of fright (Breuer and Freud 5-6). In turn, fright is caused when one runs into danger without being prepared for it (Freud qtd. in Balaev 363). The second case is when one is the perpetrator. In this case, the super-ego becomes “particularly harsh and cruel” and induces “consciousness of guilt” (Freud, “AOOP” 209) in the ego. In both cases, the ego again responds by splitting.

It is important to note that this is not a conscious process. Because of the suddenness and unexpectedness of the original event (for both victim and perpetrator), the event remains “unassimilated” in the memory or consciousness (Caruth 4). Normal memories lose their “affect” because there’s generally an “energetic reaction” to an event, ranging from “tears to acts of revenge” (Breuer and Freud 8). However, in the case of traumatic memories, the original event had happened “too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known, and is therefore unavailable to consciousness” (Caruth 4). Thus, the sufferer is “genuinely unable to recollect” the experience (Breuer and Freud 3). It remains unspeakable. 

However, the other side of the split ego induces complications. Because the original event has been denied, its “affect remains attached to the memory” (Breuer and Freud 8). As a result, it manifests as dreams, pathological symptoms and most importantly, as a “compulsion to repeat” the “repressed material as a contemporary experience” (Freud, “BTPP” 12). The compulsion occurs uncannily, “exactly and unremittingly” (Caruth 2), because trauma remains “incomprehensible” and the “violence has not yet been fully known” (6). 

Narrativisation – and literature in general – plays a crucial role in addressing trauma. This role can be understood in two ways. First, the traditional psychoanalytic stance, which Caruth summarises – “the treatment of trauma requires the incorporation of trauma into a meaningful (and thus sensible) story” (117). Freud, in fact, stresses that though repetition cannot be entirely avoided, the focus of treatment should be on remembering and not repetition (“BTPP” 13). And further – “each individual hysterical symptom…disappeared…when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words” (Breuer and Freud 6; original emphasis). All these elements – constructing meaning, detailing, putting emotional impact (“affect”) into words – are mechanisms of a traditional narrative. 

The second way in which the role of literature in repetition can be understood is through Caruth’s theorisation. Caruth argues that even while narrating, one still does not have a complete grasp of the traumatic event. And yet, one narrativizes it, opening up the possibility of seeing (and telling what one saw) without understanding it – “one might see…without knowing it” (36). This narrative bears “recurring figures…that capture the splintered referentiality that points to the “knowing and not knowing” of the traumatic past” (Balaev 364). This points to motifs in literature (or in film, the girl in the red jacket, for instance, in Schindler’s List). 

More fundamentally, Caruth argues that “literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing” (3), and that “to transmit and to theorize around a crisis” involves not a “straightforward” language, but always a “literary” one: “a language that defies, even as it claims, our understanding” (5). This indicates, in terms of trauma, “the contradictory wish to know the meaning of the past but the inability to comprehend it” (Baleav 364) – thus, repeating it through indirect, allegorical incidents and referring to something without knowing it. Again, this connects with literature in terms of elements like a) metaphors/metonyms with not one precisely defined meaning; b) allegory, and c) more specifically, in terms of the focus of literature/film on feeling/showing than explicitly stating. All these elements, in a trauma-induced narrative, would be unconscious. 

Additionally, narrativisation, especially of the first kind, also offers a safe distance for the narrator to process the original incident from a safe distance. As Freud states, the treatment should, by focusing on remembering (while allowing some re-experiencing), ensure “certain degree of aloofness” in the patient, to convince them “that what appears to be reality is in fact only a reflection of a forgotten past” (“BTPP” 13). The same can be said about the first-person narrator in literature, who is simultaneously part of the story they tell (reliving it), but also aware that it is a past experience (signified in the past tense used in storytelling generally). 

A specific way of narrativisation is Postmemory, i.e., the passing down of “traumatic historical experiences” of one generation to the next (Hirsch 9). The act becomes political as this is a process of personal memory becoming “fully historical” (Gottsche 47), because what had happened with one person (Anne Frank, for instance) is not merely a personal experience, but part of a larger historico-political process (the Holocaust). Hirsch describes this process as the striving to “reactivate and reembody more distant social/national and archival cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression” (111). In other words, “history”, i.e. the official narrative of the nation – usually constructed and persisted upon by the dominant groups – is intervened in, especially by the subaltern. This is termed as “the politics of memory”, an “intermediate position between history and memory” (Goettsche 46-7; Goettsche’s interpretation of Geschichtspolitik, a term by Heinrich August Winkler). 

These concepts, contextualised in the history and politics of Nagaland, underline the political significations of silence and narrativisation. As Dolly Kikon says, the north-eastern region of India has been important only from the point of view of territorial integrity. The region does not find itself in the “narrative and memory of the nation” (2833).  The history, the political will of the people of Nagaland, its suppression by force, and the trauma caused by the subsequent armed conflict do not fit into the national narrative of “unity in diversity”. In terms of a cultural narrative, the north-east is not what one thinks of when the notion of India as a nation is evoked. This manifests in violence of other kinds, like identifying the people from the region with terms like “Chinese” as “Japanese”, used in a racist sense. 

A truly “federalistic” approach of multiculturalism and equality, is thus not developed. The narrative of the nation remains stuck in the idea of “oneness” in terms of collective identity (Wettstein 234). (Wettstein makes these observations in the context of her critique of Naga nationalism. They, however, would be applicable to any kind of cultural nationalism.) Trauma and silence are prevalent either way, and thus triggers narrativisation. 

This “oneness” of narrative can be understood as the split ego of the nation, which remains unified by repressing the traumatised part of it. The literature from Nagaland, by Ao, Easterine Kire, Avinuo Kire and countless other writers, apart from being a psychological act of narrativizing trauma, is thus also a political one. It reminds the “mainstream” that there are repressed (and suppressed) stories, which form an alternate narrative. The idea of ‘nation’ needs to mature and expand itself to become truly “federalistic”, by accommodating every narrative. 

An Old Man Remembers – Silences and Stories

Temsula Ao’s short story collection These Hills Called Home can be read as about trauma and the memories of trauma. It is primarily focused on the early years of conflict in Nagaland, the 1950s. In the introduction to the text, titled Lest We Forget, she says that the stories are not about “historical facts”, but about “trauma (that) goes beyond just the physical maiming and loss of life” (x). Again, the political dimension of this processing of trauma can be understood when Ao says that the “inheritors of such a history” have the responsibility “to sift through the collective experience and make sense of the impact left by the struggle…” (x-xi). 

The story An Old Man Remembers (Ao 89-113) stands as a metonym of this project of remembering which the text as a whole undertakes. The story is about Sashi, an old man now living in a village in Nagaland, who was part of the underground movement. Imli, Sashi’s best friend and companion in the underground movement, dies. Moa, his grandson, asks Sashi if he and Imli had killed people in the jungle. Sashi is forced to face the past and answer his grandson. He now has to narrativise his trauma, as it hurts not just him, but also the younger generations of his community. 

One sees the splitting of ego in Sashi quite clearly. He has seen the worst kind of violence, both as victim and perpetrator (described below), and is unable to talk about it. He has consigned those memories “to a dark place in his heart”. When he is finally forced to talk to Moa, he initially has disorderly flashes of memory. There is no conventional narrativity initially, indicating that the memories are denied, and are now coming out violently. The same reluctance is seen when Sashi remembers how, after he quit the underground army and settled down, his wife (now deceased) would ask him what troubled him (since he woke up due to nightmares). She would ask him to talk about his trauma. Sashi replies, “‘Woman, you do not know what you are asking me to do.’” To be sure, as opposed to the unconscious denial discussed above, this is more a conscious suppression. Yet, the reasons and even the process remains the same to a large extent. 

As seen, in spite (and because) of this denial, the trauma and the event(s) “uncannily” repeat themselves. This is seen most prominently in Sashi’s nightmares. These nightmares begin when he’s in jail (after he surrenders) and continue throughout his life. On the night before Sashi narrates the story to Moa, he’s had another nightmare, he wakes up “with a jerk” and “sobs loudly”. Though the story doesn’t describe his dreams much in detail – again signifying that the act of writing the story is itself a process of remembering – it is safe to presume that the dreams made Sashi relive the traumatic events. Apart from this conventional form of repetition, the traumatic events manifest themselves in “jerks”, “sobs”, “whimpers” and “trembles” is Sashi. His leg, injured during the underground years, still hurts and acts up on the day Imli dies. The unconscious is forcing out the trauma, seeking narrativisation in these ways. In the words of Eva Hoffman, it is a ‘“deeply internalized but strangely unknown past”’ (qtd. in Hirsch 108).

The process of narrativisation helps make sense of these disorderly, suppressed memories. Detailing, one of the most important elements of story-telling in a conventional sense, plays an important role here. It compels one to face the events as they were, at least as much as possible. Sashi remembers how he and Imli saw the Indian army attacking their school one day. He remembers hearing “women and children shrieking and crying”, seeing “gun-toting soldiers” shooting people “like animals”. The children are instructed by school authorities to run away into the jungle. Imli is however reluctant. He sees his father being beaten up by the attacking soldiers. After a brief first stint with the underground army, when the friends come back, they see their village “burnt to ashes” and abandoned. The granaries, the school, the houses, everything is erased. Imli discovers that his father is “beyond recognition”; his “face was disfigured”, “he had a limp and one eye was missing”. 

This victimhood is juxtaposed and complicated by the guilt of being a perpetrator of violence as well. After hiding at an abandoned farmhouse, Sashi and Imli notice that the place is being approached by the enemy. Imli and Sashi block the entrance with a framework of sharply pointed bamboo stakes. They hide with their guns in the room. As the unwary soldiers enter, their bodies are pierced and they let out “blood-curdling screams”. They begin to fire randomly. Sashi and Imli, in a better position, take aim and shoot the soldiers. When the enemy fire dies down, they escape, but return in the morning. They discover “five bodies…turned black with their blood”. On finding a soldier still alive, Sashi shoots. On inspecting his dead body, he sees that the soldier is his age. The “look of pain and horror” on the soldier’s face makes Sashi vomit. They join another group of the underground army, and now indulge in violence regularly. 

While these details are fairly explicit, narrativisation and the role of narrator (for Sashi) offers a distance from them. As seen, narrativisation (and literature) offers a platform for both participating in and watching the events from a distance. It allows re-experiencing the trauma again, understanding it (at least partially) this time, and yet, not being affected as intensely by it again. Narrativising (and detailing) also offers that “energetic reaction”, again from a safe distance, helping in losing the “affect” of the traumatic memory. Apart from this, narrativisation, as hinted, gives an expression and a structure, and hence possibly a perspective, to the disorderly, denied memories, in “healing (from) and understanding” the past (Gottsche 33).

In terms of Caruth’s formulations, there is still some “unknowing”. For example, when Sashi reaches the point in his narrative where he and Imli are first found by an underground army unit, and are then being taken to the training camp, he says, “I do not know how long we stayed like that (in the state of shock of being found by them) but only remember marching alongside these creatures.” Though this is not Sashi’s core traumatic memory, it hints at something the victim cannot remember, process and hence, understand. The same can be said about his nightmares mentioned above. More than knowing, the feeling of fear, shock and numbness are the focal points. 

What narrativisation offers politically can be understood more explicitly in terms of Postmemory. The specific question here is – why Postmemory? Why should the generations that haven’t experienced the trauma first-hand, and are relatively free from it know about it? Again, in a metonymic sense, Sashi himself asks this question. He isn’t sure that children and grandchildren should know about it. Yet, it eventually becomes impossible for him to contain the trauma within. In this sense, Sashi’s narrativisation might seem like a personal, psychological act, limited to himself and those like him. However, its collective political gravity is understood when one places the trauma in a historical context. 

Hirsch cites the concept of Communicative Memory by Jan Assmann, which again means passing down memories, or “passing down…bodily and affective connection to that event to their descendants”. This happens in “normal succession of generations”. However, as Hirsch points out, when the memories are traumatic, there is “break in transmission”; “ruptures introduced” in the flow of Communicative Memory (110-11). This break leaves the succeeding generation, grappling for the past. History is thus not entirely irrelevant to even the third generation. The importance and relevance of history (in the form of generational memory), when hidden due to the trauma involved in it, is felt because of its very absence.

More immediately and explicitly, it is important to note that in a conflict zone, the signs of history are scattered all over the land. The burnt villages, the damaged churches and even plush urban centres inform them, again subliminally, about the past. As Hirsch puts it, “the (traumatic) past is located in objects, images, and documents, in fragments and traces that are barely noticeable” (119). These signs invoke “beatings, rapes, burning of villages and grain-filled barns. The forced labour, the grouping (the practice of dislocating villagers from their villages and forcing them into camps) …” (Ao 93) which Sashi experienced first-hand, but are accessible to the succeeding generations only as signifiers without signifieds. 

Conclusion

In a larger sense then, for the people in a “conflict zone”, narrativisation of trauma, and of the silences it induces, is not merely a personal, psychological act, but a collective and political one. Like An Old Man Remembers, the short-story collection itself is a metonym – a part of the countless traumatic stories Naga people have to tell, which manifest in the works of other Naga writers as well. More importantly, these stories are relevant not only for the current generations of Nagaland, but for the entire nation and humanity, as they force the “mainstream” to see the pain of the ‘Other’, to introspect, to step out of a singular narrative, and to hopefully construct a more equalitarian, truly “federalistic” society. 

It must also be noted that continued incidents of violence, like the incident in Mon district of Nagaland in December, 2021, where 13 civilians were killed in an alleged “botched operation” (Sayantani), continue to evoke the trauma.