Memory, Migration
and Trauma – A Study of Women Migrants through the Lens of Literature and
Cinema
Avipsha Kar,
Department of English Literature,
University of Calcutta,
Kolkata, West Bengal, India.
Abstract: With migration
becoming a dominant space of study, and gender-biased coercion increasing in
the modern world, it becomes quite imperative to synthesize the two spheres in order
to produce a greater scope for research. My study specifically delves into
historical accounts of the twentieth century wherein migration had become
important – and forceful. I have brought in themes of gendered memory and
trauma, and their function in the light of the past, while introducing
Literature and Cinema as agents of substitution to complete the gaps between a
survivor’s objectivity and the experience’s subjectivity. Being a woman migrant
entails a violence often overlooked, which this study tries to bring to the
forefront for a recognition of those unsaid memories still surviving through
Art.
Keywords:
migration, trauma, memory, history, literature
Diaspora emerges urgently out of mass reshaping of
identity and community faced by the modern world. Much as how ideas of nation
have always been slippery, ranging from broader emotions of a collective unity
achieved through nationality, to more intimate concepts of an inner sense of
patriotism towards one’s motherland, borders have always been a liminal thread
of separation mostly existing through manifestations of walls and fences. With
the establishment of borders comes containment, limitation, and isolation. The
abstract idea of space divided and possessed has become a more grueling issue
in the modern times with the rise of warfare and humanitarian crisis. In the
middle of this chaos, the issue of women – of their safety, their liberty and
the bigger threat on their existence – becomes paramount. Spatial independence
afforded to women have always been minimal, with urban spaces constructed to
cater to the needs of men (Greed,“Promise or Progress: Women and Planning”) even when women constitute half of the population of
the world, and have been testified to build stronger connections with their environment
than their male counterparts as they run their daily errands and fulfill family
requirements out in the society (Rashid and Haruka, “Spatial Equity of Public
Parks: A Case Study of Kabul City, Afghanistan.”).
The movement of women, and their reality of being, have always been restricted
to the house or more specifically the kitchen. When this woman is pulled out of
the same cage she was stuffed in and forced to face the wider world of men in
forms of migration and displacement during turbulent times of war, hunger, and
border reconfiguration, the need for a synthesizing research on gender and
migration becomes important.
According to the International Organization of Migration
under United Nations, migration is the movement of the people away from their
familiar place of residence to an unfamiliar place of residence, within a
familiar State or across International borders (IOM, 2026).Migration as a
gendered process had only just been validated in the 1990s. While the dominant
belief of international migrants had been that of the young men crossing
boundaries to look for bread and livelihood, the need for a clearer gendered
study of migration, to delve into the family status and mobility between
classes (Kofman, “Gendered
Mobilities and Vulnerabilities: Refugee Journeys to and in Europe.”) has become essential for the understanding of the “the autonomy and subjectivities of women migrants” (Christou and Kofman, pg 13).
Despite their recent significance, women have always been overlooked in the
broader image of migration, with the portrayal of the mass migrants still being
of men searching for work in the urbanite cities. This gender-bias overshadows
facts – in India alone, according to a 2001 Census, female migrants constitute
218 million out of 309 million migrants based on place of last residence, while
it is 91 million for men (Mahapatro, “Gender and Intra-Household Migration
Decision in India: An Empirical Analysis.”). In
recent studies, women migrants take up almost fifty percent of migration.
Keeping the earlier discussion on the strong connection
that women have to their immediate surroundings in mind, and prioritizing a
core understanding of the womanly plight in the face of any collective
masculine force like war, it is not hard to realize the trauma inflicted upon
the woman and the weight of nostalgia that they would carry for a prior state
stability. This research will explore the thin ice of memory which most exiled
women walk on, their impact on later generations and the representation of the
trauma in literature and cinema.
Trauma and Memory,
Memory and Trauma
Scholars have contested the various influences that
trauma might have on all forms of memory, especially long-term. The emotional
response of trauma, which hinders normal functioning of the cognitive brain and
more often than not overwhelms an individual enough to reduce them to their
flight or fight instincts, has received adequate reputation thanks to Sigmund
Freud’s theorizing on Traumatic Neurosis and the levels of consciousness. Hirsch’s
own interpretation of postmemory, wherein
the “post” in the term stands for a consequence of trauma recalling but with a
generational skip – that is, the next generation would enliven the traumas of
the previous ones so minutely, to even build new memories around it – has
significantly cleared the perception of the power that trauma holds.(Hirsch, “The Generation of
Postmemory.”). Intergenerational trauma refers to the
transfer of grief and its subsequent emotions down the family line. As David
Malouf believes, the fate of a migrant also decides the fate of the migrant
children, as they live in a state of doubleness, to inhabit a world of chaos
instead of a promised safety. The memory of the first generation survivors – of
the world of protection and security broken by compulsive outside forces – is
transferred to the children through oral history. This memory is active in
framing previous experiences and moments, revisited, reinvented and reimagined,
then finally synthesized with the present to keep alive the intrinsic value of
the trauma. Each time a memory is invoked, so is the trauma associated with it,
and each time a trauma is recalled, the memory naturally reveals itself. Trauma
and memory, memory and trauma, are interlinked and actively involved in adding
new meaning and perception to that which has already occurred in a new space
and time, and this process can be repeated infinitely.
The Holocaust
Between the years 1933 to 1945, a large scale of Jews
emigrated from Nazi Germany and Germany occupied Europe to escape the harsh
militant anti-Semitism practiced and propagated by the Nazi Party and the
common population. Although Hitler and his government had allowed for the
emigration of the Jews in the early years of the Reich, host countries were
hard to find after the disastrous decade of the Great Depression, which left
the emigrants to seek refuge even in the basement of sympathetic Christian friends
within Germany itself.
There is little doubt that Anne Frank is the most notable
account of displacement in recent history, and being an autobiography, we get a
first-person narrative of the lives of the Franks as they went into hiding.
Being uprooted from home does not just amount to a loss of shelter, but also of
culture, community and identity. The alienation which Anne faced, while being
just an adolescent, is one that resonates with several children in the world as
they are compelled to move and leave everything they know behind. The aftermath of the Second World War pulled humanity
to a standstill as man came face to face with a destruction only man could have
created. Psychologists and theorists started to expand the field of trauma
study, and were quite shocked to have noticed a strange pattern in the
survivors of the exploits – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Victims experienced
flashbacks, nightmares, sudden outbursts of intense emotions and hypervigilance
which remained largely undiagnosed.
Cathy Caruth is probably the most
prolific of trauma theorists in the recent years. Her books – Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and
History (1996), Trauma: Explorations
in Memory (1995) and Literature in
the Ashes of History (2013) – provide an extensive report on trauma which
is recorded, remembered and relived in literature. For Caruth, trauma is the
sudden experience of extreme catastrophic events which often result in a late
response. Anne’s diary (which she lovingly called Kitty) was not just a personal
recollection, but rather transformed itself into representational trauma as she
documented the restrained life in the annex, which finds reflection in several
post-war accounts of Jews who went into hiding. “History,
like trauma, is never simply one’s own… history is precisely the way we are
implicated in each other’s traumas” (Caruth, pg. 24).
Between the Nazi rise to power in 1933 and the surrender
of the Nazi party in 1945, around 340,000 Jews had migrated from Germany and
Austria as a way of saving their lives, and almost all of them searched around
for a sense of home. With home comes the sense of belonging within the refugee,
the lack of which creates an unredeemable sense of absence that holds even
their future in a tight grip.The alienation of an entire family from their
community and the subsequent lodging of them in a little annex would have been
harder for the women folks, as their space would be encroached upon and totally
obliterated. This close contact with death, be it through concentration camps
or a loss of home, created a generation whose trauma trespassed immediate
experiencers. According to the National Library of Medicine, Holocaust
survivors are less likely to be able to provide their children with adequate
support and care compared to that of a non-Holocaust survivor parent (Dashorst
et el, “Intergenerational
Consequences of the Holocaust on Offspring Mental Health: A Systematic Review
of Associated Factors and Mechanisms.”)Post-traumatic
stress disorder is still the raging stressor that haunts survivors and soldiers
alike, and considering that just a few hundred of survivors are alive today,
this stress is carried by them well into old age.
What must be focused on is the plight that women face in
torturous environments as that of Nazi Germany, to escape from which several
immigrate. Going through women’s memoirs during holocaust means that we are
confronted with two extreme genres – involving racism and gender issue. As
according to Myrna Goldenberg, these memoirs provide “Different horrors” of the
“same Hell” (Goldenberg and Shapiro, Gender and the Holocaust) lived by the men as well. Hitler’s vision for the Reich
had always been deeply misogynist, frequently repeating how the Nazi revolution
will be “entirely a male event”. Most of the fears that a woman could have were
biological, like psychological trauma resulting in amenorrhea or forced
sterilization. Thus one can equate the migration of a Jewish woman being more
strenuous in the sense that being captured would mean being tampered with and
experimented on. The ignorance of a woman's traumatic experiences, especially
ones which are sexually invasive, is rooted in stigma and stereotypes. The
guilt and shame associated with the experiences often remain unresolved, in
silence, and are passed on as defensive reactions and anxious attachments to
children and grandchildren. It would require the society as a whole to
acknowledge and support the victims to stop the transference and break the
cycle. Anne Frank’s autobiography becomes an identity of a collective trauma
and memory, humanizing the one million children murdered, and six million who
survived.
Comfort Women
On the other side of the world, a separate reality for
Asian women was unfolding – the concept of Comfort Women. As the UN definition
of trafficking includes in it basic concepts of “transportation” and
“transfer”, migration naturally falls in step as a part of trafficking. Since
the entirety of the action would be performed by the trafficker to exploit its
victims, migration becomes a de facto
element of trafficking.
The “comfort” women were women and girls forced into
sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces between 1923 and 1945.
Several scholars have debated the euphemism of “comfort”, coined by the
Japanese Army, believing itto be diluting the gravity of the matter. Majority
of the women were trafficked from Korea and China, while the existence of those
from Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and even European women in
Japanese-occupied territories could be traced in recent investigations. The age
of these women were diverse, starting as young as twelve. Asmore and more
comfort stations were established in the then Japan occupied countries, brokers
were employed as recruiters to gather as many women as possible particularly in
Korea and Taiwan through deceitful promises of securing factory jobs or
becoming hospital nurses.
Comfort women were beaten, raped, and even medically
experimented on. The women were forced to serve multiple men per day and were
not paid for their services. No major contraceptive cure was practiced so that
the victims were left with sexually transmitted diseases and often pregnant.
The foreign girls were forced to talk in Japanese and strictly prohibited from
speaking in their mother tongue by the army, a part of their Japanization
Policy of 1940s. During air raids they were evacuated with the Japanese
soldiers, only to be used once more in tents and caves after the bombing
ceased. There has been enough evidences of the Japanese government being
involved in the comfort woman system, and often times justifying it as a method
to stop the Japanese soldiers from raping locals. As Ok-sun Yi, a survivor from
Korea had stated in her testimony, “It was not a ‘comfort’ station. It was a
slaughterhouse!”
Since there has been a lot of shame associated with the
history of such sexual enslavement, there have been few proper literature which
addresses the complexities of trauma involved in the system. Furthermore, the
reliving of the memories by the victims for testimonial purposes have often
resulted in immediate physical ailments in the victims as headaches or nausea
and nightmare (Schellstede, Comfort Women
Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military). Given that most
of the survivors are now senior citizens, it gets difficult for scholars to
reach out to them without limitations even if efforts have always been made to
ensure their history gets recorded.Nora Okja Keller’s novel Comfort Womanacknowledges this
sentiment, but more than that highlights a different impediment when it comes
to the archiving of memory – shame, and silence. Akiko, the former comfort
woman in her book, practices the silence forced upon her by her American
Missionary Husband Richard Bradley who acts as the patriarchal head instating
the taboo surrounding rape in society. Richard had inarguably married her for
the classic American fetishizing of young Asian women prominent in how he
renamed Akiko’s entire past as a victim of sexual exploitation to
“prostitution”. Keller also fills in the research gap regarding a transmission
of trauma between a survivor of sexual violence and her child through the relationship
between Akiko and Beccah, her daughter. Robin Fivush’s essay “The Silenced
Self: Constructing Self from Memories Spoken and Unspoken” asserts, “The
transfer of silence [of the parents’ traumatic past], in effect creates
disability in the second generation to construct a coherent narrative [which…]
in turn, may lead to a fragmented sense of self, especially if the trauma
occurs early in development before children have a stable self-concept or are
able to construct a coherent narrative of a past without adult guidance”
(Fivush, pg. 89). This “fragmented sense of self” is particularly apparent
towards the end of the story when Beccah deconstructs her relationship with her
boyfriend on the same line as her mother, turning what was once “electric” to a
base sense of grotesqueness. Akiko’s trauma is transferred to her daughter
through passivity and violence. Beccah, however, has a greater role to play
than just being a vessel of her mother’s trauma – she also acts as a recorder
of her mother’s testimony. Through the cassette tapes which revealed to her at
last the horrors that her mother had gone through, she bears witness to a
history largely ignored. Keller thus creates a fictional space for a more
symbolic experience of the resistant power of memory as the silence is at last
broken. Akiko becomes the face of a political existence, though fictional,
powerful in the face of denial practiced in contemporary times - Japan has made
no clear apology for the atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army in spite
of the government militia being involved in the mass trafficking and rape. In
times like this, literature spanning generations
become a tool to amplify the silence surrounding sensitive issues that do not
resolve but rather keeps on resonating through years, unless one takes
accountability.
The Bengal Famine of 1942
According to Kratika Khatri, the idea of the kitchen and
its components have always been associated with the women of a household. Food
and nourishment fall under the motherly jurisdiction of femininity in
patriarchal societies – and when this identity falls in times of crisis,
whatever independence of space that a woman can enjoy is also compromised.
The Bengal Famine happened to be a human made one in the
year 1943 during World War II in the predominantly agrarian state of the Bengal
Province (today’s Bangladesh and West Bengal). More than three million lives
were taken by starvation and malnutrition as the Allied forces, fearing an
attack on undivided Bengal, removed excess rice and boats to stave off the
Japan Imperial Army. With the failure of provisional healthcare and medicinal
supply due to inefficiency, and the exhaustion of the rural patron’s own
resources, peasants were abandoned and left to fend for themselves. This
abandonment carried itself into family structures as husbands gave up on wives
and children, who were witnessed to be roaming the streets of Calcutta
destitute and dying. Famines particularly raises the exploitation of women, who
would be sold to rich landowners or into prostitution for as little as one
kilogram of rice (Greenough Paul R., “Indian Famines and Peasant
Victims: The Case of Bengal In 1943–44.”) Women who had been abandoned by their families could only
hope for their survival through brothels with regular meals as the only mode of
payment. In a society which highly valued the chastity of the woman, they were
transformed into social outcasts who quickly became objects of sexual
exploitation.
Most of the population trekking to
Calcutta had been from rural villages. Though no sure estimation of the exact
number displaced is available, the sick who flocked to Calcutta had been
between 100,000 and 150,000 (according to the Famine Inquiry Commission of
1945). Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder, 1973) directed by
Satyajit Ray and based on the novel of the same name by Bibhutibhushan
Bandhopadhyay, is set in the famine years 1943-44. In an unusual reversal, the
Brahmin Gangacharan Chakraborty and his wife Ananga travel has traveled to a
rural village in Bengal in hopes of earning a more solid livelihood in midst of
uneducated villagers. Gangacharan is obviously not as esteemed as he portrays
himself to be, but no one in the village is qualified enough to double check
the Brahmin priest, and so life becomes easier for the couple in the idyllic
village. However, the famine is what unveils a double reality – it had not been
only Gangacharan who had put himself out as something he was not, but the
people too whose amiability rapidly vanishes in starving times. Men resort to
violence and riots, women can only pick snails and travel deep into the woods
for wild potatoes, or sell themselves in order to survive. The displacement
showcased in the movie is not a sudden exodus, but rather a planned pilgrimage
to sustain themselves – Chutki, the village’s fiery woman – flees with a man to
the city. In all probability, she would be exploited for her beauty in exchange
for food. In the end, we see almost silhouettes approaching the landscape of
the village, as Ray wanted to examine rural Bengal as not just a land one
“flees”, but rather a region without a destination.
The Bengali kitchen transformed after
the catastrophe – as women scourged every bit of edible nutriments to create
dishes such as “lau-er-khosha-bhaja” (fried bottle gourd skin) or
“kumro-phooler-bora” (deep fried pumpkin flowers). The memories from the
famine-stricken kitchens still remain in practice in a Bengali’s regular diet.
As mothers and grandmothers pile handfuls of rice on the plates of their
children and grandchildren, one cannot help but link the action to the rice
scarcity they or their predecessors must have faced in Bengal. Does the ritual
stem from expected feminine servitude, or a fear for the Distant Thunder? According to Shreya Mandal, a licensed
psychotherapist, descendants of the famine suffer through food anxiety and
compulsive eating habits, excessive guilt around wasting food, hypervigilance,
gastrointestinal problems and the likes. She recognizes them as
“psycho-emotional echoes” and insists on the act of acceptance in the
transference of trauma, to name the affliction better. Almost seventy million
Indians suffer from diabetes, in a country which had been largely starving not
even a century back. In recent times, as Gen Z tries to figure out the inherited
trauma especially surrounding diet, threaded by a famine which had meant to
oppress the colonized along with protecting the colonizers, they need a clearer
perception to be more cognizant. Stories from the Bengal Famine has seldom been
received from actual survivors, their testimony lost to starvation, death, or
state-imposed censorships. Since oral history is largely unavailable, films
reproduce the memory of the famine with a subjectivism and empathy generally
absent in official narratives, giving the younger generation the space to
reflect on the inherited trauma honestly.
Partition of India in 1947
August 1947 witnessed the independence of India, the
birth of the new nation of Pakistan, and the world’s largest movement of
population ranging from an approximation of 10 to 18 million being displaced in
a matter of days. The worst suffererswere women who were brutally raped and
murdered, often compelled to take their own lives in order to save the life of
her husband, brother or father. In a country wherein women are largely
associated with the dispensable, the migration of women during partition had
been an open invitation for the “other” to establish dominance by attacking the
womankind. As Urvashi Butalia had pointed out, it was not just a violence observed
in the family, but one practiced to save the honour of the “family, community,
and nation” (Butalia, ‘Community, State and Gender: On Women’s Agency during
Partition’). The Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration Act of 1949, which
continued till 1954, seemed to be an initiative by the government to recover
abducted women who could have been forcibly converted and restore her back to
the original community. All the inter-communal/faith marriages were declared
null and void after 1st March 1947 as well. However, this act did
more harm than good. With notions of what is pure and what is impure for the
women being deeply ingrained in the patriarchal society, most fathers and
brothers would rather not have their daughters and sisters back. Further, the
women themselves would refuse to return in fear of various stigmas and a lack
of acceptance on the part of the family. A woman touched by a Muslim would
never be wholeheartedly accepted in a Sikh or Hindu community, and vice versa.
The double displacement threatened to snatch whatever home (or rather shelter)
the woman had managed to make for herself. Thus the trajectory for women in
times of Partition was one of a violent uprootment and then a forced recovery
which, if successful, resulted in a double marginalization for the woman.
Memory comes to play a huge role in a traumatic situation
as that of the Partition and comes to us through oral narratives. These
narrations have thankfully been archived by Feminist Historiographers like Ritu
Menon, Kamala Bhasin and Urvashi Butalia where they tried to record the
experiences of women and provide them with the very space generally rejected
for them in Borders and Boundaries
and The Other Side of Silence
respectively. There are now videos, audio clips, and interview excerpts which
help us to conceptualize and visualize, and not just imagine, the horrors of
Partition. Thus, as much as reliving these memories would give rise to trauma,
memory itself becomes important as a force of resilience.
These memories are what Partition fictions are based on.
We have Khuswant Singh’s Train to
Pakistan as the first literary fiction to analyze. Train to Pakistan
fascinatingly situates the women folk as a second gender – the “other” weaker
section of the society there to serve the first genders or the men. There might
be a dirth of female characters in the novel, but the submission and subversion
of the women is prominently shown through Nooran and Hasina. They are passive
representations of the very patriarchy that keeps them under subjugation. The
absence of women from the main conversations and dialogue exchanges in the
novel is a deliberate act on the part of the author to illustrate a reality
–women were the second sex and could only talk and dream of what patriarchy
teaches them to. Even Jugga, whom we believe loves Nooran passionately, is not
exempt from objectifying women when he declares, “Wah, Babuji – great. You must
have had lots of fun. The memsahibs are like houris from paradise – white and
soft, like silk. All we have here are black buffaloes”, (Singh, pg. 113). The
double marginalization is conspicuous when the “memsahibs” are placed above the
regular Indian woman in an apparent act of glorification, and still manages to
be a sex object for the ordinary man. An even better description of the course
of the displacement of women is portrayed in Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar wherein Pooro, a Hindu woman is
abducted by Rashid, a Muslim man over property disputes. She manages to flee
her captor and return to her family, only to be rejected and left ostracized.
Shocked, all she could manage to do next was formally marry Rashid and turn
into Hamida just to live a double life. Even if the text is a glimpse into
Pre-Partition, one must understand that communal biases and violence was in
affect from before the redrawing of boundaries Post-Partition. In fact one can
easily place Pooro’s life of reality and illusion with that of several
dislocated women during Partition. Pooro could only be Pooro in her dreams,
where she would still be a member of her family, loved and cared for. In
reality, she would be Hamida, a woman compelled to change her religion and
identity to face acceptance in the patriarchal setup. Pooro’s disgust with being
a mother is in direct resistance to the idea of India as “Bharat Mata”, and the
forced image of motherhood pushed onto women to make them child-bearers and put
the fetters on her feet. The stories of Taro – being prostituted by her
husband, Kammo who is disowned by her father, and Lajo abducted by muslim men –
all culminate to point out the exploitation of women at the hands of men. As
Amrita, through Pooro, speaks, “It was a crime to be born a girl”, (Pritam, pg.
45).
Collective memory works here as well, as the
idea of Partition and the trauma associated with it is shared and passed down
generations. But collective memory often turns into a gendered space, which is
what had happened to the women displaced during Partition till scholars started
to record oral histories of female victims fairly recently. The long term
effects of Partition shaped the second and third generations profoundly.
Economic crises evolved, with more than half the population of Bengal suffering
extreme poverty and riots. There is also a shame associated with Partition
which would keep the survivors silent with survivor’s guilt, the endurance of
which carried itself into the next generation.Survivor’s guilt particularly
wrecked the women, the supposedly weakest link in the family as well as one on
whom a family’s “honour” depended. The transmission of trauma between
generations is also a gendered act in my opinion – more patriarchal as fathers
became violent men to justify their emotional absence, while mothers stay
submissive and pliant as a continuation of a survival instinct.
The second generation suffers from what
Danieli calls to be reparative adaptation, wherein children of trauma survivors
take on the role of their parents to compensate for their traumatic pasts (Dr.
Danieli, International
Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma), by participating in the cultural phenomenon of “Indian
Parenting”. The third generation or the Gen Z is not exempt from the trauma as
well, but it negotiates with the carried-down memories, particularly through
works of art (as Aanchal Malhotra’s Remnants
of a Separation, 2017), finding individualism even in collective
solidarity.
Conclusion
My study mostly delved into recent historical accounts as
a mean to situate the problem of migration in context of more accessible and
fairly immediate events. However, one must not lose themselves in the
paralyzing misery of the past to forget the continuation of the limbo into the
present. COVID-19 found around 43.3 million interstate immigrants being displaced
and returning home in the midst of a lockdown. Out of the 43.3 million, almost
35 million travelled home by risky unusual means. Around 198 workers died in
road accidents (Wikipedia, Impact of the Covid 19 pandemic on Indian Migrant
Workers). History helps to recognize and treat the wounds carried through
generations under a more insightful light. Learning about the migration problem
faced in the past, especially the plight of the women, makes it easier to
conceptualize and familiarize ourselves with the current affairs.
The refugee system all over the world still believes in
establishing dominance through the oppression of waiting. Anwesha Sengupta has
opined on how state-imposed politics of waiting actually operates as a
diplomatic tool for implementing hierarchy, as the poorer citizens and refugees
experience prolonged delay in the execution of citizenship rights under
government bureaucracy (Sengupta,“CAAM Diaries: Anwesha Sengupta on the
Politics of Waiting.”)She
used the 1958 scenario at Sealdah Station where several hundred refugees were
kept waiting for proper integration into civilization for years to come. With
the Dandakaranya refugee camps being a failure, political parties wanting to
rally the people for their own cause, and the West Bengal government’s
declaration of a saturation point earlier in 1957, the refugees would be
replaced and displaced continuously till they deserted their camps and returned
to the overpopulated Calcutta stations as last resort. It need not be further
clarified how the lack of a proper shelter makes out the women to be more
vulnerable.
As of late, since October 2023,
tens of thousands of Palestinian women and girls have been killed in Gaza, and
around a million displaced. UNFPA estimates 50,000 women to be pregnant in the
West Bank, with 180 births being performed under extreme conditions daily.
While more than seventy percent of families had to displace due to violence,
particularly sexual in nature, against women and children perpetrated by the
settler Israeli forces, a sharp rise in domestic violence has also been noted
being practiced in cramped camps by husbands and fathers, particularly against
wives and daughters. Ruwaida Amer from Al Jazeera had interviewed one such
family in details, and the conclusion can safely be drawn that the
psychological impact of the war and the colonization of their lands would make
the men release the anger against a less threatening suspect – the wife (Amer,“‘Broken’: Domestic
Violence Impacts Women, Children in Gaza.” )
The memory of trauma received
in extreme conditions is often distorted. Yet they remain a witness, a record,
an archive mostly viable through oral history. Oral history is the spoken
testament of the victim, challenging the logistical history which has turned out
to be the convention. It brings in the subjectivism, and often times truth,
which a state sanctioned written history would generally overlook or neglect.
Even if accuracy has been one weakness of such records, it must also be
realized that any history written or unwritten can never achieve a true honesty
under societal and political pressure. The memory of the victims provide the
data with more flesh and blood, situating heinous events as such of
concentration camps or partitions in a far believable past. But not all victims
can speak up, since often times silence is heard more than any noise of
protest. Literature emerges as a witness then.
When literature of any kind
stems from injustice and lawlessness, it automatically becomes a witness. While
memoirs and autobiographies make us believe that they serve for personal
gratification, literature holds the power to revolutionize through a collective
empathy born for those personal incidents. Literature of witness cannot be
dismissed as fiction, since most occurrences in the plot run alongside real
history. Rather, it helps to contextualize and shape the trauma, impersonal and
interpersonal, filling in gaps wherein history or psychology would only be able
to provide statistics – like intergenerational trauma. For literature which can
be interdisciplinary and multidimensional, migration can be studied in light of
trauma, especially the gender bias women are forced to face.
Films also supply to the
archival process of a subjective history with or without fictional plots. With
the rate of migration on the rise in the current world, and the refugee systems
failing to protect the very people they were supposed to, the audio-visual
genre has been one of the biggest witnesses when it comes to the documentation
of the predicament the displaced have to suffer. Both literature and cinema
problematizes that which the state would rather ignore, bridging neglected
topics such as migration and gendered experiences to mainstream consumers. They
emerge as a primary source of knowledge to second or third generation survivors
providing an origin to an otherwise inherited trauma, mostly displaced.
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