Unpacking Gendered Trauma in Jean Sasson’s For the Love of a Son
Sindhu
J.,
Professor,
Department of
English,
Bangalore
University, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India.
Abstract: The focus of this paper is on the representations of
gendered trauma in Jean Sasson’s For the Love of a Son: One Afghan Woman’s
Quest for her Stolen Child, published in 2010. The figure of the Afghan woman
has been more or less crystallised in Western feminist scholarship as an
always-already constant victim of war as well as the fundamentalist ideologies,
tribalism and feudalism that underpin Afghan patriarchy. At first glance, it
would seem that Sasson’s work joins a long list of real-life accounts and
fictional work constructed by Western authors which underscore this image of
silent and helpless victimhood. However, this work emanates from Sasson’s personal
interaction with the real-life Afghan woman victim Maryam Khail, after having
heard her story and with her consent. The work employs a first person narrative
of Khail’s personal trauma, emerging as a survivor testimony (albeit mediated)
that also records intergenerational gendered trauma. Tracing Khail’s birth,
childhood and youth against the immediate background of her country’s turbulent
political history, the narrative focuses on her personal trauma located in the
experience of war, a violent marriage and the kidnapping and subsequent loss of
her first child. The most prominent faultline in the narrative is located in
the socio-cultural fabric that enshrouds and invisibilises her experiences,
with a patriarchally encrypted non-recognition/erasure of trauma at the
personal/individual level. Through an examination of the deeply gendered nature
of Maryam Khail’s personal trauma, the paper attempts to establish that her
individual experience is linked in intricate and complex ways to the collective
gendered traumatic experience of Afghan womanhood, illustrated in specific
contexts within her narrative. Thus the paper attempts to suggest that this
work aligns itself with and reflects the pluralistic texture of trauma that is
characteristic of South Asian trauma narratives.
Keywords: gendered trauma, Afghan patriarchy,
survivor testimony, erasure
The Prologue of this first person
survivor testimony records the experience of an instance of childhood trauma
which, being deeply embedded in issues of gender identity, prefigures the
gendered traumatic experiences to come in Maryam Khail’s later life. One of
Maryam Khail’s earliest configurations of personal identity revolves around her
fervent wish to be a boy, since she had caught on to the importance given to
male children in Afghan patriarchy and their vastly privileged lives as a
consequence. Her response to this realisation is a denial of her femaleness
coupled with an aggressive, if childish, enactment of masculine identity as she
understood it then. Dressed as a boy in shirt and shorts and shaved head,
Maryam reports to school as Yousef Agha Khail, with her parents’ consent. Her
female identity is revealed in front of her whole class when her older sister
Nadia unthinkingly exposes her sibling by taking down her recalcitrant buckled
shorts to help her go to the toilet. While the school authorities are highly
amused and welcome Maryam to her newfound (albeit unwanted) identity as a girl
child, Maryam herself is traumatised by this episode as she realises that it
marked the end of the privileges she had enjoyed as Yousef till then and
presaged the life to unfold to her as a girl and woman. The patriarchally
scripted nature of her future life as a female – marriage soon after puberty,
family and domesticity -- is evident to her even as a small schoolgirl.
Maryam’s early realisations of her gendered identity are part of her personal
trauma, but at the same time, it can be argued that they manifest not the
“pathological fragmentation and dissociation (which) constitute the main
argument of the “traumatic experience” in traditional literary trauma theory;
rather, they can be viewed through the pluralistic model of trauma theory which
“focuses on studying traumatic experience through the unified discourses and emphasizes
the social significance of trauma in developing the cultural experience”
(Karmakar and Khan, Introduction,12), offering greater insights into trauma
experience situated in the South Asian context. Maryam’s childhood realisations
of the implications of gendered identity are deeply conditioned by her
witnessing of the lives of girls and women around her in her immediate and
extended family, neighbours and friends.
The “referentiality of traumatic
memory” (Radstone 12) as conceptualised in Caruth’s reading of trauma theory,
is borne out by Maryam’s grandmother Mayana’s traumatic life experiences as an
Afghan Pashtun tribal woman of the late nineteenth century: married off as a
teenager—the question of her consent never having existed—to the head of her
tribe who already had six wives, her three daughters killed by a cruel stepson
during her young widowhood, her witnessing of the sadistic persecution of her
only remaining child by his older stepbrother, her own miserable vulnerability,
unending everyday persecution and domestic enslavement by jealous rival
wives. Maryam’s own sensibilities, while
rebelling against the tragic resignation of her victimised and withdrawn
grandmother, nevertheless are keenly alive to the fact that very little has
changed in the socio-cultural context that informs and controls Afghan women’s
lives. Maryam reclaims her grandmother’s tragic life story within her own life
narrative to demonstrate the referentiality of gendered trauma in the Afghan
socio-cultural fabric.
Maryam’s grandmother’s silence in
relation to her own tragic life is not just habitual to her as an individual.
While the silence can be understood as an identifiable characteristic aspect
within discourses of traumatic experience in general, it is an almost inextricable
part of the entrenched patriarchal system that enfolds the lived experiences of
Afghan women. More significantly it is to be located within the deeply gendered
trauma faced by Afghan women, especially in the context of violent
fundamentalist extremism which further buttresses the patriarchal tribal and
religious laws historically held and practised above civil law in Aghan
society, past and present. The social norms of Afghan tribal culture are
structured exclusively around male privilege at every level from the birth of a
son to larger familial/kinship bonds and dictate the absolute subservience of
women to it. At the core of the enforcement and practice of these norms are
hoary notions of family and tribe (read male) honour which are traditionally
upheld as Pashtunwali, the essence of
Afghan masculine identity. In this cultural context, male authority emanates in
ways that not only enforces the silence of women, but precludes any possibility
of articulation of ordinary female lived experience, whatever the nature and
degree of trauma it may contain. Thus, Maryam’s retrieval of her grandmother’s
traumatic life becomes a significant act in the larger pluralistic context in
which her own experiences are to be understood.
Maryam’s life as a growing youngster is marked
by various upheavals caused by the tumultuous political history of Afghanistan
of the late 20th century. Born to inter-tribal educated parents who
were themselves influenced and shaped by sporadic short-lived regimes of
liberalism and civil governance, Maryam forms into an independent free-spirited
rebellious adult woman who is keenly conscious of the gendered nature of the
injustices she is witness to. Concomitant with this consciousness is also her
realisation that violent gendered trauma is not recognised as such in the
society in which she lives, but that it is understood as the inevitable lot of
Afghan women, tacitly sanctioned by Afghan patriarchy. This knowledge is
illustrated in graphic detail in Maryam’s recounting the horrific marital abuse
of her cousin Amina, and other women in her extended family; one image of
gendered trauma that remains etched in her consciousness is the sight of three
women relatives bent double from permanent spinal damage caused by their
husband’s kicks while they were in childbirth. In every instance of gendered
trauma caused by violence and abuse, Maryam reiterates the point that these
victims would never be able to speak of their experiences (even to other
women), much less seek any semblance of redressal. In short, they become
invisibilised and their trauma erased, even if there were witnesses of it.
In Maryam’s own case, her
experiences of a violent marriage and traumatised motherhood occur not in the
traditional Afghan context, but in America, to which her family fled to escape
war (the Afghan mujahedin warlords’ insurgency against the Soviet troops in
1982). Despite being informed by
concerned relatives of the evil reputation of his prospective son-in-law Kaiss,
Maryam’s father and older sister Nadia (the latter secretly married to a man of
a different faith) pressurise the now motherless Maryam into an obviously
ill-advised marriage with Kaiss. From the very beginning of her marriage,
Maryam experiences the trauma of marital rape, beatings, physical confinement,
emotional torture and abuse from her husband, against which she has no defence.
There were immediate insider witnesses to her trauma – her father, Nadia and
others – who, because of their own internalised notions of Pashtunwali (Afghan patriarchal values) could not or would not
recognise her trauma as such. Her experiences are understood as part of an
Afghan woman’s lot even though they are now living in a vastly different
socio-cultural scenario where the possibility of civil redressal exists, at
least in theory. After she becomes the mother of a son, Maryam soon finds that
she is up against her husband’s evil machinations which circumvent the law as
much as her family’s pressure to accept her fate as inevitable. In their view
of things, to attempt a separation/divorce or even to speak of her sufferings
within the violent marriage is itself unthinkable: in the unwritten Pashtunwali code, it brings social shame
to the woman victim and by extension to her natal family, and not to the
perpetrator of the violence. Thus, her trauma gets compounded, both by not
being recognised and not being allowed an opportunity for articulating the
unspeakable. After a formal separation is underway, her husband kidnaps her son
and takes him back to a war-torn Taliban-dominated Afghanistan in order to have
a hold over her through emotional blackmail. This too is seen by her family not
as trauma to her maternal feelings, but as a legitimate act which Kaiss had
every right to do as the father of the child. In all the retrievals of other
women’s stories within the narrative, the children (especially if they are
male) are considered in Islamic patriarchies to belong to the father and the
mother’s rights are not acknowledged. Thus her own father and sister become
perpetuators of her trauma since they too subscribe to the Pashtunwali code of social norms. Maryam’s traumatic experience of
domestic violence and abuse manifests itself in social withdrawal, severe
personal depression which leads to a deteriorated state of physical and mental
health. My argument here is that, in a culture that does not acknowledge
women’s suffering nor allows an articulation of that suffering, the recognition
of trauma as a consequence of constant suffering becomes even more remote.
Even after she
enters a second marriage of her own choice and has another son, she continues
her agonised search for her firstborn, eliciting the help of well-wishers as
well as international agencies. She is able to make phone contact with her son
after seventeen years of separation, but the subsequent conversations and
meetings (which happen in America) are a fresh source of trauma to her: Maryam
finds herself battling with the unresolved traumatic memories of the past along
with the incomprehensible behaviour of her grown son, who has been
indoctrinated with the misogynies related to Afghan patriarchy and that of his
father’s personal hatred of Maryam. Maryam is newly traumatised to find that
she cannot bring about a reunion with her lost child because he has been taught
to display hostility and fierce distrust towards women, coupled with his
unquestioning acceptance of the lies told him by Kaiss about Maryam. The now
grown up but deeply disturbed firstborn
son Duran attempts to kill his little stepbrother on more than one occasion and
sees his biological mother as a sex object to be used by men, not scrupling to
tell her so. That the estrangement between mother and son is beyond salvaging
is borne out in his last phone conversation with Maryam: “This is your enemy number
one. ... I wanted to tell you that I regret only one thing. ... Oh, I regret
that I didn’t rape you. I masturbate with you in my mind every night” (Sasson
435). The horrific trauma caused to Maryam after this exchange is both
unendurable and inexpressible, even when she finds herself in a different
socio-cultural context.
Maryam’s survivor narrative derives
its significance from several inter-related aspects: one, it places on record
the impossibility of the redressal of trauma at the personal level; two, it
relates this impossibility directly to the larger Afghan socio-cultural
patriarchal complex; third, it recognises the importance of attempting to
articulate the unspeakable experience of trauma itself, a trauma that stems
from a culture that seeks to enshroud female experience of it in silence. While
both Maryam and her son are traumatised in different ways, the narrative does
not hold out the smallest hope or resolution of the effects of trauma. The permanent alienation from her older child
marks the end of her narrative; her only realisation is that gendered trauma in
her experience and understanding of it has been and probably will continue to
be intergenerational, particularly when situated in the Afghan socio-cultural
context. The recent 2021 resurgence of the Taliban and their fundamentalist
governance have once again constricted female agency and autonomy in ways that
tap into and are underscored by the unwritten but all-pervasive Afghan
patriarchal codes of social control. Pashtunwali
has always been done, forcibly enjoining women to often be perpetuators of
their own oppression by never speaking of it. Those who dare rebel against this
suffocating condition through either oral or written articulation of their
sufferings have been the targets of further violence, often by their own
families, leading to incarceration and death in many cases. Thus the
written/textual record of trauma experienced by Afghan women like Maryam Khail
in the form of personal testimonies (mediated through secondary witness or in
first person) becomes invaluable in “voicing the voiceless” and as an act of
resistance (Vijayan, 35). Within the debates of contemporary literary trauma
theory, Joshua Pederson refers to Susan Brison’s argument that “victims’
textual narratives of trauma ... have healing power” and avers that “speaking
trauma pulls it from the realm of painful obscurity and hastens the process of
rehabilitation” (338). While the first claim is debatable in the individual
context, the second point is particularly significant in the Afghan
socio-cultural context which has always-already invisibilised female experience
of trauma and erased it through deeply encrypted patriarchal codes. It is
therefore possible to view Maryam Khail’s narrative as an invaluable addition
to Afghan women’s testimonies of gendered trauma, reflecting their slow and
painful emergence within the larger context of South Asian trauma
literature.
Works Cited
Primary Source:
Sasson,
Jean. For the Love of a Son: One Afghan
Woman’s Quest for her Stolen Child. Bantam Books, 2011.
Secondary Sources:
Karmakar,
Goutam and Zeenat Khan. “Introduction: Literary Trauma Theory and South Asian
Literature”. Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature. Edited by Goutam
Karmakar and Zeenat Khan. Routledge, 2023. 1- 20.
Pederson,
Joshua. “Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma
Theory”. Narrative, October 2014,
Vol. 22, No. 3 (October 2014), pp. 333-353. Published by Ohio State University
Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24615578 DOA 19/09/2024.
Radstone,
Susannah. “Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics”. Paragraph, March 2007, Vol.30, No.1, TRAUMA, THERAPY AND
REPRESENTATION (March 2007), pp. 9-29. Published by Edinburgh University Press.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43152697 DOA 19/09/2024.
Vijayan,
Bhagya Lakshmi. “Voicing the Voiceless: Representing Marginality in Afghan
Women’s Testimonies”. IIS Univ. J.A. Vol.
13 (1), 35-54 (2024). ISSN 2319-5339 (P), 2583-7591 (O).