Understanding identity, confl ict, and trauma through literary texts of selected women writers of North-East India
Understanding identity, confl ict, and trauma through literary texts of selected women writers of North-East India

Summary/Abstract: Literature is a consequential medium that reflects human phenomena through artistic mode. It helps in recalling past traumatic experiences though more often in a masked form. The memories of the bellicose conflicts are recounted by the victims long after the harrowing events get safely buried in history and no longer accessible to the present. People conventionally forget the source of the trauma yet they recollect it through literary betokens like poems, musical compositions, plays, novels, stories, etc. The literary texts play a vital role in recalling and understanding a particular conflict through the wounded psyche which no historical or any other narratives can reach as efficaciously. This is one of the main reasons why literary discourses rather than historical narratives are comparatively more efficacious in portraying conflicts. This manuscript highlights what literature tells us about a particular conflict that social science literature has missed on. It additionally accentuates how literary discourses of select women writers from Northeast India proved to be more reliable representations of conflicts because they endeavor to capture the unknowable and inexpressible far more efficaciously through tropes and images. The manuscript is unique in the sense that it attempts to establish a periscopic understanding of identity, conflict, and trauma within literary prisms and for this, the manuscript utilizes the inditements of six women writers from northeast India like Arupa Patangia Kalita, Ratna Bharali Talukdar (State of Assam), Temsula Ao, Easterine Iralu (State of Nagaland), Irom Sharmila, and Ningombam Sunita (State of Manipur)

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