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The Bird with Broken Wings: Traumatic Memory and Identity Crisis in Hemanga Biswas' "Shunye Dilam Ura"
1. The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory
against forgetting.
~Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Dr. Khan Touseef Osman
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Daffodil International University
Bangladesh
2. [The] …cultural (re)production of
traumatic memory is tending to
congeal into predictability, primarily
because of its overwhelming reliance
on narrative forms of memory: oral
history on the one hand, and…
novels, short stories, and films… on
the other. (16)
3. Narrative:
a. A singular perspective;
b. The linear logic of cause and effect; and
c. A closure. (16-17)
[The]…epistemological burdens of narrative lead to the mutual entanglement
of nation and narration, as postulated by Benedict Anderson and elaborated
upon by Homi Bhabha. The problematic relationship of narrative and
nationalism has been noted particularly in regions characterized by multiple
identity claims on shared histories and geographies. (17)
4. If by ‘narrative’ we understand the telling of a story which is bound together
with a certain phenomenology of linear temporality, how do we distinguish
‘narrative’ from other modes of representing experience, such as lyric poetry,
which are by no means necessarily non-linear? (19)
I would argue… for the coexistence, and dialectic relationship, between two
basic impulses: one … the ‘narrative impulse’ …, and the other … the ‘lyric
impulse’. (19)
By considering creative media which invite interpretative paradigms responsive
to these non-narrative logics, and by foregrounding non-narrative modes of
remembering Partition within creativity, activism, and scholarship alike, we
can engender new approaches to making peace with the past and present. (21)