tribhuvan university forgetting the other: forget
TRANSCRIPT
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Tribhuvan University
Forgetting the Other: Forget Kathmandu and Palpasa Café in the Light of
Cultural Trauma
A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science/ Department of
English, Central College, Tribhuvan University/ in partial fulfillment of requirement for the
Degree of Master of Philosophy (M.Phil.) in English.
By
Prem Thapa
Roll No 3
M. Phil. - III Semester
Department of English/ Central College, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu
July 2011
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Tribhuvan University
The undersigned members of the dissertation committee have approved this dissertation, entitled
Forgetting the Other: Forget Kathmandu and Palpasa Café in the Light of Cultural Trauma
submitted by Prem Thapa to the Department of English, Central College, Tribhuvan University.
Dr. Beerendra Pandey
(Supervisor)
Dr. Sanjiv Upreti
(External Examiner)
Dr. Amar Raj Joshi
(Head of the Deparment)
Department of English
Central College, Kirtipur
Kathmandu, Nepal
Date:
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Acknowledgement
I would like to acknowledge the critical supervision and inputs of my supervisor Dr.
Beerendra Pandey, who encouraged in choosing the topic and helped me with the
recommendation of reference texts. There is, however, another person, my classmate and friends
for long Mahabir Paudyal, who followed the first chapter and provided some insights during the
research. I am grateful to my supervisor Dr. Pandey and Mahabir for their inputs and insights. I
also wish to thank my friends Dominic Haffner, Gilles Gobbo and Sylvie Orange for sending me
the reference texts when I most needed. Above all, I owe the encouraging moments during
research to Mom, Dad and Brother Raj for asking me if I was ever going to finish the
dissertation.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgement
Introduction: Books Born Out of War 1-13
Chapter 1. People’s War as Cultural Trauma 14-28
Chapter 2. Othering the Army: Forget Kathmandu 29-49
Chapter 3. Othering the Maoist: Palpasa Café 50-70
Conclusion: Forgetting the Other: Politics of Representation 71-78
Works Cited 79-84
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Introduction
1.1 Books Born Out of War
Every dawn precedes a phase of darkness in natural world. Same thing can be said about
a socio-political change, particularly, when people try to change existing system. A society may
go through a period of chaos, destruction, and uncertainty. Nepal, too, has gone through a period
of conflict before a couple of centuries old monarchy bowed down to the peoples‘ demands for a
republic state. The nation went through an acute pain and suffering material, as well as, cultural
loss. The result it brought is ‗New Nepal‘; the words often used referring to a political change in
2006. However, the nation has yet to promulgate the new constitution in order to institutionalize
New Nepal. In the first part of this chapter, I discuss the conflict scenario and outline some
widely read literary works that the period produced, and move on to the research problem I have
undertaken in this dissertation.
The period of conflict bore tremendous energy of creativity in Nepali writers writing in,
both, Nepali and English languages. A high flow of books swept through the post-conflict Nepal
in response to the suffering and the loss caused by the decade long political conflict with armed
forces backing it. In the year 2004, ―Ramesh Parajuli prepared a bibliography on the Maoist
movement listing over three hundred entries only in English. Numerous other works on the Civil
War have been produced since then‖ (Adhkari and Gautam 3). In order to recap the motivating
source of this huge literary output, I shall, briefly, answer the question: What was the scenario
that bore such an immense creative energy?
It is a well-accepted fact that Nepal have gone through an extreme situation since 1996,
which has left the Nepali society shattered, socially and psychologically, that it may never come
to terms with the loss. Between the year 1996 and 2006 ―about 15,000 people have lost their
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lives‖ (Baral ―Maoist Insurgency‖ 207) and the number of disappearances and the injuries
caused by the conflict has yet to be made public by the government. The rural countryside
suffered the most where the insurgents had their bases. The poor villagers were caught in the
cross-fire between the state security forces and the rebel forces. They were abducted and tortured
in the name of supporting either warring forces. Left with no choices ―the villagers could no
longer live in the villages and fled to safer areas within Nepal or went to India or abroad, seeking
employment‖ (Thapa and Sijapati 170). The countryside witnessed barren villages as mass
migration took place. The villages became empty of youths. There were, hardly, any able
working hands left in the villages. The women were left with little kids and duty to feed and care
them despite the destitution. Thus, women were forced to plough their fields, which until then,
was a cultural taboo. As the internal war escalated, the people suffered a vicious conflict trap as
double victims of the conflict. At first, they were direct victims of the state security forces as
relatives (wife, father, and mother) of the rebel. And, secondly, they had to offer hiding shelter
and food for the rebels at the cost of their own livelihood.
Apart from human loss and suffering, the material loss was immense during the conflict.
The nation‘s infrastructures, for example: bridge, government buildings, offices and industries,
were hit to an irreparable state. Observing the damage caused by the People‘s War, Thapa and
Sijapati, remark: ―The intensity of the violence has extracted a huge material loss for the
country‖ (170). Physical destruction exceeded as the conflict progressed. The survey undertook
by one of the national media houses reported that, by the year 2003 ―The cost of reconstruction
of the development infrastructure that was destroyed by Maoists is estimated at NRs 200 billion‖
(qtd. in Adhikari 61). Thus the people‘s lives were affected individually as well as collectively.
The countryside and its people lived through mayhem caused by the conflict, yet the turmoil
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went almost unnoticed to elites of the center and the world outside Nepal. The report of the
bloody war broke out now and then in newspapers that employed local journalists to report spicy
story of hunger, famine and child-marriage from the faraway hills and tarai. The elites at the
center read the exotic reports at their savory breakfast table. ―During this time, the Kathmandu
establishment did not experience what was happening in the countryside, and those who did have
first-hand experience had no voice in the establishment. Readers had to search hard to find any
reference to the war […]‖ (Thapa ―Future of Nepali Literature‖ 8). Apart from some oblique
news reports, the event remained in local geography and archives of warring forces –the rebels
and the state. It was only after the Royal Massacre in 2001 that the national and international
media came to learn about the deepening of conflict in faraway countryside of Nepal. Moreover,
―International attention on Nepal actually increased with the visit of Secretary of State Collin
Powell in January 2002- the first visit in thirty years of such a high-ranking official of the U.S.
government‖ (Riaz and Basu 154). The visit of the U.S. Secretary was followed by international
institutes, conflict experts and writers. Thus Nepal turned into a site of conflict and trauma for
national and international academics conducting researches. Adhikari and Gautam observe that
―International academia and INGOs working on conflict and development are drawn towards
studying this movement‖ (2), ever since.
It was only during and after the first negotiation period between warring forces that
writers and journalists made their journey to the conflict affected zones. The story began to
unfold at every tea table of literate class of Nepal. What the citizens outside the conflict zone
witnessed was the grotesque images of bloody violence splashed across the TV channels and on
the front page of the newspapers. The conflict continued, from bad to worse, and the texts on the
conflict began to flow in the reading circles. Who wrote about the conflicts were professionals
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and experts working in media house, human rights organization and academia. Some narrated the
story as a news reporter, the other wrote on the insurgency as a part of their research project. Yet,
because these projects are ―Frequently sponsored by donor communities, they have specific
objectives, and are often guided by a pre-existing framework on what to observe, and where.
Gaps thus remain in understanding Nepal‘s political and social problems‖ (Adhikari and Gautam
6).
To understand Nepal‘s political and social problems during the conflict we should look
into the independent works of writers, academics and artists living in the country during the
period, who strongly responded to the conflict through their writing, research papers and works
of art. However, I limit myself in outlining some of the widely discussed books and a play rather
than covering up all the texts produced during and in the post-conflict period.
Among the published works on the insurgency is an anthology of short story, Stories of
Conflict and War (2007), translated and edited by Govinda Raj Bhattarai, which covers stories
by old to young generation of Nepali writers that present the social milieu during conflict from
observers‘ perspective and from sufferers‘ perspective. Written along the same line of style is
Chhapamar ko Chhoro, a collection of short stories by Mahes Vikram Shah, which presents
social realities including the plight and state of society and the people during the insurgency.
Among the written texts Close Encounters (2010) stands apart as the collection prose on
traumatic experience that the author went through during the conflict whilst working for the
human rights issues. The book presents traumatic experiences of the ordinary people whilst
trying to get justice by identifying the perpetrators to the human rights workers. Manjushree
Thapa‘s Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy (2005), is mixture of memoir, history and
journals. It was published during the King‘s direct rule, and faced state censorship for her
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criticism of monarchy and the journal of her trip to conflict zone. First of its kind is, Kunda Dixit
edited, A People War: Images of the Nepal Conflict 1996-2006 (2007) which presents a decade
long conflict in photographs with descriptive and introductory text. The photo-text presents the
mayhem: deaths and destruction caused by the conflict. Among the fictions, Palpasa Café
(2005) by Narayan Wagle stands as having high numbers of readership which is based on
conflict in the Midwest of Nepal and Facing my Phantom (2010) by Sheeba Shan, presents
suffering elite family and changing political and social scenario of Nepal during the conflict.
Among other works, By the Way: Travels through Nepal’s Conflict (2008) is a collection of
travel journal published by Martin Chautari which presents village life from the field during the
conflict. Chhapamar Yubati ko Diary (2010) is also a memoirs by Tara Rai written during her
captive life in the army camp; Karnali Blues (2010), a fiction by Buddhi Sagar; Sapana ko
Sabiti, a play by C.K. Lal and performed at Gurukul, Kathmandu in 2009, in the direction of
Sunil Pokhrel.
These texts are, as mentioned earlier, among the most talked about and hyped works in
media, and in reading public in Nepal regardless of their critical value. The reason for high
number of readership, above all, is that they are based on the conflict or at least they touch the
events in fragments in their presentation. There is no divided view that these texts are the source
of knowledge about the conflict for those readers who did not have firsthand experience. The
knowledge of the event survived in the texts as a memory of those who had directly experienced
it; and those who came to know about it from different sources. As Larry Ray rightly points out,
―Knowledge now inheres not in ‗consciousness‘ but non-linear textuality, discourses, and
electronic archives, film and video‖ (137). Needless to say, text plays crucial role in
disseminating knowledge constructed out of past memory. In the context of media reportage and
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books written on People‘s War in Nepal, reporters and writers seemed to fail in understanding
the impacts of constructed memory in post-conflict society. Professor- philosopher Avishai
Margalit argues that ―Memory breathes revenge as often as it breathes reconciliation‖ (qtd. in
Ray 217). The impacts, they might be positive as well as negative, depend on how those
memories have been stored in texts, monument, and rituals. Any traumatic event, such as Nepal‘s
decade long conflict, that causes personal loss and cultural identity crisis leaves deep wound in
the social psyche. And these ―Personal loss
is shaped by and is located alongside textual memories adapted from school history and
literature‖ (Ray 146).
Yet there is another line of thought that questions the validity of textual construction of
the past memory. The argument is that ―We live in a time, of course, when issues to do with
representation are all the rage. For some, this stems from a postmodernist ‗certainty‘ everything
is just representation and that no judgments can be made about adequacy or inadequacy,
accuracy or inaccuracy, truth or falsity‖ (Livingstone 15). However, we cannot just dismiss the
role of textual knowledge in a society. We don‘t need to imagine an example of how rebels or
religious fighters recite line by line from the text they believe in to justify their violent act, for
they are alive and very much kicking in contemporary societies. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois
observe that ―Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for the mass violence and
genocide‖ (21). Writing on victims of the violence should be consciously checked, so that it is
―not so distance so as to objectify their suffering, and not so close that we turn the sufferer into
an object of pity, and contempt, or public spectacle. We need to avoid the aestheticization of
misery as much as descent into political rhetoric and polemics‖ (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois
26).
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As I have argued earlier the literary production in Nepal has surged up in recent years. It
is said that bad time produce good literature, the conflict in Nepal has certainly played major role
in recent literary output. As cultural critic Beerendra Pandey observes, ―The labor pain for the
birth of New Nepal has given a golden opportunity to the literature, history, and culture of this
country to move away from the focus on the myth(s) to a concentrated attention to the rhetoric‖
(―Towards Culture‖ 4). The recent growth of literature on the decade long conflict in Nepal is a
pointer to the shift away from myths to rhetoric. The recent literary work represents voice of the
people from different socio-political classes, from victims of the social discrimination to the
conflict victims. What is current and alive are the literatures of the rhetoric of pain, of trauma,
and of victimization. However, the pangs of traumatic experience remain, for the wound has not
yet healed. The society is yet to come to terms with the trauma, and no society can move away
from it. The only way to move ahead is to working-through traumatic past by ritualizing the
events, performing them in cultural and textual sphere. In the context of traumatic social milieu,
valorization or demonization of the perpetrators not only obstruct the process of reconciliation,
but also nurtures the germ for the further conflict. It is only through the discourse of pain, of
suffering and of victimhood in the balanced representation we can call for the responsibility from
the victimizers.
It is not an easy task for an author to pave a middle path and empathize with the suffering
of the victims and observe the traumatic event merely as a human being. Neil J. Smelser claims
that ―no traumatic story can be told without tracing the theme of suffering and blame‖ (282). I do
not fully agree with his argument. I share Smelser‘s idea that suffering cannot be avoided in a
traumatic story, but I have a reservation when it comes to blaming. It is possible to write
traumatic story without blaming or glorifying a group or an institution, if the narrator stand as a
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mere human being, resisting all his given identities. In an introduction to collections of Saddat
Hasan Manto‘s short stories, Bitter Fruit, Khalid Hasan points out very issue that in the stories
about partition ―none of the bloody participants is identified by religion because to Manto what
mattered was not what religion people professed, what ritual they followed or which gods they
worshipped, but where thy stood on a human level‖ (xviii). Unarguably, texts are as reliable a
memory store as any other manmade devices in disseminating a story of socio-political conflict
from one generation to the other. As Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois note, the authors writing on
violence should be aware of the fact that ―the text and images we present to the world are often
profoundly disturbing. When we report and write in an intimate way about the scenes of
violence, genocide, and extreme social suffering, our readers have the right to react with anger
[…]‖ (26).
Thus the crux of the matter for writers writing on conflict, as Scheper-Hughes and
Bourgois have rightly pointed out, is to create a middle space in text which is neither too intimate
to the victims, nor too distant from perpetrators. For the construction and mobilization of
collective memory determines the state of a post-conflict society. As Hyussen argues the issue
―is not whether to forget or to remember, but rather how to remember and how to handle
representation of the remembered past‖ (qtd. in Zehfuss 220).
1.2 Problematics
In this dissertation I argue that Forget Kathmandu (2005), and Palpasa Café (2005), the
literary output produced in the context of people‘s war, are contaminated with politics of
representation. While arguing my point, I show that the victims are not given enough space in the
text to speak out their painful stories from the site of cross-fire ensued in the violent insurgency
that had broken out in the country for a decade. While dealing with the textual representation I
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draw on Jenny Edkins‘ idea of speaker‘s ―refusal of distinction and the assumption of bare life‖
(112). According to Edkins ‗refusal of distinction ―entails a refusal to make any of the
distinctions between forms of life, or even between life and death that are constitutive of
sovereign authority‖; and ‗bare life‘ as ―mere life in all its vulnerability asserted in the face of
violence‖ (122). The problem I point out in the texts is that the speakers, instead of refusing to
make distinction between self and other or victims and perpetrators, participate in the discourse
of dividing and identifying one or the other group and institution without paying attention to the
people who suffer within the group or the institution.
In this dissertation I problematize the texts‘ language under my research with the
assumption that writers writing on conflict and violence generally draw on a world of mirrored,
manipulated, and mediated representation. Assuming the literatures on traumatic events are
inflected with mediated representation, I argue that Forget Kathmandu and Papasa Café are not
exceptional to this problem. My hypothesis is drawn from the idea that unless the literatures on
violence and war are aware of a manipulation and mediation in representing the inside story, they
fail to pave the middle ground where voice of the conflict victims is adequately given agency.
Bearing the idea in mind, in this dissertation, I look into the narrative language of the texts in the
light of the theory of cultural trauma. It is an extended part of trauma studies which is broader in
its application. It is a theory that looks into the question of memory, witness, and their
representation in the text. I discuss the theory in the following chapter with definition by
different theorists and its nature.
1.3 Review of the Literatures
A decade of insurgency led by the Maoist rebels left Nepal socially vulnerable and
politically unstable nation. The insurgency has radically changed the image of the country as a
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peaceful Himalayan Kingdom which has now turned into a myth; and social and political conflict
have deepened ever more. The writers who strongly responded to the crisis with their literary
creation vary as per the genres they adopted to pursue the events. Among the published works on
the crisis of Nepal Forget Kathmandu has been taken as a strong response to the crisis by critics.
An Indian diplomat and politician K.V. Rajan opines that the text ―is essentially a cri de coeur
from a sensitive young Nepalese as she watches her country slide downhill, as violence spreads,
governance fails, institutions collapse, politicians squabble, democracy is strangulated, values
disappear, hope fades. It is a well-written book—fast-paced, hard to put down, written with style
and sophistication, also honesty and emotion‖ (1). Similarly, Siddarth Varadarajan in The Hindu
writes that Forget Kathmandu is ―Written with a deep concern for the political future of Nepal
cornered by the authoritarian impulses of the monarchy, the grotesque factiousness of the
parliamentary parties and the anarchic violence of the Maoists, [it] is Thapa‘s lament for the
apparent impossibility of democracy in her country‖ (1). As for Islam, ―It was a clear-headed
tour through the tortuous maze of Nepalese power politics--including that Shakespearean palace
massacre that effectively was the death knoll of royal rule--that ended with an unforgettable
account of a hike through the remote, then-Maoist-controlled mountainous western region of
Nepal‖ (1).
Despite the critics‘ thematic opinion of the text, there are others who have observed the
text in the line of its writing style. One of them is Shakwa who finds Forget Kathmandu ―A
skillful mix of history, reportage, memoir and travelogue [that] reconstructs three centuries of
Nepali history as an elongated journey towards individualism and freedom.‖ (1). Summarizing
her essay she adds, ―It is at once a celebration of the power of the literary monologue and a cry
of outrage at the reality in which the present Nepali state and society are trapped‖ (ibid). More
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than a history and reportage the text is emotional response to the events taking place in the
country. It is ―a highly personal view of a country quite unlike any other, is intelligent and
challenging and deserves to be widely read, not just by those with an existing interest in Nepal‖
(Miller 1).
Similarly, Palpasa Café, among other works of literature, belongs to the category of the
literary creations in response to the conflict. The text has drawn widespread readers‘ attention to
this date. It is one of the most media hyped texts written surrounding the events of people‘s war.
Kunda Dixit claim, in Nepali Times‘ book review, goes as far as to say: ―Narayan Wagle‘s book
can be called an anti-war novel. It drags us to the edge and forces us to peer down at the abyss
below (2). He further adds, ―Not only is this novel as fresh as an open wound, the author‘s
imagination makes Nepal‘s real unfolding tragedy come alive with raw urgency‖ (2).
Chakravarti, in Outlook India, writes, ―Wagle‘s cutting observations of the two political
extremes, a light touch with words as well sexual attitude, and utterly courageous empathy with
the state of his nation, ensured major success for the novel‖ (1). And, a little further, opposing
Dixtit, he writes: ―I wouldn‘t call this an anti-war book, that‘s a quibble with an over-energetic
blurb, not the work‖ (1).
The text may or may not be an anti-war novel, I save this argument for the following
chapter, what we can claim is that it was certainly about the characters that live and die in
conflict ridden Nepal. Palpasa Café, as the author himself confesses, is the outcome of what he
went through as a journalist reporting from the conflict ridden rural parts of Nepal. As observed
in the reviews, the reviewers have fallen into surficial pattern of reading. They are far from
reading the texts from traumatic aspect upon which texts were based. The hype about the book in
the print media might have some bearings on the kinds of reading that blame one or the other
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warring parties. None of the reviewers have pointed out the characters‘ traumatic aspects in the
texts, nor have they raised the issue of adequate representation in the texts.
1.4 Objectives and Delimitations
The objective of this research is to prove that the politics of representation in the text
renders different meaning than that of what the critics in their review of the literatures came out
with. As it will be clear in the analysis, Thapa‘s deep concern for the political future of Nepal
contradicted in Forget Kathmandu when her representation of victims falls short of sympathy.
And Wagle‘s anti-war motive in Palpasa Cafe unconsciously leaves the pangs and the suffering
of the non-ruling class of the country by not giving the underprivileged sufferers a space to claim
their victimhood. However, reading these works of literature in the light of theory of cultural
trauma is a new beginning. The research will help to raise the question about the representation
of violence in the texts written so far.
In this dissertation I am dealing with the narratives Forget Kathmandu and Palpasa Café.
And I look into the problematic language in the texts. In order to back up my argument I borrow
incidents or ideas from other literary works written on the people‘s war, took place from 1996 to
2006. I might relate the story or events other than that of the period. In this context, my objective
of relating the story would be to make my argument clearer, or highlight the issue I have
undertaken in this research. This dissertation is based entirely on the textual analysis from the
perspective of cultural trauma.
1.5 Order of the Chapters
As earlier mentioned in the introduction, the first chapter, ―People‘s War as Trauma,‖
establishes a decade of the conflict as cultural trauma. I begin this chapter with the theoretical
aspects of cultural trauma. I redraw the definitions of cultural trauma as formulated by different
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theorists and critics. After the discussion of cultural trauma and its nature, I then answer the
question: why the period of People‘s War a Trauma? To answer this question I then present the
elements of cultural trauma in the context of People‘s War. I explore those theoretical elements
in the texts written during the conflict that make People‘s War a trauma. Thereafter I sum up the
chapter pointing to the texts that are under my speculation in this research text.
In the second chapter, ‗Othering the Army: Forget Kathmandu’, I discuss the issue of
representation in memoir and reportage. I explore the voices of the conflict victims in the text
and discuss about the agency given to them, if there‘s any. In doing so, I answer the question:
Why, in Forget Kathmandu, the writer has given very less agency to the victims? In this chapter
I point out how, consciously or unconsciously, the speaker in the text demonizes the state
security force by sympathizing with the rebels.
Third chapter, ‗Othering the Maoist: Palpasa Cafe’, deals with the representation in the
fiction. The novel runs around the subject of conflict. The conflict was led by the idea of
destroying the existing political, cultural and social system and create new one. The speaker
belongs to the culturally privileged class who is facing new cultural realities of underprivileged
caste as the leading voice in the text.
Finally, ‗Forgetting the Other: Politics of Representation‘, is my concluding chapter,
which sums up the argument discussed in the preceding chapters. Whilst summing up I restate
my claim giving them clearer light with the help of the arguments from preceding chapters. In
doing so, I answer the question why both the texts cannot be taken as a trauma literature in
positive sense. And I conclude the chapter with a suggestion for further research under the same
critical light.
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Chapter I
People’s War as Trauma
―Trauma‖, writes Avishai Margalitt, ―is a medical term that refers to a serious bodily
injury or shock from an accident or external act of violence‖ (125). The medical term for trauma
extends to ―medico-legal concept,‖ as mentioned by Paola Palladino, ―that is intimately involved
in the shaping of a distinctively late modern form of subjectivity‖ (qtd. in Pandey, ―Pedagogy‖
124). It may not be exaggerating to say that trauma is the invention of modern wars, particularly,
the World War I and II. Tracing the development of trauma studies, E. Ann Kaplan writes,
―Trauma studies originated in the context of research about the Holocaust‖ (1). Yet, its
development process can be traced back to Freud‘s works on war neurotics in soldiers after
World War I. Kaplan adds that Freud‘s ―most significant, and most complete discussion of
trauma occurs, not incidentally, at the end of his life, in Moses and Monotheism, when Freud was
forced to leave his homeland and takes up exile in England‖ (31).
Kaplan outlines the development of trauma studies in three different phases: ―1) the
1980s wave of books by psychologists responding to war injuries (Vietnam War) and to
increased awareness of child sexual abuse; 2) the unexpected turn of humanists to trauma in the
late 1980s […]; 3) the reaction to what rapidly was seen as a kind of ‗faddish‘ interest in trauma,
or a collapsing everything into trauma‖ (25). Despite the renewed interest in trauma there was no
theory, as such, for humanists to turn to. ―Understandably, humanists turned to the official
definition of trauma that could be found in the American Psychiatrist Association‘s Diagnosis
Manual. This manual, especially in the 1994 revised edition, stressed the phenomenon of
dissociation in trauma […]‖ (Kaplan 34). The site of trauma in this definition is confined to the
body. The psychological definition of trauma restrained itself within personal injury. It did not
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recognize the social, economic and political sphere as a site of trauma. In other words, the
emphasis on dissociation in trauma fell short to reach social and political aspects of trauma.
―This narrow focus on dissociation, together what seemed increasingly like a ‗faddish‘ aspect to
humanities trauma research soon produced strong reaction from some literary and film scholars
in the late 1990s‖ (Kaplan 34). It was Paul De Man‘s students at Yale, Cathy Caruth and
Shoshana Felman both trained in language of deconstruction, turn to trauma. Since high theory
became too abstract to engage the things happening in the world, for the both critics trauma
became welcoming field to connect a critique of representation and subjectivity with things that
happen in the world. As Kaplan notes, in the initial stage of the trauma studies:
Caruth and Felman were at Yale where Dori Laub and Geoffrey Hartman had
begun to interview Holocaust victims in a in a climate where renewed interest in
World War II and its sociopolitical meanings and personal suffering was on the
rise. Addressing the phenomena of trauma must have seemed one way for critics
to begin to link high theory with specific material events that were both personal
and which implicated history, memory, and culture generally. (35)
The research added a new psychological dimension to Holocaust studies through videotaped.
―The new dimension is reflected in Dori Laub‘s contribution to his volume, Testimony, coedited
with Shoshana Felman in 1992. This volume, together with Cathy Caruth‘s earlier Unclaimed
Experience (1986) and edited volume, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) initiated what
has become a growing field in the humanities‖ (Kaplan 33).
As a theory ―trauma studies tries to turn criticism back towards being an ethical,
responsible, purposive discourse, listening to the wounds of the other‖ (Luckhurst 506). In this
sense, trauma studies intersect with other critical vocabularies which problematize representation
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and attempt to confine the theoretical horizon. Trauma studies expanded its horizon linking
itself with studies of other social and cultural fields. In this regard Beerendra Pandey observes
that ―Since the mid-1990s, the medico-legal take on trauma has converged with the fields such as
psychology, sociology, history, political science, philosophy, ethics, literature, and aesthetics to
give rise to fast emerging critical category called ‗Trauma Theory‘[…]‖ (―Pedagogy‖ 124).
Amidst cultural theories, trauma theory, in particular, looks into the aspects of representations of
trauma in the texts, fictions and non-fiction, relating them to social history, socio-psychology,
aesthetic practices, philosophy, and national and international politics.
Trauma, for Cathy Caruth, occurs in an individual ―as the response to an unexpected or
overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in
repeated flash-backs, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena‖ (91). Trauma as affecting an
individual‘s life later on extended to new category affecting collective groups of a society. Such
a trauma has been theorized as cultural trauma by Alexander et al. in Cultural Trauma and
Collective Identity (2004). One of the coauthors of the text, Piotr Sztompka, argues that the
discourse of trauma prompted by rapid social change was first ―borrowed as a metaphor from
medicine and psychiatry and slowly acquiring new social and cultural meaning‖ (157). Thus,
culture and social contexts came under the critical investigation of the newly developed theory of
trauma. The trauma in this new category ―occurs when member of collectivity feel they have
been subjected to a horrendous events that leaves indelible mark upon their group consciousness,
marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and
irrevocable ways‖ (Alexander 1). Taking the similar line of definition, Smelser provides, rather,
a wider picture of cultural trauma in terms of virtue of memory: ―[…] a memory accepted and
publicly given credence by a relevant membership group and evoking and event or situation
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which is a) laden with negative affect, b) represented as indelible, and c) regarded as threatening
a society‘s existence or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural presuppositions‖ (44).
Moreover, as opposed to individual trauma, cultural trauma is described by Ron Eyerman
as ―[…] a tear in the social fabric affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of
cohesion‖ (―Cultural Trauma‖ 60). In cultural trauma, unlike psychological one, individuals in a
group continue with their life as before in the aftermath of the traumatic event. They are not
affected, personally, by the disaster. It is whilst living in communities as a member individuals
may afterward realize or told that they have been suffering as all the other members have. For
example, a suffering resulting from cultural humiliation, state apathy or other kinds, depending
on the nature of the events, that only as a member of a group can identify.
As Piotr Sztompka reminds us, ―Truly collective trauma, as distinct from massive
traumas, appear only when people start to be aware of the common plight, perceive the similarity
of their situation with that of others, define it a shared‖ (160). Hence, it is a social phenomenon
that shapes a group consciousness, therefore contributing towards identifying what happened in
the past as a loss or disruption of a social cohesion of the group. It is for this reason Jeffrey C.
Alexander opines that ―trauma is socially mediated attribution‖ (8). Neil J. Smelser, too,
maintains that trauma is a trauma so far as it is seen within a certain sociological and cultural
context which contributes towards constituting trauma. Before departing from psychological
trauma he observes that ―Freud was beginning a journey that would lead to the conclusion that a
trauma is not a thing in itself but becomes a thing by virtue of the context in which it is
implanted‖ (34). It is because we cannot think of an individual apart from a cultural context and
everything they come across has cultural or sociological influences, be they the state of mind
after the violent occurrence, or the life before that. A collective culture, thus, plays an important
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role in constructing, even, the psychological trauma in an individual, for ―cultural trauma for the
most part historically made, not born‖ (Smelser 37).
Since the cultural context plays a crucial role in a construction trauma, people living I
different cultural context they respond to the traumatic event differently. Writing about the site
of trauma, Hent de Vries reminds the fact that ―individual in different cultures, for example:
those with fatalistic religious traditions, may be less susceptible to traumas as they are
understood in western countries‖ (qtd. in Smelser 34). Therefore the culture of the trauma carrier
group plays very important role in shaping the dimension of historical trauma. For, ―Each culture
has its own concept of courage, victimization, dignity, and persecution as well as different
concepts and practices of bureaucracy. Whether, trauma victims understand their plight as
personal, or as part of a larger situation of political persecution is also culturally specific‖
(Shuman and Bohmer 402).
Trauma, like many other social conditions, is rooted in objective and subjective
phenomena. It is objective because trauma is, usually, based in actual occurrences; and
subjective, because it does not exist until it is defined in a particular way from a particular
location. For this reason it is said that ―All traumatic experiences are painful. But not all painful
experiences are traumatic‖ (Field 31). Beerendra Pande points out that ―The seminal event is not
naturally traumatic but that the cultural templates through which they are experienced turn into a
trauma (―Pedagogy‖ 126). As the society moves forward with some degree of cohesion, after the
overwhelming occurrence the experienced event, forms a story of that particular group that faced
it, the members of a society relate to each other by remembering the occurrence they shared as a
group. The act of remembering of the past event constructs the story which includes all the
affected members of a society. Ron Eyerman writes that ―As a cultural process, trauma is linked
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to the formation of collective identity and the construction of collective memory‖ (Cultural
Trauma 60). Because the memory of the traumatic events moves from individual memory to the
collective through the social process the diving lines between individual and collective memory
is very thin, even blurring. As Kaplan notes, because ―trauma produces new subject, that the
political-ideological context within which traumatic events occur shapes their impact, and it is
hard to separate individual and collective trauma‖ (1).
However, memory of an event is individual memory until it gets into the web of a social
construction as a story, rituals, monument, history and myth. This is where individual trauma and
collective trauma differ; for collective memory of a traumatic event never dies with the age of
the people who experienced it, but rather passes on to the generation to come. Therefore, the
societies maintain the memories of past events, whether in a form of individual story or as a
collective rituals and celebrations. Even the individual memories are shaped by the surroundings,
because we cannot think of an individual outside the socio-cultural context where memories are
constructed. It is because of the formation of collective memory in a society ―cultural traumas
are enduring, lingering; they may last over several generations‖ (Sztopmka 162).
Collective memories play important role in knowing one‘s cultural history and the roots
of new culture one is living, because ―[It] specifies the temporal parameters of past and future,
where we came from and where are going, and also why we are here now‖ (Eyerman, ―Cultural
Trauma‖ 66). Cultural trauma can be best understood in the lines by E. Ann Kaplan, drawn from
her experience in the aftermath of 9/11 in New York streets close to the Ground Zero:
―Everyone was in shock: people did not laugh out loud in the streets or in the
square; voices were muted. People‘s expressions were somber. I felt a connection
to strangers that I had never felt before. On the subway too, we looked at each
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other as if understanding what we all were facing. For at any moment, it seemed,
the subway could be blown up, gas might fill the tunnels. [...] Nowhere was safe,
just as nothing had been safe in war time England. We were in this together. (9)
As trauma creates void in individuals, and it does so in collectivity, too, by destroying existing
images or belief in the social system cultural values people lived with. It is almost always the
case with a community that has changed radically. It is a state of a community or nation where
old value and system is dead, and new has not yet born. This is the period when trauma process
moves along with respective carrier groups of affected community or nation. ―In this sense,
trauma can never be a purely individual event, in the same way as there cannot be a private
language, because it always already involves the community or the cultural setting in which
people are placed‖ (Edkins 106).
Trauma, as the theorists have it, occurs experiencing the event directly, and also by
learning about it afterwards. First type of trauma is called direct trauma and the second is called
indirect or vicarious. In most cases, cultural trauma occurs through indirect experience of the
traumatic events. In this type of trauma, a community or an individual affected through story
narrated by victims themselves; media coverage of the agonizing events in television channels,
documentary, newspaper et cetera. The following paragraph by human rights defender Shiva
Prasad Gaudel presents the both types of trauma. He narrates:
Dandapani showed us the wounds, scars and bruises that were all over his body
from head to foot and told us the story of his torture, weeping all the while. I
could not control myself as I heard him recounting how he was tortured at the
hands of the security forces. My eyes were filled with tears and, instead of
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consoling him; I took a handkerchief out of my pocket and pretend to wipe my
face, speechless with emotion. (76)
The trauma pertaining to Dandapani suffering occurred through direct experience of the physical
as well as cultural injury inflicted by the torture and humiliation at the hands of perpetrators.
And, the narrator in the paragraph is, also, traumatized, not directly experiencing the physical
injury, but by the story of the victim as he tells. It is worth quoting LaCapra at length to
understand the crux of the cultural trauma. He observes,
Everyone is subject to structural trauma. But, with respect to historical trauma and
its representation, the distinction among victims, perpetrators, and bystander is
crucial. ‗Victim‘ is not a psychological category. It is in variable ways, a social,
political, and ethical category. Victims of certain events will in all likelihood be
traumatized by them, and not being traumatized would itself call for explanation.
(Trauma, 723)
By the same token, the category ‗victim‘ in cultural trauma travel as far as the social, political,
and ethical carrier groups carry the memory on the events. Therefore the victim can as well be
trans-historical and trans-generational. As Avishai Margalit notes, ―A shared memory of
historical events that goes beyond the experience of anyone alive is a memory of memory, and
not necessarily a memory that, through the dimension of diachronic labor, ends up at an actual
event. This kind of memory reaches alleged memories of the past but not necessarily past events‖
(59). The cultural critics have claimed that when event itself is not traumatic, but the memory of
it may.
However, there are critics who have raised critical eyebrows about the notion of
collective memory. Susan Sontag is one among the critics challenging the claim of the trauma
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theorists, as she writes, ―strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory – part of
the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction. All
memory is individual, irreproducible – it dies with each person‖ (qtd. in Eyerman, ―Past in
Present‖ 162). Similarly, Susannah Radstone critiques the trauma theory as something that
replaces unconscious with memory. She claims, ―Trauma theory exorcises […] psychoanalysis‘
later insistence on the agency of the unconscious in the formation of memories‖ (qtd. in Kaplan
35). Radstone further adds, ―Trauma theorists associate trauma not with the effect of triggered
association but with the ontologically unbearable nature of the events itself‖ (qtd. in Kaplan 35).
However, amidst rising tides of criticism against cultural trauma David Becker suggests ―that in
each different social context people should create their own definition of trauma within a
framework, in which the basic focus is not so much on the symptoms of a person but on the
sequential development of the traumatic situation‖ (qtd. in Kaplan 39).
In the light of discussion of trauma theory thus far, cultural trauma occurs in sudden
event that tear the social fabric which is recognized by relevant member of public being as such;
though the affected member of a group may have lived with some sort of cohesion in the
aftermath of the event. From this definition the features of cultural trauma can be outlined as, a)
indelible, for it is scar in the spirit; b) travels as far as the memory of the events is carried by the
valid carrier; d) creates new subject or identity; e) can be direct and indirect or vicarious; and f)
the result occurring from trauma can be negative and positive.
Shoshana Felman, in her book The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Trauma in the
Twentieth Century (2002), writes, ―The twentieth century–an era of historical trials–was in effect
a century of traumas and (concurrently) a century of theories of trauma‖ (1). Felman has made
this claim in the context of the trials faced by Nazi perpetrators for the crime of Holocaust.
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Nevertheless, no critic can deny the urgency of the claim in the context of ongoing violent
episodes in the world today. However, following discussion of trauma is in the context of a
decade long conflict that has changed Nepal politically, socially and culturally.
A current debate in humanists‘ circles in Nepal, surrounding the event of People‘s War,
has been whether the event can be identified as a traumatic. As mentioned in literature review
journalist and writer Kunda Dixit noted the event as being traumatic. Govinda Raj Bhattarai is
among the writers and critics who follow this line of claim. In an introduction to Stories of
Conflict and War (2007), a collection of short stories, Bhattarai claims that the text ―presents the
horrors of the past decade which we survived and traumatic experience that we as a people
underwent‖ (7). A crucial question following the argument is: what are the ingredients that make
the Pople‘s War a historically traumatic event? What follows in this chapter is my answer to the
question in the light of the theory of cultural trauma.
Nepal, known worldwide as a Himalayan Kingdom, became a federal republic after a
decade of People‘s War. This event marked a fundamental change into people‘s future identity.
Once identified as the subjects of the King, the people of Nepal are to be called the citizens of a
federal republic. This new identity came not without a rupture in social system. ―The armed
violence has disrupted the social space [fabric] without which democratic order cannot be
restored‖ (Kumar 114). The war has changed the religious state into the secular one. The people
are no more identified as the citizens of the Hindu state. The country has been in transitional
phase since the declaration of Republic by the Interim Parliament. It is the stage where old
system is done for and new is yet to be born. ―But, at this juncture of history of Nepal, neither is
the state capable of continuing its traditional nature nor are the groups [social] bent on changing
the character of the state likely to be silenced‖ (Baral, ―Introduction‖ 8). Despite the fact that the
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event marked a new socio-cultural era, it has been laden with negative affect. Before the people‘s
war broke out most Nepalis believed Nepal to be a peaceful and only Hindu kingdom in the
world. During the war ―[the] country of Shangri-la image and characterized by serenity has
suddenly changed into one of the bloodiest theatres of the world‖ (Baral, ―Maoist Insurgency‖
185). The image of the people‘s war presented by national and international media played very
active role to establish the event as something horrendous in people‘s psyche. Jenny Edkin
writes, ―Trauma is often seen as an injury. First the word meant an injury to the body, but now it
is more commonly taken to mean an injury to the psyche, or even the community, the culture, or
the environment‖ (109).
The events that followed in the country during the people‘s war, for many, were
something beyond their imagination. For example, no one has ever thought that some village
youths turned into the guerrillas; and dare to fight the oversized well trained then Royal Nepal
Army. Professor of political science Lok Raj Baral notes: ―The nature, growth and dynamics of
PW [People‘s War] in Nepal are incomprehensible to many people including serious observers
of insurgencies across the world‖ (Baral 185). The Royal family massacre was another event
during this period of history that marked the events beyond comprehension. People were not
even ready to believe when they first heard about the massacre. Jhamak Ghimire1 records this
anguish in her autobiography: ―A kind of anxiety prevailed over the public in the aftermath of
that massacre. They said that after all there‘s no security anywhere; whole family is wiped out
even under the mighty security force‖ (184). The event of massacre came out as an extreme
surprise, as something unacceptable for the common thinking mind. For, ―[…] what we call
1 My own translation of the passage from Jiwan kanda ki Phool (Life, whether a thorn or a flower): Tyo hatya kanda
ghate pachhi maanchhe ma yek khal ko stabdhata chhayo/ Uniharu bhanthe aakhir surakshit thaun kahin
rahenachha, tyatro surakshya ko ghera bhitra baseka maanchhe ko bansa bina bhayo.
Thapa 29
traumatic is an event that cannot be placed within prior schemes or frameworks. It is a
confrontation with an occurrence that is not part of the symbolic order and hence that cannot be
predicted or accounted for: there‘s no language for it‖ (Edkins 107).
And, according to trauma theorist Cathy Caruth ―For history to be a history of trauma
means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; or to
put somewhat differently, that a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its
occurrence‖ (Possibility of History, 187). The event occurred in a way beyond normal state of
mind could grasp. The atmosphere flowed with anguished emotion that blocked the perceiving
mind. Thapa narrates her own physical and mental state after she learned about the massacre:
―Suddenly my hands began to tremble. Because Kathmandu was so small, everyone lived close
to the Narayanhiti palace; the massacre felt very close by‖ (Thapa, 11). Thapa‘s narration is no
less disturbing than Kaplan‘s state of mind and atmosphere of New York streets in the aftermath
of destruction of Twin Tower.
Kaplan has pointed out that ―People encounter trauma by being a bystander, by living
near to where a catastrophe happened, or by hearing about crisis from a friend. But most people
encounter trauma through the media, which is why focusing on so-called mediatized trauma is
important‖ (2). In the context of Nepal‘s conflict media presented images that were highly
disturbing. National newspapers reported the sorrowful plight of the conflict victims with the
spectacular photographs of dead bodies. National as well as international television channels
reported from death site, splashing the picture of blood stained bodies every now and then across
TV screens. It is worth noting the credence given by media to the Royal massacre as something
traumatic. On the day of the massacre ―None of the Nepali newspaper came that morning. The
private FM stations of which there were seven in Kathmandu –did not broadcast any morning
Thapa 30
news, and eventually they all halted transmission. [...] The state media offered no news: Radio
Nepal was playing dirges […] (Thapa, 12). After the palace massacre one segment of people felt
they are no more the subjects of the king, for the believed Father has been murdered. And the
other segment fighting to overthrow the monarchy has yet to claim their new identity.
Although the catastrophic events taken place during people‘s war have radically changed
the people‘s identity, it has also left deep mark in the people‘s psyche as something indelible.
The societies have been divisive along the ethnic lines, which resulted with the deaths of many in
revolt in Terai after the declaration of the country as a republic state. Because of a decade of
conflict ―Families have broken away, societies have been divided, and people still feel the shock
from the uprooting of the traditional value system. The trauma continues to prevail‖ (Pathak 7).
Situated at the crossfire between rebel force and state force during the conflict, the victims‘ hope
of being cared for is fading away as the leading political heads are tearing each other apart to be
the head of the post-conflict government. The people have lost hope, for the country is creeping
in transitional phase with no adequate measures of reconciliation among the victims and the
perpetrators. People of Nepal no more feel secure under the national security guards after the
events when protectors turned into perpetrators. ―It seems that trauma is more than a shock
encounter with brutality or death; in important sense, trauma is the betrayal of a promise or an
expectation […], what we call trauma takes place when the very power that we were convinced
will protect us and give us security becomes our tormentors […] or when our family is no longer
a source of refuge but a site of danger‖ (Edkins 109).
Nepal has entered into a vulnerable state with people stripped off of the old trust and
sense of pride as a subject of the Himalayan Kingdom; more so for the new identity has not yet
constructed. For trauma theorists this kind of state of vulnerability of the collectivity is very
Thapa 31
crucial. In this juncture government agencies opt for covering up the trauma with legal tag and
politics of representation, whereas victims strive for leaving the wounds open so as to claim the
identity of victimhood. Sean Field, in his essay on post-apartheid South Africa, examines the
tension in Truth and Reconciliation Commission‘s attempt to heal the past trauma by bringing
victims‘ and perpetrators‘ story to the commission. He observes,
The legal or political closure desired by lawyers and politicians is not equivalent
to the ongoing struggles of trauma survivors to at least reach a symbolic
emotional closure. But emotional closure in the complete sense is not possible.
The term ‗closure‘ evokes ahistorical fantasies that it is possible to emotionally
sever ‗bad‘ events or periods from people‘s lives. Rather central challenge faced
by survivors is how to tolerate and integrate memories of traumatic events. Some
survivors work through mourning their losses and ‗adapting‘ their lives, while
others lead their lives in ‗melancholic ways. (34)
As Smelser has pointed out, ―[…] the very effort to establish a cultural trauma is a
disputed process, as are debates and conflicts over preferred defenses. Perhaps, even more
divisive ingredients of the cultural-trauma complex are finger-pointing, mutual blame, and
demonization‖ (52). Amidst the disputes trauma theorists insist on leaving the wound open, for
―Trauma can never be ‗healed‘ in the sense of a return to now things were before a catastrophe;
but if the wound of trauma remains open, its pain may be worked through in the process of its
being ‗translated‘ via art‖ (Kaplan 19). It is in this open and vulnerable life without distinctions
an alternative measure of working-through trauma is possible. The affected community or
groups, at this juncture, stand at the crossroad of transition, where old socio-cultural bordering
lines are blurred and new is needed. As Bernhard Giesen, in his essay ―The Trauma of
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Perpetrators‖, postulates, ―the constitutive reference to triumph or trauma can be spoken or
silenced; it is always there, enabling us to represent and present the past as our history‖ (112).
The nature of traumatically affected memory is of the emerging type that cannot be silenced or
covered forever until and unless it is given an agency to identify with. ―The scar, the traumatic or
ecstatic memory trace, is never entirely erased and so becomes, whether we like it or not, the
foundation of our sense of reality‖ (Hartman 43).
What is crucial to note is that in the aftermath of traumatic event various affected groups
try to influence the representation of trauma for the formation of victimhood in their side as per
their groups‘ interest. Therefore, ―Cultural trauma always engages a meaning struggle, a
grappling with an event that involves identifying the nature of the pain and the nature of victim
and the attribution of responsibility‖ (Eyerman 62). Representation of affected community or
group in the social-political discourse of victimhood is the core element of identity formation in
a society torn by violent conflict or event.
The theory of cultural trauma explores the question about the nature and representation of
traumatic memory in the text. It focuses on systematic inquiry into the text that is a product of
traumatic phenomena and explores the possibility of resolving those traumas. There are different
ways of remembering the traumatic past, some help to decrease the traumas, whereas others
increase them. According to Ron Eyerman, ―Cultural Trauma calls attention to the negotiated
recollection of events and to the role of representation. There is power involved here as well, the
power of political elites for example, of mass media in selecting what will be represented, thus
affecting what will be forgotten as well as remembered‖ (―Past in Present‖ 163).
Therefore speculation of representation of the violence in literary work, art, and ritual
paves a way of understanding whether these genres assist to resolve the cultural trauma by giving
Thapa 33
an adequate agency to the victims‘ suffering in claiming their victimhood. Or, they help the state
authority to cover up the trauma of suffering community or groups with glorification and
demonization of the event and the actors who performed it. Thus, ―the articulating discourse
surrounding cultural trauma is a process of mediation involving alternative strategies and
alternative voices. It is a process that aim to reconstitute or reconfigure a collective identity as in
repairing a tear in the social fabric‖ (Eyerman 63). As pointed out earlier, representation of
trauma victims plays a crucial role in repairing the chasm resulted in the traumatic events. In
what follows I explore the issue of representation in the texts under my discussion in in the
research and critically analyze the language used by the respective narrators.
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Chapter II
Othering the Army: Forget Kathmandu
My concern in this chapter is with the narrative representation of the violent past of
Nepal‘s history in Forget Kathmandu (2005) by Manjushree Thapa. The insurgency known as
the People‘s War started by Maoist party and the counter-insurgency operation intensified by the
government are narrated in the text. I analyze the text‘s narrative aspect of representation in the
light of cultural trauma. In the first part of the analysis I focus on the text‘s nature of memoir.
My argument dwells on selective construction of the text in which the narrator presents a part of
the negative history of the monarchy and the Royal Army. The purpose of the memoir, as I shed
critical light in the later part of this chapter, is to back her claims. Thus, the memoir part
prepares a reader to accept the army as perpetrator presented in the second part. And in the
second part the focus is on the testimonial narrative. In this part of the text the author is not
writing a memoir, but recording testimonials by interviewing those who are affected by the
violent conflict. I examine the interviewer‘s deliberate selections of testimonies from the victims
of the insurgency and her input in those testimonial narratives as presented in the text. Lastly, I
conclude this chapter by shedding light on how she demonizes the security forces led by the
army.
Forget Kathmandu (2005) opens by remembering the result of violent past in which
inflections of trauma among Nepali public is foregrounded as a collective memory. The result of
the violence is one which narrator relates herself with the Nepalese who have shared the same
fate as the social harmony is disrupted by the insurgency. She writes:
We lost thousands of lives to a violent Maoist insurgency and repressive state
counter-insurgency. Thousands more were orphaned and widowed, hundreds of
Thapa 35
thousands were displaced from their towns and villages, and the count of
maiming, rape, unlawful detention, extortion, kidnapping, child conscription and
disappearances rose rapidly. Parliamentary democracy won late, in 1990—was
lost to a staggered coup that began in October 2002, and culminated with king
Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah‘s February 2005 military takeover. (1)
Although we are not told of traumatic events that the narrator have directly suffered on a
personal level, her narrative claim that the social surroundings has registered in her mind as
traumatic, and herself as a member of larger socio-cultural structure affected by the insurgency.
This is, as an integral part of the affected society that a member go through, what Alexander calls
a ―social process of trauma‖ where events are registered as traumatic in the aftermath of the
events, through literature, media, and the passing of story of the events by carrier group to the
larger public who have not been the direct victim of the violence2. The narrator has been through
such social process as she writes, ―I kept up with what was happening in the country as much as
any person, but watching the television news or reading the papers or listening to the radio left
me feeling defeated–personally, intimately, as though tragedy had struck me or someone I
loved‖ (Thapa Forget Kathmandu 137). From her expression we can infer that the social milieu
has made quite an impact in narrator‘s daily living, especially by the media images. She
confesses, ―I wrote this book in the thick of events, as a personal effort to work my way out of
this muddle‖ (Thapa Forget Kathmandu 4). The traumatic muddle she is living in has not come
out of her own experience of suffering the violence, but from the scene of violence in television
2 See page 1-30, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity in which Jeffrey C. Alexander postulates the social process
of cultural trauma. He explicates how trauma is not born-in-event, but constructed in the aftermath of the event.
And the process goes through making claim which is supported by carrier groups, such as a media, and constructed
in social narrative.
Thapa 36
clips and the story reported from the sites are imprinted in her mind as traumatic. Eyerman
postulates, ―for trauma is not something naturally existing; it is something constructed by
society‖ (―Cultural Trauma‖ 2). The trauma is even more visible when she writes, ―My dread
manifested itself as emotional malaise, a lagging in the heart. I would wake up, and before
starting my work I would read the newspaper and feel fatigued before my day‖ (Thapa 137).
We learn that the narrator, as a member of the violence affected society, is related to the
trauma of the society. Yet, what makes her position different from that of the suffering of the
real time victim is that she does not present the gesture which would relate her to the dead and
those who are suffering. Rather, like perpetrator of violence, she draws the lines in speaking of
violence and deviates from speaking of the pangs and pain of the marginalized victims. She
draws line between state security force and the rebel force as she writes: ―The impunity with
which the state security forces operated was enabled by the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-
evil spirit of Kathmandu‘s frightened bourgeoisie‖ (Thapa 166). The narrator‘s full-fledged
attack on state security forces casts shadows over the narration of suffering. It rather, further
intensifies the demonization of the security forces. She opines that ―[…] the army at home had
withered into a largely ceremonial body, good for adding pomp to state occasion. Of all
government branches, it was the least touched by democratic changes‖ (Thapa 162). What one
can gather from her opinion is that army is nothing but an organization of bunch of good-for-
nothing people who are frittering away national budget for their own pompous ceremonial game.
It is not difficult to point out the author‘s emotional outpouring in her redrawing of
Nepal‘s history that is intertwined with military-monarchy. E. Ann Kaplan notes, ―The main
thing about a memoir is the emotions that are remembered and the ways in which the writer
expresses them. Also important are the ways in which national/social codes and discourses shape
Thapa 37
both the impact of the trauma on the individual and how it is remembered‖ (43). In Forget
Kathmandu the author‘s emotion is linked with Army‘s past deeds which leads her, emotionally,
to blame the institution for what we call the trauma of the nation by helping the King. But what
she does forget in her emotional quandary that there are people in the organization whose family
have suffered from the violence as much as any Nepalis. They are in the organization not by
choice but by necessities created by economic condition of their families and thus have been the
victim of the insurgency just as any ordinary people. Yet in her narrative the state security forces
that are combating in the field for hand-to-mouth business are barely seen as underdog. This
creation of chasm between perpetrator and the victims as black and white is due to application of
professional model by the author whilst observing the state of violence in the state ruled by an
army King.
This polarizing binary is not new to the observers who are in the fields of violence, for
they are professionally motivated to record the events from their side. Veena Das, as an observer
in the field of violence, has discouraging experience whilst working with her co-workers. She
writes, ―Unfortunately though, there is still a tendency to work with models of clear binary
opposites in the understanding of violence–state versus civil society […], global versus locals
and so on‖ (295). Therefore, the narrator‘s model in drawing the lines should not surprise us
since she is related to the human rights organization. She is concerned more with human rights of
the people than any other rights, for example, economic rights, educational rights and so on.
Whilst the vast numbers of lower marginalized echelon have been struggling dying due to lack of
minimum medical care, the author moans that ―there were no more than three or four senior
advocates with the capacity–and inclination–to address legal and constitutional quandaries or
human rights issues‖ (Thapa, Forget 130). She is more anxious about having less number of
Thapa 38
legal experts in human rights issues than teachers, health assistants, agricultural assistants that
could actually lessen the woes of the suffering people.
However, it does not mean human rights issues are less important. They are equally
important in a democratic state. It is, rather, a matter of narrator giving more emphasis to rights
issues than actually amplifying the voices of victims is in suffering. And narrative functions in
mobilizing the collectives to give recognition to the narrated events and its affects. Regarding a
narrative‘s performativity Eyerman writes,
―Narratives are stories containing rhetorical devices, story lines, which link a
particular occurrence/experience to others, broadening their meaning beyond
situational, imposing a higher order of significance, thus orchestrating and
amplifying both the emotional experience and the meaning of the event, as
individuals fused into collective, with a purposive future and a meaningful past.
(―Performing Opposition‖ 196)
Indeed, a narrative has a power to change the environment, especially, in the aftermath of
violent event. It can call for responsibility by amplifying the suffering of the people inflicted by
in violent events; or point finger at the perpetrators in order to call for revenge which is not
recommended in trauma writing. When it comes to Thapa‘s narrative device, it is focused more
on professional side of her writing as a human rights record. To achieve her professional goal
she, through her memoir-style narrative, identifies herself as a part of the affected members of
Nepali society, which is partially true in collective level. And then she moves on with her
professional goal, that is, to count the number of human rights violation. As Frank Ankersmit
points out, ―Saying true things about the past is easy—anybody can do that—but saying right
things about the past is difficult‖ (qtd. in LaCapra Writing History 10). And Thapa in her memoir
Thapa 39
is all for recalling the violent past of the insurgency-ridden country; in other words, memorizing
the dark side of the army backed institution of Nepalese monarchy. Narrator obsessively recalls
the myth of army‘s two-hundred and forty-two years old past and notes that ―the more zealous of
the Prithvi Narayan Shah‘s soldiers cut off the noses of the local inhabitants after their victory‖
(Thapa, Forget Kathmandu 57). Such a harsh remembering of the history goes on
chronologically as writes to paint the Royal Army with criminal color heaping more information
that, ―Army troops arrested BP at an open air meeting at Tundikhel in the heart of Kathmandu‖
(Thapa, Forget Kathmandu 102). The detention of B.P Koirala, a democratic leader who is
revered as a great-man, by army troops, obviously, make the reader, who knows little bit of
Nepal‘s history, feel bitterly about the army and question their loyalty toward the nation. As she
writes about the past deeds of the military one gets the notion that monarchy and military is one
institution; and that‘s where the reader question the army‘s loyalty to the people and the nation.
Moreover, without mentioning the people‘s view of the monarchy in the contemporary
Nepali society the author toils up to show how historical texts were censored and people were
indoctrinated whilst a kid in school. She writes, ―The legacy of this censorship is still with us.
Our school texts books continue to teach old, discredited histories that glorify our rulers and
make no mention of our people‖ (Thapa Forget Kathmandu 2). It is true that history of Nepal is
history of oligarchic families that include the Shahs, the Ranas, Thapas and Pandeys. Yet the
author selects only Shahs in her memoir, despite the fact that the Ranas and the Thapas ruled
Nepal and the Army institution more than the members of Shahs family. It is an act of rewriting
history on the part of the author. In his book review essay, Dallas points out, ―[the author] turns
from novelist to journalist and historian‖ (Dallas 1). Yet the chapter 'History Exhibit' hardly
Thapa 40
speaks of the equally vibrant histories and cultures. She mentions Kirant, Licchavi, and Malla
periods, that do not exceed the space of more than two paragraphs, in the passing3.
The narrator‘s attack on monarchy from the perspective of a human rights activist
continues as she writes: ―On 1 February 2005 he further consolidated his rule when he effected a
full-scale military coup, appointing himself the ‗chairman‘ of a new right-wing cabinet and
suspending all civil liberties and most constitutional remedies‖ (3). She obsessively brings in the
army, though other branches of the state security force, too, were involved, in the front. She
remembers that ―[King] deployed the Royal Nepal Army to arrest and intimidated democratic
political activists, journalists, and human rights workers. And democratic institutions—such as
the private media—came under systematic attack‖ (3).
She suggests that Army do their duties only when they see their own benefit, in other
words, benefit to the Royal throne. The author makes strong claim that they do not abide by the
government‘s rule of law as she writes, ―Eight days after ordering the army into action, G.P.
Koirala abruptly resigned. He later cited the army‘s non-cooperation as his reason. Apparently,
the army brass had lied to him about having surrounded the Maoists. What exactly occurred in
Nuwa village remains unclear till today. But this much was obvious: the army would do as it
pleased if drawn into the counter-insurgency‖ (159). The readers are presented with the facts and
background information of the army‘s maneuvering during the period of counter-insurgency.
Thapa invests more ink writing about Royal-Army‘s history than actually writing about the
suffering people, including the members of rebels and the security forces whose voices were to
be written for what they have been through. The army‘s background information only provokes
3 See Forget Kathmandu where Thapa spares merely two paragraphs to the history of three important eras—
Kirant, Licchavi, and Malla—out of 31 pages (page 48-79).
Thapa 41
anger in people, and something that encourage venting anger is not desirable in trauma writing.
The other reason for questioning too much information is that it can evade the real issue at stake.
In the context of recording testimonial from Holocaust survivors, Geoffrey Hartman notes, ―This
greed for more and more information, for positivities, which has already accumulated and
extraordinary and melancholy records on Holocaust, has not yet yielded appreciable ethical
lessons. The heaping up a factual detail may even be an excuse to evade the issue of what can be
learned‖ (78).
Information the readers are given in Forget Kathmandu as a primary source not only
evade the issue a trauma literature looking over, to make the matter worse, the text becomes too
personal when she quotes a middle aged lady. The lady, who is petrified by the horror of the
palace massacre, as most people were, blatantly says, ―How can anyone stay at a time like this?
A brother-killer is trying to become our king. We‘ve got to stop him from entering the royal
palace‖ (Thapa Forget Kathmandu 20). This, as one finds, is taking too personally an event of a
highly serious and political in nature. But again, looking back at the time, one hardly disagrees
with the author, because the public mood had gathered up in sympathy for the dead and hatred
for the successor. Then, narrator catches up with the public mood by presenting what everyone
thinking –the king and his family were murdered. Then the narrator focuses in the royal massacre
in a way that gives her enough room to demonize the army. Indirectly the narrator blames army
as being responsible for the Royal massacre. About the massacre, she writes,
The Prime Minister did not know much about the massacre. By contrast, the chief
of the army staff, Prajjwal Sumshere Jung Bahadur Rana, had promptly arrived at
the hospital, conferred with the surviving members of the royal family, and
dispatched the helicopter to Pokhara. Curiously, he spent most of his interview
Thapa 42
with the investigation committee explaining that he was not responsible for
security in the grounds of the Narayanhiti palace. [He also explained that] the
palace security does not belong to the army. (Thapa Forget Kathmandu 45)
It does not take long for a reader to point finger at the army, actor behind the scene, after
reading this bits of information from the author about what happened soon after the massacre.
There is enough room for various interpretation of what actually took place in Kathmandu
surrounding the palace shootings. Yet, for an acclaimed author, like Thapa, to come out with
such a harsh generalization about the event is to fall prey to her sentimental feelings toward the
dead royal family members. Social philosopher Avishai Margalit opines, ―We should be even
more suspicious of those who pay attention only to what they feel towards others but are
incapable paying attention to others; in short, we should be suspicious of sentimentalist‖ (33).
Thus the author of Forget Kathmandu (2005) leaves enough room to question her memoir‘s
motive in the text.
It is even more so in Thapa‘s personalization of describing the scene involving an Army
Captain Rajib Shahi ―who was married to a niece of King Birendra, [and] had survived the
massacre. The press conference took place at the army hospital, where he was convalescing.
Shahi appeared before the camera wearing an intense, concentrated expression that suggested he
was still in shock‖ (Forget Kathmandu 31). Thapa paints the picture of the Captain as if he is a
beast of prey that ―His shaved head gave him a fiery look, as did his grey T-shirt with ‗Om‘
emblazoned across the chest‖ (Thapa, Forget Kathmandu, 31). Everyone related to the massacre
events are painted in either beastly or demoniac face. For example, the author presents the
Chairman of the Parliament Taranath Ranabhat as a gothic character when he appeared with the
investigation report on the palace shootings. She writes, ―As he began to read the investigation‘s
Thapa 43
summery report Ranabhat‘s face took on the look of an evil aunt telling ghost stories to terrified
children‖ (Thapa, Forget Kathmandu 35). The author‘s rage against the army and those who are
supporting the institution is not without a reason, for there is a feeling of shocking betrayal from,
―[…] the Royal Nepal Army whose first loyalties –many felt –were to the King and only then to
the country‖. And the deep seated fear that, ―If the army got involved, democracy would be lost‖
(Thapa, Forget Kathmandu 142). And yet, we find author emotional to the extent of
contradicting her own claim when she questions the army‘s refusal to get involved in the
insurgency as she writes:
The Prime Minister ordered deployment of the Armed Police Force and Army on
18 April 2001. Two days later, the Chief of the Army Staff General Prajjwal
Sumshere J.B. Rana publicly asked all the major political parties to reach a
national consensus on the deployment of the army. This was unheard of. Was he
questioning the Defense Council‘s order? (Thapa Forget Kathmandu 148)
To call Forget Kathmandu a history, Thapa writes, ―I have written too personally for that. […]
You could call it a book on bad politics (4). But for then power-holders it is a memoir of an
NGO worker who was criticized by, then King, Gyanendra Shah for making the human rights
issues the ―dollar-crop‖4. So it is not surprising that ―Weeks after the release of the first edition
[of Forget Kathmandu] came Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah‘s military coup of the February 2005,
with the revocation of all political, civil and human rights, including freedom of speech‖ (4).
Thus the first part of the text is, though written about and surrounding traumatic events of the
4 Gyanendra Shah, then Supreme Commander of Royal Army and king who plotted military coup in 2005, had come
heavily on the human rights activists for filing cases against the state security forces for violating human rights
during the counter insurgency. He had accused the rights activists for reaping ‘dollar-crop’ and served in the
interest of the terrorists, meaning Maoists, for their professional benefits and not for the national benefit. See
video footage, “Royal Proclamation”, February 17, 2005.
Thapa 44
country and people, an emotional journey of a very personal experience. To get better of a
memoir, it is worth quoting E.Ann Kaplan at length:
In a memoir, then, ‗truth‘ in regard to events is not, per se, at issue. The main
thing about memoir is the emotions that are remembered and the ways in which
the writer expresses them. Also important are the ways in which national/social
codes and discourses shape both the impact of the trauma on the individual and
how it is remembered. A possible difference between memoirs by male and by
female writers may emerge here because social codes of male and female
behavior differ. While no generalization hold, arguably authors of female
memoirs locate themselves within emotional relationships at stake in the past,
while male writers may focus more on institutional, historical, or sociopolitical
contexts. Yet, in both cases, personal and sociopolitical elements are involved. It
is matter of what the writer chooses to emphasize. (43)
However, in the case of Forget Kathmandu (2005) the author chooses to emphasize more
on questioning the army‘s morale and duty than on the suffering people. In fact, the memoir is
more about memorizing dead Royal members and the surroundings than remembering the woeful
plights of those who were alive and suffering from the national crisis. As Jiwan Subedi rightly
remarks: ―The Royal Nepal Army obviously is more comfortable with the security-centred
approach and less with being picked at for human rights abuses. It has whined about the
international community siding more with the Maoist‖ (149).
Even then the narrator identifies herself with the violence affected people, she visits the
sites of the violence, not as a victim, but as a human rights worker. Her position is clear from that
of the suffering people when she writes the purpose of her visit to the sites: ―My friend,
Thapa 45
Malcolm, […] was a British human rights expert interested in seeing whether the war had been,
as most independent reports had it, high in violations‖ (Thapa, Forget Kathmandu 171).
The narrator visits the sites as a human rights activist with an established image of the violence
as constructed by media and news reports prior to her visit. The report she cites is: ―International
and other human rights groups were saying that up to half of those killed by the security forces
were not Maoists engaging in combat, but unarmed Maoists and innocent civilians‖ (Thapa
Forget Kathmandu 201). Her journey to the war torn sites is not as much to reflect the agonies of
the survived as it is to confirm the idea she had of the human right violation. The testimonies
presented in the text confirm her idea of security forces being in the wrong side. One of the
testimonies given from the sites says, ―I was at home when the army came by on patrol. My
niece, a child of six, ran into the house in fear. They chased after her, firing at my house. […]
My mother was shot in the knee. My niece was shot near the stomach‖ (Thapa Forget
Kathmandu 212). The testimony of this kind is purely instrumental to support the human rights
records of violence. The narrator does not care to record a word of the plight of the victims that
who might have gone through dire situations ever since the event. In the text, readers do not
come across a voice representing people of Dunai as it is in the words of local poet Dhundiraj
Aryal. He writes,
By the Bheri river, Dunai weeps/ how long will it endure this pain and suffering?/
First food and then medicine are gone./ As though a plague of aberrant
consciousness swept/ in with breezes of Poush and Magh, Dunai begs alms./
Outside all seems well, but malice remains within./ Dunai – where pheasants used
to dance/ hearts now moan in bombs and gunpowder. (qtd. in Basnet 92)
Thapa 46
There‘s no sign of finger pointing and naming the perpetrator in the quoted poem. What
we see in the poem is immense suffering caused by evil forces. In the eyes of the suffering souls
evil has no other name, but evil. They have fallen from the human civilization to be named. As
for the poet it does not matter who they are or what ideology they followed, but where they stood
on a human level. On the contrary, the author of Forget Kathmandu (2005) is standing nowhere
near the poet of the above quoted poem, but on the opposite side of the empathic voice. There‘s
almost no record of what the narrator experienced in the sites regarding the collective wounds of
the victims in their voices. It is hard to believe that the agonies and pain did not surface, one way
or the other, whilst telling the disturbing cases of events. Author only focuses on the identified
perpetrator, such as the army, in her text as she records, ―The army raped [women] when they
came to search their houses. How could they save themselves?‖ (Thapa 213). So, the text gives
readers no time to empathize with the raped victims, for the author has placed the perpetrator
with a clear identification card in the front. Before one could even think about the victims, the
anger rises in the readers against army. Thus, the readers are dependent on the narrator‘s
judgment about the events, for she has not left the space for readers to ponder over the traumatic
events.
The authenticity of testimonies presented in the text is open to questions, since what is
seen in the site is absent. In the reporting of testimony of the violence Veena Das recommends
that the, ―Testimony of the survivors as those who spoke because victim could not, was best
conceptualized […] not through the metaphor of writing, but rather through the contrast between
saying and showing‖ (300). Unlike Das‘s recommendation, Forget Kathmandu (2005) is a report
of only of what the locals said, and not what the reporter saw in the site of the violence. It is
saying alone that dominates the narrative. In fact, there is not a single word in the text on the part
Thapa 47
of showing of what we can take for sign of suffering of widow or mourning members of the
deceased that reader could compare with that of the testimony of the villagers. One may ask, why
does the narrator of the text forget to show owes of the countrymen? The answer lies in her
privileged position as a human rights worker who is reporting from a safe site. She does not
accept the vulnerable position of a victim, but secured and privileged one; very opposite from the
position of the suffering people whose life is helpless at the face of violence. She admits the
denial of her as a vulnerable victim when she writes, ―I left Nepal so that I might continue to
write without fear‖ (Thapa, Forget Kathmandu 5). The moment she feels her privileged position
being threatened by the state censorship she avoids the site of violence, for she can afford
choose. She returns when her safety is assured by her status as a human rights worker. Her fear
of state turns into hatred that is what encourages her to draw the lines between the good and evil,
in other words, the rebel force and the state security force. Speaking about possibility of
resistance to violence, Jenny Edkins reminds us, ―It is only with abandonment of the drawing of
lines and assumption of bare life [vulnerable at the face of violence] that responsibility and
political engagement [resistance to violence] is possible‖ (114).
The drawing of lines not only makes the resistance impossible, but demands the
narrator‘s effort to prove her demonization of the state security force. It is this effort that drags
narrator along the lines of presenting statistics of dead bodies instead of the survivors‘ pangs and
pains. When she passes by the Kotabada airport of Kalikot with her team what she remembers
the dead in terms of is the number. She digs into her memory-bank and produce the data that,
―[…] on 24 February 2002, the security forces had shot dead more than 34 workers, including
17 who had come here all the way from Dhading District, near Kathmandu, to find work‖
(Thapa, Forget Kathmandu 220). The incident had been reported in the newspaper. It was not
Thapa 48
something hidden that the narrator had to remind the readers. One might ask, for what the reason
Thapa is repeating the story which is already known to the people through media sources. Does
this kind of retelling of the story help the reconciliation among affected? Or, does it make
situation more vulnerable to further conflict? And who need this kind of information and for
what reason? It may look impressive in a statistic book of human rights violation; but not in the
context where survivors are in need of empathy, and the nation is calling for reconciliation.
Gobodo-Madikizela asserts that ―The narratives of trauma told by victims and survivors are not
simply about facts. They are primarily about the impact of those facts on victims‘ lives and about
the painful continuities created by violence in their lives‖ (qtd. in Kaplan 42).
Contrary to a trauma narration, Thapa has invested more time in counting corpses than
empathizing with those who survived the traumatic events and have been traumatized. The half
of the text [pages 121 -251] is heavily dominated by narrative on death statistics. She counts,
―On the first day of the state of emergency, 34 people, including army men, were killed in a
clash between the Maoist and the army in Solukhumbu District. The next day, four policemen
and 12 alleged Maoists were killed in Darchula District‖ (Thapa, Forget Kathmandu 162).
Similarly, she writes, ―On 2 April, more than 500 Maoists armed with rifles, bombs and grenades
attacked two police outposts in Rukum and Dolakha Districts, killing 35 policemen and
abducting 24 more. Seven Maoists were also killed in the battle‖ (Thapa Forget Kathmandu
146). Then, in other instances Thapa informs the readers which sides of the forces killed more
people statistically. She writes:
Tellingly, only five of the 147 killings here [in Kalikot] had been perpetrated by
the Maoists. Of the 142 people killed by the State security forces, all were alleged
to be Maoist killed in the combat. Amnesty International and other human rights
Thapa 49
groups were saying that up to half of those killed by the security forces were not
Maoists engaging in combat, but unarmed Maoists and innocent civilians. (Forget
Kathmandu 200-201).
After reading the narrative one gets the notion, as if one side of the killers can be tagged
as more evil than that of the other side by counting the numbers of dead in their respective sides.
This mode of representation raise question about authenticity of the narration. Thus, David N.
Livingstone questions, ―How, then, do we come to the view that certain representations are less
authentic than others, that they bear false witness to what is to be human? Only, [Livingstone
thinks] when we feel the claim of human suffering or experience what is repugnant about
injustice. It cannot be done with some naturalistic, utilitarian calculus that would suppress the
language of strong evaluation‖ (17). Similarly, Dominick LaCapra notes, ―Being responsive to
the traumatic experience of others, notably of victims, implies not the appropriation of their
experience but what I would call empathic unsettlement, which should have stylistic effects or,
more broadly, effects in writing which cannot be reduced to formulas or rules of method‖
(Writing History 41).
Despite the critics‘ rallying against the statistical method of responding to victims‘
suffering, the narrative in Forget Kathmandu has been ever more focused in counting the dead
and dividing the responsibility for the death into two different camps, as per the ratio and
percentage. Among many, one example how Thapa compares the death toll in her narrative
before and after the state of emergency: ―[…] earlier the number of people killed by the Maoists
equaled the number of alleged Maoists killed by the state, now the ratio became one to four, with
the state security forces responsible for 80 percent of the killings. Of the alleged Maoists they
killed, up to 40 percent were innocent civilians, said human rights worker‖ (Forget Kathmandu
Thapa 50
162). The statistics presented, here, shows stark objectified facts and figures that are nowhere
near victims‘ ongoing sorrowful plights and pangs they are bearing in silence. It is well
established argument that ―objectification, […] in its unmitigated form, may also impede
empathy and affective response in general, thereby putting investigator in the untenable or at
least questionable position of the bystander if not fully knowledgeable subject‖ (LaCapra History
70). Instead of effacing the questionable position, Thapa, rather, moves on positioning herself
clearly on one side as she writes, ―Given the nature of Nepal‘s army, these statistics are not
surprising. […] Of all government branches it was the least touched by democratic changes.
Even after 1950, it was headed mostly by members of the Rana family, as had been the case
since Jung Bahadur Kunwar Rana‘s time, over a century and a half ago‖ (Forget Kathmandu
162). Furthermore, she claims, ―More than 100 journalists were jailed during the state of
emergency, making Nepal the most repressive state against the media‖ (Thapa Forget
Kathmandu 165). From her categorical emphasis on linking army‘s hundred years past with the
2001 state of emergency, it is not hard to conclude that the author‘s narrative stand is on the
opposite side of the army; and much more closer to Maoists.
Therefore, the narrative of Forget Kathmandu lacks the quality of a moral witness of the
People‘s War. For a moral witness, as Margalit postulates, ―He or she should witness—indeed,
they should experience—suffering inflicted by an unmitigated evil regime. Thus, to become a
moral witness one has to witness the combination of evil and the suffering it produces:
witnessing only evil or only suffering is not enough‖ (148). Moreover, ―The moral witness
should himself be at personal risk whether he [she] is a sufferer or just an observer of the
suffering that comes evil-doing. An utterly sheltered witness is no moral witness‖ (Margalit
150). Because the narrator in Forget Kathmandu is sheltered and in no way near a personal risk,
Thapa 51
for she bears the privileged position of a human rights activist accompanying a foreign journalist.
It is because of her privileged position as the rights worker she invests more words in counting
dead bodies and scrutinizes their numbers in ratio and percentage to justify her dividing lines
between victim of the army and victim of Maoists. But by numbers of the dead she finds the
army more evil. Therefore, her proceeding accounts of death perpetrated by the state security
forces gives finishing touch to her project of demonizing army.
The representation without prejudice and biases invoke moral sympathy toward the
victims and call upon the moral responsibility of the perpetrator. It is possible only where the
narration is focused more on suffering and minimum space given to the description of the violent
act of the perpetrator itself. What arouses sympathy in perpetrators and the public, who are not
traumatized, is not the description of violence and the numbers of dead bodies resulted in
violence, but the representation of collective suffering of the survived in whose wounds and
woes the death is reflected. As Eyerman suggests, ―Resolving cultural trauma can involve the
articulation of collective identity and collective memory, as individual story meld into collective
history through forms and processes of collective representation. Collective identity refers to a
process of ‗we formation‘, a process both historically rooted and rooted in history‖ (―Cultural
Trauma‖ 74). In the case of insurgency, the identity formation should move towards the
formation of collective victimhood as victims in the People‘s War, so that the victims from all
sides stand under one identity, but not as the victims of the army atrocities as such. But the
narratives in Forget Kathmandu lacks this very quality of ‗we formation‘; on the contrary, they
widen the chasm, among suffering people, created by the conflict between the rebel forces and
the state forces, for the narrator herself has taken the side.
Thapa 52
Talking about testimonies and confessions of those affected by violence Gobodo-
Madikizela asserts: ―The narratives of trauma told by victims and survivors are not simply about
facts. They are primarily about the impact of those facts on victims‘ lives and about the painful
continuities created by violence in their lives‖ (qtd. in Kaplan 42). But, rather than asking how
the people are faring in the face of violent insurgency, Thapa asks a teenage boy for information
about what happened in the past:
We asked him to tell us what happened here [at haudi Villge]. He sat down beside
us, and began to talk in low, intent voice: ‗last year they shot the ward chairman,
Dilli Prasad Achraya. He wasn‘t even a Maoist. He was in the UML. It was three
in the afternoon, and he was washing his hands at his house before having a
snack. It was this kind of courtyard‘. The boy pointed around him. The other men
had fallen silent to listen to him. ‗the army shot him‘, the boy said. ‗He died on
the spot‘. ‗His wife was pregnant‘, one of the older men added. ‗She gave birth to
their son three days after‘. (Forget Kathmandu 208-9)
Above the testimony is focused more on identity of the dead as a political activist than as a
victim of the insurgency. This general categorization of the dead resists the empathic process for
a victim to come under collective representation of victimhood. Dominick LaCapra, remarks:
―Without implying a rash generalization of trauma, empathic unsettlement should, in my
judgment, affect the mode of representation in different, non-legislated ways, but still in a
fashion that inhibits or prevents extreme objectification and harmonizing narrative‖ (Writing
History 103).
Indeed, the rash generalization of the plight of the victims ignores the representation of
positive voice in a narrative. As the saying goes, that there is always a silver lining in the cloud,
Thapa 53
there‘s always a palliative sides in the traumatic events which opens a door for reconciliation.
Even during the insurgency, one comes across a security officer who says, ―We maintained good
relations during the peace talks. We used to walk and eat together, and we went to listen to their
speeches. We ran into a few Maoist cadres two days after the talks broke down, but we did not
attack or arrest them. […] We have not met directly since then, but we correspond informally
and agree to communicate and not fight‖ (Basnet 95). But one never gets to read such a voice in
the narratives of Forget Kathmandu. The positive representation of those affected by the
insurgency is something the author selectively ignores, but not completely. There is an occasion
where Thapa pays attention to the reconciled voice. She writes, ―According to Comrade Sandesh,
the Captain from Manma had come to Ratadab village for a few days; the army and the Maoists
spent two days talking. [Sandesh said], ‗the Captain asked us: what is an interim government,
what is a constituent assembly, why were we negotiating with King and not with the democratic
government‖ (Forget Kathmandu 234).
Indeed, a Maoist rebel talking about the army in a friendly manner is, itself, a strong
statement against the popular narrative view that Maoist and Army cannot get along with each
other. After all, they, too, are victims of the events, who have lost friends and relatives in the
war. Though a very rare sight in Forget Kathmandu, Thapa, at a moment, does see suffering soul
in the army as she writes, ―Away from loved-one and safety, two hundred men –from families of
ordinary means –were daily fighting to save the government, but more immediately, their own
lives. They were no richer than the Maoists. They were only doing their jobs. The Captain was
responsible for them‖ (224). And, at another moment one finds Thapa moving away from
balanced narrator when she gives a finishing touch to the narrative. She writes, ―If I had grown
up in one of these villages, and were young, uneducated, unqualified for employment of any
Thapa 54
kind, and as a female, denied basic equality with men–hell, I would have joined the Maoists, too.
[…] Join the Maoist is what any spirited girl would do‖ (Thapa Forget Kathmandu 248).
These last lines show that the narrator until the end of the narration does not take
departure from the dividing line; rather, she invests all her effort to establish the wall between
perpetrators in which she takes the side of the rebel. Trauma narratives, as Janice Haaken notes,
pretty ―Much like other raw materials, [they] are open to a wide range of interpretations and
social uses, including exploitive one‖ (455). And, whilst narrating Forget Kathmandu, the author
seem to be unaware of the fact that there are those who might exploit the testimonies, presented
in the text, in inflaming violence for their own political interests. It is not a simple task to
accommodate victims‘ voice in the text, for there is no clearly defined way of representation.
―Historians have not yet worked out altogether acceptable ways of ‗using‘ testimonies, and their
task is further complicated by the marked difference between the conditions and experiences of
victims‖ (Field 38). It is in this context, whilst narrating traumatic experiences and victim‘s
voices, an author should pave the middle path. Yet, the narrative in Forget Kathmandu use clear-
cut method of drawing the lines, Maoists versus the Army and she herself posts on the rebels‘
side.
Whilst spending her words on Othering the army she forgets to highlight the suffering of
the victims in collectivity, who survived the cross-fire ensued in the violent insurgency. Lack of
representation of the victims‘ suffering the text fails to provoke moral responsibility in both sides
of the perpetrators towards those who have suffered most from the violence. As Andrea Hyussen
points out, the issue in the literature of trauma ―is not whether to forget or to remember but rather
how to remember and how to handle the representations of the remembered past‖ (qtd. in
Zehfuss 220). Observed, in the light of theory of cultural trauma, the text which lacks the
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representation of the actual suffering of the victims, the real Other, fails to alleviate the trauma,
but, rather increase the trauma which encourages the further violence in a society. As I have
discussed in preceding paragraphs, the text creates ‗us versus them‘ gulf in remembering of the
violence which encourages publics to take sides. The violence sites where publics are divided in
terms of remembering the past can arouse bitterness, rather than palliating the trauma of violence
ridden society.
Finally, the narrative representation of Forget Kathmandu develops demonizing the
Army, thus deviates from recognizing the true victims of the insurgency. By the same token, it
does not help resolve traumatic conflict, because the author forgets to represent the wounds and
the woes of the conflict victims, thus ignores the call for claiming responsibility. Therefore, it
may be an excellent statistical account of the ‗unlawful‘ killings to present at the High
Commission of Human Rights Organization, so that the case can be filed against the army for
violating the human rights. This kind of representation rather intensifies the rupturing of the
social bonds. Particularly, in the aftermath of armed conflict, as Avishai Margalitt notes,
―memory breathes revenge as often as it breathes reconciliation‖ (qtd. in Zehfuss 217). In present
case, the army is sure to step ahead to defend the institution, and not claim the responsibility
towards the suffering. Thus, trauma narratives should work towards creating an environment for
perpetrators to have sense of guilt leading to claim responsibility towards the perpetrated; and
not rashly demonize one side which resist the very process of guilt feeling on the part of the
perpetrator.
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Chapter III
Othering the Maoist: Palpasa Cafe
In this chapter I scrutinize the narrative representations of characters and events of
Palpasa Café in the context of the insurgency and counter-insurgency events during People‘s
War. My argument is directed by the question: Do the narratives in the text pave the middle path
by presenting victim‘s voice of suffering in the forefront of narrative device? As the chapter title
suggests, my answer is, no. This chapter argues that the narrative representation is focused more
on demonizing the Maoist rebels resisting agency to the victims‘ voices. Thus text is engaged
more on amplifying the anger and sense of revenge of perpetrators; and deviates from giving
agency to the victim‘s suffering voice that they are not given space in the text so as to claim their
victimhood. The whole chapter revolves around elucidating the argument.
The chapter is divided into two parts. First part of the text examines the author‘s
narratives presented in prologue and epilogue to begin my argument with. In this part the
analysis looks into author‘s narrative position as presented in the text reflecting in the light of
narratives of the events and surroundings of violence ridden nation. Wagle, in the prologue to his
novel Palpasa Café, sets out creating platform aimed at presenting the Maoists rebels as the
perpetrator. He reports the Maoists‘ atrocities to the public in safe capital of the conflict ridden
country. The first part of the analysis sheds lights on the second part of the analysis by clearing
the blurred lines between the author and the protagonist of the novel. I move on to second part
where I state that author‘s voice is one with the protagonist‘s and both of them come to stand on
the same side, for the narrative is not from two different persons . For, one appears in the text
whilst the other is absent, with similar tone of narratives. So, it is not difficult to establish a point
that they are but one voice in demonizing the Maoist rebels.
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Second part this chapter focuses in the narrative of the major character, Drishya who
carries Wagle‘s argument forward until the author comes to replace him with the epilogue. The
protagonist carries the author‘s narratives forward in his absence. The narrative representations
of the events and testimonies, examined in the second part of the analysis, is aimed at gathering
evidence to endorse author‘s intention in presenting Maoists rebel as evil. The protagonist‘s story
is one-sided in which he posits the Maoists rebel in the forefront of his target of demonization.
The very narrative aspects of finger-pointing and demonizing lead the protagonist to observe
only one side of the conflict, which is, inflicting side. Even in the inflicting sides, the other
warring party, the security force is spared.
However, before stepping into the text‘s narrative aspects, it is worth poring over where
the author is standing in the social milieu. First of all, Narayan Wagle is a journalist, an editor to
one of the most popular daily, only after that he is a novelist. He says, ―I‘d stopped writing my
weekly column ‗Coffee Guff‘ in the Kantipur daily newspaper to make time to finish a novel.
One of my colleagues joked, ‗You‘re a newspaper editor. What makes you think you can write?‘
Another chided me, ‗A journalist shouldn‘t write fiction‘‖ (Wagle 1). As a journalist Wagle has
been reporting the events that took place during the insurgency for a decade, before he thought
about writing a novel on the same issue. The author‘s colleague who chides him may be right
that a journalist, like Wagle, in Nepal should limit themselves to their profession rather than
venturing a project like writing a novel with the narratives of conflict events and issues. It is not
that a journalist cannot or should not write, but, as Yadav Bastola has it, ―Media in Nepal
disseminates a large quantity of popular prejudices about armed and political group‖ (6).
Writing a novel by threading traumatic events into it is not a simple task where a whole
country is going through a painful phase of social and political transformation. Moreover, trauma
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theorists claim that memoirs, biography and fiction are taken as an alternative method accessible
to the voices of the victim of traumatic events. ―Because history by definition silences the victim,
the reality of degradation and of suffering—the facts of victimhood and of abuse—are
intrinsically inaccessible to history‖ (Felman 126). Describing the social atmosphere during
which he ventured writing the novel, Wagle records, ―Even events in my country seemed to be
conspiring against my novel. A sense of shocking incidents had occurred at breathtaking speed in
the lives of my countrymen and in the life of my protagonist. The line between fact and fiction
was blurring‖ (1-2). Cultural critics and theorists often emphasize on the nature of trauma as an
after effect of an event that erodes the conventional distinctions. In his speculation of trauma
narratives Jay winter writes, ―At times, the boundaries between truth and fiction become blurred
in such storytelling, whether, its setting is a public forum or an individual memoir‖ (66).
Therefore, Palpasa Café, in its narrative form, without having to argue any further, is a
novel evolving as a trauma literature. The conflict in the novel‘s settings escalated up to the
unbelievable stage where long established sense of belief was challenged by the events that were
taking place in the country. What people thought as a fictional story, something that took place in
the realm of imagination, was now taking place in people‘s own courtyard. The sense of severe
shock prevailed over the whole social atmosphere. So, there is almost no distinction between
what happens in the novel and what was happening in the country in which the text is set. And to
write a work of fiction weaving the real time traumatic events is to write about the trauma of that
society. As Jay Winter notes, ―Fiction and fictionalized memoirs have also been important
vectors for the dissemination of notions of traumatic memory‖ (71).
Thus, the author‘s position in narrating the events plays a crucial role in disseminating
the traumatic memories into public spheres. Even more so, when writer is a popular journalist
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like Wagle who has been in the minds of people as someone who reports what is true and right.
If an author weaves the traumatic events into his work out of prejudice, as Yadab Bastola has
noted in the preceding paragraph; the work of fiction can provoke violence rather than help in
resolving it. Because, a work of literature plays an important role in shaping public opinion,
specially, when a nation is going through insurgency because of the conflicting ideologies of
different social and political groups. Moreover, a work of literature is highly regarded among the
socio-politically aware publics in terms of its dynamics of dealing with traumatic memories.
Dominick LaCapra writes, ―The apparent implication is that literature in its very excess can
somehow get at trauma in a manner unavailable to theory—that it writes (speaks or even cries)
trauma in excess of theory‖ (Writing History 183).
Yet, an author may have his own reason for writing the novel on as sensitive topic as an
insurgency despite the knowledge of what the work can do when it is amidst the reading public.
And again, as Freud notes, ―[that] the creative power of an author does not, alas, always follow
his good will‖ (qtd. in Kaplan 45). It is mainly because ―The yearning for purity, lost or about to
be lost, for dedication, for truth that lodges elsewhere […] can lead to the adoption of a
transgressive, even outlaw identity. Instead of impassiveness or trivial pursuit, an exalted,
visionary sense of purpose takes over; popular fiction is full of avengers and purifiers of that
kind‖ (Hartman 233). Wagle‘s novel is the case in the point in which he longs for truth and
transgresses his position as a fiction writer when he writes, ―I wanted one last interview with
[Drishya] before finishing my book‘ [Palpasa Café]. It was based on his story, after all, and I
needed a few more details to make it as true as possible. The novel was portrait of his world‖ (2).
The author‘s longing for what is true about insurgency deviates the novel‘s narrative
representation from what is right pictures of suffering for readers in the context of traumatic
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setting. Wagle‘s journey as a writer intermingles with his profession as a journalist as he
proceeds with the story; and the latter replaces the first one when he writes, ―Drishya was like a
painting to me and I, his enraptured viewer. I‘d written my novel in such a way that readers
could mistake his story for my own‖ (2-3).
Thus, the journalist Wagle dissolves into his novel‘s character Drishya, as a reporter in
the conflict ridden countryside of Nepal where future is a dream without image. Of Drishya the
dreamer, or of himself, Wagle writes, ―I wasn‘t sure the situation in the country was conducive
to the realization of his dream. How, I wondered, could Drishya find the strength to face all the
uncertainties? His determination impressed me, especially because I thought that the country had
already raised its hand in surrender, defeating his dream. He alone was standing defiant‖ (3).
There is no argument about Nepal‘s history was going through severe political and social change
during which period the novel was set. Yet, by no mean can it be called surrender as Wagle has
done, deliberately. To whom the country raised its hand in surrendered? The author does not find
it necessary to answer. But he points the finger at the Maoist rebels as the Other who were
defeating Drishya‘s dreams. Yet, the reporter is defiant, for he is responsible for reporting the
picture of gruesome bloodsheds to the public from the field that was taking place.
Traumatic experiences are usually ineffable in terms of a verbal expression. The author
should find a way to express the radical evil, for the character as a victim cannot directly express
what they went through. How to put the expression in the character‘s words is a crucial issue in a
trauma fiction. ―One-way of expressing the ineffable is by recourse to describing the-moment-
before and to the- moment-after the real horror takes place, but avoiding the moment of horror
itself‖ (Margalit 168). But in the case of Palpasa Café harsh details is preferred to the imagined
alternative picture of the events; and the author is describing them as they are taking place. And
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this is where a reader finds the author more of a journalist than a novelist as he writes, ―What
[sic] timing! I picked up a napkin to jot down the story: ‗A patrol of the unified command lost
contact with district headquarters after being ambushed by Maoists this morning about eight
kilometres to the east [….]‘‖ (Wagle 6). Instead of reporting the events in details as they are
taking place, the author could have adopted other narrative alternatives. ―Because imaginative
solutions have been adopted in many cases, rather than addressing the harsh specificities of the
past, there is a strong seam of reworked and re-imagined pasts that run through these new
narratives of nationalism‖ for the sake of resolving the conflict (Meskell 160).
And the author‘s intention for not adopting the indirect method of reporting is, as I have
pointed in preceding paragraph, to present the country has surrendered itself to the Other, the
Maoist rebels. Wagle‘s deliberate presentation of the Maoist as destructive force against the
government‘s security force, transgress the ethics of witness in a literature of trauma. ―One of the
main characteristics of the witnessing position as formulated by Dori Laub is the deliberate
refusal of an identification with the specificity of the individuals involved—a deliberate
distancing from the subject to enable the interviewer [in this case a reader] to take in and respond
to the traumatic situation‖ (Kaplan 124-125).
So, as we are told, one of the major features of trauma narratives is to avoid finger
pointing at the individual, or at the institution involved in the narrated events of conflict. But,
first thing Wagle does in his novel is to identify the Maoist Party as a perpetrator without qualm
as he writes, ―The Maoists had looted and bombed a bus‖ (4). The very act of naming just one
side of the perpetrators draws the lines between author and the state security forces as Self and
the Maoist as the Other. Therefore, the author‘s narratives posit him as against the morals of
trauma narratives. The authors clearly calls for the confrontation against the Maoists in his
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narratives which is not, even, recommended in journalism, leave aside the trauma literature. As
opposed to the author‘s approach to reporting a conflict event, journalist Yadab Bastola writes,
―Conflict sensitive journalism is the practice of writing news stories about conflict in a way that
does not aggravate or identify the discord. It presents a wide range of opinions, avoids
inflammatory language and experience ways in which the confrontation can be resolved‖ (6).
Among the characters in Palpasa Café, the author has given a little space to just one
character from socially and economically underprivileged class, a Tharu girl, Phoolan, from
Mid-west of Nepal. Even this girl is presented against the Maoists as he writes, ―I was still in
touch with Phoolan but she‘d changed. She lost her smile the day Drishya was taken away. […]
If Drishya doesn‘t come back soon, Phoolan might have to go back to her village. And there, she
might have to join the Maoists. They‘re asking for one recruit from each household. (Wagle
232). The girl‘s social and economic background is left untouched. Phoolan is almost a mute girl
in the novel, who is rescued by a painter from mid-hill ruling class background. Whilst reading
the passage we come to know that the author has presented only one side of insurgency, which is
the infliction caused by the Maoist. So, the narrative is more like a ruling classes‘ political
propaganda than being a truthful, for the author evades the other side, the infliction caused by the
ruling class and the state security forces among the underprivileged people.
And yet, what we find in the narrative is the author‘s relentless claim for novel‘s
truthfulness when he writes, ―[Drishya] said, ‗I want you to write truth. I‘ll help you. If I lied to
you or left things out, your writing wouldn‘t be honest. I‘ll be completely open with you‖ (Wagle
231). It is in his prologue Wagle the author claims the truthfulness of his novel, the claim he does
not leave to the narrative itself to speak, but takes upon himself to carry it until the end. When an
American girl, Gemini, asked how the author knew about Palpasa‘s death, he replies, ―I will give
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you a book, [meaning Palpasa Café]. It has all the details‖ (238). He further adds, it is truthful,
because ―I wrote it‖ (239). It is true story because Narayan Wagle wrote it. What an interesting
way of justifying the truthfulness of the novel one writes, in which the representation of the
suffering of the actual victims of the insurgency, whether they be from the Maoist‘s side, or from
the state security forces, is being overshadowed by the narratives of one eyed witnessing. As
Jeffrey C. Alexander and Jason L. Mast point out, ―[that] we are ‗condemned‘ to live out our
lives in age of artifice, a world of mirrored, manipulated, and mediated representation. But the
constructed character of symbols does not make them less real‖ (7).
Therefore, the danger of trauma narrative lies in the real setting of the story which can be
easily taken for granted by the reader, particularly, when a society is experiencing traumatic
phase in the history. And this is where a writer, such as Wagle, has an important role to play by
giving agency to the victim‘s suffering. Urging writers to be more responsible about trauma
narratives, Shoshana Felman writes, ―The task of the [writer] of today is to avoid collaboration
with a criminal regime and with the discourse of fascism. Similarly, the [writer] of tomorrow
will have to be watchful to avoid complicity with history‘s barbarism and with culture‘s latent
crimes‖ (33). But in the case of Narayan Wagle‘s novel, one side of the barbarity is foreclosed
whilst the other is completely covered. And, at times, in the narrative, the readers smell the reeks
of author‘s collaboration with the forces of the autocratic regime. In what follows, I shall be
exploring on that part of his deliberate Othering of the Maoist rebels. In her study of affects of
trauma E. Ann Kaplan notes, ―It seems to me that in certain ways trauma also produces an
‗other‘ world; in trauma as in trance, one is outside one‘s body‖ (126).
The narrative atmosphere in Palpasa Cafe is deeply traumatic, filled with fears and
uncertainty of lives. A sense of deepening anxiety overwhelms the social setting of the
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narratives, as if something horrendous is just about to take place any time. This angst is felt in
the life of protagonist as he narrates, ―A bomb might explode in the city, claiming one of their
lives. Or the man might get caught in crossfire while travelling outside the capital. His car might
be ambushed. Anything, anything could happen to deprive the couple of another afternoon like
this‖ (Wagle 36). In an attempt to understand the effect of the traumatic events in peoples‘ lives
Amy Shuman and Carol Bohmer writes, ―[When] an ordinary life has been disrupted, and at the
moment of disruption, the cause is often unclear. Each dimension of experience—of ordinary
life, persecution, and the journey—creates a different sense of self and follows different cultural
conventions for representing experience‖ (406).
And, what a reader finds in the protagonist is not a secured citizen of Nepal, but a man
perpetually haunted by the image of death and destruction of his long lived values. Therefore, he
perceives the people and surroundings in terms of their resistance to the destructive forces. As
Janice Hanken notes, ―By definition, traumatic events overwhelm existing meaning systems. But
this very disruption of normalcy invites story telling as people attempt to make sense of what has
happened. The hypnotic power of the images—bombings, corpses, the palpable horror of those
on the scene—may blind us to the psychological and political processes shaping the construction
of the story‖ (456). The over whelming effect of trauma is discernible among the people belong
to feudal structure of Nepal society, particularly, after the event of the Royal Palace massacre.
The voice over the phone call to Drishya declares, ―The country‘s been plunged into darkness.
Everything‘s finished and you are still sleeping‖ (Wagle 71). The shock is audible in this voice
over the phone that informs the protagonist about the Royal Massacre. The massacre of the
Royals, the epitome of the feudal regime in the country, comes as a threat to the existing cultural
values and system in the backdrop the Maoist war against the old regime. The Maoist has been
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waging war against the regime by mobilizing ethnic nationalities that were suppressed by the
monarchy. Riaz and Basu notes, ―As the monarchical state claimed Nepal to be a monolithic
Hindu nation, different social entities marginalized within the constructed Hindu hierarchy
transformed their diverse ascribed identities into characteristics of indigenous nationalities in
order to claim Nepal as a multinational state (69). Now, the suppressed nationalities were rising
to claim back their long lost cultural heritage and identities. It is in this socio-political context
that Drishya finds his values been threatened by the Maoist for the palace massacre at times
appear to make their revolutionary path easy.
In her study of affects of trauma E. Ann Kaplan notes, ―It seems to me that in certain
ways trauma also produces an ‗other‘ world; in trauma as in trance, one is outside one‘s body‖
(126). For a student of Cultural Trauma it does not come as a surprise when Drishya creates
Other out of the Maoist, but not the state security forces, because he belongs to the socio-
political echelon of the feudal ruling class that is being threatened. Yug Pathak writes, ―The
decade-long insurgency [known as People‘s War] significantly changed power structures
vertically and horizontally. The old order of a handful of people enjoying privileges was
threatened by this movement. When a big chunk of a subjugated population shouldered the gun,
the roots of a feudal power order were shaken‖ (6). Thus, in the fiction, a reader comes face to
face with the narrator who is traumatized, for he feels threatened by the new emerging, so far
marginalized, classes of his society.
Drishya in the novel finds peaceful and harmonious countryside ravaged with war. More
than that it is the absence of dominating mid-hill Brahmin culture and feudal system that he
perceives as a loss, for the countryside has fallen under the rebels‘ rule of law. In the absence of
the state, Drishya narrates, ―He [a rebel commander Siddhartha] and his comrades were trying to
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place a gun in the hand of a girl who was just a budding flower. They were trying to motivate
other village youngsters to join up as well. They were emptying the village of its youth and it
upset me‖ (Wagle 91). As LaCapra has pointed out ―In converting absence into loss, one
assumes that there was (or at least could be) some original unity, wholeness, security, or identity
which others have ruined, polluted, or contaminated and thus made ‗us‘ lose‖ (707). And, in an
attempt to justify the war, the rebel commander says, ―Most of the people who‘re being killed are
representatives of the old power elite‖ (Wagle 76). The old power holders could no longer
maintain their rules of law in the presence of the rebels, and thus, they were compelled to desert
the countryside.
Drishya vents anger at Siddhartha who is responsible for his perceived loss. Then he
blames Siddartha and his party destroying the very root of the system. Pointing at a sketch he
once drawn of his village school, Drishya says to Sidhhartha, ‗This school had absolutely
nothing. There wasn‘t even glass in the windows. But now even this little school‘s been
destroyed. Whenever I look at this picture, I am reminded of the way things are in our country
these days‖ (Wagle 76). And Siddhartha in his turn replies, ―I‘m sorry. I understand I‘m partly to
blame but, the ultimate blame rests with the old power center‖ (Wagle 76). Thus the narratives of
blaming and pointing finger proceeds in the novel. There is no room left for empathy towards the
suffering other, the victims of the conflict. There have been victims from both sides, the family
members of the rebels and the state security force fighting the rebels. And because they are
divided in the conflict ridden milieu as the Maoists and the Police or Army, there hardly any
room left for readers to feel their pangs and agonies. Sudhir Kakar notes, ―Empathy with
members of the other group, even when considered the enemy, defends the Other from the
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untrammelled aggression which can so easily be let loose against all those considered
subhuman‖ (180).
Because there is no space for empathy in the narratives of the text, all we find is one
defending the one‘s violent act in the course of brushing off the blames. Drishya‘s entire
conversation with Siddhartha is spent in pursuit of former trying to paint the violent demon on
the face of the latter. And Siddhartha has no other choice but defend his cause for what he is
doing. He says, ―True, some innocent people are getting caught in the cross fire[sic]. But
consider how the crisis first arose. Wasn‘t it the state which drew first blood? Didn‘t the state
first arrest, torture and killed unarmed people?‖ (Wagle 82). But Drishya is adamant to his point
and says ―What if I told you I have no faith in you people? That I don‘t think you offer any hope
for the future?‖ (Wagle 81). And Siddartha in his turn blame Drishya as conformist to old elite
class values who is against the growth, when he says, ―You have finally come to the point, dear
artist, you want to paint real character but you can‘t accept that real people change and grow.
You‘re scared of their growth‖ (Wagle 82). From the preceding conversation, a reader easily
finds that the narrative space given to the perpetrator is immense. The protagonist, a middle class
who supports status-quo in the society and spends hours arguing with the rebel commander who
holds onto principle that is against the conformist. Amidst their heated arguments the actual
sufferings of the conflict victims have been suppressed. The arguments are based upon the
characters‘ political affiliation to different warring parties, but not on the moral ground as
someone affected by the traumatic infliction of the society as a whole.
When the acts of violence is give a political dimension, then moral act of opposing
violence lose its ground, for ―in many situations of political persecution, violence becomes
normalized‖ (Shuman and Bohmer 401). By the same token, Siddhartha‘s persecution by the
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state army is normalized in Drishya‘s narration of the event. In his view, ―Siddhartha had chosen
to walk on the edge of a knife but he‘d also made the hills into a knife. So many young people
had followed him mindlessly and taken up arms without understanding the consequences. They
were exhilarated by the power guns gave them. But such power brought nothing but devastation‖
(Wagle 169). It is interesting parenthesis in which readers are not given a moment to ponder over
Siddhartha‘s death, for the protagonist step-in justifying the death before a reader could think, as
he narrates, ―I‘d been haunted by my own thoughts as I climbed that hill. I‘d been surrounded by
images of widows, orphans and old people who‘d lost their children. I was falling apart‖ (Wagle
170). And it is not hard to deduce that the intervention from Drishya points at Siddhartha being
responsible for the haunting images of the hills.
So, what is lacking in the narratives is its denial to tread middle course with use of
indirect way of representation other than stark and crude way of depiction of the events and
feelings produced by the horror of the violence. Elzbieta Halas writes, ―In the cultural
understanding of trauma, a key question is its symbolic representation and communicated
meanings, which is associated with other constitutive dimensions of cultural memory—
axionormativity, affectivity, and reflexivity‖ (6). It is well accentuated by the trauma theorists
that the balanced narrative without pointing a finger to any parties involved in the conflict
provides enough space for reflexivity.
Though, it is rare in Palpasa Café, at one point we find fine balance in the narrative when
Drisyah records, ―I heard the girl tell the porters, ‗the school closed after the teacher was killed.
The children don‘t go to school anymore. They herd cattle now‖ (Wagle 102). In this passage the
perpetrator is not identified, only the victim‘s suffering is being narrated; and the reader finds
oneself close to the sufferers. This kind of amplification of victim‘s suffering without blaming
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the parties involved goes unnoticed when the narratives of ‗us versus them‘ follow it. For
example, the distinction is made clear in the way Drishya amplifies an old-man‘s anti-Maoist
gesture as he narrates, ―He glanced around, then came close to me and whispered, ‗Take care my
son. I hear a big group‘s coming today. They take away anyone who‘s young and strong. They
don‘t give old folk like me much trouble. We just have to give them food, cooking utensils and
plates‖ (Wagle 112).
Furthermore, the old-man‘s gesture is supported by the way Drishya portrays
encountering a rebel girl as he writes, ―The barrel of her gun was pointing, inadvertently, at my
cheek. So what if there was a flower in the barrel, I thought. It‘s still could loaded. It could still
off‖ (Wagle 122). The author is unaware of the problem in the narrative representation that may
result in negative effect in the context of conflict divided public. And as Hartman notes, ―We
may not know what to do with those images of violence and wretchedness, but we cannot not be
aware of them. There is a reservoir of guilt ready to be exploited in almost all who live
comfortably in their own skin‖ (219). The author‘s lack of awareness of the positive voice of the
people, including the rebels and the security force, trapped in the conflict has rendered the text
questionable. Because, nowhere in the entire text do we come across a narrative where a security
officer sounds more insightful when he says, ―This political problem cannot be resolved by
fighting. We won‘t stop war or finish the Maoists by killing ten of them; neither can they win the
war by killing ten of us. We live with this understanding. The Maoists are also Nepali. Change
has to come by giving them what they have been demanding. Should the state always run by a
single person?‖ (Basnet 95).
So, the question arise, has the author been honest with his work as the anti-war protest as
Kunda Dixit has noted? Or does he like to provoke the war further between the warring parties
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by blaming one side and not calling the both sides for the responsibility? What one gets from
Drsihya are mere factual details of atrocities caused by only one side of the warring parties as
they take place. Walter Benjamin, in the context of Holocaust, notes, ―It is not the objective of
the story to convey a happening per se, which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds it
in the life of the story teller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening‖ (qtd. in Felman
47).
However, Palpasa Café is more for objective information than for passing the story as an
experience to the readers that the protagonist has lived through. It is because the narrative is
overtly glossed with the author‘s intervention as the protagonist rather than letting the victims to
speak for themselves. For example, when Drishya reaches a village where he sees a woman
wiping her tears showing at the shoe on her doorsteps. He does not let the silence of the woman
prevail as it would in trauma literature, but he goes onto identifying the people behind it, as he
narrates, ―Finally, a boy came over and explained that the shoe was a message from the
guerrillas, ordering the family to send someone to join their ranks. The woman had seen it [a
shoe] outside her house that morning. After that, she hadn‘t drank [sic] a drop of water or eaten
morsel a [sic] food all day. She‘d just sat there weeping‖ (Wagle 126). Thus the reader‘s
attention is driven towards the Maoist, rather than focusing on the weeping woman. Once the
identity of the inflicting group established, then Drishya let the weeping woman vent her anger at
the Moaist, as she says, ―Did my husband go to work in India just to feed these greedy pigs?‖
(Wagle 127).
The author could, as well, have let the woman speak first, and without pointing the finger
at the Maoist; then listener or even the perpetrator would have empathize with the woman, and
take the responsibility without having to defend their cause for the pain they inflicted in the
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woman. Once the institution or a group is identified as perpetrators they no longer remain
human, so as, to be able to empathize with the victim. It is by virtue of being a human that one
feels the pain of the other; and stripped of off the human face they are only capable of inflicting
more pain. Therefore, a conflict sensitive trauma literature calls for responsibility of the
perpetrator not by dehumanizing them, but by showing the wounds they have caused on the
victim.
And, in order to display the wounds and woes of conflict victims a narrative has to be
more skeletal, but not thick with description5. This is, yet another point, where Palpasa Café
goes against the current of trauma literature. The victims‘ affliction is presented by the narrator‘s
description the painting, rather than letting the painting speak for itself, when it reads, ―The
picture showed the old woman walking towards her district‘s headquarters after the Maoist‘
People‘s Court had ordered her to leave her village‖ (Wagle 224). Even on the picture, the
narrator does not spare the Maoists with their tainted image, though the old woman, with anguish
in her face, is on the way and the court is absent in the picture. But still, the narrator does not
leave it for readers to judge cause of her plight focusing only on the picture, despite the fact that
one can barely be blind to the people‘s plight during the insurgency. Moreover, the narrator, a
painter, is blind to the irony of the descriptive text when he opines, ―If an artist starts bringing
politics onto his canvas, there‘ll be no difference between him and a politician. The two should
remain separate. Art shouldn‘t become mere propaganda‖ (Wagle 85). The politics is absent in
the painting itself; it only intervenes as the caption that reads below the painting as a title. A
5For skeletal trauma narratives please read Saddat Hasan Manto’s collection of short stories, Bitter Fruit (2008),
Translated by Khalid Hasan.
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question arises, could he not do without the caption? Yes, he could. But, again that would not
have suited the author‘s objective of demonizing the Maoists.
Despite the protagonist‘s explicit dominance over the narration, at times readers come
across the text where the sufferers speak. No blaming finger pointed at the perpetrator when a
retired British army tells a sorry story of a village flute-player Krishna Lal: ‗He can‘t walk‘, he
said. ‗They took the bullet out of his leg but it didn‘t help. He was caught in crossfire,‘ he
explained. He was wandering around playing flute, and didn‘t hear the firing when it started‘‖
(Wagle 114). In this narrative readers are left to imagine the experience the flute player had lived
through, without a leg to stand on. In this narrative no overt description of blaming and
defending involved. What we see is a bare life of a poor man, open to vulnerability that anything
can happen to him anytime in that particular situation. The man is not in a privilege position as
the protagonist to make distinction between self and the other; he lives in the zone of in
distinction as oppose to the protagonist who is politically on the side of the sovereign power. As
Jenny Edkins, in her essay ―Trauma Time and Politics‖ notes, ―In an apparent contradiction,
sovereign power has relied since its beginning on making distinction between bare or naked life
(the life of the home) and politically qualified life (the life of public sphere)‖ (111). And equally
vulnerable are the state security forces once the sovereign power is absent in the battle ground;
so are those rebels who are fighting against the sovereign power agent. In deaths and wounds
humans are bare and naked, all the distinctions collapse. For example, after the battle of all night
between the rebels and the state force, Drishya in morning witnesses: ―One of the policemen
resting against the wall stretched his legs and saw an unexploded bomb. He looked anxious but
didn‘t move. Beside him, two police officers lay dead, spread like drunkards with their faces to
the ground‖ (Wagle 134-35). There could have been the Maoists‘ dead body as well but the
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narrator does not include those other dead in his description. Even, when they are dead, Drishya
makes distinction by identifying the police.
This power of making distinction posits Drishya in a position of privileged one, though,
ironically enough, he says, ―I was in danger from both sides‖ (Wagle 176). Yet, there‘s not a
single incident where the Maoists threatened him with his life, leave alone the state security
force, for the army did not even question him when he led them to identify Siddhartha who was
shot by the army. And still he solicits with reader for sympathy as if he is the one who is
victimized. Despite the author‘s attempt to present Drishya as a balanced story teller, the
narrative happens to come out a total failure, in this regard. He exaggerates a an ordinary
situation where a rebel asked him to draw a picture, as any village youth would have asked him
out of curiosity. Owing to this incident he become paranoiac and says, ―Would they shoot me?
Would anything happen to me while I slept? I‘d told them I didn‘t agree with their ideology. I‘d
even refused to make a sketch of their Chairman‖ (Wagle 180). Drishya cultivates clear
antagonism between himself and the Maoist throughout the narratives. One such antagonistic
attitude is that he blames only the rebels for what is happening in the life of the countrymen, not
the state and its fighting forces when he questions, ―Where was Siddhartha now? What had he
been doing all this time? How could he bear being responsible for these widowed hills? How
could he stand to see these innocent people being turned into widows or orphans or losing their
children? Or was he only thinking about the next attack on a district headquarters?‖ (Wagle 161).
There is, yet, another such an antagonistic narrative when he is led by a rebel girl, when he
narrates, ―I followed her in dutiful silence, as if I were in a mediation [sic] centre where all
conversation was banned. But then I began to think: whole villages are in mourning, hundreds of
houses have been abandoned, and thousands of people face an uncertain future. And this girl‘s
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pointing a gun at me. Who does she think she is? Does she have the courage or the culpability to
solve our nation‘s problem and create a prosperous future for us? No. All she had was a gun, and
she was using that gun to intimidate me‖ (Wagle 164). Drishya‘s narrative of presenting the
Maoist as the Other reach the climax when, in an exactly the same situation as in preceding
passage, the army, though he prefer not to recognize them, abduct the rebel girl and gaged her
mouth and blindfolded him. This time, he does not feel threatened, nor does he think about the
callousness of the army‘s behavior; rather, he appears romantic, yet not without being a sarcastic
towards the rebels, as he narrates, ―At one point I could tell we were walking uphill. When my
blindfold was lifted, I found myself in a stunningly beautiful valley. I was surprised to see the
girl beside me with a gag in her mouth. Were her comrades punishing her for some reason?‖
(Wagle 165).
Drishya, despite being a country-lad once, stands against the rebels who, once were his
mates and grew up with them. The reason behind this fierce opposition is not that Maoists alone
are responsible for the deaths and destruction, but they are the one to bring about fall of
suppressive feudal rulers in the countryside. All what is old, suppressive and hierarchic in nature
have been despised and fought against by the Maoist which has threatened the cultural roots of
privileged class. In their research book on the decade long insurgency Thapa and Sijapati note,
―Along with the development of the Peope‘s War a new consciousness for fighting for their own
right and liberation is spreading amongst many oppressed nationalities of the country such as
Magars, Gurungs, Tamangs, Newars, Tharus, Rais, Limbus and Madhises [sic]. (105)
In his return to the village Drishya finds sweeping change has taken, where was born and
grew up as a lad. People from the untouchable caste group are serving tea to the highest
Brahmins caste. It is the lowest class of people who are ruling the countryside with support from
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the rebels. The whole countryside changed with the impact of the insurgency and Drishya returns
with the picture of the old and romantic country with obedient village folks among whom he
once lived during the feudal regime. For not being able to embrace the change and detach
himself from old mid-hill Brahmin cultural identity, Drishya finds himself against it, when he
says, ―No one here believed I was neutral. I‘d become a stranger in my own home district. Who
was I? My identity linked to my profession but who‘d respect my profession here? What had my
paintings done to these hills? No one knew my art. My identity as an artist wouldn‘t win
anyone‘s trust‖ (Wagle 152). He is already mourning for the loss of his identity and yet, not able
to embrace or create the new one. Relating the traumatic affect in Drishy‘s life it is worth
quoting psycho analyst Sudhir Kakar at length. He writes,
Psychologists report and novelists describe the feelings of bereavement and states
of withdrawal among those mourning for old attachment and suspicious of
creating new ones. These tendencies are not only harmful for individuals but also
hinder the birth of new social structures and forms while they rob community life
of much of its vitality and therefore its capacity for counteracting the sense of
helplessness. (185)
Wagle‘s Palpasa Café, other than a fiction, is, also, a personal testimony of a countryman
who witnessed the damage, psychological and cultural, caused by conflict in the lives of people
and the society at large. Owing its story to the sensitive events of the insurgency, it is normal that
reader expect the text to be on the side of those who are suffering, thus the medium for the
reconciliation among the warring parties. Underscoring the intrinsic feature of trauma narrative
Ruth Leys, writes ―It is because personal testimony concerning past is inherently political and
collective that the narration of the remembered trauma is so important‖ (qtd. in Kaplan 121). Yet,
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in the narratives of Palpasa Café the collectivity has been overshadowed by the story‘s dividing
lines, as it occupies most part of the text demonizing and antagonizing the Maoist rather than
focusing on the collective suffering of the victims from all sides. The narrative is filled with the
details of the events occurred as the narrator is told by the people he meets, and glosses the story
with his own impression. And, ―especially with controversial topics, nothing is more misleading
for a reader than the impression that an account simply relates the facts or explains a problem
without having a formative and ideologically weighted relation to other accounts‖ (LaCapra
Representing 40). The dividing lines run through narrative from beginning to the end of the text.
One such example comes from Palpasa as she says, ―Maoists have made the villagers their
prisoners! No one can go anywhere without their permission. It‘s simply a dictatorship. It shows
how they‘d run the country if they ever came to power. And that could only be achieved at the
barrel of a gun, not with the support of the people‖ (Wagle 184).
Despite the thick description against the Maoist, and none at all against the state security
force, Drishya goes on reiterating his innocence as being a neutral and thus belonged to the
collectivity. He says, ―People who felt as I did could be targeted by either side because we
opposed both. I‘d protested against both warring sides in these paintings, my colours showing
my support for the third camp. This was my strength. But would I be safe in choosing this path?‖
(Wagle 213). In the preceding pages I have pointed out the statement Drishya has made about his
being a neutral. He has been saying the same thing in his attempt to convince the listeners (and in
the case of the author the readers), but never care about showing it in his narrative. Therefore he
has not been genuine in what he says about the third camp. In order to belong to the third camp,
in as vulnerable situation as in the decade long conflict, lives ravaged by hatred and horror, one
has to accept the vulnerability of life coming out of the secured zone. As, in the context of the
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Holocaust, Victor Klemperer says, ―Where there‘s no human being, be one‖ (qtd. in Margalit
157). It applies, also, with the narrative of a text composed of the victim‘s testimonies and the
experiences they have in the violent conflict. Because, to listen to the voice of the victims
imbued with suffering in the situation dominated by the evil is to claim the responsibility as
human. As an author, one should claim this responsibility of listening to the victims in that
situation; and only with the responsibility s/he belongs to third camp, the camp of the collective
solidarity against the violence and amplifies the victims‘ voices.
In the situation where the darkness of the extreme suffering invade the narrative whilst
amplifying victim‘s voice, humor can be used. A trauma narrative without humor is a story
without life. The sense of humor shed light in the darkness of the trauma narrative. It is the
humor that helps the victims come to terms with the most bitter and painful situation. ―The
attempt to come to terms with extremely traumatizing events involves the work of mourning.
[…] Certain rituals teach us that this work does not exclude forms of humor, and gallows humor
has been an important response to extreme situations on the part of victims themselves. Needless
to say, the employment of humor is one of the most delicate and complicated issues in the light
(or darkness) of certain events‖ (LaCapra Representing 65). In the respect of use humor, Palpasa
Café remains hollow, imbued with factual darkness without light to guide the future of the
victims. The author has an utterly failed in trying to create humor in the dark situation of the
victims‘ of the insurgency, as he writes, ―Walking behind the widow was an elderly man. He was
on his way to claim his son‘s body. His sighs had become the signs of the hills. He was leaning
on a walking stick but it was hard to tell whether the stick was supporting him or he was
supporting the stick.‖ (Wagle 159). Rather than light laugher, a reader finds narrative mocking
about the condition of the old man, though the author intends to make a reader laugh.
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Conclusion
Forgetting the Other: Politics of Representation
Among the literary works produced by Nepali writers, writing on the conflict in Nepal,
Forget Kathmandu and Palpasa Café stand apart as having the high number of readership. Both
the texts is about conflict narrative despite their difference in genre, the first is mixture of
memoir and journal, whilst the latter is a fiction, ‗more real than the fact‘ as Kunda Dixit termed
it. By sheer coincidence, as one may like to say, both of these texts were published in the same
year. Above all, both the texts are inflected with the traumatic stories of people of Nepal who
lived through the crossfire between the warring forces; and the trauma of the nation at large, for
the change the conflict brought about caused a tear in the socio-cultural beliefs and hitherto lived
values. Yet, the texts are pole apart in their narrative construction of the traumatic events and
stories, despite having been written in the same context, the Maoist composed People‘s War
against the ‗old regime‘ and the state orchestrated counter-insurgency to crush the Maoist‘s
revolution.
As I have discussed in the preceding chapters, the narrative in Forget Kathmandu is
heavily loaded in demonizing the army institution for their service to the nation throughout
history and about their counter insurgency tactics against the rebel. And the narrative in Palpasa
Café, as oppose to Forget Kathmandu, is very thick with descriptive details of the conflict events
antagonistic to that of the Maoist version of revolt to free the people of oppressed classes and
castes. However both the texts meet at one point that they fail to listen to the real Other, the
victims of the conflict, for the cacophony of blaming and finger pointing the army and the
Maoist, or rather focused on Othering both the warring parties renders the voice of the suffering
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victims inaudible. The author should focus on the conflict victim with the sense of responsibility.
The trauma literatures are ―concerned with the issue of responsibility, that is, with finding ways
to enable us [Nepali] to be responsible. To do this, one has to learn to take the Other‘s
subjectivity as a starting point, not as a something to be ignored or denied‖ (Kaplan 123). The
responsibility to work for what is to come, in the near future, collective identity for
reconciliation, for example; and not with the statistical details of what happened and the
gruesome facts of the violence. Since the text ―both personal memoirs and biographies have
come to be looked at as an instructive and expressive literature rather than strictly historical
(‗factographic‘) documents. A biographer, it has been said is a novelist under oath‖ (Hartman
26). So, it is natural that a reader might expect the written on conflict about suffering of the
people to be rather palliative, but not provocative.
Yet Thapa and Wagle appear to be unaware of this instructive aspect of the text written
about the sensitive issue of the insurgency; and more than the awareness, they have infused
politics in the narrative to meet their own objectives. Because, as Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois
note, ―Focusing exclusively on the physical aspects of torture, terror, violence misses the point
and transforms the project into a clinical, literary, or artistic exercise, which runs the risk of
degenerating into a theatre or pornography of violence in which the voyeuristic impulse subverts
the larger project of witnessing, critiquing, and writing against violence, injustice, and suffering‖
(1). The texts, other than critiquing the violence through representation of suffering victims,
represent each of the warring parties. The politics of representation in the narrative of traumatic
memory resist the call for responsibility, but rather encourage wide range of interpretation
against collective solidarity of the public. It is because, ―Cultural memory is historically variable
and shifting. An analysis of this sociocultural process requires taking into account both the
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symbolic actions that construct the memory of trauma and the interactions of social subjects
which respond variously to the claims of memory‖ (Halas 7). In the case of the texts under my
topic, as I have explained, the memory can only be claimed either as the victims at the hands of
the army; or, as the victims at the hands of the Maoist, but not as the victims of the decade long
insurgency. Therefore, the narratives of demonization of the army and the Moaists keep the rest
from moral responsibility. The Holocaust narrative is the case in point about which Bernhard
Giesen argues, ―Demonization of Nazi rule removed the nation from the realm of moral
responsibility and culpability. Intoxication, seduction, and blindness allowed Germans even to
regard the German nation as the true victim of Nazism‖ (120). And, in the context of People‘s
War, it is not surprising that the ruling class elites are presenting themselves as the victims of
conflict and asking for compensation with the republic government.
The problem, solely, arise in the very construction of memory in the narrative where
Thapa and Wagle invest more energy in digging the statistical and factual details of the events
took place during the conflict; and in their bid to blame the warring parties they forget to pay
attention to the actual Other of the conflict who suffered at the hand of the rebels, the army, and
the state‘s elite culture as a whole. As, Livingstone aptly points out, that ―If we do not adopt the
posture of courtesy [of listening], we remain out off from the very possibility of experiencing the
real presence behind representation. Without that real presence, there is nothing to which
representation is answerable‖ (Livingstone 17-18). Because, both the narratives are built upon
the selected story of the victimized people and the atrocities that are politically inflected, there is
no real presence of the neutral human voice. It is not as important to question whether the
politically detached voices existed among the traumatized victims, as it is to question the
authors‘ intention for not giving those voices the proper agency. Because, as Sudhir Kakar has it,
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―We must note that there are always some individuals whose personal identity is not
overwhelmed by their religious or cultural group, [or political] identity even in the worst phases
of violent conflict. These are the persons capable of acts of compassion and self-sacrifice, such
as saving members of the ‗enemy‘ group from the fury of a rampaging mob event at considerable
danger to their own physical safety‖ (Kakar 244). So, the concerned authors‘ fail in representing
voice and acts of the compassionate individuals who stood at a human level putting their lives in
danger, whilst facing the violence and, as Edkins would have it, accepting the vulnerability of
bare life.
The texts, such as Forget Kathmandu and Palpasa Café, that are for counting the dead
and recording the details of that deadly event, and do not provide narrative space in representing
the apolitical individuals‘ action or their stories, rather pave the excuse for trauma victims
avenging the death of their dear and near one in the name of justice. For, ―In particular, the
collective memory of trauma, of counting the dead and the construction of a narrative
community with the dead, can invest collective memories with pathos that under certain
circumstances legitimate expiatory violence‖ (Ray 153). So, it is crucial that trauma narratives
take note of what is to come in the aftermath of the violent conflict. And Thapa and Wagle have
failed in this aspect of trauma narrative, too; for their narratives are concerned only with the past
and present dimension of the trauma. ―Thus, trauma understood as a cultural process is not
restricted only to the experience ‗here and now‘, but consists in interaction and communication,
where a blow dealt to the community is defined, victims are identified, responsibility is ascribed
and future consequences of the experiences ‗there and then‘ are determined. A crucial
component of this process is the way of presenting trauma, its images, in other words—
symbolization that influences the constitution and changes of collective identity‖ (Halas 7).
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In the context of People‘s War, as Nepali sociologists have pointed out, the conflict has
been rooted in the traumatic events that indigenous people underwent in the past during the
unification period, and caste hierarchy imposed by Rana regime in 1854. Instead of leaving the
wounds of loss open and working it through, the oligarch covered the wounds by writing new
history of Nepal as a homogenous culture. Chaitnya Subba notes, ―Historical documents and
other relevant evidences and living collective memories of the common past of the nationalities
sustained by words of mouth (oral tradition) reveal that military oppression, political exclusion,
cultural destruction and economic marginalization invariably led to their low human
development‖ (32). Historically oppressed groups have been double victim of historical trauma
caused by oppressive monarchical state. First, the groups suffered culturally, socially and
economically in the hands of the state government. Second, the victims of the oppression were
not allowed to claim their victimhood; in other words, they were not given agency to speak of
their wounds. The working-through trauma by mourning their loss had been closed by the state.
As I noted earlier, the root of People‘s War lies in the closure of traumatic history of
Nepal. Without adequate working-through the trauma of cultural loss and indignation inflicted in
the indigenous communities may have deepened as melancholia which erupted in violent as well
as peaceful revolt against the state, time and again. One of many examples, ―Limbu revolt
against language suppression and Far Kirant execution of Phakosek Limbu, expulsion of many
others [in 1778]‖ (Subba 39). And ―Tamang peasant revolt against high caste exploitation and
suppression of local people [in 1951]‖ (Subba 40). Yet, people of Nepal are unaware of these
historical revolts ever taking place. It is because in the process of closure, as Avishai Margalit
points out, ―Mythmakers, epic poets, and chroniclers of the royal court are kept busy trying to
provide legitimacy for regimes whose entitlement to govern is anchored in events of the dire
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past. Hence, the urgent need and ardent desire of authoritarian, traditional, and theocratic
regimes to control collective memory, because by doing so they exercise monopoly on all
sources of legitimacy‖ (11).
And, it is the texts like Forget Kathmandu and Palpasa Café that help legitimizing the
suppression of the victims‘ voice by deliberately forgetting to record them in the national
narratives of victimhood. It is easy for them to do so, because they do not belong to the realm of
the victims. As E. Ann Kaplan, commenting on Sarah Kofman‘s and Marguerite Duras‘s trauma
narrative, who were both the victims of the Holocaust in different situations, writes, ―These
victims of parallel but different traumatic situations put their experiences in writing, I believe, for
several reasons: to organize pain into a narrative that gives it shape for the purposes of self-
understanding (working their trauma through), or with the aim of being heard, that is,
constructing a witness where there was none before‖ (20). But, in the cases of both Thapa and
Wagle it is different, for they were not the direct victims of the violence of people's war. Nor
they construct the witness for working through purposes. That‘s where both the texts differ from
trauma narrative and invest more ink blaming and finger-pointing at the party involved in the
conflict, and ignoring the suffering of the real Other.
And, to blame the whole institution, as the case in the narratives under my topic, for the
crime committed in the people‘s war, is to limit those individuals, who within the institution
resisted the violence and have been victims themselves, to the category of the evil and digress
from taking the responsibility as collective whole. Critiquing the narrative of blaming and
scapegoating in the context of representation of the Holocaust, Marguerite Duras argues, ―The
only possible answer to this crime is to turn it into a crime committed by everyone, to share it.
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Just like the idea of equality and fraternity. In order to bear it, to tolerate the idea of it, we must
share the crime‖ (qtd. in Kaplan 53).
For the most part, as the ethnic scholars argue, People‘s War has been waged by
historically traumatized nationalities and gender in order to reclaim their loss and right to
victimhood and communal mourning. The Maoist party only provided them, afterward, with
political cover to fight their way through to be heard and listened to, because the national
narrative put closure to their suffering and did not give agency to enable them to claim their
victimhood. In this respect, keeping the wounds open in the form of narrative, art, and
performance is very crucial in the aftermath of traumatic events. Thomas Laquer notes, ―Nations,
like individuals, sustain trauma, mourn and recover. And like individuals, they survive by
making sense of what has befallen them, by constructing narrative of loss and redemption‖ (qtd.
in Kaplan 136). A decade of people war has disclosed the past wounds and created new. In this
sense trauma has revisited history by offering an opportunity to mourn the loss.
Unfortunate though, in the aftermath of violent conflict in Nepal, government agencies
and political parties promoted, encouraged, and writers in some cases argued for the closure of
the conflict wounds. The parties involved in the conflict are still blaming each other, which has
delayed the formation of a commission of truth and reconciliation. Even after the reconciliation
Nepal will be forever wounded or nonetheless scarred; yet, as trauma theorists claim, trauma can
be both creative and destructive. It all depends upon the how the national narrative presents the
trauma in the public sphere. Therefore, writing about or writing on People‘s War, we cannot miss
the factors that contributed to the Maoist early rise in power through war. The trauma of being
deprived of their political, social and cultural agency, the marginalized groups of different
nationalities found People‘s War a way to make their voice heard. ―But at least the residue of the
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trauma that perhaps lay beneath the conflicts and tensions of rebuilding may be lessening. We
have begun to translate the trauma into a language of acceptance while deliberately keeping the
wound open; we [ought to be] learning to mourn what happened, bear witness to it, and yet move
forward‖ (Kaplan 147).
It is well accepted notion that the literature influence people in a society to cultivate
harmony or conflict, the literatures of trauma demand the author‘s moral responsibility. When an
author deviates from taking the moral stand whilst writing on violence, the literature might turn
out to be the seeds of further violence in future. Being a conflict victim himself, diasporic writer
Karahasan has a lot to say about literature on violence. Nevertheless, I shall limit myself to one
line where he says, ―I come from a destroyed country. Bad literature or misuse of literary craft is
responsible for that‖ (72). Therefore, the works of literature on conflict should channel the
memories of violence towards reconciliation and not toward dividing the public into ‗for‘ and
‗against‘, who are affected, because ―the traumatic memory reaches back to an act of violence
that breaks down and reconstructs the social bond‖ (Giesen 113). In this sense traumatic memory
if channeled wisely help in reconstructing the social bond, as it did among the American after the
events of 9/11; and if inflected with politics of representation, the memory can trigger the further
conflict, as it has been going on between India and Pakistan after the partition of 1947.
However, in the context of literary representation of a decade long insurgency in Forget
Kathmandu and Palpasa Café; the first one might help the human rights organization, as old
regime would choose to put, for its statistical record of the number of illegitimate killings by the
state; and the latter might please the elite of the old regime, as the Maoist would choose to put,
for its story of the Maoists atrocities and justification of the state orchestrated violence against
the people in the pretext of the rebel forces. Thus, as I have argued, both the texts fail to appeal
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the collective identity of the conflict victims under the one term ‗victimhood‘. As texts are far
from giving victims the agency than demonizing the warring parties, the texts utterly fail to stand
apart as literature of trauma, against the reader‘s expectation of palliative texts. I would like to
suggest the negative image of India among Nepalis can be, yet, another topic for research from
the perspective of cultural trauma. One may find interesting to note that the construction of
Nepali history has functioned as the closure of trauma of defeat and loss in Anglo-Nepal War.
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Works Cited
Adhikari, Jagannath, and Bhasker Gaumtam. ―Introduction: Writing on Armed Insurgency‖.
Ajit Baral et al., By the Way: Travels through Nepal’s Conflict. Kathmandu: Martin
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