Bahareh Bahmanpour; Amir Ali Nojumian
Volume 14, Issue 19 , October 2018, , Pages 77-97
Abstract
The present article is based on the hypothesis that immigration, in all shapes or forms (either as a forced exile or a voluntary displacement), is an unsettling and traumatic experience which leads to the formation of traumatized subjectivities. This trauma (also referred to as "diasporic trauma" or ...
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The present article is based on the hypothesis that immigration, in all shapes or forms (either as a forced exile or a voluntary displacement), is an unsettling and traumatic experience which leads to the formation of traumatized subjectivities. This trauma (also referred to as "diasporic trauma" or "trauma of displacement") is, like many other types of trauma, transgenerational: that is, it affects not only the lives of the first-generation diasporic subjects but also the diasporic experience of their descendants by problematizing any illusory sense of a coherently hybrid self. Since from the view of many trauma theorists, literature (from autobiography and testimony to fiction and poetry) highlights the problematics of the representation and the narrativization of trauma; the present article, then, aims to explore the possibility and the means of the literary representation of trauma of displacement in diasporic literature. Employing the Post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory of trauma within a diasporic context, it thus opens up new avenues to offer a psychoanalytic study of the diasporic trauma in Lahiri's trilogy of "Hema and Kaushik" (including, "Once in a Lifetime," "Year's End," and "Going Ashore") from her Unaccustomed Earth (2008) through the lens of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's theory of hauntology—particularly their notion of the phantom, the two processes of introjection and incorporation, and the crypt. Drawing on the dead-mother metaphor around which the whole trilogy revolves as well as underlining the notion of afterwardsness which is circuitously performed within the unconscious structure of the whole text, it thus argues that trauma of displacement whose psychoanalytic pain amounts to that of being ripped off the mother's womb and a life-long exposure to the phantom of an absent/present mother is so disconcerting and deep that it takes it about a generation (if not more) to be resolved and to be possibly put to rest. This possibility, of course, can be only opened up if the diasporic subject has, often transgenerationally, acknowledged, claimed, and confronted the phantom of the loss of the motherland and has even begun a belated mourning process for it. This process, however, as Lahiri's texts suggest, does not often run smoothly since the diasporic subject constantly, though unconsciously, incorporates (rather than introjecting) that constitutive element of loss at the core of his/her subjectivity by activating a series of defense mechanisms, erecting dysfunctional crypts, and getting stuck in a vicious circle of acting-out (rather than working through).