sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

unaccountable increase in abuses of civic and human rights. Her son was picked up by security forces
in the nineties and nothing is known about him to date.
Repression may induce certain types of collective actions; Parveena Ahangar turned women’s loss
and weakness into strength, to wake and shake the authorities and call for accountability by taking
into public sphere the private act of grief. Memory being a complex collage, there are many factors
that contribute to what and how the women remember and, therefore, also how they tell their
memories in a narrative form. Memories come and go. They change. They are reconfigured and
revisited by events in the present. Memories of specific events are not static. Memory is personal
and also collective. It is built and changed communally, as well as held and altered individually.
Understandably, these women’s memories of post 1990 turmoil are painful and traumatic, especially
in light of the repression they experienced at the death/disappearance of male relatives as well as
the marginalization they have always known. Unfortunately, the opportunity to tell their own stories
came about as a result of horrible circumstances. Without the opportunity openly to share their
suffering and have it acknowledged and validated, the women were forced not only to experience
their grief alone, but also to endure a sense of suspended reality in which everyone thought of but
no one discussed the horrors that occurred in their own families in particular and society in general.
These testimonios from across Kashmir resist the silencing that has been imposed on them
through political, social, and economic repression. By giving their testimonios, women have
challenged that silence. This has both political and personal effects. It bridges the public and private
realms because it contributes to the women’s personal healing and at the same time participates in
the struggle to create an alternative memory of the period.
These testimonios do not allow for the creation of a single, uniform narrative of events. Rather,
they offer a multitude of perspectives, some complementary, others contradictory, which, when put
together, can provide not so perfect yet multidimensional picture of past reality. At times, this may
be a contentious or opaque portrait, all the more so considering the extreme state of affairs in the
Valley. Yet these testimonios give us greater depth and nuances than can be derived from the
tendentious obfuscation of official accounts: “The social space occupied by scarred populations may
enable stories to break through routine cultural codes to express counter discourse that assaults and
even perhaps undermines the taken‐for‐granted meaning of things as they are. Out of such
desperate and defeated experiences stories may emerge that call for and at times may bring about
change that alters utterly the commonplace‐ both at the level of collective experience and at the
level of individual subjectivity.” 19 The empirical experiences of these women, their individual yet
collective narratives harmonize their individual voices in polyphony of other voices. Rashid’s
documentation of human sufferings and experiences’ pertaining to human rights violations is an
endeavour to sensitize people, government actors, civil society and others towards the families of
disappeared persons to initiate social change to end discrimination in the Valley.
Keywords: Testimonios, Conflict, Potential action, Violence, Women
Dr. Anupama Vohra
Associate Professor of English, DDE, University of Jammu, Jammu, INDIA.
vohranu@gmail.com
Notes
1
Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (USA: Basic Books, 1992), 1.
2
Kali Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 12.
3
Kimberly A Nance, Can Literature Promote Justice? Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin
American Testimonio (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), 12.
4
Ibid., 158.
5
Ibid., 158.