MEMORYSCAPES BEYOND TRAUMA IN PAKISTANI POETRY: INTEGRATING POST-9/11ISM AND (POST)MEMORY STUDIES

Abstract

Contemporary Pakistani poets including Harris Khalique, Rizwan Akhter and Imtiaz Dharker in the last two decades (2001-20) have translated the event of 9/11 and its offshoots into individual, communal, public, prosthetic and transcultural memories of violence, and determined their own paths to manage the turmoil different from the one witnessed by the post-9/11 American poets. This research negotiates with the poetics and politics of difference while highlighting the polyphonic aesthetic structures of (post)9/11- memory in Pakistani poetry. It entwines trauma, memory, and cultural studies, and scaffolds its argument upon the thematic concerns of the selected Pakistani poetry around the four concepts of public fantasy, communal memory, identity displacement, and transculturality. Squaring the theoretical canvas, it traces the repercussions of 9/11 beyond trauma in prosthetic contexts. It further maps how natal alienation – a disconnection of historical memory from the cultural context – not only augments mnemohistory in subjectivity but is also indelible in influencing social, political, and territorial contexts of analogical 9/11 memory. This way, this study will contribute to the understanding of  forms of memory and thematic concerns of (post-9/11 Pakistani English poetry. Here, unlike Marianne Hirsh’s use of the term in the context of intergenerational memory, the parenthesized ‘post’ of ‘(post)memory’ refers to the space where my research engages with memory studies theoretically on the rhetoric of difference through which poets construct post-9/11 poetic memorials in Pakistan. In other words, within the canvas of this research, the parenthesized ‘(post)’ provides theoretical space to the diversity of Pakistani poetic voices to 9/11 and its offshoots.