The Trauma Aesthetics: Symptomatology of Intrusive Past and Traumatic Memory in Agha Shahid Ali’s Poetry

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between trauma and narrative. It asserts that to preserve one’s culture, identity, and tradition in an alien world, the traumatic memory of the past should be transmuted into narrative memory. This qualitative research studies trauma aesthetics as a form of utilitarian movement to creatively represent what is unspoken and unpresentable generally. This research will incorporate Agha Shahid Ali’s selected poems to exemplify the articulation of disrupted memory and nostalgia in a poetic narrative. It is significant to include a poetic narrative because it can be a primary tool available to enunciate trauma as it can maintain a specific aesthetic and cerebral distance from the actual event and re-inscribe the traumatic experience. This paper aims to foreground the distressed reminisces in the poetic narrative of Agha Shahid Ali to demonstrate the collective trauma of diasporic people at national and international levels. Keeping an eye focused on trauma aesthetics, the research will analyze Agha Shahid Ali’s selected poems in the light of Cathy Caruth’s interpretive framework of Trauma. It is important to know about trauma aesthetics and incorporate this psychological framework because they consider it important to listen to or read the traumatized other for each survivor brings a new understanding and information about the pathology of human history. Hence, the paper crystallizes an argument about the narrativization of traumatic memory that pays certain attention to the symbolized referentiality of the matter.