SPECTRES OF THE PAST: TRAUMA, MEMORY AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN DUR E. AZIZ AMNA A SPLINTERING

Abstract

This article critically examines Dur e Aziz Amna’s A Splintering (2025) through the lens of Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory, foregrounding the interrelated dynamics of trauma, memory, and political violence within a contemporary Pakistani socio-political context. The novel is read as a trauma narrative that resists linear historiography and stable meaning, instead articulating violence as a belated and unresolved experience that persistently intrudes upon the present. The study also explores how spectral haunting operates as a central metaphor, signifying the return of repressed political violence and the collapse of boundaries between past and present. Drawing on Caruth’s conceptualization of trauma as an unclaimed experience the study argues that A Splintering portrays political violence not as a singular historical rupture but as an ongoing psychological condition that fractures subjectivity and destabilizes both personal and collective memory. This study adopts a qualitative, interpretive research methodology grounded in literary textual analysis, drawing primarily on Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory as its central theoretical framework. The methodological approach is thematic and theory-driven, aiming to examine how trauma, memory, and political violence are narratively constructed in Dur e Aziz Amna’s A Splintering. The analysis demonstrates that Amna’s narrative structure marked by fragmentation, silence, and temporal disjunction mirrors the internal workings of traumatic memory, which, according to Caruth, emerges in repetitive and involuntary forms rather than coherent recollection. Characters in the novel are shown to inhabit splintered identities shaped by fear, loss, and suppressed histories, highlighting the inadequacy of language in fully representing traumatic experience. By situating individual suffering within a broader framework of collective and intergenerational trauma, the study contends that A Splintering offers a critique of political power and its long-term psychological consequences. The novel emerges as an ethical act of witnessing that insists on remembering violence even when it defies articulation.