Memory, Trauma and Affect: The Implicated Subject in Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North

Abstract

In A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam invades the consciousness of the protagonist to reveal the subliminal enmeshed spaces of the personal and the political. The distance between the traumatic events of the Sri Lankan civil war and the alienated individual who has apparently remained aloof, is obliterated through the refracted memories that have embedded the subject in the matrix of his country’s political history. The individual memory thus coalesces into the fabric of collective memory as the narrative unfolds. The concatenation of the traumatic realities and the sequestered psyche, untethers the individual from its ensconced private sphere and situates it within the macrocosmic and pervasive sociopolitical structure. The transmutation of subjectivity is attuned to the affective sites of collective trauma. The dichotomy of proximity and distance elucidated by the apprehensive reflections of the survivor is symptomatic of the subterranean intensities that elude corporeal presence and agency. The memories of the individual become resonant with the affective (un)lived experiences of traumatic violence, that deconstruct the tension of presence/absence, and consequently reconfigure the preconceived notions of subjectivity. The theoretical framework of this paper would foreground Michael Rothberg’s conceptualization of the implicated subject, to limn the trajectory of identities who are indirectly implicated in traumatic legacies. This paper argues that the trauma of the genocidal war and its aftermath is transcribed into affective memories, that bear the potential to reconstitute identity by recognizing and transcending the state of implication.