Psycho-emotional Trauma in the Conflict Zone: A Cross-cultural Epistemological Reading of Soniah Kamal's An Isolated Incident

Abstract

Trauma in conflict zones, especially amongst women, has been an important, often under-studied issue both in literary analysis and cross-cultural psychology. However, literature has been one of the few fields where such sufferings have been acknowledged and explored in South Asia where state violence, enforced disappearances and gender-based violence has caused deep psychological distress. This paper studied the depiction of this protagonist's psycho-emotional trauma in the novel An Isolated Incident set in the conflict area of Indian Kashmir. The study used an interdisciplinary methodology to examine Zari's trauma using the Ayurvedic approach, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Buddhist philosophy, Jeffrey Alexander's Cultural Trauma Theory, and Foucault's theories of power, which concluded that this trauma could not be fully explained using solely Western clinical frameworks. The Eastern perspective, which sees trauma as a disturbance of vital energies, and/or as ongoing suffering, provided a more culturally and experientially grounded understanding of Zari's experience. The analysis foregrounded the psychological traumas of the protagonist and embedded them in the wider context of military occupation, gendered violence, and patriarchal shame and collective silence, which all helped to sustain individual trauma. The study utilized a textual analysis method to demonstrate that An Isolated Incident had played an important role in representing trauma experience among women in the South Asian conflict literature and could be understood in a cross-cultural and decolonizing manner.

          Keywords: psycho-emotional trauma, hypervigilance, dissociation, survivor's guilt, social withdrawal, vital energy disruption, biopolitical surveillance, collective silencing