Jibon O Rajnoitik Bstobota Analysis

Memory, War and Trauma Interwoven in Shahidul Jahir’s Jibon O Rajnoitik Bastobota

Abstract: The present study is on Shahidul Jahir’s Jibon O Rajnoitik Bastobota (Life and Political Reality), a novel based on two different times: one before the independence of Bangladesh while the other after its independence. Set in time of the liberation and the post-liberation war, the novel narrates a story of one Abdul Majid who survives the Liberation War of 1971, and passes his life with the inescapable war memories in the post war period. He had a sister named Momena who was raped and killed at the fag end of the war, and her death still haunts him in the present—so much so that he finds his sister’s image and wound in his wife, Yasmin and names his daughter after Momena. Therefore, the article shows how trauma, memory and war are connected to one

Still, there are many people who are haunted by the war memories. Though the outcomes of their experiences are different, they have one thing in common— the trauma of war affects all of them. The impact of war memories on an individual as well as on a society is what Shahidul Jahir’s Jibon O Rajnoitik Bastobota is concerned with. One afternoon in 1985, fifteen years after the liberation war, when Abdul Majid is on his way to Raisa Bazar, the lace of his flip-flop is torn away, and then he stops walking. In fact, he has to stop since it is not an ordinary incident to him, and so out of its triviality a metaphorical meaning crops up. He stops, thinking that the lace is disjointed from the sole the way once the thread from his heart was disjointed fifteen years back. The instant, therefore, the sudden rupture happens, it cuts him off from the present, triggering the memories of the past, fifteen years back from now when the war breaks out in the country. He observes his surroundings deviantly, like one with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which Cathy Caruth defines