DefinePK

Abstract

A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear by Atiq Rahimi (2002) is a detailed analysis of the tragic effects of the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989) on the lives of Afghan people. It takes place in the tense anticipation before the Soviet invasion in deep late 1979 of Kabul and follows the life of a young student Farhad who is beaten by the enforcers of the regimes but who is discovered in the house of a widow, Mahnaz, to the lateral knowledge of the world between dreams, memories and hallucinations. According to the theory of Cathy Caruth on trauma in her book Unclaimed Experience (1996) this paper explains why Rahimi embodies the insidious invasion of war into the psyche and the domestic in the forms of late repetitions, dissociative conditions and cultural tropes like djinn folklore. Rahimi culturalizes the trauma through the use of the stream-of-consciousness narration which blends practices of the Western modernism, but which includes the spirituality of the Afghans to depict the sense of loss among the civilian population and how they are vulnerable to both sexes. The discussion deconstructs textual passages in order to demonstrate the two facets of displacement, physical exile to Pakistan in case of the mass migrations, and psychological exile of identity and community. The literature review contextualizes the novel in both Afghani diasporic fiction and violence as a feminist narrative and application of trauma studies to war narratives. Findings emphasize the hybridity of aesthetics because ethical witnessing in the form of Rahimi cannot be classified using Eurocentric paradigms of trauma by focusing on common historical damages. The pluralistic theories of trauma have been proposed to be used with non-Western epistemologies and interdisciplinary studies that relate literature and mental health of refugees. Lastly, the paper recommends that the work by Rahimi is a survival job amid repeated labyrinths of fear and urges the world to identify with Afghanistan with its lasting scars. This paper is also included in the discourse of postcolonial literature as it illuminates the repossession of unclaimed experience in fiction of the conflict zones that results to the formation of survival in the long term crisis.