Speaking Through Bodies

Dalit Women’s Lyrical Testimonies of Trauma and Possibilities of Encounter

Bibliographic Data

ID7173051
AuthorsShruti Shukla (0000-0002-1315-0759, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume40
Issue1
Pages17-31
Publication date2025-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueWasafiri (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0269-0055 • E-ISSN: 1747-1508
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/02690055.2025.2435141
OpenAlexW4407947099
LanguageEN
References cited22

The ‘unspeakability’ and ‘incomprehensibility’ of trauma have haunted the field of literary trauma studies for decades, leading to a continued scepticism and disbelief of literary narratives and testimony. This article moves beyond the Eurocentric trauma models, which emphasise the unreliability of memory and literature's limited capacity to represent trauma. Focusing on the element of ‘difference’ within Dalit women's lived experience, this article investigates the impact of gender–caste intersections on trauma experience, remembrance, witnessing, and representation. The article positions poetry as a form of lyrical testimony and argues that Dalit women's poetic articulations disrupt essentialist conceptualisations of trauma experience while interconnecting the past and present to create a narrative chain of remembrance. Positioning Meena Kandasamy's and Sukirtharani's poems as lyrical testimonies, this article argues that poetry allows for the representation of trauma beyond the presumed capacity of language through structural and spatial possibilities of meaning. In particular, it focuses on the verbal and non-verbal possibilities of expression within poetic bodies, which give voice to the gaps and silences within histories and narratives as they engage in the process of ‘talking back’ to practices of erasure and assimilation

Art · Literature · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · South Asian Cinema and Culture · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · South Asian Studies and Diaspora

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