Journal Article

Metaphors of Depression, Illness, and Silence: A Close Reading of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand (2022)

Sarkar, Abi, Sarkar, Sandip

2024

Overview

The horror history of the Partition in 1947 is inscribed in the hearts of South Asians, strongly to those, who crossed borders for survival. Nuances of the “fluid border” stimulate the psychological catastrophe of the individuals who lived a life in the pre-Partition era and faced its bloody consequences and the phases of refugee life in the aftermath. In the arena of literary representation of historical trauma, Geetanjali Shree’s masterpiece Tomb of Sand (2022) is grounded on the pain of a female survivor with an envisioning understanding of metaphorical expressions and manifestations. Metaphor as a conceptual theory of mapping thoughts, emotions, and linguistic expressions by George Lakoff engages with the psychological understanding of individuals’ mental images. Victims and survivors of the subcontinent often suffer from depression, hallucination, a shroud of silence, and insomnia and communicate their traumatic pain through metaphorical expressions. This article critiques the significance of the metaphors used by individuals, particularly female survivors of the Partition, to express their disturbed thoughts, disoriented behaviors, and unresolved and hidden pains regarding their loss of home and homeland, forceful displacement, and communal violence. Taking the prism of metaphor theory in the method of critical metaphor analysis, this article will analyze selected metaphors to highlight the trauma of female survivors of the Partition as manifested by the central character in the post-Partition fiction.

• Publisher: Common Ground Research Networks
• Subject: Females / Fiction / Metaphor / Refugees / Silence / South Asian cultural groups / Trauma