Sayyed Abdullah

As a literary enactment of Cathy Caruth’s Trauma Theory (1996), this article examines Kathy Harms’s Resilience in the Rubble (2006) which is a dual-narrative work about the 2005 Kashmir earthquake by a Canadian paramedic and nineteen-year-old survivor Nadeem Malik. The article makes the argument that this is where Harms’s text makes the formal nature of traumatic experience more visible the belatedness, latency and intrusion are not only represented as content but enacted at the level of the narrative structure, syntax and tense. The study, using Caruth's analysis as its methodological framework and Alan McKee’s textual analysis (2003) as its analytical tool, focuses on the ways in which the wound of traumatic experience cries out in Nadeem Malik’s narrative long after the event, on the ways in which the period of latency the silence between the earthquake and its belated return shapes the formal properties of the text, and on the ways in which intrusive memory breaks into the survivor's consciousness without consent or control. The results support the insight that vulnerable adolescent psychological trauma is disproportionately experienced and can remain as an unspoken trauma long after the earthquake, and the multi-narrative form of disaster documentation in Resilience in the Rubble is a unique and under-studied type of disaster testimony. The model of traumatic narrative is formally enacted, structurally unfinished process in which the event which was never fully experienced comes back, ad infinitum as the wound that never closes.