Beyond the Borders of the USA: Unpacking the Socio-Psychological Impact of 9/11 on Youth and Children in The Blind Man’s Garden

This paper examines the socio-psychological impact of 9/11 on young characters beyond the borders of the USA as reflected in Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden. In the novel, the shifting of the setting of post-9/11 narratives from the West to South Asia is significant, which illustrates the horrors of the ‘war on terror’ and the global impacts of America’s neo-imperialism on people and societies beyond its borders. The USA’s post-9/11 approaches – which foregrounded religious and ethnic differences - led to the dichotomous resurgence of identity crises that strongly resemble the colonial era’s binary oppositions of Self/Other, Occident/Orient, Superior/Subaltern, and White/Brown. This article also determines that after the fall of the Twin Towers, the new developments in the shape of post-9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ and America’s hardline policies of neo-imperialism mark a new epoch analogous to postcolonialism. Qualitative methods of data collection have been utilized. For the conceptual framework, the research examines the social and psychological dimensions of postcolonial literary theory, considering the concepts of Homi K. Bhabha and other eminent theorists. In the field of social psychology, the study utilizes Erik Erikson's concepts outlined in the book Identity: Youth and Crisis and the parameters developed by Robert T. Carter concerning PTSIM, a hypothetical psychological theory. This paper’s specific focus on the representation of the socio-psychological impact of post-9/11 on young characters and their consequent resistance adds more to the dynamics of contemporary literature.