The Need for Certainty versus the Subjectivity of Memories: Examining Trauma Narratives in Rohini Mohan’s The Seasons of Trouble

Abstract

The Sri Lankan Civil War (1983-2009) was a time of deep trauma for the Sri Lankan and diaspora Tamil populations. This paper explores Rohini Mohan's narrative non-fiction, The Seasons of Trouble (2014), as a space where journalistic expectations of verifiable certainties encounter the fragmented, culturally mediated memory of trauma. Using Kai Erikson’s theory of Collective Trauma and Michelle Balaev’s critique of classical trauma paradigms, the book explores three central narratives, namely Mugil, a former female LTTE combatant, Sarva, a Tamil man tortured under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and Indra, his mother, who attempts to extract him through bureaucracy. The paper shows that Mohan’s structural methods of narrative, withholding and bodily metaphor are not journalistic limitations but deliberate representational techniques of ethnic conflict, sexual violence, oppressive power conflicts, and forced displacement. The study also reveals that gender reassignment and post-war surveillance after the civil war served as forms of secondary communal trauma for the female ex-combatants. The work contributes to the under-researched fields of trauma theory, narrative journalism and gender in post-war South Asia.