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Vol. 11 No. 2 (2010): Identity, Culture and Politics: An Afro - Asian dialogue

4 - Memory Of A Lost Past, Memory Of Rape : Nostalgia, Trauma And The Construction Of Collective Social Memory Among The Zo Hnahthlak

https://doi.org/10.57054/icp.v11i2.5132
Anup Shekhar Chakraborty
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7386-549X

Corresponding Author(s) : Anup Shekhar Chakraborty

noreply@codesria.org

Identity, Culture and Politics, Vol. 11 No. 2 (2010): Identity, Culture and Politics: An Afro - Asian dialogue

Abstract

Collective Social Memory is indeed the moving force of all narrations of identity, national or otherwise, displacement or movement, good times as well as bad times. In fact memories are objects that tumble out unexpectedly from the mind, linking the present with the past. The link between people, heritage, territory, and state is brought about strongly by the use of botanical metaphors. The Zo/Mizo or Zomi also use the metaphor of a tree to link up their rooted-ness with the claimed territory; the Zo/Mizo claim that their folksongs and folklores speaks of a grand tree- ‘Khampat Bungpui’ (Banyan tree) planted by their fore-fathers before they migrated from ‘Zopui’ village, west of Tiau valley in Myanmar. The memory of the ever blessed village ‘Zopui’ symbolic of the grandeur of Zo history serves the purpose of providing a unifying thread for the collection social memory of the Zo hnahthlak.
The horrors of the Insurgency and the Counter-Insurgency; the mass rapes of women and abuse of minors remain embedded in the social memory of the Zo/Mizo people.The paper attempts to accentuate the embeddedness of ‘Memory and Trauma’ on the vexing issues of identity among the Zo hnahthlak.

Keywords

Memory Lost Past Memory Of Rape Nostalgia Trauma Construction Collective Social Zo Hnahthlak
Anup Shekhar Chakraborty. (2010). 4 - Memory Of A Lost Past, Memory Of Rape : Nostalgia, Trauma And The Construction Of Collective Social Memory Among The Zo Hnahthlak. Identity, Culture and Politics, 11(2). https://doi.org/10.57054/icp.v11i2.5132
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