Getuigen van oorlog en conflict in het werk van 20ste-eeuwse Britse en Pakistaanse vrouwelijke auteurs

This dissertation focusses on the literary responses of a selection of British and Pakistani women writers to wars and conflicts in the twentieth century as examples of literary testimony. Bearing witness to some of the major conflicts of the twentieth century, these literary texts evoke the tensions between a witness’ experiences and the literary means to render these experiences into narration. These tensions, which accompany any attempt to represent subjective experiences within a historical context, inform both the content and the style of these narratives. Through a framework situated at the crossroads of theories about the role and function of testimony and critical debates about gender and literature of war and conflict, I analyse eight literary texts by women writers which respond to the Great War, the Second World War, Indian Partition, and Pakistani conflicts, and are written between 1918 and 2010: Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918), Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933), Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948), Naomi Mitchison’s Among You Taking Notes (1985), Mumtaz Shahnawz’s The Heart Divided (1957), Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988), Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days (1989) and Fatima Bhutto’s Songs of Blood and Sword (2010). By analysing the selected corpus in relation to the discourse about witness and testimony, I aim to expand the framework of testimony from the historical contexts of Holocaust, Latin American Testimonio, and the atomic bombings in which it has predominantly been used, to other contexts of war and conflict. I also aim to understand how the gendered perspective affects both the form and content of these texts. Furthermore, by looking at British and Pakistani women writers’ responses to conflict and wars, this dissertation shows the existence of a locus where national and temporal boundaries give way to a global and inclusive dialogue.

By conducting close textual analyses, this dissertation demonstrates the socio-historic and epistemic position of the witness along with her vulnerabilities, uncertainties, pluralities or even falsities in some cases. Different literary genres such as diary, memoir, and autobiographical novel, contribute in pronouncing the heterogeneous condition of the witness and the self-reflexive role of literature in relation to testimony. Finally, by analysing how a witness, be it the main protagonist or the retrospective narrator, constructs his or her testimony, the formation of a testimonial bond between the witness and the reader is further highlighted.