Silence as Counter-Memory: Trauma, Resistance, and Feminist Testimony in Beloved and The Story of Zahra

Abstract

The modern world has seen significant social and technological progress, but this progress has also exposed deeper wounds of history and identity. Women, especially, tend to remain silent, unheard, and unseen.  Generally, silence means oppression in literature.  However, in feminist writing, it means remembering, resisting, and articulating that which cannot be talked about. The article studies the role of silence as memory and resistance in two significant feminist works, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra (1980). Both authors have illustrated women ensnared in violent patriarchal worlds where their pain, guilt, and trauma are expressed in silence and not in words. The silence in these pieces is a presence where memories linger, not an absence of sound. The study looks at Cathy Caruth’s concept of the “disrupted narrative” in terms of Judith Herman’s “temporal disruption” and Hélène Cixous’ “theory of language”, through Aleida Assmann’s “corporality”.  In Beloved, Sethe's immobility suggests the constant dwelling with the memories of slavery and the pain of motherhood, and how the past never goes away. In The Story of Zahra, Zahra prefers silence as a form of survival, resistance, and life in the war-torn, oppressive, violent world. In the end, silence in these novels is a kind of counter-memory. It resists the imposition of dominant histories. In addition, it offers a voice when language fails. Morrison and al-Shaykh's conversion of silence into strength reveals their engagement with testimony and memory as survival.