Flashback as Resistance: Traumatic Memory Beyond Catharsis
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Abstract
This article explores the function of flashbacks in trauma narratives not as therapeutic tools leading to closure or catharsis, but as potent acts of resistance. Using Desha Kala Patra by Jagannath Prasad Das, a groundbreaking work in Odia literature that skillfully combines personal and collective memories, the paper looks at how broken memories mess up the flow of time and deny the end of healing. Here, memory is not just a place to heal; it's also a place to face the past, where the things that can't be said come back to life in the present. This study goes against the grain of traditional psychoanalytic frameworks that look for resolution through expression. Instead, it uses postcolonial and affect theory to say that flashbacks show histories that have been silenced and show a politics of incompletion and narrative rupture. These returns that happen over and over again are emotional protests against forgetting, erasing history, and the clean arc of redemption. The article shows how the flashback, through its repetition and disorientation, becomes a formal strategy of survival and subversion by making readers stay in the discomfort of memory instead of escaping it. In this way, it takes back trauma as a place not of closure but of ongoing resistance.
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