Memory, Trauma and Affect: The Implicated Subject in Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North

In A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam invades the consciousness of protagonist to reveal subliminal enmeshed spaces personal and political. The distance between traumatic events Sri Lankan civil war alienated individual who has apparently remained aloof, is obliterated through refracted memories that have embedded subject in matrix his country’s political history. memory thus coalesces into fabric collective as narrative unfolds. concatenation realities sequestered psyche, untethers from its ensconced private sphere situates it within macrocosmic pervasive sociopolitical structure. transmutation subjectivity attuned affective sites trauma. dichotomy proximity elucidated by apprehensive reflections survivor symptomatic subterranean intensities elude corporeal presence agency. become resonant with (un)lived experiences violence, deconstruct tension presence/absence, consequently reconfigure preconceived notions subjectivity. theoretical framework this paper would foreground Michael Rothberg’s conceptualization implicated subject, limn trajectory identities are indirectly legacies. This argues trauma genocidal aftermath transcribed memories, bear potential reconstitute identity recognizing transcending state implication.