A Recreation Mechanism for Refugee Memories to Get through the Betrayal and Trauma in The Hungry Tides by Amitav Ghosh

Abstract

Mental stress is an inevitable part in the life of a refugee, especially when they have to struggle through many political oppression, war, and migration. Refugees are the individuals who are forced to leave their land because of extremely disturbing external factors. Refugees go through all the struggles in the hope of having a better life, which they may not have in their homeland. This would lead to mental and physical torture as they have to go through traumatic experiences while being an immigrant like loss of property, livelihood, malnutrition, identity crisis etc. The way of recalling the past events through one's perspective is memory. Memory is also a way of remembering the painful past, which could be the cause of preventing oneself from healing the trauma. This research will look at how memory or recalling the past is used as a tool to understand the mental stress of the refugees. This research will analyse the novel “The Hungry Tides'' by Amitav Ghosh to see the use of memory and will also try to understand whether recalling painful events is a way to cope with the past and how the memory of a person can be manipulated to manage past trauma. Through textual analysis of the novel, the researcher uses the theory of betrayal trauma and the Pavilion method of fear extinction to help in understanding the usage of memory to change the trauma of a person. The article will show how memory can be manipulated by forgetting and recreating the events in a way so that the refugees can be relieved from their stressful situations and traumatic events.