Article
Mohajir women survivors in postcolonial Karachi: on grief
South Asian History and Culture
(2014)
Abstract
This article explores Mohajir women’s experiences and constructions of grief in the face of losses incurred during the 1985–1999 phase of armed conflict in Karachi, Pakistan. Survivors’ testimonies of grief, and their attempts to manage that grief, become points of entry to an understanding of the impact and contours of multiple types of violence, including the structural violence, within which the lives of poor women especially are embedded. Memories, historical as well as more recent, and identities, remain imbricated in women’s narratives of grief as they mourn individual and familial losses along with more collective sites of disenfranchisement. The totalizing violence in their lives and lifeworlds is mirrored by their totalizing grief. For many Mohajir women, being trapped in refugee or immigrant mode represents a layer of this totalizing grief. Bereaved and poor Mohajir women can only find some solace amongst women in similar circumstances. Women above fifty, women in their thirties and forties, and younger women display different coping mechanisms in the face of grief. Interviews become sociopolitical and psychosocial spaces – often for ‘raising the dead’, especially for poor women who are at times denied public mourning for loved ones either killed or incarcerated as terrorists.
Keywords
- Karachi,
- terrorism,
- violence,
- mourning,
- death
Disciplines
Publication Date
April, 2014
DOI
10.1080/19472498.2014.905328
Publisher Statement
This is the metadata for an article published by Taylor & Francis in the South Asian History and Culture Journal, in April 2015, to find the full article available online follow the link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2014.905328
Citation Information
Chaudhry, L. N. (2014) Mohajir women survivors in postcolonial Karachi: On grief. SouthAsian History and Culture, 5(3), 349-364.