Refracting Postcolonial Terror: Trauma and Empathy in Nadeem Aslam’s Post-9/11 Fiction

Abstract

Nadeem Aslam’s latest novels bring the politics of post-9/11 terror to the fore by exploring various manifestations of trauma and vulnerability in the wake of 9/11. In The Blind Man’s Garden (2013) and The Golden Legend (2017), the British Pakistani author combines vulnerability with empathy to build up postcolonial narratives where the state of contemporary global terror is juxtaposed to empathic responses in intricate plotlines where Islamic culture and Islamophobia overlap. Thus, Aslam novels analysed here can be read as studies in vulnerability and empathy, and this is what the article aims to demonstrate. To do so, my essay will focus on such formal features as shifting focalisation, narrative gaps, and disjointed temporal structure, to show how empathic connections can be aroused. By embracing wounds and loss, the novel therefore favours an ethical model predicated on a practice of a dialogic structure between self and other.