Half Motherhood and Beyond: Trauma, Schizophrenia and Resistance in Shahnaz Bashir's The Half Mother

Abstract

This research paper explores the re-conceptualization and revision of the idea of motherhood in The Half Mother by Shahnaz Bashir (2014). The protagonist, Haleema, is the embodiment of thousands of Kashmiri mothers of the 1990s torn between political violence, personal loss, and social desertion. Her cheating husband abandons her when she is pregnant; she finds shelter with her father Ghulam Rasool Joo and there she gives birth to her only son, Imran. Her future history is marked by traumatic events, first of all the cruel killing of her father by Indian soldiers, and then the kidnapping of her adolescent son by the same forces. The title of the novel is an indication of her fragmented identity as a ‘half mother’ who is in a constant state of limbo concerning the fate of her son. The mental consequences of the long-term trauma and solitude are shown when she slowly falls apart emotionally, and eventually develops schizophrenia. Her psychosis is an expression of the highly personal price of an unresolved loss and the wider phenomenon of the collective silencing of women in conflict zones. This research study applies the psychoanalytic theory of schizophrenia formulated by Fromm-Reichmann (1959) to analyze the factors that lead to the decline in the mental state of Haleema. Furthermore, it adds to the debate about women in conflict literature by showing how the novel by Bashir reinvents maternal identity as both vulnerable and protesting. Therefore, by placing the experience of Haleema into this theoretical context, this study investigates into the overlaps of motherhood, trauma and mental illness whilst pre-empting the resistance of Kashmiri women to systemic violence.