War Memories and Peacebuilding in “From East Pakistan to Bangladesh”

Hearts are as much ravaged by war and as much in need of repair as burnt-out cities. Thus, the success of peacebuilding depends, at least in part, on individuals’ life writings that allow them to put their past tainted by war and its horrors behind them and offer them future possibilities of reconciliation and peace. The study of the life writing (memoirs) ‘East Pakistan to Bangladesh’ by Saadullah Khan was used as a test case in this research paper to support this argument. The critical framework of Decolonizing Trauma Theory given by Rothberg (2009) was used in this qualitative study to explore how the writer, who not only fought in the civil war in Bangladesh but was also taken as a prisoner of war, moves beyond a cycle of retaliation to something more constructive. The objective is to explore how, after facing the horrors of war, human beings can feel compassion for antagonists and offer alternative narratives divergent from the official narrative. An analysis of the war imagery demonstrates that the writer does not use it to create a meta-conflict to legitimize war, demonizing the enemy to justify the killings and polarizing us versus them as good and evil as a means for dealing with the conflict. Rather, he uses war imagery as an organizing principle, determining and impacting people’s response to the world and the war with a new perception and comprehension that emphasizes the factors of contingency and ambiguity. This approach enables him to eschew blame. Hence, he does not attribute the causes of conflict to the members of the out-group, thus suggesting possibilities of transformation and peace, rather than ascertaining factors such as the nature of the enemy that suggests the impossibility of peace. Keywords: decolonizing trauma, forgiveness, heroic courage, memory, peacebuilding, war