Wounded Streets, Haunting Voices: The Lived Experience of Terror and the Act of Witnessing in After the bombs by Arturo Arias and Pages Stained with Blood by Indira Goswami

Abstract

The article focuses on a comparative study of conflicts in two novels: Arturo Arias’s After the Bombs and Indira Goswami’s Pages Stained with Blood. Although they are set against vastly different conflicts- the 36-year-long Guatemalan Civil War and the Anti-Sikh Pogrom of 1984 in India- both novels stand as fearless acts of bearing witness against political amnesia. The two cities, Guatemala City and Delhi, are portrayed as active and traumatised characters bearing the scars of violence in their streets. The authors use starkly different literary tools to represent the literary memory of their respective historical violence. Arias’s use of a satirical lens and dark humour exposes the surreal horrors of military rule in Guatemala City; meanwhile, Goswami’s work offers raw, diary-like recordings as a witness, trapping the reader in the suffocating, blood-stained city of Delhi, where Sikh hunting was being practised in every nook and corner of the city. Both authors aim to produce an immediate response, accounting for a deeply personalised, fragmented narrative of memories in opposition to official, sanitised government histories.