'Lest We Forget': Mapping the Written and the Unwritten in the Tales of North-east India

Abstract

The world of story is not a simple one. Every story is a story of something imagined or real, experienced or narrated, personal or political, and, mythic or modern. Issues such as nation, nationality, identity, home, country, being and belonging enter the arena of creativity whenever a writer pens his or her story from the margins. For the voices from north east India every story, every reading creates a new meaning- a new construct. They create, rewrite and share their identity through collective culture, shared history or ancestry very often. Such one writer who contemplates in her works within these frameworks and boundaries from the point of an individual and the community is Temsula Ao. Hailing from the region, she delivers an extremely sensible and almost firsthand experience of the happenings in the region in her writing that is so evocative at the same time. The present paper aims to explore the short stories by Temsula Ao from her Sahitya Academy Prize winning collection Laburnum for My Head (2009) from the perspective of both written and oral account of emotional identities and aspects of showing multiple ways of being, becoming and belonging.The Northeast has long been on the fringe of mainstream literary consciousness, edged out by its complex socio-politics, crisis of identity and the prolonged rule of the gun. Temsula, through her narratives,has expressed a strong political awareness to interrogate the violence that has ravaged the Northeast region as a whole and the 'Naga nation' in particular due to the tussle between the insurgents 'underground extortionists or rebel forces'and the Indian government in complex ways.