The Damaged Landscape as
Archive: Ecological Memory and Slow Violence in Mirza
Waheed’s The Collaborator
Misbah Khursheed
ABSTRACT
The existing scholarship on Mirza Waheed’s novel
The Collaborator (2012) has mostly focused on the themes of
contested national identity, the experience of trauma, political
violence, and militarization. These perspectives provide a glimpse
into human suffering of the Kashmir conflict, but often neglect its
ecological elements, the aspects of the violence that are felt and
remembered. This article offers a new approach to the scholarship on
The Collaborator and Kashmiri literature as it foregrounds the
ecological dimension of the conflict and memory. The article will
discuss how The Collaborator reimagines Kashmir as an active
ecological archive, that has been shaped over the years by the
impacts of longstanding conflict spread across the land of
mountains, forests, rivers and borders of Kashmir. The article
builds on Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, Lawrence Buell’s
ecocritical framework, Ursula K Heise’s concept of sense of place,
and Aleida Assmann’s theory of cultural memory. The study employs
close reading of text, to show how familiar landscapes, with the
passage of time, are slowly becoming historical memory and spatial
archives. It argues that ecological changes in the novel are not
merely symbolic, but rather another archive which carries histories
of disappearances, death, displacement, and prolonged militarization
that remain marginalized by official political narratives. The focus
of this article is shifted from political space of Kashmir towards
the ecocentric space of Environmental Humanities to enrich the
current work on Kashmir and draw attention towards the connection of
ecological transformations, memory and historical testimony.
Keywords: Ecocriticism, Ecological Memory, Slow Violence, Kashmiri
Literature, Environmental Humanities, Conflict Literature.
