Refracting Post-9/11 Terror: Trauma and Empathy in Nadeem Aslam's Postcolonial Fiction

Nadeem Aslam’s latest novels bring the politics of post-9/11 terror to the fore by exploring various manifestations of human vulnerability in those who confront tensions and conflicts in the wake of 9/11. In The Blind Man’s Garden and The Golden Legend, the British-Pakistani author combines vulnerability with empathy to build up a postcolonial narrative where the state of contemporary global terror emerges. Thus, Aslam’s two novels can be read as studies in vulnerability and empathy, and this is what the article aims to demonstrate. To do so, it focuses on the issues of grievability as a modality of dispossession. It then moves on to show how grief and wounds are tackled by analysing some formal strategies that arouse empathic connections in the reader. The last part of the article concentrates on the temporal disarray that in both novels acts as a background against which a dialogic structure between self and other is eventually developed, thus refracting the politics of terror.