Narrating the Aftermath: Form and the Limits of Expression in Sorayya Khan’s Noor

Abstract

This paper examines how Sorayya Khan’s Noor represents the enduring consequences of the 1970 Bhola cyclone and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 through family relationships, silence and visual expression. Drawing on Cathy Caruth’s account of trauma and scholarship on memory and gender, it employs close textual analysis to explore the novel’s epigraphs, narrative structure, characterisation and use of drawings. It argues that Noor’s art mediates an intergenerational encounter with experiences that her mother, Sajida, and grandfather, Ali, have struggled to articulate. Her images evoke Sajida’s childhood loss and unsettle Ali’s suppressed memories of wartime violence, exposing tensions between private remembrance and authoritative national histories. Rather than treating silence as an absence awaiting disclosure, the paper reads it as a narrative device shaped by fear, guilt, withholding and the limits of expression. Moving between domestic intimacy and collective history, Noor explores fiction’s capacity to acknowledge traumatic experiences without claiming to resolve their uncertainties.