Societal Trauma and Identity Formation in Hope Ablaze: A Psychosocial Exploration of Memory and Belonging

Abstract

This study examines societal trauma and identity formation in Sarah Mughal Rana’s Hope Ablaze, focusing on the relationship between discrimination, memory, familial responses, and poetic expression. It investigates how public suspicion and media distortion shape Nida’s understanding of herself and how family relationships and poetry mediate her negotiation of voice, agency, and belonging. The research adopts a qualitative, interpretive literary design, employing close reading and thematic analysis. Cathy Caruth’s account of traumatic experience and Ruth Leys’ critical genealogy of trauma provide the principal theoretical framework, supported by perspectives on collective memory and injurious speech. The analysis reveals that accusations based on religious identity and familial association impose a suspect identity upon Nida, while manipulated representations of her poetry undermine her narrative authority. Protective familial restrictions further complicate her creative agency, and repetitive memories preserve the emotional consequences of domestic conflict. Ancestral stories offer resources for understanding cultural belonging, while poetry enables her to reconsider inherited obligations and articulate personal purposes. The study concludes that identity in Hope Ablaze develops through an ongoing interaction between societal exclusion, intimate relationships, historical remembrance, and creative expression. It contributes to scholarship on contemporary South Asian diasporic fiction by examining how these interconnected processes shape the pursuit of recognition and belonging.