ECHOES ACROSS THE GENERATIONS: INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF TRAUMA IN KHALED HOSSEINI’S AND THE MOUNTAINS ECHOED: A FANONIAN READING

Abstract

This article examines Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed (2013) as a meticulously constructed literary investigation of intergenerational trauma in postcolonial fiction. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s theorisation of collective and inherited psychic injury in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Black Skin, White Masks (1952), and supplementing Fanon with the trauma theory of Cathy Caruth (1996), Dominick LaCapra (2001), and Marianne Hirsch (2012), this article identifies five distinct mechanisms by which trauma propagates across generations in Hosseini’s novel: the mythic-narrative mechanism (the Baba Ayub folktale and its re-enactment); the somatic mechanism (the inscription of colonial labour and grief on Saboor’s body, read by Abdullah); the material mechanism (the tin feather box preserved across six decades); the onomastic mechanism (the naming of Abdullah’s daughter after his lost sister); and the diagnostic mechanism (Abdullah’s dementia as the catastrophic interruption of transmission at the moment of its possible completion). The analysis argues that Hosseini’s most original contribution to postcolonial trauma literature lies in his insistence on a third possibility beyond successful transmission or complete severance, namely incomplete transmission, whereby subsequent generations inherit the shape of an absence without the resources to resolve it. Read through Fanon’s framework of decolonisation as perpetual, unfinished labour, the novel emerges as a sustained demonstration of why, in the conditions of colonial dispossession, intergenerational trauma is never simply transmitted or simply overcome, but must be consciously taken up by each succeeding generation.