Silenced Desires and Subaltern Voices: A Postcolonial Feminist Study of Selected Short Stories by Abbasi and Sidhwa

Abstract

This study is a postcolonial feminist reading of the silencing of female desire in selected short stories of Pakistani Anglophone writers Bapsi Sidhwa and Talat Abbasi, based on the concepts of subalternity, epistemic violence and discursive foreclosure as theorized by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988). The study investigates Breaking It Up, Their Language of Love, Sehra-bai, and Defend Yourself Against Me from Sidhwa's fiction and The Birdman, Simple Questions, A Bear and Its Trainer, and A Piece of Cake from Abbasi's fiction, and how each story systematically forecloses a particular female desire. While Sidhwa, writing from within the elite Parsi community, highlights the paradox of the privileged subaltern. Abbasi's portrayal of working women and girls of the same class occupies the different social location. Both writers however emphasizes that female silence is structurally produced rather than naturally given and that internalized patriarchy is transmitted across generations