In Search of Return

Shifa Haq’s book is a prose poem written to honor the disappeared of Kashmir and those who unceasingly mourn them. Haq is as adept at guiding the reader through deep theoretical meditations on mourning as she is bearing witness to the experiences of those whose ferocious suffering she shared over many years. She asks us, her readers, to listen to the voices of the mourners and to host a reciprocal remembering that keeps alive the demands of the sociopolitical ghosts of Kashmir.

-- Lynne Layton, Harvard Medical School

This book gives one of the most profound and insightful presentation of what it is to lose and what mourning implies that I have ever read. The work of Shifa Haq is situated in Kashmir, a region which is plagued by severe atrocities where thousand has been killed and many have disappeared. The wars and the Human Rights Violations in today’s world leaves increasingly many in situations where they lose close ones and often don’t know their destiny: the dead without grave, the mourners without a place to mourn.

Shifa Haq gives words to those who have lost, and also to those who have disappeared.

In this book we find strategies that can give mourning a space and form in the social context and that make visible that mourning is a social process, and an unconscious political that take place in families and social groups—and that need to be acknowledged by society at large. This book is the most important contribution in psychoanalysis on loss and mourning that I have ever read.

-- Sverre Varvin, Oslo Metropolitan University

Shifa Haq, recounts, with sensitivity and compassion, many stories of interrupted lives, of anguished survival, of unending mourning along with life affirming rituals of memorialization from the spectacularly beautiful yet ravaged and devastated landscape of Kashmir. Like other parts of the world which have borne the onslaught of militarization, Kashmir too has grappled with decades of extreme circumstances. In Search of Return is based on a psychoanalytic researcher’s journey of becoming a ‘hamdard’ or a co-sufferer in pain who empathetically participates in the trying context of those she pauses to listen to.

Acquiring a flow, In Search of Return ascends to a remarkable level of ethical engagement. It impels us to recognize the life enhancing value of mourning and grieving without ever becoming judgmental and prescriptive in its tone or content. It delicately perches itself in the ‘inbetween’ zones where grief and pain blend into forms of creative remembrance and resistance, and where ‘going ahead’ remains contingent on ‘keeping the lost one alive within the self.

-- Honey O. Vahali, Ambedkar University D