Poetry as Counter-Archive: Cultural Trauma, Militarization, and Narrative Agency in Pashtun Lived Experience

This study examines contemporary Pashto poetry as a critical cultural site through which collective trauma, identity, and resistance are articulated under conditions of prolonged militarization and political marginalization in Pakistan. Drawing on Cultural Trauma Theory, the study conceptualizes poetry not merely as an aesthetic form but as a mode of cultural knowledge through which communities narrate suffering, contest dominant power structures, and preserve collective memory. Focusing on Pashtun regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the former FATA, the analysis explores how poetic discourse represents state violence, surveillance, displacement, and the transformation of Pashtun identity into a securitized and suspect category. Using qualitative textual and thematic analysis, the study examines a selected corpus of contemporary Pashto poems produced in the post-2001 conflict context. The findings demonstrate that Pashtun poetry functions simultaneously as testimony, critique, and resistance by exposing the normalization of violence, the erasure of Pashtun agency, and the unequal valuation of life and death within dominant national narratives. Through metaphor, imagery, silence, and symbolic inversion, poets challenge imposed representations and reclaim narrative authority over Pashtun history, identity, and experience. The study argues that cultural trauma in Pashtun society is not produced by isolated events but is sustained through repetitive processes of militarization, misrepresentation, educational exclusion, and spatial control. By foregrounding poetic expression as a form of counter-archive, this research contributes to trauma studies, postcolonial literary scholarship, and South Asian cultural studies, demonstrating how marginalized communities employ poetry to resist erasure and articulate alternative moral and political imaginaries beyond securitized frameworks.