ABSTRACT
The afterlife of the partition and the continuation and prevalence of the ‘time of partition’ as Deschaumes and Ivekovic phrase it, were represented, several decades after the event in different and problematic ways in novels published since 1980. Deschaumes and Ivekovic observe that ‘the moment of partition itself is the time of collective violence against individual destinies, that of massacres, the rape of women, aiming at wresting the other from the self, aiming at an unlikely homogeneity. It is the time of forced individual and mass displacements, the time when the refugee becomes the emblematic fi gure…’ even as such refugees are ‘amputated from their own biographies’.1 Afterwards, according to them, the time of partition invades the present, structures mentalities and modes of representation around a before and after, which turn out to be blurry zones.2
