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Shifa Haq is a wakeful artist at her core, asking the questions, “What symbols and representations might appear in cultures ravaged by violence and repetitious anxiety…how do we make meaning of uncontainable messages?” (p. 89). In her book, In Search of Return: Mourning the Disappearances in Kashmir (2021), she turns her “empathic inwardness…dream < s> the undreamt in the symptomatic aspects of traumatic moments in Kashmiri history” (p. 90). The book narrates her exquisite attunement to peoples who have been residing in the most militarized zone in the entire world, tens of thousands of whom have become victims and mourners resulting from extrajudicial killings, custodial torture, detention, rape, forced labor, crackdowns, and disappearances. Honing in on the incomprehensible loss and demolition specifically consequent from a son, a father, a husband suddenly disappearing on what would have otherwise been an ordinary day, she chronicles the processes of the most complicated type of mourning, ambiguous loss in the context of an oppressive, traumatizing surveillance society.
Describing how more than 8,000 Kashmiris have disappeared since 1989 (xiii), her writing thoroughly responds to her two primary research questions: When loss is unacknowledged by the other, what effects does it have on mourning and, how do we locate the individual in the social suffering produced by political conflict? Shifa Haq steps far outside (over 400 miles) of both the therapy office and her academic institution, visiting bereft survivors in Kashmir across a span of ten years. She delves into her research questions by way of intimate contact with the catastrophic pain and suffering experienced by Rasool Ahmed and his wife Rafeeqa, whose son, Junaid disappeared in 1993 at age 13; Sameena, whose husband, Abdul Hameed, disappeared in 2000-we learn that their daughter, Amna, was born 10 days after he vanished when their son, Ajaz, was just 2 years old; and Aasa, whose son, Ajeet, disappeared in 1