Trauma, Displacement, and the Construction of Disability in Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom: A Psychosocial Perspective

Abstract

Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom represents mental distress not only through the symptoms associated with Imelda Mendes’s illness but also through the family, social, linguistic, and institutional environments in which that illness is experienced. This article examines the novel through trauma studies, psychoanalytic literary criticism, and disability studies, with particular attention to displacement, memory, language, stigma, caregiving, and psychiatric authority. Rather than treating Imelda’s bipolar disorder as a clinical consequence of migration, the article asks how the narrative connects her history of forced displacement from Rangoon with experiences of loss, cultural discontinuity, economic insecurity, family conflict, and the difficulty of belonging. The analysis also considers the narrator’s experience as a caregiver and as the child of a woman repeatedly labelled ‘mad.’ The novel’s recurring attention to words such as ‘mad,’ ‘normal,’ ‘patient,’ and ‘diagnosis’ demonstrates how language can become a mechanism of exclusion while also becoming a means of resistance. The article further examines the novel’s representation of psychiatric institutions, including its treatment of electroconvulsive therapy, not to evaluate clinical treatment in itself but to analyse the narrator’s concerns about autonomy, identity, dignity, and institutional power. The article therefore argues that Em and the Big Hoom constructs disability as a psychosocial and relational experience: distress is located within an individual body and mind, but disability is intensified by stigma, social expectations, family pressures, and institutional practices.

Keywords: Disability, displacement, trauma, bipolar disorder, psychoanalysis, caregiving, stigma, psychiatric institutions