Endemic Pains and Pandemic Traumas: The Narrative Construction of Public Memory in Iran, Palestine, and the United States

• Author / Creator

  Khadem, Seyed Amir

• Once limited to clinical psychology, trauma, broadly defined as a disruptive pain, an extraordinary malaise that may leave an indelible mark on one’s memory, has been extended in the past decades to describe abruptly horrific experiences on the communal level. Wars, revolutions, genocides, or large scale calamities of any kind that sweep the social sphere without giving it a chance to adapt or resist, are considered traumas. Since the rise of academic studies of the Holocaust, the prevalence of trauma studies has continuously grown. A line of inquiry, however, that is not yet fully investigated in trauma studies is the issue of narrativization. The essential question of this project is how emplotment—i.e., arranging experiences into a coherent plot—renders horrific memories comprehensible. In other words, the question is how narration engenders trauma out of mnemonic fragments. To this end, the project offers an original tripartite paradigm of trauma emplotment. The three stages of this paradigm, each defined as a dialectical opposition of two narrative trajectories, are named comic-tragic, inclusive-exclusive, and universal-unique. Collectively, they illustrate the process through which convoluted, and sometimes incongruous, memories of extraordinary hardship and horror are aligned into an understandable whole. Using this composite framework, I examine three distinct, but interrelated, national cases of traumatic histories in Iran, Palestine, and the United States. In the chapter dedicated to the Iranian pro-government literature of the 1980-88 war against Iraq, the hegemonic discourse of war, known as the Sacred Defense (defa-e moghaddas), is studied. Four representative literary works are analyzed to unearth the narrative that supports an apologetic account of war, appropriating the raw material of iii traumatic memories to consolidate an Islamic revolutionary nationalism, particularly one that is bolstered through a historical antagonism against the American foreign policy. The next chapter, examining Palestinian literature after the Oslo Accords (1993-95), grapples with a problem from a different direction: in the absence of any national sovereignty, it asks how memories of dispossession and displacement are organized, to what collective identity they contribute, and how several generations of traumatic memories are prioritized to construct a narrative whole. This chapter analyzes the fragmented experiences of a nation under constant threat of extinction, whose commemoration of historic traumas is both thwarted and intensified by the ceaseless unfolding of new traumatic experiences. Studying the American literature of the two post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq complements, and complicates, the topics covered in the two previous chapters. In the case of literary works by American veterans, mostly personal war experiences thinly shrouded in fiction, the issues of nationalism and public memories of war are explored by turning the tables, as it were, to examine the trauma of the traumatizers. This chapter focuses on the reveries of empathy with one’s purported national enemy and the moral dilemmas, which exacerbate the traumatic experience. With all their different political trajectories, the representative texts in these three national cases use common narrative strategies to construct unified stories, resolving innate problems of memorialization in order to present indelible pains. Each of these literary constellations applies the same narrative paradigms of trauma emplotment, but generates entirely different artefacts. My project articulates, in sum, how narrative processes move from painful experiences to political statements.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Palestine literature
  • Post-9/11 American literature
  • Iran-Iraq War literature
  • trauma literature

• Graduation date

  Fall 2017

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3833NF25

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.