Collective Traumatic Memory in Palestinian Resistance Poetry
Marian MacCurdy, in the Mind’s Eye, defines trauma “any assault to the body or psyche that is so overwhelming … [it] is an event that that shatters belief systems about life, beliefs that help us operate in the world” (16). The phenomenon of trauma, some argue, is closely related to modernity. Freud believes that the industrial revolution helped crystallize trauma more clearly because the former provided social conditions for possible traumatic situations and symptoms. A person experiencing a traumatic event “will be traumatized depend[ing] on the particular sensitivity of the person” (Kaplan 26). A traumatic event caused by war neurosis, for example, may trigger early traumatic …show more content…
Trauma shifts the inside and the outside both spatially and temporally. The reader together with the witness partakes in the reliving of the traumatic event. Writing narratives shows an “attempt to remember, reconstruct and heal from traumatic past” (Steele 61). Literature deals with the manifestation of trauma in the present. It helps in the acting out of the effects of trauma in one’s daily life. Earlier repetitions of painful past turn into a kind of trauma. These traumatic memories are experienced as uncontrollable forces invading and controlling the survivor’s life. Milan Kundera’s character in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting said: “The struggle of man’s power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” (qtd. in MacCurdy 11). The voicing of memories takes the trauma and puts it back outside into the world so that it does not translate into insanity. In remembering and voicing the memories, one begins to reconstruct the traumatic event and in so doing, one makes of the private terror a public story. This helps the survivor realize that he is part of a community of survivors. By reconstructing the event or telling the story, one is giving warnings and lessons to those who will come …show more content…
An individual experience of trauma holds lessons of significance for an entire community. The reconstruction of individual trauma allows the community to reflect upon its part in answering the needs of its survivors. When the community acknowledges trauma, it is forced to confront the ideological structures that make possible such traumatic events. Witnessing is both necessary on individual and collective levels. Memories are turned from problems into solutions. These solutions take the shape of narratives. A narrative could be bearing witness to the destruction of an individual or a cultural element and then that narrative brings about the healing of the people. Some of these memory images are fragments of a
Marian MacCurdy, in the Mind’s Eye, defines trauma “any assault to the body or psyche that is so overwhelming … [it] is an event that that shatters belief systems about life, beliefs that help us operate in the world” (16). The phenomenon of trauma, some argue, is closely related to modernity. Freud believes that the industrial revolution helped crystallize trauma more clearly because the former provided social conditions for possible traumatic situations and symptoms. A person experiencing a traumatic event “will be traumatized depend[ing] on the particular sensitivity of the person” (Kaplan 26). A traumatic event caused by war neurosis, for example, may trigger early traumatic …show more content…
Trauma shifts the inside and the outside both spatially and temporally. The reader together with the witness partakes in the reliving of the traumatic event. Writing narratives shows an “attempt to remember, reconstruct and heal from traumatic past” (Steele 61). Literature deals with the manifestation of trauma in the present. It helps in the acting out of the effects of trauma in one’s daily life. Earlier repetitions of painful past turn into a kind of trauma. These traumatic memories are experienced as uncontrollable forces invading and controlling the survivor’s life. Milan Kundera’s character in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting said: “The struggle of man’s power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” (qtd. in MacCurdy 11). The voicing of memories takes the trauma and puts it back outside into the world so that it does not translate into insanity. In remembering and voicing the memories, one begins to reconstruct the traumatic event and in so doing, one makes of the private terror a public story. This helps the survivor realize that he is part of a community of survivors. By reconstructing the event or telling the story, one is giving warnings and lessons to those who will come …show more content…
An individual experience of trauma holds lessons of significance for an entire community. The reconstruction of individual trauma allows the community to reflect upon its part in answering the needs of its survivors. When the community acknowledges trauma, it is forced to confront the ideological structures that make possible such traumatic events. Witnessing is both necessary on individual and collective levels. Memories are turned from problems into solutions. These solutions take the shape of narratives. A narrative could be bearing witness to the destruction of an individual or a cultural element and then that narrative brings about the healing of the people. Some of these memory images are fragments of a