Cultural Trauma in Narratives of Displacement With Special Reference to Mirza Waheed's The Collaborator, Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin, and Khaled Hosseini's Sea Prayer

Abstract

This study develops trauma from a cultural perspective in relation to the ‘social experience’ of displacement that leaves permanent scars on the heart and soul of the displaced collectivities scattered as refugees in different countries around the world. The aim of this dissertation is to explore how the selected displaced writers under study, namely, the Kashmiri-British writer Mirza Waheed (1955), the Palestinian-American novelist Susan Abulhawa (1970), and the Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini (1965), narratively structure their displacement experience as traumatic in their works respectively; The Collaborator (2011), Mornings in Jenin (2010), and Sea Prayer (2018)? This study further offers an answer to the question: could narratives built around the displacement experience serve an alleviating role in the healing process of trauma? In this dissertation, the trauma of war is examined considering its resulting catastrophic aftermath of displacement with a special attention to Kashmiris, Palestinians, and Syrians. To fully grasp the profound effects of war and its aftermath of displacement upon the collective psyche of these selected traumatized populations under study, this dissertation adopts an interdisciplinary approach combining the psychoanalytic and the socio-cultural theoretical framework. Each displaced writer makes his/her narrator eyewitness to the consequences of war on the psychological and the socio-cultural levels. Moreover, each of the focal characters in the selected works under the study is presented as an epitome for the dynamics of displacement and nostalgia. Considering nostalgia as intermingled with the dialectics of memory and displacement, this dissertation presents a socio-cultural analysis of the selected nostalgic narratives of displacement under study.