A bond of wound: tracing transnational connections between Syrian-Americans and Syrians in diaspora in poetic testimonies of the Syrian Civil War

Abstract

The ongoing Syrian civil war has inflicted immense suffering on Syrian people. Experiencing its atrocities since 2011, millions of Syrians have fled their homeland and dispersed around the world. Many traumatized Syrian refugees have resorted to poetry to contextualize their personal suffering, using writing as “scriptotherapy”. This transnational crisis has generated some sort of solidarity between Syrians in diaspora and Syrian-Americans. Several Syrian-American poets have also employed the power of words to voice the common wound of war. This paper scrutinizes poetic testimonies of the Syrian civil war written by a number of Syrian-American and Syrian refugee poets showing how their normally different paths intersect. In doing so, the researchers mainly draw on trauma theory from a psychoanalytic perspective of Freud, Cathy Caruth, and others. There is also a special focus on testimonial literature termed by Suzette Henke as “scriptotherapy”, as it helps the traumatized heal and re-integrate into society and the human community at large.