The Journey to Death: Fictionalizing the Syrian Refugee Crisis in Khaled Hosseini’s Sea Prayer

This paper explores the fictional representation of the Syrian refugee crisis in Khaled Hosseini's novel Sea Prayer (2018). The novel is considered a refugee narrative, examining the question of home, displacement, and the fateful journeys of the Syrian refugees. The novel depicts the heart-wrenching experiences of the refugee community in war-torn Syrian city Homs before and after the outbreak of the civil war in the country. Evoking the tragic death of Alan Kurdi, Hosseini vividly illustrates the various dimensions of the Syrian refugee crisis, including the outbreak of the civil war in Syria and the eventual birth of refugees, their homelessness/statelessness, perilous journey to escape the persecution, xenophobic attitudes towards them, and post-war trauma. This paper draws on postcolonial refugee narratives, concept of journeys of non-arrival, memory, and trauma studies to elucidate its argument. The contention here is that the current crisis in Syria is also accounted for by analyzing the fictional refugee narratives. The unspeakable trauma is communicated through fiction, and Hosseini’s novel depicts the dangers engulfed and the hope entrusted in the refugees’ journeys.

"How do you Criticize a Life Story?"

“‘How do you Criticize a Life Story?’: Form, Trauma, and Memoir in Canada Reads 2020” investigates the practice of reading for empathy, as it pertains to memoir and trauma operating in the hypervisibility of the public sphere. The emotional connection between reader and author that memoir inspires is also encouraged on Canada Reads, the popular intersection of a literary contest and reality show. The panelists’ 2020 discussion of Jesse Thistle’s From the Ashes and Samra Habib’s We Have Always Been Here encouraged reading as a means of empathizing with the author’s experiences. As Danielle Fuller details, this is also how many viewers appraise the titles featured on Canada Reads, adopting a method of literary evaluation that is inherently personal. Memoir, given its connection to the real world and real people, becomes an excellent candidate for connecting with the reader. While Philippe Lejeune argues that memoir must be entirely non-fictional, G. Thomas Couser and Leigh Gilmore demonstrate that for a genre grappling with selective memory and trauma, this is impossible. As a result, memoir proves to be a genre that is both popular amongst readers and necessarily literary and inventive in its construction. The popularity of Canada Reads and memoir indicate that empathetic reading deserves a place in literary discourse, which in turn reimagines the Canadian literary canon and traditional methods of evaluation.

Filmic Therapeutic Encounters and Resistance: Silence, Forgetting, and Guilt in the Face of Historical Violence

Mental disorder and therapeutic encounters are central aspects of three films that were groundbreaking in addressing collective trauma in the aftermath of slavery, colonialism, or genocide: Peele’s GET OUT (USA), Ruhorahoza’s GREY MATTER (Rwanda) and Mhando and Mulvihill’s MAANGAMIZI—THE ANCIENT ONE (Tanzania/USA). Recurring to theories of collective memory and trauma, the article assumes that asymmetric historical violence causes a crisis of reason among the victims, and that the affective dream-like technique of film has the potential to make unutterable mental conditions explicit and relatable without trivializing their complexities. Oppression is usually perpetuated by an alliance of domination with forgetting, silencing, and a sense of guilt, inflicted on the victims who are thereupon labeled as overly sensitive, moronic, or insane. The films depict mental conditions caused by collective trauma which are expressed by haunting memories, ancestral visions, or victims being possessed by their oppressors. A central element is the depiction of problematic therapeutic encounters which may be abusive, manipulative or turn the patient–therapist relation upside down. By challenging notions of therapy and critically addressing its potential embeddedness in power relations, it is argued, the films themselves serve as a form of postcolonial therapy and empowerment.

The case for graphic counter-memorials in the comics of Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, and Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli

My dissertation considers a group of contemporary comics about war by Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, and Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli, as examples of a larger genre I call the graphic counter-memorial. Graphic counter-memorial comics address history, memory, and trauma as they depict the political, violent, and collective aspects of war and social conflict. I argue that the particular comics I study in this dissertation, which mingle fiction and non-fiction and autobiography as well as journalism, follow the tradition of the counter-monuments described by James E. Young. Studying commemorative practices and counter-monuments in the 1980s, Young notes a generation of German artists who resist traditional forms of memorialization by upending the traditional monument structure in monument form. Young looks at the methods, aims, and aesthetics these artists use to investigate and problematize practices that establish singular historical narratives. Like these works of public art, the graphic counter-memorial asks the reader to question ‘official history,’ authenticity, and the objectivity typically associated with non-fiction and reporting. I argue that what these comics offer is an opportunity to re-examine comics that incorporate real and familiar social and historical events and wars. Comics allow creators to visually and textually overlap perspectives and time. Graphic counter-memorials harness the comic medium’s potential to refuse fixed narratives of history by emphasizing a sense of incompleteness in their representation of trauma, memory, and war. This makes possible a more complex and rich way to engage with Western society’s relationship to the past, and in particular, a more complex way of engaging with collective memory and war. Their modes of mediating history produce political intervention through both form and content.

The case for graphic counter-memorials in the comics of Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, and Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli

My dissertation considers a group of contemporary comics about war by Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, and Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli, as examples of a larger genre I call the graphic counter-memorial. Graphic counter-memorial comics address history, memory, and trauma as they depict the political, violent, and collective aspects of war and social conflict. I argue that the particular comics I study in this dissertation, which mingle fiction and non-fiction and autobiography as well as journalism, follow the tradition of the counter-monuments described by James E. Young. Studying commemorative practices and counter-monuments in the 1980s, Young notes a generation of German artists who resist traditional forms of memorialization by upending the traditional monument structure in monument form. Young looks at the methods, aims, and aesthetics these artists use to investigate and problematize practices that establish singular historical narratives. Like these works of public art, the graphic counter-memorial asks the reader to question ‘official history,’ authenticity, and the objectivity typically associated with non-fiction and reporting. I argue that what these comics offer is an opportunity to re-examine comics that incorporate real and familiar social and historical events and wars. Comics allow creators to visually and textually overlap perspectives and time. Graphic counter-memorials harness the comic medium’s potential to refuse fixed narratives of history by emphasizing a sense of incompleteness in their representation of trauma, memory, and war. This makes possible a more complex and rich way to engage with Western society’s relationship to the past, and in particular, a more complex way of engaging with collective memory and war. Their modes of mediating history produce political intervention through both form and content.

Oral History Illustrated by the Case of Cyprus

Oral history offers unique meaning for curriculum studies by presenting, analyzing, and interpreting experiences and memories of participants in an educational situation. The situation and context of Cyprus, an island with protracted conflicts and ethnical division, provides sites of illustration for oral history in curriculum studies. Couched in an historical background of oral history and definitions, as well as characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of narrative inquiry, the essence and application of oral history can be conveyed through the case of Cyprus. Oral history projects undertaken in Cyprus are conveyed, with prominent reference to the Cyprus Oral History Project (COHP), which has delineated the nuances of language, performance, and creation of pedagogical spaces. For example, COHP established a link among oral history, curriculum, instruction, and education, which has been used in Cyprus to understand memory as curriculum and to rethink issues of language and curricular questions in light of the knowledge drawn from oral histories. Further, oral history projects in Cyprus have delineated refugee trauma through the description of loss, painful memories, and silence; how narratives worked as significant evidence and material in conflict and reconciliation workshops; and the importance of the gender lens of oral history in Cyprus. The themes of cultivating historical consciousness, shaping responses to conflict, discomforting pedagogy, memory and trauma, and their role in the reunification process have been explored extensively through such projects; yet, more extensive work needs to be done. The number of oral history projects is still limited, yet there is still so much to be uncovered through people’s narrations. In the case of Cyprus, oral history is considered as a source of information about ordinary people’s lives but also for the role it can play in understanding how being dispossessed and returning to the homeland can reconstruct and reorganize education and culture. The uses of oral history to understand curriculum in Cyprus is offered as an example for modified use for exploring a broader sphere of curriculum studies in other settings.

Survivance and Remembrance: A Study of Trauma and Chronotope in the Book of Gold Leaves

The book of Gold leaves by Mirza Waheed aims to present the interconnectedness of memory and trauma in making the survival of an individual complicated. Memory of any incident makes it traumatic when it returns with haunted effects. Remembrance of traumatic incidents makes survival complicated by creating a distressing situation for the devastated self by switching the timeless past into the present through Bakhtin's chronotopic images of time and place. Struggle to re-memorize the event through narration is like denying the traditional concept of indescribability of trauma and narration is equal to re-live that moment and be at that place again in the memory when places turned into traumatic sites and time ceased. Time becomes circular and these sites become a referent of that devastating time according to Caruth, it is the trauma of survival rather than the death that pinches most. Waheed's book of Gold leaves is a part of Kashmiri literature, explores the struggle to gain freedom and identity through collective losses. Intriguing situations of lockdown and bombings are enough to create hollow identities. Thus Words, being semantically analyzed, heighten the trauma of survival through the Spatio-temporal spectrum.

Búsquedas estéticas para el afecto y la desafección. La memoria de hijos de sobrevivientes y desaparecidos en Chile y Argentina

Using a methodological framework based on cultural studies concerning transgenerational memory and trauma, on the one hand, and theoretical contributions on affection and emotions, on the other, this article analyzes and compares a series of novels and films written and made by Chilean and Argentine novelists and filmmakers in which they reflect on exile, forced disappearance and the violence perpetrated by the dictatorships of the Southern Cone. In particular, it investigates the way in which affection is encoded in the contemporary literary and audiovisual production of these sons and daughters of the disappeared and of former militants. For this purpose, the relationships of tension, resignification, dialogue and / or questioning about the role of fathers and mothers in the lives of these children and their configuration in some illustrative works are analyzed. We begin with a consideration of the compositional and formal resources of these stories in order to then, on an interpretive level, link these aesthetic decisions with different strategies that are used to deal with the complex situations experienced in childhood and with relationships with parents. Finally, the interpretation leads to identifying different aesthetic choices and possible resolutions related to the affective world that help to promote memory and build a present and an identity.