Revising Trauma Theory: Trauma as Identity Construction and the Discontented Self in Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma (2007)

This essay will examine the concept of traumatic identity in My Name is Salma, exploring theories of traumatic identity and their relationship to the self in Arab Literature, the social context of the text and its historical resonance, and representation and identity via the female traumatic experience. The analysis will seek to reflect upon the impact and convergence of feminism, trauma and post colonialism within issues like the construction of the self, belonging, and the juxtaposition of homeland and exile. This essay argues, in part, that Arab women writers embrace trauma in their texts, while simultaneously critiquing the effects of trauma on the construction of personal identity. In particular, the work of Jordanian author, Fadia Faqir, in her novel, My Name is Salma (2007), provides a first-person narrative of the narrator and protagonist, Salma, who defines her personal identity as constructed from trauma, yet who is unable to process, mediate, or overcome her traumatic past. As she nevertheless attempts to construct a coherent narrative of self, the character of Salma allows readers insights into her thoughts, actions, and the way she views herself. This essay asserts further that the types of trauma that inform Salma’s narrative of self also speak to the experiences of many women in Arab states, such as the social stigmatization of so-called illegitimate birth, the violence of honour killing, racial abuse, Othering, and the dire circumstances and suffering inherent in life as a refugee.

Not Going to Plan

Even those families for whom works of literature and learning afforded ways of projecting themselves into the past and the future did not always follow through smoothly on that projecting. Many works of literature and learning therefore communicated a version of family that did not square with smooth patrilinear norms. One kind of disruption was illegitimate birth. Others included bitter personal, confessional, and inheritance-based divisions within families. Two case studies are highlighted: that of the poet and magistrate Jean Vauquelin de la Fresnaye and his children, in particular his courtier and libertin-poet son Nicolas Vauquelin des Yveteaux; and that of Nicolas Vignier (the once-Protestant historian) and the confessionally divided literary producers who were his descendants.

The Monstrous Birth of Alexander the Great

Alone among the French romances of Alexander the Great penned in the twelfth century, Thomas de Kent’s Roman de toute chevalerie reproduces the story of Alexander’s illegitimate birth from the principal Latin source. According to this account, Alexander’s father was Nectanabus, a mage and astrologer who seduced Queen Olympias with an astronomy lesson, deceived her by using animal pelts to disguise himself as a god, and then used his magic arts to retard the child’s birth when his astrological calculations indicated the child would be born a hybrid man-beast. Thomas wrote his romance at the very moment when both astrology and paradoxography (the writing of marvels) were being reevaluated as means of understanding the world, and so Alexander’s odd birth offers a reflection — shaped by the romance genre — on the limitations and ethical implications of medieval natural science.

“Be Not Afeared”

This paper looks at the thematic and rhetorical variations of a fundamental fear that frequently surfaces in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: the fear of illegitimate birth, which may also be understood as the fear of non-contractual sexuality. Sycorax is the prominent supernatural figure that the play deploys to depict unpredictable, indeterminate and horrible acts of creation unsanctioned by society. The paper shows how the fear of illegitimate birth not only shapes entire characters such as Sycorax and Caliban, but also infiltrates the language and figures that prevail in Prospero’s orchestrations of the marriage plot, his betrothal masque and his deployment of Greco-Roman mythologies (Hymen, Venus and Cupid). This fear is also connected with the play’s other fears and desires evoked in Gonzalo’s anarchist utopia and in the play’s preoccupations with the issue of legitimate government. The focus on the fear of illegitimate birth and non-contractual sexuality connects the different plot elements and rhetorical devices used in the play in a novel way, providing a plausible explanation for Prospero’s burst at Caliban in the masque scene and foregrounding (and hence doing justice to) the long-neglected figure of Sycorax.

The Medici Family

Members of the Medici family were arguably the most-conspicuous social climbers of the Renaissance period. In the 15th century the principal branch of the family acquired great wealth from banking and commerce and used it to exercise political influence in the Florentine republic, but in the 16th century the republic gave way to a principate, with the Medici as dukes of Florence and grand dukes of Tuscany, a transformation made possible by the election of Medici popes. Whether as citizens or as princes, posterity has placed so much emphasis on their cultural patronage that they have often been cast as central figures of the Renaissance as a cultural phenomenon. This article opens with General Overviews, Reference Works, Collections of Papers, and Digital Resources, all of which span various generations of the family’s history, but then follows the example of so many works in those opening sections by taking a chronological approach to the subject. The section on the Earlier Medici takes the story up to the death of Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici in 1429. Thereafter, the article traces the family’s rising economic and political fortunes in the Generation of Cosimo il Vecchio, the initial reaction against their anti-republican instincts in the Generation of Piero il Gottoso, and the more determined but ultimately futile opposition in the Generation of Lorenzo il Magnifico. From that point the story is much more complicated, in part because there was a genuine difference of opinion about whether republican Florence was better off with or without the Medici, and in part because that portion of the dynasty known as the line of Cafaggiolo dwindled to a clerically-led rump. Those clerics were nevertheless the key to what happened next. The first Medici pope, Leo X, obtained titles of nobility for his kinsmen, and the second, Clement VII, ensured that his niece Caterina married into the ruling French house of Valois and that Alessandro de’ Medici, regardless of his illegitimate birth, became the first duke of Florence. Leo is featured among the Children of Lorenzo il Magnifico; Caterina/Catherine and Alessandro, among the Other Descendants of Lorenzo il Magnifico to 1537, the year that began with Alessandro’s assassination by his kinsman Lorenzino de’ Medici. If anything, when Florence rejected its republican past and embraced a dynastic present and future, it created a model that other states followed: many a feature of what came to be regarded as the ancien régime could be seen first in the Tuscany of Cosimo I, Francesco I, and Ferdinando I. Their title may have been inflated from duke of Florence to grand duke of Tuscany, but by the Generations of Cosimo II and Ferdinando II, their realm was becoming a somewhat Ruritanian shadow of its former self, while the economic and political initiative was assumed by the Atlantic powers.

The Right to a Father's Name: A Historical Perspective on State Efforts to Combat the Stigma of Illegitimate Birth in Brazil

Over the past decade, state agencies throughout Brazil have launched initiatives that aim to defend children's rights to their father's name. These initiatives take the form of discrete programs in different states, all of which seek to identify children who lack a paternal last name—an estimated 10–25 percent of all Brazilian children —in hopes of finding their fathers and encouraging or obligating them to legally recognize their paternity and inscribe their names on the children's birth registries. Project staff also sometimes formalize child support arrangements, although this is not the primary objective. Instead, Responsible Paternity projects (as most of them are known) seek to free children from the social stigma of illegitimate birth, thus protecting their constitutional right to equality and human dignity.

Medico-social and demographical tendencies in forming of reproductive health

In the article the medico-social and demographical tendencies in forming of reproductive health are minutely considered. Among them there are: mass prevalence of little number of children in the family, postponement of the date of the first childs birth, increase of illegitimate birth rate and change of optimal reproductive age coefficients of women groups may be mentioned. Changes of reproductive conducthave the great significance in the organization of obstetric- gynaecological care. Methods of dispensary observation includingpsychological training of married couples for delivery demand perfection. Pregnancy and delivery conducting of women incoming the groups of high risk of maternal and perinatal pathology also expects attention.