Transgenerational Trauma and Mental Health Needs among Armenian Genocide Descendants

The trauma of a genocide can be transmitted to subsequent generations though familial mental health, sociopolitical trauma, and cultural narratives, thereby impacting mental health and well-being. Understanding specific mechanisms that are unique to each ethnic group impacted by genocide illuminates cultural, sociopolitical, and individual factors related to the transmission. For the Armenian community, the unresolved historical loss of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, with the threat of acculturation for such a large diasporic population, a continued denial by the perpetrators, as well as subsequent generations’ refugee experiences, may further exasperate the impact of transgenerational trauma from the genocide. This literature review explores the mental health needs of Armenian youth in the current sociopolitical context and provides implications for how schools and communities may use this knowledge to inform supports that center Armenian community healing. Future directions for research are also discussed.

Exile and the Disabled Body in Randa Jarrar’s “The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Zelwa the Halfie”

This paper seeks to analyse the notion of exile as one of paradox, of being both within and without, as a disconnect between the mind and body. Edward Said has noted that exile is “strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience”. Said’s suggestion of a mind/body split gives us room to consider the sense of self as already in-between, as the exiled ‘I’ attempts to find a home within a new land and a new body. Exile from one’s own homeland is also exile from one’s body in Arab-American author’s Randa Jarrar’s latest novel Him, Me, and Muhamad Ali (2016). The collection of stories moves away from reclamatory approaches to ethnic identity and examines the characters’ trajectories of selfhood through a gendered, racialized, and embodied image. Disability features as a site of tension, a site of interrogation of Zelwa’s (the protagonist) sense of self. It is a peculiar coming-of-age narrative in the sense that it is an anti-Bildungsroman, a probe into bodies that fail to be integrated, assimilated, or acclimated to American culture, while also failing to maintain their association with an Arab collective identity. Jarrar’s text underscores and redefines the “I” of the Arab immigrant exploring transgenerational trauma and reclaiming her identity through celebrating the body.

Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book: Indigenous-Australian Swansong or Songline?

The Swan Book (pub. 2013) by the Indigenous-Australian author Alexis Wright is an eco-dystopian epic about the Indigenous people’s tough struggle to regain the environmental balance of the Australian continent and recover their former habitat. The book envisions a dire future in which all Australian flora and fauna—humans included—are under threat, suffering, displaced, and dying out as the result of Western colonization and its exploitative treatment of natural resources. The Swan Book goes beyond the geographical and epistemological scope of Wright’s previous two novels, Plains of Promise (pub. 1997) and Carpentaria (pub. 2006) to imagine what the Australian continent at large will look like under the ongoing pressure of the Western, exploitative production mode in a foreseeable future. The occupation of Aboriginal land in Australia’s Northern Territory since 2007 has allowed the federal government to intervene dramatically in what they term the dysfunctional remote Aboriginal communities; these are afflicted by transgenerational trauma, endemic domestic violence, alcoholism, and child sexual and substance abuse—in themselves the results of the marginal status of Indigeneity in Australian society—and continued control over valuable resources. This essay will discuss how Wright’s dystopian novel exemplifies an Indigenous turn to speculative fiction as a more successful way to address the trials and tribulations of Indigenous Australia and project a better future—an enabling songline rather than a disabling swansong.

Emotionale Objekte und die Last der Vergangenheit

Summary In many literary texts the haptic symbolism of transgenerational trauma is illustrated by objects. Inherited artefacts are in this understanding symbolic as well as indexical: e. g. when amulets, that are worn around the neck, illustrate a burden inherited from earlier generations. Such a meaning becomes often evident already in the symbolic act of passing down an object to a successor. The paper lays its focus especially on motifs of interaction between characters and objects that illustrate their coping with the emotional charge of the past. This is to shed light on the emotional value of different objects and on the mimesis of the physiologically perceived burdens of trauma.