The atrocities of the Arab-led slave trade can be traced long before the transatlantic slave trade and even prior to the advent of Islam, which persisted systematically into the twentieth century, and even into the twenty-first century according to some scholars. Arab enslavement included Africans of various ethnicities as well as other ethnic groups of people of varying skin colors. Throughout the thirteen centuries of the Arab-led slave trade, whose perpetrators included Muslim, Christian and Jewish men, the number of enslaved Black and Afro-Arabs continued to increase while the number of enslaved white and lighter-skinned ones gradually decreased in the Arabic-speaking world. Notably, despite the long duration and atrocity of the Arab-led slave trade against Black-skinned individuals, there is a dearth of serious engagement with slavery and anti-Black racism in Arabic scholarship. Unlike previous Arab novelists, who treated slavery and anti-Blackness as marginal, sensitive topics in canonical Arabic literature, contemporary Arab novelists re-center the Black experience in their narratives, attempting to advance the conversation on anti-Black racism in the Arabic-speaking world. After examining a corpus of contemporary Arabic novels, I argue that the atrocity of enslavement and the suffering of enslaved Black and Afro-Arab individuals remains disregarded in Arabic literature and criticism. The lack of engagement with such an issue—among others—renders Black and Afro-Arab people to feel marginalized as if they were not part of the history and present-day of the Arabic-speaking world. This presentation focuses on the traumatic impact endured by Black and Afro-Arab characters as depicted in contemporary Arabic narratives. By utilizing the lens of literary trauma theory, which is relatively disregarded in Arabic literary criticism, I investigate the psychological suffering and traumatized experiences that Black and Afro-Arab protagonists endure during abduction, enslavement, and even after the end of enslavement. For an in-depth analysis of enslaved traumatized characters, I select Salmeen as an example of a contemporary Arabic novel produced in 2015 by Yemeni author ʻAmmar Ba Tawil. Ba Tawil highlights an active period of enslavement during the Arab-led slave trade in which Afro-Yemenis silently yet intolerably suffer racial subordination and traumatic stress in the twentieth century. By offering a close reading of Salmeen, my goal is to examine the persistence of intrusive traumatic memories and discuss the construction of the traumatized Black identity under enslavement.