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The Poetics of Communicating Trauma in Iranian Post-war Cineture
Abstract
The Iran-Iraq war is a cataclysmic historical episode that continues to preoccupy the Iranian authors both in literature and film. Those local stories of Iran-Iraq war which aim to do justice to the traumatic event as experienced by the war’s victims, have to overcome a global double blind: trauma is an unspeakable experience but desperately calls to be expressed. What renders traumatic event largely unspeakable for the victims is what radically distinguishes it from other human experiences. Trauma is an event that is not experienced at the time of the occurrence of the original incident but one which is characterized by its incomplete registration at the time of occurrence and subsequent delayed obsessions and reenactments. Therefore, trauma is inherently experienced belatedly. The belated and insistent resurfacing of the fragmented memories, some reemerged with tremendous literality, provide the traumatic experience with a possessive or haunting quality. “To be traumatized”, therefore, as Cathy Caruth suggests, “is precisely to be possessed by an image or event.’’ Moreover, the insistent and intrusive eruption of the past into the present in trauma constitutes a unique temporality that cannot be grasped with a sequential notion of time. The victim of traumatic memory is trapped in a past that does not pass and is condemned to reenact the overwhelming horror. In order to adequately communicate these peculiarities, authors have to devise novel forms of storytelling. This paper explores the ways in which the Hossein Mortezaian Abkenar’s novel, Scorpion, and Rasoul Mollagholipour’s feature film, Mazraeye Pedari, have managed to communicate the peculiar experience of trauma. In these works, the impact of trauma is adequately represented by mimicking the symptoms of trauma and the forms it takes. Firstly, by departing from linear narrative and chronological time, these works are more faithful to the temporality of trauma. Secondly, the undecidable figures of specter or ghost that appear in these trauma narratives depict the haunting nature of trauma, and in their own turn, facilitate the disarticulation of chronological time. This paper seeks to demonstrate how the dream-like or surrealistic style of these narratives is not only a hindrance to, but is a means of, providing access to the traumatic event, and particularly, to what would remain untestifiable in a straightforward realist account, namely, the haunting nature of trauma, the undecidability of the characters’ existence and the peculiar temporality of traumatic entrapment.
Discipline
Art/Art History
Geographic Area
Iran
Sub Area
Iranian Studies