Through a comparative reading, I will examine the artistic manners in which a selection of post-World War II Arab-American literary texts builds a strategy of excavating historic events of violence at home and in the Middle East through a poetics-of-suspended-crisis. I look at novels and poetry of wartime and psychosis by Elmaz Abinader, Etel Adnan, Susan Abulhawa, Naomi Shihab Nye and Susan Muaddri Darraj. My analysis contextualizes their literary influences within the work of such comparative writers like Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut as they depict trauma and violence. I draw on the work of Maurice Blanchot on the impossibility of thinking disaster juxtaposed with Walter Benjamin’s notion of violence, mythic or divine, as belonging to the metaphysics of absolute negation. I place these theoretical intimidations alongside, for example, Nye’s inscription of violence as strangeness inherent in our agitation and fundamental disorientation. My analysis further examines two interrelated issues. First, the aesthetic manners used to map out the psychic wounds left by wars and inscribed through poetic and fictional language. Here, I attempt to answer the following questions: what are some of the psychological and mental areas that are being historicized in such a fiction and poetry? How does an inflicted writing begin to historicize war based on an attention to aestheticizing the splitting of human understanding of reality, the fragmentation of mental being and the disintegration of psychological equilibrium? Second, my analysis of these texts will explore the relationship between war literature and history. What would it mean to speak of the aesthetics of history and the historicity of literary aesthetics? I am interested in demonstrating that the relationship between these forms of writing and the philosophy of history underscores the political and cultural place of literature and history in the contemporary Arab-American writing. By taking the writing on violence out of hierarchical, imperialistic, pseudo-scientific, and repressive frameworks, and by positioning the acts of conceiving violence elsewhere- that is in a poetics of literary deferral, I am situating my reading of these narratives within a fresh debate about a poetics-of-suspended-reflexivity, which reads violence from the philosophical and literary ideas of post-apocalyptic visions. Ultimately, I argue that these writers, memoirists, and poets have deployed transitional events from the Nakba (the catastrophe) of 1948 all the way to 9/11 to rethink fresh literary paradigms reimagining an anti-eschatological vision of language and history as unresolved landscapes of imagination.