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.

Multilingual narratives are a largely unexplored aspect of war memoirs in Iran (1980-present). Iran-Iraq war literature is mostly narrated by and centered around a male-Shi’a-Persian-speaking narrator. Even literary works that are produced by ethnic minorities during and after the war are mostly written in Persian, the official language of Iran. Nevertheless, there are moments in these texts that ethnic languages find a transient space to emerge and remain “untranslated.” Focusing on Da: Kh?ter?t-e Seyyedeh Zahra Hosseini (2008) and Nooreddin, Pesar-e Iran: Kh?terat-e Seyyed Nooreddin-e Afi (2011), this article argues that the emergence of minor languages provides a possibility to trace the implications of multilingualism and its relation to war trauma in Iranian official war literature. The momentary emergence of minor languages, particularly at the sites of trauma—losing a loved one, a limb, or homeland—allows us to examine the ways through which the “invisible” war trauma challenges the “monolingual” narrative of the war. Moreover, this linguistic shift contests the constructed homogenous notion of Iranian identity. Code-switching mostly happens when narrators of these books attempt to communicate their physical and psychological traumas of loss. Such language alternation between Persian and minor languages happens on both syntactic and semantic levels. It is sometimes a word, a phrase, a full sentence, or a line of a poem in their mother tongue that emerges in the Persian text and remains unintelligible for the monolingual-Persian speaker reader. Switching to their mother tongues, the narrators address a new interlocutor and a new community—a collectivity that is not centered around an exclusive and monolithic notion of Iranian identity and national language. In this shift, a new form of relationality both paves the way for working through trauma and addresses the plurality of hyphenated identities in Iran.

This paper aims to reframe the history of Moroccan anti-colonial cinema, by examining Noureddine Lakhmari’s Le Regard (2005). This landmark movie employs magical realism to endow Moroccan characters with an agency that they lacked due to the traumatic torture they endured during the war of independence. Robert Stam has argued that cinema, “as a technology of representation, is equipped to magically multiply times and spaces” (2005, 13). Le Regard revolves around Albert Tueis, a French photographer who, while organizing a photo exhibition in Paris, realizes that his exhibition is incomplete without the photographs he took of Moroccan prisoners while serving in the French army in 1955-56. Being haunted by memories of torture, especially of resistance fighter Issa Daoudi, he returns back to Morocco fifty years later in search for the photos he left behind. The film uses flashbacks as a narrative device. The flashbacks highlight Lakhmari’s use of magical realism in depicting the cruel treatment of Moroccan prisoners against a surreally calm scenery in the background. As a way of confronting an oppressive reality, the film resorts to surreal forms of agency in an attempt to redress the wrongs done to the victims. It also makes uses of techniques such as the gaze and lighting in order to transform their grim reality, allowing them a form of agency. The film opens magical realist spaces where the Moroccan others can become agents of their destiny. Lakhmari uses photography as a form of semiotic empowerment, thereby capturing different forms of agency through the photograph. Frederic Jameson's critical approach to magical realism in studying film images draws on the same methods used by visual art critics, while Ann Bowers examines how the narrative is informed by visual elements in magical realism. Lakhmari’s film resorts not only to visual elements such as photography but also to different forms of communication through the magical powers of gazing, thus intervening into the objectifying discourse of colonialism and the non-dialogic aspect of empire. Le Regard’s greatest accomplishment lies in its representation of the Moroccan other’s agency through multiple forms of magical powers in the struggle over access to signification. While drawing on the work of critics who have studied films in magic realist terms such as Fredric Jameson (1986), Ann Bowers (2004) and Robert Stam (2005), my analysis of Le Regard explores forms of agency and communication which critics of realist magical films have not addressed before.

Disenfranchised bodies contest normative processes of subject formation in global capitalism. They produce sociopolitical imaginaries that challenge capitalism’s utilitarian view of embodiment. In this paper, I examine the sociopolitical discourses generated by such disenfranchised bodies that are suffering the effects of oppression, mutilation, commodification, or structural violence. In the novel Khar??i? al-t?h (Maps of Loss) (2015), the Kuwaiti author Buthaynah al-??s? sheds light on the exploitative realities of organ trafficking and sexual violence in the Arab Gulf through a narrative about a seven-year old Kuwaiti child, who is abducted by an international organ trafficking network, while his parents are performing hajj in Mecca. In my reading of the novel, I explore how the economic structures of both the Arab Gulf states and the global black market view the human body as a site of extraction. I contend that extraction, in the form of the psychic and physical dismemberment of children, is a form of disenfranchisement. It simultaneously exposes processes of subject formation propagated by a global capitalist order, and the way such dismembered bodies deviate from the biopolitical regulation of state capitalism. In other words, children’s dismemberment diverges from the capitalist view of the subject as a unitary, self-contained, hence extractable whole. I argue that the commodification of human flesh generates an epistemic knowledge that cannot be fully subsumed under the extractive expectations of the capitalist order. Due to their marginalized position, dismembered bodies communicate, move, and convey their experiences in a manner that cannot be fully comprehended or extracted by capitalism. I examine the dismemberment of children’s bodies in the novel in conversation with Athena Athansiou and Judith Bulter’s iteration of dispossession, Sharon Marcus’ rape script, Gibson-Graham’s Marxian analysis of the capitalist body, and Saidiya Hartman’s theorizations of subjection to investigate how dismemberment generates social and political imaginaries that destabilize extractive economies of the body.