Echoes of Iraqis’ Plight: Reading a Selection of Hassan Blasim’s Short Stories as Trauma Narratives

الملخص

Literature has played a fundamental role with respect to the conceptualization of the sufferings of trauma survivors, signifying a close kinship between literary tropes and clinical symptoms. Nevertheless, what many writers have emphasized is not the inevitable continuity of the trauma throughout history, but the transformations that gave birth to a post-trauma diagnosis and turned it into a narrative and cultural force. Some Iraqi writers have sufficiently registered the traumas and their psychological and social aftermath which Iraqis experienced throughout different phases of their history. Contemporary Iraqi narrativists have shown the nature of trauma and the variety of its forms and consequences in their fiction. Hassan Blasim is not an exception. He has dedicated his entire short fiction to elucidate what the Iraqi people went through from 1980 to post-2003. The present study draws upon the theory of “trauma narratives” which is pioneered by American university professor and trauma theorist Laurie Vickroy. In doing so, it ultimately attempts to read five of Blasim’s short stories as trauma narratives which focus on the psychologically destructive impacts of wars which people in combat zones suffer from.