Dr Nora Parr (SOAS, London) presents "How do you say 'trauma' in Arabic? When critical terms cross uneven contexts"

'Trauma' as both word and concept came into its current (dominant) meaning in Interwar Europe and was honed in Post-Vietnam United States.  There, and then, 'trauma' came to mean a 'shock', something 'unspeakable', and 'other' to the everyday (LaCapra).  However, in the Arab World the experience of violence has its own past and its own cultural touchstones.  To understand 'trauma' in the Arab-world context, does the word 'trauma' suffice?  This talk explores the assumptions of trauma theory, and the limits that these assumptions (about trauma as an 'event', about silence as an eloquent and touching way to render the experience of violence, and the norms of chronology) place on the possibility of imagining trauma differently.  It then looks at some examples of Palestianian literature on and around the Nakba, the Lebanese Civil War, and the 'Spring' of Egypt.  Analysis of texts shows that learning how to say trauma in Arabic is not so much about finding the right word, but recognising the cultural weight and power structures that words carry with them when they travel across uneven contexts.