Displacement as a traumatic experience in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010) and Khaled Hosseini's Sea Prayer (2018)

This paper examines how Susan Abulhawa and Khaled Hosseini narratively structure the displacement experience as traumatic one in Mornings in Jenin (2010) and Sea Prayer (2018). Both writers display this experience in light of its resulting catastrophic aftermath that Palestinians and Syrians have been enduring. To fully grasp the profound effects of this daily lived reality, this study adopts an interdisciplinary approach combining socio-psychological and literary examination. Both literary works are examined within the theoretical framework of Cathy Caruth’s psychoanalytic notion of the ‘repetitive seeing’ of ‘the story of the accident’, and what Deborah Horvitz postulates the different symptoms that haunt the consciousness of a traumatized person. These symptoms of PTSD will be examined as a post-traumatic effect of displacement experience. Narrators in Mornings in Jenin and Sea Prayer are depicted as a nostalgic spectrum of traumatized refugees. The Palestinian nostalgic pattern represented in Mornings in Jenin serves as a positive psychological function, ‘increasing self-esteem’ and ‘alleviating their existential threat’. The plight of Syrian refugees in Sea Prayer echoes another positive psychological function embedded in the positive emotion of persistence to preserve heritage. In this sense, the focal characters of the selected narratives of displacement are depicted as traumatized eyewitnesses of the Palestinian and Syrian plights. This paper chiefly answers the question: to what extent is nostalgia interwoven with the dialectics of displacement and memory? In other words, how far the past and the present are mingled in the displaced person’s consciousness as “a metaphoric designation” for “an absent presence" ? To answer this question, the first section of the paper is devoted to the theoretical framework. The second part presents the analysis and, a discussion of the selected texts. The last section offers answers to the research question and a conclusion.