Contemporary

Scheherazades:
Modern Arab Women Narrate Their War
Stories
Danah Hashem
Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Salem State University
December 3, 2015

The Hashems

Scheherazades Model

Metanarrative
Jean-Franois Lyotard

Trauma and Memory

What is trauma?
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma,
Narrative, and History (1996)
How does memory relate to trauma?
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises
of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and
History (1992)
Difficulties with Trauma Memories
Difficult or impossible to access
Non-linear or image based

Multidirectional Memory
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory:

Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of

Decolonization (2009)

Working Thesis
Arab women in my nations of study often use
art or literature to narrate and externalize their
wartime traumas, sometimes creating
alternatives to the metanarratives dominating
the violent conflicts in which they live. Their
narrations create new potentials for healing and
trauma recovery for both themselves as
individuals and for their nations collectively.

Dehomogenization: A Major
Project Goal
Arab Women
Nations of Study
Lebanon
Palestine
Syria

Chapter 1: Lebanese Civil War

1975 1990

Alternative Narratives
Beirut Decentrists
Confronting the trauma in

the wars aftermath

Lebanese Authors
Hanan al-Shaykh, The Story of Zahra (1988)

Hoda Barakat, The Stone of Laughter (1988)

Barakat & al-Shaykh: Processing

Trauma
Individual
Externalizing personal memories of war
Judith Herman stages of recovery

Collective
state-sponsored collective amnesia

(Haugbolle, Little Militia Man 121).

Facilitating collective awareness and trauma
healing

Ongoing Questions
Can I apply Judith Hermans steps to trauma

recovery to a collective trauma?

Chapter 2: Palestinian-Israeli
Conflict

Alternative Narrative: Hope for what

Palestine could be

Nateels Work: If I Wasnt

There

Postmemory and Prosthetic

Memory
Marianne Hirsch, The

Generation of
Postmemory: Writing
and Visual Culture After
the Holocaust (2012)
Alison Landsberg,

Prosthetic Memory: The

Transformation of
American Remembrance
in the Age of Mass
Culture (2004)

Ongoing Questions
If Nateel has created these prosthetic

memories that never actually happened, who

is the rightful owner of these memories?
Can you call what she is painting memories if

no one ever lived them?

Chapter 3: Syrian Civil War

Alternative Narrative: The reality of life for the

rebels

Nour Kelze
I gave up to death.

Kelzes Work: Countering

Media
Judith Butlers Frames of War (2009)
How do Kelzes photographs change the way we

view the worth or humanity of Syrian life?

Susan Sontags On Photography (1977)
Does Kelzes work just serve as another means

by which we as viewers can distance ourselves

from what is happening in Syria?
Ariella Azoulays Potential History (2013)
How does Kelzes work enable her to revise the

worlds concept or metanarrative of the Syrian

civil war?

Ongoing Questions
What is the significance behind these women

narrating outside of the established

metanarratives?
Is healing from trauma enhanced by working

outside of the established, dominant

discourse?
Suggestions?