War Traumata in Literature: From Homer to Sahar Khelifeh

Abstract

In this paper, I identify and describe pain, its signs and symptoms, as manifested in various fictional combatants and noncombatants (civilians) in literary texts that span across few millennia and different cultures and literary genres. Since literature is imitation/representation/simulation of reality, it does give insight into the minds and souls of the characters populating it. From the writings of Homer in ancient Greece to the writings of Wilfred Owen, W.B. Yeats in Britain, Randal Jarrell in America, Ghassan Kanafani in Lebanon, Sahar Khalifeh in Palestine, and others, one can discern war tormented and traumatized characters exhibiting all sorts of symptoms, such as the Agamemnon and Achilles’ syndrome, and the Ulysses-Rambo syndrome. The symptoms exhibited by such tormented characters are similar to and go beyond those inscribed in the scholarly and professional literature in medicine and psychiatry. The paper affirms that war traumas, and pain in certain cases and under certain conditionality that involve occupation of territories and dislocation of civilians, become contagious and dangerous as the plague where the infected becomes either very sick and dies or very sick and lives.