Poetry of Witness: A Traumatic Reading of Carolyn Forché and Fady Joudah’s War Poetry

Abstract
Introduction
Among many others, the aftermath of the Cold War generated two poets whose works of art significantly impacted their traumatized audiences. Forché and Joudah are among those whose lives were altered following their visit to war zones. The former is known as an established, and the other as a doctor who is not loaded with literary studies, will be considered a non-established one. As a poet, editor, and human rights advocate, Forché is seriously concerned with traumas that ordinary people face in tragic events such as war, genocide, social and political upheavals, as well as any other similar incidents that would devastate them emotionally and psychologically.
Background
The poet-journalist Forché introduced a self-created term called ‘poetry of witness,’ she relates it to the poets and non-poets globally similar to herself who endured a catastrophic event and composed regarding that event. She gathered a collection of 144 poets and published the book Against Forgetting (1993).
There is no record of Fady Joudah’s education in literature, yet his poems and translations were rewarded. Moreover, a poet, Baker, interviewed Joudah in his Kenyon Review Journal (2009). Baker discusses Joudah’s poetry style and states, "Joudah’s poetry is rich with the influences and styles of American and Arabic poetry. It can be personal and image-driven, by turns, as well as discursive and social” (69).
Methodology
To go through the ‘Poetry of Witness’ composed by the two traumatized artists, a blend of Laub and LaCapra’s theories has been applied to their poems; although mastered in distinct majors, psychology and historicism, respectively, Laub and LaCapra are both seriously concerned with trauma. In Bearing Witness(1991), Laub divides the process of witnessing into three classes, the “second-level,” referring to the population of people including journalists and reporters who have gathered information.
As pinpointed by Laub, since both Forché and Joudah have been first-world witnesses who encountered traumas in a foreign, third-world country, they are categorized as ‘second-level witnesses.’ To come to terms with their trauma, they both initially resolved to poetry; studying their composures would illuminate their steps toward closure and, in LaCapra’s words, whether they have ‘acted out’ or ‘worked through’ their trauma. By acting out, he refers to a type of mourning for trauma, he states in his article “Trauma, Absence, Loss” (1999) that “Mourning involves a different inflection of performativity: a relation to the past that involves recognizing its difference from the present-simultaneously remembering and taking leave of or actively forgetting it” (716).
The next step in LaCapra’s trauma treatment is “working-through.” the critic in “Trauma, Absence, Loss” (1999) states that “a basis of the desirable practice is to create conditions in which working-through, while never fully transcending the force of acting-out and the repetition compulsion, may nonetheless counteract or at least mitigate it in order to generate different possibilities” (718). Respectively, an amalgamation of these concepts will be administered to the chosen poems desiring to achieve the “trauma treatment” goal through poetry.
Conclusion
This article aimed to disclose that a person, whether classified as established or not, would successfully ‘work through’ their trauma via reading and writing poetry. This case was considerably under suspicion when both poets did not only suffice to compose, they moved forward by editing books and gathering more than a hundred poets sharing the same pain in the matter of Forché and Joudah, as a physician, continued his medical path by helping people in need, especially in more underprivileged areas. It could be concluded that in this way, their poetry has assisted them in finding their mission of helping themselves and others physically and emotionally to overcome their trauma.