شعر شاهد: خوانش روان زخمی از سروده های جنگ کارولین فورشه و فادی جودا

نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی پژوهشی

نویسندگان

1 گروه زبان و ادبیات انگلیسی، واحد مرکزی، دانشگاه آزاد اسلامی، تهران، ایران

2 استادیار زبان و ادبیات انگلیسی، گروه زبان، واحد پرند، دانشگاه آزاد اسلامی، تهران، ایران

چکیده

این پژوهش به دو شاعری می پردازد که شعر خود را در دوران پس از جنگ سرد سروده‌ اند. کارولین فورشه و فادی جودا از جمله کسانی هستند که زندگی شان پس از بازدیدشان از مناطق جنگی در سراسر جهان، تغییر کرد. شاعر اول را شناخته شده، و دیگری را به عنوان پزشکی که تحصیلات آکادمیک ادبی ندارد در نظر میگیرند. با وجود اینکه هر دو شاعر در آمریکا به دنیا آمده اند، اصالت اروپای شرقی و خاورمیانه ای، طرز فکر و نگارششان را نسبت به دیگر ادیبان آمریکایی متمایز کرد. بررسی اشعار آنها، با استفاده از کلمه کلیدی «شاهدان سطح دوم» ابداع شده توسط دوری لاب که شخصاً حادثه را از نزدیک تجربه کرده بود، و همچنین «شعر شاهد»، اصطلاحی که کارولین فورشه مطرح کرده است، دلالت بر میزان آسیبی دارد که فرد در صورت مشاهده بحران‌ها یا اخبار آسیب ‌زا، از آن رنج می ‌برد. از این تحلیل می توان چنین نتیجه گرفت که صرف شعر سرودن پایان کار شاعر نیست، بلکه شعر سرایی راه را برای ارتباط با افراد آسیب دیده تر هموار می کند و از این طریق شاعر به رسالت خود کمال می بخشد و در برخی موارد، به روشی هماهنگ ترومای خود را نیز درمان کنند.

کلیدواژه‌ها


عنوان مقاله [English]

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

نویسندگان [English]

  • Seyedeh Yasaman Ghodsi 1
  • Narges Montakhabi 1
  • Razieh Eslamieh 2
1 English Literature, Central Branch, Azad University, Tehran, Iran
2 Department of English, Parand Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran
چکیده [English]

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.

کلیدواژه‌ها [English]

  • second-level trauma
  • the poetry of witness
  • trauma
  • acting out
  • working through
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Bahmanpour, Bahareh and Amir Ali Nojoumian. “A Haunted Narrative: Signifying Trauma of Displacement in Lahiri's Trilogy of "Hema and Kaushik" in her Unaccustomed Earth.” Journal of Critical Language & Literary Studies. Shahid Beheshti University Press, 2018. pp. 77-97.
Baker, David. Talk Poetry: Poems and Interviews with Nine American Poets. The University of Arkansas Press. 2012.
Breuer, Josef and Sigmund Freud. Studies in Hysteria, translated by Nicola Luckhrust, Penguin classics, 2004.
Davis, Colin. “Interpreting, Ethics and Witnessing in La Peste and La Chute.” Traces of War:                           Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Twentieth-Century French Writing, LiverpoolUniversity Press, 2018, pp. 80–116.  
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Translated by Peggy Kamuf, New York and London: Routledge. 2006.
Forché (1950), Carolyn. Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century “poetry of witness”. W. W. Norton & Company, 1993. 
---. The Country Between Us. Harper Perennial; First Edition. 1982. 
---. Gathering the Tribes, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. 
---. Poems. Poemhunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive. 2012.
---. on '“poetry of witness”: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001’ at the 2017 AWP Book Fair”.
Harris, Maria. Proclaim Jubilee!: A Spirituality for the Twenty-first Century. Westminster John Knox Press. 1996. 
Horowitz, Sara R. “Rethinking Holocaust Testimony: The Making and Unmaking of the Witness.” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, vol. 4, no. 1, 1992, pp. 45–68. 
Joudah, Fady. “Tell Life.” Poetry, vol. 203, no. 2, 2013.
LaCapra (1939) , Dominick. “Trauma, Absence, Loss.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 25, no. 4, 1999, pp. 696–727. 
Lehman, David. “The Prose Poem: An Alternative to Verse.” The American Poetry Review, vol. 32, no. 2, 2003.
Matin Parsa, Lida, and Negar Sharif. “The power and identity of post-terrorist narrators; September 11 and the mental reconstruction of trauma in the novel The Falling Man by Don DeLillo”. Journal of Critical Language & Literary Studies. Shahid Beheshti University Press, 2019. pp. 267-299.
Poetry of Witness. Directed by Billy Tooma and Anthony Cirilo. Performances by 
Carolyn Forché, Saghi Ghahraman, Fady Joudah, Neil J. Kressel, Claudia Serea, Mario Susko, Bruce Weigl, Duncan Wu. Icon Independent Films. 2015.
Rea, Paul. “The Poet as Witness: Carolyn Forché’s Powerful Pleas from El Salvador.” Confluencia, vol. 2, no. 2, 1987, pp. 93–99.
Ribando Seelke, Clare. “El Salvador: Background and U.S. Relations". Congressional Research Service. Version 30. 2020.
Valis, Noël. “Fear and Torment in El Salvador.” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 48, no. 1, 2007, pp. 117–131. 
Wainwright, Michael. Game Theory and Postwar American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Worsham, Lynn. “Composing (Identity) in a Postraumatic Age.” Identity Papers: Literacy and Power in Higher Education. Williams, Brownvynt, editor.. University Press of Colorado, 2006. 
Wright, Carolyne. “The Country between Us by Carolyn Forché (1950) (1950) : review.”The Iowa Review, vol. 13, no. 1, 1982, pp. 130–139. JSTOR, https://jstor.org/stable/20155839. Accessed 9 July 2020.    
Aarons, Victoria, and Alan L Berger. “Trauma and Tradition: Changing Classical Paradigms in                        Third-Generation Novelists.” Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory, Northwestern University Press, 2017, pp. 107–146.  
Bahmanpour, Bahareh and Amir Ali Nojoumian. “A Haunted Narrative: Signifying Trauma of Displacement in Lahiri's Trilogy of "Hema and Kaushik" in her Unaccustomed Earth.” Journal of Critical Language & Literary Studies. Shahid Beheshti University Press, 2018. pp. 77-97.
Baker, David. Talk Poetry: Poems and Interviews with Nine American Poets. The University of Arkansas Press. 2012.
Breuer, Josef and Sigmund Freud. Studies in Hysteria, translated by Nicola Luckhrust, Penguin classics, 2004.
Davis, Colin. “Interpreting, Ethics and Witnessing in La Peste and La Chute.” Traces of War:                           Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Twentieth-Century French Writing, LiverpoolUniversity Press, 2018, pp. 80–116.  
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Translated by Peggy Kamuf, New York and London: Routledge. 2006.
Forché (1950), Carolyn. Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century “poetry of witness”. W. W. Norton & Company, 1993. 
---. The Country Between Us. Harper Perennial; First Edition. 1982. 
---. Gathering the Tribes, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. 
---. Poems. Poemhunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive. 2012.
---. on '“poetry of witness”: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001’ at the 2017 AWP Book Fair”.
Harris, Maria. Proclaim Jubilee!: A Spirituality for the Twenty-first Century. Westminster John Knox Press. 1996. 
Horowitz, Sara R. “Rethinking Holocaust Testimony: The Making and Unmaking of the Witness.” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, vol. 4, no. 1, 1992, pp. 45–68. 
Joudah, Fady. “Tell Life.” Poetry, vol. 203, no. 2, 2013.
LaCapra (1939) , Dominick. “Trauma, Absence, Loss.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 25, no. 4, 1999, pp. 696–727. 
Lehman, David. “The Prose Poem: An Alternative to Verse.” The American Poetry Review, vol. 32, no. 2, 2003.
Matin Parsa, Lida, and Negar Sharif. “The power and identity of post-terrorist narrators; September 11 and the mental reconstruction of trauma in the novel The Falling Man by Don DeLillo”. Journal of Critical Language & Literary Studies. Shahid Beheshti University Press, 2019. pp. 267-299.
Poetry of Witness. Directed by Billy Tooma and Anthony Cirilo. Performances by 
Carolyn Forché, Saghi Ghahraman, Fady Joudah, Neil J. Kressel, Claudia Serea, Mario Susko, Bruce Weigl, Duncan Wu. Icon Independent Films. 2015.
Rea, Paul. “The Poet as Witness: Carolyn Forché’s Powerful Pleas from El Salvador.” Confluencia, vol. 2, no. 2, 1987, pp. 93–99.
Ribando Seelke, Clare. “El Salvador: Background and U.S. Relations". Congressional Research Service. Version 30. 2020.
Valis, Noël. “Fear and Torment in El Salvador.” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 48, no. 1, 2007, pp. 117–131. 
Wainwright, Michael. Game Theory and Postwar American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Worsham, Lynn. “Composing (Identity) in a Postraumatic Age.” Identity Papers: Literacy and Power in Higher Education. Williams, Brownvynt, editor.. University Press of Colorado, 2006. 
Wright, Carolyne. “The Country between Us by Carolyn Forché (1950) (1950) : review.”The Iowa Review, vol. 13, no. 1, 1982, pp. 130–139. JSTOR, https://jstor.org/stable/20155839. Accessed 9 July 2020.