Introduction

There is no life without Trauma. There is no history without trauma… Trauma as a mode of being violently halts the flow of time, fractures the self, and punctures memory and language. (Gabriele M. Schwab, 2010, p. 42)

The past is a remarkable unit of time which seems hard to understand, control, or cope with. Equally difficult is the attempt to define, specify, and identify it as a separate period of time or to isolate it from the other two units: the present and the future. Such difficulty stems from the interconnection of the past with the present and, even, the future. According to Lieb (1991), “In the past… time dominates individuals. As time becomes past, it transforms the individuals in which it was present, depriving them of their singularity and making them part of the fabric of a vast, stilled time that is as real and full as the present and is effective, too” (p. 89). The past then, as opposed to the present, is a more dominant force that sweeps the minds and envelopes the souls of people. With the past being associated with painful memories and feelings, it acts as a strong unbearable force on individuals who often seek to escape their traumatic experiences. Cathy Caruth (1996) defines the term trauma as “the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena” (p. 91). Lenore Terr (1990) clarifies when and why trauma happens: “psychic trauma occurs when a sudden, unexpected, overwhelming intense emotional blow or a series of blows assaults the person from outside. Traumatic events are external, but they quickly become incorporated into the mind” (p. 8). Individuals usually suffer from trauma for several reasons: accidents and fatal injuries, natural disasters, war, death of a family member or friend, violence, abuse, or rape. The previously listed traumas can leave individuals with feelings of helplessness and entrapment. Therefore, individuals who have gone through such experiences often have panic attacks, fear, and sleeping disorders (nightmares). The reason behind this is that traumatized individuals are always “haunted or possessed by the past and performatively caught up in the compulsive recognition of traumatic scenes- scenes in which the past returns and the future is blocked or fatalistically caught up in a melonic feedback loop” (LaCapra, 2001, p. 21). Based on the previous view, understanding the past of traumatized individuals is an important step for addressing such painful experiences, as well as for healing their wounds. This paper aims to analyze the dramatization of trauma and its effects on the characters showing how they appear as victims in two contemporary plays: The Sins of the Mother (2008) and Outside Time (2008).

The Sins of the Mother is an American play written by Tony Devaney Morinelli (http://theaterwords.com/sins-of-the-mother.html) which exposes the struggle of an Irish American family with alcoholism. The play was presented at the Wits School of Arts and Kelowna Community Theatre, and at Montreal Fringe Festival in 2013. It was also performed in several theaters around the world. Set in Philadelphia in the 1950s, the play deals with the lower-class suffering, longings, and wasted opportunities. It is centered on the painful experiences of four women, with very few references to the male figures who are almost always depicted as the deserters of their own families and the reason behind the mothers’ struggle and resort to alcoholism. As the title implies, the play explores the past mistakes of mothers passed on to their daughters. The use of flashbacks in the play exposes the reality of this cyclic pattern of the mother drinking, losing control, becoming a nuisance and a burden, obstructing the happiness of her daughters, then the submissive daughter becomes a replica of her own mother inheriting her sin and failure.

Outside Time portrays current Iraq through the eyes the protagonist Zahra who fails to escape her painful memories despite her relentless attempts to do so. It is based on The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas LIosa, adapted by Nasser Awad and Ronak Shawki, performed by The Actor Studio, an Iraqi diaspora theatre group that resides in England, and directed by Ronak Shawki. It was first performed in October 2009, at the Cockpit Theatre, London. On 5 August 2018, it was shown as part of the Cairo International Festival for Contemporary and Experimental Theatre celebration of its silver jubilee.Footnote 1 The playfully exposes the effect of the past on present-day Iraq. The suffering of Zahra, the protagonist, because of Saddam Hussein’s regime is highlighted in the constant flashbacks she has.

In the two plays, the present is always interrupted by the relentless intrusion of the act of remembrance of traumatic events that took place in the past. Collectively, the past moments in both plays are interconnected and help in clarifying why the characters still exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. The two contemporary plays, to the best of my knowledge, have not been critically dealt with. They have been selected because, despite belonging to two different cultures, they have a striking resemblance: they revolve around the impact of the traumatic past on the characters who seem helpless and entrapped. They employ significant dramatic techniques to dramatize painful memories; namely, flashbacks and scenes in which the boundaries between the past and present are blurry to exemplify how the traumatic experiences of the characters reveal a myriad of themes and ideas: familial, social, and political. Both plays will be probed through the lens of literary trauma studies.

Trauma studies began to emerge in the 1990s and developed as a result of the “complex interaction of suffering, law, ethics, and medicine” (Davis and Meretoja 2020, p. 2). Historically, the interest in trauma began to be evident after the Second World War, as Shoshana Ringel and Jerrold R. Brandell (2012) affirm: “After World War II, studies on the impact of prolonged stress and trauma on concentration camp survivors coincided with observations of combat stress” (p. 3). Later, more studies that focused on victims of other traumatic incidents like rape, abuse, and domestic violence started to increase. Significantly, studies examining the strong connection between trauma on one hand, and culture and literature on the other also emerged, thus asserting Kirby Farrell’s belief that “trauma is a clinical concept and a cultural trope that has filled many different needs. As an interpretation of the past, trauma is a kind of history. Like other histories, it attempts to square the present with origins. The past can be personal or collective, recent or remote” (1998, p. 4). Literary trauma studies is thus a subbranch of trauma studies which, as Davis and Meretoja (2020) explain, “has often focused on historical catastrophes and explored their impact on both individuals and communities… it has frequently been interested in how literature explores the interplay between the personal and the cultural in narrating particular experiences of trauma” (2020, p. 2). In this respect, literary trauma studies investigate the depiction of trauma in literary works in order to highlight and enlighten readers with painful experiences that they might have encountered themselves but fail to understand or describe. Elisa Marder (2006) comments on the intersection of trauma and literature stating that “Literature is one of the ways we tell one another about aspects of human experience that cannot be contained by ordinary modes of expression and that may even exceed human understanding” (p. 3). In other words, traumatic experiences depicted in literature allow the readers/audience not only to passively read about or watch trauma presented, but to also engage in a process of introspection where they reflect upon their own traumatic experiences that they could not describe or explain. Miriam Haughton (2018) emphasizes the importance of presenting trauma on stage believing that the “staging of trauma” is a “staging of suffering. It is an attempt to identify personal and public, as well as individual and collective, patterns of pain, fear and dissociation that are dramatized or theatricalized for public engagement” (p. 1). She adds that “to write on the staging of trauma is to approach … these shadowed spaces of performance, knowledge, memory, politics, and experience. This field of analysis necessitates an ambitious and flexible scope for the distinct and case-specific conditions exploring … perpetrator and victim, pain and recovery, redress and denial, continuity and rupture” (p. 1). From this viewpoint, the aim of this paper is to analyze the dramatization of trauma in the two selected plays through the lens of literary trauma studies. The paper will highlight the use of flashbacks and scenes in which there is the simultaneous existence of past and present as a means of foregrounding the traumatic experiences of the characters who still suffer from post-traumatic stress disorders and are unable to heal from such traumas.

Violence and oppression: cyclical vices

Violence and oppression are portrayed in the two plays as the real causes of the trauma of the characters, thus exemplifying Kirby Farrell’s view that “the core experience of trauma is violence” (p. 14). The reasons behind such violence that the characters have been subjected to and which appears as never-ending are varied and diverse. Elisa Marder (2006) argues that “because traumatic events often happen due to social forces as well as in the social world, trauma has an inherently political, historical, and ethical dimension” (p. 1). In the two selected plays, characters suffer from post-traumatic effects due to different types of situations and experiences that are personal, social, and political and in which violence and oppression have been strongly exercised upon them. Cathy Caruth (1995) describes post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as follows: “there is a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which may take the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts, or behaviors stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event” (p. 4). LaCapra (2001) argues that post-traumatic stress disorders have several forms: “repetition compulsions, startle reactions, overreactions, severe sleep disorders, including recurrent nightmares, and so forth)” (2016, p. 377). To Herman (1992), there are three stages of post-traumatic stress disorder: “’hyperarousal, ‘intrusion,’ and ‘constriction.’ Hyperarousal reflects the persistent expectation of danger, intrusion reflects the indelible imprint of the traumatic moment; constriction reflects the numbing response of surrender” (p. 25). In the two plays, characters exhibit the last two stages throughout the events of the play. However, it is intrusion that seems to occupy a bigger part in the plays. Tracy (2005) defines “intrusion,” as “the reliving of the trauma event through flashbacks when one is awake or through nightmares … intrusion can also involve intense emotions such as panic or rage. … the trauma memory of the past keeps ‘intruding’ into the present, and abuse victims relive the past trauma over and over again” (p. 60). Despite the occurrence of trauma at a very young age, the characters in the two plays constantly recall and relive the same bitter, painful, and violent experiences that they have gone through. This engagement in the process of remembrance is reflective of the recurrent pattern that traumatized victims usually exhibit. According to Morgenstern (1996), the traumatized past … [is] not been forgotten … It is strangely concrete, forcefully present, literally there, not past at all” (p. 103). Similarly, LaCapra (2001) also asserts that “something of the past always remains” (p. 49). Reliving the past then is an involuntary act that the traumatized characters are forced to endure and live with. According to Herman (1992), “traumatic events generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death. They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror and evoke the responses of catastrophe” (p. 24). Because of the horrific nature of such experiences, characters are compelled to rethink, relive, and even retell these situations. Therefore, the flashbacks in both plays exemplify the intrusive moments that traumatized victims often experience. To Bloom (1999), a flashback is “a sudden intrusive re-experiencing of a fragment of one of those traumatic, unverbalized memories. During a flashback, people become overwhelmed with the same emotions that they felt at the time of the trauma” (p. 6). She adds that “flashbacks are likely to occur when people are upset, stressed, frightened, or aroused or when triggered by any association to the traumatic event. Their minds can become flooded with the images, emotions, and physical sensations associated with the trauma and once again” (1999, p. 6). In the two plays, flashbacks are triggered every time the characters are reminded of their past or of the source of their traumatic experiences.

In Sins of a Mother, the audience learns that Marie, the mother, and her sister, Aunt Theresa, still suffer from the effects of a childhood full of pain and misery because of the desertion of their father and the violence of their alcoholic mother, referred to in the play as the Grandmother. Similarly, Marie’s daughters Ellen and Rose are tormented by Marie who has become a replica of her own mother. Therefore, the traumas of the characters in the play are all personal and revolve around the figure of the mother. The play thus confirms how family violence and abuse leave a long-lasting effect as the characters are adults, but they are still incapable of forgetting their painful childhood memories. Hence, several flashbacks take place in the play, each emerging as, to borrow Georg Lukács’ (2010) words, “a symbol, a reduced-scale image of the whole, distinguishable from it only by its size. To fit these moments together must therefore be a matter of fitting them into one another, not after one another” (p. 182). The flashbacks are interwoven and are more recurrent as the play’s events head towards the climax and the denouement. As a dramatic technique, “a single flashback,” as Maureen Turim (2013) asserts, “can generate many meanings and functions” (p. 32). Realizing the significance of flashbacks, Turim (2013) provides a list of their possible functions. Of the different seven functions that she mentions, only three seem to apply to the selected plays: to act as “a frame/past/history,” “haunting of the past,” and “character’s past explained” (p. 33). To add to the previously stated functions, the flashbacks in the plays highlight a major theme in the plays: the relationship between the victimizer and the victimized. Structurally speaking, each of these scenes has its own climactic structure: beginning, middle, and end. They include moments of tension where the rhythm of the scene becomes rather quick. Moreover, these scenes are loaded with information and events, in contrast to the present line in which very few actions take place. Munsterberg (2004) maintains that when dramatists decide to use flashbacks, the transition between the present to the past should be “slow” to give ample time to the audience to comprehend the connection between the past events and the present ones (p. 42). Pickering (2010) also confirms the same view: “When a dramatist employs flashback it is important that the play establishes the convention within which it operates so that the audience is aware that it is seeing time manipulated in this way” (p. 3). In the play, the transition to/from the past is carried out through the use of light, and the accompanying visual and acoustic signs, which helps the audience become aware of the pattern used: a scene in the present followed by the past. The flashbacks in the play are mainly those of Marie and Rose. Significantly, Ellen is the only character whose past is not revealed through flashbacks, implying that such flashbacks will take place only when she follows her mother’s footsteps because of her submissive nature. Rose’s “private thought” is the first moment from the past that functions as a prelude to all the ensuing flashbacks:

ROSE: Sometimes I wish I were [deaf]. It may be a lot easier. (Rose stops searching for the candles in the sideboard. All lights dim. Rose is lit in a single beam. This is a private thought.)

A lot easier to be deaf. Deaf to everything in this house Deaf as the walls. Hard like the walls. Dark like the closets. The closets. A little girl behind the coats. …

Curled into my knees tight under my chin; buried; my hands between my legs. Hiding from the shouts, hiding from the fights, hiding from the men, from the slaps, hearing her scream, hearing her cry. Afraid to be found. … I am deaf. I’ve had to be deaf. Deaf from childhood, deaf from infancy, deaf from my birth. Alone in closets of camphor and wool and smoke and gin. Waiting in the dark. … For the screams to stop? For the beatings to stop? … Easier to be deaf. (The Lights return to normal full stage)

Acting as an indexical sign, light signals the beginning and end of this moment, but, more importantly, it foregrounds Rose and her memories, told through narration. Rose’s flashback highlights several important aspects: first, it confirms the existence of child abuse and domestic violence as two major traumatic experiences that children often go through. According to Murray and Graves (2013), “girls are reported as maltreated more than boys. In particular, girls are more likely to be sexually abused” (p. 159). They add that “child maltreatment is often reported in mother-led, single parent families” (p. 159). This scene helps the audience understand the dilemma of Rose, who is still tormented by her past. Rose, the adult, fully exposes the unforgettable traumatic experience of her younger self who was exposed to constant physical violence. Second, the flashback underscores a continuous process of victimization. King and Osofsky (2018) affirm that “exposure to violence in childhood and adolescence may have unique deleterious consequences for development and mental health … These experiences of violence are sometimes referred to as interpersonal trauma, which differs from accidental trauma or exposure to natural disasters in that human actors intentionally cause harm” (p. 9). They add that “studies suggest that those who are victimized in childhood are more likely to be victimized later in life” (2018, p. 11). Based on the previous views, Rose’s flashback thus confirms not only her past suffering, but also her continuous present pain because of her mother. In other words, Rose is still victimized by her mother. Third, the flashback affirms Judith Herman’s view that “repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality. The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with formidable tasks of adaptation. She must find a way to preserve a sense of trust in people who are untrustworthy, safety in a situation that is unsafe, control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable, power in a situation of helplessness” (1992, p. 96). In the above private moment, Rose’s act of encroaching in the closet and locking herself away as a child was her means of finding protection and of coping with the endless violence she experienced on daily basis because of her mother. Sarah Bloom (1999) lists two types of reactions to trauma: “we are biologically equipped to protect ourselves from harm as best we can. The basic internal protective mechanism is called the fight-or-flight reaction” (p. 2). To Bloom (1999), the “fight-or-flight reaction” is what distinguishes people’s reactions to trauma. In other words, “if a person is able to master the situation of danger by successfully running away, winning the fight or getting help, the risk of long-term physical changes are lessened. But in many situations considered to be traumatic, the victim is helpless and it is this helplessness that is such a problem for human beings” (p. 3). In the above flashback, Rose’s reaction is “flight” whether during the trauma or even after. Her narration of her traumatic experience as a child affirms her struggle “to survive” such painful moments. Therefore, her trauma lies in what Caruth (1996) calls “the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival” (p. 7). This oscillation is even reflected in Rose’s contradictory behavior towards her mother: her anger, anxiety attacks, and her obvious hatred of what her mother does, on one hand, and her attempts to help her on the other. It is this combination of mixed feelings that eventually leads her to kill her abusive mother to put an end to her own dilemma. The fact that Rose’s flashback is presented at an early point in the play paves the way for the emergence of the flashbacks of Marie and reveals the parallelism between Rose and her mother: both suffered as children from their mothers.

Marie’s flashbacks confirm the transformation of the victimized into a victimizer; that is, “in cases of child abuse or violence, the necessity of abused children to defend themselves at an early stage in life might evolve into offending behavior later on” (Aradau, 2008, p. 193). These flashbacks show how Marie never healed from her own traumatic childhood memories. Judith Herman (1992) argues that trauma is “an affiliation of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. … When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning” (p. 24). The thematic importance of these flashbacks is that they expose the source of the trauma: the mother. In other words, they expose the abusive mother-daughter relationship and the never-ending cycle of traumatic experiences passed on from the dominant mother to the traumatized daughter. Significantly, Marie’s flashbacks take place every time Marie reproduces the same words of her mother, thus asserting the inevitable continuation of the past:

MARIE: (Still in her stupor.) Birthdays…. What’s the point of all the fuss?… MARIE: (Aside. The lights dim except for a single beam on Marie. We are back in time with Marie who speaks to her mother. Marie’s mother is on her hands and knees with bucket and floor brush. She speaks with an Irish brogue. Marie speaks normally, an innocent child. Each speaks directly to the audience.)…

MARIE: When is it my birthday mommy? …

The other girls have birthdays. …

GRANDMOTHER: So, you want a party. …

Greedy little thing aint ya.

Like your ol’man. … And where dya think the money comes from to pay for yer party?…

Here’s a party (She slaps her in pantomime. MARIE reacts in pantomime.)…

You want a party? Take this pail and rag and get on your hands and knees. … (The lights return. We are back in the present.)

Collectively, this flashback and the other three occur every time Marie talks about the futility of birthday celebrations, of school, and when she finally curses her daughters. Structurally, they always begin with the daughter requesting something. The argument between the daughter and the mother soon escalates, and with its climax, the daughter is harshly silenced. Hence, the scene ends with the daughter’s submission, which is one of the strategies for survival. Hamel (2021) explicates that the victimized “eventually adopts later self-repair strategies, healthy or not (drugs, alcohol, etc.)” (p. 8). In this respect, these flashbacks confirm how Marie, as a child, coped with domestic violence with her submission and silence, and later evolved into an alcoholic. Davis and Meretoja (2020) maintain, “trauma … signals a shift in our general relationship to the past. There is now a wide recognition of how past violence leaves marks on the present and future, how the past haunts us and how past injustice needs to be remembered and worked through so that we can avoid repeating it” (p. 3). Because the past traumas of Marie remained unhealed, unaddressed, and untreated, the result is the inevitable continuation of “repeating” these memories and even reproducing them. Therefore, the flashbacks highlight the cyclic pattern and how Marie has become the oppressor following her mother’s footsteps. This vicious circle reflects Laurie Finke’s view (1986) that “There are no oppressed groups pure and simple, only shifting relations between oppressors and oppressed” (p. 253). Significantly, Marie’s voice is only heard when she imitates her own mother; that is, when she becomes an oppressor. Another important function of these flashbacks is that they provide background information of how the Grandmother was also a victim; she was abandoned by her husband and was thus forced to take her children and leave Cork, Ireland, to follow the American Dream, hoping to have a better life. Unfortunately, she soon realized that she is forced to become a mere maid at her fellow countrymen’s houses. Therefore, abject poverty and dire need forced the Grandmother to drink as her only source of comfort and means of escape from a morbid present and a dismal past. In this respect, the victimized Grandmother gradually evolved into becoming the victimizer.

In Outside Time, Zahra’s traumas are more diverse than Rose and Marie; they are personal, cultural, and political. Moreover, Zahra engages in a process of retrospection and introspection; she does not merely remember her past like Rose and Marie, but she also comments and reflects upon them. By reliving the past, the audience learns of the real cause of her post-traumatic symptoms in the present. She enjoyed a happy childhood until the President, Saddam Hussein, ruined her life. Like the Grandmother in The Sins of the Mother, the President is the absent/present character that is brought to life in the memories of Zahra. In all her flashbacks, the suffering of women because of Saddam Hussein’s regime is revealed. In fact, the representation of Zahra’s trauma, to borrow LaCapra’s words (2001), “may provide insight into” the period of Saddam’s regime “by offering a reading of a process or period, or by giving at least a plausible ‘feel’ for experience and emotion which may be difficult to arrive at through restrictive documentary methods” (p. 13). Zahra’s painful memories revolve around what the President did to her family and to the people in Iraq. According to Ingrid Vledder (2005), “Iraqi women have suffered severe hardships for decades: loss of male relatives in the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq war; mass expulsions to Iran of entire families… Under the Government of Saddam Hussein, women ‘disappeared’ and were arbitrarily arrested, tortured, and executed by the authorities on political grounds” (p. 13). Aligning enactment with narration, Zahra’s flashbacks provide a clear dramatization of the suffering of women during that period. According to Tracy (2005), “intrusive memories can be profoundly traumatic, for they often have all the vividness and emotional intensity of the original trauma” (p. 60). Tracy’s view can be clearly seen in Zahra’s emotional reaction every time she relives her past; she collapses on the stage weeping and lamenting. Like Rose, Zahra’s memories assert her helplessness in facing these experiences. However, it is worth mentioning that despite their devasting effects on Zahra, the flashbacks are meant to act as a confrontation with the father whom Zahra views as an accomplice to the victimizer, the President. Jenny Edkins (2003) explicates that trauma “has to be more than just a situation of utter powerlessness. It has to involve a betrayal of trust as well” (p. 4). She adds that trauma “takes place when the very powers that we are convinced will protect us and give us security become our tormentors: when the community of which we considered ourselves members turns against us or when our family is no longer a source of refuge but a site of danger” (p. 4). In the play, Zahra incriminates her father because of his silence and compliance to the President’s tyranny. In her eyes, he is also the source of her misery, disappointment, and trauma. Therefore, she uses her painful memories as a means to face him. Ahmed Hussein (2010) states that the aim of these scenes is not to “punish, but to purge the spirit” (par. 4). Contrary to Hussein’s view, these moments are used to confront and punish the guilty. At one point, the father tells Zahra “Don’t torture me” and she simply replies, “Suffer, father. Suffer like I have suffered.” Immediately, Zahra literally and physically confronts her father, who was a minister in the President’s cabinet, and induces him to think of his own crime: his silence. The previous words show how Zahra is not submissive and that her means of rebellion seen in her act of confronting her father by recalling past events. Therefore, Zahra’s retelling of her memories are a blend of weakness and resistance. she is the oppressed, but when she confronts her father with such memories, she becomes the oppressor.

Zahra’s first flashback begins when she journeys backward attempting to remember the turning point of her life, the moment the President began to court her mother. The stage dims, and the mother appears on stage and uncovers her shock when the maid tells her that the President has come to her house to meet her. Because he is a well-known philanderer and womanizer, the mother is both scared of meeting him while her husband (the minister) was travelling abroad lest she becomes his mistress and of not meeting him for fear of getting killed. Zahra emerges at a very intense moment, after giving space to the main character in this flashback, her mother, and she plays the role of the chorus providing past information:

Zahra: The great president banished his minister and forced him to live abroad.

The Mother: My family and I kept wandering in exile.

Zahra: And this was because the Great President had his eyes on the Minister’s wife, but she said no.

The Mother: Yes, I refused him. I refused him. He denationalized us and deprived us of our homeland. He deprived us of our homeland. (The three women hold the mother’s hands who screams while trying to get away.) Let go of me, I want to cry out everything that is going on in my head. I want to expose him. To expose his filth. (She moves in anger and so do the three women).Footnote 2

The flashback reaches its climax with the mother standing in front, whereas the three other women stand behind her (Zahra and the two maids). This visual formation of the women acts as a sign that the mother’s sad story is merely a prelude to all the following depressing stories of women who suffered during the President’s regime. Therefore, this flashback can be seen as an example of cultural trauma, a term referred to by Jeffery Alexander (2012) as “occur[ing] when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (p. 1). Zahra, her mother, and all Iraqi women experienced traumatic pain because of the past regime. This psychological damage is verbally confirmed with a powerful auditory sign at the end of the scene when the three women sing together the following song: “Let all the women in this neighborhood wail. Let all the nightingales in this world cry.” The reference to the weeping of the nightingale, a bird of love and life in Greek mythology and Romantic poetry, accentuates the suffering of women who like the nightingale are also symbols of love and life.

The second flashback shows another depressing and even more traumatic experience. After Zahra confronts her father with the fact that the past regime taught generations of young people to kill, she tells him: “Do you remember the story of the young officer?” Following her words, the stage dims, then is lit in luminous white foregrounding the young Fiancée who wears a white wedding dress and holds the letter of her lover while his voice is heard narrating the content of this letter. Following this short verbal sign of love, the Fiancée starts narrating their love story and how this young man was the man of her dreams. The combination of narration and enactment intensifies the suffering of the Fiancée. She reveals the turning point in this love story when her fiancé (an officer) submitted a request to his superiors for a leave to get married and had to wait a whole year without any reply until the president himself requested meeting him. Zahra enters to fill in the gaps in the story. She reads the letter that was written by the lover, after meeting the President, which states that he will not marry his fiancée because her brother is a rebel. The flashback quickly accelerates, and the tension rises when Zahra and the Fiancée engage in a very quick exchange of how, one day, the officer was given an order to kill a prisoner:

Fiancée: Yes, a prisoner. My brother was the prisoner.

Zahra: Maybe he begged them to have mercy on him or called them names.

Fiancée: The guards let him go.

Zahra: He stood still until one of them cried: “Run! Run! Run!” [Both Zahra and the Fiancée start running].

Fiancée: So, he ran and kept running. He couldn’t even look back …

Zahra: Or even stop. The general gave him a gun and ordered him to kill the prisoner.

Fiancée: “Kill him! Kill him! Finish him!”

Zahra: The prisoner was running and running as if someone is chasing him. The ground was soft.

Fiancée: And the rain was falling heavily.

Zahra and the Fiancée: Run. Run. Run. [Sound of a gunshot. The Fiancée stretches her arms while Zahra stands behind her and holds her as she gradually collapses to the ground].

Zahra [singing]: Cold rain falling over my lover’s body.

Fiancée: They killed my brother.

Zahra [singing]: Cold rain falling over my lover’s body.

Fiancée: He was killed by my love.

The sound of the gunshot and the red light, symbolic of bloodshed, mark the climax of the flashback, thus putting an end to the intensity of the above exchange which slows down as a reflection of their sadness. Visually, the Fiancée appears as though she is crucified emphasizing how she, Zahra, and other women as well, are doomed to suffer from the President’s crimes. The flashback ends with Zahra carrying the Fiancée on her back, as a clear visual symbol of the burden of her traumatic experiences that still torment her in the present. Therefore, the symbol of crucifixion stands for the unbearable pain of traumas and the suffering of the innocent. This is visually confirmed when Zahra then moves in the direction of the father (far left) and sits on the ground saying “They killed him,” lamenting the death of the brother. This deliberate smooth visual transition from the past to the present shows Zahra’s plight, the long-lasting effect of such traumatic stories on her in the present, and the legacy that the President and his regime left for other generations. The ending of the flashback also confirms how trauma does not merely influence the traumatized, but it affects others as well, as Hunt and McHale (2012) confirm: “trauma affects not only the person’s life, it affects those around, family, and friends, work colleagues and neighbors” (p. 6). They add that the “effects” of trauma “are seen among the people who surround [the traumatized person] … they too get badly affected. Sometimes they hear tales of horror; on other occasions it may be fear or anger resulting from what happened to the traumatized person” (p. 5). Zahra’s anger and weeping confirm how this traumatic story affects her as well, even though she never tells the audience how she knows the fiancée.

Scars unhealed: open wounds and endless pain

In the two plays, the traumas of the protagonists never truly heal; this is visually and verbally confirmed in the endings of the two plays that comprise scenes in which the past exists in/ with the present. This simultaneous existence of the past and present confirms LaCapra’s view (2001) that “when the past is uncontrollably relived, it is as if there were no difference between it and the present” (p. 89). Dramatically, this blurry distinction or what Arthur Miller calls “mobile concurrency” takes place inside the minds of the characters. The use of this dramatic technique in the endings of both plays exemplifies how all these traumatized characters continue to exhibit post-traumatic stress disorder as they are still incapable of healing despite the passage of years since their exposure to the traumas. In The Sins of the Mother, the overlapping of both units of time is evident in one scene: the climax, which takes place towards the very end of the play. The scene begins with Ellen imparting her desire to go back to school. The ensuing argument rises till Marie remembers how she once begged her mother to go back to school. The heated conversation reaches its peak when Marie begs her daughters not to send her to the nuns. It is at this precise moment that the dead Grandmother appears. This whole scene takes place inside Marie’s mind. To borrow Arthur Miller’s words on Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Marie is “at this terrible moment when the voice of the past is no longer distant but quite “as loud as the voice of the present … The past and the present are … openly and vocally intertwined in [her] mind” (p. 138). This moment signifies Marie’s inability to distinguish the past from the present:

(Marie starts arguing with an unseen person.)

I won’t.

You can’t make me…

(The GRANDMOTHER becomes part of the scene. Only MARIE sees her and speaks to her. The others participate in the conversation without realizing what MARIE sees. The scene culminates in the GRANDMOTHERS monologue.)

GRANDMOTHER (appearing):

You do as you’re told or I’ll call them nuns.

They’ll come to take you away.

They’ll take you back to the home. …

MARIE: Don’t let them take me, mommy.

I’ll be good.

I’ll be good.

Don’t let them take me….

GRANDMOTHER: You don’t deserve the home ya got.

MARIE: I’m sorry. …

(The image fades. She sees ELLEN.)

The moment Marie begins to feel that she is burden (her sister refuses to take her to her own home and her daughters express their inability to look after her), her feelings of shame are triggered and she begs them not to send her to the nuns. Micheal Cotsell (2005) argues that “core shame—shame of what we are rather than what we have done—is a typically a central characteristic of trauma… Shame follows from defeat, the loss or abandonment of will, the experience of being treated as of less than human significance” (p. 2). Symbolically, the appearance of the Grandmother in this scene confirms Marie’s feelings of shame, since she has evolved into becoming a copy of her Mother and affirms the cyclic pattern of trauma. The whole scene is, thematically, important as it shows the inherited mistakes of the mothers and, structurally, as it hints at the continuation of this sin with Ellen. Symbolically, this vicious circle is broken by Rose. After the mental collapse of Marie, Rose engages in a heated conversation with her sister Ellen and her aunt, Theresa, in which she accuses both of being the causes for the augmentation of the deteriorated mental and physical condition of her mother: “you keep her in a constant drunk. A constant drunk just so you can feel like some wounded martyr. She’s not the one they should put away. It’s you two!” Rose’s emotional outlet of her long-repressed feelings comes at an extremely critical moment in the play after Rose sees her submissive sister, Ellen, give in to Marie and after she even realizes that Ellen has already begun drinking in secret, thus following the footsteps of the mother. As a result, Rose puts an end to her and to her sister’s misery by killing the mother, visually signified by placing the pillow on Marie’s face, followed by Rose crossing herself. Despite the morbid and hideous act of killing her own mother, the ending explicitly confirms Rose’s need to put an end to the dominance of her painful past. Still, the act of killing is another traumatic experience that Rose is forced to live with. In other words, Rose has paradoxically ended a traumatic experience that she had to live with all her life by living another one. Rose has become even more violent than her own mother. In this respect, the cyclic nature of traumas in the play confirms how the only way to heal is by seeking therapeutic assistance to learn how to deal and cope with their traumas.

In Outside Time, Zahra’s agony and pain are aggravated in the final scene. She even reiterates that her memory of all the traumatic experiences has not faded or faltered. She thus asks her father to stop being deaf and blind to the present suffering of the people in Iraq and to feel her own pain “which is different from the pain of the victimizers,” as she says. Before Zahra and her father exit, wailing is heard as the actors appear on stage lamenting the disappearance of a young girl called Basma while the stage is lit in red to connote bloodshed:

Basma disappeared. They searched for her everywhere for three days but could not find her. Then, on the fourth day, they found her lying on their threshold almost naked, wrapped in a worn-out cloth, and with wounds and scars of torture on her body. The father and brothers got mad. They carried her inside the house, then, in cold blood killed her. … The mother lamented her death. They told her to be quiet and tried to silence her … Her own sons … whom she carried in her womb, breastfed them, and toiled for them. … She heard them whisper that they will kill her to silence her. She became quiet. She came to me! To me! Her friend and neighbor. She came to me in my house asking for help. They followed her! Her filthy sons followed her and killed her. Her blood is on my face, on my dress, on my threshold!

The scene confirms the continuation of violence and the suffering of women in present-day Iraq. It highlights the act of victimization inside the family and the community (personal and cultural or collective trauma). The dismemberment of the family and the existence of domestic violence in the above scene confirms how “massive trauma on a collective level disrupts the fabric of communal life, challenging core social institutions and cultural values” (Kirmayeret al., 2007, p. 10). According to Kai Erikson (1991), collective trauma is

a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality. The collective trauma works its way slowly and even insidiously into the awareness of those who suffer from it, so it…[is] a gradual realization that the community no longer exists as an effective source of support and that an important part of the self has disappeared… ‘We’ no longer exist as a connected pair or as linked cells in a larger communal body. (p. 460)

The above story of Basma that ends with an act of lamentation that the four women engage in and the symbolic verbal signs “her blood is on your hands” exemplify Erikson’s view of the effect of collective trauma on the family and even community. The narrated story emphasizes the fact that part of the collective trauma is the feelings of shock and anger because of the silence of the people, including Zahra’s father, which makes them part of the inhumane, heinous crimes that still exist in the present despite the disappearance of the former regime. Moreover, the story also confirms how Zahra and her people exhibit feelings of “shame” and “guilt.” According to LaCapra (2016), the “descendants of victims and of perpetrators may possibly share something significant for they inherit a burden for which they are not, but may feel, guilty and for which they are within limits answerable and may assume responsibility” (p. 379). What further confirms the resonating effects of the collective trauma reflected in this story is that amid this emotionally intense moment, the President enters in a disruptive manner that drives them all to silence and they quickly move to sit with the spectators. This significant kinesthetic sign further confirms the passivity and silence of the people towards the bloodshed in the past and present. In Zahra’s mind, the president was and still is the cause of all the pain in her land. Thus, his appearance in this final scene validates Zahra’s earlier accusation that the President raised generations of Iraqis whose trauma lies in being forced to live with killing and death on daily basis. The ending of the play is a strong reminder that it is the past that led to the current chaotic state of Iraq. Hence, the ending is a confirmation of the inevitability of reliving the same traumatic memories unless there is an end to the existence of violence and deaths in the land. In other words, for Zahra to heal, and the Iraqis in general, they have to end the cycle of traumas and the country has to heal itself by restoring peace.

Conclusion

Seen through the lens of literary traumatic studies, the use of flashbacks and the simultaneous existence of the past and present in the two plays underscore how the characters still exhibit post-traumatic stress disorders because of different types of traumas that they have experienced. Such scenes highlight the victimization of the traumatized characters who are unable to heal. Despite the death of the Grandmother and the President a long time ago, they are still alive in their minds of the characters; thus destroying their present. Still, despite the cyclical nature of the traumatic experiences of the characters, both plays suggest two ways for healing: first, by what LaCapra (2001) calls “working through,” which entails that the traumatized distance themselves from the trauma and see it as an event that occurred in the past. LaCapra asserts that the “acting-out” of trauma in which “tenses implode, and it is as if one were back there in the past reliving the traumatic scene” (p. 21) should not be the only means of healing. He emphasizes that “working through” helps the traumatized “distinguish between past and present and to recall in memory that something happened to one (or one’s people) back then while realizing that one is living here and now with openings to the future” (p. 22). In this respect, “working through” will not be a “closure, totalization, full cure, full mastery” of the trauma, but will complement the stage of acting out and will help in the transformation of the “victim” into a “survivor and social agent” (p. xi). Applying LaCapra’s view to the plays, characters can heal when they decide to break free from the relentless act of reliving the past. To break the vicious cycle of repetition of traumatic memories, the father’s advice to Zahra “forgive my child” is the key to heal, but it is something that Zahra, like most Iraqis, cannot do because she simply wants him to “confess [his] sins first to be able to forgive him.” Samarqand Aljabry (2010) explicates: “in order to be free from the nightmares of the past and the present … We must not repeat the mistakes of the past. In order to forgive ourselves, we have to acknowledge our history and to confess our sins” (par. 3). The implicit message presented through the past scenes is that the country will remain outside time and place (a limbo) unless Iraqis decide to forget and learn from the past and build their country again.

The second mode of healing suggested in both plays is seeking therapeutic help in a new and safe environment away from their houses, which constantly flood the characters with painful memories. Bloom (1999) emphasizes that a new safe environment is necessary for trauma victims to be able to recover and heal from their scars. She underscores the importance of “creating a sanctuary” which “refers to the process involved in creating safe environments that promote healing and sustain human growth, learning, and health” (1999, p. 15). When applying Bloom’s view to the two plays, it can be argued that neither Zahra nor Ellen and Rose can ever recover as long as they are in the same childhood house in which they were subjected to violence and pain and in which the sources of their trauma still exist: the father and the mother, respectively.

Combining both modes of healing, the recovery of the victimized characters will take place once they decide to be, as Judith Herman (1992) asserts, “the author or arbiter of [their] own recovery” (p. 133). This is because healing “is based on the empowerment of the survivor and the creation of new connections. … In [the] renewed connections with other people, the survivor re-creates the psychological faculties that were damaged or deformed by traumatic experiences … such as trust, autonomy, initiative, competence, identity, and intimacy” (Herman, 1992, p. 13). Applying the previous words to the two plays, the characters cannot mend their wounds without having the desire and willpower to do so. Healing will be reached once the characters seek help, which will in turn compel them to situate their sad memories in the past while understanding that they are grounded in the present. This outlook will help them understand their present, fix it, and even have a better future.