Postcolonial Trauma and Embodiment in Iraqi War Theatre: A Study of Qassim Matroud’s Spears of Calamity

Abstract

The study examines the representation of post-war trauma in Qassim Matroud’s play Spears of Calamity by the dramatically perceptions of belatedness, embodied memory, and post-colonial trauma. Depending on trauma theory, adopting Cathy Caruth’s notion of belatedness and Dominick LaCapra’s differentiation between acting out and working through, and Jennifer Scuro’s postcolonial feminist theory of embodiment. The investigation clarifies how traumatic experience in Iraqi war theatre comes out that the play performs trauma not only as a psychological situation but as an embodied manner of recollection formed by postcolonial cruelty and historical fracture. Given its prevalence in the modern period of struggle, the current study examines the trauma of belatedness among female characters as a consequence of colonialism. Besides, the study scrutinizes the stages of traumatic memory caused by war crises and their psychological drawback that the female characters pass through, and the processes of avoiding traumatic memory and healing. Lastly, the study aims to explore how the female character’s body becomes a medium of articulation and a record of brutality as a consequence of war. To fulfill these goals, the present study uses a contemporary literary text featuring a traumatized female protagonist who experiences war trauma.