Challenging Trauma’s Invisibility: Constructing Voice in AlAmmar’s Silence is a Sense Hanane Bouchebouche Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan Hala Abutaleb Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan Abstract—Traumatic experiences often leave one suppressed and spiritually weak due to marginalization and voicelessness. This article aims to show how the protagonist in Silence is a Sense manipulates the disadvantages following and associated with trauma to create her own voice. Layla AlAmmar employs the theme of trauma to elaborate on refugees’ need to concede their own power of speech, acknowledging their past, present and future existence. Through textual analysis, the researcher examines voicelessness as a political, social and cultural challenge to subjugation. Recording her memories, Rana establishes a resisting voice and becomes known as The Voiceless. Interestingly, readers only know her name at the very end, in an indication that Rana’s story is no different than any other refugee with any other name. Eventually, AlAmmar succeeds in using the motif of muteness in order to expose the disastrous result of the war especially after the Arab Spring. Index Terms—Arab spring, trauma, voicelessness, identity, resistance, exposure I. INTRODUCTION It is scientifically acknowledged that experiencing trauma often negatively affects the victims’ mental, spiritual and physical abilities as the memories continue to manipulate their sense of who they are and what they are worth. As a concept, trauma is “generally understood as a severely disruptive experience that profoundly impacts the self's emotional organization and perception of the external world” (Balaev, 2018, p. 360). Such inability to exist in the external world leaves the victims an easy prey for all sorts of racial, political and economic oppression. Such experiences feed on one’s self-esteem leading to exclusion and eventually voiclessness. In other words, trauma as a controversial term is seen as an intruding experience that has the ability to disturb a person’s emotional stability as well as his/her conception of the world. Scholars and scientists acknowledge the destructive consequences of trauma and continue to attempt to fully grasp its physical and mental dimensions in order to help victims continue living life as full- fledged human beings. Artists also see the urgency to produce aesthetic works devoted to do victims of trauma justice through retelling their stories and empowering them to resist. Eventually, intellectuals saw the need to establish an independent field of study which dedicate various resources and the efforts of creative and activist minds in order to make sense of victims’ actual and metaphorical silence. As it was first developed in 1990s, Trauma studies aimed at exposing the challenge which a traumatic experience imposes on language, expression and meaning. According to Craps, trauma theory is “An area of cultural investigation that emerged in the early 1990s as a product of the so-called ethical turn affecting the humanities. It promised to infuse the study of literary and cultural texts with new relevance. Trauma theory confidently announced itself as an essential apparatus for understanding ‘the real world’ and even as a potential means for changing it for the better” (2014, p. 45). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1955), Freud points out that hysteria as a psychological disorder is mainly caused by sexual assault and that hysteric symptoms such as contractures, paralyses, hysterical attacks, chronic vomiting, anorexia and recurrent visual hallucination...etc. All these symptoms are the result of a repressed traumatic event (196- 199). Freud’s ideas are concerned with the impact of sexual exploitation on a person’s psyche and mental health while this study elaborates on this by focusing on other factors including oppression, discrimination and violence and their severe outcomes on a person’s psyche. Nevertheless, Freud’s theory paved the way for a model that perceives trauma as a severe experience that is unspeakable and which exposes the traumatized person to a meaningless and fragmented life. Caruth, a pioneer in coining traditional model of trauma, applies a poststructural approach as a means to claim that trauma causes a lasting fragmentation of the consciousness and thus cannot be represented through the use of language. This view was challenged by a pluralistic model of trauma that suggests traumatic experience creates a reorientation of the consciousness as it produces a new knowledge about one’s identity and the external world as well (Balaev, 2018, pp. 363-366). Subsequently, Caruth, defines trauma as “a blow to the tissues of the body—or more frequently now, to the tissues of the mind—that results in injury or some other disturbance” (1995, p. 183). As she observes the recurrent breakdowns and anxiety felt by the traumatized person are acts of narration of the traumatic event and experience (Qing, 2020, p. 2). This means that memory is the box where the trauma resides and once these memories are brought to the ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 13, No. 5, pp. 1304-1309, May 2023 DOI: https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1305.26 © 2023 ACADEMY PUBLICATION