The Transcultural Response to War Trauma in Helen Benedict’s Sand Queen*

The location of war is a multicultural arena where multiple traumatic discourses of dissimilar nationalities are converged and yoked together by the bond of a collective traumatic response; it significantly functions as a major generative character that directs the formulation of the traumatized identity of an individual, group, or community. The present paper, in this regard, examines Helen Benedict s Sand Queen through the premise that the location of war is a place of an encounter through which Benedict expounds and mirrors multiple internal struggles and multiple responses that are structured in relation to the location of trauma. The war-ravaged country, Iraq, in Benedict s novel, functions to convey the paradoxical truth regarding the extent to which the transcultural traumatic turmoil engendered by war can, on the one hand, establish a collective traumatized identity and how this particular collectivity, on the other hand, is continually torn apart by the same force upon which it is established. The study draws on the psychological as well as literary aspects of trauma theory in which the components of the traumatic experience are encapsulated within the literary form of trauma fiction. As such, the meaning and the being of the traumatic experience parallels the close connection between psychology and literature.