The Aesthetics of Trauma in Fadia Faqir’s The Cry of the Dove

Since the last decades of the 20th century, trauma theory has gained academic status for analyzing literary representations of various forms of violence, oppression, and social upheavals. Drawing upon the Freudian model of trauma and more recent categorizations of post-traumatic stress disorder, this paper aims to study Fadia Faqir’s third novel, The Cry of the Dove. The author, who writes about and from diaspora, leads her young Muslim female character to fight for her identity in a Western country. The paper analyzes the literary strategies and narrative techniques in this feminist trauma narrative to indicate how the author has tried to represent what is originally marked by voicelessness. In order to imitate the forms and symptoms of the impact of trauma, the novel’s narrative style features fragmentation, non-linearity, repetition, poetic prose, and stream of consciousness. This paper proves that the interplay of these techniques helps the reader understand the evasive nature of traumatic experience and engage her or him emotionally with the narrator’s story. Cathy Caruth, Anne Whitehead, and Laurie Vickroy are among the main theoreticians of the research.