A Psychoanalytic Study of Yussef El Guindi’s Back of the Throat | ||
| المجلة المصرية للدراسات الأدبية واللغوية | ||
| Volume 1, Issue 1, July 2024, Pages 49-76 PDF (820.36 K) | ||
| Document Type: المقالة الأصلية | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/egsl.2024.411243 | ||
| Author | ||
| Khaled Saad Sirwah | ||
| Professor of English Literature Kafr El-Sheikh University | ||
| Abstract | ||
| Drawing on a psychoanalytic approach, the present paper tackles Yussef El Guindi’s Back of the Throat (2006) as a study of the American attitude towards Arab/Muslim Americans after the 9/11 attacks, with a special focus on the traumatic effects arising from police interrogations throughout the play. This is done by employing such features as fear, verbal and physical attacks, inhuman practices, cynicism, scapegoating, etc. as negotiated by psychoanalysts like Allan Young, Philip Bonifacio, Marna Young and others. In a seven-character one-act piece, El Guindi illustrates how the police officers, traumatized by the 9/11 attacks, pass on their own trauma to innocent people on so fabricated evidence that they may appear as more sinned against than sinning. The paper has reached three findings. (1) The playwright fulfills his target of showing the American traumatization of Arab/Muslim Americans as due to the West’s old view of the latter as inferior and uncivilized. (2) Trauma survivors (the police officers) usually have to pass their trauma on to their victims (by means of cynical inhuman practices). (3) The 9/11 acute trauma has developed into different chronic traumas due to passing it on to others. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| 9/11 attacks; Arab & Muslim American; physical/verbal attack; psychological trauma; trauma survivors | ||
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