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Despite its richness and diversity, Anglo-Arab fiction is often haunted by the themes of loss and displacements that are often associated with the experience of exile. This preoccupation with loss resonates with recent postcolonial re-appropriations of the Freudian theory of melancholia, that are aimed at uncovering the theory’s potential for explaining the phenomenon of unresolved integration at the heart of several diasporic narratives of migration. One such revisionary model, Sara Ahmed’s figure of the melancholic migrant, provides a useful interpretive framework with which to explain the elegiac mood that pervades a number of Anglo-Arab novels. This paper focuses on two key works from this tradition, Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret, to argue that these texts employ the archetypal figure of the melancholic migrant both as a psychic response to loss and a strategy of resistance and empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads Fadia Faqir's My Name is Salma (2007) as a narrative of insidious trauma. The text's oscillation between a violent past and a confusing present, and the mournful disposition of the narrative perspective invite questions about the role of memory in the aftermath of violence, and the link between migration and psychic trauma. And while it is not difficult to understand the protagonist's post-traumatic response to her pre-migration history of violence and cruelty, her confused reaction to the demands of the experience of migration does not fit in with classical, event-based models of trauma, which revolve around the notion of a singular, catastrophic event. Salma's experience as an immigrant, I would suggest, is best understood in light of recent postcolonial revisions of major creeds of trauma theory, particularly the idea that minor, quotidian acts of violence on the psyche could trigger a post-traumatic response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That Heart of Darkness continues to generate multiple critical responses owes to a large extent to the text's endemic ambivalence. Conrad's tendency to remain inconclusive, what Harold Bloom calls his 'unique propensity for ambiguity'1, has received a great deal of critical attention, and its ideological and moral foundations have been thoroughly analysed. However, the possibility that the text's indeterminacies may have their origins in the psychological conflicts of its central narrator has not been sufficiently addressed. This paper draws upon Cathy Caruth's pioneering work on trauma and testimony, to argue that the fragmentation in Marlow's narrative is the result of a psychological crisis that is caused not by direct exposure to violence, but by witnessing someone else's trauma. Having come into contact with Kurtz's disturbing story, Marlow steps in the position of the confused listener, and his story becomes the fragmentary account of a traumatised subject. By shifting attention from the shocking events of the novella to the narrator's predicament as he attempts to bear witness to Kurtz's trauma, one would begin to address another enigmatic aspect of the trauma in the text – how the encounter with someone's psychic wound can lead to the traumatisation of the witness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]