Memory, Trauma, and Resistance in Nuzūḥ Maryam by Maḥmūd Ḥassan al-Jāsim
Maḥmūd Ḥassan al-Jāsim’s novel Nuzūḥ Maryam (Maryam’s Forced Migration, 2015) is structured as a series of memories recorded by Sāra for her daughter Maryam. Maryam is only a toddler when the initial demonstrations occur in Syria in 2011, and she remains unaware of the rapid transformations taking place in her hometown of Raqqa. By the novel’s conclusion in 2015, Maryam resides in a refugee camp in Turkey. During their journey to the camp, she and her mother have lived under Daesh's rule, fled within Syria, encountered fellow displaced Syrians, and heard accounts of atrocities committed by regime soldiers, various militias, Islamist groups, and foreign participants in the conflict. The text is analyzed through the framework of literary trauma theory as proposed by Joshua Pederson (2014), which views victims as capable narrators. Additionally, it will be discussed as a form of fictional testimony (Rowland, 2024) to a specific historical period and as a counter-narrative (Tello, 2022) to the accounts presented by the various parties involved in the conflict.
The analysis concludes that the novel serves as a fictional documentation of the violent war and its impact on ordinary citizens. Furthermore, it functions as a form of resistance against the normalization of violence. Whereas some characters accept war as normal, the narrator, Sāra, is consistently horrified by the crimes committed against her fellow citizens. Thus, the novel resists the violent present while recording the traumatic past.
al-Jāsim, Ḥ. M., Nuzūḥ Maryam. Beirut: Dār al-tanwīr, 2015.
Pederson, J., “Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory”, Narrative 22(3) 2014):333-353.
Rowland, A., “Fiction as Testimony”, Literature and History, 33(1) 2024: 37-52.
Tello, V., “Counter-memory and and-and: Aesthetics and temporalities for living together”, Memory studies 15(2) 2022: 390-401.
2025.
6th Congress of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Strasbourg, 24-27 June 2025