Department of English Language and Literature
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Browsing Department of English Language and Literature by Subject "adaptive mechanisms"
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Item Open Access Unresolved Refugee Trauma and Adaptive Mechanisms in Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil’s The Girl who Smiled Beads(UNIVERSITY OF MOHAMED BOUDIAF- M’SILA, 2025-07-15) Ms. Soumia AHMED KADIThis dissertation examines how unresolved trauma manifests in the experience of an African refugee who endured the horrors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide as well as forced displacement, starvation, and terror in seven African refugee camps in Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil’s memoir The Girl who Smiled Beads (2018). It also aims to analyze the adaptive mechanisms that refugee characters employed to cope with their haunting past and intrusive traumatic memories. To achieve this end, Wamariya and Weil’s narrative is thoroughly analyzed through the psychoanalytic lens, particularly through contemporary trauma theory as theorized by Cathy Caruth and Judith Herman. It also draws on Freudian psychoanalysis in order to scrutinize the different coping mechanisms used by Wamariya to protect herself from anxiety and distressing memories. This research substantiates that Clemantine Wamariya’s past traumatic experiences, including war, forced migration, prolonged separation, and homelessness remain repressed at the moment of genocide, resurfacing later in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, including fragmented memories, haunting dreams, flashbacks and harrowing nightmares which force her to relive the fear, anxiety, and emotional distress of the original event. This research contributes to psychoanalytic literary theory and refugee literature in general, and trauma theory, in particular by investigating the long-term effects of unresolved refugee trauma and the adaptive mechanisms that the survivors adopt to deal with their disturbing memories