Damascus: Trouma

Abstract

The chapter applies the notion of trouma (combination of hole in French—trou—and trauma), borrowed from Jacques Lacan via Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century (1996) to the playwright/Paul, Zakaria, Elena and the stage direction “news images of the current situation” in order to examine how trous, connected to the traumatic under globalization, render time, location and characters collapse into a sense of holed world, of “here” in Damascus (Traverse, 2007). I use trouma because when one looks at trauma, the multifarious concept reveals a traversed dimension, because trauma is indeed defined by a holed experience or an experience that metaphorically tears a hole (or holes) and to call attention to the traumatic across art and life.