The Future of Education

    Drawing on the theory of trauma and memory studies as elaborated in the works of Sigmund Freud, Cathy Caruth, and Pierre Nora, this paper is a comparative poetic study that investigates the traumatic feminist experiences and sites of memory in Sylvia Plath, Alice Oswald, and Nazik Al-Malaika’s selected poems. These experiences are psychological, social, cultural, and autobiographical in many instances.  Haunted by bad experiences that left indelible scars in their memories, these poets lived personal and national traumas which are reflected in their poems. This paper will also explore the female power of telling against the patriarchal hegemony in Plath, Oswald, and Al-Malaika’s poems. Furthermore, it will highlight the points of convergence and the points of divergence between Plath, Oswald, and Al-Malaika’s poetry regarding the ways of telling their own trauma. Furthermore, the research examines the poetic techniques such as metaphors, imagery, and tone in the poems under question and investigates how they are used to express the sites of memory in their poems and formulate the poets’ sense of trauma.

Keywords: Alice Oswald, Sylvia Plath, Nazik Al-Malaika, Trauma Studies, Pierre Nora.