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A central claim of contemporary trauma theory stresses that terrifying experiences cause a speechless fright that cannot be fully articulated afterwards. This thesis conducts a close analysis of representations of trauma in five twentieth century novels: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (written 1928-40, published 1965, Russia), Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970, USA), Gina B. Nahai’s Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith (1999, Iran), Damon Galgut’s The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991, South Africa), and Pak Wanseo’s Three Days in that Autumn (1985, South Korea). The objective of this analysis is to cross the boundaries of languages and nations as well as those of literary and cultural traditions to excavate literary devices, in particular, metaphoric images, which give some expression to individual traumatic experience through a visual mode. Missing buttons, rose petals, a giant squid, blue eyes, a flying body, corpses, bleak landscapes and a strange chair allow secret, pockets of pain to be made more accessible. The theoretical framework of this study is drawn from trauma theory, psychoanalysis and literary fiction that consider the effect of trauma on narrative. By drawing on these theories, I argue that the relationship between images in the chosen novels and trauma is paradoxical: metaphor is a useful tool for approximating traumatic experience, but, simultaneously, draws attention to its own limitations. Several characters in the novels endure compulsive re-experiencing of the past as their suffering seems not sufficiently accessible in language in a controlled, self-reflexive manner. The psychological effects of their trauma manifest in various flashbacks, dreams, images and syntactic patterns embedded within the narratives that repetitively bear witness to some earlier exposure to violence. This study explores the form and language of these narratives which offer unique, visual representations of disturbing and painful elements that would otherwise remain unrepresentable. My intention is to open up an inquiry into the relationship between literary imagination and the survival of an ordeal by considering fictional traumatic representations from diverse cultures within convulsive historic periods.

Region, home and transnational migration are explored in terms of the transcultural complexities that reverberate through Iranian American Gina Nahai's \"Sunday's Silence\". Nahai grapples with stereotypes that attach to the Holiness churches in the east Tennessee region of Appalachia. This essay argues that the novel's politics rest on the intersubjectivity of strangers as bound into a metaphysics of desire. It is through this paradigm that Nahai writes against the reductive association of \"minority\" literature with discrete \"national\" models and through which she explores the local and the regional in a culturally complex narrative about the crisis of alterity.

Like the Iranian Jewish women whose writings I analyze here, the past of thirty years ago is another country for me. That country is Iran. We look backwards to that past Iran, but also sideways to the Iran and the United States of today (if the past is another country it is of course not the case, as Clifford Geertz reminds us, that another country is the past). What follows is written from the shared experience of living in pre-revolutionary Iran, and from the shared experience of writing about a remembered Iran.

A short story is presented.

How different is Iran from Appalachia? Iranian-born writer [GINA B. NAHAI]'s first two novels, Cry of the Peacock and Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, were set in her native land, to great effect and rave reviews. Now, in a thoughtfully executed third novel, Nahai takes on Appalachia, illuminating another region whose people are united by a fundamentalist faith, their beliefs as exotic to, and misunderstood by, most Western readers as those of the people of Iran.

Gina Nahai and her husband, David Nahai, have been living together in Los Angeles for 33 years - 24 of them in their current home in Benedict Hills. Both are of Persian descent. Gina, 54, is a writer and professor of creative writing at the University of Southern California. David is an attorney and environmental activist. Their 15-month-old dog, Gus, is a half Labrador half Dachshund mix rescue that the adult Nahai children have given to their parents. Gina Nahai's most recent novel, \"The Luminous Heart of Jonah S,\" was released in the fall of 2014. She has written about Los Angeles's Persian Jewish community in the pages of the Forward before, and answered the questions below. David takes out the garbage, and if I'm not around he'll even put a new bag in the trash bin. He's good with light housework - picking up dishes, making his own dinner, even filling the dishwasher - but he's the least handy person you'll ever meet. Once, I asked him to change a light bulb and he said, \"Why don't you hire an electrician?\" I swear this is true.

Raphaels Son, a mega-wealthy Iranian Jew with many enemies, has been murdered. The story behind his odd name and his life of cruelty and revenge is labyrinthine and dramatic. It begins in 1950s Tehran, where the Soleyman clan prospers under the shah, even though Raphael, the oldest son, is strangely afflicted with an inexplicably glowing heart. He comes under the spell of an enigmatic older woman, who, years after his death, reappears with a boy she improbably claims is Raphaels son.

The family is almost entirely without money; her father is the son of a rich, loveless family, the Arbabs' grotesquerie springing from its devotion to status over feeling. The marriage of Yaas's parents is accurately forecast by their own parents to be a disaster. Yaas's father, unable to love until he sees a mysterious, exotically beautiful woman, a woman with a capital-P Past (and frankly entirely unbelievable, even on the book's own terms), is struck senseless with mad, undying passion and abandons his family, first emotionally and then physically. Her mother, unexceptional except in her desire to experience life, experiences instead only bitter frustration. That this story is not going to end well is foreshadowed throughout the book. \"I nod and inch closer to her,\" [Yaas] says, with characteristic portentous glumness, \"and then we begin to walk, down the alley and through the intersection, onto the long stretch of street at the end of which, I sudden know, is nothing but despair.\"

[Gina Nahai]'s parents emigrated because they wanted to give her and her sisters access to better opportunities abroad and because they were convinced that an upheaval in the guise of regime change was inevitable. \"They had a sense that ban was far more volatile than people thought. The shah was not an 'island of stability in the Middle East,' as [former U.S. president] Jimmy Carter claimed during a visit in 1977.\" \"Things were going well for Jews under the shah and his father,\" said Nahai. \"They protected us. The Jewish community was generally prosperous, but there were deep class divisions.\" She doubts whether the Jewish community will dwindle in the years ahead. \"Most Jews in Iran today feel secure enough,\" she said. \"They don't feel threatened enough to abandon their lives and go into exile.\"

The ensuing crackdown by religious authorities -- including the imposition of the veil -- spurred a wave of immigration to the U.S. It took a tumultuous couple of decades -- from the 1980 hostage crisis through the Iran-Iraq war and the Salman Rushdie fatwa until the era of the \"axis of evil\" -- for these immigrants to start writing their stories.