Linguistic Exile: The Psychological Cost of Voicing Middle Eastern Trauma

This study examines the affective gap and psychological friction that surface when non-Western war trauma is articulated within English linguistic structures. Utilizing a descriptive qualitative method driven by close reading and critical textual analysis, the research deconstructs Suheir Hammad’s contemporary poetry anthology, Born Palestinian, Born Black (2010). The analytical focus targets three pivotal cultural-emotional terms to map how the raw intensity of suffering undergoes emotional dilution when shifted into a dominant second language. Nakba to "Catastrophe": Flattens a systemic, politically driven genocide and collective historical memory into a detached, politically neutral event akin to a natural disaster. Ghurba to "Exile" or "Homesickness": Strips the existential agony of losing one’s identity and homeland, reducing it to a superficial, individualized emotional state. Sumud to "Resilience": Erasures the radical, anti-colonial dimension of ideological and spiritual endurance embedded in the indigenous term. The findings indicate that while English successfully mobilizes subaltern narratives onto the global geopolitical stage, it simultaneously enforces a rigorous linguistic exile. By filtering and attenuating the emotional gravity of Middle Eastern trauma, the foreign vocabulary subjects the displaced voice to a secondary alienation—proving that trauma undergoes further distortion within the prison-house of an alien vocabulary. Keywords: Affective Gap, Linguistic Exile, Middle Eastern Trauma, Suheir Hammad, Critical Textual Analysis.