Nostalgia for a Lost Home: Exile and Trauma in Lucette Lagnado’s Memoirs

Abstract

This paper seeks to study exile as a traumatic experience by focusing on the multiple manifestations of trauma in the memoirs of the Jewish-Egyptian writer Lucette Lagnado. Exile, in Edward Said’s view, “is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home” (Said 2000: 173). Lagnado chose writing to voice the trauma of exile of the whole Jewish Egyptian community expelled from Egypt after the establishment of the state of Israel and the arrival of the Free Officers to power in 1952. In Lagnado’s memoirs, trauma re-surfaces in different places and times, through flashbacks and nightmares. These unwanted and suppressed memories reemerge involuntarily and keep Lagnado trapped in an ever-ending nostalgia. Both Caruth’s work on trauma and Herman’s analysis of the three stages of trauma recovery will help us better understand the place of trauma in Lagnado’s memoirs.