الفهرس 
Individual MemoryOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 141 |  |  |
| | | from | 141 | | |
Abstract
Abstract
Human-inflicted traumas like oppression shatter the individual’s sense of self through different polices of dehumanization, exploitation, and domination. Within societies that are dominated by oppressive systems, the individual encounters cycles of violence that redeem his sense of self. Furthermore, those societies impose limitations on revealing or articulating the individual’s experience of loss. Therefore, the individual within oppressed community suffers the inability to speak out his traumatic suffering due to the limited space and the absence of the emphatic audience who hears and acknowledges his traumatic suffering.
The investigation of human-inflicted traumas like oppression reflects the way the traumatized self within oppressed community suffers the traumatic loss of his sense of self. Moreover, the individual within the oppressed community suffers the inability to speak out his traumatic suffering due to the limited space and the absence of the emphatic audience who hears and acknowledges his traumatic suffering. Therefore, the traumatized individual envisages new modes to articulate his traumatic torture.
Soyinka in his poetry generates new meaning for the traumatized self’s experience of loss through the exploration of three phases of trauma: individual memory, collective memory, and trauma narrative. The individual traumatic loss in the first phase of individual memory reveals the entrapment of the self within a single moment in the past. However, the traumatized individual’s power of the mind and his imaginative faculties enable him to create his personal myth of survival. To reconstruct his past as part of the cultural heritage, the traumatized self in the second phase of collective memory undergoes a revival of the African cultural materials, a transitional phase of agency and empowerment. His involvement in the act of retelling in the third phase of trauma narrative, the traumatized self repossesses the narrative, regain his voice and his subjectivity.