Sexual Violence and Psychotrauma in Roxane Gay's An Untamed State and Nabard Fouad's Parrot: A Psychoanalytic Study

Abstract

The History of humanity has widely witnessed violation of human rights during the wars and in the political, ethnic and religious disputes. Heartbreakingly, most of the victims are women and children. Females in general and underage girls are vulnerable to rape and sexual violence either to satisfy the lustful captors or to be used as ransom. Most awfully, in many cases, the fighting groups, terrorists and thugs target females as effective weapons against each other since in several societies women are regarded as the honor of the families, such as what happened to the Yazidi Kurds in Shangal, North of Iraq when ISIS terrorists attacked their city. The detainers think only of achieving their aims and never care about what will happen to the prey. This paper shows how the male captors rape and sexually abuse the female captives during their confinement, and more significantly to unveil how the trauma affects the victims after they get their freedom. What happens to a woman when she is taken by a group of ruthless lustful men is expectable, but how she continues is incomprehensible. The study selects two novels An Untamed State by Roxane Gay (2014) and Parrot (Tutti) by Nabard Fouad (2015) which narrate the story of women abducted and raped by their abductors. The psychological battle the women suffer from does not end in the prison rooms, but it will continue and actually it will never end since the victims develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and can never live a normal life thereafter. The sufferers are not criminals; they are mere victims of political and religious rage.