Monograf Journal Edebiyat ve İktidar (2014 / 1) | Page 70

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70 • Emel Taştekin
(what the authors call “lay trauma theories”) in that they focus
on the social process of cultural trauma—based on Weberian
constructivism—rather than assuming it as “naturally existing”
phenomenon or a humane reaction to forced abrupt change or
threat to identity. These theorists argue that cultural trauma is
constructed by creating “new meaningful and casual relationships between previously unrelated events, structures, perceptions, and actions,” once a commonly perceived “source of
suffering” is identified (Alexander 1). Alexander, for example,
notes that through this process “societies expand the circle of
the we;” that is, their response to the trauma leads to a more
comprehensive political action and responsibility; thus, the perceived trauma is not only memorialized through forms of cultural representation but they also offer “progressive narratives,”
meaning that they tend to prescribe a utopian future (8). Most
importantly—and this is how it is different from previous theories on collective trauma—this trauma theory acknowledges
that such social groups often “refuse to recognize the existence
of others’ trauma” or, depending on the success of their imaginative language, are able to assimilate other forms of a suffering
under a single trauma as signifier. Nursi’s Risale-i Nur, with
its insistence on a direct relationship to the text, with its claim
for a “jihad of the word” that guides a spiritual transformation,
which however also externalizes the suffering to a vague Western agent, constitutes a perfect example for what Alexander and

Secular Trauma and Religious Myth • 71

his colleagues describe in their book as “trauma process” (11).
Risale, in that sense, in its entirety captures “the imaginative
process of representation” that gives the “actors a sense of experience of a trauma,” rather than the other way around, namely,
when representation naturally follows a traumatic event (Alexander 9). At the same time, cultural trauma theory is different
than Benedict Anderson’s theory on “imagined communities,”
since the latter implies that traumas or nation building myths are
constructed entirely of imaginative, i.e. unreal and nonexistent
events (see Anderson). Cultural trauma theory extends its focus
from national ideologies to other smaller and sometimes resisting and liberative political communities, and is not interested in
the question whether a traumatic event has actually occurred.
It focuses solely on the process of trauma construction. In fact,
cultural trauma theorists do not correlate the reality of the event
with the effects of the trauma at all. Alexander for example
comments that some massive social disruptions might never be
represented as a cultural crisis, and smaller events can ea ͥ