Othello, "Dull Moor" of Cyprus: Reading Racial Trauma and War Trauma

In 1980, American Psychiatrists Association announced that trauma is a mental disorder under the term of PTSD. By that time, trauma became a popular field of study for the literary scholars specially literary critics such as Cathy Caruth, as it offered new insights into traditional literary criticism. The increase of psychological and physical violence all over the world, in the last twenty years has made trauma and witness inevitable realities of life. The evident role of "testimony" and "talking cure" had already been demonstrated by scholars such as Sigmund Freud; but then it has become clear that literature can reflect and even cure the unspeakable pains of trauma victims. This article is an attempt to show that Shakespeare's Othello is affected by different sorts of unresolved traumas such as racial and war traumas. The writers of this paper have tried to show that the unresolved traumas of a tragic hero can cause tragic ends and affect other characters in the play. The findings of this article might bring about a change in the way we discover and treat the trauma victims. The main conclusion which can be drawn from this research is that not being appropriately heard and diagnosed, Othello, a representative of real racial trauma victims, is bewildered in the clash of knowing and not knowing, between the knowledge of a past event and the inability to understand its frequent reenactments; and this leads to his tragic end.