| Abstrakt: |
This essay analyzes the complicated relationship between narratives of trauma and claims to truth by focusing on the case of a memoir concerning honor killing in Islamic culture that was commercially successful and critically acclaimed, but upon examination found to be, depending on one's perspective, either a fiction or a fraud. Specifically, the essay shows how Norma Khouri's text Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern Day Jordan used the emerging conventions of the trauma memoir to gain credibility while calling the reader to identify with the narrator, the lone witness to the apparent murder by family members of a woman wrongly suspected of having a sexual liaison with a non-Muslim. The feigned narrative further deepened the outrage in Western culture over the excesses of Islamic extremism while portraying outwardly respectable Jordanians as willing to commit savage acts in the name of supposed "honor." This case shows how commonplaces of ideology and rhetorical conventions function together to support claims that may pass as true without the critical scrutiny Khouri's text eventually received. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
