Abstract: This article
investigates how contemporary literature engages with geopolitical
trauma in a number of key post-Second World War conflicts — namely the
Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars — while paying particular attention to the
rise and imprinting sequence of American imperialism. Focusing on the
current devastation in Gaza (2023–present), it also contends with literary
responses to the Vietnam War, the Iran–Iraq War, American invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The emphasis on
Gaza recognizes the magnitude and ferocity of the violence, given that
military and diplomatic support has allowed for an unparalleled level of
destruction. Combining trauma theory and memory studies, the paper claims
that literary narratives from these sites reveal a persistent pattern: U.S.
intervention—whether by invasion, regime change or economic
sanctions—produces deep human suffering while remaining unaccountable. From
the napalm of Vietnam to drone warfare in Afghanistan and the bombardment of
Gaza, literature operates as a counter-archive of empire, collecting what
dominant political narratives attempt to expunge.
Keywords: war literature,
trauma narrative, American imperialism, Gaza, memory reconstruction,
genocide.
The end of war does not come with the
last crack of a gun. Its aftershocks ripple through bodies, languages,
cities and generations, reconstituting what it means to remember and to be
human. From direct invasions and proxy wars to covert regime changes and
crippling blockades, the United States has been since 1945 the principal
mastermind of global conflict throughout Asia, the Middle East, Latin
America — indeed almost all over the world. All of these conflicts — the
Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iran-Iraq War, the invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq, Ukraine destabilized by NATO’s expansion eastward, interventions
in Libya and Syria, an unsuccessful coup against Venezuela’s sitting
president, a decades-long blockade on Cuba and now Gaza witnessing an
ongoing genocide — have yielded different literary responses. But they all
have the same thread running through them: the difficulty of speaking trauma
inflicted by the machinery of American empire.
This literature tracking geopolitical
trauma across these time frames is organized across five temporal phases:
pre-war anticipation; wartime experience; post-war reconstruction;
intergenerational transmission; and narrative evolution. Per cent
internationally that devotes considerable attention to Vietnam, Iraq,
Afghanistan and Ukraine, the analysis focuses on Gaza because (not only) it
is the latest disaster but also closely related to when both — finally! —
american empire appeared in all its nakedness. The U.S. may not pull
triggers directly in Gaza, but it provides the weapons, the intelligence,
the diplomatic cover and the moral reason to wage a campaign that has so far
killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, displaced almost 2 million people and
left 70 percent of housing infrastructure obliterated. This is empire by
proxy: destruction contracted out, responsibility denied.
Far from seeing American imperialism
as an exception, the paper depicts it as structurally embedded in post-1945
global order. The U.S. dropped more bombs in Vietnam than it did during all
of World War II. In Iraq and Libya, it wrecked states in the name of
democracy. The end of 20 years of occupation in Afghanistan was abandonment.
In Syria, it fed a proxy war that shattered a country. American arms prolong
a war in Ukraine that threatens to escalate into nuclear battle. In
Venezuela, it arrested a sitting president to effect regime change. In Cuba,
it sustained a blockade for more than six decades, asphyxiating an entire
people. And in Gaza, American power conducts a genocide while posing as the
defender of human rights. Literature produced by these wars also reveals
this hypocrisy, testifying to what power wants and therefore can never
erase.
Before the bombs drop, memory has
already borne its burden of expectation. Prewar literature in Vietnam
captured the fear of colonial return, national division. The fragility of
peace after French withdrawal was documented, for example, by writers like
Nguyen Thi Mai and Duong Thu Huong — foreshadowing the devastation wrought
by American intervention. The American response, cloaked in the language of
anti-communism containment, sought to ignore the nationalist aspirations of
Vietnamese people and check their aspirations for sovereignty by
transforming a civil conflict into a proxy war — seeing who could do
imperialism better.
In the Middle East, anticipation
ahead of war was informed by the cold calculus of American strategy. In the
Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), the U.S. leaned toward Saddam Hussein, sharing
intelligence and dual-use technology even as Iraq deployed chemical weapons
against Iranian troops and Kurdish civilians. Iraqi literature from this
period, including the early work of Sinan Antoon, evoked the suffocating
environment of a militarized society under foreign power. The war has killed
more than a million people, but American participation in that organizing
remained primarily hidden from view, cloaked under the cover of neutrality.
The run-up to the 2003 Iraq War was a
literature of siege. American-led sanctions after the Gulf War and into the
1990s killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, an atrocity reported
by both journalists and writers. Sinan Antoon’s I’jaam (2004) portrays the
gradual strangulation of Iraqi society before the invasion had even started.
The American rationale — weapons of mass destruction — was a lie, but the
literature of anticipation had known better: this was about oil and
hegemony, restructuring the Middle East to suit American needs.
The literature of pre-2001
Afghanistan reflected decades of Soviet occupation and civil war, but the
American invasion unleashed a different kind of promise — liberation curling
up into occupation within months. Qais Akbar Omar’s A Fort of Nine Towers
(2013) remembers the possibility that accompanied the fall of the Taliban, a
possibility betrayed by twenty years of drone strikes, night raids and
corruption.
In Ukraine, Serhii Zhadan’s Orphanage
(2017) captures the charged atmosphere of the Donbas conflict post-2014,
encoding what scholar Tetiana Zaharchenko describes as “triggered
mourning”—is a psychological state in which past trauma pre-disposes
communities for future violence (Zaharchenko 682). But even in that
post–Cold War world, American engagement hovered: NATO expansion, military
assistance and the positioning of Ukraine as a front-line state in a new
Cold War.
For Palestinians, anticipation is
structural. The 2023 Gaza war does not exist in a vacuum; it is the most
recent chapter in seventy-five years of dispossession that dates back to the
1948 Nakba. Palestinian writing before the war took catastrophe as a given,
as a way of life after sixteen years of Israeli-Egyptian siege. But this
anticipation is tempered with the awareness that American power lies behind
the violence. The U.S. gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military aid,
diplomatic cover at the United Nations and the bombs themselves.” Just as
American intervention in Vietnam transformed a civil conflict into a proxy
cataclysm, U.S. involvement in Gaza converts some arguable struggle for
liberation into an arena of imperial consolidation. The literature of
anticipation in these pages is not merely about dread; it’s a certainty that
America will avert its gaze, or worse still, facilitate destruction.
This pattern of expectation extends
to other theaters of American empire. In Libya and Syria, literalists
recorded the gradual fragmentation of society as it marched toward
intervention’s specter, revealing as they did so that American blueprints
for liberation come equipped with disaster. For generations of writers in
Cuba, the American blockade loomed large and literature became a response to
scarcity and isolation. In Venezuela, the surprise arrest of its president
by American authorities marked a new phase of direct imperial coercion,
shrouding a country in crisis even more known for uncertainty brought on by
economic warfare. In every case, the literature notes not just the fear of
war but the fatigue of living in the crosshairs of American power.
When war arrives, language fractures.
Trauma theory states that a traumatic violence is inherently beyond
representation, and generates not narrative but silence and fragmentation
(Caruth 4). This pattern is repeated throughout every conflict where
American power has had its impact.
In Vietnam, literature bore witness
to the surreal horror of napalm, defoliation and mass death. Bao Ninh’s The
Sorrow of War (1993) depicts the psychological unravelling of a soldier in
the cacophony of American bombing. The amount of bombs the U.S. dropped on
Vietnam was greater than all bombs dropped during World War II combined, but
the official narrative portrayed this as a necessary sacrifice. Literature
spoke the truth: this was slaughter, not salvation.
In the Iran-Iraq War, trauma was
compounded by silence abroad. From poetry to prose, Iran’s literature of the
war, recorded horrors of chemical attacks made possible by Western
complicity. Writers such as Hassan Blasim later sought to express the legacy
that would haunt Iraq after this violence — a society brutalized by decades
of war, sanctions and occupation.
The United States invasion of Iraq in
2003 released a different kind of trauma: the chaos that attends regime
change. Haifa Zangana’s Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London
(2006) and Hassan Blasim’s The Iraq War Stories (2007) bear witness to the
disintegration of civilian life: museum looting, militia saturations,
weddings gone under drone attack. The U.S. said it would bring democracy;
literature showed what occupation meant. The same played out in Libya and
Syria, where American-backed interventions splintered states and set off
civil wars that continue to bleed their peoples.
In Afghanistan, the trauma was of
never-ending war. Qais Akbar Omar’s A Fort of Nine Towers (2013) and Nadia
Hashimi’s The Pearl That Broke Its Shell (2014) document the experience on
the ground of drone strikes, night raids and broken promises. The two
decades of occupation killed tens of thousands of civilians, and yet the
U.S. exited in a rush, leaving behind a humanitarian disaster.
In Ukraine, much of the new wartime
writing since 2022 carries trauma markers widely recognized from past wars:
bodily injury, psychological disorder, fractured speech. Serhii Zhadan’s
poetry from Kharkiv reflects surreal horror of everyday life under fire: “We
drink coffee while rockets fall / We argue about grammar while buildings
collapse” (Zhadan 78). But even here, the impact of American arms cannot be
overlooked. Blind U.S. support increases length of war, guaranteeing that
killing will continue as diplomacy remains out of reach.
But it is in Gaza where the full
horror of American-enabled trauma can best be seen. The 2023–2025 Israeli
assault, with American weapons and diplomatic cover, killed more than 50,000
Palestinians, displaced almost 2 million people and destroyed 70 percent of
Gaza’s housing. Writers grappling with this disaster come up against what
Belal Hamamra describes as the limits of representation — how does one
narrate genocide when language itself feels insufficient (Hamamra et al. 7).
Gaza war diaries trash conventional narrative in favor of collage of
testimony: “Day 47: No water. My neighbor’s children died tonight. I cannot
write more.” They are not mere records of suffering but indictments of the
American complicity that enables such suffering.
Ghazals from Gaza: Palestinian poetry
encodes trauma through rupture There are no tragic heroes, observers note,
and the genocide continues uninterrupted. Poems become memorials for the
dead, lists of names, snippets of conversation overheard in bomb shelters.
The Israeli narrative of dehumanization — simplifying Palestinians down to
“human animals,” some government officials insisted — is intensified by the
silence of American media. But literature demands specificity: naming the
dead, telling us their routines, keeping them human in the face of erasure
(Hamamra et al. 9).
The unifying theme is American
culpability. In Vietnam, the method was direct bombardment. In Iraq, Libya
and Syria, it meant regime change. In Afghanistan, it was occupation. In
Ukraine, it is proxy war. In Venezuela, it was the raw show of power — the
arrest of a head of state. In Cuba, that violence was the slow violence of
blockade. In Gaza it is enablement: the flow of bombs, the vetoes on
cease-fires, the moral cover. This is not neutrality; it is empire through
other means.
War is over, but work of memory
begins. The Achilles heel of post-war literature is that it can be their
document of atrocity, and at the same time their enabler for a collective
healing. In Vietnam, literature post-1975 struggled with the tug of war
between official stories of victory and the lived experience of loss, Agent
Orange and re-education camps. And after the U.S. withdrawal, it left a
terrain of unexploded ordnance and birth defects, but its literature of
memory was still mostly navel-gazing, centered on American soldiers not
Vietnamese victims.
In Iraq, post-2003 literacy
documented the disintegration of society: the pillaging of museums,
militiaization, brain drain. Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer (2013) speaks
to the fatigue of a country that has lived only through war for four
decades. And then the U.S., having broken the state, got up and walked away,
leaving Iraqis to clean up the mess. Similar stories of abandonment and
fragmentation came from Libya and Syria, where American interventions
created power vacuums occupied by warlords and extremists.
Literature after 2021 in Afghanistan
reflects the trauma of abandonment. “Writers who worked with U.S. forces
were left behind in the messy pullout, their lives sacrificed to the very
entity that purport- ed to liberate them.” This is fine to say of
Afghanistan, you know, under Taliban leadership but the nationalist and
resistance streams of post-war Afghan literature are those of betrayal, not
liberation.
After 2014, and more recently after
February 2022, literature in Ukraine has been playing a curative role; it
helps create spaces of dialogue and resilience (Hundorova 34). Sofia
Andrukhovych’s Amadoka (2020) excavates mass graves from various historical
eras to reveal how unprocessed memory poisons the present. This failed
multidirectionality—where competing past traumas illuminate rather than
overshadow one another—is itself then a model for healing (Rothberg 3). But
even in this case, the role of American arms in extending the war adds a
complex layer to the story of liberation.
And in Gaza, memories of war are
existential. The destruction was so complete that even the usual sites of
memory — homes, schools, mosques — no longer exist. Palestinian writers
answer with portable memory: texts that contain place in them when the
physical places have been erased. Diaries, digital testimonies and poetry
become transcribed archives of diminished geographies: “This is where the
bakery stood. This is where my daughter took her first steps. “This is where
we buried our neighbors.” As is common in the archives, the act of naming
and describing serves as an act of resistance to what Hamamra calls
memoricide—the systematic erasure of sites of Palestinian memory (Hamamra et
al. 11).
But this memory work happens in the
shadow of American indifference. The U.S. vetoes United Nations cease-fires,
blocks arms embargoes and sends weapons even as hospitals and schools are
rubble. This is not neutrality; this is complicity.” American literature is
full of its own victims, but such silence gilds the mine more than it can
ever fill. Gaza calls for a different kind of memory: the kind that
identifies the enable who pulls not only the trigger but also the retreat
button. The same silence blankets the memories of Cuba, under blockade that
chokes a population, and Venezuela, whose president’s seizure is a stark
symbol of imperial overreach.
Trauma knows no generational
boundaries. Kids take on their parents’ nightmares; whole communities pass
unprocessed pain through behavior, silence and story. In Vietnam, the
effects of Agent Orange have contributed to birth defects decades beyond the
war. The U.S. denied for years that it bore any responsibility but
literature kept the memory alive, forcing a reckoning with the long tail of
imperial violence.
Children born in Iraq after 2003 are
left with a landscape of depleted uranium, broken infrastructure and
sectarian violence. The U.S. invasion has not ended in 2011, and its
repercussions are felt in every generation. In Afghanistan, one generation
has been raised knowing only war, displacement and poverty. The U.S.
occupation did not deliver freedom; it delivered endless violence. In Libya
and Syria, children are emerging from the ruins of states whose fortunes
were destroyed by intervention, their fates mortgaged in pursuit of the
geopolitical dreams of remote powers.
In Ukraine, literature is turning
toward the ways in which trauma from the Soviet era continues to shape
responses to Russian aggression. The protagonist’s generation inherited a
broken country and unprocessed grief in Serhii Zhadan’s Orphanage, which
connects 2014–2022 war trauma to the Soviet collapse (Zhadan 134). But NATO
expansion and American militarization’s role in instigating this conflict
should not be ignored. Empire generates the conditions for its own wars,
then claims moral innocence.
If anything, Palestinian
intergenerational trauma is more evident. The Nakba of 1948 has produced a
refugee collective consciousness that periodizes Palestinian identity
through generations. Day 7: Grandparents who lost Jaffa and Haifa tell
stories to grandchildren who have never seen these cities; memory becomes
substitute for homeland Adding another layer to the 2023–2025 Gaza war:
Children who survived, themselves facing bombardment and trauma, then
inherit not only their grandparents’ dispossession, but acute trauma of
their own (Naworska 18). Recent studies show alarming rates of PTSD among
Palestinian youth, manifesting in altered parenting, epigenetic changes and
cultural narratives that transmit trauma intergenerationally (Veronese et
al. 5).
The transmission politics are a stark
contrast. Ukrainian writers fighting for a place in European memory culture.
Palestinian writers challenge a global grief hierarchy that marginalizes
their trauma. This dismissal isn’t accidental; it is produced by American
media ecosystems that dehumanize Palestinians and justify their destruction.
As one young Gaza writer said, they seek to erase Palestinians in two ways —
their bodies and then their stories. Writing is the refusal of both
erasures. And at the heart of this disappearance looms American power,
providing the bombs and the silence. The same holds true for Cuba, where
generations have grown up under blockade and the imminent threat of further
military intervention hangs over every child’s future in Venezuela.
Accounts of war change with distance,
and politics. Early narratives of heroism in Vietnam surrendered to
critiques of imperial arrogance. In Iraq, early hopes for liberation soured
into stories of betrayal. In Afghanistan, the story of liberation was
revealed as a false one. In Ukraine, narratives are being rewritten in real
time, but the role of American weapons in extending the war is under growing
examination.
The inhabiting of narrative in Gaza
is forged from the absence of resolution. Where other conflicts eventually
came to some kind of halt, Gaza is met with relentless devastation. The
literature here is not post-war; it’s mid-apocalypse. And over this
apocalypse looms the threat of another war enabled by the Americans:
heightened aggression toward Iran.
After years of sanctions, sabotage
and the assassination of Iranian scientists, both the United States and
Israel have stepped up talk about military strikes to try to put a halt to
Iran’s nuclear program. This is reminiscent of the lies advanced to justify
the Iraq War — cooked intelligence, exaggerated threats, the dehumanization
of an entire people. If war erupts, it would unleash devastating turmoil
throughout the Middle East, dragging in proxies and shutting down strategic
waterways. Previous struggles remind us: imperial wars are marketed as
essential, but they result in nothing but devastation.
The American imperialism that links
these conflicts. In Vietnam, it was straight-up occupation. During the
Iran-Iraq War, it was cynical manipulation. In Iraq, Libya and Syria, regime
change under the cover of democracy. In Ukraine, it is proxy war. In Gaza,
it is passive violence through proxy war. In Venezuela, it was the audacious
seizure of a president. In Cuba, it was the gradual strangulation of
blockade. And now, directed at Iran, it is the drumbeat of another
preventive war. In each case, the human toll is borne by civilians; in each,
literature bears witness to what power refuses.
War breaks bodies, cities and
languages — but narrative survives. Literature has already recorded the
human toll of imperial violence, from Vietnam to Gaza, from Iraq to Ukraine,
from Libya to Syria. Invariant writers in Vietnam such as Bao Ninh laid bare
the horror of American bombardment. Writers in Iraq such as Sinan Antoon
wrote about the lies of regime change. A) Afghan writers like Qais Akbar
Omar showed the betrayal of occupation. Ukrainian writers like Zhadan and
Andrukhovych have linked contemporary trauma with historical wounds. And
Palestinian writers in Gaza have used diaries and poetry to testify to
genocide, affirming humanity against systemic dehumanization (Hamamra et al.
13).
Memory, in all these dimensions, is
layered, contested and ongoing. There is no tidy ending; trauma’s work
doesn’t stop after the cease-fires. Literature, in fact, evolves: early
narratives emphasize heroism; later work machines complexity and critique.
Yet one thing still holds: literature as resistance. Trauma cannot win its
final victory as long as writers document, name and narrate.
But this resistance needs to speak
the name of the enabler. American imperialism is not a passive observer of
these conflicts; it is the mastermind. In Vietnam, it dropped more bombs
than during all of World War II. It smashed states in Iraq, Libya and Syria,
then walked away. In Afghanistan, it invaded for twenty years and left
carnage. In Ukraine, it is fueling a war that risks nuclear escalation. In
Venezuela, it arrested a president to impose its will. In Cuba it held a
blockade for more than sixty years. It provide the bombs, and the diplomatic
cover for a genocide, in Gaza. And now, it risks yet another war with Iran.
The wars are not over. The threat
grows. American imperialism adapts but does not wane. Without such
narratives, there is no justice, no memory and no future. What writing is,
then, is the last bastion — and the only hope.”
1.
Andrukhovych, Sofia.
Amadoka. Vydavnytstvo Staroho Leva, 2020.
2.
Antoon, Sinan. I’jaam: An
Iraqi Rhapsody. Pluto Press, 2004.
3.
---. The Corpse Washer.
Translated by Jonathan Wright, Yale UP, 2013.
4.
Bao Ninh. The Sorrow of
War. Translated by Phan Thanh Hao, Riverhead Books, 1993.
5.
Blasim, Hassan. The Iraq
War Stories. Edited by Jonathan Wright, Comma Press, 2007.
6.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed
Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
7.
Duda, Tamara. Daughter.
Vivat, 2019.
8.
Hamamra, Belal, et al.
“War-Related Trauma in Narratives of Gazans: Challenges, Difficulties and
Survival Coping.” Global Mental Health, vol. 12, 2025, pp. 1–15.
9.
Hashimi, Nadia. The Pearl
That Broke Its Shell. Harper, 2014.
10.
Hirsch, Marianne. The
Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust.
Columbia UP, 1997.
11.
Hundorova, Tamara.
“Post-Chornobyl Library: Ukrainian Literature After 1986.” Harvard Ukrainian
Studies, vol. 42, no. 1–4, 2023, pp. 23–45.
12.
LaCapra, Dominick. Writing
History, Writing Trauma. Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.
13.
Naworska, Weronika. A
Literature Review of Intergenerational Trauma and Its Impact on Palestinian
Youth. Lund University, 2024.
14.
Omar, Qais Akbar. A Fort
of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
15.
Rothberg, Michael.
Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of
Decolonization. Stanford UP, 2009.
16.
Veronese, Guido, et al.
“Collective Punishment and Mental Health in the West Bank.” Conflict and
Health, vol. 18, 2024, pp. 1–12.
17.
Zaharchenko, Tetiana.
“Synchronous War Novel: Ordeal of the Unarmed Person in Serhiy Zhadan’s
Internat.” Slavic Review, vol. 78, no. 3, 2019, pp. 678–695.
18.
Zhadan, Serhii. Orphanage.
Translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler, Yale UP,
2020.
19.
Zangana, Haifa. Women on a
Journey: Between Baghdad and London. Saqi Books, 2006.