The aesthetic sublimation of pain in Niyi Osundare’s City Without People

Niyi Osundare is a Nigerian poet-scholar, who was a victim of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe in 2005 in New Orleans, Louisiana. A few years after the cataclysmic event, Osundare versified his experience in the poetry volume entitled City Without People. This article examines the narration of his painful experience and memories in the collection. I begin by exploring the thematization of pain in the volume, before proceeding to argue that the poet’s pain, largely psychic, is a product of losses of various kinds. The article goes further, demonstrating how the poet “worked through” the pain to attain wellness. Relying on insights from trauma theory, complemented by some assumptions about the concept of scriptotherapy, the analysis of poems drawn from across the collection demonstrates the paradox of using pain to birth writing and using writing to kill pain.

Gendered Subaltern in Abhi Subedi’s Dreams of Peach Blossoms

This paper examines the consciousness of gendered subaltern in Abhi Subedi’s poetic play Dreams of Peach Blossoms and looks at how Subedi deconstructs the existing historiography to bring forth the issue of gendered subaltern who have been subjected to the hegemony of the ruling class. Drawing on insights and postulations from Subaltern Studies theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, Gautam Bhadra and others, this paper examines the pain and agonies of female characters that are glossed over in the grand narrative of the mainstream culture. This paper concludes that while exploring the painful experience of women erased from the pages of history, Subedi is focused on the Maiju culture that began since Bhrikuti’s marriage to a Tibetan King in the sixth century and reveals the injustice of patriarchy against women with an aim to make correction in such distortions of history.

The Grief Elaboration Process in the Pandemic Scenario: A Group Intervention

The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed thousands of victims worldwide. To deal with loss is a formidable challenge for all, especially those who experienced losing their loved ones. The grief elaboration process is complex, and the pandemic adds some specific challenges, such as the restrictions to funerals and farewell rituals or the impossibility of saying goodbye due to the sanitary measures. This chapter presents a group psychological intervention aimed at people who lost their relatives to COVID-19. The therapeutic groups were carried out virtually through six sessions and brought together people from all over Brazil. Narrative therapy was the theoretical model adopted. The participants mentioned the moment of diagnosis as decisive for experiencing the disease\'s terminality and anguish, promoting guilt and anxiety in the family. In the group, the participants found space to share the painful experience, and throughout the sessions, they were able to develop coping resources. They mentioned strategies, such as activating the family and social support network, recalling legacies and moments they shared with the deceased, and elaborating farewell rituals adapted to the pandemic circumstances. The participants evaluated the group intervention as very important for reframing the pain of loss and restoring future projects since they counted on the help and inspiration of the other participants who went through this painful experience in similar circumstances.

Identity Crisis and Solution for Canadian Native Women in Halfbreed

Maria Campbell’s autobiography Halfbreed is a self-exploration of herself in the process of her survival pursuit. Her thirty three years of bitter experience with racism and poverty are the major content of her autobiography. Moreover, she has also recorded in the work the sense of alienation in her own land which mainly has made her to feel the traumatic painful experience. Hence, Identity crisis is seen as the major issue that steeps as a block for not only to herself but also to her community women fully towards overcoming their social barriers like poverty, sexism, and racism. Moreover, her self-exploration sets up an ideal to her community women to become stronger and self-reliant. Hence, the paper argues that how Campbell has created her own identity while experiencing problems and issues on her growing up with shameful identity and how she has become the solution to all the halfbreeds like her. The paper further studies that how Campbell has dealt with shame and humiliations which are the threat in achieving empowerment. The paper also analyzes the solution that Campbell has developed by herself despite her negative experiences, what she has learned from the negatives and how she has constructed her own identity which strengthens herself and her community as well.

AB0898-HPR WICH FACTORS ARE RELATED TO PAINFUL EXPERIENCE IN PATIENTS AFFECTED BY CHRONIC INFLAMMATORY RHEUMATIC DISEASE DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC?

Objectives:To evaluate the effect of containment, during the Covid-19 pandemic, on the pain of patients with CIRD, and to analyze the factors associated with the experience of pain.Methods:A cross-sectional study was conducted among patients with rheumatic diseases using a questionnaire providing information on patients and disease characteristics. Impact of COVID-19 on This is a cross-sectional study that consecutively includedPatients were asked to assess the global pain which they had experienced before and during the containment period, using a single Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) ranging from 0 (no pain) to 10 (greatest pain).Statistical Analysis System IBM SPSS Statistics V20.0.0 was used to analyze the study data.We performed univariate then multivariate analysis to search any related factors to pain perception during to quarantines. Qualitative values were analyzed by the chi2 test. Quantitative values were analyzed by the Student test when the measures were normally distributed or by nonparametric test (Mann–Whitney U) when the measures were not normally distributed (Kolmogorov–Smirnov test was used to test normality).Results:Among the 350 patients who answered to the questionnaire online, rheumatoid arthritis represented 62.3%, spondyloarthropathy 34.3% and undifferentiated CIRD 3.4%.Pain experience caused by the CIRD during the containment was reported by 79.1% of patients.The level of pain, using the VAS of Pain increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic (4,6 ± 2,8 and 5,4 ± 3 before and during the containment; p<0.001).In multivariate analysis, the factors implicated in pain were the negative impact of Coronavirus on access to rheumatologic care, discontinuation of therapeutic adherence, the disturbed quality of sleep and the negative psychological impact (table 1).Table 1: Summarize multivariable analysis of factors associated with painful experience related to CIRD during containement.Table 1.Multivariable analysis of factors associated with painful experience related to CIRD during containementPImpact on monitoring0.05Impact on therapeutic adherence<0.001Quality of sleep disturbed0.001Negative psychological impact0.02Conclusion:This survey showed the that the COVID-19 pandemic have incresed painful experience in CIRD patients. Factors influencing painful experience should be taken into account to help patients to cope with their chronic rheumatism and this global health crisis.Disclosure of Interests:None declared

PAKISTAN AFGHAN RELATION: HISTORY CONFLICTS AND CHALLENGES

Pakistan and Afghanistan, two immediate Muslim neighbors, that not only share a common border but also have many other commonalities such as; linguistic, strong historical, ethnic, cultural, and religious ties. Despite of its geo-strategic location and various common factors, nature of Pak- Afghan ties the nature of PakAfghan relations is characterized by mistrust and suspicions and painful experience for both of them. Since its inception, Pakistan faces a hostile attitude from its western neighbor Afghanistan. Except during the Taliban’s four-year era, all the rulers of Afghanistan showed fluctuating degrees of dissatisfaction towards Pakistan. Conflict over Duran line, Soviet-Afghan war Pakistan support to Taliban, Pakistan role in War on Terror, and growing cross border militancy has stained relation between both countries. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the Pakistan Afghanistan relation in a historical context and highlight those factors which were the main hurdles in the way of a smooth and positive relation.

State Violence, Justice, And The Suffering Of Others

In 1955, Alain Resnais's now canonical documentary, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) ended with an ominous question, asking “who, among us, is keeping watch from this strange watchtower [of the ruins of Auschwitz] to warn of the arrival of our new executioners” who might bring about the return of the “concentrationary plague?” One man had already made it his mission to do so: the French writer and former political deportee David Rousset. Rousset had shaken the French world of letters and politics with the 1946 publication of L'univers concentrationnaire (The Concentrationary Universe), which warned of the civilizational and moral cesura that the Nazi camps had been. The term quickly became a widely used conceptual framework. Former deportee and Catholic writer Jean Cayrol borrowed from it to write his voice-over to Night and Fog. In 1949, Rousset published another text that created a scandal in Cold War France: an Appeal to “fellow deportees” calling upon them to “investigate the USSR's concentrationary universe” (Kuby, 46). This indictment fiercely divided the French left. In 1950, he brought a libel suit against another former deportee, communist writer Pierre Daix, who had accused him of amnesiac “apoliticism” (Kuby, 65–6; Dean, 61). Just before, in the wake of his Appeal, Rousset had founded an organization against concentrationary regimes with those, like him, who had been political deportees. In 1951, it put the Soviet Union on trial for crimes against humanity. Rousset and his organization were involved in many trials, eager to denounce the “new executioners” who had revived the “scourge of the camps” in the postwar world. For many today, he is an “exceptional” man because, as philosopher and critic Tzvetan Todorov argues, he was not paralyzed by the memory of “this painful experience”; instead, he harnessed it into action against dehumanizing state violence. For Todorov, Rousset had allowed morality to prevail over base political considerations.

Painful Experience and Constitution of the Intersubjective Self: A Critical-Phenomenological Analysis

In this paper, we discuss how phenomenology might cogently express the way painful experiences are layered with complex intersubjective meaning. In particular, we propose a critical conception of pain as an intricate multi-levelled phenomenon, deeply ingrained in the constitution of one’s sense of bodily self and emerging from a web of intercorporeal, social, cultural, and political relations. In the first section, we review and critique some conceptual accounts of pain. Then, we explore how pain is involved in complex ways with modalities of pleasure and displeasure, enacted personal meaning, and contexts of empathy or shame. We aim to show why a phenomenology of pain must acknowledge the richness and diversity of peculiar painful experiences. The second section then weaves these critical insights into Husserlian phenomenology of embodiment, sensation, and localisation. We introduce the distinction between Body-Object and Lived-Body to show how pain presents intersubjectively (e.g. from a patient to a clinician). Furthermore, we stress that, while pain seems to take a marginal position in Husserl’s whole corpus, its role is central in the transcendental constitution of the Lived-Body, interacting with the personal, interpersonal, and intersubjective levels of experiential constitution. Taking a critical-phenomenological perspective, we then concretely explore how some people may experience structural conditions which may make their experiences more or less painful.