Through Trump’s Looking Glass into Alice’s Wonderland: On Meeting the House Palestinian

Abstract

In this article, I explore—as a woman of color, a theorist, and a clinician—what it means to be a subject with conscious and unconscious relations to power and domination. To do so, I limn a psychic space I encountered through the Trump looking glass, where my understanding of the world around me was turned on its head and where newly found sociopolitical realities and discourse feel bizarre and nonsensical. There, like Alice in Wonderland, I realized that I did not know who I was and felt my identity morphing into different shapes and sizes: Through Trump’s rhetoric I became viscerally aware of multiple interpellated selves (interpellation is described in the paper), within which a hidden traumatic narrative led me to enact such interpellations. I use earlier clinical and personal experiences to demarcate these selves and identities, which I did not know I knew, by revisiting a talk I gave at a conference on immigration 3 years prior to Trump’s inauguration. I also attempt to uncover how my identities came to be by studying those sociopolitical and cultural factors, I believe led to such interpellations. I propose that such experiences are probably universal.

Keywords:

• Al-Nakba
• colonization
• intergenerational trauma
• interpellation
• Islam
• islamophobia
• mourning
• Palestine
• phobogenic
• subjection

Notes

¹ I do not recall the name of the association.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lama Z. Khouri

Lama Z. Khouri, LCSW, is a psychotherapist living in New York. She is the Executive Director and Founder of the Circle of Arab Students In Schools; a clinical supervisor at the Arab American Family Support Center in Brooklyn; and a coeditor of the Britain-based online journal Ecronicon for Psychology and Psychiatry. She is on the advisory board of several organizations and is a published author and presenter.