A Poetics of Trauma: The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch by Ilana Szobel (review)

As I prepare this review, Operation Protective Edge is underway in the Gaza Strip and news and social media outlets circulate daily competing narratives of grief and culpability. Questions of perspective shape each tweet, Facebook status, and news report that passes across my computer screen. Where does one stand—geographically, politically, culturally—in relation to this conflict? Who has the authority/responsibility/objectivity to report/represent/translate it? Questions like these preoccupied the Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936–2005) for decades, beginning with her landmark collection The Love of the Orange (1959), which included the heartbreaking poem, “A Man Stands on the Road.” When the poet was six, her father was run over by a drunk driver; Ravikovitch was told that he had gone abroad for treatment. A few years later, her playmates informed her that he had died in that accident. The father would never return, instead he remains a spectral figure in this poem, standing in the middle of the road, in limbo, occupying an intermediary and precarious position that would become a critical and political vantage point in Ravikovitch’s later work. It is a vantage point that she would encourage her readers to risk.

Ilana Szobel’s A Poetics of Trauma: The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch, is the first comprehensive scholarly study of the poet in English. The word “trauma” gestures to the theoretical framework that Szobel applies to Ravikovitch’s work, but the key word in this study is “poetics,” the way that a poet harnesses the mechanics of a poem—its form, tropes, and language—to fashion what Szobel refers to as the “traumatic personality” that develops in Ravikovitch’s oeuvre.

In her introduction, Szobel poses two crucial questions: “How can a situation without choice be part of a process of self-construction? How can a state of emotional imprisonment function not as a limitation that covers up a repressed subjectivity, but rather as the subjectivity itself?” (p. xvii). The question of genre—why a poem?—emerges from these considerations. How does a sonnet, for example, articulate and represent conflict, trauma, and crisis in ways that are absent or otherwise distinct from a news report or doctor’s diagnosis? Rather than assume obvious answers to these questions, Szobel’s reading examines the “specific poetic language and structure” that Ravikovitch developed over five decades in her poetic representation of private and political conflicts and their protagonists (p. 5).

Szobel’s study divides into four parts. The first introduces Ravikovitch’s work through the theme and tropes of orphanhood that run through it. Szobel contends that orphanhood, often read as an autobiographical status, is also a symbolic position, “representing femininity in its social, cultural, and emotional formation” (p. 30). Szobel’s reading proves to be groundbreaking: it balances Ravikovitch’s biographical orphanhood with an astute theoretical reading that understands orphanhood as a state in tension with inherited religious, cultural, and national narratives and affiliations, even with the “symbolic order” of the poem itself. In the second section, “Estrangement: The Project of Female Subjectivity,” Szobel persuasively argues that the estrangement (harigut) of Ravikovitch’s poetic speakers and fictional characters is an “enterprise of self-production,” a way to position and develop a self-identity that is subjective, authentic, and independent of societal expectations and patriarchal law (p. 39). This chapter offers a close reading of select stories from Ravikovitch’s collection Winnie Mandela’s Soccer Club (1997). The title is a reference to the notorious Mandela United Football Club, which was responsible for acts of vigilante violence in the 1980s of South Africa. While Szobel does not discuss here the relation between the historical Winnie Mandela, who founded the club, and Ravikovitch’s protagonists, it is a strand that deserves further study.

In part 3, on mania, depression, and madness, Szobel argues that a fundamental component of the manic-depressive temperament is the “inability to not...