perspective by narrative in order to integrate and accept them as part of their lives, they

will remain in the "black hole" of trauma that saps the life out of them by fixating them

on trauma.33 Hence, they will engage themselves in the perpetual and hopeless effort of

regaining their foothold on the solid social ground that has already crumbled under their

feet.

 Trauma is often called an "action schema," in which victims partially remember

and repeat their traumatogenic pasts without cognitively and emotionally recognizing

their meanings. 34 Saying something about trauma changes it, for as Charles Edward

Robins argues, narrative as a "symbolic work. .. lays a net over it."35 Rather than seeing

the general feeling of disintegration and loss that pervades our culture as an entirely new

phenomenon, we need to see it along the line of our continuously increasing awareness of

the potentially destructive forces of civilization, or, what Horkeimer and Adorno several

decades ago called, the haunting historical "wound in civilization."36

 The imbalance, which catastrophic incidents people usually call traumatic

precipitates, foregrounds the actually porous nature of the boundary between the self and

other, which, under normal circumstances, is made into a thick wall of discrimination and

segregation, which is carefully guarded, policed, and maintained by the dominant group.

Yet what the collective trauma of marginal groups, such as the Holocaust, the slavery and

racism inflicted upon African-American, and ethnic genocides, reveals is the inextricably

bound, complex circuit of recognition between the self and the other, which usually

travels on an uneven road in only a unilateral direction.

 In order to revisit the scenes of uneven recognition and desubjectification of the

marginal self, I analyze, in the following chapters, different ethnic subjects' traumas