ABSTRACT
Lamentations presents readers with a conflict between two very different kinds of trauma, collective and psychological. Collective trauma is a narrative created by a social group to explain traumatic events, but many individuals who suffer from psychological trauma have not fully experienced and do not truly know the events that traumatised them, and so they cannot create narratives about them. In Lamentations readers see some of the speakers advance narratives to explain to the survivors of the Babylonian siege and destruction of Jerusalem why these horrific events befell them, but the voices of the survivors who speak in Lamentations’ poetry are never able to accept coherent narratives of these events. The suffering of psychological trauma that readers encounter over and over simply appears to reject narrative.
