The Liminal Space between Imprisonment and Freedom:

Trauma in Mustafa Khalifa’s The Shell

Abstract

This paper aims to study The Shell (2008) by the Syrian writer Mustafa
Khalifa. It analyzes the physical as well as the psychological trauma
suffered by the protagonist Musa, who was imprisoned for fourteen
years without knowing the cause of his imprisonment. After studying
film in Paris, a Catholic student Musa returns to his homeland,
Syria, and upon landing at the airport, he is unjustly arrested. He
is mistaken for a radical Islamist and is imprisoned with detainees
who were either with or suspected of being affiliated with the Muslim
Brotherhood. He is locked up without trial in Tadmur under Bashar
al-Assad’s regime. Tadmur has been called the “absolute prison” by
dissident Yassin al-Haj Salih and the “kingdom of death and madness”
by Syrian poet Faraj Bayraqdar. Musa remains oblivious to the crime
he has been charged with until just before his impending release. From
the very beginning, his life is endangered not only by the harshness of
daily torture and humiliation but also by the Islamist extremists in his
confinement who deem him deserving of execution as an unbeliever
due to his Catholic faith. He faces exclusion because others perceive
him as impure. This isolation is enforced not just by the jailers but
also by his fellow prisoners, mirroring the suppression experienced by
several political detainees who made their way through Tadmur and
other prisons in Syria and were unable to share their suffering. The
paper argues that Musa is trapped in a liminal space, that is, he is
physically released but has never truly been released, and thus is a
victim of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suffering emotional
numbing.