Abstract
The true cost of war is not only engraved in the physical losses on the battlefield but rather in the echoes of pain screamed loud from the depths of the psyche. Wars are features of existence that extremely impact human life and injure the inner self by their traumatizing impacts that stay in the minds and psyches of people. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to uncover the role of drama in depicting these psychological impacts of war, particularly within the context of anti-war drama. It tends to explore anti-war motifs through a psychoanalytic lens, represented in the adoption of Trauma Theory as a means of exploring the effects of wars on psychological fragmentation as reflected through anti-war themes in American and Iraqi plays. It provides a sort of comparative analysis between American and Iraqi anti-war drama, respectively represented in Lydia Stryk’s American Tet and Qassim Matroud’s My Blood is Stations and Shade. The findings highlight suffering, loss, depression, and family disintegration, among other themes, as key notions mirroring the interplay between traumas and wars. Besides, the results reflect the varying representations of wars between the American and Iraqi contexts, asserting that although wars only result in misery, this misery differs from individual context to the wider shared communal sociocultural destruction.