Blame towards the international community in relation to the Syrian War complicated already conflicted attitudes among exiled Syrian intellectuals in Europe towards their host societies where inner tensions between appreciation and condemnation intensified. Energised by a recaptured faith in ‘the people’ after the 2011 uprising, disillusionment with the West’s moral superiority, and a growing disdain towards an ‘unjust unsustainable world order’, exiled Syrian intellectuals were deconstructing a historical sense of ‘cultural insult’ and recapturing self-narratives of empowerment, resilience, epistemic authority, and cultural self-respect in their narration of their collective trauma. This recaptured voice and sense of agency appears to be subverting a previous ethos of powerlessness, subordination, and despair. The chapter argues that a paradigm shift is taking place in the ‘trauma work’ of exiled Syrian intellectuals, a change in the direction of focus from a politics of being perceived to a politics of perceiving. This new paradigm, the chapter argues, repositions the margin, through its very silencing and traumatic essence, at the centre of a new world view.
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