Trauma Studies have been marked by an intensified traffic between disciplinary, artistic and media languages. Cultural theory, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, psychology, on the one hand, and literature, drama, the visual, land and body arts, as well as cinema, television and even the net, on the other hand, have each contributed to render the concept of post-traumatic experience not only familiar but altogether extremely popular (Buelens, Durrant, Eaglestone 3). Traumatic forms of narrativization can be considered a sort of thematic topos central to our cultural and psychological imaginary and its contribution to a new process of identity formation (Luckhust 209). The aim of my paper is to try to understand how traumatic images and their proliferation through media have haunted, and inspired, the literary production post-9/11 and in particular the novel "Incendiary" (2005) by the British journalist Chris Cleave. "Incendiary" was written just a few months before the terroristic attack in London, on July the 7th 2005, and, to some extent, it seemed to foresee it. The incipit of the novel “Dear Osama, they want you dead or alive so the terror will stop” introduces the reader into a story of loss, terror, trauma and addiction in which one of the most significant absence the protagonist has to face is the impossible chance of mourning her loss through forgiving.
