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African American went through centuries of repeated cruelties, disgrace, and segregation, along with psychological domination leaving its influences and imprints on their personalities. Distorted personality, seemingly, has become an identical feature of the African American males; it stuck to their characters even after gaining literal freedom from slavery. The purpose of this study is to explore the traumatic experience of the African American male protagonist in an African American novel; Toni Morrison‘s, Home (2012). The study examines the impact of repeated form of trauma on male personality. Morrison typifies African American male's role and behavior in society and family –in the mid20th century. The main aim here is to expose the traumatic experience impacts on the protagonist, Frank, showing how it consequently affects the social constructed aspect of his personality. The analysis employs the concept of the complex post-traumatic stress disorder which is introduced fully in Judith Herman‘s book, Trauma and Recovery. Herman gives insights into the theory from psychological thinking relying on the studies of her own and of other previous researches in the field of psychological trauma. This study traces the origin of the existing misunderstanding caused by some African Americans‘ behaviours. Studying the novel and probing the impacts of chronic trauma on the character's personality clarifies and even justifies many social performances like violence and passivity. Moreover, African Americans trauma is not a single traumatic experience, but a chronic one. In effect, it is the male characters complex traumatic syndrome which defines their masculinity. Introduction Regardless of their emancipation from slavery in 1865, African Americans encountered discrimination in every aspect of their lives in America. After the Civil War, many blacks went to work with their former masters in order to provide food and life expenditure. However, what they gained was a share of crops which was not sufficient for paying rent and buying other supplies. In this way, they were pushed to be in debt all the time. There was a wide spread code since 1890s, like ̳separate but equal‘, which enforced the blacks to use distinct public facilities like churches, schools, restaurants, hotels, bus seats, public toilets, bathrooms and water fountains. Of course, African Americans‘ separate services were usually and considerably second-rate compared with those provided for the whites. These second class, unemployed, and sometimes low-paid citizens lived the in poor and underprivileged districts. The litanies of abuses increased day by day besides lynching and using the blacks as human laboratory animals in medical experiments. Therefore, it is obvious that the abolishment of slavery did not end the trauma of African 5 Conference for the language and Human Sciences (Special Issue), 2019 Page 1023 American people. The repeated abuses, humiliation and segregation that the African American passed through have their own influences and imprints on their personality. The black male was denied to act freely, being deprived of taking the role of an honorable, protector and provider father. He had to repress his anger, weep and grief for a long time tolerating the cries of his beloved family members as they were tortured. Distorted personality has become the standard factor an African American male took and was equipped with when he was given the chance to live as a free man. Bell Hooks in We Real Cool (2005) states that ―while social critics looking at black life have continually emphasized the notion that black men were symbolically castrated because black women were often the primary breadwinners‖ (8). She also holds the viewpoint that some studies and researches about black families done by white Americans confirm that blacks suffer from ―disrupted marriage‖ and families are affected by their ―lack of interest in sustaining two-parent households‖ (10). To find out the truth or the problems behind what have been said about black men in America, we need to go further to trace the impacts of their chronic trauma which, as it has been noticed, encapsulate a further issue besides the personality disorder. In fact, most of the conditions that caused and nourished psychological trauma during 1930s1950s in America are presented in Toni Morrison‘s very recent novel Home (2012). Toni Morrison (1931) is one of the African American greatest authors who has determined her literary life on the trauma of African Americans in her novels. Through her chronicle novels, she explores the lives, societies, individuals, and histories of her people in America. Morrison‘s quests for discovering the roots of most destructive aspects of behaviour and personality might have its claim from her personal life as well. She brought up her sons alone and took their responsibility after her divorce from a six year marriage. She had to work more than one job to afford a comfortable life for her sons in the segregated America during the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, it is not strange to find the theme of the role of father, or man, in general reflected in most of her works. She published her first novel The Bluest Eyes in 1970. Since then she has written ten novels including Home (2012), her most recent one. As usual, in her fiction, Morrison exposes new forgotten facts about African Americans‘ daily life in America besides high lighting the neglected period in American history which is the Korean War in the 1950s. The most critical achievement in Morrison‘s novel, Home, is placed in her capability to portray what it denotes to be a black in America of the postbellum throughout the 1930s-1950s. The novel is set in a society where the black individuality is looked down and segregated in relation to the supreme whiteness and the touches of this inferiority advocate an array of trauma in connection to African American experiences. Home is about an African American war veteran, Frank, who has a disturbed childhood memory which combines with his struggles with the changes that have been happening to his psyche after his return from Korea. Frank‘s disorder continues in the segregated Ame rica who treats him less than an animal depriving him of any solace. Reading Toni Morrison‘s Home, one can understand that the male character in the novel is suffering from social domination and oppression. Herman suggests that people in captivity, due to the social oppression and the abuse of prolonged repeated trauma, suffer from an established sever personality disorganization. Therefore, Herman‘s concept of chronic trauma is significant while dealing with the problems of personality disorder and role dysfunction. Thus, this study seeks to prove that the African American male character, Frank, is chronically traumatized 5 Conference for the language and Human Sciences (Special Issue), 2019 Page 1024 individual; his trauma has not caused from a single traumatic experience. Hence, it is his prolonged repeated trauma that defines many aspects of his personality including his social role. In this study Home will be analyzed, where the elements of the male character's psychological domination will be discovered, and the syndrome of his chronic trauma or complex posttraumatic stress disorder will be examined. It is essential first to define the term 'trauma' before tackling the concern of this paper. As it is known the traumatic event attacks without warning and reverses daily experiences effectively. A number of approaches have historically grown around the relations of trauma to psychoanalytic discourse and individual‘s identity development as well as the performances of well-being. Lenore Terr states that, ―psychic trauma occurs when a sudden, unexpected, overwhelming intense emotional blow or a series of blows assaults the person from outside. Traumatic events are external, but they quickly become incorporated into the mind‖ (8). Cathy Caruth in her essay The Wound and the Voice illustrates that Freud called the traumatic event ―traumatic neurosis‖ and defined it as disturbing event that is undesirable as well as uncontrollable and repeats itself persistently and unconsciously in the survivors‘ acts. This repetition of the traumatic experience appears to be due to the victim‘s inability to leave it behind. Caruth affirms that literature and psychoanalysis are both concerned in the multifaceted link between ̳knowing‘ and unknowing. Accordingly, Frank‘s traumatic syndromes take the quality of knowing and unknowing due to the unjustifiable nature of his domination which prevents him normally assimilating his trauma into his everyday experience. Cleo Van Velsen elaborates that the wound which is the root of trauma involves penetration and damage of the ̳protective shield‘ whose essential funct ion is to protect the ego (mind) from being intimidated by the internal and external stimuli. The link between the external and internal reality is the root of developing the concept of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. The term post-traumatic stress disorder which is referred to by the abbreviation (PTSD) is provided by the American Psychiatric Association in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the third edition (1980), to what had formerly been called shellshock, combat neurosis, or traumatic neurosis. In A Guide to Psychological Debriefing (2007), David Kinchin defines the official definition of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder as: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder results when a person has been exposed to an event which may be outside the range of normal human experience: an event which would markedly distress almost anyone. It is the normal human response to an abnormal situation (Kinchin, 12). In fact he introduces the forces that may lead to traumatic experience including a serious lifethreatening event to a person or to the children, spouse, parents, relatives or friends. It can also be the unexpected

Tittle: The Study of Frank Money's Chronic Trauma and Complex Post-traumatic Stress Disorder in Toni Morrison's Home