Meaning-making after loss: A study of two literary nonfiction narratives on the Chernobyl Disaster استحضار مغزى التجربة في أعقاب الفقد: دراسة لنصين غير روائيين عن كارثة تشيرنوبيل

This paper examines two witness accounts of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster: Svetlana Alexievich's Chernobyl Prayer (1993), a collection of thematically organized interview "monologues" from survivors, soldiers, cleanup workers, scientists, teachers, journalists, photographers among others; and Mohammad al-Makhzangi's Memories of a Meltdown:An Egyptian between Moscow and Chernobyl (1998), comprising short self-narratives from his experience as a psychiatry fellow in Ukraine during the catastrophe. Death features prominently in both texts, literally and metaphorically. The analysis argues that these witness accounts represent attempts to process and adapt to the irreversible new realities imposed by a monumental event. Beyond their sociopolitical function of countering official narratives about the disaster, the works construct personal and collective narratives of death, grief, and mourning that implicitly engage in making sense of profound loss. This meaning-making process helps both narrators and readers process their feelings about the transformed world after the disaster and to find meaning amid widespread death and destruction. The texts thus serve dual purposes: providing alteranative narratives to counter the official story, while facilitating psychological processing of a catastrophic event. The paper draws on the conceptualization of “narrative empathy” introduced by Suzanne Keen arguing that narratives invite readers to engage and share perspective with texts through purposeful reading. This frameowork is combined with the work on death, grief, mourning, and meaning or sense making from the field of psychiatry by Robert A. Neimeyer, where storytelling of death and bereavement ultimately help people find orientation in a very turbulent experience