This paper investigates traumatic memory and identity politics in Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016). The primary objective is to examine how textual voids and evocative imagery facilitate the “working through” of transgenerational trauma. The study explores the navigation of individual remembrance within collective memory frameworks to reconstruct queer refugee identities. The methodology employs an interdisciplinary framework integrating Hirsch’s “postmemory,” Halbwachs’ “collective memory,” and Caruth’s “unclaimed experience”. It also utilises Clark’s research on somatic historiography regarding sexual violence. The paper hypothesises that Vuong's specific poetic structures and somatic imagery provide a creative framework for translating fragmented psychic trauma into recognisable personal narratives. For the refugee subject, the body functions as a “tomb” for dead voices. Identity is viewed as a process “born and reborn” from the disentanglement of loss and survival. Ultimately, the research suggests that reclaiming the “soma” subverts official narratives to honour marginalised subterranean memories.

Keywords: Traumatic Memory; Identity; Postmemory; Somatic Historiography; Collective Memory

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