Introduction: Postcolonial Trauma Novels

Trauma studies, an area of cultural investigation that came to prominence in the early-to-mid-1990s, prides itself on its explicit commitment to ethics, which sets it apart from the poststructuralist criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s in which it has its roots. Standing accused of irrelevance or indifference to “real-world” issues such as history, politics, and ethics because of its predominantly epistemological focus, this earlier, “textualist” paradigm was largely eclipsed around the mid-1980s by overtly historicist or culturalist approaches, including new historicism, cultural materialism, cultural studies, and various types of advocacy criticism (feminist, lesbian and gay, Marxist, and postcolonial). Trauma studies can with some justification be regarded as the reinvention in an ethical guise of this much maligned textualism.

Cathy Caruth, one of the leading figures in trauma studies (along with Shoshana Felman, Geoffrey Hartman, and Dominick LaCapra), counters the oft-heard critique of poststructuralism outlined above by arguing that, rather than leading us away from history and into “political and ethical paralysis” (Unclaimed 10), a textualist approach can afford us unique access to history. Indeed, it makes possible a “rethinking of reference,” which aims not at “eliminating history” but at “resituating it in our understanding, that is, at permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not” (11). By bringing the insights of deconstructive and psychoanalytic scholarship to the analysis of cultural artifacts that bear witness to traumatic histories, critics can gain access to extreme events and experiences that defy understanding and representation. Caruth insists on the ethical significance of this critical practice. She claims that “the language of trauma, and the silence of its mute repetition of suffering, profoundly and imperatively demand” a “new mode of reading and of listening” (9) that would allow us to pass out of the isolation imposed on both individuals and cultures by traumatic experience. In “a catastrophic age” such as ours, according to Caruth, “trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures” (“Trauma” 11). With trauma forming a bridge between disparate historical experiences, so the argument goes, listening to the trauma of another can contribute to cross-cultural solidarity and to the creation of new forms of community.

Remarkably, however, trauma studies’ stated commitment to the promotion of cross-cultural ethical engagement is not borne out by the founding texts of the field (including Caruth’s own work), which are almost exclusively concerned with traumatic experiences of white Westerners and solely employ critical methodologies emanating from a Euro-American context.¹ Instead of promoting solidarity between different cultures, trauma studies risks producing the very opposite effect as a result of this one-sided focus: by ignoring or marginalizing non-Western traumatic events and histories and non-Western theoretical work, trauma studies may actually assist in the perpetuation of Eurocentric views and structures that maintain or widen the gap between the West and the rest of the world.

If, as Caruth argues, “history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (Unclaimed 24), then Western traumatic histories must be seen to be tied up with histories of colonial trauma for trauma studies to be able to redeem its promise of ethical effectiveness. Attempts to give the suffering engendered by colonial oppression its “traumatic due” have begun to be made in various disciplines in recent years. Mental health professionals, for example, are becoming increasingly aware of the need to acknowledge traumatic experiences in non-Western settings and to take account of cultural differences in the treatment of trauma. These concerns are reflected in the titles of two recent collections of essays: Trauma and Dissociation in a Cross-Cultural Perspective: Not Just a North American Phenomenon (2006) and Honoring Differences: Cultural Issues in the Treatment of Trauma and Loss (1999).² Concurrently, taking their cue from such thinkers as Aimé Césaire and Hannah Arendt, historians working in the fledgling field of comparative genocide studies–including A. Dirk Moses, David Moshman, Dan Stone, and Jürgen Zimmerer–have complicated the notion of Holocaust uniqueness by situating other, mainly colonial, atrocities in relation to the Shoah. Moreover, postcolonial critics and theorists like Kamran Aghaie, Jill Bennett, Victoria Burrows, Sam Durrant, Leela Gandhi, Linda Hutcheon, Rosanne Kennedy, David Lloyd, and Rebecca Saunders have lately suggested theorizing colonization in terms of the infliction of a collective trauma and reconceptualizing postcolonialism as a post-traumatic cultural formation.

Following on from the research of these and other scholars, some of whom contribute to this issue, the writers gathered here set out to examine whether and how trauma studies can break with Eurocentrism through the analysis of novels that bear witness to the suffering engendered by colonial oppression. They consider the specificity of colonial traumas and of the act of postcolonial literary trauma representation in relation to the dominant trauma discourse and attempt to arrive at alternative conceptions of trauma and of its textual inscription that might revitalize the field of trauma studies by helping it to realize its self-declared ethical potential. The rapprochement between trauma studies and postcolonial studies to which the essays contribute also enriches the latter field, which, as Durrant argues, all too often manifests itself as “a recuperative, historicizing project” and as such fails to adequately address the inability or refusal of much postcolonial literature to simply narrativize a painful colonial past (7). Examining a variety of issues surrounding the intersection of trauma, narrative, and the postcolonial, the contributors to this issue assess both the difficulties to be confronted and the benefits to be gained in “postcolonializing” trauma studies.

A recurring theme in the essays that follow concerns the usefulness of trauma theory as we know it for understanding colonial traumas such as dispossession, forced migration, diaspora, slavery, segregation, racism, political violence, and genocide. Rather than assuming that Western theoretical and diagnostic models can be unproblematically exported to non-Western contexts, the authors investigate the extent to which these models are culture-bound, and ponder how they might be modified with a view to wider applicability. The feminist psychotherapist Laura S. Brown has argued that traumatic experiences of people of color, women, gays and lesbians, lower-class people, and people with disabilities often fly under the trauma-theoretical radar because of the fact that current definitions of trauma have been constructed from the experiences of dominant groups in Western society. Brown stresses the need to expand our understanding of trauma from sudden, unexpected catastrophic events that happen to people in socially dominant positions to “insidious trauma,” by which she means “the traumatogenic effects of oppression that are not necessarily overtly violent or threatening to bodily well-being at the given moment but that do violence to the soul and spirit” (107).³ A classic example of insidious trauma due to systematic oppression and discrimination is provided by Frantz Fanon’s oft-cited account of encountering racial fear in a white child. In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon describes how he felt his corporeal schema crumble as a result of being objectified as a demonic black figure in the eyes of a little white boy. The imposition of the child’s gaze “abraded” his body “into nonbeing” (109). Fanon compares the shock of encountering racial prejudice, an experience that “completely dislocated” him, to psychic splitting and physical amputation (112). His analysis brings to light the harm done to marginalized groups by continuous exposure to “a galaxy of erosive stereotypes” (129), which causes them to develop feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and self-hatred. Routinely ignored or dismissed in trauma research, the chronic psychic suffering produced by the structural violence of racial, gender, sexual, class, and other inequities has yet to be fully accounted for. By revising and broadening hegemonic definitions of trauma, the contributors to this issue seek to gain deeper insight into the distress and alienation represented and enacted in postcolonial literature.

A related problem explored in this issue lies in the fact that the study of trauma has traditionally tended to focus on individual psychology. Colonial trauma, however, is a collective experience, which means that its specificity cannot be recognized unless the object of trauma research shifts from the individual to larger social entities, such as communities or nations. Yet it is hardly self-evident how this transition might be effected. While some theorists assume an unproblematic translation from individual to collective trauma (LaCapra; Erikson; Hutcheon), others warn that a simple metaphorical extension may be reductive and politically irresponsible (Lloyd; Saunders and Aghaie). However, refusing to move from the individual psyche to the social situation is bound to have damaging consequences. A narrow focus on individual psychology ignores and leaves unquestioned the conditions that enabled the traumatic abuse. Indeed, the psychologization of social suffering encourages the idea that recovery from the traumas of colonialism is basically a matter of the individual witness gaining linguistic control over his or her pain. Immaterial recovery–psychological healing–risks becoming privileged over material recovery: reparation or restitution and, more broadly, the transformation of a wounding political, social, and economic system. Again we can take instruction from Fanon, who called attention to the social nature of the traumas caused by the colonial predicament and cautioned against the inclination to value “the salvation of the soul” over and at the expense of material liberation.⁴ As Fanon argued in Black Skin, White Masks, the black man’s chronically neurotic state of mind cannot be alleviated as long as the socioeconomic structure that brought it on remains unchanged: “There will be an authentic disalienation only to the degree to which things, in the most materialistic meaning of the word, will have been restored to their proper places” (11–12). This sentiment also informs many of the novels discussed in this issue, which are seen to offer a corrective to the individualizing, psychologizing, and ultimately depoliticizing tendencies characteristic of Western models of trauma treatment.

The disempowering effect of Western psychoanalytically informed approaches on members of subaltern groups can also be traced back to the specific character of the underlying therapeutic model (Kennedy and Wilson 125–27). In Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s landmark study Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, for example, the relationship between the witness and the listener/reader is based on that between the analysand and the analyst in the psychoanalytic situation. The respective subject positions into which the witness and the listener/reader are interpellated are those of a passive, inarticulate victim on the one hand and a knowledgeable expert on the other. The former bears witness to a truth of which he or she is not fully conscious, and can do so only indirectly, making it impossible for his or her testimony to act as a political intervention. The latter responds to the witness’s testimony by showing empathy, a reaction that supposedly obviates any need for critical self-reflection regarding his or her own implication in ongoing practices of oppression and denial, let alone political mobilization against those practices. The writers represented in this issue find that postcolonial trauma novels often denounce the pathologization and depoliticization of victims of violence, critique Western complacency in dealing with non-Western testimony, and call for the development of alternative modes of address.

Above and beyond shedding light on the particularity of the traumas associated with colonialism, the essays that follow address the inscription of such experiences in postcolonial literature. Within trauma studies, it has become all but axiomatic that traumatic experiences can only be adequately represented through the use of experimental, (post)modernist textual strategies. Our contributors test this hypothesis by looking at the representational techniques employed by various postcolonial novelists for bearing witness to colonial trauma. In some cases, a reliance on self-reflexivity and anti-linearity is shown to be an integral part of the authors’ critique of naively redemptive accounts in which colonial trauma is easily and definitively overcome. In others, an attachment to realism and indigenous literary practices is interpreted as a deliberate eschewal of the Western discourse of unspeakability, recourse to which is seen as politically debilitating. These contrasting appraisals of the appropriateness and effectiveness of (post)modernist forms for the representation of traumatic experiences provide a welcome reminder of the importance of attending to the political and cultural contexts in which literary testimonies are produced and received (Bennett and Kennedy 9–11; Kennedy and Wilson 122–25).

In her essay “Journeying through Hell: Wole Soyinka, Trauma, and Postcolonial Nigeria,” Anne Whitehead raises the important issue of mislaying a Western construct (trauma studies itself) onto the likely radically different experience of suffering and oppression known to African postcolonial subjects. For insight, she turns to the nonfiction and fiction of the Nigerian novelist and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, who in Season of Anomy underwrites the Western myth of Orpheus with the more collectively oriented and regenerative Yoruba myth of Ogun. Whitehead notes that Ogun’s act of traversing the gulf that separates humans and gods is one that, for Soyinka, “must be re-enacted periodically through rituals and ceremonies, which help to diminish the distance between the human and the divine” (17). With respect to the subject at hand, “Soyinka forces us to encounter a response to trauma that asserts the relevance of localized modes of belief, ritual, and understanding, thereby undermining the centrality of western knowledge and expertise” (27).

In “Who Speaks? Who Listens? The Problem of Address in Two Nigerian Trauma Novels,” Amy Novak continues the discussion of Nigeria’s colonial-induced traumas as realized in contemporary literature, specifically Christopher Abani’s GraceLand and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Novak selects these works for their shared challenge the notion of a colonial past, when the lingering effects of Britain’s “divide-and-rule policies” (34) and new modes of neocolonial exploitation are everywhere to be found. She notes both novels’ critique of the West’s poor reception of the African story–its tendency to distort modern-day realities as versions of old, tenacious stereotypes and to fetishize African art and other native resources with the eye of an imperial overlord. Opening her argument with a gender- and race-based critique of the Tancred and Clorinda myth read by both Freud and Caruth for its traumatic effects on Western, murderous Tancred instead of the murdered, silenced, Ethiopian Clorinda, Novak concludes by lamenting that neither novel grants its female characters a centralized voice or lasting agency.

Novak observes that the three main characters in Adichie’s novel all attempt to narrate their traumatic witnessing of atrocities committed before and during the Nigerian Civil War, but in each case, literally and metaphorically, words fail them. Laura Murphy, in her essay “The Curse of Constant Remembrance: The Belated Trauma of the Slave Trade in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments,” explores another troubled attempt to narrate a traumatic past, this time the theft of Africans for slavery in the Americas. Complicating the traditional reading of Armah’s Fragments as a novel mainly about Ghana’s contemporary importation of Western consumerism, Murphy reads the novel’s heavy material focus both to implicate Africans as (slave) traders long oriented toward individual material gains and to function as a means by which they forget their traumatic past.

In “‘You would not add to my suffering if you knew what I have seen’: Holocaust Testimony and Contemporary African Trauma Literature,” Robert Eaglestone provides a comparative survey of the features of Holocaust testimony and recent works about genocide, mass-murder, and atrocity in Africa. Eaglestone begins by noting the overlap of Holocaust and colonial discourses in many writings about the Holocaust. He cautions against the “‘game’–and the consequences–of drawing moral equivalents” (73) between different world cataclysms, yet, for Eaglestone, “the Holocaust and our knowledge of the representation of the traumas and damages of those events shape in no small part the form of [African] accounts of atrocity and mass death” (77). Both Holocaust and African trauma narratives complicate the notion of authorship, and they share a variety of meaningful formal and thematic features.

Countering Eaglestone’s approach, Rosanne Kennedy makes the case for stepping away from the Holocaust as the touchstone traumatic event in “Mortgaged Futures: Trauma, Subjectivity, and the Legacies of Colonialism in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not.” Reviewing the significance of Fanon’s work with traumatized Algerian fighters (and traumatized black citizens in a white/colonial context), Kennedy draws attention to the parallels with Dangarembga, who like Fanon has had medical and psychiatric training and depicts in her work the psychopathology of “ordinary” racism as well as the larger trauma stemming from colonization and neocolonialism. In The Book of Not, says Kennedy, the protagonist Tambu provides the female perspective that Fanon did not; Tambu’s disheartening relationships with both her black roommates and the white fellow-students and teachers who exploit but refuse to credit her obvious talent lead her to internalize racial self-hatred despite her great hunger for recognition and equality. As Kennedy observes, “The Book of Not brilliantly inscribes a young woman’s struggle to achieve subjectivity in the context of the ongoing denial, forgetting, and the unspeakability of racism, colonialism, and war” (102).

In “Apartheid Haunts: Postcolonial Trauma in Lisa Fugard’s Skinner’s Drift,” Mairi Emma Neeves draws upon the writings, published elsewhere, of several of the contributors to this volume. From Rosanne Kennedy (and her co-editor Jill Bennett), Neeves takes up the issue of trauma studies’ overlap with postcolonial studies; from Petar Ramadanovic comes the consideration of various genres–specifically literature–best suited to the processing and dissemination of the trauma experience; and from Anne Whitehead Neeves adopts an interest in the traumatized form of literature itself. For Neeves, “Fugard’s use of a fragmented or dispersed narrative and her employment of repetition as formal literary devices . . . communicate traumatic experience” (112). In Fugard’s novel, the main character is haunted by a past she can barely stand to recall. When she returns physically from the US to South Africa, she returns temporally to memories of both endearing and painful experiences–some of which she herself in part inflicted upon her black fellow-South Africans. As Neeves observes, a key feature of Fugard’s fragmented, non-traditional narrative is the technique of “switching points of view and employing multiple characters as focalizers for the narrative. These characters present different perspectives, which challenges and subverts the isolating effects of trauma” (116).

Also turning to South Africa, Shane Graham in “‘This text deletes itself’: Traumatic Memory and Space-Time in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story” continues and expands the discussion of the unconventional narrative form. For Graham, “Wicomb employs (post-)modernist narrative techniques in order to dramatize the ways in which history itself has been ruptured in southern Africa. But her novel also calls into question the adequacy of narrative alone to enable healing and the restoration of agency” (129). As does Neeves, Graham rejects the idea that South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) can alleviate the trauma of apartheid simply by inviting its victims to share their individual testimony. In addition, the apartheid era in South Africa had collective, spatial, and material repercussions, all of which must be addressed and assuaged if healing is to take place. According to Graham, David’s Story addresses these very issues by mapping the characters’ physical bodies with the scars, birth cauls, and steatopygia that link them not only to their traumatized ancestors but to the land itself. Employing both the tropes of haunting and the palimpsest, Graham argues that Wicomb’s novel “dramatize[s] the fractures and blind spots of cultural trauma: haunted landscapes, fractured genealogies, troubled nations, digging a ‘thing of absence,’ and palimpsestic traces of that which has been imperfectly erased” (139).

Third in this cluster of South African novel analyses is Ana Miller’s “The Past in the Present: Personal and Collective Trauma in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit.” According to Miller, Dangor’s novel rejects the notion of a homogenized (often Eurocentric) approach to trauma “management” (characterized by the ultimately inadequate attempts of the TRC to clear the air) by emphasizing the particular effects of trauma experienced by South Africans of different races, generations, sexes, and sexual orientations. Once again, multiple points of view create a necessary sense of discomfort or unmooring for the reader, whose sympathies and identifications are constantly shifting. The story of Lydia and Silas, a colored couple driven apart following Lydia’s rape by a white security policeman during apartheid, “represents the damaging psychological effects of repressed and silenced trauma, but it also raises numerous difficulties that surround the articulation and communication of trauma” (156). For Miller, “The bitter fruit of the title plays on the notion of antecedents; the past produces the future. We see the bitter fruits of one brutal act [including Lydia’s half-Boer son Mikey] and the bitter fruit that is apartheid’s legacy” (159).

Victoria Burrows turns to the Sri Lankan Civil War context in “The Heterotopic Spaces of Postcolonial Trauma in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.” Drawing upon a wide range of Foucauldian terms, including heterotopia, propinquity, and space of emplacement, Burrows determines that the main character of this novel–Anil herself–is a hybrid figure with ties to both Tamil and Sinhalese cultures and also with divided allegiances between the West (and the Western medical establishment that shaped her professionally) and her Sri Lankan, personal, familial, traumatic past. As Anil always detours in her autopsies in search of the mysterious brain structure the amygdala, so she represents–Burrows echoes Novak at this point–the universal tendency to turn away from, to refuse to listen to, the traumatic stories of a colonial and postcolonial environment riven by oppression and civil war. Burrows observes that in autopsying bodies heterotopically (that is, unnaturally) transformed by acts of terrorism, Anil is forced to confront her colonial roots.

In his essay “‘You your best thing, Sethe’: Trauma’s Narcissism,” Petar Ramadanovic takes the tack of exploring not the detour or turning-away enacted by traumatized subjects but the turning-inward–the initial “focus . . . on him- or herself and [the closing] off from anything that can be construed as different, threatening, or alien” (178)–through a reading of the traumatized characters of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Drawing upon Freud’s theories of narcissism and the Oedipus complex, Ramadanovic observes that both trauma and postcolonial narratives follow the same path to understanding through withdrawal, self-absorption, and self-reliance. He suggests that both Morrison and Rushdie “chronicle . . . a new wound, a kind of masochism, which is a product of the very process of forming a posttraumatic or postcolonial identity” (188).

Stef Craps’s essay “Linking Legacies of Loss: Traumatic Histories and Cross-Cultural Empathy in Caryl Phillips’s Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood” builds upon Dominick LaCapra’s concept of “empathic unsettlement,” which describes a listener’s appropriate response–open and accepting but respectfully acknowledging unbridgeable distances–proffered to the trauma narrative. Phillips, who in his work depicts male and female victims of racist or anti-semitic oppression, has been criticized for appropriating traumatic experiences of groups to which he himself does not belong; Craps, however, observes that Phillips is careful to balance the narrative empathy he attempts to extend with sufficient narrative distancing between these characters and his own authorial perspective. Despite the apparent ease with which Phillips enters the experience of characters from many different backgrounds, and despite the numerous parallels he suggests between histories of black and Jewish suffering, Craps notes that both novels contain “textual signs which complicate the pursuit of imaginative identification, inviting critical reflection on the potentially harmful consequences of the drive to fully imagine another’s reality or voice” (197). By simultaneously engendering affect and promoting critical inquiry, Phillips’s novels open up a space for genuinely ethical cross-cultural encounters and exchanges.

Reading two recently published novels by Native North American writers, Nancy Van Styvendale, in “The Trans/Historicity of Trauma in Jeannette Armstrong’s Slash and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer,” develops the concept of the trans/historical. With this term, she considers the specific nature of trauma as suffered by Native inhabitants of the North American continent, in both nineteenth-century “removal” and modern-day “reservation” contexts. For Van Styvendale, the trans/historical describes “the intergenerational trauma of Native communities . . . gesture[ing] toward a trauma that takes place and is repeated in multiple epochs and, in this sense, exceeds its historicity” (204). The two novels explore “the contemporary conditions and consequences of extra-tribal adoption, assimilationist policies, urban relocation, and the identity politics of authentic Nativeness” (221). In both, the protagonists come to realize their fundamental connectedness to both their modern-day communities and their tribal pasts.

In his summation of the arguments raised in this special issue,“Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response,” Michael Rothberg calls attention to the shared concerns of several of the essays collected here, as well as to his own points of departure from what has been argued. André Schwartz-Bart’s novel A Woman Named Solitude, like Phillips’s novels analyzed by Craps, interimplicates (post)colonial and Holocaust trauma and narrative, providing for Rothberg a corrective to the overly Eurocentric cast to much trauma theory, which he joins the issue’s other contributors in questioning. In his response, Rothberg is especially appreciative of these writings’ contribution to “the creation of an alternative canon of trauma novels,” even as many of them “question whether trauma provides the best framework for thinking about the legacies of violence in the colonized/postcolonial world” (226). He calls attention to the complex notion of “white Westerners” (does this, for instance, include the Irish and the Jews?), as well as to the methodological split between practitioners of more theoretically-oriented (Bhabha-inspired) postcolonial studies and those focused on the material, political aspects of power and history. Additionally, Rothberg searches out the productive medium between the “hyper-particularism or hyper-localism” called for by some postcolonial trauma specialists (229) and the “over-homogenization” that is the typical, regrettable tendency in trauma studies thus far (229)–a medium he hopes to locate through consideration of “the multidirectionality of collective memory” (230).

This project began when we organized a special session on the topic of “Trauma, Narrative, and the Postcolonial” for the 2006 MLA Convention in Philadelphia. The call for papers that we put out for this event generated a significantly larger number of promising submissions than the panel could accommodate, which is why we were thrilled to learn that the editors of Studies in the Novel agreed to publish this special issue devoted to postcolonial trauma novels. Three of the four original panel papers are included here, along with new writings by established scholars as well as by emerging voices in the field. What unites them is their commitment to exposing the Eurocentric blind spots that trauma theory will have to confront if it is to have any hope of delivering on its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement. In fact, we believe that this collection of essays, brought together in one of our discipline’s most visible and influential journals, goes a long way toward that end.