Transatlantic Voices: Interpretations of Native North American Literatures

6. Of Time and Trauma: The Possibilities for Narrative in Paula Gunn Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows

deborah l. madsen Of Time and Trauma The Possibilities for Narrative in Paula Gunn Allen’s The Woman Who Owned the Shadows In the introduction to her 1998 essay “Contemporary Two-Spirit Identity in the Fiction of Paula Gunn Allen and Beth Brant” Tara Prince-Hughes observes that for Native American writers the “struggle for identity has required writers to engage actively and dispute dominant Western fictions of ‘Indianness’ and to express the fragmentation experienced by people of mixed ancestry” (9). In this essay I want to address the way in which Paula Gunn Allen, in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983), actively engages and disputes dominant Western fictions of “trauma” in a Native American context. In a central sequence of episodes in the novel Allen depicts her protagonist, Ephanie, undergoing Western-style therapy in the attempt to heal her alienated condition. Eventually, Ephanie comes to reject psychotherapy because at the point when she leaves her therapist she finds herself in a more alienated and fragile state than ever. Western approaches to the healing of trauma are powerless to help Ephanie; in this novel, however, Paula Gunn Allen offers us not only an alternative vision of healing but also a different way of viewing and understanding trauma itself. This essay considers the contested thematics of trauma, in Paula Gunn Allen’s novel, in terms of the treatment of time. The connection between time and trauma is crucial to the Western understanding of trauma presented by influential theorists such as Ruth Leys and Cathy Caruth. I want to use trauma theory to approach the question of the 6 112 Of Time and Trauma representational capacities of language within the context of a trauma that is both racial and gendered, historical and personal. In particular, I want to question the issue of trauma as characterized by Caruth’s concept of “belated temporality” in relation to the ways in which Allen depicts the destruction of subjectivity within trauma and the implications of this representation for the construction of a temporal narrative of self. I want to introduce in this context Allen’s insight into an alternative approach to trauma: the idea that in fact trauma is unrepresentable in narrative terms because the destruction of the traumatized “I” renders the linear history of trauma unrecuperable. Let me begin by acknowledging that trauma may seem to be an inappropriate approach to Allen’s work (especially given the negative representation of psychotherapy in the novel) and, indeed, to Native American literature in general. As Hartwig Isernhagen observes in his essay in the present volume, Native American literature can be distinguished from African-American writing (to take one fairly arbitrary example of American “minority” literature) in that Native writers have avoided “trauma narrative” as a designation for their work, and critics of Native American literature have tended to follow this lead (“They Have Stories”). Writers such as Paula Gunn Allen emphasize the status of their texts as healing narratives, and it is in these terms that Allen describes her project in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows in the essay “Whose Dream Is This Anyway? Remythologization and Self-definition in Contemporary American Indian Fiction” (Sacred Hoop 98–100). At the same time that Allen approaches the issue of Native experience from the perspective of a woman-centered Keres-Pueblo cultural tradition , however, she offers a revisionary perspective on the whole contemporary discourse of trauma. A monolithic view of trauma, such as seems to be emerging from the contemporary orthodoxy surrounding trauma studies, cannot offer this revisionary approach. But a sensitive , tribally informed approach, such as Allen’s novel represents, can uncover for us a larger truth about identity de/formation under conditions of trauma. deborah l. madsen 113 Of Time and Trauma In most dominant theoretical accounts of trauma there are two moments in the chronology of psychic trauma: the original traumatic event and its belated emergence as a symptom. Ruth Leys explains: Theideaisthat,owingtotheemotionsofterrorandsurprisecaused by certain events, the mind is split or dissociated: it is unable to register the wound to the psyche because the ordinary mechanisms of awareness and cognition are destroyed. As a result, the victim is unable to recollect and integrate the hurtful experience in normal consciousness; instead, she is haunted or possessed by intrusive traumatic memories. The experience of the trauma, fixed or frozen in time, refuses to be represented as past, but is perpetually reexperienced in...