Traumatic Possessions: The Body and Memory in African American Women's Writing and Performance

Introduction

Introduction In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Dori Laub describes a videotaped archive of a Holocaust survivor recounting a Jewish rebellion at Auschwitz. “She was,” Laub writes, “relating her memories as an eyewitness of the Auschwitz uprising; a sudden intensity, passion and color were infused into the narrative. She was fully there.”1 In the tape, which Laub presents to an interdisciplinary conference, the woman remembers four chimneys exploding. After the conference screening, the historians in the audience protest the accuracy of her testimony because, in fact, only one chimney had been destroyed. For Laub, this factual discrepancy does not discredit the testimony. The historians in their judgment fail to recognize the emotional and psychological dimensions of testimony. The event had happened in several ways simultaneously. The survivor’s perspective offers insight into the magnitude of the event in the lives and memories of the individuals most intimately affected by it. The Laub anecdote raises crucial questions about the body, witnessing , and the creation of testimony. Since trauma evades conscious understanding , memory becomes encoded on a bodily level and resurfaces as possession. According to trauma experts such as Judith Herman and Bessel van der Kolk, the survivor relives the original experience through a body memory yet struggles to find words for an experience that exceeds representation. A kind of break between body and language occurs that, as Laub suggests, only a connection to another body can bridge. Laub explains, “Massive trauma precludes its registration; the observing 2 / traumatic possessions and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out, malfunction. . . . While historical evidence to the event which constitutes the trauma may be abundant and documents in vast supply, the trauma—as a known event and not simply as overwhelming shock—has not been truly witnessed yet, not been taken cognizance of.”2 The event becomes known through the process of telling the story to a listener, “who is . . . the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time.” Testimony, therefore, depends on a relationship and a process between the survivor and the witness, as memory emerges and reunites a body and a voice severed in trauma. These fractured pieces of the survivor’s self come together in the reflection of the listener, and memory comes into meaning through this bodily transaction , rather than simply by creating a narrative in language. Laub asserts that “the absence of an empathic listener, or more radically, the absence of an addressable other, an other who can hear the anguish of one’s memories and thus affirm and recognize their realness, annihilates the story.”3 The listener becomes an integral part of this awareness and the process of creating meaning from the chaos of trauma. Testimony, therefore, exposes the vulnerability of listeners as well. They must face their limitations, their mortality, through the story of another’s trauma. According to Laub, “The listener . . . has to be at the same time a witness to the trauma and a witness to himself. It is only in this way, through his simultaneous awareness of the continuous flow of those inner hazards both in the trauma witness and in himself, that he can become the enabler of testimony—the one who triggers its initiation , as well as the guardian of its process and of its momentum.”4 The testimonial encounter happens when the listener comprehends the bodily response accompanying the struggle for a language to express the chaos of trauma, such as in Laub’s example when he reads the body of the Holocaust survivor while she tells her story. Holocaust stories and the theory developed from them have achieved what Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith refer to as “paradigmatic status,” providing “limit cases of trauma”; however, recent scholarship has challenged the notion of the Holocaust as a discrete event beyond comparison with other experiences of extreme human suffering.5 Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler claim in their introduction to Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma, “The view that the Holocaust is unique and without parallel in human history is closer to a doctrine or a dogma than to a reasoned discursive position.”6 Traumatic Possessions is interested in this challenge to the Holocaust’s “uniqueness” only in that it allows introduction / 3 the theories about human response to traumatic experience developed by Holocaust scholars to illuminate other encounters with race-related trauma and its...