Traumatic Possessions: The Body and Memory in African American Women’s Writing and Performance (review)

In her original and perceptive book Traumatic Possessions: The Body and Memory in African American Women’s Writing and Performance, Jennifer L. Griffiths draws on the work of contemporary trauma specialists Dori Laub, Judith Herman, and Bessel van der Kolk as she focuses on the bodily resonance of traumatic experience in the works of contemporary African American women novelists and playwrights. “Since trauma evades conscious understanding,” Griffiths explains, “memory becomes encoded on a bodily level and resurfaces as possession.” As the survivor “relives the original experience through a body memory,” struggling in the effort to verbalize the trauma, there is a “break between body and language,” which can be bridged by telling the trauma story to an empathic listener (p. 1). Indeed, testimony “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” (p. 2) In the testimonial encounter, which depends on an intersubjective dynamic between the survivor and witness and which makes public the private trauma, the empathic witness-listener “comprehends the bodily response accompanying the struggle for a language to express the chaos of trauma” (p. 2). But even as testimony “offers a public enactment of memory,” problems arise when the transmission of the trauma testimonial happens within a racialized public space where the “dominant cultural voice performs a kind of dubbing over the scene of violence” in a denial of the survivor’s testimony (pp. 5, 9).

After offering in her introduction an overview of trauma theory and a discussion of the usefulness of Holocaust studies to an analysis of trauma and race, Griffiths devotes the rest of her study to an investigation of literary and performance texts in which the authors creatively attempt to read the legacy of the traumatized black female body against the dominant racist perceptions that would deny the survivor’s testimony and silence her voice. Griffiths begins her analysis with an insightful discussion of Sherley Anne Williams’s novel Dessa Rose (1986), which is a contemporary rendering of the female slave’s experience. “For Dessa,” Griffiths explains, “the break in memory, the point of rupture in language, occurs across her genitals,” which are damaged when the pregnant Dessa is savagely beaten by her white slave master (p. 15). To the white writer Nehemiah, Dessa’s scarred body and damaged genitals are evidence not of her trauma but of her “insubordination and beastliness” (p. 18). However, when an old blind slave woman gently touches Dessa’s scarred body, her “ability to feel and to know the meaning of Dessa’s scars creates a new reading, one that bears witness to suffering without condemning the survivor to silence” (p. 32).

Like Williams in Dessa Rose, Suzan-Lori Parks focuses on the plight of the traumatized black woman in a racialized public space in her play Venus (1997), which is based on the life of Sara Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus. Brought from South Africa to Victorian England, Baartman was put on display because of her physical features, in particular her protruding buttocks. Not only does Baartman’s situation of captivity, as Griffiths argues, resemble the contemporary plight of trafficked women, but Baartman, in a common survival strategy of those held captive, comes to identify with her victimizers and against her own body. When Baartman’s supposed rescuer, the Doctor—who is based on the historical figure Dr. Cuvier—has sexual relations with the woman he “plans to dissect posthumously,” he becomes the ultimate victimizer of Baartman (p. 44). As Parks uses the Doctor’s relation with Baartman to reveal “the paradoxical intimacy involved in traumatic experience,” she implicates those critics or viewers who fail to recognize the trauma that “occurs within or because of this intimacy” (pp. 43, 45).

Viewers are also implicated in Robbie McCauley’s play Sally’s Rape (1994...