The Dissertation Committee for Alyssa D

Copyright by Alyssa D. Harad 2003 The Dissertation Committee for Alyssa D. Harad certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Ordinary Witnesses Committee: _________________________________ Ann Cvetkovich, Supervisor _________________________________ Mia Carter _________________________________ Evan Carton _________________________________ Phillip Barrish _________________________________ Kathleen Stewart Ordinary Witnesses by Alyssa D. Harad, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August, 2003 Acknowledgements This project had its genesis in the stories I heard in the halls of Intermountain Psychiatric Hospital from 1993-1995. The people I met there were the first to show me the everyday nature of trauma. They also taught me to always respect what seem to be delays, detours and failures. During my time at the University of Texas, the brains and hearts of my colleagues have dazzled and comforted me. In particular I would like to thank my first partner in the study of testimony and autobiography and dear friend, Traci Freeman; the members of my first dissertation group, Jennifer Mason, Paige Schilt, and Sandy Soto; and my later dissertation group members, especially my fellow mystic, Jonathan Ayres and the fabulous Chris Strickling, who not only read my drafts and challenged me always to be better and clearer, but who has been my stalwart friend and partner in stretching the narrower bounds of graduate school. Julie Sievers leant me her sharp attention at several crucial moments in the project’s final stages. As my fourth chapter attests, I have learned a great deal from my students. I thank them for their commitment, their creativity, and their tolerance of my more obvious obsessions. What I have learned from my teachers, through lesson and example, cannot be counted. Among many blessings was the great luck I had to take Lisa Moore’s Lesbian Fiction/Theory seminar in my first year of graduate school, a class which produced the initial draft of Chapter One. Joanna Brooks arrived at UT when the project was already iv in full swing, but her advice on the field and spirit of Native American literature, and her thorough, kind, and very smart emergency service at the project’s close greatly affected its present and future shape. My committee members, Evan Carton, Phillip Barrish, Mia Carter, and Kathleen Stewart have been an ideal audience: witty, attentive, challenging, generous and wonderfully diverse in their interests and approaches to my topic. My advisor, Ann Cvetkovich has served as my inspiration in and out of the academy. An excellent long and short distance teacher and a master of kind detachment, she asked me understated questions that resonated for weeks and helped give me the freedom and confidence I needed to carry out the project as I envisioned it. Among my first teachers were my parents, without whose generous emotional and financial support I could not have begun this project, let alone finished it. Last, because he is closest, I thank my partner Vicente Lozano for his love, forbearance and great good humor. Our conversations run throughout these pages. His insights were invaluable to the project’s beginnings, and his patience invaluable to its end. v Ordinary Witnesses Publication No. _______________ Alyssa D. Harad, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2003 Supervisor: Ann Cvetkovich “Ordinary Witnesses” takes up and extends Toni Morrison’s call to recognize the unspoken, but “seething presence” of America’s historical traumas in some of the American canon’s most venerated works. Beyond its explorations of trauma in three deeply resonant works of contemporary American literature, it shows how trauma provides a critical lens through which we may begin to read and teach across the multiple literatures of the United States without collapsing their specific histories. Rather than simply “applying” trauma theory to literature, “Ordinary Witnesses” makes explicit the rich implicit work on American trauma already present in its literature. In doing so, this project reframes debates about the practice of canonization. For example, while its primary texts might normally be read within separate canons of Native American literature, African American literature, Southern literature, or lesbian literature, here they are complimentary pieces of an ongoing national debate about the nature of America’s story, a debate that is deeply inflected by trauma’s long term effects. Chapter One traces Dorothy vi Allison’s strategies, as reflected in Bastard Out of Carolina, for rewriting a contemporary political narrative of child abuse that relegates class oppression to the background. Chapter Two examines how Sherman Alexie’s novels and short stories, particularly Reservation Blues, intervene in a genocidal myth of the disappearing Indian that makes its survivors invisible. Chapter Three explores why, in The Alchemy of Race and Rights, legal scholar Patricia Williams turns to literary strategies to show the everyday effects of a social contract based on slavery. The fourth and final chapter brings these literary lessons to the classroom, in order to argue for a pedagogy of witness based on learning’s repetitive remembering and forgetting, rather than the oft-employed rhetoric of crisis and conversion. vii Table of Contents Introduction ‘My memory stammers’: Trauma, Witness, and Literary Evidence …………1 Chapter One Dorothy Allison’s Everyday Trauma and the Call to Emergency……………..32 Chapter Two Invented Indians: Tragic Disappearance and the Long Laughter of Survival.………………………………………………………………………...70 Chapter Three Law, Literature and the Traumatic Contract ………………………………….117 Chapter Four Crisis and Everyday Learning: Toward a Pedagogy of Witness ……………..165 Epilogue Debts and Homeplaces…………………………………………………………...209 Works Cited ………………………………………………………. …………….225 Vita………………………………………………………………………………...231 viii Introduction ‘My memory stammers’: Trauma, Witness, and Literary Evidence The evidence of things not seen In 1982, James Baldwin was living in Paris, France, in voluntary half-exile from the United States having fled in 1948, he writes, because he was not sure he could survive being black in America. He came back to the U.S. at the request of Playboy Magazine to report on the twenty-six missing and—it soon evolved—murdered black children of Georgia whose bodies had surfaced along the sides of the roads running through Atlanta. In the opening pages of his brief preface to the resulting book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, Baldwin produced a curious and moving meditation on nationalism, memory, terror, and the effort to bear witness.1 Like many of the texts I will read in this project, though Baldwin’s essay never employs the word trauma, his description of how terror makes its mark on human consciousness both resonates deeply with trauma, as it has traditionally been defined by clinicians and theorists, and raises significant challenges to this definition. When he reads the story of the missing children in the French papers, Baldwin imagines he can see a pattern, a familiar outline to the story. It is the terrible familiarity of home: …what I remembered —or imagined myself to remember —of my life in America (before I left home!) was terror. And what I am trying to suggest by what one imagines oneself to be able to remember is that terror cannot be remembered. One blots it out. The organism — the human being blots it out. One invents, or creates, a personality or a persona. Beneath this accumulation 1 (rock of ages!) sleeps or hopes to sleep, that terror which the memory repudiates. (xi, italics in the original) Baldwin’s description of terror’s impact and “the organism’s” attempt —not always successful — to “blot it out” overlaps almost exactly with the clinical descriptions of trauma’s impact. In most of these, trauma is figured as a shock, or a wound in the victim’s world view or psyche. It’s an event that overwhelms thought, feeling, and sense at the time it is happening, and goes “underground” (into the unconscious, if you believe in it, or into certain cordoned off parts of the psyche or the brain) to become a tyrannical absence that haunts the survivor, interrupting sleep and life with dreams and the waking somatic symptoms of “flashbacks,” which include both signs of fear such as trembling, sweating, increased heart rate and rapid breathing, and intense bodily hallucinations that mimic fragments of the body’s original traumatic experience.2 Baldwin’s description of the “personality or persona” under which “terror sleeps or hopes to sleep” chimes equally well with the clinical vocabulary of repression, disassociation, and “splitting,” all of which speak to the ways in which the trauma survivor continues to experience trauma to varying degrees (consciously, unconsciously, through somatic or psychic distress, through habit or behavior) while passing as “normal” —or as simply belonging to the daily world, or even, in some cases, as alive. Though these rough equivalencies are striking, there is one equally striking difference. The terror that Baldwin speaks of is not an attack from the outside, not an exceptional circumstance, nor even an identifiable shock. Instead, it is a terror that is inseparable from home, from daily life, from the particular nation in which that life took place: It is the terror of Baldwin’s

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