Masarykova univerzita Filozofická fakulta
Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky
Literární komparatistika
Mgr. Jana Heczková
In the Wake of Atrocity: A Comparative Study of Native American and African American Narratives of Trauma Disertační práce
Vedoucí práce: Mgr. Kateřina Prajznerová, M.A., Ph.D.
2009
I declare that I have worked on this PhD dissertation independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the Works Cited.
Prohlašuji, že jsem disertační práci vypracovala samostatně s využitím uvedených pramenů a literatury.
……………………………………………..
Acknowledgements
Great portion of the research preceding this dissertation would be only scarcely possible without the scholarship and assistance which I have received from the Fulbright Commission. I would like to thank the Commission for the grant which gave me the opportunity to spend ten months of the academic year 2008/2009 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, finalizing my project.
I would like to express my immense gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Prajznerová, for her ceaseless support, both professional and personal, for invaluable feedback and suggestions and for devoting endless hours to helping me shape the dissertation into its present contours. The writing process would be almost unimaginable without her constant presence in the virtual world of electronic communication, without her willingness to probe with me even the most complex of issues and without her incessant encouragement. My indebtedness also goes to Dr. Kevin Gaines from the University of Michigan who so kindly allowed me to work under his guidance. His insightful comments have shed distinct light on many areas of my research. I would also like to thank Dr. Donna Nagata from the University of Michigan whose expertise on the psychology of trauma was invaluable in the initial stages of writing. I cannot forget to thank the graduate students from the English Department at the University of Michigan with whom I explored the intricacies of trauma in class and on numerous occasions outside of classroom.
The acknowledgements would be incomplete without stating my profound gratefulness to my parents who have continued to support me through the many years of my studies; to my husband for his infinite patience and comfort which never fails to come when needed the most; and to all of my friends whose listening ears and words of consolation were always ready when the writing process was all but effortless.
Table of Contents
Introduction 2
The Genesis of the Project 4 Methodology and Key Concepts 10 A Preview of the Chapters and a Statement of My Contribution to the Existing Scholarship 18
Chapter 1: Psychology, Literature, Culture: Navigating Trauma across the Disciplines 24
1.1 Trauma as a Psychological and Literary Phenomenon 26 1.2 The Soul Wound and the Legacy of Slavery: Manifestations of Trauma in Native American and African American Cultures 53
Chapter 2: The Transcendence of the Soul Wound: Native American Trauma in the Novels of Linda Hogan, Sherman Alexie and Anna Lee Walters 78
2.1 The Body and the Land Abused: Visceral Imagery and Somatization in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms 83 2.2 The Trauma of Displacement: Out Adoption and Homelessness in Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer 102 2.3 Victims and Perpetrators: Cultural Dispossession in Anna Lee Walters’s Ghost Singer 122 Conclusion 142
Chapter 3: The Inscription of Trauma onto the Body of a Text: African American Trauma in the Novels of Gayl Jones, Ernest Gaines and Sapphire 148
3.1 “The Return of the Repressed”: Traumatic Temporality in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora 154 3.2 Voicing the Trauma of Racism: The Survivor/Listener Dyad and the Trope of Violent Death in Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman 169 3.3 From “Insect” to “Incest”: A Trauma Survivor Strives to Reclaim Her Language in Sapphire’s Push 186 Conclusion 203
Conclusion 208
Posttraumatic Growth and Healing 208 Some Concluding Notes on the Comparison of the Six Narratives of Trauma 216
Works Cited 232
I suffered for the felling of this world, for those things and people that would never return. Linda Hogan, Solar Storms (81)
I wasn’t the victim, but at the same time I was too. Anna Lee Walters, Ghost Singer (154)
Small as he was he knowed death was only a few feet away. Ernest Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (22)
Introduction
Trauma is an intricate concept diagnosed in individuals, identified in cultures and analyzed in art. Given the sometimes inconsolable state of human rights, the escalation of violence, and the inadequacies of social, environmental or political justice in various regions of the globe, trauma may as well be one of the features defining what it means to be human in the contemporary world. Every encounter with trauma poses complications and dilemmas for those involved, be they victims, perpetrators, survivors, witnesses or bystanders, dilemmas that academic disciplines ranging from psychology to literary studies have been tackling for decades.
The category of trauma is a terrain ridden with human suffering which invites constant attention and interrogation. Scholarly and lay explorations of trauma attempt to map the category’s elusive avenues and shed light on the experience of the unspeakable while uncovering the harmful tendencies of historical and cultural development. Students of trauma question the social structures and ideologies which sanction oppression and disempowerment of individuals and communities, no matter how diverse the traumas may be, or where their geographical and temporal origins may reside. What brings many studies on trauma together is their authors’ concern with individual and social healing and a hope for a future devoid of traumatogenic stress. In my dissertation, I would like to join the ranks of the many scholars and artists who, in their engagement with trauma, express a belief in the indestructibility of the human spirit.
This introductory chapter presents the impetus motivating my project, the fundamental concepts and the methodology that I employ, and the main points that I argue. First, it focuses on my professional, and in part also personal, reasons for undertaking a comparative analysis of
Native American and African American literatures through the critical framework of trauma. I address the benefits of a dialogue between two literatures which originate within the boundaries
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of a singular political entity. I continue to outline the methods of comparison and cross disciplinarity which govern my work. From a conceptual perspective, I speak mainly about the category of trauma itself and situate it in its collective and intergenerational contexts. In addition,
I also briefly preview the culturally bound concepts of the soul wound and the legacy of slavery that I use in reference to the selected Native American and African American literary texts, respectively. I close the introduction with an overview of structure and the dissertation’s potential contribution to the discourses of literary and trauma studies.
Despite the burgeoning body of literary criticism which exists on Native American and
African American literatures separately, only a very limited number of comparative studies has been published thus far. 1 A critic may encounter scholarly papers comparing individual texts by
Native American and African American authors, yet rarely are these two domains of American literature compared in a more systematic fashion. This is one of the niches that I hope this dissertation will help, albeit partly and fractionally, fill. I present the reader with a comparative analysis of three novels by Native American writers and three novels by African American writers. In particular, these are: Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (1995), Sherman Alexie’s Indian
Killer (1996), and Anna Lee Walters’s Ghost Singer (1988), representing Native American writing, and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane
Pittman (1971), and Sapphire’s Push (1996) representing African American literary production.
The common denominator of these six novels is trauma of a historical experience and its
1 Whereas scholarly texts on African Native American literature and culture are more or less frequent today, comparative studies focusing on Native American and African American literatures as two separate entities are relatively less common. Some recent texts on African Native Americans include Tiya Miles’s Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (2005), and Jonathan Brennan’s collection of literary and cultural essays, When Brer Rabbit Meets Cayote: African-Native American Literature (2003). However, to the best of my knowledge, only very few comparative studies which exclusively bring together Native American and African American writing exist in the realm of literary criticism. One of them is a collection edited by Angela L. Cotten and Christa Davis Acampora, published in 2007 and titled Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women’s Writing . Some of the interpreted authors which the editors chose to compare are, for instance, Paula Gunn Allen, Linda Hogan, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison.
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inscription onto the body of the text. I argue that each of the six novels has a specific means of narrating the trauma of Native American and African American encounter with colonialism and with the dominance of the European American order. My interpretations of the texts are both thematic and structural, and they are also cross disciplinary and cross cultural. My humble desire is that the dissertation can bridge the gap between the study of American literature on the one hand and psychology of trauma on the other.
The Genesis of the Project
Having been trained in the domains of history and literature, my academic interests have been frequently motivated by an aspiration to discover a site of concurrence between the two disciplines. Oftentimes, I have found myself preoccupied with the question of how to reconcile the seemingly disparate portraits of the empirical world that history and literature offer and how to navigate between the dissimilar methodologies that they employ. In the course of my historical training, much emphasis was on objectivity, historical facts and on their evidence.
Such accentuation undoubtedly stems from the deep embeddedness of history as an academic discipline in the Western intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment and in its nineteenth century positivist culmination. 2 Comparatively less space was devoted to discussing the subjective aspects of the allegedly objective historical facts (Le Goff 113), for historiography in the West has traditionally dedicated itself to quasi objective description of the world. However, the second
2 Not all of Western historiography has been guided by positivist premises. The movement initiated by French historians gathered around the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale needs to be pointed out. The historians of Annales were among the first ones in their field who already in the 1920s began to raise their voices in support of the everyday in historical writing. Regardless of the influence that the methodology of Annales continues to exert, much historiographical writing still tends to overlook the human and subjective aspects of history. However, this is not the place to discuss the development of Western historiography. Those interested in the topic may find relevant, for instance, Lloyd Kramer’s and Sarah Maza’s A Companion to Western Historical Thought (2002) or A Global History of Modern Historiography (2008) by Georg G. Iggers, Q. Edward Wang and Supriya Mukherjee, which is one of the pioneering studies on historiography in a global context.
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domain of my academic instruction, that of literature, provides alternative ways of writing about the world and about the condition of people’s being in the world. Literature can, and generally does, venture beyond the limits of historical representation; it gives platform to those voiceless and dispossessed and, like Klee’s Angelus Novus in the painting of the same name, “would like to […] awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed” (Benjamin 257). Or as Lisa
Garbus observes:
Literature matters because it’s [ sic ] about what it means to be human. Literature
matters because it’s [ sic ] about what it means to live in a world of language and to
encounter what is inassimilable by language, for example trauma […]. Literature
is about what it means to be a speaking being faced with things that are
unspeakable. Literature […] goes to the place of trauma. […] Literature uses
language as the vehicle to arrive at the very place where language breaks down.
(53)
The contrast between the approaches of history and literature is particularly noticeable when the two disciplines explore trauma, which is a contested ground where the individual intermingles with the communal, the political penetrates the cultural, and the objective ruptures the subjective.
Pertaining to the particular context of American history, the trauma of the (neo)colonial presence has manifested itself most conspicuously in systematic oppression and disempowerment of the ethnic other, that is, among many others, of Native American and
African American communities. Both of these cultural groups have been for centuries subjugated under the colonial order, suffering from familial uprooting, geographical relocation and physical and economic exploitation. Besides physical, and, in consequence, psychological, hardships, the two groups have been marginalized in terms of civil rights, and socio political representation.
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Still more essentially, contemporary American society seems to suffer from a pronounced reluctance to openly address the injustice of the past and to open, thus, a doorway to a future where the traumas of the past would not be replicated. In the absence of a sufficient number of official channels in the form of educational facilities, museums or other venues, which would document the atrocities of the past, Native Americans and African Americans are left with the artistic media of expression through which to revisit the past and re examine the suppressed traumas.
The choices behind my project have also a personal dimension. Although I have never been exposed to any direct violence, those close to me have not been equally fortunate. The person that comes to my mind is my late Grandfather who was born and raised in Polanka
Wielka, Poland, some ten kilometers from Oświęcim (Auschwitz). His fate was incomparably better than the fates of the hundreds of thousands of others interned and exterminated in the Nazi camp. My Grandfather’s association with the place of indignity and death consisted in supplying it with food on a daily basis, but those few years, spent in the vicinity of incomprehensible trauma, transformed his perception of humankind. It was mostly the scenes he was forced to witness on his errands that became imprinted in his memory beyond erasure. So they later did in mine when, as an adolescent, I listened to my Grandfather’s stories. In all frankness, I do not remember all the episodes that he had recounted. However, the pictures of unattached bodily extremities, of emaciated bodies and of the endless smoke rising from the chimneys of Brzezinka
(Birkenau) which I visualized as he was talking, have remained with me since. I can still recollect the texture of the sofa on which we were sitting and the shadows that the morning sun cast at the walls of my parents’ living room. Later in my life, the persistent presence of these images was accompanied by a curiosity which was no less obstinate. My curiosity has almost
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always revolved around questions concerning memory and time. Repeatedly I have attempted to probe the workings of human memory, its ability to retain some things and release others, and the striking precision of memories stored under extraordinary circumstances.
During my university studies, therefore, I started to pursue the trope of memory in literature, endeavoring to analyze its recurrence in and influence on works of fiction. However, for fear of insufficient objective detachment, I initially turned my attention away from the trauma of the Holocaust. The first works that I examined in the context of memory, and briefly also trauma, were Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony , both exposing the
American trauma of (neo)colonialism. Memory in contemporary American fiction was also the original topic of my current project. However, the more I delved into memory as a thematic and formal principle in novels, the more I became concerned with the authors’ rationale to utilize the trope in their works in the first place. In other words, the compelling question that inevitably arose was: what is so intriguing about memory that so many contemporary writers across literatures, from Toni Morrison to Michael Ondaatje, from Pat Barker to Kazuo Ishiguro, make it one of the crucial metaphors and drives of their works? A potential answer can be found in the close association between memory and trauma, that is, in the way an experienced trauma affects a person’s capacity to store and recall his or her memories of the accident (van der Kolk and van der Hart 160). 3 Frequently, a novel’s engagement with memory correlates with its portrayal of some sort of trauma. This argument holds true for Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Ondaatje’s
3 In the dissertation, I speak interchangeably about an “accident,” “traumatic accident” and “traumatogenic accident,” referring in all three cases to an occurrence endowed with negative affect and/or traumatogenic stress which can possibly trigger a posttraumatic reaction. My perception of traumatic accident is based on Shoshana Felaman’s elaboration on the category in her Testimony: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History . Felman summarizes that a traumatogenic accident, “formal or clinical, carries historical significance which goes beyond the individual and is thus, in effect, in spite of its idiosyncrasy, not trivial ” (24, emphasis in the original). Paraphrasing Felman, Ruth Leys summarizes that an accident is defined by “contingency, unpredictability, unlocatability, and the unsettling of semantic expectations and meanings” (Trauma 279). Like Felman, I use “accident,” “traumatic accident” and “traumatogenic accident” indiscriminately to refer to individuals’ traumas as well as to historical episodes such as wars, genocides and other atrocities committed in pursuit of colonial ideology.
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The English Patient (1992) as well as for Pat Barker’s WWI trilogy, Regeneration (1991), The
Eye in the Door (1994), and The Ghost Road (1995), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of the
Hills (1982). In the course of my research, I have developed a tentative conclusion that the authors’ employment of the memory trope indicates a larger presence in the novel, the presence of trauma, of which memory is a function. In consequence, I have decided to modify the theoretical scope of my project so that it now focuses primarily on trauma and its complexity as described in recent Native American and African American fiction.
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Psychological trauma in individuals, and some argue that also in collectives (Erikson,
Everything 154), comes into existence in succession to violations of an individual’s integrity, both physical and psychical. A significant portion of psychological trauma ensues as a result of the collapse of a person’s internalized assumptions about the world as a place driven by order and just principles (Janoff Bulman, “Aftermath” 15). Nowadays, trauma has become an umbrella term conceptually embracing the moment of an accident as well as its aftermath (Erikson,
“Notes” 184). The term is characterized by a considerable diversity in regard to the breadth of occurrences which it incorporates. From the perspective of large scale historical events,
American scholars speak often about the trauma of the two World Wars (Herman), the Holocaust
(Felman, “Education;” Laub, “Bearing”), the Vietnam War (Brett; Tal), and the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center (Young, “Posttraumatic”). Trauma is also often employed to refer to the genocides that the past half a century has witnessed, those in Cambodia, Rwanda and most recently in the Balkans and Darfur. 4 On another plane, trauma can be a very intimate incident in a person’s life. It can be an experience of a sexual assault, a violent, or even not so violent, death
4 Literary texts which narrate the genocide in Cambodia and the civil war in the Balkans as traumatic accidents are Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (2000) and Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo (2008), respectively.
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of a friend or relative, a car accident resulting in a physical and/or psychological impairment of the victim, and many others.
Trauma has always been a subject of literary texts, but only in the past several decades have both authors and critics started to accentuate trauma’s existence in narratives. At present, the literary production that explores trauma constitutes a substantial genre to which critics refer as trauma narratives, narratives of trauma, or, more generally, trauma literature (Tal 17; Vickroy x). As I will discuss more thoroughly in the first chapter, the canon of trauma literature comprises primarily of works written on the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and incidents of rape, incest and other breaches of one’s bodily integrity. There also exists a tendency to associate formerly marginalized literatures, such as those written by women, African American, Native
American, or queer authors, with the concept of a trauma narrative (Tal 17). This is the realm of literary criticism in the midst of which I have positioned my dissertation. In the two main analytical chapters, I analyze six novels by Native American and African American writers through the prism of trauma theory. Some of the texts, most particularly Jones’s Corregidora , have received critical attention as a narrative of trauma (Simon). In the case of Corregidora , my reading functions as an extension of the existing debates and a demonstration that Jones’s frequent narrative shifts between the past and the present signify the novel’s portrayal of the ruptured temporality of trauma as delineated by Sigmund Freud (Moses 105). However, to my knowledge, the other novels, such as Walters’s Ghost Singer or Gaines’s The Autobiography of
Miss Jane Pittman , have not yet been critically considered in the context of trauma literature. My interpretation of these two novels shows that some narratives can be ascribed the status of a trauma text even in the absence of formal narrative techniques that typically define a text narrating trauma.
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Methodology and Key Concepts
My dissertation is a comparative analysis embedded in the field of literary criticism. In terms of formal organization, I divide the novels’ textual interpretations along ethnic lines, conducting the thematic and formal comparison primarily between Solar Storms , Indian Killer and Ghost Singer on the one hand, and Corregidora , The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Push on the other. However, my goal is to also bring the texts into a mutual, six fold, interaction with one another, demonstrating the authors’ subtle treatment of trauma. Hence, when appropriate in the course of a novel’s reading, I provide references to the other texts, both inter and intra culturally, highlighting the similarities and/or differences that such a multilateral comparison reveals.
One of the possible arguments against the relevance of a comparative analysis of Native
American and African American literatures is their shared national and regional provenance, and, to a certain extent, their common socio historical and cultural milieu. Regardless of the indisputable appropriateness of this claim, Native American and African American cultures resemble each other in as many aspects as they differ in. Both the cultures have suffered oppression under the (neo)colonial project pursued by Europeans and European Americans; great portions of Native American and African American populations have been subjected to hardship, injustice and physical as well as discursive oppression. However, the actual encounters with the
European colonizers, and the treatment that Native Americans and African Americans have received from the American government, betray a multitude of differences across as well as within ethnic boundaries.
It needs to be emphasized that it is not my intent to artificially diversify, or, on the other hand, homogenize, the historical experience of Native Americans and African Americans in the
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post contact era. The differences between Native American peoples of the various geographical regions were conspicuous and not all of them have experienced the colonizers’ proximity in the same manner (Duran, Duran, and Brave Heart 62; Stannard, American ). Yet, in one way or another, almost the entire Native American population has been exposed to the (neo)colonial presence and/or its implications. In the same vein, the experience of African Americans was different in the North and in the South of the United States, as it was, within slavery, quite unique for those working in the master’s house and in the field. Some of the contrasts in the historical experience of Native Americans and African Americans allow me to assert the pertinence of the proposed literary comparison. I maintain that the characteristic distinctions are some of the cultural constituents from which the respective cultures’ literary productions emanate. These distinctions encompass, among others, Native American confrontation with forced relocation and land dispossession on the one hand, and the occurrences of the Middle
Passage and slavery which define African American history on the other. Many Native American peoples who inhabited the continent in the pre contact era witnessed violent exploitation of their lands; the African American variant of the colonial abuse, then, assumed the form of severe uprooting from the people’s African homelands.
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Apart from the dissertation being a work literary criticism, it is also a cross disciplinary study. The aspect of cross disciplinarity is engendered by the very topic of trauma which, as some critics have demonstrated, precludes its own exploration within the confines of a singular discipline (Felman, Foreword xvi; Laub, Psychoanalysis 5). The first chapter, “Psychology,
Literature, Culture: Navigating Trauma across the Disciplines,” will make it clear that cross disciplinarity of approaches is therefore what scholars of trauma frequently advocate for. Trauma
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is a concept originally developed and utilized by the fields of psychoanalysis and psychology;
Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud were among the first ones to observe and theorize occurrences of psychological trauma in individuals almost a century and a half ago (van der Kolk and van der
Hart 159; Herman 10). Psychology contributed to our understanding of trauma significantly in the 1980s when, in 1980, the American Psychiatry Association published the third edition of
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III ), in which the category of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) appeared for the first time. 5 I will examine the difference between the general concept of trauma and its diagnostically specific counterpart of PTSD in more detail later, but for the time being, suffice it to say that the debates on trauma in literature would be inconceivable without the input from psychology and psychoanalysis.
As a result, besides the method of literary comparison, I also commonly employ findings and conclusions procured from psychological and psychoanalytical studies. Most importantly, I work with the fundamental criteria that constitute the diagnostic category of PTSD. In this respect, one of my arguments focuses on the fact that some narrative techniques in trauma texts derive from, and at the same time replicate, the psychological processes as described in the
PTSD characteristics. From a psychological perspective, the processes include intrusive traumatic repetition and avoidance of trauma related stimuli observed in trauma victims and survivors (Amer. Psychiatric Assoc.). These psychological and behavioral mechanisms translate into works of literature as recognizable deviations from a conventional linear mode of narration.
A text can narrate trauma via the means of a circular structure, persistent repetitions of both
5 Throughout the dissertation, I utilize the unhyphenated spelling of “posttraumatic stress disorder” and its abbreviated form “PTSD” interchangeably, in which I draw on the official form of the term as itemized in the most recent edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV-TR ) published in 2000. However, in some instances, particularly when referring to the earlier versions of the Manual , I comply with the original hyphenated orthography, “post traumatic stress disorder.” This also applies to quoting other sources, some of which rely on the third edition of the Manual , and thus on the older variation of the spelling.
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themes and imagery, through structural circularity, and, simultaneously, by intentional omissions and silences. It is for the purpose of demonstrating the interconnectedness between the psychological mechanisms of trauma and the textual narrative techniques that my work draws on psychology and psychoanalysis.
For these reasons, literary studies, psychology and psychoanalysis are the main scholarly domains informing my work. However, any discussion of trauma in Native American and
African American literatures cannot be dissociated from the cultural and historical context of the two. The historical conditions of the post contact era, conditions marked by political, economic and cultural dominance of Europeans and European Americans, are among the primary traumatogenic stressors of both Native Americans and African Americans. Hence, although my work is principally a literary study, cultural and historical aspects cannot be eliminated entirely from the interpretations of the six narratives. This assertion becomes even more pertinent in light of the social critique which, I propose, the authors pursue in their employment of the trauma trope.
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From what has been said thus far, it follows that the concept of psychological trauma constitutes the interpretative lens of my readings. I utilize psychological trauma as theorized by
Freud and supplement his voice with more recent understandings of the concept introduced, among others, by Judith Herman, Ruth Leys, Kai Erikson, and, in the bio medical context, by
Bessel van der Kolk. Outside of the psychological discipline, trauma is also oftentimes applied as a category characterizing the existential condition of a culture as theorized by Jeffrey Alexander,
Ron Eyerman and Niel Smelser. In the domain of literary criticism, some of the most articulate scholars of trauma are Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman. Furthermore, scholars analyzing both
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Native American and African American cultures have suggested specific modulations of psychological trauma in order to better define the cultures’ historical and contemporary situations. Regarding the Native American realm, Eduardo Duran, Bonnie Duran, and Maria
Yellow Horse Brave Heart have developed, separately and in collaborative studies, a category of the soul wound which stems from a postulate about the cumulative historical traumatization of the Native American peoples (Duran 16; Duran, Duran and Brave Heart 64; Brave Heart 288).
Duran, Duran and Brave Heart conceptually incorporate a classic psychological understanding of trauma with specific aspects derived from Native American epistemology so as to address the destitute state of some Native American communities on present day reservations and in urban areas. Corresponding tendencies can be recognized in regards to African American studies where the concept of the legacy of slavery has been proposed, but which scholars such as William
Cross challenge. While the soul wound is perceived to comprise various instances of injustice and violence committed against Native Americans (Duran and Duran 32 34), the legacy of slavery presupposes a continuous impact that the historical occurrence of slavery has exerted over the African American population up until the present (Cross 387).
Therefore, my readings of the novels navigate within the confines delineated by these three concepts, psychological trauma, the soul wound and the legacy of slavery. As I hope the subsequent chapters will demonstrate, the soul wound proves to be an applicable construct for the purpose of analyzing Native American literature. However, the legacy of slavery appears to be somewhat limited in scope to fully accommodate the African American historical condition and the culture’s literary production. Hogan’s Solar Storms , Alexie’s Indian Killer and Walters’s
Ghost Singer each elaborates on one of the facets which Duran, Duran and Brave Heart understand to constitute the soul wound; Hogan portrays environmental damage to the land,
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Alexie tackles the theme of Native American displacement, while Walters addresses the dispossession of Native American material culture. However, Jones’s Corregidora , Gaines’s The
Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Sapphire’ Push extend their explorations of African
American trauma beyond the paradigm of slavery. Although slavery is discussed in their novels, predominantly in Corregidora and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman , all three authors imply that the historical and contemporary traumatogenic oppression of African Americans transcends the temporal and institutional boundaries of slavery. The novels illustrate that the mechanisms of disempowerment stem from the ideology of racism ingrained in the American culture, of which slavery was but one manifestation. To the same extent as Jones’s, Gaines’s and
Sapphire’s narratives address slavery, they portray the traumatization inherent in the process of
Reconstruction and in the systemic oppression in the second half of the twentieth century. By that, my interpretation conforms to Victoria Burrow’s observation about the trauma inducing potential of racism (17) and to Irving Allen’s contention about the “persistence of destructive, abusive, and racially discriminating behavior towards African Americans” exercised by the dominant American society (211).
Additional concepts which form the theoretical foundations of the following chapters are collective trauma and intergenerational transmission of trauma. Analogously to the soul wound and the legacy of slavery, collective trauma and its intergenerational transmission are of cross disciplinary design; they derive from a psychological conception of trauma and are applied as both vehicles of psychological diagnosis and cultural analysis. Whenever speaking about collective trauma in the dissertation, I do so with considerate care and I utilize the term as elaborated on by Kai Erikson. Erikson’s definition exceeds a straightforward transplanting of trauma of an individual to that of a collective. That is, a community of traumatized individuals
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does not necessarily signify the existence of collective trauma (Erikson, “Notes” 185). Rather,
Erikson theorizes that collective trauma is likely to be identified in groups of people whose very mutual relations to each other have been severed by a traumatogenic accident (“Notes” 187).
Drawing on the manifold case studies constituting his research Erikson concludes that the traumatic blow can assume the form of a natural as well as an artificially induced disaster. 6
The second of the two aforementioned categories, intergenerational transmission of trauma, is frequently seen as an emergence of psychological trauma in generations never directly exposed to an accident (Cross 387; Danieli 3). It is predominantly via familial environment that a traumatic accident indirectly affects the descendants of the originally traumatized persons. Like many other aspects of trauma theory, its intergenerational transmission was initially studied and defined in association with the victims of the Holocaust and their offspring (Danieli 3). Hence the hesitance with which specifically Native American scholars embrace the concept of trauma in general, and its intergenerational transmission in particular, as analytical devices employed in
Native American studies. My readings of Hogan’s, Alexie’s and Walters’s novels are guided by an awareness of the intercultural transposition of the concept and the possible dangers that this transposition imposes. In no way do I intend to utilize an analytical construct which is incompatible with Native American epistemology; thus, I oftentimes refrain from an explicit reference to intergenerational transmission of trauma and read the novels through the optics of
Duran’s, Duran’s and Brave Heart’s soul wound. At the same time, I would like to express my conviction that both trauma studies and Native American studies can benefit from a mutual discursive approximation. By analogy, this applies to African American literature. If any work of literature is to have a redemptive effect for the future, the complex interrelatedness of violence
6 In order to avoid any terminological confusion, when referring to the collective counterpart of individual trauma, I work with the term “communal trauma.” I employ “collective trauma” in Erikson’s understanding only.
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and trauma should be interrogated also through comparative studies and cross cultural communication.
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The principles of cross disciplinarity, comparison, and cross cultural reference between
Native American, African American, but also Western, cultures are the governing propellers of the literary interpretations to follow. The reason why I selected six novels, three representing
Native American literature and three representing African American literature, is given by the same condition which requires the cross disciplinarity of my approach, that is by trauma’s multifacetedness and intricacy. In regards to this complexity, the literary scholar Shoshana
Felman speaks about a certain “unnarratability” which pertains to trauma: “ the difficulty of articulation of the catastrophic story, the difficulty of articulation and the tragic unnarratability of the ungraspable disaster and of its immeasurably devastating, unintelligible trauma” ( Juridical
159, emphasis in the original). Although Felman refers explicitly to the accident of the
Holocaust, I posit that her description of trauma’s defiance of narrative can be in its entirety transplanted to the traumatic encounters of Native Americans and African Americans with the colonizing Europeans and European Americans. Native American genocide and African
American experience of the Middle Passage and slavery are incidents which elude ready assessment or easy explanations. I believe that through the diversity of perspectives offered by the six authors these traumas are rendered, at least in part, comprehensible and graspable. The multivocal testimony that surfaces in the course of my explorations addresses the historical oppression and the contemporary, sometimes no less traumatic, ramifications thereof. Moreover, none of the six narratives under examination has been written out of the experience of a direct trauma victim. As will be discussed in the first chapter, some critics deem an author’s personal
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subjection to trauma as the defining feature of a trauma text (Tal). Quite to the contrary, my intentional choice of narratives originating not with traumatized authors, but with historically traumatized cultures instead, enables me to argue for the significant domination of trauma over a culture’s artistic production.
A Preview of the Chapters and a Statement of My Contribution to the Existing Scholarship
The dissertation is divided into three major parts, an opening theoretical chapter which is succeeded by two analytical chapters. The first chapter functions as an overview of the historical and contemporary discussions pervading trauma studies. It contextualizes psychological trauma from a historical perspective and provides a diachronic summary of the zeniths that the research of trauma in psychology and psychoanalysis has experienced since the middle of the nineteenth century. Moreover, as already indicated, the first chapter also establishes the fundamental difference between trauma and diagnostically specific category of PTSD. In addition to the realm of psychology, both clinical and research oriented, this chapter focuses on the encounter between psychological trauma and literature. I point to the common themes and techniques with which trauma texts confront their readers. More specifically, I examine formal fragmentation and generic hybridity accompanied by repetitions which frequently display themselves as recurring imagery, such as that of a human body, or as structural circularity of the narrative. Despite the frequent recurrence of some of the themes and techniques in trauma literature, it is not my intent to present this literature as a homogenous group. It is essential to remain conscious of the fact that these are not universal features characterizing every text of trauma. Rather, they are strategies which critics repeatedly tend to associate with trauma texts. More notably still, as my readings of Walters’s Ghost Singer and Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman will
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show, a text may be devoid of such narrative devices and continue to function as a narrative of trauma. I devote the remainder of the first chapter to discussing trauma in relation to Native
American and African American cultures, that is to the soul wound and the legacy of slavery. My general objective in the “Psychology, Literature, Culture: Navigating Trauma across the
Disciplines” chapter is to prepare the conceptual grounds for the analytical parts that succeed it.
The second chapter brings to the forefront the primary texts by Native American authors,
Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms , Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer and Anna Lee Walters’s Ghost
Singer . According to my premise that trauma permeates both the thematic and formal planes of a narrative, I examine the specific formal narrative techniques that the three writers utilize in order to accentuate the traumas of Native American peoples that their texts narrate. In reference to
Hogan’s Solar Storms , I speak about the concept of somatization, or, more explicitly, about
Hogan’s employment of the imagery of a vulnerable feeling body attributed to both animate subjects and inanimate objects. This narrative strategy, I argue, allows the author to portray the trauma of environmental exploitation sanctioned by the capitalist ideology of the dominant
European American society. I posit that Hogan’s exposure of the environmental devastation correlates with what Eduardo Duran understands as one of the constitutive elements of the soul wound (16). Duran et al., then, suggest that, apart from the mistreatment of the land, the soul wound also emanates from various forms of “the trauma of colonialism” (62). Among others, the forms can refer to the incidents of historical relocation of Native American peoples and to the appropriation of their cultures, both intellectual and material. The last two are the traumas that I locate in Alexie’s Indian Killer and Walters’s Ghost Singer , respectively. In particular, I understand the method of displacement, which is the formal organizing principle in Indian
Killer , as the author’s narrative devices of the portrayal of trauma. In Walters’s Ghost Singer , the
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main narrative mode of imparting trauma is the way in which Walters depicts her characters as historical victims/survivors and perpetrators/beneficiaries of the colonial process. The displaced chapters in Indian Killer and the (in)distinct dichotomy of victims/survivors and perpetrators/beneficiaries in Ghost Singer are, according to my reading, the novels’ means of bearing witness to the trauma of the (neo)colonial order. As I show, each of the three Native
American novels is populated by characters who can be interpreted as suffering from some kind of posttraumatic reactions. Yet, the mere textual presence of the traumatized characters does not make Solar Storm , Indian Killer or Ghost Singer narratives of trauma. In my interpretation, the novels become trauma texts specifically in their interrogation of the various forms of injustice committed against Native American peoples. Moreover, the second chapter suggests that the trauma of (neo)colonial order has the potential to become inscribed through formal narrative means onto the body of a text. In reciprocity, these formal narrative aspects function as indications of the trauma of Native American culture.
The third chapter concentrates on depicting the trauma of historical disempowerment in
Jones’s Corregidora , Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Sapphire’s Push .
Among some scholars, there is a tendency to abbreviate the trauma of the African American historical and cultural experience into the institution of slavery (LaCapra; Flanagan). As I endeavor to demonstrate in the close readings of Jones’s, Gaines’s and Sapphire’s novels,
African American trauma needs to be perceived in the broader terms of (neo)colonial racial oppression, by which slavery was ideologically promoted. My selection of texts shows that the social structures devised by dominant European Americans have generated traumatogenic stress in both the past and the present. I suggest that it is somewhat erroneous to disconnect slavery from the other instances of racially motivated abuse, such as the hardships of the Middle
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Passage, the episodes of lynching rampant in the Reconstruction era, or the systemic oppression in the form of restricted access to social institutions in the post Civil Rights period. Among the three novels, Corregidora and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman explicitly address slavery, both in South and North America, whereas Push focuses exclusively on the insidious oppression of the African American inner city populations in the 1990s. Sapphire’s rejection to draw a causal link between slavery and her protagonist’s trauma (which is instead directly induced by her social and familial environment) allows me to extend the notion of African
American trauma beyond the paradigmatic confines of slavery.
As in the case of the Native American narratives examined in chapter two, the trauma of historical abuse informs both the thematic and formal levels of Corregidora , The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Push . In terms of themes, the African American novels, too, feature characters who are exposed to an undeniable traumatogenic stress and who, in consequence, betray recognizable symptoms of PTSD. Further, analogously to the three Native American texts, mostly the formal features allow a critic to claim that Corregidora , The Autobiography of
Miss Jane Pittman and Push are narratives of trauma. I argue that the novels’ narrative devices embody the fundamental observations about the mechanisms of psychological trauma. Thus, I read Corregidora as an exploration in trauma’s disjointed temporality, The Autobiography of
Miss Jane Pittman as a novel written in the form of a trauma testimony, and Push as an interrogation of the (un)narratability of trauma. While I posit that, in regard to Solar Storms ,
Indian Killer and Ghost Singer , the novels’ narrative techniques are mostly influenced by the traumas inherent to the Native American historical experience, the narrative techniques in
Corregidora , The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Push predominantly epitomize the mechanisms of psychological trauma itself.
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What still remains to be addressed is the modest contribution to the discourses of literary criticism and trauma that I would like this dissertation to make. Given the complexity with which trauma is endowed, be that psychological trauma in individuals or communal trauma in collectives, the concept is under constant scholarly scrutiny and subject to continuing reevaluation. It is my hope that the current work will become an extension of the debates which are, first and foremost, initiated by the need to both better understand the phenomenon and expand its conceptual boundaries. The fact that trauma is in a continuous discursive flux is best corroborated by a brief look at the redefinitions which the clinical category of PTSD has undergone with each successive publication of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders since 1980.
As will become apparent in the course of the next three chapters, apart from bringing together literary studies and psychology, my work combines diverse domains of trauma studies themselves. More particularly, I approximate the concept of trauma as established through
Holocaust studies with trauma as understood in the milieus of Native American and African
American studies. Despite the dissimilar historical and cultural contexts in which the respective traumas originally transpired, it is beneficial to theorize these three dimensions of trauma in unison. Not only does the idea of cultural traumatization emerge with the Holocaust studies of the 1960s and thus it is virtually almost impossible to dissociate the Holocaust from trauma discourse. But, most importantly, European Holocaust was yet another variation on the theme of alleged superiority of one group of people over another, resulting in oppression, harm and suffering. A similar conviction of putatively profound superiority is inherent to the (neo)colonial project; a conviction which, in the United States, generated conditions physically incomparable
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to those of the Nazi occupied Europe, yet endowed with an equivalent number of traumatogenic factors for the subjugated people. Therefore, I draw on trauma researched in association with the
Holocaust as well as with Native American and African American cultures. In this sense, I perceive this dissertation as an attempt to bridge the artificially conceived discursive divide between the various occurrences of large scale traumatization of human beings.
Furthermore, I hope that, in addition to shedding light on the landscape of trauma, the dissertation will also broaden the canon of trauma literature. Analyzing the narrative techniques in the six novels as affected by trauma enables me to position the texts in the company of other trauma narratives. Expanding the canon becomes a means of pointing to the traumatization that the American society has for centuries exerted against the people of non European American descent. I would like to believe that this dissertation will join the ranks of the many public voices speaking in favor of social justice and the restoration of humanity in the contemporary world.
Although all the six authors provide accounts of suffering and injustice, they also envision social change. The texts interrogate the past and current condition of the American society, accentuating human rights violations, but, through their traumatized characters, they become pleas for a future devoid of cruelty. I hope that my elaboration on the theme of trauma will emphasize the writers’ call.
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Chapter 1
Psychology, Literature, Culture: Navigating Trauma across the Disciplines
The concept of trauma has become the focal point of predominantly Western scholarship in the past three decades. The extent of attention it has received from psychologists and clinicians on the one hand, and from cultural and literary critics on the other, indicates that the phenomenon is unlikely to subside into scholarly oblivion any time soon. Literature dedicated to trauma is emerging from various realms of the academe while the discoursive avenues are being constantly redefined and a still broader range of occurrences is being interpreted through trauma’s analytical framework. Despite the growing number of studies exploring trauma from manifold perspectives, the category seems to be persistently eluding its own theoretical containment. The more one examines trauma and its facets, the more profound disagreement among scholars is uncovered, and the greater the confusion of its student. The objective of the following chapter is to be a contribution, albeit a small one, to the ongoing debate on trauma, its nature and implications. Simultaneously, it is a presentation of my psychological, literary and cultural understanding of the category, from which the subsequent analytical chapters will stem.
This chapter comprises of two main parts. In the first section, I discuss the general circumstances and the tribulations of the unconcluded process of trauma’s conceptualization, along with the various functions of trauma in the literary domain. In this section, my approach is a synthetic one, rooted in the intrinsic cross disciplinarity which trauma studies require. As already anticipated, it is only in a cross disciplinary dialogue and cooperation that trauma can be effectively addressed and theorized. I devote the second section of the chapter, then, to a more specific elaboration on trauma in the context of Native American and Africa American cultures and, very briefly, also literatures. The motivation behind this chapter is my conviction that, if
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employed in an informed way, trauma has the potential to become a powerful tool of literary analysis and cultural critique.
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1.1 Trauma as a Psychological and Literary Phenomenon
Only very few aspects of the vast and fluctuating paradigm of trauma can be regarded as permanently established givens, immune to challenges and further redefinitions. One of these is the year 1980 which signifies a chronological milestone, marking trauma’s codification as “post traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD), an official diagnostic category included in the third edition of
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Diseases (DSM-III ) published by the American
Psychiatric Association. 7 However, despite the illusion of constancy, the definition has been already revisited three times, namely in 1987 ( DSM-III-R), 1994 ( DSM-IV ), and, most recently, in 2000 ( DSM-IV-TR ). 8 According to the Manual , PTSD classifies as an anxiety disorder which assumes the form of “characteristic symptoms following exposure to an extreme traumatic stressor” (Amer. Psychiatric Assoc.). The definition is exquisitely detailed, divided into seven elementary Criteria that are subdivided even further. The criteria address the actual conditions of the traumatic occurrence, a person’s immediate response, the characteristic symptoms of intrusions, hyperarousal and avoidance of trauma related stimuli, and the time for which the symptoms must be present in an individual in order to meet the diagnosis. The final, F, Criterion states that “the disturbance must cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning” (Amer. Psychiatric Assoc.). This comprehensive enumeration demonstrates the common tendency of itemization and particularization which governs the understanding of trauma in contemporary medical milieu.
7 It would be erroneous to operate with PTSD, as defined in the four successive editions of DSM , as with the only normative diagnostic entity. Despite the dominance of PTSD in American trauma discourse, the concept also has its counterparts in several entries listed in the fifth chapter, dealing with mental and behavioral disorders, of International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD ) published by the World Health Organization. In its latest, tenth, edition, ICD-10 (1992), a more nuanced categorization than the one introduced in DSM-IV-TR is used. What DSM-IV-TR subsumes under “posttraumatic stress disorder” can be alternately found in “acute stress reaction,” “post traumatic stress disorder” and “enduring personality change after catastrophic experience” in ICD-10 . 8 Preparations are currently being carried out for an updated, fifth, version of the Manual , DSM-V (Amer. Psychiatric Assoc.).
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Nevertheless, not even the most refined specifications can protect PTSD from being questioned, extended and amended in each new edition of the Manual . The numerous reformulations testify to the considerable flexibility of psychiatry as a discipline capable of readjustments in compliance with the dynamically changing perceptions of the empirical world. On the other hand, they also imply the impotence of PTSD to embrace a traumatic condition in its entirety. In light of the challenges and subsequent modifications that each new definition of PTSD instigates, one may conclude, together with Neil Smelser who speaks about the “industrial proportions” of present day trauma research (56), that distilling trauma into PTSD did not mean an end so much as a reinforced impetus for the already ongoing debates.
It is essential to emphasize that the two concepts, trauma and PTSD, do not necessarily correlate with each other. Whereas trauma generally refers to a comprehensive phenomenon,
PTSD is hierarchically its secondary derivate, encapsulating only some of trauma’s features (van der Kolk, McFarlane and Weisaeth 47). The meaning of trauma originates with the Greek traumatizo , denoting “to wound,” and traditionally referring to “a sudden physical blow or injury” inflicted on a human body (Almog 290). However, as Kai Erikson and others convincingly demonstrate, the general understanding of the term has been reconsidered (Erikson
“Notes” 184). Apart from the primary meaning of “a stress or blow that may produce disordered feelings or behavior,” trauma also denotes “the state or condition produced by such a stress or blow,” which inevitably signals trauma’s conceptual instability (Erikson 184). As my discussion will show, the shift from a blow to a state is illustrative of the continuous exertions to establish an explicit and definite locus of trauma.
Despite the unquestionable, but sometimes also solely unquestioned, and well documented presence of trauma in individuals who have survived overwhelming experiences
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endowed with negative affect, one cannot perceive PTSD as a conclusive category capable of encompassing, and even less so explaining, trauma. As Ruth Leys points out in her instructive study Trauma: A Genealogy , the proponents of PTSD try to designate the category as “a timeless diagnosis, the culmination of a lineage that is seen to run from the past to the present in an interrupted yet ultimately continuous way” (3). As a form of a counterargument, Leys’s intricate analysis of the hundred and fifty year long attempts at conceptualization demonstrates that
PTSD, “far from being a timeless entity with an intrinsic unity […] is a historical construct”
(Leys, Trauma 6). Using the words of Allan Young, who in his The Harmony of Illusions:
Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder explores the political and social agendas informing the birth of PTSD, Leys reasons that PTSD “has been ‘glued together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, treated and represented and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments that mobilized these efforts and resources’” (6). This is not to deny the indisputable diagnostic and analytical potential of the category of PTSD.
However, such an endorsement should not obscure the fact that PTSD is still only a particle, limited and incomplete, of the procedural efforts to categorize trauma. Despite arguments to the contrary, PTSD remains an unfinished entity, open to challenges and alterations, and in this bears resemblance to its predecessors, which are outlined in the following paragraphs.
Since the inception of the debates, trauma has been theorized in terms of manifold conceptions such as railroad spine, hysteria, soldier’s or irritable heart, shell shock or combat neurosis, war neurosis, post torture syndrome, concentration camp syndrome, and rape trauma syndrome, to name some of the accepted denominations. 9 As early as 1880, the French
9 The condition of a railroad spine was associated with victims of railroad accidents and its supposed etiology derived from the physical damage affecting the victim’s spinal column. This diagnosis was identified for the first time by the English surgeon John Eric Erichsen in his 1867 publication On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System (Leys, Trauma 3). The state of soldier’s/irritable heart was observed in WWI soldiers and, by
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neurologist Jean Martin Charcot formulated his conviction that symptoms of hysteria, or what he called the Great Neurosis, in his female patients were of psychological design (Herman 11). In the following decade, his findings were corroborated, more or less independently, by Sigmund
Freud working with Josef Breuer in Vienna and by Pierre Janet in Paris (Herman 12). Despite some initial minor disagreements, all three of them unanimously declare, as Judith Herman invokes in her Trauma and Recovery , that “hysteria was a condition caused by psychological trauma” (12). Thus, it was particularly with Charcot, Freud, Breuer, and Janet that the term trauma migrated from its original context of a physical wound to the realm of a person’s psychology.
A careful analysis of the symptoms characteristic of each of the syndrome listed above would disclose the syndromes’ mutual congruence and a significant extent of overlapping.
However, this does not mean that the nuanced categories are wholly analogous with PTSD, or that PTSD is merely a different denomination of the otherwise identical concepts. This observation has been recently brought to the fore by Patrick Bracken, a consultant psychiatrist and currently a professor of philosophy, diversity and mental health. He concludes his discussion of the interrelation between the post modern cultural condition and PTSD by maintaining that his
“analysis renders any simple explanation of syndromes such as shell shock in terms of PTSD problematic: victims of ‘shell shock’ were not suffering from PTSD as currently formulated”
(742, emphasis in the original). In other words, despite the close affinity of the notions of shell
analogy, perceived in purely organic terms as a somatic disease manifesting itself in the area of a patient’s chest (Bracken 735). Shell shock is a term coined by the British military psychiatrist Charles Samuel Myers in his 1940 book Shell Shock in France 1914-1918 . Other classic texts illustrative of the development of trauma categories are Abram Kardiner’s 1941 study The Traumatic Neuroses of War on WWI combat veterans and Roy Grinker’s and John Spiegel’s 1945 text Men under Stress , focusing on the veterans of WWII. For a comprehensive historical survey of trauma discourse since the second half of the nineteenth century, see the book chapter “History of Trauma in Psychiatry” by van der Kolk, Weisaeth, and van der Hart. Although I do not quite agree with the authors’ implied proposal that the enumerated categories in fact conform to the present day PTSD, from a historical perspective the reader may find their text informative.
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shock and PTSD, each of them is firmly embedded in the socio historical milieus of their origins, constructed upon and emphasizing slightly varying aspects of the phenomenon of trauma. As a supplement to Bracken’s argumentation, I propose that the diagnostic category of PTSD is another phase in the ceaseless process of trauma (re)definition liable to future reconfigurations.
It is apparent that a great majority of the syndromes specified in the preceding paragraphs are related to the historical occurrences of the two World Wars. In the same vein, the immediate stimulus leading to the inclusion of PTSD in DSM-III was, in part, the Vietnam War (Brett 120).
This shows that the mechanisms governing the codification of trauma, and to a certain extent informing recent debates, are closely related to the extra discoursive reality at large, and, more specifically, to the current political atmosphere. Oftentimes, trauma has emerged as a center of attention succeeding major historical events such as the already mentioned World Wars and trauma’s accentuation or lack thereof has been also motivated by nation state political agendas.
For instance, during WWI, a great number of soldiers were rendered incapable of combat, betraying signs of trauma exposure and consequent symptoms (Leys, “Cures” 624; Herman
20).10 Yet, for fear of the allegedly demoralizing effect that openly admitting to war traumatization could have on the general public, the responsible military authorities downplayed the soldiers’ condition. The condition’s etiology was interpreted either in terms of a lack of sufficiently strong will, malingering and cowardice on the soldiers’ part (McFarlane and
Girolamo 133), or as embedded in a physical wound (Herman 20). Only very gradually was the mental state of the soldiers perceived in terms of psychopathology. Such politically sanctioned
10 The soldiers’ symptoms significantly coincided with those observed and documented by Charcot, Freud, Breuer, and Janet in their female patients suffering from hysteria. As Ruth Leys lists in detail, some of the symptoms included, but were not limited to, “stupor, confusion, mutism, loss of sight or hearing, spasmodic convulsions or trembling of the limbs, anesthesia, exhaustion, sleeplessness, depression, and terrifying, repetitive nightmares” (“Traumatic” 624).
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evasive practices naturally had a detrimental impact on the particular forms of treatment of the affected individuals and on the research of trauma in general.
Another example of the interaction between political motivations and psychological research came with the occurrence of WWII and the Holocaust which brought about a surge of interest in psychological trauma. The political underpinnings concerned compensation and reparation pursuits for the Nazi orchestrated genocide. Shoshana Felman comments on the increase in the significance of trauma in connection to the Holocaust and its consequences: on the public and cultural levels, “[i]t is a well known fact that, prior to the Eichmann trial, the
Holocaust was not discussed in Israel [or elsewhere] but was, rather, struck by shame, silence and widespread denial,” indicating that it was only the legally dubious act of bringing Adolf
Eichmann to justice in 1961 which initiated private and public reflections on the Holocaust trauma ( Juridical 126 27). It needs to be said that neither the scholarly response was immediate, but, likewise, occurred only belatedly at the beginning of the 1960s. The experience of the
Holocaust lead to the establishment of several theoretical tools in trauma studies, namely the idea of the survivor as “the carrier of history” (Wieviorka qtd. in Rothberg 1240) and the notion of intergenerational transmission of trauma. 11
Thus, a definite degree of interconnectedness can be recognized between major historical events, politics, and scholarly interest in trauma. Such approximation of the three realms is evident in the graduate expansion of the subject matter of trauma studies. As indicated above, the
11 The first article on intergenerational transmission of trauma was published by Vivian Rakoff, John Sigal, and Nathan Epstein in Canada in 1966 under the title “Children and Families of Concentration Camp Survivors” (Danieli 3). It is an account of the children of Holocaust survivors seeking medical treatment for their mental health problems that apparently lacked any immediately perceptible etiology. In the lay domain, the existence of intergenerational transmission of trauma has been long acknowledged. Each community which has been subject to some major traumatic stressor has its own ways, overt or covert, of passing the experience to the subsequent generations (Danieli; Cross; Duran). Although the term has received some scholarly attention, there is still much room for further research. To convey the ungraspability of this term, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok theorize intergenerational transmission of trauma as a phantom, which brings to mind Eduardo Duran’s trope of a vampire referring to the same entity (17 19).
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two World Wars and the Holocaust have constituted the elementary repertoire of trauma studies for decades. The canon of trauma discourse was extended in the 1970s with the occurrence of the
Vietnam War. Elizabeth Brett explains the rationale behind this expansion, claiming that “[l]ike
World War II, the Vietnam War stimulated the study of trauma. It is not difficult to see that closeness to large populations of traumatized individuals enhances the ability to describe and retain descriptions of traumatic stress, and that distance from such populations diminishes this ability” (120). Only relatively late, at the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s, did the
Japanese American incarceration and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb detonations start to receive scholarly attention in terms of the accidents’ traumatic potential; 12 later still, the debates incorporated the traumatized groups of southeast Asian refugees and Asian American
Vietnam War veterans (Abueg and Chun; Loo). Even more recently, scholars have begun to employ trauma to address the collective experiences of, for instance, the mass ringworm irradiation of the Israeli immigrants coming from North Africa in the 1950s (Davidovitch and
Margalit) or the supposedly illegal status of undocumented migrant workers in present day Israel
(Willen).
It is not rare nowadays to ascribe an incident, such as the two latter examples, with traumatogenic potential. The tendency of such terminological augmentation may, on the one hand, prove useful, bringing into focus victims and survivors of various injustices whose voices had been subdued or completely silenced by former dominant paradigms. Frequently, this may result in an acknowledgement of the harmful effects of the past actions, and in very material
12 See for instance Nagata’s “Transgenerational Impact of the Japanese Americans Internment” and Tatara’s “The Second Generation of Hibakusha, Atomic Bomb Survivors.” To my knowledge, there are no scholarly studies of the traumatizing impact of Japanese American incarceration or the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki published prior to the beginning of the 1980s. The case of Japanese American internment is another instance of the close interrelationship between politics and trauma studies, as it can be observed that the first texts appeared only after the politically initiated establishment of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in 1982. For the discussion of how the political atmosphere can stimulate or inhibit acknowledgement of trauma, see the first chapter of Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery , “Forgotten History.”
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terms may lead to monetary reparations for the survivors. However, on the other hand, understanding trauma in its metaphorical or indirect sense may also result in a diffusion of the concept (Willen 171). The tension between the need to recognize the traumatic status of persons whose victimhood may have been suppressed and the danger of trauma’s conceptual disintegration in the aftermath seem to be one of the structuring drives of current trauma debates.
The complicated process of discourse formation is indicative of how deeply the political dimension is ingrained in the structural fabric of trauma. This aspect should not remain unidentified when trauma becomes a theoretical framework of cultural and literary analysis.
In terms of the development of trauma studies since the nineteenth century, some theoreticians have observed that it is reminiscent of the ways psychological trauma manifests itself in individuals suffering from the pathology of trauma (Herman 7). Almost uncannily, trauma discourse has experienced cycles of profound interest succeeded by scholarly amnesia of equal intensity. As van der Kolk, Weisaeth and van der Hart notice in their historical survey,
“Mirroring the intrusions, confusion, and disbelief of victims whose lives are suddenly shattered by traumatic experiences, the psychiatric profession has gone through periods of fascination with trauma, followed by periods of stubborn disbelief about the relevance of patients’ stories” (47). I argue that, in addition, each surge of interest in psychological trauma has been accompanied by an attempt to establish trauma’s original locus. Scholarly understanding of the source of trauma is as fluctuating and unstable as the category of trauma itself. As already indicated, with Charcot,
Breuer, Janet and, chiefly, with Freud trauma abandoned its original context of the physical and entered into the realm of the psychological. Ruth Leys quotes Jean Laplanche who, in his Life and Death in Psychoanalysis , specifies the dynamics of this transformation, perceiving the psychological aspect of one’s personality in terms of trauma’s final frontier:
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There would be a series of gradations linking major impairments of tissue to
decreasingly perceptible degrees of damage, but that would nevertheless be of the
same nature, […] histological damage and, ultimately, intercellular damage. The
trauma would proceed, as it were, to a kind of self extenuation, but without losing
its nature, until it reached a certain limit, that limit being precisely what we call
‘psychical trauma.’ ( Trauma 19)
It is not inappropriate to claim that in contemporary thought, trauma has transcended even the limit of the psychological, or Laplanche’s psychical, and acquired the function of a cultural and literary trope. However, in what immediately follows, psychological trauma remains in the focus of my attention. Throughout the analysis, which is both diachronic and cross disciplinary, I address the various locations deemed as trauma’s potential source.
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I posit that psychological trauma ensues in consequence of a person’s distinct form of experiencing empirical reality. It emerges in succession to an occurrence which collapses the boundaries between the subjective and objective, and which, at a specific moment on the temporal continuum, exceeds the limits demarcating the self and the other. More explicitly, psychological trauma is to be regarded as proceeding from the mutual interference of the internal and the external. However, since Freud’s times a tendency has existed to emphasize one over the other and to conceive of the origins of psychological trauma as strictly in the internal or in the external domain. As a result, the alleged sources of trauma are ambiguous and overlapping, rendering the very concept of psychological trauma a contested space. I believe it is beneficial to provide a survey of the various sites of trauma origins, without a pretense to conclusiveness and without offering a statement of ultimate validity. This contention resonates with Neil Smelser’s
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introduction to his own analysis of psychological and cultural trauma, in which he maintains:
“The most promising avenues of insight appear to be in the definition of trauma; its status as negotiated process” (32). The following several paragraphs review some instances of the conceptual boundaries within which the process of negotiation has been carried out.
From the vantage point of Freud’s psychoanalysis, trauma originates in an individual’s mind. It is ingrained in the process of psychological changes, and, more specifically, in a “post traumatic ‘incubation,’ or latency period of psychic elaboration” which succeeds a potentially traumatic confrontation (Leys, Trauma 19). Like Leys, Neil Smelser observes that Freud’s perception of trauma is embedded in the mechanisms of a person’s internal coping, defenses and repression (44 45). Such views, which renounce the possibility that psychological trauma originates in an exogenous event, are in accordance with the Western notion of a sovereign individual in control of his or her self. Patrick Bracken et al. maintain that “[i]n Western thought and culture the concept of the individual plays a pivotal role, shaping and defining political, cultural and medical discourses;” the individual occupies “the center of Western morality and cosmology” (1074). According to this assertion, the individual whose interpretational framework and world beliefs are shattered, in an endeavor to negotiate the impairment, develops the condition of psychological trauma from within his or her own psyche. As Bracken observes elsewhere, this particular line of argumentation finds its support in the field of cognitive psychology which holds that the domains of culture and psychology are independent of each other (737). Cognitivists comprehend trauma in terms of shattered inner assumptions and “as
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being produced as part of the individual’s unconscious (and sometimes conscious) attempts to cope with [the] loss of meaning” (Janoff Bulman qtd. in Bracken 737). 13
Another stream within trauma studies, represented primarily by Bessel van der Kolk and his colleagues, is to ground trauma research in the biology of the human brain. 14 McFarlane with van der Kolk admit to the present day accentuation of biology in the study of trauma and PTSD:
“The data related to the biology of PTSD will play an important role in defining the questions for future investigation. However, because of their apparent objectivity and validity, biological data have the potential to dominate the study of PTSD, just as they have done in the approach to other psychiatric disorders” (561). Biology and clinical findings indicate that specific parts of the human brain betray activities which differ when they occur in traumatized and nontraumatized individuals (van der Kolk, “Body;” van der Kolk, “Posttraumatic”). However, as Patrick Bracken convincingly posits, neither of the two individualistic approaches just delineated is capable of containing “the cultural dimension of suffering” which is an intrinsic element of every traumatic accident and posttraumatic condition (738). The inadequacy of Freud’s internal explanation or van der Kolk’s biological one makes it essential to investigate other prospective loci of trauma.
But even their potential to grasp psychological trauma, PTSD, or the magnitude of human suffering, is exhaustive only remotely.
Standing in opposition to the internal world of an individual, there is a well established tradition that positions the source of trauma in the realm of exogenous events. One of the proponents of the idea of the external sources of trauma is Arthur Neal. In his National Trauma
13 For a more detailed analysis of how a loss of meaning can trigger trauma see Janoff Bulman’s Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma or her paper “The Aftermath of Victimization: Rebuilding Shattered Assumptions” in Figley’s Trauma and Its Wake . 14 For a criticism of this approach and of some of van der Kolk’s research conclusions, see Allan Young’s The Harmony of Illusions and the book chapter “The Science of the Literal: The Neurobiology of Trauma” in Ley’s Trauma: A Genealogy .
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and Collective Memory: Major Events in the American Century , he argues that some events in the twentieth century United States were intrinsically traumatic for the Americans. For instance, he refers to Kennedy’s assassination and to the attack on Pearl Harbor as illustrations of an acute crisis, and to the Great Depression and the Vietnam War which betray chronic character (7).
Moreover, I believe that Kai Erikson’s concept of collective trauma, in which I partly ground my own explorations of Native American and African American trauma, can be perceived through the exogenous optics. For the notion of collective trauma, again, consists in the blow from the outside which traumatizes the affected group(s). Like the approaches grounded in psychoanalysis and in biology, the conception of exogenous trauma betrays a degree of cultural insensitivity in presuming that each occurrence with putatively injurious dynamics will culminate in psychological trauma regardless of the socio cultural context. Jeffrey Alexander sees the exogenous approach to trauma as an extension of “Enlightenment thinking” (3 5), echoing
Patrick Bracken’s observation about the “positivist agenda” that governs theorizing about trauma
(741). In the course of his critique of this perception of trauma, Alexander emphasizes that
“trauma is not something naturally existing; it is something constructed by society” (2). His contention effectively defies any a priori traumatic status inherent to an empirical event.
Alexander subsumes both, the individualistic psychoanalytical, psychological and cognitive understanding of trauma on the one hand and the externally oriented Enlightenment thinking on trauma on the other hand, under, what he calls, lay trauma theory characterized by the naturalistic fallacy (2, 8). The fallacy of ascribing traumatic potential to events themselves had already found its expression at the time of WWI when the source of the soldiers’ altered psychic state was located in “the concussive effects of exploding shells” (Herman 20). In order to return to Smelser’s notion of trauma as “negotiated process,” one has to look beyond the self contained
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intrinsic or extrinsic locations and instead contemplate trauma in the socio historical and political contexts which surround its existence.
Therefore, I argue that the most distinguished source of trauma lies in the unexpected and overwhelming intervention of context or meaning into a person’s experiencing of the world. The very arbitrariness of meaning conforms to the negotiated status of trauma. Although both
Alexander and Smelser focus their respective studies on cultural trauma, I argue that their propositions can be transplanted to the realm of the psychological. Alexander maintains that
“[t]raumatic status is attributed to real or imaginary phenomena, not because of their actual harmfulness or their objective abruptness, but because these phenomena are believed to have abruptly, and harmfully, affected collective identity” (9 10, emphasis mine). This assertion implies that within the domain of the social sciences and cultural studies, trauma can be interpreted through the prism of its cultural construction. What Alexander and Smelser argue about the predominance of context over the empirical characteristics of an event, and over the individual’s psychosomatic processes, can be also found in psychological trauma. It is again
Patrick Bracken and his colleagues who, drawing on research in Africa and South America, provide instances of persons who after having been subjected to severe suffering did not interpret their posttraumatic condition in terms of psychopathology (1077). 15 Bracken et al. demonstrate that no event can “be objectively described as damaging or traumatic” and although “[i]ssues of
15 The subsequent vignette challenges the Enlightenment influenced thinking about trauma to such a degree that I find it worthy of being reproduced here in its entirety: “A 40 year old Ugandan man who had been a prominent politician in the past was arrested and brought to an army compound. He was held for seven days. During this time he was beaten and humiliated while being interrogated. After his release he was referred to see one of us [Patrick Bracken et al.] by a friend who assumed that he would be in need of some form of psychiatric help. When interviewed, however, he denied any great distress. He told us that he was a Christian but that prior to his imprisonment his faith had not meant a great deal to him. While he was in detention he felt a strong identification with the figure of Jesus Christ who had also suffered torture and humiliation. He found that his own suffering and his identification with Christ brought him closer to his religion and since his ordeal the quality of his spiritual life was intensified. He indicated that because of this the overall effect of his experience had been positive for him” (Bracken et al. 1077).
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context are seen as secondary and as being merely ‘factors’ which impinge on the progress of a now reified psychological and biological process [of trauma development],” in reality the “issues of context in terms of social, political and cultural realities should be seen as central” (Bracken et al. 1077). Thus, not only the source of cultural, but also of psychological, trauma can be established in the interaction of the various contextual conditions in which individuals find themselves at the moment of enduring a detrimental confrontation with the external world.
However, Bracken’s analysis may also inadvertently suggest that any kind of violence or suffering inflicted on the other is excusable if the consequences of the violence are not symbolically represented in terms of trauma, either psychological or cultural. This is an opinion explicitly advocated by Alexander who holds that with regard to trauma: “We [social scientists] are concerned only with how and under what conditions the claims are made, and with what results. It is neither ontology nor morality, but epistemology, with which we are concerned” (9).
This kind of rationalization renders invisible the dimension of human suffering which is inextricably interwoven into the structure of trauma. Thus, I propose that trauma be considered not only as a contested space, or Smelser’s “negotiated process,” but primarily in an interrelationship with social injustice and individuals’ suffering. As the preceding discussion discloses, neither psychological nor cultural trauma can be theorized within the confines of one discipline only. Although each realm provides valuable insight into the phenomenon, it is only by means of a cross disciplinary dialogue that trauma can be understood, albeit inadequately and partially. Indeed, cross disciplinarity has become one of the main principles informing interpretations of trauma in the social and literary sciences. For example, Shoshana Felman,
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among others, utilizes a cross disciplinary approach in her studies in which she freely steers across the borders of literary criticism, psychoanalysis and legal theory. 16
Moreover, Felman proposes that through the methodologies derived from diverse academic disciplines complemented by art itself the experience of trauma is relatively conceivable ( Juridical 106 07). Although she theorizes the Holocaust trauma, I argue that this kind of methodology is applicable to other instances of traumatic histories in general and to
Native American and African American trauma specifically. Felman explains the cooperation of judiciary and artistic media along with the ramifications of such cooperation in terms of comprehending the incomprehensible:
It is not a coincidence that the two works [a non fiction report Eichmann in
Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt, and Shoah , a film by Claude Lanzmann] that have
forced us to rethink the Holocaust in modifying our vocabularies of remembrance
were, on the one hand, a trial report and, on the other hand, a work of art. We
needed trials and trial reports to bring a conscious closure to the trauma of the
war, to separate ourselves from the atrocities and to restrict, to demarcate and
draw a boundary around, a suffering that seemed both unending and unbearable.
Law is a discipline of limits and of consciousness. We needed limits to be able
both to close the case and to enclose it in the past. Law distances the Holocaust.
Art brings it closer. We needed art – the language of infinity – to mourn the losses
and to face up to what in traumatic memory is not closed and cannot be closed.
[…] Between too much proximity and too much distance, the Holocaust becomes
16 See Felman’s The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century , where she compares trauma as portrayed in literature, in particular in Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata , with trauma’s enactment during and through legal trials, focusing on the trials with O. J. Simpson in 1995 and Adolf Eichmann in 1961.
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today accessible, I will propose, precisely in this space of slippage between law
and art . ( Juridical 106 07, emphasis in the original)
Whereas the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Eichmann trial have endowed the traumas of WWII and the Holocaust with a sense of assumed legal closure, neither the forced displacement of
Native American peoples nor the enslavement of Africans and African Americans has been addressed in corresponding terms. One of the distinctive features of both Native American and
African American cultures is thus a pronounced void in place of a narrative of ceremonial conclusion. Provided this incompleteness, it is desirable that the creative energies of art be engaged to populate the void. The artistic narratives do not necessarily need to offer finalized explanations of the past or present injustices, but rather, through their fictional recreations, they bear witness to the existence of the void and challenge the reader’s possible complicity with it.
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Scholarly accentuation of trauma has recently found its expression also in the realm of literary criticism, and the past several decades have seen a gradual emergence of the genre referred to as trauma literature. Some critics observe that trauma has been portrayed in literature since the times of Homer (van der Kolk, Weisaeth, and van der Hart 47). 17 I suggest, however, that only recently have writers started to employ the trope in a more conscious fashion, transforming it from a metaphor into the singular governing principle of their texts on both structural and thematic levels. Likewise, critics have commenced literary examinations of narratives through the optics of trauma theory. Great contribution to this genre comes from authors narrating their stories from within formerly colonized regions or from territories shaped
17 In the introduction to the collection on intergenerational transmission of trauma, Yael Danieli enumerates some classic texts and authors offering symbolic representations of trauma. For instance, she speaks about the Bible, Euripides, Horace, Shakespeare and Hawthorne (2).
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by recent experience of violence such as some African, South American and Asian areas. 18 As I hope my literary examinations will demonstrate, establishing the interconnection between Native
American and African American literatures on the one hand and the genre of trauma literature on the other is another phase in the process of acknowledging the existence of past and present socio historical injustice across cultures, time and space.
For a long time, the genre of trauma literature had been predominantly shaped by narratives of Holocaust survivors. 19 These are accounts by immediate victims for whom relating their personal encounters with atrocity may have signified an attempt to comprehend the experience and to incorporate it into their conscious cognitive schemes. According to Kalí Tal, who compares narratives by Holocaust survivors, Vietnam War veterans and survivors of rape and/or incest, the author’s direct confrontation with violence is a distinctive feature of a trauma text. In her view “[l]iterature of trauma is defined by the identity of its author. Literature of trauma holds at its center the reconstruction and recuperation of the traumatic experience, but it is also actively engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the writings and representations of nontraumatized authors” (17). Tal’s own choice of primary texts conforms to her fundamental criterion of trauma literature; she focuses solely on narratives whose authors write from the perspective of former personal traumatization. From the quoted excerpt it also follows that Tal draws a demarcation line between trauma literature written by survivors and literature by
18 Instances of such texts are, among many others, Antjie Krog’s Country of my Skull (1998), a non fiction report on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which at places bears resemblance to its fictional counterparts portraying the trauma of South African apartheid such as Gillian Slovo’s Red Dust (2000); Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto (2001) which concentrates on the rampant terrorism in South America; Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) which narrates the story of forced sexual exploitation of Korean women during WWII; and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1991) which depicts the traumatic birth of India and Pakistan as two sovereign nation states in 1947. 19 For instances of trauma narratives in the context of the Holocaust and WWII, I refer the reader to Anne Frank’s Diary by herself and Night by Elie Wiesel.
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“nontraumatized authors” (17). Although Tal accepts the mutual interference of the two groups, she conceives of them as separate nonetheless.
I believe that Tal’s differentiation is valid in that she draws on Barthes’s notion of polysemous signifiers. Barthes’s concept denotes “a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds” which is present in every society endeavoring to express its experience in the imagery of trauma (Tal 16).
Tal demonstrates the effects of polysemousness on the varying perceptions of a text by traumatized and nontraumatized readers: “the ability to ‘read’ words like terror may extend across traumas , so that the combat veteran of the Vietnam War responds viscerally to the transformed signs used by the survivor of the concentration camp since they mirror his or her own traumatic experience, while the nontraumatized reader will come away with a different meaning altogether” (16, emphasis in the original). Tal implies that an account of a traumatic occurrence written by a survivor will inevitably differ from that by a nontraumatized author.
However, as my interpretations in the following chapters will reveal, texts written by not directly traumatized authors possess an articulate capacity to symbolically represent trauma. Thus I posit that Tal’s differentiation presents the critic with two categories of narratives whose independence of each other may be somewhat artificial. I hope that chapters two and three will show that texts written without the history of personal trauma can sometimes feature characteristics that scholars identify in texts written by survivors. A brief overview of these characteristics follows.
An obvious parallel can be discerned between the extension of the trauma literature canon and the process of trauma conceptualization discussed in the preceding section. Texts which Kalí Tal considers as specimens of trauma narratives are written by survivors whose respective traumas have also provided the codification framework for PTSD. Although the primary texts of Tal’s study are written solely by immediate survivors of traumatic accidents, I
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propose that the texts’ narrative techniques bear resemblance to techniques sometimes employed by authors who have not been personally traumatized but who write out of a communal experience of historical traumatization.20 Thus, the literary metaphor of trauma is not exclusively confined to stories informed by an individual’s psychological traumatization. It permeates works of literature narrated from the standpoint of traumatized authors as well as works emanating from communities with the historical experience of trauma. However, in the contemporary global world, a trauma narrative does not necessarily need a direct connection to either a traumatized author or a region and can still operate as a testimony to the proliferation of suffering. The varsity of occurrences which have been lately incorporated into trauma discourse is reflected in the broadening thematic scope of trauma literature. Rather than defining trauma literature by the status of the author, I believe that it is pertinent to understand this literature in terms defined by
Laurie Vickroy, that is as “personalized responses to this century’s emerging awareness of the catastrophic effects of wars, poverty, colonization, and domestic abuse on the individual psyche”
(x). Authors whose association with traumatization is only indirect, mediated through the visual immediacy of modern technology or by the authors’ rootedness in cultures with a traumatic history, can become eloquent witnesses to the proliferation of human suffering. Their texts perform a dual role as trauma testimonies (Felman, “Education” 6 7) and as voices which call for social change and justice.
Oftentimes, the presence of trauma in literature manifests itself beyond the portrayal of traumatized characters or traumatogenic accidents. Although imagery and references to trauma
20 I would like to refer the reader to a comparison of Linda Katherine Cutting’s Memory Slips: A Memoir of Music and Healing (1997) and one of the novels analyzed in my dissertation, namely Sapphire’s Push . Although both are narratives portraying the trauma of an incestuous parent child relationship, Cutting’s text is an autobiographical account whereas Sapphire’s novel is a work of fiction. Nevertheless, the writers communicate the trauma of incest through similar formal disintegration of their narratives and through the trope of persistent repetition of trauma related imagery.
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abound in these narratives, the trope of trauma transcends the texts’ thematic level and imprints itself on the narrative techniques. Regardless of the impossibility to formulate a definite set of features intrinsic to all trauma narratives, a comparative method reveals some similarities which allow the critic to subsume the highly diverse body of texts narrating trauma into a coherent literary category. The presence of characteristic narrative devices concords with the implicit cross disciplinarity of contemporary trauma discourse, as the majority of the techniques make use of research and clinical findings conducted in the domain of psychological trauma.
Fictional accounts addressing trauma are typically narrated from myriad perspectives, engaging a variety of narrative voices and tenses, and occupying manifold spatial and/or temporal settings. My analysis of Sapphire’s Push will demonstrate that sometimes the body of the text itself may be dismembered, combining prose, poetry and visual imagery. I suggest that the technique of fragmentation parallels the processes of traumatic memory which has a tendency to unexpectedly interrupt the continuum of a person’s consciousness only to subside into the state of previous latency again shortly. McFarlane and van der Kolk contend that a traumatic memory “may return, triggered by reminders, at any time during a person’s life” (565), in the same way as one narrative voice unexpectedly disrupts another, itself resuming silence or being forcefully silenced presently. Traumatic dissociation, developed by Pierre Janet (Herman
12), and its equivalent of Freud’s “split ego” (Leys, “Traumatic” 634), alternately called “double consciousness” (Herman 12), is another aspect of psychological trauma relevant to the fragmentation of narratives. The fractured narrative voices are dissociated from one another, each approaching the story from the depth of their own subjectivity. In a specific way they also dissociate from the conventions of linear storytelling and from the figure of an omniscient narrator. In addition, textual fragmentation can refer to the notion of shattered assumptions
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which for Janoff Bulman signify the onset of trauma in individuals (“Aftermath” 15). What has been said about the significance of fractured narrative voices can be equally extended to narrative tenses and spatiotemporal settings. Commonly, a change of the narrator inherently generates an alteration of the narrative tense and/or the locale of the story. In the same way that the text fluctuates between individual narrators, one narrator’s voice can oscillate between the past and the present of his or her fictional existence and between various locations. 21
From a literary perspective, the fragmentation of trauma narratives correlates with
Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of dialogism which defies any authoritative discourse, or, what
Laurie Vickroy terms, “authoritarianism [and] easy prescriptions” (222). Vickroy’s reading of
Toni Morrison’s Beloved through the prism of dialogism renders the concept an appropriate analytical tool for critical assessment of other trauma narratives. Vickroy perceives the disintegrations in Morrison’s narrative as “intermixtures” that resemble dialogism. According to
Bakhtin, dialogism conveys a condition when “[t]he word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group” (qtd. in Vickroy 183 84). The multiplicity of voices and perspectives that dialogism entails allows the text to formally bear witness to the trauma portrayed and critiqued on its thematic level.
Apart from the fluctuation of narrative voices, tenses and settings, what defines a trauma text is a particular set of metaphors which, in alternate versions, recur throughout the narratives. I propose that one such set of imagery is associated with the human body and its sensations; the body oftentimes faces harm, disfiguration, pain or some sort of abstract rupture. These images
21 Illustrative representatives of this technique can be found in Morrison’s Beloved or Jones’s Corregidora . Both novels rely on a cacophony of narrative voices which present their subjective perceptions of the stories portrayed.
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can assume a variety of forms while constantly maintaining their close ties to the general realm of the visceral. 22 While it is plausible to understand the narrative fragmentation in terms of the psychological processes in traumatized persons, I argue that the imagery of corporality and severance denotes trauma in its original context of a physical wound. Hence, the imagery refocuses the reader’s attention on the collision between the physical environment and the human body, which, depending on the context of the occurrence, may result in traumatization. Despite the prevalence of the psychological dimension in contemporary perception of trauma, the violent physical contact of the inner and outer worlds, of the subject and the other, should not elide the critic’s focus. Even though the majority of trauma texts concentrate primarily on the posttraumatic period, portraying the characters’ coping mechanisms and provisions for healing, the link to the initial traumatization is maintained in the presence of the visceral imagery. 23 As I have demonstrated in the analysis of the localization of trauma, trauma never transpires in a physical or contextual vacuum but, as McFarlane and van der Kolk remind us, it is perpetually marked by “the complex ways in which organism and culture interact” (559). In cases of violent interactions, these are remembered through metaphors of the human body that pervade the texts.
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22 The symbolism that readily comes to mind is the torture scars in the shape of a chokecherry tree branded on Sethe’s back in Beloved or the scarred face of Angel, the protagonist of Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms . 23 As I will show in the close readings, and then again in the conclusion of my dissertation, each of the authors puts an emphasis on corporality in his or her text. The corporal element may be observed in the scarred body of Linda Hogan’s Hannah in Solar Storms as well as in the pictures of physical violence depicted by Ernest Gaines in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman . Beyond the realm of the six novels, a trauma narrative which deserves attention for its accentuation of corporality is a French novel Un Secret (2004) by Phillipe Grimbert, which was translated into English, alternately, as Secret or Memory . The novel is an account of intergenerational transmission of trauma to the second generation of Holocaust survivors and about the almost unbreakable silences between Holocaust survivors and their offspring. The element of the visceral achieves preeminence in the novel through the sport activities of the narrator’s parents. On many occasions the narrator depicts his parents well trained bodies and implicitly admits to his own fascination with the corporal. In one of his fantasies of the past, the narrator concedes to his obsession: “On Saturdays my parents met up with their sporty friends for volleyball or tennis matches. Sitting on the grass with my pen and notebook, I feasted my eyes on these leaping bodies glistening with sweat in the sun, enriching my collection of pictures” (Grimbert 44). In case of Grimbert’s novel, the bodies are not necessarily physically traumatized, but still their centrality to a narrative of trauma is marked.
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The purpose of employing these narrative techniques, and in consequence the function of the literary texts which they constitute, is to testify to human traumatization; the category of testimony occupies a central position both in the literature and in the structural framework of trauma. 24 Shoshana Felman insists that the mode of testimony is “indeed pervasive, […] implicated – sometimes unexpectedly – in almost every kind of writing” (“Education” 7). In her analysis of fiction (e.g. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Albert Camus’s The Plague and The Fall ) and non fiction (e.g. Paul de Man’s literary essays), Felman accentuates the mechanisms of testifying. What her analysis chiefly reveals is the dominance of narrative, or simply storytelling, as a vehicle of testifying to both psychological and communal trauma.
Moreover, in the context of traumatogenic stress induced by war trials and tribunals,
Selma Leydersdorff consents that even a lawyer’s interpretation of reality is merely one of many possible narrative accounts: “Testimonies are often labeled as ‘subjective’ or ‘biased’ in the legal proceedings concerning war crimes. The lawyers of war criminals […] demanded precise statements of facts … A lawyer’s case is after all merely another kind of story” (qtd. in Felman,
Juridical 233). Although the stories narrated in the legal environment have the status of an illusory factuality and are presented as precise replications of the past experience, in fact only within the legal structure itself do they acquire such distinction. From a sociological perspective, it is clear that “[l]inguistic action is powerfully mediated by the nature of the institutional arenas and stratification hierarchies within which it occurs” (Alexander 15). As Leydersdorff asserts,
24 See Felman’s and Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History , in which the authors theorize the testimonial process through the lenses of their respective disciplines of comparative literature and psychoanalysis. Felman and Laub understand themselves as “engaged in separate, yet complementary, fields of endeavor: one of us is a professional interpreter of texts, the other – a professional interpreter of people; one of us is a literary critic and a literary educator at Yale University […]; the other is a psychiatric educator” (Foreword xiii xiv). The collaboration of Felman and Laub is, yet again, an expression of the cross disciplinarity of trauma discourse.
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the lawyers’ narratives are stories endowed with their power and meaning only via the spatiotemporal context of their articulation (qtd. in Felman, Juridical 233).
Regardless of the character of the particular stories, storytelling per se functions as the common grounds for persons engaged with trauma, be that victims, mental health providers, scholars or writers. It is mainly the purposes that the stories are used for in their respective frames of reference that distinguishes them from one another. The very structure of narrative as the most general and fundamental means of communication remains unchanged. This is despite the fact that the narrative’s actual realizations may be as varied as “a shattered memory that did not fit into any language” and a piece of objective “legal evidence,” both of which Leydersdorff identifies in the testimonies during Eichmann trial (qtd. in Juridical 233). It can be assumed that the preeminence of narrative in trauma discourse is defined by trauma’s most essential association with memory processes observed already by Pierre Janet in his 1889 study
L’automatisme psychologique . In the study, Janet distinguishes between the mechanisms of traumatic and narrative memory (van der Kolk and van der Hart 160). As van der Kolk and van der Hart point out, according to Janet’s now classic conception, memory system is “the central organizing apparatus of the mind, which categorizes and integrates all aspects of experience [, integrating] them into ever enlarging and flexible meaning schemes” (159). This natural process, which Janet calls narrative memory, is a “uniquely human capacity,” consisting of “mental constructs, which people use to make sense out of experience” (van der Kolk and van der Hart
160). However, when confronted with a trauma, individuals may find it impossible to formulate a conscious narrative out the experience because, in Janet’s words, “[u]nder extreme conditions, existing meaning schemes may be entirely unable to accommodate frightening experiences, which causes the memory of these experiences to be stored differently and not be available for
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retrieval under ordinary conditions: it [the memory] becomes dissociated from conscious awareness and voluntary control” (qtd. in van der Kolk and van der Hart 160). Thus, in what became “the first comprehensive formulation of the effects of trauma on the mind” (van der
Kolk, Weisaeth, and van der Hart 52), Pierre Janet establishes the opposition between conscious narrative memory and pathological traumatic memory, emphasizing the positive aspects of narrative over the pathology of trauma.
Apart from functioning as metaphorical testimonies of real or fictional traumas, I believe the very testimonial status of literary narratives transforms them into catalysts propelling the cultural trauma process as defined by Jeffrey Alexander. Although Alexander speaks from the vantage point of a social scientist, his concept is appropriate for exploring trauma in literature.
Alexander’s basic postulate, on which I had elaborated earlier, is that only rarely are any accidents in the cultural domain intrinsically traumatic. What endows an accident with a traumatic status is either the context in which it arises or, more importantly, its representation as trauma mediated by the trauma process. According to Alexander, the process is “[t]he gap between event and representation,” that is the space demarcated by the original event on the one hand and its ultimate public acceptance as traumatic on the other (11). The trauma process is confined to manifold, as Alexander terms them, “institutional arenas,” encompassing the realms of the religious, aesthetic, legal, scientific, and mass media and state bureaucracy (Alexander 15
21). Literature, thus, as an embodiment of the aesthetic milieu, has the potential to articulate as traumatic an experience of an individual and/or community, predominantly in cases where such articulation through other discourses is denied. Therefore, the symbolic representation of an event as traumatic constitutes the very foundations of cultural trauma (Alexander 1). In these
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terms, literary texts become “claims” which challenge “the shape of social reality, its causes, and the responsibilities for action such causes imply” (Alexander 11). 25
Via employing the narrative techniques enumerated above, these literary claims, or testimonies, involve all those implicated, the reader, the characters and the writer, in a communal process of bearing witness to people’s traumatization. Trauma narratives invite their readers to witness the particular traumatization of the characters, and, simultaneously, they request the readers to question the socio political, cultural and historical structures which have allowed, or in the future may potentially allow, the portrayed suffering and its consequences. In confronting the characters’ traumas, their coping techniques and ideally also healing, the readers are encouraged to reassert their own humanity. Let me borrow Alexander’s words once again, for he poignantly summarizes what is relevant for the cultural sphere and what, I believe, can be fully transplanted into the domain of literature: “By allowing members of wider publics to participate in the pain of others, cultural traumas broaden the realm of social understanding and sympathy, and they provide powerful avenues for new forms of social incorporation” (24). A trauma text, being one among many claims for acknowledgement of social injustice, lays bare the detrimental effects of some of human actions for both the victims and the perpetrators. Consequently, trauma narratives frequently collapse the binary opposition of the victim and the perpetrator onto itself, pointing to the dangers of easy categorizations and rhetoric indulgence in ostensible clear cut divisions. 26 Ruth Leys criticizes, in an unexpectedly fierce manner, Cathy Caruth for suggesting
25 This mutual engagement of literary and social studies can be seen as yet another instance of the benefits derived from a cross disciplinary approach to studying trauma. 26 For a comprehensive discussion of the categories of victims and perpetrators see the third part of the second chapter, “Victims and Perpetrators: Cultural Dispossession in Anna Lee Walters’s Ghost Singer .” I demonstrate that Walters develops her characters in such a way that, regardless of their historical positions of either victims or perpetrators of the trauma of colonialism, in the present, they are affected by the trauma alike.
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this conflation. 27 Even though the conceptual fluctuation of victims and perpetrators may be dubious from a legal perspective, I hold that literature sometimes positions itself into an opposition to the definitive narratives produced by the juridical discourse. In fact, many trauma narratives present the legal milieu as another structure inducing traumatization in individuals the way Felman proves in The Juridical Unconscious . Trauma narratives are bestowed with a power to reconstruct the experience of suffering and to open a space for reconciliation, healing and social improvement. As it has been demonstrated, they do so by questioning widely accepted categories, presenting the experience of trauma as a multifaceted condition, and by employing narrative techniques that derive from the psychology of trauma.
27 See “Introduction: The Wound and the Voice” in Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience for her exploration of Freud’s analysis of the love story of Tancred and Clorinda by Tasso. For Caruth, this parable signifies a conflation of the dichotomy between the victim and the perpetrator, which in consequence implies that the dynamics of violence, trauma and suffering are too complex to be enclosed within the limits of the two distinct definitions. For Ruth Leys’s critical response to Caruth, see the last chapter, “The Pathos of the Literal: Trauma and the Crisis of Representation,” in her Trauma: A Genealogy .
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1.2 The Soul Wound and the Legacy of Slavery: Manifestations of Trauma in Native American
and African American Cultures
This subchapter delimitates some of the ways in which trauma, both psychological and cultural, can be conceived in relation to Native American and African American cultures and literatures. A widely acknowledged agreement exists among scholars across disciplines that trauma theory is instrumental in providing insight into the historical experience, contemporary condition, and literary production of the two cultures. However, regardless of the theory’s substantial benefits in facilitating critical analysis, the association of trauma with Native
American and African American cultures poses limitations worthy of attention. Only after examining and accepting the conceptual boundaries that trauma presents can one embark on the literary analysis proper. Thus, I will devote the next part to such explorations, focusing first on the Native American and subsequently on the African American cultural and literary milieus.
In Western thought, the human experience of being in the world is oftentimes compartmentalized and analyzed in terms of binary oppositions (Duran and Duran 15). Such is also a frequent tendency in academic investigations of trauma in Native American and African
American cultures. Some scholars believe that colonial ideology with its manifold implications is the primary stressor historically triggering psychological and intergenerational trauma in Native
American communities (Duran, Duran, and Brave Heart 62). In regards to trauma in African
American groups and individuals, critics have argued that the explicit encounters with racially induced prejudice are to be perceived as the source of present day trauma in African American culture (Cross). It is tempting to subsume the origins of most of the psychological and cultural dysfunction of Native Americans and African Americans under the respective headings of colonialism and racism. However, such strategy obliterates many of the harmful mechanisms
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which are still covertly in operation in the United States today. Besides, this strategy renders invisible the fact that the mechanisms of colonialism and racism are mutually interwoven and together inextricably ingrained in the structures of American society. Colonialism and racism cannot be contained as two independent stressors without seriously distorting the perception of the socio historical and political conditions of Native Americans and African Americans during the past five hundred years. Therefore, a certain degree of conflation, or ambivalence, as Victoria
Burrows puts it (12), may prove beneficial in analyzing the psychological and communal traumas of the two cultures. Most of the impairment in the current Native American and African
American communities is due to the colonial experience combined with the history of legally sanctioned racism; colonialism functioned as a larger ideological platform for racial practices and these practices served as effective tools of colonial oppression.
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Trauma in the Native American frame of reference gives rise to two sets of problems which have recently initiated numerous controversies. The problems are associated with the clinical environment and literary studies. Mental healthcare providers have expressed doubts about the efficacy of trauma theory in presenting the contemporary Native American population with adequate treatment options. Resonating with this argument is the second admonition, voiced by Native American literary scholars, who emphasize the inappropriateness of reading Native
American literature through trauma’s analytical framework. What underscores both of these concerns is the alleged impotence of the classic theory of trauma to fully address Native
American historical and present day conditions. Trauma theory, building on the work of
Europeans such as Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud or Abram Kardiner and structured in response to the two World Wars and the Vietnam War is, from a Native American perspective, an alien
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concept. It is a theoretical construct which does not accommodate Native epistemology and which originates with a culture accountable for over five centuries of oppression of the world’s indigenous peoples, Native Americans being only one of them.
In spite of these objections, the presence of trauma resembling symptoms in Native
American communities has been well documented. In the following discussion, I draw on the work carried out by Eduardo and Bonnie Duran and Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart who have conducted research among various Native American communities. 28 The most frequent referents to trauma employed in their studies are the soul wound and historical trauma, both stemming from the premise of intergenerational transmission of trauma. 29 However, any possible terminological resemblance with the nomenclature of DSM-IV-TR does not necessarily entail close conceptual proximity between the soul wound and historical trauma on the one hand and posttraumatic stress disorder on the other. The relationship between historical trauma as understood by Duran, Duran and Brave Heart and posttraumatic stress disorder as defined by the
American Psychiatric Association is more of complementarity than of two variants of an identical concept. Historical trauma functions as a terminological and conceptual descendant of posttraumatic stress disorder and constructs its own diagnostic authority upon the symptomatology defined in the category of PTSD. Nevertheless, as Eduardo Duran accentuates,
“I have not been able to find any acknowledgement of historical trauma in the DSM IV” (31).
For neither DSM-IV nor the latest DSM-IV-TR includes the soul wound, historical trauma and/or
28 Eduardo Duran has worked for more than two decades with various communities across the United States; Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart focuses her research specifically on the Lakota people. 29 Although the terms “the soul wound” and “historical trauma” were coined by Eduardo Duran with Bonnie Duran and by Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart respectively, the three scholars have also conducted collaborative research. In their collaborative works, they employ the two concepts interchangeably and so do I in my dissertation; the soul wound implies historical trauma and vice versa.
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intergenerational transmission of trauma as valid diagnostic constructs. 30 While sharing much of their symptomatology, the two types of trauma, historical trauma and DSM based PTSD, are most distinguishable on the basis of their etiology.
As discussed in the introductory section of this chapter, PTSD is a characteristic set of symptoms which appears in the aftermath of a “direct personal experience of an event” and involves overwhelming stress and negative affect (Amer. Psychiatry Assoc., DSM-IV-TR ). Only rarely is a “direct personal experience” of traumatogenic stress identifiable among Native
Americans seeking mental health intervention, for many of the affected individuals are not cognizant of the origins of their symptoms (Duran 50). In his Healing the Soul Wound , Eduardo
Duran recalls some of his therapeutic meetings in which the individuals receiving treatment frequently betrayed such unawareness. One of them, a man diagnosed with “a long history of anger and violent behavior, which has resulted in difficulties with the legal system,” concedes to his ignorance, answering Duran’s query, “Where did you learn to be so violent,” with a simple “I don’t know. I have just been like this” (50). By definition, historical trauma cannot be ascertained from a singular exposure to a traumatic accident in an individual’s life. The origins of historical trauma are located in the colonization of the North American continent and the racial and other implications for the indigenous population. Historical trauma stems from five centuries of oppression and victimization pursued against the ancestors of the present day Native
Americans by European colonizers. There is no unique event or occurrence which can be deemed the source of the present historical trauma. The trauma’s dynamic ensues from the
30 I do not intend to project the impression that intergenerational transmission of trauma is not acknowledged in mental health circles. It has been an accepted concept since the 1960s when the first studies were carried out with the second generation of Holocaust survivors. However, what Duran points to is the absence of the concept’s codification in the official terminology despite prolific research carried out in recent decades. For some of the studies on intergenerational transmission of trauma, see International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma , edited by Yael Danieli.
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complex interrelationship of violence perpetuation and the victims’ inability to ameliorate its effects via effective mourning processes (Duran 85). 31 In one of his healing sessions, Duran explains this mechanism to a woman suffering from a chronic depression: “When our ancestors were genocided, they did not get the opportunity to grieve or to heal. Sometimes, we have to do that for them” (85). What then, within the broad colonial frame of reference, were some of the principal traumatogenic stressors contributing to the genesis of historical trauma?
One of the pronounced attributes of historical trauma is its gradual development over centuries; Duran, Duran and Brave Heart hold that “historical trauma is a continuing process, maintained via the pressures of acculturative stress” (65). It is a process of enduring the oppressive domination of Europeans and European Americans in the post contact era and passing the effects of the suffering to the posterity. I do not possess the slightest intent to homogenize the experience of Native American peoples vis à vis their colonizers either geographically or chronologically in the course of centuries. Yet the colonization process betrays some characteristics common, to a lesser or greater extent, to the majority of the Native
American populations. These features range from physical extermination through combat, diseases and intentional malignant conduct of the colonizers, to dispossession of lands and systems of beliefs, to the social experiment of boarding schools at the end of the nineteenth century (Thornton, “Demography;” Duran, Duran, and Brave Heart 62). 32 One of the crucial stressors is undoubtedly the displacement of Native Americans which, as Raymond Fogelson
31 For the destructive effects of suppressed mourning in trauma victims and their posterity, see Tamar Shoshan. His paper, “Mourning and Longing from Generation to Generation,” focuses on individuals in the second generation of Holocaust survivors whose delineated patterns of repressed grief can be recognized also in Duran’s Native American patients. 32 Duran and Duran classify several major stages of the traumatization of the Native American peoples. In a chronological order, these periods involve: first contact with Europeans, economic competition with the colonizers, invasion wars, subjugation and reservation, boarding schools, and forced relocation to urban areas in the 1950s (Native 32 34). In more general terms, David Stannard summarizes the causes of Native American historical extermination, and thus also traumatization, as “the combined violence, torture, removal, disease, exhaustion, exposure, and other factors” (“Uniqueness” 258).
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reminds us, “took place historically in two fashions. First, Native American populations were removed ever westward and resettled behind natural boundaries, like the Appalachian Mountains or the Mississippi River […]. Secondly, Native American groups were encircled and placed on reservations where they could be confined, controlled, civilized, and Christianized” (50). Later sill, the displacement took the form of organized relocations from reservation to urban areas of
San Francisco, Chicago and others.
Despite the various particularities of colonial oppression, the soul wound pervading the present day Native American population is intense, betraying markedly uniform symptomatology across communities. Even though the degree of traumatization can differ, a combination of two or more detrimental traumas has been experienced by virtually all of the
Native American communities. I posit that both historically and at present, Native Americans suffer from what Kai Erikson terms collective trauma ( Everything 154). Drawing on many years of field research and work with disaster survivors, Erikson concludes that “traumatized communities” are “something distinct from assemblies of traumatized persons” (Erikson,
“Notes” 185). Although he acknowledges that trauma has the potential to create collectives, that is congregations of those seeking others in order to share their traumatic experiences, first and foremost Erikson emphasizes that trauma “damages the texture of community” (Erikson, “Notes”
187). Erikson’s definition of collective trauma is poignant and worth quoting in full:
By collective trauma , on the other hand, I mean a blow to the basic tissues of
social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the
prevailing sense of communality. The collective trauma works its way slowly and
even insidiously into the awareness of those who suffer from it, so it does not
have the quality of suddenness normally associated with “trauma.” But it is a form
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of shock all the same, a gradual realization that the community no longer exists as
an effective source of support and that an important part of the self has
disappeared. […] “I” continue to exist, though damaged and maybe even
permanently changed. “You” continue to exist, though distant and hard to relate
to. But “we” no longer exist as a connected pair or as linked cells in a larger
communal body. ( Everything 154, emphasis in the original)
Erikson’s words resonate with what a Native American community worker shares with Eduardo
Duran about the condition of her collective: “We have a lot of community dysfunction, alcohol, drugs, and such. […] Right now, there’s a lot of infighting among ourselves. The social services people aren’t getting along with the docs. The tribal council is not being supportive, and they have other agendas. Our youth are in trouble, and no one seems to see any of this” (qtd. in Duran
115). The worker’s observations reveal the communal impairment and lack of nurturing ties which can in final effect contribute to an individual’s secondary traumatization when the community turns from a “therapeutic” to a “corrosive” one (Erikson, “Notes” 189). Corrosive communities are no longer strong enough to provide its members with what Marten deVries terms “homeostatic mechanisms” of “rituals, social organization, and the economic system”
(401). Or, to return to Erikson’s own definition, such communities are not able to function as “a cushion for pain” to the already traumatized persons (Erikson, “Notes” 188).
The centuries of colonial oppression have resulted in a collective trauma of Native
American communities that, in their corrosiveness, are incapable of adequately sustaining or fostering their own members. Colonialism as a socio political entity and the ideology of supremacy have traumatized, to a lesser or greater extent, entire Native American populations.
Through the colonizing practices the organisms of Native American communities were exposed
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to a level of traumatic stress comparable to the stress suffered by the people’s bodies. Russell
Thornton holds that the changes that Native Americans suffered during colonialism and its aftermath were “social, cultural, biological, and perhaps psychological” (“Demography” 19). His listing is literally consonant with the realms of human functioning affected by trauma as observed by deVries: “Research on stress, trauma, and their interaction with health in psychology, physiology, and sociology has demonstrated that the impact of stress and trauma encompasses biological, psychological, social, and cultural phenomena” (400). The constellation of the protracted periods of oppression affecting collectives and of the actual traumas suffered by the individuals has given rise to a very specific condition of the Native American soul wound. Its onset in the present day populations does not derive from an immediate physical experience in the individuals’ lives, yet its symptomatology is as pronounced and malignant as in the officially codified PTSD.
It can be maintained that many of the symptoms determining Native American historical trauma are concurrent with the physical manifestations of PTSD; the symptoms encompass distressing dreams, “psychic numbing” and “emotional anesthesia” as well as “self destructive and impulsive behavior” and hostility (Amer. Psychiatry Assoc., DSM-IV-TR ). In addition to these, the concept of historical trauma also entails “[a]lcohol and substance abuse” in frequent combination with “somatic problems, including chronic illnesses, […] [d]iabetes, hypertension, and respiratory and coronary illnesses” (Duran 50, 82). Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart has conducted extensive research among the Lakota people to ascertain the correlation between historical trauma and suicide rates which represent still another facet of historical trauma’s symptomatology (291). Eduardo Duran argues against the seemingly non causal relationship between the past injustice and the existence of the soul wound in the present, explaining that
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“most of [the] suffering is symptomatic,” that is “the suffering cannot be resolved without healing the wound that underlies suffering at the soul level” (47).
As Eduardo Duran suggests further, the presence of this kind of complex trauma requires highly specific means of intervention which draw on classic Western methods of “supportive, insight, and problem solving therapy” only in part (51). The prime constituent of the healing process is what Duran terms “liberation discourse” between the patient and the therapist,
“liberation psychology” and “epistemological hybridism,” denoting techniques which focus on re introducing the practices and cosmology specific to the particular Native American community into the therapy sessions (14). Psychotherapeutic intervention which is cross cultural and culturally sensitive is not a novelty in contemporary mental healthcare. It has become almost a necessity with the ever increasing cultural diversity in many nation states. However, Duran asserts that cross cultural awareness is not sufficient in dealing with people who have been oppressed both physically and discursively for many centuries. His proposed method consists in taking “the actual life world of the person or group as the core truth that needs to be seen as valid just because it is” as the point of departure in the therapy (Duran 14).
To enhance Duran’s idea, I suggest that the medical discourse itself is in a compelling need of liberation. Despite the recent attempts at increasing the awareness of culturally bound origins of trauma, 33 the very language of some of the studies continues to reveal a high degree of inadvertent oppressiveness, cultural and/or human insensitivity, and inability to comprehend the extent of trauma suffered by some of the oppressed peoples. Paradoxically enough, deVries’s
33 For an instance of culturally cognizant approaches to the treatment of trauma, see Anna Georgiopoulos’s and Jerrold Rosenbaum’s collection of essays Perspectives in Cross-Cultural Psychiatry . The book’s main areas of focus are reflected in the headings of the three sections it comprises: Biological and Cultural Diversity, Psychotherapy in Cross Cultural Context, and International Mental Health Policy. A tendency toward cross cultural awareness has also translated into DSM-IV-TR , one of whose appendices, Appendix I, is entitled “Outline for Cultural Formulation and Glossary of Culture Bound Syndrome” (Amer. Psychiatry Assoc., DSM-IV-TR ).
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text, already invoked here for its undeniable insight into the interaction of trauma and culture, also betrays such cultural disregard. While he discusses the benefits of a culturally conscious approach to trauma, his language choice subverts his argument. Praising the healing effects of group self help strategies, deVries maintains: “The gourd dance among the Native Americans of the southern plains is an example [of such a strategy]. It dates back to before the creation of reservations, when these groups were warrior societies. When the warriors put down their arms in the late 19th century and were placed on reservations, the gourd dance served as a means to work out their frustrations” (408). The historical example that deVries chooses solicits a potentially fruitful discussion of cultural sensitivity to which his whole chapter is devoted.
However, the author’s language, which completely fails in accurately identifying the agent behind “putting down the arms,” is indicative of the discoursive offensiveness deeply embedded in Western centered theorizing of trauma. Given such paragons of discursive (neo)colonization, it is not surprising that Native American communities are hesitant to fully embrace the Western paradigm of trauma and trauma treatment.
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Furthermore, the rhetoric of the putative incompatibility of Western trauma theory with
Native American epistemology gets replicated in the literary realm. As anticipated, the domain of literature signifies the second disputable area regarding Native American and trauma studies.
Several literary critics have observed the inadequacy of reading Native American literary production through the analytical lens of trauma. The reason provided is the obvious dependence of trauma studies on Freud’s psychoanalysis and Holocaust studies, neither of which is characteristic of Native American cultural and/or literary experience. In her analysis of Paula
Gunn Allen’s The Woman Who Owned the Shadows , Deborah Madsen addresses “the way in
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which Paula Gunn Allen […] actively engages and disputes dominant Western fictions of
‘trauma’ in a Native American context” (111). For Madsen, trauma in Native American literature is a “contested thematics” challenged by both Native American literary critics and the works of literature themselves. Along the same lines, Jennifer Lemberg opens her discussion of James
Welch’s The Death of Jim Loney in these words: “There are multiple reasons why the interdisciplinary fields of Holocaust studies and American Indian literary studies have maintained cautious distance” (67). Madsen’s and Lemberg’s representative observations read as distant echoes of the controversy pervading the psychotherapeutic discussions outlined above.
However, like Duran, Madsen and Lemberg eventually acknowledge the benefits of cross disciplinary approximation in the realm of Native American studies and they approve of the collaboration of trauma theory with Native American literary criticism.
In tracing the origins of the debate, one can conclude that a great deal of unfortunate misconceptions is at its source. I presume that the discursive hostility, that is upsetting the prospect of healing via a cross disciplinary dialogue, is closely intertwined with acknowledging the very status of Native American historical experience. Some of the denominations of this experience are the terms Native American holocaust or American holocaust, denominations promoted, among others, by Russell Thornton and David Stannard. The expressions have become targets of intense denunciation from the midst of Holocaust scholars. In the course of the second half of the twentieth century, “Holocaust” became a generic term, widely used in media as a referent to any large scale violation of human rights. However, when used as a signifier of the colonial practices against Native American populations, it oftentimes engenders heated, albeit rather counterproductive, arguments. Kalí Tal divides Holocaust scholars into two generations; the first is represented by direct Holocaust survivors, such as Bruno Bettelheim or
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Elie Wiesel, and the second, emerging in the 1980s, by scholars such as Lawrence Langer, Dori
Laub, 34 and Shoshana Felman. Tal observes that the first generation, speaking from the vantage point of insiders, distinctly emphasizes the uniqueness of the Holocaust as a traumatic event.
Indeed, Bruno Bettelheim disdains any equating of the Holocaust with, for instance, Hiroshima or My Lai, condemning such comparisons as “consciously or unconsciously tak[ing] the side of the Nazis against that of the Jews” (382). Also Elie Wiesel laments the loss of the Holocaust’s, as he says, “sacrosanct” character: “The Holocaust became a literary ‘free for all,’ the no man’s land of modern writing. […] Novelists made free use of it in their work, scholars used it to prove their theories. In so doing they cheapened the Holocaust; they drained it of its substance” (qtd. in
Bettelheim 383). 35 The first generation Holocaust scholars thus engage in a very protectionist approach to the event with which their unfortunate survivor status originates. Dori Laub and
Shoshana Felman still focus predominantly on the Holocaust as the epitome of trauma in their studies but they do not venerate its status of a unique accident any more. Laub’s and Felman’s choice of the subject matter of their research suggests that neither do they welcome the extension of the term holocaust to encompass other events, among them the five hundred year genocide of the Native American populations.
Such is the intellectual backdrop against which ceaseless controversies emerge. The proponents of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, in terms of the impossibility to compare it with
34 Although Dori Laub is also a Holocaust survivor, his experience must be markedly different from Bettelheim’s, for Laub was born in 1937, that is only two years before the outbreak of WWII, and is over a generation younger than Bettelheim. 35 It needs to be acknowledged that throughout the 1970s, Elie Wiesel closely studied the documentation on the Paraguayan government’s attempts at the extermination of the Aché Indians. This led him to a significant reconfiguration of his previous insistence on the uniqueness of the Holocaust. He admits to his intellectual shift, maintaining: “Until now, I always forbade myself to compare the Holocaust of European Judaism to events which are foreign to it. [But now] there are here indications, facts which cannot be denied: it is indeed a matter of a Final Solution” (qtd. in Stannard, “Uniqueness” 280).
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other instances of genocide, in fact deny other genocides their status. 36 In these academic disputes, heated argumentation is articulated at both ends of the intellectual spectrum. 37
However, not all the discoursive rhetoric stems from a binary perception of historical experience.
Nor is all of it cloaked in scholarly arrogance obliterating actual human suffering in pursuit of academic interests. Some of the exchanges spring from misreadings of the original assertions rather than from the entirely malevolent character of the observations per se. An instance of a misread proposition can be found with Yehuda Bauer, a professor at Hebrew University in
Jerusalem and the editor of the Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies . Along with Steven
Katz, Bauer has been accused of advocating the uniqueness of the Holocaust, thus neglecting and disparaging the experience of the Native American peoples. Broadly speaking, both Bauer and
Katz pursue the tradition of viewing the Holocaust as an incomparable historical occurrence, a tradition established by Bettelheim and Wiesel.
Without any mediation of context, Bauer’s claim can be easily regarded as condescending and offensive to Native Americans: “[i]t is clear that this [the violent extermination of American indigenous peoples] is a case of mass murder, and it should be considered a genocide, but it cannot be seen on a par with the Holocaust” (33). Appropriately enough, his words are used to point to the (neo)colonial oppressive tendencies in contemporary
36 It is not my intent to elaborate on comparative studies of genocide here. Those interested in this relatively young, but all the more thriving and beneficial, discipline can be referred to Raphael Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress , published in 1944, constituting a key study informing the definition and codification of genocide four years later, and also conceived of as the fundamental text of the discipline itself. More recent publications focusing specifically on the comparative aspect of genocide are, for instance, Studies in Comparative Genocide (1999) edited by Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian, The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (2003) edited by Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, and Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (2001) edited by Alan Rosenbaum, to name just a few. 37 One of the enthusiastic advocators of the uniqueness of the Holocaust is Steven T. Katz in his three volume The Holocaust in Historical Context . Academic voices from the opposite camp are represented mainly by Ward Churchill, the author of A Little Matter of Genocide , who already in the Acknowledgements of his study addresses Steven T. Katz and Yehuda Bauer “by way of negative inspiration,” as those against whom he structures his argumentation (v).
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discourse. 38 However, at a closer examination, Bauer’s formulation loses much of its initial edge.
Concluding his analysis, Bauer maintains that “the destruction of the Indian Peoples by Anglo
Saxon settlers was, I think, clearly, genocide. The motive was greed for land and for the riches under the land. The aim was the removal and elimination of the rightful owners” (38). 39 Bauer proceeds to list several aspects in which the Holocaust was different from other genocides, such as the ideology behind targeting the Jewish population and the global proportions of the so called
Final Solution. Yet he also concedes that “[t]he Holocaust is not unique, in my view, from any other point of view – not in the number of the victims, not in the proportion the victims constituted of the total targeted population, and not in the vehemence of onslaught, its sadism, its cruelty or its murderousness” (40 41). In fact, Bauer embraces the idea which Levon Chorbajian proclaims in the preface to the collection in which Bauer’s just quoted essay appears. Chorbajian writes that “all genocides are unique in their particulars” and each of them needs to be perceived
“as an important part of the continual unfolding of genocides during the twentieth century, and tragically, it can be predicted, into the twenty first century” (ix). Undoubtedly, certain precision of definitions is desirable, particularly if former and future perpetrators of genocidal acts are to be held accountable on their basis. However, Bauer’s apt question about a mass murder, “How much is a mass?” points to the counter productivity of attempts at hierarchically structuring the discourse of genocide (37).
Thus, I believe that since the 1980s, another generation of cultural critics has emerged, represented by scholars such as Kalí Tal, who attempt to transcend the rhetoric of uniqueness.
38 See Lilian Friedberg’s paper “Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust,” in which she provides relevant arguments as to why the Native American historical experience can be referred to as holocaust. 39 Bauer’s view of Native Americans as the owners of the land is clearly Western informed and from a Native American perspective susceptible to contesting. As John Donaldson observes, ownership of land by an individual was clearly an unknown concept for many Native American peoples. Although Donaldson contends that “[s]ometimes resources are under the guardianship of an individual or group,” he hastens to acknowledge that “even in such cases, the group members are custodians or trustees, not owners in the sense of being able to dispose of the resources as they alone see fit” (75).
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Rather, Tal and others advocate the need to prevent any further perpetuation of violence in society and in doing so to alleviate the already existing human suffering. Dirk Moses, after a thorough analysis of both sides of the academic dispute on the Jewish and Native American holocaust, finally observes:
If the positivism implicit in the vain search for a neutral definition is no longer
sustainable on epistemological grounds, the challenge for historians and social
scientists is to work through their often traumatic emotional investment in their
own position and engage in two tasks: acknowledge the broad areas of consensus
in the discussion; and try to imagine the genocides of modernity as part of a single
process rather than merely comparative (and competitive) term. (28)
Such synthetic approach could be, and in fact has been, adopted by literary scholars. More critical voices have sprung up in support of reading the Native American literary production through the theory of trauma. As Madsen and Lemberg eventually document in their respective interpretations of The Woman Who Owned the Shadows and The Death of Jim Loney , both the realms, trauma studies and Native American literary criticism, can be enhanced by such readings.
Whereas trauma theory effectively sheds light on the traumas, psychological and cultural, portrayed in the texts, the texts in return illuminate the reader’s perception of trauma at large and of trauma theory specifically. A critical juxtaposition of Native American literature and trauma studies generates original readings of literary texts as well as points to some of the conceptual limitations of the trauma paradigm. Such a symbiosis is no less than mutually enlightening.
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As demonstrated, trauma in Native American culture is understood in terms of the soul wound, a category representing a space in which the boundaries of individual and collective
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trauma collapse (Duran and Duran 196). Regarding the trauma of African American culture, it is rarely discussed as such an unequivocal term. This is despite the fact that an implicit cross disciplinary agreement exists about the connection of African American trauma to the historical experience of slavery (LaCapra 724; Garbus). Instead, theoretical constructs which attempt to illuminate and synthesize the relationship between slavery and the cultural condition of generations of African Americans are manifold. Some of the most frequented terms in the discourse are the legacy of slavery (Cross) and founding trauma (LaCapra; Flanagan). My intention in the ensuing analysis is to address both of the two theoretical constructs as to how satisfactorily, or not so satisfactorily, they are able to contain the trauma of slavery. At the end of the discussion, I will propose that slavery cannot be fully accommodated by either of the categories. At the same time, I will suggest that African American trauma transcends the institution of slavery and needs to be theorized as part of a larger trauma of racially informed oppression which includes also the Middle Passage and which is still perceptible at the turn of the twenty first century.
The category of slavery has been discursively laden with multiple connotations which sometimes prove to be an obstacle to an unambiguous debate. In order to avoid a terminological and/or conceptual confusion, I decided to split the term “slavery” into two signifiers: “slavery as construct” and “slavery as practice.” In short, slavery as construct expresses the rhetorical representation of the historical institution of slavery. I theorize slavery as construct as a category of trauma discourse which emerges from scholarly and public debates and which communicates a cultural perception of the institution. Like some other entities in the realm of trauma, and like trauma itself, slavery as construct is subject to interrogation and is in the midst of conceptual flux. I understand slavery as practice as the system of forced servitude and crippling practices
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per se. There is no doubt that from an empirical perspective, the occurrence of slavery as practice had a traumatizing impact on all aspects of human lives, whether physical, psychological, social or cultural.
A theoretical category which can be to some degree affiliated with the notion of the
Native American soul wound is the legacy of slavery. Like the soul wound, the legacy of slavery is chiefly a psychological concept with relevance for the realms of cultural and literary analysis.
In his essay, “Black Psychological Functioning and the Legacy of Slavery,” William Cross engages in a critique of the traditional model of the legacy of slavery. It is a model that postulates that slavery accounts for the dysfunctions and malaises pervading the lives of many
African Americans today. As Irving Allen enumerates, the malaises encompass urban violence, domestic violence toward African American women, unemployment, crime, suicides, AIDS epidemics and others (211, 216). Another resemblance with the soul wound pertains to the mechanisms of intergenerational transmission of trauma, whose existence both the legacy of slavery and the soul wound anticipate. As studies with the Holocaust survivors conducted in the
1960s indicate, intergenerational transmission of trauma is a valid analytical and diagnostic tool although it has not yet been admitted into the official diagnostic register of DSM (Danieli 3).
Despite the transient character of trauma’s intergenerational transmission, its processes are relatively well explored. Cross introduces intergenerational transmission of trauma, or, as he terms it in the context of slavery, the intergenerational legacy of trauma, in a brief summary:
[W]e document the trauma and its termination, and then try to determine whether
attitudes and behaviors originally elicited by the trauma have been passed down to
the immediate and extended kin of the original victims, even though the survivors
and their progeny live under conditions that are a far cry from the period of
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trauma. When such transcendence is confirmed across several decades or longer,
we speak of the intergenerational legacy of the trauma. (387)
Cross concludes that the “legacy of slavery” model, derived from a pattern in which trauma is directly reinscribed in successive generations through transcendence as a legacy (i.e. trauma transcendence legacy), is not fully applicable to contemporary African Americans (387).
In support of his argument, Cross instead acknowledges the existence of, what he terms,
“racial anxiety” observed among his African American patients (387). According to him, racial anxiety can be either “grounded in postslavery or contemporary encounters with discrimination and injustice” or it can transcendently stem from the historical experience of slavery itself (388).
These two separate domains are to emphasize Cross’s claim that the majority of the dysfunctions of African Americans, psychological or not, originate in contemporary racial prejudice rather than with the institution of slavery proper. By way of a counter argument, I deem Cross’s strict demarcation of the contemporary and transcendent anxiety as somewhat artificial. I believe that
Cross’s anxiety is in the cultural domain of the same signification as the concept of trauma. The systemic perpetuation of the rhetoric of race, mainly in the stereotypical imagery of the popular discourses, can incite both, the said anxiety as Cross demonstrates, and communal trauma as my readings show. Moreover, the same holds true for Native Americans who have been subjected to an analogous stereotyping (Alexie, “A World” 158; Deloria 38), and in consequence to corresponding racially substantiated physical subjugation. Despite this contention, like Cross, I am hesitant to fully endorse the notion of slavery as the dominant trauma imprinting its legacy on the contemporary African American population.
In the course of his argumentation, Cross releases slavery of direct responsibility for some of the malfunctions of African American communities, transferring it to the racial
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prejudice and to social and economic injustice instead. However, when examining the particular cases of psychologically distressed patients, he fails to draw a connection between the patients’ problems and their social environment, undermining thus his own idea. As Cross explains,
“Many therapists have notes on black clients who came to them with ‘blackness’ issues, only for it later to be revealed that sexual problems, problems of repressed anger, or problems of low self esteem, all unrelated to race , were at the core of their misery” (395 96, emphasis mine). Note that what Cross depicts is a reversed reasoning to that of Eduardo Duran who examines his
Native American patients. Whereas Duran establishes a link between the patients’ condition and the historical suffering that their communities have endured, Cross severs such affinity, deeming it “unrelated to race.” Contrary to Cross’s contention, I believe that the model developed by
Duran, Duran and Brave Heart can be transplanted to the African American context. In other words, the origins of the African American patients’ “sexual problems, problems of repressed anger, or problems of low self esteem” can be related to an extra somatic/extra psychic etiology which resides in the socio cultural environment of thriving racial prejudice (Cross 395 96). Still more explicitly, the problems recounted by some of the individuals seeking medical intervention are not un related to the social construct of race. My argument is that the trope of trauma employed in the analyzed literary texts indeed embodies the relatedness between people’s suffering, whether physical, psychological or other, and the injustice of racial prejudice perpetuated by their social surroundings.
The second concept devised to contain the past and present occurrences of grave human rights violations such as slavery is Dominick LaCapra’s founding trauma. LaCapra enumerates the historical events which can potentially constitute a communal founding trauma, listing the
Holocaust, slavery, and apartheid, holding that “even suffering the effects of the atom bomb in
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Hiroshima or Nagasaki – can become a founding trauma” (724). Founding trauma is undoubtedly an insightful methodological instrument pertinent to the examinations of large scale human suffering. Among some scholars, slavery’s status as the foundation of African American collective identity is taken, almost automatically, for granted (Flanagan 388). It is truly inviting to place slavery in parallel with the Jewish enduring of the Holocaust, with the Japanese survival of the atom bomb detonations, or even with the colonization of Native Americans, and understand them all singularly as the foundations of the respective collectives’ traumatized identities. However, I would like to propose that slavery, not so much as an empirical event but as a culturally perpetuated metaphor, what I term here slavery as construct, breaks the conceptual boundaries of what LaCapra understands as founding trauma. 40
Without the least doubt, slavery is a dominant component in discussing the African
American historical experience. It was the very institution through the mechanisms of which
Africans were subjugated into involuntary acculturation and subsequently emerged as a distinct cultural group within the diverse American population. Apart from the historical and cultural milieus, the institution of slavery is also assigned a prominent role in the realm of literary imagination. There, slavery functions as a frequent trope and, through the genre of slave narratives, forms the foundation of the African American literary tradition itself (Gates, Classic
7). The point of departure of my argumentation is Dominick LaCapra’s specification of founding trauma. He posits that it is “the trauma that […] becomes the basis for collective and/or personal identity” (724). His formulation implies that founding trauma is an event, accident or circumstance with a traumatizing impact on an individual or a community from which the consequent self perception of the respective individual and/or collective emanates.
40 I tentatively believe that another of the instances of founding trauma, the South African apartheid, is, too, on the verge of breaking LaCapra’s paradigm. However, this assertion deserves a more in depth analysis which is beyond the scope of the present dissertation.
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The notion of a person’s or group’s self perception is, however, very intricate and can pose unexpected difficulties in theorizing LaCapra’s notion. Some of the interviews conducted with former slaves in the 1930s reveal that the atmosphere of violence, as artificially maintained by the owners, was to a certain extent internalized as a norm, and not perceived as immediately traumatic. Katie Phoenix, one of the interviewees, speaks about her own limited worldview under slavery: “I knew I was unhappy, but I thought everythin’ was like dat. I didn’t knowed there was happiness for nobody – me, nor nobody. When I got whipped I thought that was jus’ a part of being alive. I didn’t take it like it was my special punishment jus’ comin’ to me” (qtd. in
Berlin 214). Phoenix’s account is not fully representative of the vast heterogeneity of voices of the former slaves but, nonetheless, can be considered as an illustration of a certain mental scheme a subjugated person could have. A scheme which, I argue, may have precluded some former slaves from perceiving their identity as a space of contestation between the pre trauma and post trauma existence, with the suffering of trauma occupying its center. At the same time, historical evidence chronicles murderous acts of slave mothers who, as a way of protecting their children from the perversity of slavery, opted to deprive them of their lives. 41 Phoenix’s words on the one hand and the instances of infanticide on the other document that the injustice of the slave order was almost unrealized by some yet fully acknowledged by others.
As shown on the account of Phoenix, in the context of slavery, the ideology of the normalcy of violence perpetuated by the European American masters might have been internalized by some of the enslaved subjects. In consequence, such putative normalcy could have diminished the traumatogenic perception of slavery on the part of slaves themselves.
41 Thanks to Toni Morrison’s fictional recreation in Beloved , one of the well known stories of an infanticide is the case of Margaret Garner (Lerner). The trope of an intentional infanticide as a means of protecting one’s children is frequently invoked in African American literature. Like Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, too, employs the metaphor of an enslaved mother killing her children in Corregidora .
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Nevertheless, to claim that slavery was not traumatic is a preposterous fallacy merely a step from maintaining that once violence and injustice become normative, pain inflicted on other human beings is justifiable. I would like to suggest that if understood as LaCapra’s founding trauma, slavery slips the conventional trauma paradigm. I am fully cognizant of the fact that my argumentation does not conform to the generally held belief in the opposite. However, I suggest that LaCapra and Flanagan draw the parallels between slavery and, for instance, the Holocaust or
Partition of the Subcontinent as grounded more in the reality of the individuals’ suffering than in the comparison of the structures of the events proper.
Despite the fact that the theoretical category of slavery seems to elude the paradigm of trauma, I cannot emphasize enough that slavery as practice was inherently traumatic for those who were directly affected by its day to day functioning. This leads me to strongly disagree with statements such as the following by Arthur Neal in the preface to his National Trauma and
Collective Memory: Major Events in the American Century : “Certainly, the American
Revolution, the institution of slavery, and the Civil War were major traumas that are deeply embedded in the American conscience. However, with the passing of time, these aspects of our past more appropriately belong to the domain of professional historians. The more recent traumas are a part of the memories of Americans now living” (x). Regardless of the fact that from a psychological perspective the connection between slavery and its dormant effects on the current society cannot be entirely substantiated, it remains pertinent to subject both slavery as construct and slavery as practice to continual cross disciplinary probing instead of treating slavery as an event “now frozen in the past” (Neal x).
Two conclusions can be drawn in consequence of the above discussion. First, from both psychological and sociological perspectives it is unacceptable to hold the institution of slavery
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solely directly accountable for present day racial/skin color based forms of injustice. This tendency obscures the structural oppression and political agendas which are at the core of the noted inequalities. Second, it is no less dangerous to exclude slavery from the contemporary discourse altogether, confining it within the boundaries of the historical discipline only. Both the considerations, the racially biased present and the slavery ridden past, still deserve undivided attention of scholars and the general public. It is, however, important to establish some sort of a relationship between the present and the past and to not entirely confuse one with the other. As anticipated earlier, theorizing slavery within the conceptual limits of the legacy of slavery and founding trauma are but two attempts to grasp the complexity of this interrelationship.
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Both of the theoretical categories, the legacy of slavery and founding trauma, elucidate a certain layer of meaning which slavery as construct generates. The category of slavery is a prime instance of how certain empirical occurrences of trauma avoid their own incorporation into the theoretical framework developed for containing and explicating them. Events like slavery, even despite their alleged firm embedding in the discourse, may in fact collapse the discursive limits, desiring to be re visited and re inscribed within a redesigned framework. In the context of trauma of the African American historical experience, colonial and racial ideology, of which slavery was but one manifestation, need to be theorized in unison. If, then, the category of slavery is to be perceived as a traumatic stressor comparable to that of colonialism, as a metaphor of trauma discourse rather than an empirical event, the metaphor’s scope needs to be extended to embrace the institution of slavery per se along with the Middle Passage and the racial prejudice of Reconstruction and segregation.42 Particularly the latter, Reconstruction and
42 The imperative to theorize slavery as a process including the Middle Passage and the consequences of Emancipation in part derives from what Orlando Patterson argues in his comparatives study of slavery through the
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segregation as two very specific outcomes of slavery, are closely connected to the North
American form of slavery (Patterson). The Middle Passage, then, as a process of initial dispossession and enslavement of human beings, conveys the kind of disruption of a person’s life that trauma is supposed to provoke. It is believed by some that “[f]or African slaves, the highest rate of loss would have occurred in the first fourteen weeks of captivity: on the journey through
Africa, within the coastal holding quarters (the barracoons), and during the Atlantic Middle
Passage” (Drescher 101). This primal physical and psychological traumatization, in many instances fatal, closely corresponds to Caruth’s understanding of trauma which ruptures the time continuum, disjointing one’s temporal existence into before trauma and after trauma realms. I propose that African American trauma is not to be located in one or the other specific historical episode: within the trauma category of slavery, slavery as practice should not be separated from the Middle Passage, and neither should Reconstruction be omitted from discussions of racial adversity. The continuous interaction of all of these occurrences should be emphasized and subsumed under the notion of African American trauma of racial inequity.
Eyerman demonstrates how this kind of inequity can be encapsulated by his concept of cultural trauma. Although my analysis of slavery has revealed slavery’s conceptual discordance with the categories such as the legacy of slavery and founding trauma, I believe that reading slavery as construct through the critical framework of cultural trauma is beneficial for understanding the nuances of the historical event. According to Eyerman, “[t]he notion of cultural trauma implies that direct experience of an event is not a necessary condition for its inclusion in the trauma process. It is through time delayed and negotiated recollection that
history of humankind. He emphasizes that in general, slavery cannot be separated from what precedes and succeeds it. He concludes: “Enslavement, slavery, and manumission are not merely related events; they are one and the same process in different phases. To separate one from the other in an imposed schema is as gross an error as the attempt of a biologist to classify as distinct entities larva, chrysalis, and imago” (296). Or more poignantly yet, slavery is an institutional process of three stages, “enslavement, institutional liminality, and disenslavement” (Patterson 340).
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cultural trauma is experienced, a process which places representation in a key role” (12). As
Eyerman further observes, “slavery is traumatic for those who share a common fate, not necessarily a common experience” (14 15). Still, I would like to emphasize that in the domain of trauma theory, slavery is in fact a cultural construct which encompasses a historical process, not merely the period of explicit systemic oppression whose name it bears. In the textual analysis of the third chapter, I hope to challenge the notion of the omnipresence of slavery in contemporary
African American culture and argue, instead, for the continuum of racial oppression assuming the status of African American trauma.
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Chapter 2
The Transcendence of the Soul Wound: Native American Trauma in the Novels of Linda Hogan,
Sherman Alexie and Anna Lee Walters
Trauma in Native American culture displays itself through a diverse symptomatology, encompassing, among many others, somatic problems, alcoholism and high suicide rates. In order to embrace this diversity, Duran, Duran and Brave Heart offer the concept of the soul wound, which subsumes the variety of symptoms and, at the same time, addresses their etiology in the mechanisms of (neo)colonial oppression. While psychology has developed a concept and a term for the oftentimes impaired condition of Native Americans, both historically and today, literature seems to be still in the process of searching. The following chapter is another expression of this search, which desires to understand what evades comprehension, and to expose the trauma pervading Native American literature and culture. The chapter comprises of three parts, each devoted to one of the already mentioned texts, Hogan’s Solar Storm , Alexie’s
Indian Killer and Walters’s Ghost Singer , and the specific traumatic aspects of the Native
American historical experience they portray. Without exception, but to a varying degree, the three texts articulate the said experience and participate in a multivocal dialogue about Native
American past and present and the traumas within. Neither the authors nor the texts share much of their geographical or cultural provenance, yet each of them bears equal witness to the history of the relationships between the indigenous populations and European American colonizers, a history accompanied by violence and disempowerment. Linda Hogan (Chickasaw/European
American) comes from Colorado and grew up in Oklahoma. 43 Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene) was raised on the Spokane Reservation, Wellpinit, Washington state, whereas Anna
43 In an interview with Laura Coltelli, Linda Hogan acknowledges some of the implications for her narratives stemming from her mixed heritage. She says: “My father is a Chickasaw and my mother is white, from an immigrant Nebraska family. This created a natural tension that surfaces in my work and strengthens it” (“Linda” 71).
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Lee Walters (Pawnee/Otoe) comes from Oklahoma. Like Hogan, Walters is of mixed heritage, being born to a Pawnee mother and an Otoe Missouria father. Despite their authors’ dissimilarities in cultural and familial backgrounds, and hence differences in the traditions of thought, Solar Storms , Indian Killer and Ghost Singer present a comparably uncomplimentary image of the dominant American society and its mistreatment of indigenous peoples. The correlation of Hogan’s, Alexie’s and Walters’s rhetoric conforms to what Louis Owens observes about the approximation of epistemologies among Native American writers today. According to
Owens, there seems to exist “a remarkable degree [of] a shared consciousness and identifiable worldview” among many Native American authors (20).
Each of the three novels raises multiple questions about the intentional neglect and ignorance toward Native cultures on the part of non Native Americans. But primarily, each author makes her or his text revolve around a specific instance of historical abuse of Native
American peoples, in which sense Solar Storms , Indian Killer and Ghost Singer become contributions to the continuously expanding body of trauma literature. It would be a mistake to assume that the texts concentrate explicitly on their authors’ respective cultural backgrounds and histories, for as Linda Hogan observes, to fictionally conceive other cultures and geographies is not a privilege of non Native writers (qtd. in Tarter). 44 Thus, she locates the story of Solar
Storms into a borderland region between the United States and Canada, largely into a country of the imagined tribe of Fat Eaters. Both the setting and the culture are distant from her own environment of Colorado, Oklahoma and the Chickasaw people. As with his other novels,
44 At the same time, Hogan seems to be well aware of the traps which writing about different cultures presents for an author. In a 1994 interview, in which she speaks about working on Solar Storms , she concedes: “There are all kinds of restrains that you have as a writer from a particular community. You can’t just assume that you know another community. Right now I’m trying to work on a book that’s set in the north, but it has to be from a Chickasaw point of view because I would never pretend to presume to understand tribes up in the north, or to speak for a person of another tribe” (qtd. in Tarter).
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Sherman Alexie sets Indian Killer in Washington state, close to the Spokane Reservation, featuring characters of Spokane and mix blood descent. Anna Lee Walters, then, provides her readers with a mélange of people ranging from Navajo and Ioway, to characters of mixed origins including Cheyenne, Kiowa and Pawnee. The variety of the novels’ cultural heritage notwithstanding, they all portray the consequences of historical injustice that the majority of
Native American peoples have been, to a lesser or greater extent, subjected to.
The history of North American colonization, with its residual structures of
(neo)colonialism (Tarter 136), has been a complex process allowing for multifaceted experience both geographically and diachronically. The historical experience of Native American peoples in its course has been anything but homogenous. The three authors thus carefully inscribe a diversity of traumas in their texts, never focusing exclusively on merely one aspect of the historical development. Attempting to severe the traumas from one another, would, on the one hand, defy the causality and complexity of history. On the other hand, it would undermine
Duran’s, Duran’s and Brave Heart’s concept of the soul wound as a viable frame of reference used for explaining the present condition of many of Native American communities. For it is precisely the combination and interaction of multiple traumas which constitutes the theoretical foundations of the construct. I envision the close readings to follow as each representing a specific facet of the soul wound, that is addressing one originary trauma or social injustice, which allows me to more fully identify the potential of the social critique that the authors engage in.
In particular, the major themes of Hogan’s, Alexie’s and Walters’s texts are environmental, social and cultural mistreatment respectively. Solar Storms exposes a ruthless environmental exploitation and its impact on both the human and nonhuman subjects who are
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closely linked to the abused geography. The story of Indian Killer explores some of the consequences of displacement, whether geographical, cultural or social, for both individuals and communities. The notion and practice of displacement undeniably resides in a central position among the forms of suffering launched by the settlers’ occupation. Walters’s Ghost Singer probes yet another form of historical injustice, one associated with cultural dispossession, both material and intellectual. Her novel focuses on the stealing and physical appropriation of Native
American ceremonial artifacts and ancestral bodily remains under the auspices of racially prejudiced scholarly anthropology. In order to emphasize the contemporary aspects of Native peoples’ cultural conditions, the texts consciously refuse to be confined by the past. Their manifold portrayals of human rights violations unmask the present day implications of these violations, and even more importantly, their endless perpetuation. Linda Hogan points to the ongoing environmental damage, as Sherman Alexie does to the practice of inter ethnic adoption, also known as out adoption, of Native American children by non Native families. Analogously,
Anna Lee Walters brings to the forefront the controversies surrounding the repatriation of Native
American remains and ceremonial artifacts. In connecting past traumas with their current extensions and/or detrimental consequences, the authors unanimously raise their readers’ awareness of the problems and stimulate moves toward tolerance and justice.
As the following analysis will demonstrate, trauma manifests itself on two separate, yet interconnected, textual planes. Its presence on the thematic level can be interpreted as a vehicle of the envisioned social change. In addition, the mechanisms of trauma function as organizing principles of the texts when each portrayed trauma is inextricably linked with a specific narrative device, literary imagery and the author’s questioning of the trauma related categories of victims and perpetrators. The trauma of environmental destruction in Solar Storms becomes inscribed in
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the visceral imagery and the principle of somatization that Hogan employs; the experience of geographical and social displacement in Indian Killer is replicated in Alexie’s use of metaphors of displacement such as out adoption and homelessness and in the novel’s disjointed structure.
Walters’s focus on Native American cultural dispossession and loss of material heritage manifests itself in her challenge to the dichotomy of a victim and a perpetrator, a challenge to one of the constitutive elements of trauma discourse. Each text functions as a unique voice testifying to the historical and contemporary oppression of Native Americans. In facilitating the encounter between the texts and trauma discourse, and illustrating how trauma informs the texts’ narrative techniques and imagery, I hope my interpretations of Solar Storms , Indian Killer and
Ghost Singer will be a tribute to the authors’ voices calling for a reinstitution of social justice and humanity.
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2.1 The Body and the Land Abused: Visceral Imagery and Somatization in Linda Hogan’s Solar
Storms
Linda Hogan’s second novel, Solar Storms , recreates a story emanating from the depths of a land and community traumatized by a history of colonization, occupation and violence. It is a text which portrays the land’s past and present exploitation and focuses the reader’s attention to the pressing question of environmental abuse. It is also a text depicting a family of four women and a journey by water that they undertake, both literally and figuratively, toward wholeness, completion and healing. Angel 45 is a seventeen year old woman with a history of foster homes and a face which would be beautiful but for scars “like the cratered moon,” the origins of which remain, for most of the story, only insinuated (Hogan, Solar 33). In search of her mother,
Hannah Wing, Angel returns to the places of her ancestors, Adam’s Rib and Fat Eaters, in the former of the two reuniting with her grandmothers, Agnes and Dora Rouge, and her surrogate mother, old Bush. The women’s canoe voyage is initiated by a rumored hydroelectric project which is to divert rivers, create mudflats and disrupt the already fragile ecosystemic equilibrium.
Each of the women has her own personal investment in the journey; Bush demands visual corroboration of the reported project, intending to participate in the Native organized protests;
Angel hopes to reunite with her mother; and Dora Rouge desires to die in the place of her people. It is only Agnes whose motivation is vague. Hesitant in regards to the travel plans since their inception, she joins only reluctantly, and mainly because of her determination not to abandon Dora Rouge, her mother, in what promise to be the last moments of Dora Rouge’s life.
45 The main protagonist and narrator of the novel changes her name several times in the course of the story. Starting as Angela Jensen, early on she accepts her grandmothers’ address, Angel. Later, Angel assumes her grandmother Agnes’s family name, Iron, and still later she becomes Maniki. The name alternations and their progression are significant markers of Angel’s mental and emotional growth. Executing the primary agency in the name changing, she communicates independence and self possession. Throughout the analysis, I adhere to the most frequent name variation, “Angel,” the one which is also employed by others in their readings of the novel.
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Given the framework of environmental exploitation and looming ecological catastrophe as an effect of putative technological advancement, the novel has been widely read through the critical lenses of ecocriticism and/or ecofeminism (Schultermandl). In this respect, Jim Tarter explicitly insists that the novel “deserves to be carefully read as environmental literature” (128).
Critics oftentimes emphasize the narrative means which Hogan employs in order to raise awareness of the injustice committed against the land and the people who occupy it. Some of the predominant metaphors examined in Solar Storms are those of water (Donaldson), place (Castor) and land (Fisher Wirth), to name just several instances. Furthermore, concepts such as
Indigenism (Udel) and women’s spirituality (Arnold) have also been probed by others, relating these to Angel’s transformation into a woman of agency. Most of the novel’s readings draw on a fundamental premise derived from Native American epistemology, a premise which holds at its center the interdependence of all the elements of Creation. That is, scholars have mainly focused on Hogan’s fictional account of the severance of bonds between humans, animals, vegetation and places, and the consequences this kind of rupture entails for the contemporary world at large and
Native American communities specifically. According to Native American cosmology as discussed by Vine Deloria, humans are but one component of life, equal to and mutually interconnected with others: “At the bottom of everything, I believed then and continue to believe, is a religious view of the world that seeks to locate our species within the fabric of life that constitutes the natural world, the land and all its various forms of life” (1). Hogan voices a similar concern in an interview with Joseph Bruchac: “we are short in our span here and we are not the most significant of lives on earth. We share the planet with plants and animals equal to ourselves, and we are small in the universe” (“To Take” 125). In line with this argumentation, in
Solar Storms Hogan fictionally revises this essential conviction and (re)instates its continuing
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relevance, not for Native Americans only but for all the readers who inhabit today’s world threatened with ecological collapse.
From this perspective, the novel is a prime instance of an environmentally conscious text, presenting a fictional account in order to promote people’s awareness of the world’s endangered ecosystems. 46 However, I would like to suggest that the pertinence of the novel’s ecocritical readings equals the pertinence of its reading as a trauma text. Some of the characters’ depictions, particularly of Angel and her mother Hannah, are obvious portrayals of individuals traumatized both physically and psychologically. In addition, drawing on the previous ecocritical interpretations of the novel, I posit that Hogan’s representation of the land is also highly reminiscent of a subject enduring physical and psychological traumatization. Therefore, my analysis will show that it is through the use of visceral imagery that Hogan portrays both the characters and the land as subjects of trauma. For this purpose, I propose the concept of somatization, as opposed to the classic literary understanding of personification and anthropomorphism; in somatizing the land Hogan endows the nonhuman world with a body, subjectivity, and its own idiosyncratic life which is as threatened with trauma as a human body is.
Embedded in the literary domain, personification denotes “a figure of speech by which animals, abstract ideas, or inanimate things are referred to as if they were human” (Baldick).
Another concept oftentimes appropriated for the purposes of literary criticism is anthropomorphism which, interpreted very succinctly, denotes “the residue of assumptions about
46 Although the story of Solar Storms is a fictional narrative, Hogan clearly draws her inspiration from the hydroelectric project Hydro Québec designed in 1971 for the area of James Bay, “the largest river drainage system in North America,” which has caused damage to Cree territory and community, and the James Bay ecosystem (Castor 157 58). Despite the fictional character of this particular narrative, Hogan also explicitly acknowledges its veracity when she says: “It’s a form of truth, not a story. It’s in some ways a retelling of history” (qtd. in Tarter 139).
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humans applied to animals,” to nonhuman entities, the inanimate world and others (Spada qtd. in
Mitchell et al. 5). As an accompaniment and extension of the two, I suggest the analytical construct of somatization which, by contrast, originates in the psychological realm. The term itself comes from the Somatization Disorder defined as “a pattern of recurring, multiple, clinically significant somatic complaints” appearing “over a period of several years” (Amer.
Psychiatric Assoc.). Researchers have confirmed significant correlation between “severe histories of trauma” and the diagnosis of the Somatization Disorder (van der Kolk, “Complexity”
194 95). However, in trauma discourse the term somatization also includes the inability to express oneself in verbal and symbolic mode, relying on bodily actions instead (van der Kolk,
“Complexity” 195). In the absence of verbal capacities to articulate a traumatic experience, the acting out through one’s body is a means of endowing trauma with specific contours. In other words, somatization is a particular channel of communicating trauma, in the course of which trauma literally acquires the form of a human body. Bearing these facets of the concept in mind,
I propose to consider somatization in literature as a means of granting a body to entities which, in the tradition of Western thought, do not possess one. As somatization makes trauma corporal in psychology, so does Hogan’s use of visceral imagery render the nonhuman world of her novel in bodily terms. Nevertheless, the way I employ somatization as a tool of literary analysis differs from personification or anthropomorphism in that somatization implies an inherently vulnerable body, that is a body prone to, or experiencing, traumatization. In Solar Storms , somatization accounts for Hogan’s employment of visceral images and verbs typical of a human body in reference to the nonhuman world, subjectivizing this world and bestowing it with life. As will be demonstrated later, the nonhuman world of the novel is portrayed as shattered and endangered, a condition which Hogan’s narrative repeatedly emphasizes.
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I argue that Hogan’s text focuses on traumatized subjects which, by Western thought, are perceived in a binary opposition, that is on humans on the one hand and on the world of the inanimate and wildlife on the other. By employing the same variety of visceral imagery in reference to both these kinds of subjects, Hogan challenges her readers to deconstruct the binary and, instead, perceive the suffering of the land as parallel to that endured by Angel and Hannah.
In the choice of literary imagery, Hogan demonstrates the timeless significance of Native
American cosmology, in which the human and nonhuman elements of Creation are inseparable, and in which hurting one inevitably culminates in injuring the other. This kind of reciprocity informs Hogan’s inscription of the wounds of the land onto her characters’ corporal forms and vice versa. I propose that it is indeed the ongoing trauma of the nonhuman world which imprints on Angel and Hannah in the form of their physical wounds and scars, and in the perpetuation of violence these scars signify. The mutuality of the process precipitates a condition in which the land’s injuries are re inscriptions of the harm suffered by the daughter and the mother.
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In viewing Angel as a trauma survivor, the reader may refer to her self perception as such when, after the women accomplish their canoe voyage, Angel silently ponders their survivorship:
“[n]ow we were nothing more than survivors no one knew or cared about” (Hogan, Solar 212).
In addition, Hogan’s focus on Angel’s disfigured body and her former (self) mutilation are explicit indicators of some kind of trauma burdening Angel’s past. Angel’s face is the most conspicuously wounded space, a corporal part which she treats with distinguished self consciousness. At the beginning of the story, Angel’s understanding of her self is that of an observed object which she depicts in a detached impersonal manner thusly:
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What a picture we would have made on that warm September day, Agnes and I,
[…] me, barely able to keep up with her, a rootless teenager in a jeans jacket and
tight pants, a curtain of dark red hair falling straight down over the right side of
my dark face. Like a waterfall, I imagined, and I hoped it covered the scars I
believed would heal, maybe even vanish, if only I could remember where they’d
come from. Scars had shaped my life. I was marked and I knew the marks had
something to do with my mother. (Hogan, Solar 25)
Angel’s attempts to cover the scars literally by hair and ignore them rhetorically connote her continual awareness of the mutilation combined with a desire to obliterate it. When Angel’s friend Tommy inquires about the scars’ origins, the attitude of denial manifests itself in Angel’s defiance of the scars’ very existence: “And one day, as I sat close to him in the truck, Tommy touched my face and said, ‘Tell me about the scars.’ […] ‘What scars?’” (Hogan, Solar 125).
This kind of disavowal is emblematic of Angel’s difficult existential position of a survivor who is only starting her journey toward healing.
In terms of trauma, Angel’s scarred face performs a dual role. It is a physical reminder of a past traumatization and, simultaneously, a metaphor for trauma itself. Like any trauma, the scars are omnipresent and are governing Angel’s life in that she incessantly seeks for their origins and inadvertently attempts to disguise them. Yet, only seldom do they occupy her conscious focus or the center of the narrative. Each time they are brought to the forefront of the story and to Angel’s attention, it happens abruptly, without previous meditation, engendering a violent or resistant reaction on Angel’s part. The most acute visceral response transpires in the scene in which, as if only in passing in between cutting cheese and pushing a plate of cookies, one of the female characters unexpectedly asks, “What happened to your face, anyway, dear?”
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(Hogan, Solar 51). The combination of both, the taboo question being voiced and the relatively innocent context of the enquiry, propels Angel’s intense somatic reaction. As with the victims of trauma examined in psychological studies, most of Angel’s ensuing behavior is independent of her consciousness and inherently visceral. Hogan emphasizes the contrast between Angel’s instant acting out of the trauma and the seemingly harmless environment, in that the setting of the scene is an evening of friendly chatting and card playing at Agnes’s house. Angel’s reaction is in sharp contrast with the tranquility of the evening as she unawares cuts her finger, shatters a bathroom mirror in a fit of rage, vomits, sobs and cries out without cognizant knowledge thereof
(Hogan, Solar 52). The array of rapidly successive physical acts clearly resembles the symptomatology of psychological trauma.
Apart from the manifest scars, a textual reference to which correlates with the somatic aspect of traumatic acting out, Angel admits that “[t]here were others, as well, on my body”
(Hogan, Solar 34). However, the scars on Angel’s body are as implicit in the story and covered by protective layers of clothes as her facial scarification is exposed and governing of her actions.
Still, analogously to Angel’s face, her body remembers the past injuries only viscerally, that is as scars, not cognitively as memories. Although it is insinuated that Angel’s bodily harm has been induced primarily by her mother, the character of the scars remains ambiguous, as Angel also accidentally concedes to prior self mutilation. At the beginning of the story, Angel designates
Hannah as the singular originator of the scars: “The scars, I knew, were from my mother”
(Hogan, Solar 34). But as the narrative proceeds, Angel’s words indicate an extra textual past in which she used to direct harm against herself: “Gone were the times my hands were tied down so
I wouldn’t hurt myself” (Hogan, Solar 204). Angel’s body, which bears evidence to an extensive physical damage, may be a means of enhancing the parallel between her and her mother.
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Throughout the narrative, their mother daughter bond is almost irrevocably severed, marked by few unaccomplished attempts at a reunion, and anything but nurturing. Yet Angel and Hannah are inextricably connected through the physical resemblance of their bodies which goes beyond the corresponding color of hair and bone constitution. It is bodily correspondence which Angel frequently invokes, as in the following instance when she observes Hannah’s recently deceased body: “her arms so like mine, her bones familiar” (Hogan, Solar 252). According to Angel, such resemblance bears almost uncanny, “frightening,” characteristics (Hogan, Solar 242). Yet, what underscores their affiliation even more profoundly is the “scars speaking […] their language of wounds” that the mother and daughter share (Hogan, Solar 267).
Whereas Angel’s presence and (self) characterization permeate the text, Hannah lingers merely at its periphery, for the most part being absent physically and present only as an implicit source of Angel’s traumatization. On the few occasions when Hogan ushers Hannah to the fore of the reader’s focus, it is by emphasizing the multiplicity of physical injuries inscribed on her body. Bush, recalling the first sight of Hannah’s nudity when Hannah was a ten year old child, recounts:
She removed the pants while I wiped the table. She came down to a swimsuit,
much too large. But when I saw her in her small, bare nakedness, I stopped and
stared. Beneath all the layers of clothes, her skin was a garment of scars. There
were burns and incisions. Like someone had written on her. The signatures of
tortures, I call them now. I was overcome. I cried. She looked at me like I was a
fool, my tears a sign of weakness. And farther in, I knew, there were violations
and invasions of other kinds. (Hogan, Solar 99)
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As Hannah’s corporal introduction to the story is marked by the description of her wounds, so is her last appearance. Angel, while undressing her mother and preparing her for an improvised funeral, notices the injuries. The vividness of their description is significantly toned down in comparison to Bush’s recollection above, yet Angel does not fail to remark that “there were burn scars on the tops of her feet” (Hogan, Solar 252). Moreover, the only times when Hogan endows
Hannah with a voice, granting her a direct agency to speak and probably defend her violent actions, Hannah’s words, overtly or covertly, signify physical damage and violence against a body, Angel’s or her own. The first words that Angel hears from her mother at their brief reunion at Fat Eaters refer to the acts of traumatization explicitly, although only as a means of denial, “‘I never hit you.’ […] ‘I never laid a hand on you,’ she said to me. ‘I think you ought to know that’” (Hogan, Solar 231).
From the perspective of Hannah’s characterization, it is plausible to assert that Hogan reduces Hannah’s existence to deeds of trauma. She is both a victim of violence committed against her and a perpetrator of pain inflicted on others. Her detrimental treatment of those around her can be assumed from the pathological symptoms of her other children. In a cursory fashion, Angel mentions her half sister Henriet, who “was lovely and quiet, but she was a girl who cut herself, cut her own skin, every chance she had. Her eyes were innocent and trusting, but her skin was full of scars. She cut herself with scissors and razor blades” (Hogan, Solar 118).
Henriet’s communication via self mutilation finds its analogy in another of Hannah’s children who is known to devour glass and razor blades (Hogan, Solar 246). Hogan portrays Hannah’s body as a space of intersecting violent drives, as a nexus of traumatization. The distinctiveness of corporal imagery testifies to the specific circumstances of Hannah’s being in the world, and in a perverse way it also replaces the almost intangible maternal bond with her daughter. Apart from
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Hannah’s and Angel’s striking physical likeness, the corresponding bodily evidence of suffering is another form of attachment substituting the almost complete void of emotional union between the two.
In perceiving Hannah as a point of concurrence of multifaceted damage, I would like to propose a reading of her character as an embodiment of Abraham’s and Torok’s phantom or
Duran’s vampire, that is as an epitome of intergenerational transmission of trauma. Hannah’s constant slipping in and out of the story, her implicit presence in Angel’s body, yet explicit absence from her life, along with the crucial role she performs in the perpetuation and replication of violence, are all reminiscent of the mechanisms of trauma’s intergenerational transmission.
Like the metaphors of a phantom and a vampire, Hannah is oftentimes recognized by other characters as a nonhuman presence; one of her many lovers confides that “‘She’s a spirit,’ […].
‘She’s not a real woman at all’” (Hogan, Solar 246). The characters who do not equate Hannah with a mythical creature still believe that such creatures, “demons or restless beings or ice spirits,” occupy her body (Hogan, Solar 247). Laura Castor presents her own reading of Hannah as a recreation of the Cree and Ojibwe mythical windigo , that is as a representation of a malicious cannibalistic spirit in which humans can incarnate or which can possess them (169).
The aura of the mythical which accompanies Angel’s mother throughout the novel transforms itself into a kind of imagery which is, again, related to the human body, namely to olfactory sensations of a bittersweet almond smell. The odor is conspicuously perceived by others whenever Hannah, or merely a reminder of her, are present in the story. An old picture of
Hannah triggers this bodily sensation in Angel, a sensation of “an odor suddenly in the air.
Almond. Sweet” (Hogan, Solar 72). It is also Hannah herself who, upon her entrée to the narrative, already smells of bitter almonds, a scent which “never came off that poor girl. It was
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deeper than skin. It was blood deep. It was history deep” as Agnes remembers (Hogan, Solar
40). The pervasiveness of the aroma in Hannah’s vicinity enhances her epitomizing the concept of intergenerational transmission of trauma and intensifies the association of trauma and corporality in the novel. 47
As already indicated, Hannah inhabits the position of both a victim and a victimizer. In her, the dichotomy of the allegedly definite boundaries collapses, recreating her into a single element on the continuum of violence, simultaneously a cause and a consequence of torture. The awareness of traumatic transmission, or rather its transition through Hannah, leaving her wounded and wounding, is obvious from the other characters’ futile rhetorical quest for the beginnings of the cycle of violence. As Agnes maintains, its origin, that is “the original sin,” cannot be located within a single individual or historical incident (Hogan, Solar 39). The characters’ contemplations reveal the ambiguity with which any concept of an originary trauma is perceived by Native Americans. Hogan provides her readers with a fictional account of what
Duran addresses from a psychological perspective, that is the writer shows the interaction between historical occurrences and the experience of various peoples that gives birth to the pathology of the soul wound. The fictional construction of Hannah bears witness to the past traumatization of Native Americans. Despite manifold physical evidence to the contrary, the other characters do not hold Hannah thoroughly accountable for Angel’s harm. Oftentimes, Bush emphasizes the fact that Hannah’s situation is not of her own agency, as for instance in the following plea: “I’m so sorry, Angel. But I hope you believe me; it’s not her fault” (Hogan, Solar
232). Along the same line of thought, neither can the pathology of some of the present day
Native American communities be interpreted in a manner which dissociates the condition from
47 Corporal living characters signifying the transhistoricity of trauma can be found in many other texts such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Tar Baby , or Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar , to name just a few examples.
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the history of oppression. An essentialist rationale which seeks to place the source of the pathology with the peoples’ inherent characteristics, is, according to Duran, unacceptable; as his case studies show, this tendency results in retraumatization of the individuals and communities.
What Hogan and Duran require is a reversal of the harmful rhetorics, accompanied hand in hand by an acknowledgement of the fact that the contemporary social maladies are a function of colonial exploitation and destruction.
Although Angel concedes that her “beginning was Hannah’s beginning,” she hastens to correlate the foundations of their shared traumatization with the history of colonialism manifest in “broken lives, gone animals, trees felled and kindled” (Hogan, Solar 96). Hogan reiterates the tropes of destitution, ruin, disappearance and extinction in order to problematize the inception of the extra literary social dysfunctions on the one hand and Angel’s and Hannah’s textual traumas on the other. The descriptions that the author provides are commonly associated with the damage suffered by the land, as the next passage demonstrates:
It was why Agnes, on a warm, damp night a few days after my return, said,
“Nobody knows where it began, your story.” […] “I’ve thought of it for years,
where the beginning was.” […] “What happened to you started long ago. It began
around the time of the killing of the wolves. When people were starving.” […] “I
think and I think and still don’t know.” […] “There wasn’t a single beaver that
year. They’d killed them all. And they’d just logged the last of the pine forests.”
(Hogan, Solar 37)
Although ruthless exploitation of the land and the adverse ramifications of such conduct are apparent in the quoted excerpt, Hogan’s accusing voice does not restrain itself merely to the destroyed wildlife. At times, she transgresses the confines of environmental injustice, addressing
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instances of social injustice and outright violence against the Native American peoples. Agnes, again, contemplates the ambiguous locus of beginnings in a conversation with Angel:
I don’t know where the beginning was, your story, ours. Maybe it came down in
the milk of the mothers. Old Man said it was in the train tracks that went through
the land and came out of the iron mines. […] It might have started when the
crying children were taken away from their mothers or when the logging camps
started and cities were built from our woods, or when they cut the rest of the trees
to raise cattle. (Hogan, Solar 40)
Hogan clearly recognizes the diversity and interconnection of historical traumas such as the boarding schools and the extreme alternations in the ecosystems, which are both systemic functions of the colonial ideology. For much of the novel, however, it is the metaphor of vanished animals which symbolizes the suffering of the people and the land.
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Within the narrative, Hogan exercises extensive determination to draw the reader to the continuing damage of the land that causes rapid eradication of animals and vegetation. This tendency of hers is obvious in the fragments just quoted where the characters circularly return to the theme of vanishing, extinct or hurt animals in their search for “beginnings” and for the originary traumatization. Hogan implicitly suggests that like the human bodies of her characters, the environment can be injured, with similarly pathological ramifications. However, the Western intellectual tradition continues to perceive the possibility of traumatized nonhumans as superstitious (Cook) rather than as a valid way of knowing the world. Although the idea of a unity between the human and nonhuman world forms one of the cornerstones of Native
American cosmology, some of the readers related to Western thought may consider it irrelevant
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or irrational. Hogan seems to be aware of such danger, for initially in the narrative, the instances of injuries are indeed those experienced by humans, Angel and Hannah. Nevertheless, as the story of the daughter and the mother unfolds, pieced together from the various characters’ narratives, Hogan cautiously weaves into their physical wounds the wounds of the land. The device with which she (re)instates the environmental injustice into the center of the reader’s attention is the proposed somatization. Employing analogous corporal imagery for both Angel and Hannah and the land, which is literally violated by heavy machinery, Hogan recreates the severed bond of the human and nonhuman worlds. In the story, the two spheres cease to occupy the dichotomous positions of a subject and an object. Instead they are treated equally, as subjects capable of experiencing pain which in consequence gives rise to their physical and psychological trauma.
The instances of somatization are most apparent in place names such as the town of
Adam’s Rib, the spot of warm currents in the lake called the Hungry Mouth of Water, and the
Big Arm River. All these names contain a reference to a part of the human body, implying the places’ sensation capacities. As a means of emphasizing the vulnerability of these places, Hogan offers portrayals of their physical alteration and sometimes complete destruction; Adam’s Rib is gradually effaced by the rising waters caused by artificial flooding (Hogan, Solar 334 35); the
Hungry Mouth of Water is “taken in” and disappears at the end of the story (Hogan, Solar 339); and the Big Arm River is diverted, becoming an angry force of two rivers (Hogan, Solar 191).
Another pronounced example of Hogan’s somatizing the land is her consistent use of verbs denoting communication in the realm of the nonhuman. Advanced cognitive processes and the ability to communicate in the symbolic order, to speak and to listen to others, are some of the typically human characteristics distinguishing humans from nonhumans. As Jim Tarter in his
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analysis of the novel succinctly expresses, “nature and animals are to be distinguished from humans precisely because only humans use language” (145). Yet, Hogan frequently utilizes specifically the verbs associated with communication to give voice, and hence body, to the land, animals and vegetation. Thus, the reader repeatedly encounters descriptions analogous to these two quotations: “But I had truly entered a different world, […] where water’s voice said things only the oldest of people understood” (Hogan, Solar 73) and “As we neared the Se Nay River, the land began to change. It was rocky and darker. We felt the breeze from the river. First, it was soft, but that was only its deceptive voice, whispering. […] The Se Nay yelled out in a voice so loud, nothing could be heard above it” (Hogan, Solar 191 92). In a synthesizing fashion, Jim
Tarter speaks about “the languages of land, water, and animals” (134), indicating that Hogan endows nonhuman entities with capacities which are in traditional Western conception reserved for humans only. Not only does Hogan imply the existence of cognition and a body in her nonhuman subjects, but, more importantly, she portrays the traumatization of this body.
Comparably to the effaced Adam’s Rib, the Hungry Mouth of Water, and the Big Arm River, the body of seemingly inanimate water is vulnerable, suffering from abuse and lingering on the verge of destruction.
As shown, Hogan’s intentional portrayal of the land as a body is indicative of the novel’s fundamental reliance on Native American cosmology. Whereas for the Native American readership, this way of literary treatment of the land may reaffirm the traditionally held worldview, which is in many cases obliterated by centuries of acculturation pressures, Hogan’s non Native readers are confronted with a somewhat novel epistemology. The narrative technique of somatization clearly suggests the possibility of the unified Creation that Vine Deloria and others invoke. If the reader accepts the prospect of unity, it becomes plausible to contemplate
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Angel and Hannah along with the land itself as entities which are subject to equal traumatization in the course of the (neo)colonial project. The concordance between Angel, Hannah and the land on the basis of the bodies they share further elucidates the presence of the wounds that both
Angel and Hannah bear. Their injuries and scars are physical symptoms of the violations of the land; they are literal extensions of the land’s suffering imprinting itself on the characters’ bodies.
This technique becomes Hogan’s literary expression of the soul wound. Even though most of the symptomatology that Duran, Duran and Brave Heart discuss is confined to the psychological realm of inexplicable anger or grief, Duran also addresses entirely physical manifestations of the soul wound, such as cardiovascular problems and diabetes (82). In Hogan’s treatment, it is the physical aspect that is predominant, articulated by Angel’s and Hannah’s corporal scarification.
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The unity of human and nonhuman subjects which Solar Storms advocates also allows for understanding the wounded bodies of Angel and Hannah as two distinct prospects of the future that Linda Hogan imagines. The traumatized land may indeed collapse figuratively and literally onto itself and withdraw from the living creatures, ceasing to provide them with nurturance in the same fashion that Hannah abandons Angel. Hannah’s body, a parallel to the body of the land, is not only scarred and mutilated but primarily barren of any emotional and biological sustenance to her daughter. In a story recounting the circumstances of Angel’s birth,
Bush comments on Hannah’s body’s deficiency: “Hannah’s breast were dry. Like her mind and heart, her body had nothing to offer. It had already abandoned you” (Hogan, Solar 110). What
Hogan suggests is that, given the interconnectedness of abuse against Hannah and the land, both the human and nonhuman subjects occupying the land’s surface are doomed to violence and destruction, replicating Hannah’s actions, her life and also death. Obviously, such catastrophic
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outcome does not consist in the land’s own agency only. It is those who ruthlessly exploit it for mineral and energy resources which Solar Storms criticizes. On the other hand, Hogan also envisions change and hope, symbolized by Angel. Like Hannah’s, her body is a witness to the history of violence, yet her character breaks the cycle of traumatization and reintroduces nurturance and care to her life and to the lives of others. Watching Hannah slowly pass away,
Angel resolves to be compassionate and welcoming: “I made up my mind to love in whatever ways I could” (Hogan, Solar 251). Angel’s determination translates into immediate actions when she starts taking care of her baby half sister Aurora and begins to organize protests against the proposed hydroelectric project at Fat Eaters.
It is vital to emphasize that in the case of both Angel and Hannah, the agency, or lack thereof, emanates from within the characters themselves. They decide, consciously or not, to hurt others or to assist in the process of healing and recovery. Thus, Hogan urges her readers to question some of their own actions and to challenge the principles which sanction the relentlessly ongoing harming of the land. Presenting the readers with the characters of Angel and Hannah,
Hogan expresses her profound belief in the possibility to reverse the present course of action and to reconstruct the now broken contract between humans, animals and the land (Tarter 133).
Whereas Hannah symbolizes destruction, of self and others, Angel, on the other hand, despite bearing analogous marks of suffering, is a harbinger of hope. These are the two envisioned paths which offer themselves to the traumatized land, and the subjects inhabiting it, to be pursued.
Although Hogan expresses optimism and faith in the dialogism of Hannah’s death and Angel’s life, she does not dismiss the alternative of eventual destruction either.
Lisa Udel interprets this manner of Hogan’s appeal for environmental justice in terms of the ideological novel, a concept elaborated on by Susan Rubin Suleiman in her study titled
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Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre . According to Suleiman’s definition, the ideological novel entails “a novel written in the realistic mode (that is, based on an aesthetic of verisimilitude and representation), which signals itself to the reader as primarily didactic in intent, seeking to demonstrate the validity of a political, philosophical, or religious doctrine” (qtd. in Udel 66). It is obvious that Solar Storms does not conform to the definition in its entirety, however, it complies with the primary conceptual facet, with “a clear ideological message that seek[s] to persuade [the] readers of the ‘correctness’ of interpreting the world”
(Suleiman qtd. in Udel 66). Despite the tone of authoritativeness underscoring the definition, an authoritativeness to which Solar Storms does not subscribe, Hogan indeed does concede to an activist agenda behind her art. In an interview with Joseph Bruchac she speaks about the importance and inextricability of the spiritual and the political aspects of life in her work:
For me, the things that are very important, the spiritual and the political, are very
united. You do not believe one way and act another. You see cruelty or injustice
and you act. You do not sit and meditate and think you are making yourself clean
and pure by that. I know some tribal people I respect very much who do
absolutely destructive things to themselves and would never consider sitting and
meditating. They’re too busy running around all the land speaking for tribes; yes,
for the spiritual aspects of life: about federal policies or the destruction of energy
development. (Hogan, “To Take” 131)
Interpreted in light of Hogan’s words, Solar Storms thus directs the reader’s attention to the contemporary environmental condition and presents the validity of a worldview which can facilitate approaching some of the environmental problems. While the current situation is not
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intrinsic to the Native American world only, Hogan anticipates that some specific features of
Native American cosmology are relevant for its meaningful, effective treatment.
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Positioning Solar Storms in the tradition of trauma literature can enhance the stimulus for change that Hogan invests in her novel. As Marten deVries writes in a different context, it is essential to acknowledge human suffering, one of the effective means of which can be legitimization of the suffering as a traumatic accident (406). 48 In the medical realm, the diagnostic category of PTSD can function as such legitimizing vehicle. deVries expresses his conviction that labeling a certain physical or psychological condition as traumatic creates a degree of normalcy of the state and promotes mediating the situation. His discussion focuses on the experience of Vietnam War veterans, but the mechanisms he proposes can be transplanted into the literary domain. He posits that “[t]he expansion of taxonomy not only facilitated adjustment to stress but also the management of trauma. For example, it allowed the normalization of war trauma reactions in the United States following the war in Vietnam,” mostly through “medical labeling” and extending the diagnostic potential of trauma (deVries
406). The act of denominating an experience as traumatic promises increased attention from the general public and a possibility of action as a means of coping with the trauma. I believe that
Hogan’s novel identifies the contemporary condition of abused land as traumatic, granting it a body which is subject to equal disfiguration as the bodies of her female characters. Through the narrative device of what I call somatization, Linda Hogan requires her readers to reconsider their perception of historical, social, and environmental responsibility and to start addressing the instances of injustice and traumatization perpetuated against the body of the land.
48 From the perspective of my discussion of Hogan’s text thus far, deVries’s concern with human suffering must be supplemented with the suffering of both the human and nonhuman world.
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2.2 The Trauma of Displacement: Out Adoption and Homelessness in Sherman Alexie’s Indian
Killer
Whereas the primary trauma in the focus of Hogan’s text is the continuous exploitation of the land and its resources, in the ensuing discussion of Sherman Alexie’s novel Indian Killer , the trauma in question is a sense of displacement, stemming from the geographical, cultural, social, and economic dispossession of Native American peoples. The notion of displacement testifies to a history of numerous physical relocations, loss of ties with one’s original lands, to social dissociation, and subsequently to economic impoverishment and cultural alienation which all mark the Native American experience under the (neo)colonial domination. As in Solar Storms , my analysis of Alexie’s novel embarks from the fundamental premise of Native American epistemology in regard to the peoples’ interdependence with a particular geographical region and/or place. In this respect, Kathryn Shanley invokes “place centeredness” as one of the cornerstones of the Native American worldview. What she contends about the significance of place, and of “connectedness to local geographies,” is as valid for Native Americans who live on reservations as for urban dwellers (Shanley 134). Shanley observes that “place centeredness […] figures broadly into American Indian identity even in the case of urban Indians, who live away from their ancestral homeland, by virtue of kinship ties, ancestral burial sites, political and social centers, and other connections” (139). However, these kinship ties and links have often been irrevocably disconnected, resulting in an acute destitution of those concerned. Sherman Alexie’s
Indian Killer offers a variation on such a theme. Provided the novel’s contemporary urban setting, Indian Killer actualizes the centrality of place in portraying the depressing condition of those Native American characters whose geographical, social and cultural bonds have been significantly weakened. Most of the characters populating the novel have been figuratively and
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literally displaced through adoption or homelessness from their original familial and communal environments. As a consequence, their lives revolve around a void which emerges after their sense of belonging to a place has been severed by social practices exerted by the dominant
American society.
The objective of this sub chapter is to demonstrate that literal and figurative displacement, instigated mainly by the forced relocations of Native American peoples to reservations in the nineteenth century and to the urban areas of San Francisco, Los Angeles,
Chicago and Minneapolis in the 1950s, can be read as another kind of trauma of the relations between the Native and non Native populations of the United States. As trauma, the notion of displacement invites negotiating and fictional recreations. In the same way as the ecological catastrophe in Solar Storms imprints itself on a specific kind of imagery in the center of the novel, the trauma of displacement becomes one of the organizing principles of Indian Killer .
Predominantly, displacement manifests itself in the novel’s crucial metaphors of out adoption and homelessness, both of which serve Alexie as vehicles of social critique. Also, in several instances, Alexie employs the mechanism of displacement as the characters’ specific ways of approaching the empirical reality. Conscious acts of displacing what is unpleasant function as a form of the characters’ escapism which verges on avoidance as it is generally exercised by trauma victims. As van der Kolk and McFarlane explain, avoidance of stimuli reminiscent of trauma is one of the features typical of a posttraumatic condition: “Avoidance may take many different forms, such as keeping away from reminders, ingesting drugs or alcohol in order to numb awareness of distressing emotional states, or utilizing dissociation to keep unpleasant experiences from conscious awareness” (“Black” 12). Along similar lines, Freud comments on avoidance as a strategy of the ego which, informed by the pleasure principle, “seeks to avoid the
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unpleasure” ( Beyond 21). Apart from being the characters’ method of dealing with reality, which has the form of Freud’s unpleasure, displacement as avoidance replicates itself in the novel’s structure. This narrative strategy is most obvious in Alexie’s formal organization of the chapters which disrupt and, in a sense, displace each other.
In probing the characters’ existential condition of displacement, Alexie implicitly criticizes the government orchestrated projects of reservations of the nineteenth century and the termination policy of the 1950s which have affected great portions of the American indigenous population. Among Native American scholars, the mechanisms and implications of these geographical relocations are generally perceived in a negative light. In the chapter of his
American Indian Holocaust and Survival entitled “Decline to Nadir: 1800 1900,” Russell
Thornton documents the physical and psychological hardships that the refugee Native Americans had to endure when thousands of people were migrated, for instance, to the Indian Territory of what is today’s Oklahoma ( American 114 18). The victims’ accounts which Thornton records testify to the enormous pain and traumatization that inevitably accompanied the forced moves. 49
Simultaneously, Eduardo Duran and Bonnie Duran identify relocation, to both reservations and urban areas, as one of the crucial sources of trauma in Native American communities of today
(33 34). They theorize these two instances of racially oppressive political schemes as historically interconnected yet semi independent developmental phases of the traumatization of Native
American populations (Duran and Duran 33 34). In terms of the termination policy of the 1950s,
49 The removal of Native Americans was legally sanctioned by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. One of its immediate outcomes was the so called Trail of Tears, or Nunna dual Tsuniy, which, as Thornton translates, in Cherokee means “the trail where we cried” ( American 114). Apart from the Cherokee, the other peoples relocated from the Southeast of the United States to the region of today’s Oklahoma were the Creek, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Seminole (Thornton, American 113). From a demographic perspective it is estimated that something between four thousand to eight thousand Cherokee Indians, out of approximately twenty two thousand, died as a result of the migration (Thornton, American 118). I find it worth pointing out that the accounts of the trepidations that some of the survivors recalled years later are not unlike those provided by Elie Wiesel in his autobiographical novel Night , an account of the transportation of the European Jewish population to the concentration and extermination camps in Poland and Germany at the time of WWII.
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Louis Owens provides a summary of its effects on Native Americans in the introduction to his
Other Destinies : “Following the displacement initiated by the world wars, the relocation program
– designed to move Indians from poor reservations to jobs and greater prosperity in the cities – helped to create a generation of displaced urban Indians” (31). I argue that the historical occurrences of reservation and urban removals have resulted in a loss of connection to place and entailed a grave breach of the traditional Native American worldview. When articulated as trauma, displacement becomes a means of addressing and understanding this loss. However,
Alexie’s Indian Killer does not explicitly depict any of the particular cases of historical relocation. 50 Rather, he utilizes the concept of displacement as a literary device which, in the form of metaphors and the structural organization of the novel, inherently permeates his narrative.
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Under the guise of a detective thriller story, Indian Killer is a novel which examines a sense of alienation generated by the modern urban space. The novel portrays its characters’ yearning for ethnic and cultural belonging and the disappointment in which their endeavors mostly result. Many of the novel’s characters are of mixed origin, occupying a liminal space between ethnicities, and their identities are drawn from ambiguities and distorted self perceptions. The main protagonist, John Smith, is a Native American who lacks any explicit tribal affiliation. Born to a fourteen year old mother, he is given up for adoption and raised by
Daniel and Olivia Smith, a white middle class couple living in Seattle. Despite John’s surrogate parents’ persistent efforts to reconnect him with the world of his biological origin, their attempts are rather misguided and a priori in vain. The only information about John’s roots available is the
50 I would like to acknowledge my advisor for bringing to my attention Diane Glancy’s novel Pushing the Bear , which offers a fictional account of the relocation of people in the course of the Trail of Tears.
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age of his birth mother, with the rest remaining inaccessible, for, as the narrator observes, “[t]he adoption agency refused to divulge John’s tribal affiliation and sealed all of his birth records”
(Alexie, Indian 12). Lacking any knowledge of his tribal history and people, John is destined to become a generic Indian, defined solely by his explicit physiognomic features. Alexie implies that John’s fluctuating identity is at the source of his mental health impairment, the manifold symptoms of which can indicate schizophrenia (Christie) or, as will become apparent in my reading, a posttraumatic condition.
The thriller facet of the narrative develops around a mysterious nameless character, a genderless entity unanimously referred to as the killer, who commits brutal murders of two white men and kidnaps a white male child. As James Giles convincingly demonstrates, in accordance with the genre of the detective novel, Alexie leaves clues throughout the story which implicate more than one of the characters as a potential perpetrator. However, Alexie also rewrites this literary tradition when he intentionally abandons the mystery without a conclusive solution, withholding the victimizer’s identity (Giles 128 44). The singular hint constituting the killer’s identity, one which also contributes to his/her unspecified nickname, is two owl feathers which s/he leaves at the places of the crimes and the fact that his/her victims are scalped. Both the feathers and the ritual of scalping conform to the popular misconception of a “real Indian,” a cultural construct which Alexie explicitly denounces. In an interview with Åse Nygre, Alexie, with a typically humorous twist, explains his approach to the stereotypes that are projected by the dominant public discourse and frequently internalized by Native Americans themselves:
you can never measure up to a stereotype. You can never be as strong as a
stereotypical warrior, as godly as a stereotypical shaman, or as drunk as a drunken
Indian. You can never measure up to extremes. So you’re always going to feel
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less than the image, whether it’s positive or negative. One of the real dangers is
that other Indians have taken many stereotypes as a reality, as a way to measure
each other and ourselves. […] Indians have accepted stereotypes just as much as
non Indians have. We believe them too. I think that many Indians have watched
too much television! (158)
In the novel, the insufficient fragments of evidence suffice to create a connection between the crimes and the putative ethnicity of their perpetrator, testifying thus to the stereotypical construction of the other.
One of the manifest strategies used for critically exploring the novel comes with the assistance of the medical lexicon, reading the narrative as a schizophrenic text, a tendency which in his own reading the literary critic Stuart Christie refutes. He attempts to prove that transposing the language of psychology to literary discourse is questionable in the case of Indian Killer , and, on a more general plane, ethically problematic. His analysis becomes a criticism of scholars who consider the association of the medical and the literary as beneficial and desirable for both the discourses. Particularly, Christie focuses on those critics who employ the metaphor of schizophrenia to address the fragmented narrative structure of the novel and John’s apparently pathological symptoms. Christie problematizes others’ renderings of Indian Killer as a schizophrenic text and their use of the analytical framework of schizophrenia as “a useful catch all term” (6). He also expresses concern about the prevalent “trend in the American Indian academy to appropriate mental illness or schizophrenia as a metaphor […] that emblematizes in narrative form the predicament of American Indian cultures, histories, and alterity at the present time” (Christie 2). To account for this kind of disapproval, Christie brings to the fore the life experience of many individuals suffering from mental illness, and schizophrenia in particular.
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Schizophrenia, according to Christie, is “radically and individually stylized,” manifests itself with a great extent of idiosyncrasy and defies sweeping generalizations (5). It is
“gratuitous,” to use Christie’s own word, to appropriate such “individualized states to a novelistic aesthetic called the ‘postmodern experience’” (5). Through his interpretation of the novel, Christie counters the idea of a schizophrenic text, demonstrating conversely that the very fact that Indian Killer operates as a functional narrative precludes its theorizing in terms of this particular mental illness. Likewise, Christie invites his readers to challenge the portrait of John as a schizophrenic character, because, as he implies, John possesses the means to articulate his story: “[John] Smith is ostensibly cut off from his tribal story, and it follows that his schizophrenia would therefore preclude him from mapping his own story in narrative terms” (5).
In this instance, however, Christie’s argumentation appears to conflate John’s voice with that of the novel’s narrator. The novel itself is indeed a functional text, with the narrator navigating the reader through the fragmented imagery, “mapping” the story. But, only rarely does Alexie endow
John with a voice to express himself directly, a trait of John’s on which other characters invariably comment. In this respect, I believe it is plausible to posit that, in contrast to Christie’s conclusions, John for the most part fails to provide an adequate narrative of his life and therefore reading him as a schizophrenic character is appropriate.
Although focusing primarily on schizophrenia, at one point Christie extends his criticism to other mental illnesses which, I believe, include trauma. I am convinced that Indian Killer is a text allegorizing Native American history as trauma and that the imagery of mental illness in general, and schizophrenia and/or trauma in particular, is a relevant critical framework for the novel’s interpretation. Mental illness and trauma are categories pertinent to many contemporary literary texts, not only those written by Native American and African American writers. Such
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texts strive to recreate the traumatic experience of the concrete individuals or groups through the language of fiction, giving the experience a form and expression. In my reading, Indian Killer is no exception from this trend. The story of Alexie’s novel functions as a contested space in which he negotiates the Native American experience of displacement and its many implications for the present. For this purpose Alexie employs narrative techniques which are reminiscent of the mechanisms of trauma as delimited in psychological literature and discussed in the first chapter.
The text virtually abounds in narrative devices closely related to the idiosyncrasies of a posttraumatic condition. These include the author’s emphasis on memory and dreams as indirect modes of accessing the lived past, his fragmentation of narrative voices and tenses, and also his developing some of the scenes as a series of still images with only a minimum of verbs utilized.
The last technique on the list evokes “photographic recollections,” commonly called flashbacks, which are known to accompany a posttraumatic condition (van der Kolk, “Trauma” 288), but it also evokes trauma’s thwarted temporality as theorized by Caruth.
An analysis of how Alexie reinscribes the history of displacement into the text will follow shortly. For the present, as a means of responding to Christie’s challenge, I will provide a brief reading of Father Duncan, on whom I will show the usefulness of the medical register in interpreting fictional characters in general and Father Duncan as an embodiment of the trauma of displacement in particular. In the story, Father Duncan is “the only Indian Jesuit in the Pacific
Northwest” (Alexie, Indian 13), and he performs the role of John’s spiritual guide until John is seven years of age, at which time Father Duncan “walked away into the desert […] and was never seen again” (Alexie, Indian 16). The seeming finality of the adverb “never” is only semi precise, for John continuously encounters Father Duncan in his dreams, visions, and waking hour daydreams; although physically absent from John’s side, the Indian Jesuit priest re enters
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the story, and John’s mental world, at frequent occasions. Father Duncan’s character is a literary signifier gesturing toward the history of forced relocations of many Native American peoples.
Before he walks away into the desert, he is “summarily removed from active duty and shipped to a retreat in Arizona,” where he perishes, apparently of his own accord (Alexie, Indian 16). In a sense, the trajectory of Father Duncan’s disappearance follows the course of some of the journeys undertaken by Native Americans in the nineteenth century. Their migrations had been designed by authorities and by people who remained anonymous to the majority of the Native refugees. They were the “them” implied by Alexie’s passive voice in “Duncan was summarily removed” (Alexie, Indian 16). Many people did not survive the hardships of migrations in consequence of “military actions, disease, starvation, extremely harsh conditions during the moves, and the resulting destruction of ways of life” (Thornton, American 50). In summary,
Russell Thornton mentions “high death rates in transit and thereafter” ( American 50). In other words, the people disappeared in the same way as Father Duncan does after he “walk[s] away into the desert.”
Besides Father Duncan’s association with a physical departure, emblematizing the grand scale relocations of the indigenous population onto reservations, his surfacing in John’s consciousness is accompanied by very literal bodily sensations on John’s part. The narrator comments on the physical aspect of the sensations in the following words: “Duncan never spoke.
He just brought the smell, sounds, and images of the desert into John’s head. The wind pushing sand from dune to dune, the scorpions and spiders, the relentless yellow sun and deep blue sky, the stand of palm trees on the horizon” (Alexie, Indian 16). Having experience with hundreds of child and adult trauma survivors allows Bessel van der Kolk to speak about the preeminence of the sensual in trauma victims: “memories of the trauma tend, at least initially, to be experienced
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as fragments of the sensory components of the event: as visual images; olfactory, auditory, or kinesthetic sensations; or intense waves of feelings” (287). Psychological literature documents ample instances of individuals affected by trauma who concede to very vivid sensual memories of the past traumatization, a parallel of which can be read in Father Duncan’s bringing “smell, sounds, and images” for John to experience. With his ceaseless materializing in John’s inner world accompanied by these sensations, and with his act of disappearance evoking peoples’ displacement onto reservations, Father Duncan embodies trauma in a corporal form, haunting
John and the text alike. In order to return to Christie’s criticism of the appropriation of medical diagnostic categories for the purposes of literary analysis, I argue that it is specifically the language and methodology borrowed from other disciplines, such as psychology here, which enables a critic to elucidate the textual presence and ambiguity of characters akin to the absent/present Indian Jesuit Duncan.
Father Duncan’s definite geographical relocation to the desert in Arizona is a precursor of acts which result in the other characters’ relocations and a sense of displacement that Alexie portrays. It needs to be acknowledged that reading the novel as a narrative informed by displacement is not an original idea per se; other critics have likewise observed that the text revolves around the conceptions of relocation and the ensuing feeling of displacement. However to my knowledge, none of the novel’s critical readings relate displacement to trauma discourse or to Duran’s soul wound. Nancy van Styvendale approximates this line of argumentation when she articulates the importance of dislocation in Alexie’s novel. In her comparison of Indian Killer with Jeannette Armstrong’s novel Slash , van Styvendale demonstrates the benefits derived from the encounter of Native American literature, literary scholarship, and trauma studies (205), emphasizing dislocation as one of the traumas permeating Native American post contact
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historical experience (212). van Styvendale draws on the theory of trauma recently redefined by
Caruth, Felman and Laub, yet advances that their perception of trauma as an isolated event cannot be fully translated to Native American history which is, as van Styvendale formulates it,
“traumatic event which is not one” (204). Indeed, as Russell Thornton points out, the ideology of Native American relocation had been pursued by European settlers, and later by the government of the United States, for centuries ( American ). Hence, the longitudinal character of the history of colonization precludes any prospect of containing the trauma within the confines of a singular event. It is worth observing that although van Styvendale discusses the trans/historicity of Native American trauma and its intergenerational transmission, she does not incorporate
Duran’s psychological concept into her paper. This concept may prove viable for van
Styvendale’s reading, particularly as she opens her analysis with a call for a category more encompassing and accommodating than DSM based PTSD (207).
van Styvendale’s primary argument concentrates on Alexie’s fictional treatment of dislocation through his narrative construction of John. She concludes that John is an allegorical character who “bear[s] witness to a trauma – specifically, the trauma of dislocation and rootlessness – that exceeds [his] individual experiences of this wound,” by which John
“testif[ies] to a collective, intergenerational trauma that exceeds – yet informs – its unique articulations” (213). van Styvendale also calls attention to the novel’s very first chapter,
“Mythology,” which in her reading epitomizes “historical dislocation and trans/historical trauma” (216). I would like to resume van Styvendale’s argumentation and enhance it, starting at the point where she abandons it. In my discussion of the novel, I do not consider the institution of adoption as the sole metaphor of displacement the way van Styvendale does; homelessness is equally an embodiment of the harmful mechanisms of displacement. Also, in my reading the
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concept of displacement permeates the text in more profound ways. Apart from its existence as metaphors of adoption and homelessness, displacement parallels a posttraumatic coping practice of avoidance and escapism which, then, inform the very organizational structure of the text.
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Alexie endows the metaphors of displacement, that is the social mechanisms of out adoption and homelessness, with negative attributes which indicate one’s not belonging or one’s belonging elsewhere. Both metaphors inherently signify instances of historical injustice perpetrated against the Native American populations and the consequential present day destitution. The fictional out adoption of the novel can be related to the history of legal kidnapping of Native American children and their relocation with non Native surrogate families. 51 Simultaneously, the metaphor allegorizes the ongoing practice of present day out adoption, for, as Louis Owens observes, “on reservations today, more than 90 percent of Native
American children up for adoption are adopted into non Indian families,” which signifies “an institutionalized ‘mainstreaming’ of Indian children into Euramerica that results in widespread loss of cultural identity as well as a feeling by Indian people that their children are being systematically stolen away” (Owens 4 5). In a similar way, Alexie’s fictional engagement with homelessness relates to the condition of Native Americans living in cities and metropolitan areas, the so called “urban Indians,” among whom homelessness is a widespread social phenomenon
(Christie 10). The fact that at present almost forty nine percent of the Native American population lives in cities is mainly the result of the relocation and termination policy of the 1950s discussed above. Stuart Christie notes that homeless urban Native Americans comprise somewhere between three and five percent of the American homeless, their condition being all
51 The official termination of this practice came only in 1978 with the Indian Child Welfare Act which “creates and protects the rights of Native tribes to control the placement of abandoned Native children” (Homans 17).
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the worse owing to the absence of the “safety net of traditional tribal ties to land and community” which is still in part available to those living on reservations (10). However, the state on the reservations is frequently no less destitute than the urban condition. In the novel,
John seems to venerate the reservation which, for him, symbolizes the lost biological family.
Therefore, in one of his quests for the cultural experience of his ethnic origins, he ventures onto a reservation. Not only is his quest eventually futile, but the picture of the place inhabited mostly by unemployed and drunk people allows Alexie to unmask the notion of the reservation and strip it off its idealized connotations.
An act of adoption is a form of displacement in its own right, an act in which a surrogate family replaces a child’s biological family and when the dispossession of biological roots may amount to feelings of loss of origin and/or identity on the adoptee’s part. The cross ethnic feature of out adoption significantly enhances this sense of alienation, whereas the specific circumstances of John’s adoption intensify the alienation still further. As the narrator relates,
John’s surrogate parents for unspecified reasons cannot have a child of their own: “But the baby would not happen. […] ‘Listen,’ the doctor had said. ‘There are some people who just cannot have babies together. We can’t always explain it. Medicine isn’t perfect’” (Alexie, Indian 11). In becoming John’s surrogate parents, Daniel and Olivia literally displace John’s biological mother, whom John always imagines as being coerced to the adoption. A typical picture appears in the narrative’s opening chapter in which John sees his mother after giving birth to him as “crying. I want my baby. Give me my baby. I want to see my baby. Let me hold my baby ” (Alexie, Indian 5, emphasis in the original). The implied oppression of John’s mother in this scene underscores the involuntariness which John believes to have accompanied his adoption. Also, the manner in which John is suggested as an alternative to Daniel and Olivia already projects a picture of
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otherness and detachment: “‘Listen,’ the adoption agent said. ‘Let’s be honest. It’s going to take at least a year to find a suitable white child for you. Frankly, it may take much longer than that.
Up to eight years or more. But we can find you another kind of baby rather quickly’” (Alexie,
Indian 9, emphasis mine). The time preceding the first physical contact between John and his surrogate parents is contaminated by alterity and potential tensions ensuing from the otherness of
John’s status. Alexie does not depict any detrimental conflicts between John and his parents originating with their dissimilar ethnicity. Rather, the very structure of out adoption is the primal trigger of distress that John experiences in both the social and mental domains of his life. John’s displacement from his fourteen year old mother who is, according to the narrator, “making the right decision,” is the originary trauma that his character unsuccessfully tries to cope with throughout the whole text (Alexie, Indian 10).
John’s feeling of displacement stems from his geographical and cultural disassociation which prevents him from knowing his own or his ancestors’ past. In a similar manner, the metaphor of numerous other characters’ homelessness testifies to a displacement instigated, in great part, by social detachment and economic loss which bear equally detrimental repercussions.
I suggest that John’s liminal existence, arising from his out adoption and demarcated by his
Native American physical features contrasting with his white middle class family background, gives birth to his mental health problems. These are obvious from his parents’ occasional threats of “‘group home’ and ‘medication’” and from John’s disturbed behavior (Alexie, Indian 74). In the same way as John’s disconnection results in his health impairment, so the condition of social and economic displacement negatively affects the homeless persons portrayed in the novel. The overwhelming majority of the homeless characters are of Native American descent, which further aggravates their condition. Marie Polatkin, one of the novel’s main characters,
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contemplates on the desperate existential situation of the many Native American homeless in the novel: “In a way, she believed that homeless people were treated as Indians had always been treated. Badly. The homeless were like an Indian tribe, nomadic and powerless, just filled with more than any tribe’s share of crazy people and cripples. So, a homeless Indian belonged to two tribes, and was the lowest form of life in the city” (Alexie, Indian 146).
The homeless are displaced from their previous lives, and are perceived by the general public as having surrendered their humanity and dignity. The negative prejudice toward them is epitomized in “a law that made it illegal to sit on the sidewalk,” a law created by “[t]he powerful white men of Seattle” and targeted implicitly at the homeless people, as Marie continues to ponder (Alexie, Indian 146). Alexie criticizes the near complete loss of a homeless person’s human status in the public’s eyes when not even one’s death is capable of endowing a stigmatized individual with her lost humanity. Beautiful Mary is a Native American homeless woman who is sexually violated and murdered. Upon inquiring into her case, Jack Wilson, a
“rookie police officer” (Alexie, Indian 158), receives an answer informed by extensive racial bias: “Shit, that case is low priority, rook. One dead Indian don’t add up to much. Some other
Indian guy killed her, you know. Happens all the time. Those people are like that. You ask me, it’s pest control” (Alexie, Indian 160). The circumstances of Beautiful Mary’s life and violent death are condemned to oblivion paradoxically by those whom the society endows with the responsibility to protect civilians’ rights. Beautiful Mary becomes a symbolic victim of the adverse practices which warrant a person’s ostracizing to the societal fringes on the basis of her ethnic or social categorization. Oftentimes, one’s homeless status is in a causal relationship to some concrete acts of displacement, as in the case of Alexie’s characters whose ties to their communities, people and lands have been broken. The impact of the characters’ exclusion from
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their original environments, both reservation and urban, is such that it prevents them from finding an alternative center around which their lives can continue revolving. Most of the characters are traumatized by the dominant order to such an extent that they cannot derive any consolation from, what Shanley terms, “place centeredness” any more (134). Many of the homeless characters, then, become substance addicts and/or end their existence by a violent death.
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Apart from the metaphors of adoption and homelessness, Alexie utilizes displacement as a means of John’s avoidance of reality and, at the same time, as a motivation informing the novel’s structural level when displacement fractures the story’s linearity into an amalgamation of disconnected images. Provided John’s potential posttraumatic condition, it does not come as a surprise that it is his character who mostly engages in the strategy of avoiding any unpleasant stimuli. The stimuli are largely generated by reality which John perceives as deficient or incomplete. Instances of his coping with this kind of reality appear, for instance, in the chapter called “How He Imagines His Life on the Reservation,” which is an imaginary account of John’s childhood conjured up by his adult self. Here, the perception of the world as imperfect is symbolized by a game of Scrabble with missing tiles and by sophisticated words in a book which
John’s child mind cannot comprehend. The board game of Scrabble is a secondhand bargain in which “[f]or some reason, all the E tiles were missing” (Alexie, Indian 44). John thus pictures his family to have “always compensated by allowing any other tile to function as an E. […] Near the end of a game, when John’s rack is filled with difficult letters, Q, Z, K, and he has nowhere to play them, he can always pretend they are all E tiles” (Alexie, Indian 44). The alteration of the letter value of the tiles becomes a demonstration of how displacement becomes in fact an act of
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avoidance. John performs a corresponding act of displacement with “the big words with their amorphous ideas,” which he imagines that his mother oftentimes reads to him from books
(Alexie, Indian 44). The narrator relates that “John sometimes pretends that all of the difficult words, […], are simpler and clear. A word like democracy can become rain instead. That changes everything. John can read a phrase from his history book and change it to ‘Our
Founding Fathers believed in rain’” (Alexie, Indian 44). The images of displaced E tiles and incomprehensible words have an air of seeming contentment, submerging themselves in an escapism where everything is “simpler and clear,” and “work[s] well” (Alexie, Indian 44).
Presented from John’s perspective, the reader obtains the impression that the acts of displacement in these two instances are positive mechanisms which allow John to adjust to the existing situation. However, I posit that John’s acts can be also interpreted in terms of avoidance frequently observed in trauma victims. His actions do not address the reality which is for John subjectively deficient, they merely obscure, to use Freud’s expression, its “unpleasure” (Freud,
Beyond 21).
On the novel’s structural level, the tendency to displace what John is reluctant to confront directly signifies a form of escapism and a lack of agency on his part, and contributes to the fragmentation of the storyline. The narrative progresses forward as a sequence of scenes in a non linear manner, oscillating between the characters’ memories and fantasies of the past and their actions executed in the present. A triggered memory or fantasy is what oftentimes displaces the narrative’s fragile linearity. In a scene from the past, which is John’s memory of his adolescence, Alexie further ruptures the linear continuum when he makes John imagine a dialogue which possibly preceded the situation depicted. Alexie leaves John voiceless in response to his girlfriend’s suggested separation, “I just don’t think it’s working out” (Alexie,
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Indian 18). John’s alternative answer is a dialogue replayed in his mind which may have taken place prior to the scene narrated. The narrator observes that John “could almost hear the conversations that had taken place,” after which the imagined exchange between the girl and her father ensues (Alexie, Indian 18). Alexie transplants this technique to the organization of the chapters, making the novel’s structure resemble the instances of John’s avoidance in the excerpts just quoted. On the level of the chapters, an idealized fantasy frequently displaces a scene of violence. In this manner, chapter three narrates an encounter between the potential killer and one of his victims, concluding in a language charged with suspense: “John watched as the young white man crossed against the light, stopped briefly to look at himself in a store window, and then walked south down the Ave. Carefully and silently, John followed him” (Alexie, Indian 42).
Any subsequent image of a conflict between John and the young white man is, however, obscured by the already discussed chapter, “How He Imagines His Life on the Reservation,” which presents a romanticized image of John’s fictional childhood with his biological family.
By way of parallel, the text is interspersed with eleven chapters named “Testimony” which infallibly succeed descriptions of fictional and insinuated violence or bodily harm. For instance, number eight is the first “Testimony” chapter whose presence discontinues the outlined story and disrupts the linearity established by the previous chapter. Chapter seven, “Introduction to Native American Literature,” concludes with a fictional account of violence in a film being watched. At the chapter’s end, the narrator describes the scene in an objective impersonal voice:
“De Niro held the pistol against his temple and pulled the trigger” (Alexie, Indian 70). An echo of such suspended violence, albeit fictional even within the novel itself, appears in the closing remarks of “The Aristotle Little Hawk Fan Club” chapter, which precedes another “Testimony” section: “Wilson could see the knife separating scalp from skull” (Alexie, Indian 165). Instead of
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elaborating on the concrete circumstances of the implied violent acts, the narrator surrenders the platform of the story to police witnesses whose direct voices testify to the killer’s real crimes which appear at different places of the text. On the one hand, the witnesses’ voices absolve the narrator from the necessity to develop in detail the pictures of violence which conclude the preceding chapters. On the other hand, functioning merely as retrospective memories, the witnessed narratives dilute the degree of the killer’s violence and distort, thus, the testified incidents. Their recollections remain subjective interpretations which are informed by the individual characters’ perspectives, never attaining the alleged objectivity of the authoritative omniscient narrator who dominates the rest of the story. For as van der Kolk in collaboration with van der Hart posits, human memory has a tendency to wane in veracity over periods of time
(171). These subjective accounts of experienced violence, then, function as a relief of the tension which consistently accumulates as the narrative progresses. In an evasive manner, the
“Testimony” chapters displace any depictions of violence and become one of the narrative strategies with which Alexie fragments his story.
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Through the discussed techniques, Indian Killer becomes another articulate contribution to the body of trauma literature. What makes this claim appropriate is related less to the protagonist’s mental health condition, be that schizophrenia or trauma, and more to Alexie’s textual engagement of displacement as one of the narrative principles of the novel. Displacement can be seen as a concept subsuming the particular traumas of geographical relocations, land dispossession, and economic deprivation which many Native Americans suffer on reservations and in cities throughout the United States. Like Hogan’s Solar Storms , Alexie’s novel stems from a culture marked by historical injustice and extensive human rights violations. Such is the
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background which in many instances reinscribes itself into the culture’s artistic artifacts. As I have illustrated with Indian Killer , the reinscription does not necessarily have to be literal, informing the thematic level of the text. It can be more indirect, in that it determines the selection of some of the text’s imagery and penetrates the structure of the novel. Both the traumas that
Hogan and Alexie portray, environmental destruction and a history of displacement, remain either ongoing social practices or exist as insidious legacy informing the lives of many contemporary Native Americans.
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2.3 Victims and Perpetrators: Cultural Dispossession in Anna Lee Walters’s Ghost Singer
Thus far in the readings, I have focused on two distinct instances of injustice which
Native Americans have endured under colonialism and its present (neo)colonial mutations. I have structured my readings of Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer around textual manifestations of environmental and social injustice respectively, arguing that both the novels function as narratives of trauma. Also, I have suggested that the texts’ trauma status is informed less by Hogan’s and Alexie’s employment of traumatized characters, or the authors’ personal experience of trauma, and more by the narrative strategies that the writers utilize. In my exploration of Anna Lee Walters’s novel Ghost Singer I will partly abandon the realm of formal narrative devices and, instead, focus on Walters’s fictional negotiation of two fundamental categories of trauma discourse, those of the victim and the perpetrator. The two concepts play important roles in Hogan’s and Alexie’s novels as well. Solar Storms criticizes anonymous officials who have designed the devastating environmental changes and probes the possibility of a person’s existential condition of both a victim and a victimizer in its portrayal of
Hannah, while Indian Killer offers characters who act as victims and/or perpetrators of very immediate physical violence. However, in Ghost Singer victims and perpetrators are endowed with a significance much larger than in Hogan’s and Alexie’s texts. I believe that Walters’s novel explores the conceptual boundaries dividing victims and perpetrators of historical oppression which has led to cumulative traumatic effects and the Native American soul wound.
Ghost Singer is a novel which fictionally recreates the present consequences of indigenous cultural dispossession at large as well as the theft of many cultural artifacts, ceremonial objects, and ancestral bodily remains. The cultural orientation of Ghost Singer supplements the forms of injustice explored by Hogan and Alexie. It also provides the reader
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with characters whose present social status is largely determined by the victim/perpetrator dichotomy of those oppressed and oppressing, established by the past and replicated in the present. I will demonstrate that Walters dismantles the binary, and, in doing so, she exposes her readers to a worldview which discards the classic concept of dichotomous oppositions dominating traditional Western epistemology. Simultaneously, my reading will show that
Walters’s careful navigation between the two categories, her way of approximating and interconnecting the victims and the perpetrators through trauma, opens a space for reconsidering the connotations that these categories have traditionally been endowed with. Thus, in regard to trauma, Walters conflates the seemingly transparent separation of the two, laying bare the inefficiency of either category to describe complex problems or to envisage potential solutions for the future. She suggests that the condition of trauma obliterates recognizable distinctions which demarcate the victims from the perpetrators, and in this way complicates the separateness and interpretative value of the two concepts.
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Ghost Singer is Walters’s first novel; published in 1988, it is now considered a literary predecessor of the movement for repatriation of Native American human remains and cultural artifacts (Graber, “Anna Lee” 11). The extensive cultural dispossession that Native American peoples have endured finds its ramifications in the ongoing discussion between tribal representatives, anthropologists and museum curators which concentrates on the proprietary rights to the objects of the tribes’ material heritage. The debate has found its culmination and legal expression in the National Museum of the American Indian Act of 1989 and a year later in
NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (Tillett 91). The latter
Act “makes illegal any amateur collecting of grave goods or human remains on federal land. It
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also provides for the return of such items to tribes from museums and other facilities receiving federal funding” (Graber, “Anna Lee” 10). 52 The condition which eventually required this kind of legislation dates back to the nineteenth century, when an extensive abuse of human bodily remains was not an uncommon practice among both soldiers and scholars. Rebecca Tillett draws a thought provoking comparison between the acts of the military, medical and academic professionals in relation to the Sand Creek massacre of 1864. After the massacre of the
Cheyenne and Arapaho villages, the U.S. military is said to have displayed “strings of scalps and severed testicles and vaginas” throughout theaters in Colorado (Tillett 88). This manifestation of utmost dehumanization found its parallel only three years later when army doctors exhumed the
Native bodies of those massacred in 1864 and studied them for “the logistical effects of bullet wounds” (Tillett 111). Still later, these bodies became parts of the anthropological collection of the Smithsonian Institution. This kind of disrespectful practice was not a manifestation of cultural insensitivity or undisguised hostility in the nineteenth century only. As Vine Deloria reminds us, the practice of grave looting and appropriation of sacred burial artifacts was very much thriving still at the beginning of the 1970s (16).53
52 It is beyond the scope of my present work to include a detailed analysis of the controversy accompanying NAGPRA and the human remains repatriation movement. Those interested in the still highly relevant topic, I direct to Dorothy Grarber’s paper “An Indian Artifact Collection at Court: Whose Family Heirlooms?” and James Riding In’s “Repatriation: A Pawnee’s Perspective.” Graber’s text is culturally and regionally specific and focuses on the legal case over burial artifacts initiated by the Burns Paiute Tribe of southeastern Oregon. James Riding In provides an overview of the general areas of contention surrounding the repatriation debate. Both of the authors indicate commonalities which pervade the repatriation movement across the tribal spectrum. See also: Ferguson’s “Native Americans and the Practice of Archeology” and David Hurst Thomas’s Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity (2000). 53 Deloria enumerates manifold instances of the so called attempts to “preserve Indian culture” on the part of the dominant society at the onset of the 1970s (16). It was no exception that such attempts took the shape of archeological and anthropological societies excavating Native skeletons and transporting them for study and display to museums and universities. For more detail, see the first chapter, “The Indian Movement,” of Deloria’s God Is Red . A tint of bitter irony underscores his account of a specific case of pillage: “By early fall 1971, Indians were on the defensive all over the country, trying to prevent the looting of their burial grounds. Whites were just as determined to preserve Indian culture on their terms even if they had to dig up every Indian skeleton on the continent. Near Pedricktown, New York, the Abnaki Archeological Society continued its excavation of an old Abnaki village site, uncovering its ninth body in less than a year. A story about Abnaki in early September in The Philadelphia Inquirer , optimistically related that the digs would reveal a cross section of Indian life and not just
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In her novel, Walters revisits the controversy encompassing Native cultural dispossession and the appropriation of many tribal artifacts of both human and nonhuman origins. In this respect thus, the spatial setting of Ghost Singer is equally divided between the Navajo
Reservation and the Natural History Building of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
D.C., with some minor excursions to Oklahoma, Virginia and Tennessee. Concerning the story’s temporal setting, Walters contends in an interview with Rhoda Carroll that she selected the years
1968 69 mainly for personal reasons connected to her life but also because the year 1968 marked a centenary of the creation of the Navajo Reservation in 1868 (“Values” 69 70). More importantly still, the turn of this decade saw the rise of the American Indian Movement and it was also the time when the repatriation movement was beginning to gain momentum.
Ghost Singer is a mystery novel inhabited with characters of both Native American and
European American descent. 54 The novel’s forefront is occupied by a collection of cultural artifacts and human remains stored in the attic of the Natural History Building of the
Smithsonian Institution, a collection which literally haunts its two Anglo curators, Geoffrey
Newsome and Donald Evans, as well as the museum staff and visitors. The collection comprises of such items as necklaces of human fingers, human skulls, shields of hide, a “full scalp, with the ears attached to it” and others (Walters, Ghost 38 39). The undeniably violent circumstances and negative affect surrounding the collection’s origins transcend time and space in the form of a corporal ghost who is a mysterious presence, described as “a giant of a man, standing well near seven feet tall” (Walters, Ghost 73). Through him, the violence of the past manifests itself in the present. As the story progresses, Walters insinuates that the cases of many mysterious deaths
burial patterns. It would have been nice if the settlers in the region had learned something from the Abnaki when they were contemporaries so that the dig would not have been necessary” (16). 54 Walters’s way of referring to the non Native characters of the novel is “Anglos.” Although throughout my dissertation I tend to use the referents “European American,” “American” or “non Native,” in the present analysis, when speaking about Walters’s text, I preserve her choice of denomination.
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occurring in the Smithsonian are in a direct causal relation to the collection in general and to the spiritual entity of the Singer in particular. 55
Given the crucial role that artifacts and remains perform in Ghost Singer , the majority of the novel’s critical assessment focuses on the text being a part of the dialogue which accompanies the repatriation movement. Critics have mostly observed Walters’s fictional articulation of the claims of the movement and her providing an alternative epistemology to the one pursued by Western academia in relation to the study of human remains (Graber, “Anna
Lee;” Tillett). Walters herself promotes the benefits of accepting, or at least contemplating, others’ worldviews, an opinion expressed in the already quoted interview: “I would tell them
[her interviewer’s students] to experience another view of the world besides the one they’ve always known. There’s magic in doing this, and enrichment. I hope that my stories reflect another perspective that is rewarding to receive” (“Values” 72). Acknowledging these observations, in my reading I intend to explore Native American dispossession of material culture as the novel’s underlying trauma. I propose that while criticizing the racially prejudiced scientific and administrative practices which have made such dispossession possible, Walters also portrays the present day consequences of this trauma. Most importantly, she questions the dialectic of victims and perpetrators and the dialectic’s relevance for addressing the contemporary condition informed by centuries of systemic oppression. The author constructs her characters, that is the historical victims and perpetrators, along relatively strict ethnic lines.
However, when they are confronted with the residue of the past, with the trauma of cultural abuse and theft, the demarcation line of their ethnicity dissolves; their status of the oppressed and the oppressor abates. No longer is it important who has done the original wrong and who has
55 The character of the ghost remains nameless throughout the text, thus I utilize the expression from the novel’s title, apparently referring to him, and address him as the Singer.
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been injured, the trauma of the past haunts both the Anglos and the Native characters indiscriminately.
In the first chapter of the present work, I briefly pondered on the tendency of trauma texts to undermine the dichotomous relationship between victims and perpetrators. From a theoretical perspective, the debate has been shaped mainly by Cathy Caruth who has expressed the conviction that the two categories inevitably coalesce with each other in a posttraumatic situation. Ruth Leys suggests a counterargument and a challenge to the collapse of the said dichotomy. She accuses Caruth of deconstructing the cultural trope of victimhood and points out
Caruth’s “primary commitment to making victimhood unlocatable in any particular person or place, thereby permitting it to migrate or spread contagiously to others” (Leys, Trauma 296).
Needless to say, Leys’s contention is pertinent to legal discourse. However, its legitimacy weakens when transplanted to the realm of the here and now of a person’s existence. The human element notwithstanding, oftentimes it is the larger socio political structures which sanction the existence of both the victim and the perpetrator. Although Leys uses a persuasive assertion against Caruth, one which centers on the Holocaust and Caruth’s inadvertent equating of Jewish victims with their Nazi oppressors (Trauma 297), I suggest, along with Caruth, that in many cases dividing a victim from his or her victimizer with a singular line is a questionable act. I cannot emphasize enough that it is not my intention to diminish the people’s suffering under the
Nazi regime, or in any other instance of human rights violations, nor to alleviate the perpetrators’ guilt. In most cases, those individuals were exercising their own agency and words of condemnation are well in place. However, the ideologies, historical processes, and the broader social, political and cultural institutions which frequently initiate the violations also need to be taken into consideration. Those who inhabit the legally defined position of a perpetrator may
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sometimes endure their own traumatization post or prior to the trauma itself. Although juridical framework does not permit such provisions of ambiguity, literature provides a platform for interrogating the relevance and rigorousness of the victim/perpetrator dichotomy in the aftermath of physical and psychological violence. I posit that from the perspective of trauma theory,
Walters’s novel can be interpreted as a relevant contribution to the debate commenced by Caruth and Leys. Reading Ghost Singer as an elaboration on this particular facet of trauma allows me to position the text within trauma discourse and in the genre of trauma literature.
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As already indicated, Walters distinguishes her Native American and Anglo characters along ethnic lines. These are governed by a person’s physiognomy and oftentimes dress code, that is mostly by the individual’s external bodily features. Although the distinction is not charged with the racial hatred manifest in Alexie’s Indian Killer , Walters still makes the divide highly conspicuous. What separates the Natives and Anglos, apart from their bodies exposed to the other’s immediate scrutiny, is the epistemologies of their respective cultures. The adherence to distinct beliefs and worldviews anchors the characters at the separate poles of the victim/perpetrator dichotomy. That the characters imagine themselves to be occupying detached spheres of the power hierarchy, influenced by the colonial project of violence and injustice, is apparent in some of their observations. At a certain point in the story the Cherokee/Creek tribal official George Daylight comments in a disturbed manner on the inextricability of people’s ideas and actions: “I was reading these unpublished manuscripts […] It’s a hell of a thing, the ideas they had ’bout ‘red Indians.’ […] What’s even more spooky is that people acted upon these ideas, made decisions based upon them, decisions that still affect us guys. Willie, you and me’s lucky to even be sitting around here at all” (Walters, Ghost 72). A strong disagreement mingles
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with frustration and apprehension in George’s pronouncement. His words are illustrative of the hierarchical discrepancy between the Native and non Native population of the United States both in the past and in the present. The condition of victimhood is so ingrained in the contemporary discourse, of both the general public and academia, that when James Giles refers to the Native
American characters of Alexie’s Indian Killer , he speaks about the oppressed indigenous population in terms of “hereditary victims” (129).
Along the same lines, the narrator comments on the unequal distribution of agency from the perspective of Donald Evans, one of the two Anglo curators of the incriminated collection:
“American Indians were curiosities to him, people who should have become extinct by all the rules of the game” (Walters, Ghost 82). His speaking position cannot be in a starker contrast to
George’s observation quoted in the previous paragraph. The remarks make apparent the Native characters’ cognizance of their stigmatization as victims, which is of the same extent as the non
Natives’ awareness of being in the position of beneficiaries, or alleged victors. The Anglos’ patronizing attitude, intertwined with self righteousness, is most obvious in Donald’s contemplations. Equally condescending to his ideas per se is the objectification of Native
Americans which taints his reminiscences. Donald thus embodies the scientific arrogance and racial bias of academic disciplines, mainly anthropology, which is in the forefront of Walters’s criticism:
Donald, on the other hand, found him [the tribal official George Daylight]
curious. The way that Daylight saw things sometimes bordered on superstition;
his existence at all – a practicing heathen who endowed each lifeform with a
personification of his own mind – in a fast paced society that hurled itself toward
high tech and outerspace was wryly amusing to Donald. He couldn’t help but
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chuckle at Daylight and his kind, and Donald meant no harm. His observations
were impersonal assessments, much like a report on earth from another planet.
(Walters, Ghost 108 09)
I have purposefully substituted the latter part of the victim/perpetrator dyad above with the expression “victor,” for this is the self representation that Walters’s Anglo characters project on the outside. Walters suggests that the mechanisms which allow this kind of substitution are embedded in the politics of denial practiced by most of the non Natives. The instances of denying anything discordant with rational explanations allegorize the ongoing greater denial of the atrocities of the past and their ramifications in the present, a denial pursued by many public figures and private citizens of the United States.56 Walters shows that the strategy of denial is a crucial element of the non Native worldview, contrasting it with the traditional Native American cosmology. However, as shown in the analysis of Alexie’s Indian Killer , Native Americans can pursue similarly harmful politics of denial and/or avoidance, as their non Native counterparts. In
Ghost Singer , the author reserves denial for the Anglo characters only, and the dissimilar worldviews are the most distinguished indicators of the characters’ ethnic background, and thus also of their status as historical victims or perpetrators.
The accounts of denial that Walters depicts, some of them very personal such as between a wife and a husband or a brother and a sister, symbolically recreate the extra textual atmosphere of denial pervading the American culture. In the novel, the spheres of reality
56 Dorothy Graber provides a verbatim account of one of the witnesses in Burns-Paiute Tribe v. Fred E. Moore trial over appropriation of Native American cultural artifacts held in the state of Oregon in 1996. Mr. Lemons’s testimony is an example of the denial and arrogance that one may still encounter among the general public: “Big Weasel Springs was where the Indians camped . . . right where my grandparents lived but I suppose it was, I guess it was before I was, well I know it was before I was born. But they’d go there and you can still go there but the City of Mt. Vernon took all the dirt away and the Indians camped here on this property and made their arrowheads and fished. The river changed places and you own it now, Mike, you remember you and Jimmy Weaver and those guys went up and plowed it up and you picked up the artifacts […] and I think the Indian people should be proud that the white man wants to display and own the art, artifacts that there are real good, really. I’m serious. What the hell good are they buried up out there in the ground and nobody knows it” (“Indian” 190).
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commonly renounced by the Anglo characters are associated predominantly with Native
American culture, beliefs and material artifacts. At the beginning of the story, one of the
Smithsonian’s staff, Jean Wurly, realizes the presence of spiritual beings at her workplace.
However, as this kind of discovery is incompatible with her scientific training, she confides to her brother in a manner expressing her apprehension: “Among this crowd, Davie, were three old gentlemen, wearing suits in the style of the late 1800s. […] they were Indians, […] I approached the crowd to speak with them, but by then they were no longer there and that is when I realized that they weren’t real” (Walters, Ghost 5 6). In the same dialogue, Jean also confesses to her own husband’s disregard since he views Jean’s sensations as nonsensical: “Dennis thought I was going crazy” (Walters, Ghost 6). The disagreement between Jean and her husband is of such proportions that it ultimately disrupts their marriage and culminates in a divorce. Jean’s brother,
David Drake, voices his own concern when articulating his anxiety over Jean’s possible mental heath damage: “he called Jill and told her everything, stating frankly that he was worried about
Jean’s mental state” (Walters, Ghost 7). The story provides multiple examples of knowledge which is refuted on the basis of its putative irrationality, deemed directly absurd or impossible due to a lack of an explicit rational explanation. The Anglo characters endow reason and rationality with utmost interpretative capacitates. Oftentimes, the two curators of the
Smithsonian collection, Geoffrey Newsome and Donald Evans, refer to themselves as rational human beings, as in the following example: “Yet, about half a dozen times recently, while he
[Geoffrey] was working on the shreds, he did feel that someone had tapped him on his arm or shoulder. Though it had momentarily unnerved him, each time he’d handled it in a rational way”
(Walters, Ghost 40). Geoffrey’s conviction illustrates the deeply embedded Western worldview
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according to which almost everything can be interpreted with the assistance of reason; spheres of being in which rationality fails are a priori denied their existence.
As a means of contrast, Walters introduces the Native American epistemic set represented primarily by the tribal elders, Johnie Navajo and his wife referred to as grandmother,
Wilbur and Anna Snake, and the recently deceased, yet still partly present, LeClair Williams.
The author also expresses confidence in preserving the traditional ways, as Ghost Singer features several characters from the younger generation who show considerable interest in their relatives’ ways of knowing the world. By presenting her readers with Russell Tallman, Willie Begay, and
Nasbah Navajo, to name a few, Walters imagines an uninterrupted continuum of Native knowledge thriving despite the adverse atmosphere of denial and sometimes open hostility rampant in the dominant society. Walters’s Native Americans do not necessarily share the same tribal affiliation: as his name suggests, Johnie is a Navajo, Wilbur Snake is “a member of the
Ioway tribe” (Walters, Ghost 61) and “‘Ol’ Russ is a little bit of a half dozen tribes. He’s part
Kiowa, part Caddo, part Pawnee, part Comanche, and what else, Russ?’ ‘Cheyenne’” (Walters,
Ghost 47). However, in spite of the characters’ dissimilar tribal associations, the elders exercise ways of knowing which bear commonality with one another. In this respect, Louis Owens points out the disparity between Native American epistemology and the Western tradition of thought, rather than among the Native systems of ideas themselves: “traditional American Indian epistemology had little in common with the empiricism of the Enlightenment inheritance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries or with the logical positivism that flowered along with high modernism” (16). Similarly to Owens, Walters presupposes the existence of a shared worldview among her various Native characters, a worldview which rather starkly contrasts with the Anglos’ epistemological frameworks. The familiarity of the Native American ways of
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knowing the world oftentimes finds its assertion in the ceremonies that Johnie and Wilbur are asked to perform for others, and also in the stories that they relate as an alternative means of educating the young. In addition, as tribal elders Wilbur and LeClair function as mediators between the Native and non Native cultures when they are invited to Washington, D.C., to assist with some scientific enterprise: “Wilbur and LeClair got called upon by some researchers, you know, white people, to help them out, look at old photographs of Indians, and other stuff”
(Walters, Ghost 17). Although the Native characters are generally viewed as “curiosities”
(Walters, Ghost 82), as less “educated and tolerant” than the dominant group (Walters, Ghost
39), and as “both arrogant and ignorant” (Walters, Ghost 41), the summoning act indicates the presence of certain knowledge which is beyond the Anglos’ grasp.
For most of the story, Walters keeps the Native and Anglo epistemic worlds separate, with the characters adhering to their corresponding systems of beliefs. The adherence becomes a marker of ethnicity, denoting those historically victimized and those accountable for the violence of colonization and cultural disruption. The distinct worldviews function as inherent traits and attributes which Walters utilizes in order to fictionally construct the characters. Only at certain points does the author bring the two traditions of thought closer and provides her Anglo and
Native characters with a chance to reconsider their respective worldviews through the encounter.
In these scenes, the Native American characters are portrayed as both literally and figuratively reaching out in attempts to provide assistance, only to encounter denial grounded in rationality yet again. Among others, the situation stands out in which the curator Donald Evans, of his own agency, approaches one of the young tribal officials, Russell Tallman, asking him for a specific kind of help. What instigates Donald’s move is the incessant haunting of his attic office and his person culminating in a physical assault by the corporal spirit of the Singer. Donald is propelled
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to seek Russell’s assistance by a violent confrontation with an entity transcending the boundaries of time, space and ethnicity. However, the ensuing ceremony organized by the tribal elders and intended to appease the Singer is diminished when Donald brings along his girlfriend. What is supposed to be a cleansing spiritual event turns into a spectacle for the Western gaze embodied by Elaine. The act of bringing another participant, one who “couldn’t help but giggle” during the ceremony, can be interpreted as an inappropriate interference of Western rationality which contributes to the ceremony’s inefficiency (Walters, Ghost 185). Elaine does not demonstrate any signs of accepting the others’ worldviews. Instead, all of her actions and words reveal her reliance on the rational as the only means of interpreting reality and they testify to her position as a subject entertained by the non Western objectified other. Immediately preceding the ceremony, she asks: “‘I hope you don’t mind that Donald asked me to come with him this evening. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,’ she said sincerely, with a look of eager anticipation”
(Walters, Ghost 183). Her question and confession establish a space in which the unequal relationship between the Native and non Native population of the contemporary American society is replicated once again. Despite the fact that the Native American characters are in charge of the ceremony, possessing both the knowledge and appropriate artifacts for its performance, Elaine does not exhibit any respect. For her, the elders are exotic performers, not competent human beings with their own ways of knowing. As already indicated, Elaine and
Donald upset any prospect of reconciliation, and of the ceremony itself, with actions and attitudes deeply embedded in their Western cultural upbringing.
The failure of the ceremony, and the lack of acceptance on Donald’s and Elaine’s part, are demonstrated in the two Anglos’ immediate refuge in the practice of denial. Donald engages in escapism both physical and mental; he leaves for a holiday in Hawaii, while simultaneously
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considering changing his current curator position in the Smithsonian (Walters, Ghost 209). His mental escape is all the more significant in that it represents an epistemology unaltered by the experience of the ceremony. Donald admits his denial, first to himself and later to Russell. The narrator recreates Donald’s inner monologue which illustrates his doubts and uncertainty about the way he and Elaine cope with the situation: “Stranger still was that Donald and Elaine had not talked about that night since then. It was as if they ripped the experience of that night right out of their minds” (Walters, Ghost 210). What Donald subsequently concedes to Russell is a direct echo of the former’s inner contemplations: “‘You know what’s odd about everything that happened that night? Elaine and I have never spoken one word about it. We’ve swept it under the rug,’ Donald said reluctantly. ‘We’re going away to Hawaii and pretend it never happened’”
(Walters, Ghost 210). However, the Western conviction about its own apparent incommensurability with non Western traditional worldviews, communicated by Donald’s and
Elaine’s denial and pretense, does not make the Anglo characters any less vulnerable to the physical manifestations of the past.
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In Ghost Singer , the trauma of cultural dispossession, in the past frequently accompanied by atrocities committed by groups of settlers or organized by the American government, are epitomized by the Singer and other spirit people haunting the Smithsonian building. Walters suggests a relationship of causality between the spirits’ presence and the bodily harm, and sometimes death, of the employees affiliated with the collection of human remains and artifacts.
Walters’s emphasis is on the seeming epistemic incomparability characterizing both those historically victimized and those responsible for the victimization. Nevertheless, she also suggests that the binary of victims and perpetrators has become partly insufficient for dealing
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with the contemporary condition of the American culture. This is not to say that the trauma of the past has ceased to reverberate in the present day society. Indeed, Walters is careful to not diminish the settlers’ impact on the lives of today’s indigenous peoples, which is apparent, for instance, in the ongoing disavowal of the atrocities by American cultural institutions as well as in the curator’s rejection of alterity. Yet, Walters also indicates that any strict separation of victims and perpetrators, in the way Leys’s trauma theory presupposes, is counter productive for the present. As already observed, the separation does have undeniable relevance from a legal perspective, but what Walters’s novel portrays is a condition in which the descendants of the former oppressors, that is the present beneficiaries, and those historically victimized are equally affected by the haunting past. In other words, the potential traumatization of the Anglo and
Native characters by the remnants of the past is comparable. The trauma of the past atrocities, of which the questionable collection of Native artifacts is a reminder, continues to affect the society as a whole.
In the novel, the Anglo curators and staff of the Smithsonian commit unexpected suicides, disguised to the Western rationality as “freak accidents” (Walters, Ghost 9): “The article in the Washington paper gave about three inches of space to a suicide of a prominent anthropologist. […] The news had shocked Donald’s colleagues, because this was the second suicide in two weeks” (Walters, Ghost 209). But it is also the young Navajo student and researcher Willie Begay who betrays symptoms of some sort of traumatization. The Anglo characters experience altered states of being and other physical impairments which, from the vantage point of Western thought, resemble trauma symptomatology. Geoffrey Newsome suffers from headaches and from experiences of “an unspoken apprehension or anxiety” (Walters, Ghost
35 36). The variety of his sensual perceptions, from tactile, audible to olfactory, corresponds to
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those sustained by the second of the curators, Donald Evans. Although the story intimates that all these manifestations originate with the presence of the disturbed past in the Smithsonian,
Donald’s denial does not allow him such interpretation. What he has at his disposal is medical vocabulary which enables him to think in terms of physical or psychological damage. He views his mental health as threatened by the occurrences at his working place and is anxious that “his sanity was at stake” (Walters, Ghost 209). From the Western point of view, Geoffrey Newsome’s abnormal symptoms and perceptions can also be interpreted as those of a trauma victim. The trauma, however, reaches further into the past, beyond Geoffrey’s physical existence. It originates in the previous centuries when indigenous gravesites were looted under the auspices of allegedly scholarly research; at a time when peoples’ bones were excavated and transported only to be later displayed as specimens of supposedly extinct cultures. Not even Donald’s and
Geoffrey’s membership in the still privileged class of (neo)colonial beneficiaries can protect them from traumatization by the lingering residue of the oppressed and suppressed past.
Concerning Willie, it seems almost irrelevant that he belongs with the historically disenfranchised population, for his bodily manifestations are on a par with those of Geoffrey
Newsome’s and Donald Evans’s. Willie, too, is subject to extraordinary impressions, perceiving figures which are discernable only to him: “Willie […] looked around the room to see who else saw this man. No one did” (Walters, Ghost 73). In addition, he suffers from nausea and, similarly to Geoffrey Newsome, from severe lapses of consciousness (Walters, Ghost 73). In the course of the story, Willie’s condition deteriorates to such an extent that he has to be admitted to a hospital. Given the etiology of his illness, locatable in the trauma of historical experience rather than in any empirical cause, the medical staff is unable to provide Willie with much assistance in healing. The denial and rationalism of the Western worldview comes into play once again when
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Willie’s doctor requests a psychologist to examine the case. The psychologist explains: “I was asked by your doctor to look in on you. […] Well, your doctor is exploring all the possibilities, that is all the possible sources of your illness” (Walters, Ghost 148). Despite Willie’s hospitalization and a variety of examinations constituting the treatment, his somatic symptoms persist unabated and their origins remain unidentified by his doctors. The high correlation of
Geoffrey’s, Donald’s and Willie’s bodily manifestations of the mysterious illness indicates that the past is still present, much more than just in the artifacts of the collection, and continues to act upon people’s lives across ethnic lines.
Hence, when located in the discursive boundaries of trauma, the novel probes the present condition of the American society where the historically oppressed and the oppressors are equally confronted by the legacy of the violent past. The disturbances of the Anglo and Native characters can be viewed either through the prism of traditional Native spirituality as echoes of the past or as trauma. Presenting her curators simultaneously as both disseminators of oppressive hegemonic knowledge and as victims of theirs and their predecessors’ disrespectful actions,
Walters questions the validity of the victim/perpetrator dichotomy for negotiating the present cultural condition. Donald Evans is physically abused by the Singer to such an extent that the reader cannot but endorse that Donald, too, is in a sense a victim of the structures sanctioning the past exploitation and the present denial thereof. Walters devotes considerable attention to a meticulous description of Donald’s confrontation with the Singer which consists mainly in physical harm of the former and abusive behavior of the latter (Walters, Ghost 114 15). The subversion of easy explanations and stigmatization enables Walters to emphasize the complexity of a person’s existence at a certain moment in time.
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Although the manifold past injustice which is at the source of the contemporary inequality in many Native American communities remains to be appropriately revisited, there exists a whole realm of pressing grievances of the present which need to be negotiated. One of many is the complaints of Native American tribes concerning the cultural artifacts and bodily remains of their people which continue to be appropriated by museums and universities, that is by institutions bestowed with cultural and intellectual education. Emphasis on the problems of the present, rather than the past, can be read in George Daylight’s urgent words:
This concern revolves around the role of the caretaker of these items. Yes, the
items are here . You claim ownership , by however means the items came to be
here. Though this aspect ain’t under discussion now, we both know that even how
the items came to be here, through legal or illegal acquisition, might also be
another issue. But this aside. The items are here. Now, how to take care of them?
[…] For the moment, you are the caretaker here, Evans. American society ain’t
the caretaker – hell, American society don’t even know what it has here! Not even
the Board of Directors, or Trustees, or whoever governs the operation of this here
place is caretaker. (Walters, Ghost 111, emphasis in the original)
George’s explicit accentuation of the “here” is illustrative of his anxiety about the present condition. He does not disregard the settlers’ illegal conduct in the past, but his repetitive use of
“here” directs the reader’s attention toward the present and toward the conundrum that the contemporary American society faces, such as the controversy around the NAGPRA legislation.
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By ascribing her Native and non Native characters with symptomatology conforming to the definition of trauma, regardless of their ethnicity or worldview, Walters collapses the
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dialogism of victims and perpetrators. In doing so, she offers a fictional portrayal of a society whose members suffer from the trauma of the past injustice and its present perpetuation. The loci of contention which her novel uncovers are more complicated than can be sufficiently interpreted through the binary of victims and perpetrators; Walters herself explains the lack of conclusive resolutions marking the novel’s ending as a parallel to the contemporary problems of the
American society which do not have “easy solutions” (“Values” 69). What her novel suggests is that the demand for redress should be equally divided between addressing the forms of historical injustice and negotiating the contemporary situation, the “here” George Daylight emphasizes. In
Ghost Singer , the trauma of cultural dispossession, or the spiritual holocaust as James Riding In terms it (241), transcends the victim/perpetrator binary and the trauma’s physical and psychological manifestations imprint themselves on both Natives and Anglos. The way towards the future may consist in very concrete actions executed for the benefit of the present, rather than in vague discoursive quests for the origins of the contemporary problems. Walters makes this explicit in a conversation between George and Russell, the two tribal officials:
“Now does that answer all your questions?” George looked at Russell. He
answered, “All except one. Why? Why is this happening?” George was annoyed.
He said, “Damn Russ, you been gone too long. Starting to think like them. What
the hell kind of question is that? Why? Why is this happening? You sound like
you’re just going to sit down and work this out till all the answers come up clean
and simple. It don’t matter. What matters is that people – spirit people – are
there .” (Walters, Ghost 19, emphasis in the original).
If the present day society indulges in trying to “come up [with] clean and simple” answers, or contents itself with assigning of the allegedly lucid stigmata of victims and perpetrators, the
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spirits of the past may as well keep persistently resurfacing, affecting Natives and non Natives alike.
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Conclusion
In the first chapter of the dissertation, I emphasize that not every text written from within a culture determined by a traumatic experience should be automatically subsumed under trauma literature. Nevertheless, my current analysis of three Native American novels indicates that even though these texts are to a certain extent devoid of explicit portrayals of traumatic occurrences, they function as relevant contributions to trauma discourse and trauma literature. The manner in which trauma manifests itself in Solar Storms , Indian Killer and Ghost Singer offers itself to an interpretation in terms of “insidious trauma,” a term coined by Maria Root. Root is a feminist therapist and has designed this concept as a form of encounter between the discourses of trauma and feminism. Laura Brown paraphrases Root’s definition and observes that insidious trauma refers to “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). Drawing on Root, Brown elucidates the analytical category still more specifically:
for all women living in a culture where there is a high base rate of sexual assault
and where such behavior is considered normal and erotic by men, as it is in North
American culture, is an exposure to insidious trauma. Most women in North
America today are aware that they may be raped at any time and by anyone. […]
In consequence, many women who have never been raped have symptoms of rape
trauma; we are hypervigilant to certain cues, avoid situations that we sense are
high risk, go numb in response to overtures from men that might be friendly – but
that might also be the first step toward our violation. (107)
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Although appropriated from a feminist realm, insidious trauma can accompany Duran’s concept of the soul wound in reading Native American texts which rewrite the history of oppression and violation.
The insidious presence of trauma in the analyzed texts consists in the indirect manner in which the novels narrate the history of trauma. At a cursory glance, all the three texts portray present day existential conditions of their Native American characters, be that the fictional community of the Fat Eaters in Solar Storms , the Spokane and mix bloods in Indian Killer or mostly the Navajo in Ghost Singer . The accentuation of the contemporary directly correlates with Alexie’s and other Native American writers’ urge to rewrite the image of the “real Indian,” a misinterpretation created by public discourse and pervading the public’s imagination.
However, as already indicated in this chapter’s introductory section, Hogan, Alexie and Walters causally relate the present problems and destitution to the history of colonial exploitation of the indigenous lands, peoples and cultures. In depicting today’s conditions of Native lives, all the three novels invoke manifold forms of injustice, past and present, committed against Native
Americans by European settlers and by the government of the United States. In this sense, trauma as a latent historical legacy is a persisting omnipresence just beneath the stories’ surfaces.
Although each novel features some characters whose condition, at least in part, corresponds to the symptomatology of trauma, neither Solar Storms , nor Indian Killer or Ghost
Singer centers on trauma and/or traumatization as their principal themes. In this respect, the novels deviate from a traditionally conceived narrative of trauma as discussed by Kalí Tal and
Laurie Vickroy in their respective studies on trauma in contemporary literature. In Tal’s rendering, trauma texts originate with authors who themselves have endured a degree of traumatization and their texts thus recreate the circumstances of the given traumatization and/or
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the characters’ coping with the trauma’s aftermath. The range of texts that Vickroy selects for her explorations indicates that, to her understanding, the authors’ personal trauma does not constitute a prerequisite of a trauma text (xiii). However, the act of traumatization and its consequentiality continue to be the prime thematic foci of such texts. 57 Thus, some of the common instances comprising the canon of trauma literature are novels by Holocaust survivors, such as Elie Wiesel’s Night and André Schwarz Bart’s The Last of the Just , novels and poetry written by Vietnam War veterans such as W. D. Ehrhart, and texts by the victims of sexual abuse, for instance Louise Armstrong’s collection of incest narratives Kiss Daddy Goodnight
(1978). In the realm of Native American writing, a text conforming to this conception of trauma narratives is, for instance, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977). Angel in Solar Storms , John
Smith in Indian Killer and Geoffrey Newsome and Willie Begay in Ghost Singer are all portrayed as experiencing some sort of posttraumatic condition which manifests itself in their mental and physical health impairment. However, any explicit traumatization akin to the depictions of Jewish transports in Wiesel’s Night or to Tayo’s symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder upon his return from WWII in Silko’s Ceremony are markedly absent from the three novels under discussion.
As my close readings demonstrate, the novels’ engagement with trauma transpires more on the formal levels of imagery and narrative techniques and less in explicit depictions and themes of the stories. The recession of trauma into the texts’ formal planes is what accounts for the trauma’s insidiousness in relation to the novels. For it is only a detailed analysis of the
57 The novels analyzed in Vickroy’s Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction encompass the whole second half of the twentieth century and transcend the boundaries of gender, ethnicity and geographical origins of their authors. Vickroy includes Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Sula (1973), The Bluest Eye (1970) and Jazz (1992), Marguerite Duras’s The Sea Wall (1950), The Vice-Consul (1965), The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein (1964) and The Lover (1984), Jamica’s Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina (1992), Pat Barker’s (1991 95) Regeneration trilogy, and Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story (1986).
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novels’ formal structures which uncovers their encounter with trauma. Unanimously, Solar
Storms , Indian Killer and Ghost Singer re imagine some of the major chapters of injustice committed against the indigenous populations of the United States, both in the past and the present. Linda Hogan provides a disquieting account of land abuse sanctioned by the capitalist ideology of the Western world. As governing principles of the contemporary Western society, capitalist mechanisms advocate the value of progress, advancement and accumulation of resources at the expense of individual human beings and of both the animate and inanimate subjects occupying the land. The mistreatment of the land, together with a blatant disregard of
Native American cosmology in which the land is assigned a central position, constitute one of the inherent traumas of the Native American peoples. Hogan probes the severed relationship between the land and those who inhabit it on the formal level through images with which she recreates the destroyed link. The imagery of a vulnerable, wounded, but also wounding, human body, which Hogan ascribes equally to both human and nonhuman subjects of the novel bears witness to the interconnectedness of the people and the land. It also reveals the degree of the land’s and peoples’ traumatization by the inconsiderate practices of those who possesses agency and power.
The question of power (mis)distribution and its abuse is also one of the fundamental issues examined in Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer . The story focuses on the absence of power in people who have been disenfranchised by a history of forced migrations resulting in geographical, cultural, social and economic displacement. In Alexie’s novel, the concept of displacement functions as the organizing textual principle. It points to the multiple forms of historical displacement that the American indigenous populations have been subjected to by the dominant society. Alexie addresses the trauma of displacement through specific imagery of out
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adoption and homelessness and a disjointed non linear narrative structure. If Solar Storms and
Indian Killer are concerned with metaphors and the progression of the narrative as the main media for narrating trauma, then in Ghost Singer , it is the method through which Anna Lee
Walters constructs the characters as historical victims and perpetrators which contains the locus of trauma. Walters portrays her Native and non Native characters as members of distinct cultures with dissimilar epistemologies and establishes an almost unsurpassable chasm between them. As my analysis shows, when the author introduces the trope of trauma, it shatters the binary and undermines the seemingly well defined demarcation distinguishing the victims from the perpetrators. Walters’s novel is one of the voices arguing for repatriation of Native American human remains and material artifacts which have been appropriated by federal institutions, museums, universities and also private citizens. Therefore, Ghost Singer can be read as a novel which questions many a racial prejudice pervading contemporary academia and its unabashed replication of the Native American trauma of cultural dispossession.
The insidiousness of trauma in Solar Storms , Indian Killer and Ghost Singer does not reduce the immediacy of the traumas discussed or the authors’ calls for social, political and human redress. Quite on the contrary, the implicit presence of trauma in Hogan’s, Alexie’s and
Walters’s novels can be read as the authors’ engagement with what Jeffrey Alexander calls the trauma process. Each text functions as a contribution to the multivocal dialogue between media, artists, activists, politicians and the general public, a dialogue through which the suppression of people’s rights is discursively recreated as trauma. As Alexander argues, in the course of the trauma process, instances of human suffering, such as environmental, social and cultural injustice, are re formulated within the limits of trauma discourse and granted the status of a trauma (11). Consequently, such status has the potential to draw the public’s attention and to
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open possible routes for reparation and redemption. Albeit indirect, Hogan’s, Alexie’s and
Walters’s negotiations of the Native American past and present as trauma are powerful articulations of problems which were until recently rendered by the dominant American society as nonexistent. The fictional accounts in Solar Storms , Indian Killer and Ghost Singer make these pressing issues accessible to a greater readership, both Native and non Native, and verbalize the condition of a marginalized Native American population within the conceptual boundaries of trauma. The texts’ participation in the trauma process, thus, offers the possibility of a future which is driven more by environmental and social justice and less by
(re)traumatization of human beings. The chapter to follow will demonstrate similar tendencies pursued by African American writers.
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Chapter 3
The Inscription of Trauma onto the Body of a Text: African American Trauma in the Novels of
Gayl Jones, Ernest Gaines and Sapphire
Like in the preceding chapter on three Native American novels, my aim in this chapter is to facilitate an encounter between literary narratives and the theory of trauma. The three African
American texts in the center of my analysis are Corregidora by Gayl Jones, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest Gaines, and Push by Sapphire. This opening part briefly introduces the three novels under discussion and previews their distinct ways of participating in trauma discourse. The analysis will show that trauma is a literary trope that a critic can repeatedly identify in African American writing. Oftentimes, the presence of trauma in the three texts examined is associated with some racially motivated actions targeting the African
American characters. Hence, Corregidora , The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Push manifest a pronounced tendency to emphasize the causality between their characters’ traumas and the racially adverse social climate of the American society. Although Jones’s, Gaines’s and
Sapphire’s texts portray varied examples of human and civil rights violations, and/or physical and psychological exploitation, their focus on the implied racial motivations thereof is uniform.
While the novels by Hogan, Alexie and Walters turn their explorations toward the contemporary
Native American condition, the three African American texts underscore primarily the continuous racial adversity itself. Corregidora , The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and
Push mostly refrain from drawing a direct link between the historical occurrence of slavery and the oppression and disempowerment of the present. Jones, Gaines and Sapphire are more concerned with the racial divide of the American society and with the concrete physical and psychological breaches of their characters’ integrity which the racial hostility engenders.
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Hence, the three African American authors predominantly expose and examine the subtle continuity of culturally constructed racial stereotypes. On the thematic plane, the locations of the characters’ trauma in Corregidora , The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Push have a more immediate foundation than in the Native American narratives. Out of the three Native
American texts, only Hogan’s Angel is a character whose traumatization has an immediate cause in the violence against her personal and bodily integrity. Neither John Smith in Alexie’s Indian
Killer nor Willie Begay and the Anglo curators in Walters’s Ghost Singer suffer from a direct traumatogenic stressor. Their respective posttraumatic reactions are presented as allegorical culminations of the historical oppression of Native American peoples and the traumas’ origins remain shrouded in vagueness. By contrast, the reader can distinguish very concrete instances of a person’s traumatization in all the three African American novels. Jones’s Ursa has to confront an episode of domestic coercion and her subsequent hysterectomy; Gaines’s Miss Jane recalls many an occurrence of direct brutality committed against herself and others; and Sapphire’s young protagonist Precious is a victim of her parents’ sexual abuse and physical violence.
In this sense, the trauma in the African American narratives conforms to the conviction expressed by William Cross about the sources of, what he terms, racial anxiety among the
African American population. Cross maintains that, from a psychological perspective, frequently some very particular life episodes in an individual’s life determine the development of his or her racial anxiety and/or potential trauma (387). However, his observation fails to sufficiently emphasize the prejudice which motivates such episodes. Irving Allen is more explicit in addressing the correlation between the occurrence of problems in people’s psychological health and the continuous latent racism in the American society:
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Establishing the continuity between the slavery/segregation past and the current
political and social climate raises the following obvious question: Why does
racism continue? The answer to that question is as important to the understanding
of PTSD among Black Americans as the discovery of a virus is to an infectious
disease. Racism is the ideological foundation for excessive stress in the lives of
African Americans, which remains deeply ingrained in the American psyche, and
has been relatively untouched by the legal changes to date. (221)
Where the language of psychology clearly states the interconnectedness between social maladies, a damage to individuals’ health, and the society’s malign racism, literature possesses the capacity to also present a critique of this condition. Despite conspicuous differences in the novels’ temporal and spatial settings, Corregidora , The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Push provide an unanimous argument about the racial bias of the American society. What is more, when juxtaposed, the novels show that culturally constructed preconceptions about African
Americans bore as much traumatogenic potential at the time of slavery as in the second half of the twentieth century.
Apart from the texts’ voicing this kind of social criticism, each of the three novels also functions as a powerful articulation contributing to the cross disciplinary constitution of trauma discourse. Corregidora , The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Push , each in its own way, discloses and explores some of the facets of trauma. Comparably to Solar Storms , Indian Killer and Ghost Singer , the three African American novels examine trauma in its complexity. That is, to a lesser or greater extent, the narratives are all concerned with the problems of trauma’s
(un)narratability, its disjointing of language and temporality, and with the process of bearing witness to traumatic accidents. I argue that in each of the three texts, the reader can identify a
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specific aspect of psychological trauma that pervades the narrative’s thematic and formal planes.
Namely, it is the disturbed perception of time in a traumatized person which informs
Corregidora ; the collaborative act between a survivor and a listener producing a trauma testimony that governs The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman ; and a concern about the limitations of language, typical in trauma survivors, that characterizes Push .
In Corregidora , the conflation of the past and present time planes, and the narrative’s oscillation between them, can be interpreted as Jones’s attempt to fictionally portray a subject’s understanding of the temporal facet of his or her trauma and of the posttraumatic state. Jones alternates between the past and the present in her narrative, treating the two temporal strata as an undistinguished entity, through which she collapses any semblance of the novel’s linear chronology. As a result, the reader repeatedly encounters difficulties when endeavoring to locate a particular scene or image on the temporal axis. I suggest that Jones’s amalgamation technique captures the experiential condition of a traumatized individual. In comparison to Corregidora ’s dismantled non linear temporal framework, Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane
Pittman is an exemplar of a narrative’s linear progression. The hundred and ten year old Miss
Jane is both the novel’s narrator and its main protagonist. The story of her life commences in the last years of slavery and terminates at the outset of the Civil Rights Movement. Although Miss
Jane relates her memoir within the boundaries of an almost conventional chronology, hers, too, is a narrative of trauma. I read Miss Jane’s story as a testimony to African American history as trauma, and her act of telling as bearing witness to this trauma. Gaines organizes his novel as a written account of interviews conducted between Miss Jane and the imaginary editor of the text.
In consequence, Miss Jane and the editor can be seen as partners in the dyad of a survivor of trauma and her listener or, more poignantly, as collaborators participating in the construction of a
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trauma testimony. The testimony which emerges addresses the continuous racial oppression, variably manifesting itself as slavery, post slavery segregation and physical and psychological violence against the individuals who engage in the struggle for African American civil rights.
If compared to Gaines’s text, Sapphire’s Push is anything but linear. Nevertheless, what connects Sapphire’s text to The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is a significant reliance of both the novels on the mode of memory as the primary means of recounting their stories.
Precious, the protagonist of Sapphire’s text, and Miss Jane of Gaines’s novel both retell their life stories from the vantage point of the present, with memories functioning as the gateway to their respective pasts. In contrast to The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman , Push can be perceived as a literally broken text which draws meaning specifically out of its very brokenness. Not only do the memories of the protagonist’s past intermingle with her actions in the present, rupturing the narrative’s temporal setting and its linearity. But essentially, the novel’s formal features such as the typography of letters and their visual organization on a page, and also the language of the narrative, convey an impression of disruption. At certain moments, the narrative contains passages which are written by the novel’s almost illiterate protagonist, at other moments,
Sapphire intersperses the text with poems and pictograms. The synthesis of such multifaceted storytelling comprises the novel’s main passage into trauma discourse. The narrative’s fractured texture, and its frequent grappling with language itself, can be viewed as Sapphire’s negotiation of the (un)narratability of trauma. It is explicitly in the near incomprehensibility of the story that the main heroine’s trauma takes its contours.
In this chapter, I underscore the presence of trauma in each of the three texts. Hence, together with the Native American novels considered earlier, the examined African American novels can be positioned within the genre of trauma literature, for the latter, too, present a
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testimony to a history which has been ridden with traumatization and injury. While portraying the damaged temporality of a traumatized subject, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora simultaneously problematizes slavery as a chapter in American history which has not been adequately processed by public discourse. Like Corregidora , Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman can be read as an exploration of both trauma and the social conditions of African Americans in the years between Emancipation and the 1950s. In the same respect, Sapphire’s Push fictionally examines the limitations of language affected by trauma and bears witness to the destitution of
African American inner city youth. Similarly to my readings of Hogan’s, Alexie’s and Walters’s texts, I believe that my interpretations of the novels by Jones, Gaines and Sapphire will promote a cross disciplinary conversation between literature criticism and psychology. I also hope that the analysis will shed some critical light on the presence of trauma in literature and on the traumatogenic cultural condition with which African American trauma originates. Regardless of the legally granted civil rights, African Americans continue to suffer from lack of acknowledgement regarding their historical oppression. I will stress in the analysis that through their narratives governed by inequality, prejudice and trauma, Jones, Gaines and Sapphire envision the eventual attainment of such acknowledgement accompanied by introduction of tolerance and social justice.
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3.1 “The Return of the Repressed”: Traumatic Temporality in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora
Gayl Jones’s Corregidora is the author’s first novel, written and published when she was still in her mid twenties (Jones, “Gayl” 282). Despite Jones’s relatively young age, her text is a confident address of the burning problems facing many African American women in contemporary American society, as much as it is a powerful exploration of the history of slavery in both the Americas. As anticipated, my analysis addresses the novel from the vantage point of its temporality. More particularly, I elaborate on Jones’s conspicuous tendency to conflate the past and the present, which I read as a recreation of the temporal idiosyncrasies pertaining to trauma. In the opening section of my analysis, I present some of the critical responses which the novel has elicited and I position my reading in the company of those critics who understand
Corregidora as concerned with the peculiarity of time. In the second section, then, I provide a more thorough analysis and concrete examples of the ways in which Jones complicates the temporal aspect of her text. I argue that the author’s treatment of time evokes Freud’s theory of trauma, and more particularly his category of the return of the repressed. Hence, I devote the concluding section to discussing Freud’s concept in association with Caruth’s belatedness of trauma, in which Caruth directly draws on Freud’s perception of trauma.
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Corregidora revolves around its main protagonist and narrator, Ursa Corregidora, a young
African American woman living in Kentucky who is a descendant of three generations of sexually oppressed and physically abused women, Mama, Gram and Great Gram. The novel’s contemporary setting notwithstanding, the story focuses on slavery as the omnipresent metaphor of human rights violations. For it is the Portuguese slavemaster Corregidora, whose last name
Ursa bears, who had held Great Gram and Gram captive, exploiting them both physically and
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psychologically. What differentiates Corregidora from other narratives of slavery, such as for instance Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada , is Jones’s reference to the Brazilian mutation of the institution rather than to its North American counterpart. In an interview with Charles Rowell, Jones concedes to her interest in Brazilian history (qtd. in Coser
121), which inescapably comprises the history of slavery practiced there by the Portuguese colonizers until as late as 1888. Jones explains that to her, it is essential to be able to write about
“the whole Americas,” that is about both parts of the continent, and to “write imaginatively about blacks anywhere/everywhere” (“Interview” 40). Jones’s literary recreation of Brazilian slavery thus extends the conception of the African Diaspora, and at the same time, as Jones acknowledges, it provides an indirect perspective on slavery in the North American South
(“Interview” 40). Whereas Beloved focuses on the all encompassing dehumanizing conditions of human bondage which can initiate the most desperate of actions, an attribute of slavery which is portrayed and simultaneously ridiculed in Reed’s ironic Flight to Canada , Jones selects female sexual exploitation in slavery, and also in the twentieth century, as the focal point of
Corregidora .
Hence, in comparison with Solar Storms , Indian Killer and Ghost Singer , the presence of trauma in Corregidora is considerably more explicit. Unlike in the texts previously analyzed, trauma firmly resides in the thematic plane of the novel, where Ursa ceaselessly wavers between her own traumatization and the trauma of her formerly enslaved and sexually abused foremothers. It is tempting to posit that Jones’s novel portrays the interplay between Ursa’s individual trauma and the communal trauma of slavery to which Ursa’s maternal ancestors were forcibly subjected. However, on closer inspection it becomes apparent that Jones transfers the text’s concern from a potential dialogue between personal and communal trauma to the
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explorations of the existential condition of African American women both historically and in the present. Her female characters’ physical existence spans the geography of two continents and both the rural and urban areas of the United States. It also covers almost two centuries of slavery and post slavery, and reaches well into the 1970s. Jones’s concentration on several generations of women characters can be paralleled to the women in Hogan’s Solar Storms , yet the women’s actual situations in each of the novels differ. While Hogan explicitly depicts almost exclusively
Angel’s and Hannah’s physical and psychological traumas, Jones bestows each woman inhabiting Corregidora with her personal traumas grounded in sexual and gender related abuse and intentional mistreatment. Great Gram and Gram are held captive and sexually exploited by their Portuguese slavemaster Corregidora; Mama becomes a one time victim of a physical assault by her husband; in a fit of her own husband’s jealousy, Ursa is thrust down a flight of stairs in consequence of which she undergoes hysterectomy and loses both her fetus and her uterus; Ursa’s friend Catty is unable to derive any sexual satisfaction from an intercourse with her husband; whereas Ursa’s school friend becomes pregnant in her early teens upon which the child’s father abandons her.
Such is the textual diameter through which Jones navigates her individual characters’ traumatization, ranging from Catty’s unfulfilled sexual desire to Ursa’s battering, to coerced prostitution exercised on Great Gram and Gram. Ursa’s hysterectomy, with the entailing condition of sterility, becomes her determining trait as well as the novel’s governing trauma.
Jones opens Corregidora with the act of violence against Ursa:
It was 1947 when Mutt and I was married. I was singing in Happy’s Café around
on Delaware Street. He didn’t like for me to sing after we were married. […] it
was in April 1948 that Mutt came to Happy’s drunk and said if I didn’t get off the
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stage he was going to take me off. I didn’t move. […] ‘I don’t like those mens
messing with you,’ he said. ‘Don’t nobody mess with me.’ ‘Mess with they eyes.’
That was when I fell. The doctors in the hospital said my womb would have to
come out. (3 4)
In the course of coping with her radically redefined womanhood, a coping which constitutes the novel’s thematic framework, Ursa unravels her relatives’ traumas as well as the other women characters’ encounters with physical maltreatment. As the narrative unfolds, Ursa slowly recounts her incest stained genealogy, embodied mainly in the fact that the slavemaster
Corregidora is both Gram’s and Mama’s father. Ursa cogently summarizes her foremothers’ history in this excerpt:
I took one of my iron pills. I swallowed it and closed my eyes. I wanted a song
that would touch me, touch my life and theirs. A Portuguese song, but not a
Portuguese song. A new world song. A song branded with the new world. I
thought of the girl who had to sleep with her master and mistress. Her father, the
master. Her daughter’s father. The father of her daughter’s daughter. How many
generations? Days that were pages of hysteria. Their survival depended on
suppressed hysteria. She went and got her daughter, womb swollen with the child
of her own father. How many generations had to bow to his genital fantasies?
(Jones, Corregidora 59, emphasis in the original)
The knowledge of her relatives’ history of extensive abuse, to which this passage testifies, introduces another dimension of trauma into Ursa’s life.
In terms of scholarly acknowledgement, Corregidora has been interpreted from manifold critical perspectives. The metaphors and tropes widely explored range from the blues embodying
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Ursa’s alternate voice and agency (Dubey, “Gayl”), to subjectivity and intersubjective relations
(Rushy), to Jones’s pronounced employment of the imagery of silence (Cognard Black). Time and temporality is yet another theme dominating both the narrative and the novel’s readings.
Between Ursa’s hysterectomy and her final reunion with Mutt at the novel’s conclusion, the story bridges the period of twenty two years, while simultaneously extending to the nineteenth century through Great Gram’s and Gram’s lives. Provided the accentuated presence of the past, a past which is never too remote to prevent instant recollection, time is of prime importance in the characters’ lives. Frequently, images and stories pertaining to the characters’ past intermingle with their present existence. Moreover, Jones structures the narrative in a manner which oftentimes leaves the reader hesitant as to the identity of the remembering character, the addressee of the recollection, or the central subject of the narrated memory. As the novel’s narrator, it is predominantly Ursa who recalls her mother’s, grandmother’s and great grandmother’s stories to which she had been exposed since her early childhood. Ursa’s recollections, thus, frequently actualize the past in and for the contemporary here and now. In this regard, Hershini Bhana Young speaks about the novel’s temporality as about “the past that is present” (108), for indeed, the past is never completely absent. It constantly resurfaces in Ursa’s reminiscences or, as she observes, materializes as the consequences of one’s actions:
“Consequences. […] Consequences of what? Shit, we’re all consequences of something. Stained with another’s past as well as our own. Their past in my blood. I’m a blood” (Jones, Corregidora
45). Whether in the form of consequences or merely as intangible memories, the past resurfaces ever so often and blurs with the present into an almost inseparable temporal sequence.
The omnipresence of the past, which, from the perspective of narrative devices, inevitably culminates in temporal shifts and conflations of time planes, can be related to various
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motivations. For instance, Stelamaris Coser maintains that the fluctuations of the temporal setting, accompanied also by alterations in spatial locations, allow for “broader and deeper perceptions to be translated into writing,” that is for portraying the complexities of human experience in a fashion which is profound and all embracing (121). Coser’s observation finds its echo in Madhu Dubey’s analysis. Dubey asserts that the structure of Jones’s novel “so thoroughly fuses Ursa’s story with the history of her foremothers that any distinction between past and present becomes inoperative” (“Gayl” 251). Jones herself locates the reason for emphasizing the novel’s temporality in her engagement with oral tradition. 58 In an interview with
Roseann Bell, Jones explains how she sees the fundamental interrelatedness of time and oral tradition: “Perceptions of time are important in the oral storytelling tradition in the sense that you can make rapid transitions between one period and the next, sort of direct transitions” (285).
Jones transplants this perspective in its entirety to the novel, where the transitions from the past to the present and back are genuinely prompt and immediate. In light of the critics’ observations and Jones’s own words, one can suggest that the author endows time and temporality in
Corregidora with a presence comparable to that of the characters.
As an extension of Coser’s and Dubey’s readings I propose that the novel’s disturbed temporality can be also interpreted in terms of trauma, given the continuum of sexual oppression and its ramifications which Corregidora portrays. Among others, Bruce Simon identifies the trauma pervading Ursa’s narrative in that, as he asserts, Ursa’s singing of the blues is her way of
“bearing witness to New World history as a history of trauma” (96). The prime metaphor occupying the center of Simon’s reading is that of traumatic repetition which he derives from
Freud’s concept of compulsive repetition, or repetition compulsion, developed in Beyond the
58 For Jones’s discussion of the importance of orality in African American literary tradition, see her collection of essays Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (1991).
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Pleasure Principle (Freud 19 20). In his analysis, Simon maintains that trauma accounts for
Great Gram’s seemingly incomprehensible repetitive patterns structuring her storytelling acts about the past (99). In the same vein, Simon extends the trope of trauma to the manifold other instances of repetition and return depicted in the course of the narrative. Adopting Simon’s conclusions, I argue that the very mechanism of repetition already entails an inherent conflation of temporal planes when, through its recurrence as the repeated, the past is made present. Hence,
I resume Simon’s conviction and maintain that in Corregidora the presence of the characters’ traumas accounts for both the repetitions and, most notably, for the fluctuating temporality. This particular reading broadens the scope of motivations for Jones’s specific treatment of temporality, and it enhances Simon’s discussion of trauma in the novel. Analogously, the framework of traumatic temporality allows me to demonstrate how Jones’s text chronicles the uniqueness of a person’s experiencing time when confronted with the overwhelming circumstances of trauma and its consequences.
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The scene which is highly illustrative of the intertwined perception of time in encountering trauma transpires at the novel’s very opening and is identical to the excerpt quoted earlier. Namely, it is the moment when Mutt, in a seizure of possessiveness, triggers a chain reaction beginning with Ursa’s fall and culminating in the irreversible consequences of her hysterectomy. In the printed version of the novel, Ursa’s fatal accident and her subsequent sojourn in hospital comprise of no more than seven lines: “That was when I fell. The doctors in the hospital said my womb would have to come out. Mutt and me didn’t stay together after that. I wouldn’t even let him come in the hospital to see me when I knew what was happening. They said he’d come in when I didn’t know what was happening. They said when I was delirious I was
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cursing him and the doctors and nurses out” (Jones, Corregidora 4, emphasis in the original).
Upon careful examination, one realizes that the actual physical trauma, the blow against Ursa’s body, is conspicuously absent from Jones’s depiction. 59 In fact, the void in the narrative encompasses both the act of traumatization proper and its agent, for Ursa herself assumes the responsibility for the fall. Her transposition of the actual agent is evident in her unambiguous and impassionate statement “That was when I fell” (Jones, Corregidora 4, emphasis mine). Despite the evasiveness of this particular passage, the reader doubtlessly identifies Ursa’s husband as the character to be held accountable.
Nevertheless, in this way Jones presents the reader with a fissure in the linearity of the narrative. It is a fissure which, like a missing central piece of a puzzle, testifies to the perceptual incompleteness of the subject’s experiencing of reality in and/or after trauma. In other words,
Jones’s omission of the crucial information signifies trauma’s elusiveness to a person’s senses and cognition. In consequence, Ursa does not possess any immediate conscious recollection of the incident, which precludes her from meeting the expectations imposed on her as the novel’s narrator. Being simultaneously the narrator and an individual subjected to trauma, Ursa’s narrator’s self forcibly succumbs to her traumatized self, leaving the reader with an image which is crucial yet unfinished. To take the argument further, Ursa’s accident takes place in a temporal vacuum; time resumes its standard procession only after Ursa is taken to hospital. The time between “That was when I fell” and the immediately succeeding “The doctors in the hospital” is as nonexistent as the missing fragment of the narrative description.
Both the imminence of the scene and its anchorless temporality constitute Ursa’s inability to fully experience, and subsequently narrate, her actual traumatization and its instant aftermath.
59 I would like to acknowledge Hershini Bhana Young’s book chapter, “Between a Push and a Fall: The Politics of Re Memory in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora ,” the title of which has provided the originary impetus of my current argumentation.
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Only in the gradual development of the story do the other characters reveal to Ursa the circumstances of her hospitalization, but not of the fall which remains shrouded in vagueness till the novel’s end. Jones foreshadows Ursa’s inevitable reliance on others’ knowledge already in the twice repeated “They said:” “They said he’d come in […]. They said when I was delirious
[…]” ( Corregidora , 4). As the story progresses, Jones substitutes the anonymity of “they” with
Ursa’s second husband Tad who helps Ursa re visit her conduct in hospital. At a certain later point, Tad discloses to Ursa what he himself had learnt only second hand: “They said you had those nurses scared to death of you. Cussing them out like that. Saying words they ain’t never heard before. They kept saying, ‘What is she, a gypsy?’” (Jones, Corregidora 8). In other words, only in the act of re vision, with a pronounced assistance of others, does Ursa experience her trauma as if for the first time. This belatedness of traumatic experience is one of the cornerstones of Caruth’s theory of trauma to which I will return shortly. For the time being, however, I deem it essential to read Ursa, not only as a symbolic, but primarily as a literal trauma survivor. For
Ursa’s post hysterectomy symptomatology significantly correlates with cases described in medical literature on the trauma of miscarriage.
Ursa’s hysterectomy, apart from depriving her of a potential motherhood, also means a termination of an early stage pregnancy, a fact which she confesses to Catty: “‘It wasn’t just the fall, was it, baby?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘You was big, wasn’t you?’ ‘He [Mutt] didn’t know.’
‘Did you know?’ ‘They said I was about a month pregnant, little over a month’” (Jones,
Corregidora 15). Clinical research confirms that even in very early stages of pregnancy, miscarriage can “initiate a grief response” which involves “myriad adverse physical and psychological symptoms,” such as shock, sadness, anger, sleep and appetite disturbances and interpersonal conflicts, to name just a few (Van 231). In general, studies show that miscarriage
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has the potential of inducing emotional responses in the form of depression and anxiety (Lee and
Slade 235). What is more, the moment of miscarriage has to be oftentimes viewed as a traumatic event in its own right and as the traumatizing stimulus per se. Lee and Slade argue that “[t]he experience of miscarriage may also be a very physically traumatic event,” comprising
“considerable and sudden pain, loss of blood, rapid hospitalization, and an operation” (239).
Majority of these observations are applicable to Ursa’s medical state. Also Ursa’s general post operation health condition bears resemblance to individuals suffering from posttraumatic states.
The condition comprises Ursa’s already discussed rudeness toward the hospital personnel which the others refer to as “evil spells” (Jones, Corregidora 14); her lapses into half conscious reveries (Jones, Corregidora 24); and some initial irregularities of dietary habits (Jones,
Corregidora 5). Yet another aspect contributing to Ursa’s status of a trauma survivor ensues from her being a victim of her husband’s violence. Manifold research corroborates that exposure to domestic violence may result in trauma symptoms or even diagnosable PTSD (Brown et al). 60
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I argue that Ursa’s immediately personal trauma, that of physical abuse, hysterectomy and sterility, is a replication, or return, of the repressed trauma of the colonial oppression. As I discuss in the first chapter, this kind of trauma encompasses the Middle Passage as well as the bondage of slavery, and finds its extension in the sexual exploitation, racial discrimination and disempowerment of the present. In the process of Ursa’s coping with her newly redefined womanhood, she begins to interrogate the life experience of her foremothers from an original perspective. Despite having been exposed to her Great Gram’s, Gram’s and Mama’s stories since
60 Brown et al. maintain that partner violence “is often experienced as a traumatic event” (1481). Drawing on research data from the last ten years, the scholars demonstrate that more than fifty percent of individuals exposed to partner or domestic violence eventually develop some sorts of trauma symptoms or full fledged PTSD (Brown et al. 1481).
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childhood, the experience of hysterectomy propels Ursa to recall the stories and to attempt to fully comprehend them in new light through imaginative dialogues with her foremothers. Ursa’s trauma functions as a doorway through which the reader accesses the traumatization of the preceding generations. The private trauma makes Ursa actualize the past and transplant it to the present, obliterating in the course any transparent distinctions between the two temporal planes.
Oftentimes, the graphic design of the text is the sole marker of temporality in the narrated scene.
Jones utilizes two kinds of letter font to distinguish between the non italicized narrative present and the italicized extra narrative past of Ursa’s recollections and fantasies.
In the overwhelming majority, the text comprises of the characters’ verbal exchanges, memories thereof, and Ursa’s depictions of hers or her relatives’ past. On the other hand, descriptions pertaining to the physical circumstances of the narrative present are noticeably absent. Jones leaves it up to the reader’s imagination to interpret the concrete conditions along with the temporal setting of the scenes narrated, the only indicator being the said font alternations, as, for instance, in the following passage:
“…The important thing is making generations. They can burn the papers but they
can’t burn conscious, Ursa. And that what makes the evidence. And that’s what
makes the verdict. ” “Procreation. That could also be a slave breeder’s way of
thinking.” “But it’s not.” “No. And you can’t.” “Not anymore, no.” Gram was
standing in the doorway looking down at me. She looked tall then, because I was
little, but Mama said she wasn’t no more than five feet. “… His hair was so dark
and greasy straight you could a swore he was pure Indian. […] He was from over
there somewhere in Portugal. Naw, it wasn’t Lisbon. That’s the capital. Naw, I
don’t know where. ” (Jones, Corregidora 22 23, emphasis in the original)
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The excerpt clearly demonstrates the degree to which Jones intermingles the present with the past. It also testifies to the considerable omissions pervading the narrative. It is apparent that when the recalled dialogue occurred in its original setting, Ursa could not refrain from subjecting
Gram’s story to supplementary questioning. In its present recreation, however, the questions are no longer available to the reader. What remains is Gram’s answers which unveil only some aspects of her personal story. The quoted passage can be viewed as a representative recollection which exemplifies the manifold other occasions upon which Ursa introspectively revives the past via memories, dreams and daydreaming. Through these media, the repressed past of the colonial oppression is displayed for the reader to ponder.
It is essential to emphasize that in the family of the Corregidora women, the past has always been debated frequently and in vivid detail. All the three women, Great Gram, Gram, and
Mama, have shared their past with one another and with Ursa. As Ursa observes about the regularity of storytelling: “My great grandmama told my grandmama the part she lived through that my grandmama didn’t live through and my grandmama told my mama what they both lived through and my mama told me what they all lived through” (Jones, Corregidora 9). However, behind the superficial accessibility of the stories, there are layers of repression which prevent
Great Gram, Gram and Mama from narrating their experiences in their complexity. Ursa realizes the presence of the repressed very early in her life: “‘Did they [Great Gram and Gram] have any other children?’ I’d asked Mama once when they weren’t there. I’d been afraid to ask when they were there, because I’d asked Great Gram once when I was real small if Grandmama had any brothers or sisters, and she’d given me this real hateful look” (Jones, Corregidora 61). The repression which my analysis, and Ursa’s words above corroborate, is what Toni Morrison has termed “national amnesia” (Angelo), that is a widespread reluctance to impart one’s past in its
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entirety and collaboratively construct a picture of the past in doing so. The repressed in the novel allegorizes the blatant absence of an open public discourse with the capacity to link the affluence of the contemporary American society with the exploitative mechanisms out of which this society has been created. As a specific example, Toni Morrison brings to the fore the scarcity of educational institutions dedicated to the slavery past of the United States. In an interview with
Walter Clemons, Morrison describes her disappointment when she was confronted with the lacking unambiguous evidence of this past: “I went to slave museums, but they weren’t much help: little handcraft things that slaves had made. No chains or restraining devices” (qtd. in
Broad 193). I argue, therefore, that Ursa’s traumatization induces a fictional meeting between the past and the present, a meeting through which Jones counters the amnesia and uncovers the repressed of the contemporary American society.
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Ursa’s traumatic hysterectomy becomes the stimulus which reveals the past injustices the knowledge of which has been largely suppressed in and by the general public discourse. In this sense, the novel’s opening scene bears resemblance to Freud’s understanding of trauma. In particular, it evokes Freud’s initial perception of trauma, according to which a later incident in an individual’s life brings into his or her consciousness the event of previous traumatization, hitherto unacknowledged or repressed. Judith Herman explains the fundamental principle of
Freud’s system thusly: “Freud and his patients uncovered major traumatic events of childhood concealed beneath the more recent, often relatively trivial experiences that had actually triggered the onset of hysterical symptoms” (13). In Moses and Monotheism , Freud expands the premise of his trauma theory and applies it to the process of history, which is, in Caruth’s own elaboration on Freud, “the history of a trauma” ( Unclaimed 15). Explaining his perspective on the origins of
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Judaism as a monotheist religious institution, Freud concludes that historical events which are specifically defined by violence betray a disposition toward duplication, that is toward their own repetition at a certain moment in history (Felman, Juridical 62). In Shoshana Felman’s summarization, Freud’s paradigm indicates that “great historical events (especially events related to a murder) tend to repeat themselves and are inherently dual in nature, because their impact – as a consequence of trauma – takes effect and truly registers in history only through the gap of their traumatic repetition (or through their post traumatic reenactment)” ( Juridical 62, emphasis in the original). If interpreted through the prism of dualism, Mutt’s harmful act is the trauma which unmasks the traumatization inherent to the colonial system. Ursa’s consequent inner contemplations voice her foremothers’ personal oppression against the larger backdrop of colonialism as the originary trauma.
This indicates that one of the defining features of Freud’ conception of trauma is trauma’s latency, or as Caruth says, belatedness ( Unclaimed 16 18). Freud illustrates what latency means in the frequently quoted example of the victim of a railway accident:
It may happen that someone gets away, apparently unharmed, from the spot where
he has suffered a shocking accident, for instance a train collision. In the course of
the following weeks, however, he develops a series of grave psychical and motor
symptoms, which can be ascribed only to his shock or whatever else happened at
the time of the accident. He has developed a “traumatic neurosis.” ( Moses 105)
Still further, latency, sometimes referred to as an incubation period, is, as Freud puts it, the “time that elapsed between the accident and the first appearance of the symptoms” (Freud, Moses 105).
Caruth then appropriates Freud’s metaphor of the accident victim for her own understanding of the dual character of trauma, which allows her to conclude that “[t]he historical power of the
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trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all” ( Unclaimed 17). Based on my reading of Jones’s novel, I regard it necessary to supplement Caruth’s observation by that the originary trauma is experienced not so much through “its inherent forgetting” as in its remembering and reenacting. As Ursa’s example demonstrates, it is only her own encounter with trauma, and the ensuing introspective contemplations, which allow her ancestors’ traumas to emerge in the narrative. In Ursa, Jones also enhances the highly distinguished temporality of trauma, observed by both Freud and Caruth, by ascribing her protagonist with an almost limitless temporal transcendence. In Ursa’s (day)dreams the present and the past collapse into an undistinguishable continuum and regularly defy the possibility of any differentiation.
Although the opening paragraph of Corregidora establishes the text’s explicit temporal dimensions, “It was 1947 when Mutt and I was married. […] We were married in December
1947 and it was April 1948 that Mutt came to Happy’s drunk,” the novel’s subsequent temporality is anything but unequivocal (Jones, Corregidora 3). The narrative’s ceaseless alterations of the past and the present disrupt any conventional conception of time, replacing it with a time which reflects the characters’ condition of trauma. Ursa’s hysterectomy shatters the confines of the past and the present, in the approximation of which Ursa endows her maternal ancestors’ experience with form and voices thus the repressed. In this sense, Corregidora bears witness not only to the oppressiveness of slavery in particular, and of the colonial project in general, but primarily to the uniqueness of a person’s temporal perception under circumstances affected by trauma. It is my conviction that through its peculiar treatment of time, Jones’s novel can be read as a symbolic embodiment of a traumatized human psyche and as a testimony of the extensive human suffering under the (neo)colonial rule.
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3.2 Voicing the Trauma of Racism: The Survivor/Listener Dyad and the Trope of Violent Death
in Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
Like in the preceding section, my analysis of Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman addresses trauma in African American literature from the vantage point of slavery but also Reconstruction. Gayl Jones, in an attempt to fictionally recreate the experience of the
African diaspora in both the parts of the American continent, selects Brazilian slavery as the epitome of human rights violations. In contrast, Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane
Pittman relocates the institution of slavery to the geography of the American South. In the previous part of this chapter, I demonstrated that Jones utilizes the conflation of temporal planes, of the past and the present, in order to explore a subject’s experiencing of temporality under traumatic conditions. More importantly, Jones uses this technique to draw a parallel between the sexual violence of slavery and its later replication in the form of domestic abuse of African
American women. While Jones fluctuates between two eras which are almost a century apart,
Gaines presents a narrative which is coherent and linear, yet delineated by almost the same chronological boundaries as Corregidora . The story of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman commences in the final years of the American Civil War and concludes in the 1950s, at a time of escalating struggles of the Civil Rights Movement. The objective of the following exploration is to present Gaines’s text as a narrative of incessant traumatization of human beings which is abated only partially by social development and by the introduction of specific legislature such as the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. As will be shown, Gaines’s employment of a fictional editor of Miss Jane’s autobiography and the author’s emphasis on repetition are two prime narrative strategies through the optics of which The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman can be understood as a trauma narrative. I will devote the first half of the ensuing analysis to positioning
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the editor and Miss Jane as the two collaborative partners of the listener survivor dyad of a trauma testimony as theorized by Dori Laub. Subsequently, in the second half, I will turn my attention to the repetitive imagery of violent death which signifies the novel’s negotiation of the perpetual traumatization exerted against the African American population by the dominant
American society.
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Despite the novel’s purposefully deceptive title, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is a work of fiction like the rest of the texts explored in this dissertation. It is a fictional memoir of Miss Jane, a former slave living in Louisiana, who gives an account of her life to a nameless editor. At the time of the interviews, Miss Jane is already a hundred and ten years old. What
Gaines offers to the reader is, in his words, a “folk autobiography” (qtd. in Wertheim 219). For although Miss Jane is a classic first person narrator, as the fictional editor admits in the novel’s
“Introduction,” Miss Jane’s voice comprises a multitude of other voices coming from both her lived past and the present (Gaines viii). Gaines thus bestows Miss Jane’s story with a dual character. It is an intimate narrative of personal suffering and perseverance, and at the same time it embodies an archetypal life story of many African Americans whose rights have been almost equally suppressed in slavery as in their life after Emancipation. Miss Jane selects as the beginning of her narrative the time when she is a child of ten or eleven years of age who lives at her master Bryant’s plantation and bears the name Ticey. The victorious Union Army is advancing through the South when one of its Corporals, a Mr. Brown from Ohio, encounters
Ticey and replaces her slave name with his daughter’s name Jane (Gaines 8). Although Corporal
Brown’s naming act is no less authoritative or patronizing than the naming done by the slavemasters, to Miss Jane her new appellation represents freedom and she readily accepts it for
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the rest of her life. In terms of narrative structure, Gaines organizes the novel into fours books, titled “The War Years,” “Reconstruction,” “The Plantation,” and “The Quarters,” in which Miss
Jane documents her emergence from slavery and a futile quest for Ohio state, her subsequent work on two Louisiana plantations, and, predominantly, her endless confrontations with racially induced violence and bias. Miss Jane’s and others’ recurring collisions with the racially oppressive ideology of the American society is indicative of traumatic repetition which becomes one of the informing principles of Gaines’s narrative.
Thus, the act of testimony and Gaines’s employment of repetitive imagery of death and violence are the focal point of the upcoming discussion. I argue that The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman is a pertinent contribution to the genre of trauma literature in that Miss Jane’s memoir is in fact an act of testimony. It bears witness to the continuing racial prejudice, the human rights violations and to the subsequent traumatization of individuals in and by the
American society. In my reading, Miss Jane is a trauma survivor who imparts her life story to a listening other embodied by the fictional editor. Miss Jane’s personal recollections and her implied interaction with the editor is the immediate context which gives birth to the testimony.
Although Miss Jane’s testimony encompasses the decades between the end of the American
Civil War and the inception of the Civil Rights Movement, she emphasizes that the trauma which she narrates transcends these strictly delineated temporal boundaries. The almost seamless continuity of violence, both physical and psychological, perpetrated by the dominant society against the African American population is, then, represented by the key metaphor of violent death. In the course of her narrative, Miss Jane relates four episodes of such death, each of which occupies the center of one of the novel’s individual books. These recurring portrayals of death are evocative of repetition as one of the inherent features of a person’s posttraumatic condition.
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In Freud’s conception, this kind of repetition in relation to unnatural death is a fundamental aspect of trauma and, as shown in my reading of Jones’s Corregidora , of history stained with trauma. The deaths portrayed in Gaines’s narrative trigger reactions in other characters which can be deemed traumatic, consolidating thus the presence of trauma in the novel. 61 Analyzing the author’s choice of the repetitive imagery allows me to interpret the novel as a fictional corroboration of the continuum of violent oppression. It is oppression which transgresses the era of slavery and Reconstruction and manifests itself in the twentieth century with an almost comparable intensity. In this sense, the novel presents a challenge to the general assumption about slavery as the originary trauma whose legacy is ubiquitous in the contemporary American society. Instead, Miss Jane’s testimony locates the trauma with the atrocities of slavery as well as with the cruelties of Reconstruction and those committed later in the twentieth century. The repetition of a violent death is a narrative means through which the historical traumatization of African Americans is associated with the perpetuated unequal power hierarchies of the American society more than with the institution of slavery exclusively.
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Concerning the novel’s status of a testimony, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman represents what Dori Laub terms the testimonial process to a massive psychic trauma
(Psychoanalysis 4). Like many other studies on trauma, Laub’s is mostly embedded in his work with Holocaust survivors. Yet, Laub’s definition of massive trauma is pertinent to other occurrences of human rights violations. The most significant characteristics which Laub
61 Such immediate responses of trauma survivors are known in psychological literature as peritraumatic reactions to a stressor and they may include “(1) observable behaviors or symptoms (e.g. conversion, agitation, stupor); (2) emotional or cognitive experiences (e.g. anxiety, panic, numbing, confusion); or (3) mental processes or functions (e.g. defenses)” (Shalev 87). In the novel, the characters’ responding to the violence committed against others involve stupor (Gaines 23) and loss of consciousness (Gaines 105, 243), contrasted with physical agitation (Gaines 183).
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mentions pertaining to trauma include its ability to shape “the representation of reality of several generations,” and, more importantly, to affect all the persons involved in a trauma’s occurrence
(Psychoanalysis 4). As Laub observes, “whoever partakes of trauma, whether victim, perpetrator, bystander, or even remote historical victim (such as children), is affected by it [trauma], albeit in very different ways” ( Psychoanalysis 4). Miss Jane’s narrative demonstrates both the main features of Laub’s concept. As her story advances, it becomes evident that the social structures responsible for people’s traumatization under slavery replicate themselves and oppress persons also in the era when the slaveholding practice is formally abolished. Retraumatization of successive generations, either by some violent acts themselves or by maintaining a system of unjust inequity, becomes the crux of Miss Jane’s testimonial narrative. In addition, her story documents how trauma equally affects all the individuals implicated, whether victims or perpetrators, in the same way as Anna Lee Walters’s Ghost Singer does. For it is the suicide of a white character, Tee Bob, which points to the socially harmful atmosphere and to the impact that trauma exercises over the population of the South, over both former slaves and their masters.
As Dori Laub elaborates further, within the context of trauma testimony, the subject of the listener is of identical prominence to the subject of the teller. In the case of Gaines’s novel, the listener is an implied figure whose voice sounds directly only on the four pages of the novel’s
“Introduction.” The motivating principle of the “Introduction” is to disguise the novel as a non fiction study marked in the “Introduction” by both formal and thematic aspects. The chapter precedes the novel’s actual text and its lower case roman pagination conforms to the standard pagination of an introduction in an academic work. Also, in terms of its content, the
“Introduction” resembles its non fiction models. The editor describes the progression and circumstances of the interviews conducted with Miss Jane and the difficulties which he had
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encountered in the process. In an instance which is illustrative of Gaines’s imitating scholarly writing, the editor explicates the discrepancy between Miss Jane’s spoken word and the editor’s ultimate written version of her narrative. In effect, the editor creates a notion of addressing the technical facet of his project: “I could not possibly put down on paper everything that Miss Jane and the others said on the tape during those eight or nine months. Much of it was too repetitious and did not follow a single direction. What I have tried to do here was not to write everything, but in essence everything that was said. I have tried my best to retain Miss Jane’s language. Her selection of words; the rhythm of her speech” (Gaines vii). In a corresponding manner, the editor concludes the “Introduction” with an analogy to the conventional words of acknowledgement:
“In closing I wish to thank all the wonderful people who were at Miss Jane’s house through those long months of interviewing her” (Gaines viii). In these excerpts, Gaines creates an illusion of a listening character who is at the origin of both Miss Jane’s telling and the physical existence of the novel itself. Although the editor provides the framework and general perspective on the rest of the text, his character is mostly ignored by critics in their readings of the novel. Contrary to the critics’ neglect, I argue that the editor’s importance surpasses the introductory chapter for he acts as the initiator of Miss Jane’s testimony and in essence her listener. 62 Despite the editor’s physical absence from the rest of the novel, he is present as the entity against whom Miss Jane endows her personal story with distinct contours.
Hence, being in the position of Laub’s listener to a traumatic testimony, the editor facilitates Miss Jane’s witnessing of her trauma and the very emergence of her story. In Laub’s own formulation, the listener, or the “hearer” of the testimony, is “the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time” (“Bearing” 57). As the process of witnessing rests
62 The figure of a listening other is also partly discussed in the concluding section of the present chapter focusing on Sapphire’s novel Push .
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predominantly in the cooperation between the teller and the listener, Laub maintains that “[i]t is the encounter and the coming together between the survivor and the listener, which makes possible something like a repossession of the act of witnessing. This joint responsibility is the source of the reemerging truth” (“Truth” 69). The relevance of Laub’s observation notwithstanding, it is essential to problematize his conception of truth. What emanates in the course of a testimony is a subjective truth, which always varies for both the teller and the listener, rather than any allegedly objective truth about the historical experience that is being narrated.
Moreover, Laub observes that in the course of testifying, the listener ventures beyond what is known, that is beyond historical accounts of the traumatic event. More specifically, Laub notes that, as the testimony unfolds, the listener “comes to look for something that is in fact nonexistent; a record that has yet to be made” (“Bearing” 57), which correlates with what the novel’s editor explicitly concedes to be dedicated to. Upon being confronted by Mary Hodges, a woman who lives with Miss Jane and looks after her, the editor reveals his motivation for approaching Miss Jane. To his perception, Miss Jane represents an element of reality which is absent from official accounts of history. Mary Hodges’s following straightforward question elicits the editor’s concession: “What you want know about Miss Jane for?” (Gaines v). The ensuing verbal exchange illustrates how, in the editor’s view, Miss Jane’s testimony can complement the narratives constructed by historiography: “‘I teach history,’ I said. ‘I’m sure her life’s story can help me explain things to my students.’ ‘What’s wrong with them books you already got?’ Mary said. ‘Miss Jane is not in them’” (Gaines v). The conversation indicates the editor’s search for underrepresented narratives with the capacity to communicate a history as trauma which is oftentimes absent from scholarly historiographic discourse. Laub’s theory also
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elucidates what may be seen as the novel’s editor’s inherent motivation behind his enterprise:
“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 an overwhelming shock – has not been truly witnessed yet, not been taken cognizance of” (“Bearing” 57). The editor’s urge to record an alternative history of the first hundred years of the post slavery
American society is what incites Miss Jane’s narrative. The desire is apparent immediately in the opening sentence of the novel: “I had been trying to get Miss Jane Pittman to tell me the story of her life for several years now” (Gaines v). By initiating the narrative, which constitutes the body proper of the novel, the editor locates himself in the position of a witness to a narrative of trauma.
In respect to the editor’s condition of a witness, his character can be read as an almost ideal listener to trauma. Although the manner of Miss Jane’s speech implies the editor’s omnipresence, the editor’s verbal interventions are virtually nonexistent in the novel’s text, but for the “Introduction.” At the same time, the reader encounters a story which directly proceeds from the listener’s inconspicuous presence. It can be argued that Gaines fictionally recreates a delicate balance between actively mediating a testimony and acknowledging the benefits of silence on the listener’s part. Laub defines the exquisite complexity of the dynamics within the teller/listener dyad: “Paradoxically enough, the interviewer has to be, thus, both unobtrusive, nondirective, and yet imminently present, active, in the lead” (“Bearing” 71). The particular narrative device establishing the editor’s textual absent presence can be traced in the oraliterary qualities of the novel. Oraliterarity is a term which the critics Jennifer Cognard Black and Gay
Wilentz employ in the context of Gayl Jones’s works, Corregidora and Liberating Voices , respectively. As a concept, oraliterarity denotes a text’s combination of the oral and the written.
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In this sense, oraliterarity is a relevant analytical tool for other texts in the African American literary tradition. Specifically in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman , the text’s oraliterary character indicates the insinuated cooperation between Miss Jane and the editor, that is between the teller and the listener of the testimonial process. Primarily, the novel’s oraliterarity translates into Miss Jane’s vernacular language. More significantly still, at some places Gaines intersperses the novel with Miss Jane’s remarks which instantaneously imply the listener’s presence. The remarks then remind the reader that, according to the “Introduction,” the novel’s textual body is in fact structured as a transcription of tape recorded interviews. In consequence, the text’s fundamental reliance on oral exchanges is what allows for its oraliterary reading. But it is in
Miss Jane’s cursory remarks that the existence of the listener is acknowledged the most.
The two excerpts which follow are instances of the language that Gaines utilizes to bring into the fore the implicit presence of the listener and, with him, the text’s reliance on the orality of the conducted interviews. Both the passages direct the reader’s focus to the actual present when Miss Jane relates her stories. In the first example, Miss Jane retells an anecdote in which, immediately after liberation, the former slaves are assuming their new names. In the course of this story, Miss Jane draws a parallel between her recollection and the existing physical surroundings of the interview in process. She describes a situation when she had attacked a person for naming himself Brown, that is appropriating the name that Jane had received from the
Unionist Corporal Brown: “But when I heard the slow wit say his name was Brown I was ready to fight. I jumped up off that log and went for him. […] And I tried to crack his head open with that stick. But I didn’t bit more hurt that loon than I would hurt that post at the end of my gallery” (Gaines 18 19). Miss Jane’s reference to the concrete shape of her gallery draws the reader’s attention to the company of the addressee of this remark. In other words, Miss Jane
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emphasizes the presence of the listener and editor of her narrative, to whom she shows the indicated gallery post. Another instance is yet more straightforward in its direct address of the editor. It occurs when Miss Jane muses about the struggles at the inception of the Civil Rights
Movement:
These white people had been living like this for hundreds and hundreds of years
and they wasn’t about to give up without a fight. Look what they did that young
lady at that Alabama school. Look what they did them little children there in
Tennessee and there in Arkansas. What about that thing they had to kick out the
Catholic church there in New Orleans? Suppose to be great leaders – but who was
the bravest? Tell me. (Gaines 230)
Although Miss Jane’s ways of addressing the editor may seem as mere rhetorical devices of speech, they also insinuate the listening other for the benefit of whom they are primarily uttered.
Therefore, in the vicinity of the editor, Miss Jane becomes a witness to the trauma of
African Americans, a trauma initiated and sanctioned by racial prejudice and power inequality intrinsic to both slavery and the post slavery eras. As it is common with trauma survivors, Miss
Jane initially attempts to defy the possibility of her narrative. When the editor introduces the reader into the story, he points out this kind of resistance on Miss Jane’s part: “each time I asked her [to tell the story of her life] she told me there was no story to tell” (Gaines v). As already indicated, Miss Jane manages to overcome her evasive reluctance only with time. The traumas marking Miss Jane’s life range from her mother being murdered by a plantation overseer, to Miss
Jane herself being sterile as a direct consequence of beating by a slaveholding master, to witnessing excessive abuse and killings of others. In the gradual development of the story, Miss
Jane’s personal traumas are complemented by the African American trauma from a communal
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perspective. In Miss Jane’s frequent remembering of the injustice perpetrated against other characters, her memoir can be interpreted as a multivocal testimony in which other characters’ life stories resurface from the depths of historiographic oblivion. This multivocality is one of the aspects that the editor emphasizes in the “Introduction.” As he acknowledges, many a time in the course of the interviews, Miss Jane’s voice had betrayed a need to be complemented by the voices of the nameless others: “But during that third week everything slowed up to an almost complete halt. Miss Jane began to forget everything. […] The only thing that saved me was that there were other people at the house every day that I interviewed her, and they were glad to help in every way that they could. Miss Jane was constantly turning to one of them for the answer”
(Gaines vi). Except for Mary Hodges and “[a]n old man called Pap,” the persons to whom the editor refers remain anonymous (Gaines vi). To the same extent as the individuals are willing to continue Miss Jane’s narrative in cases of her memory indispositions, the editor seamlessly incorporates their stories into the flow of Miss Jane’s speech. About this the editor observes:
“Miss Jane’s story is all of their stories, and their stories are Miss Jane’s” (Gaines viii). In the final effect, Miss Jane’s testimony organically coalesces the individual and the communal of the
African American traumatic history.
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In order to indicate this kind of longitudinal trauma and its almost unchanging nature,
Ernest Gaines employs the device of narrative repetition, the most pronounced instances of which materialize themselves as the novel’s imagery. As James Snead points out, repetition is one of the inherent and inevitable principles of any culture (215). He theorizes that, in terms of
African and African American cultures, repetition is overtly present particularly in the cultures’
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artistic expressions. 63 In addition, I posit that the recurring tropes of the characters’ violent and unnatural deaths in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman can be also read in terms of Freud’s repetition compulsion, through which the traumatic history haunts the text. As already presented in the preceding section on Jones’s Corregidora , Freud believed that, in the course of time, eruptions of violence have a tendency to duplicate themselves. He explains such reemergence of atrocities by individuals’ fixation on trauma. That is, in an attempt to remember one’s trauma, or to comprehend it in reliving, a person inadvertently re exposes himself or herself, yet again, to situations which are potentially harmful (Freud, Moses 118 19). In these terms, contemporary research substantiates that trauma victims are more susceptible to retraumatization than persons who have not been previously traumatized. Both McFarlane with van der Kolk and Judith
Herman arrive at a comparable conclusion about this kind of predisposition to retraumatization.
McFarlane and van der Kolk claim that “once people are traumatized, they are liable to be traumatized again. […] Once traumatized, people often lose their hold on self protection and are prone to put themselves in harm’s way” (“Trauma” 35). By the same token, Herman quotes
Diana Russell whose study of incestuously abused women shows that two thirds of the women constituting Russell’s sample “were subsequently raped” (111). In this sense, the four occurrences of violent death in the novel can be read as representing Freud’s duality of trauma’s reemergence and at the same time as Gaines’s criticism of the social system which validates ongoing retraumatization.
63 Snead draws a parallel between diverse cultural media, be that music, religious sermons or literature, and maintains that repetition assumes its existence as a form of rhythm: “Repetition in black culture finds its most characteristic shape in performance: rhythm in music, dance and language” (215). Specifically in literature, according to Snead, repetition tends to derive its actual presence from the musical realm (217). As he notes, literature “has learned from ‘musical’ prototypes in the sense that repetition of words and phrases, rather than being overlooked, is exploited as a structural and rhythmic principle” (217). Indeed, in her analysis of Toni Morrison’s Beloved , Maggie Sale corroborates that repetition penetrating literary language and structure is frequently encountered in African American writing (44).
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The first instance of lethal violence directed against the novel’s characters is perpetrated by a group of so called “patrollers.” As Miss Jane explains, patrollers are “poor white trash that used to find the runaway slaves for the masters” and whose racial prejudice had eventually resulted in their membership in the Ku Klux Klan (Gaines 21). Although the temporal setting of the particular episode is in the days and weeks directly succeeding the abolishing of slavery,
Gaines emphasizes that the legal freedom was insufficient to protect individuals from serious trauma or death. Miss Jane offers a graphic portrayal of the violence:
They came in on horses and mules, and soon as they saw the slow wit they
surrounded him and started beating him with sticks of wood. Some of them had
guns, but they would not waste a bullet. More satisfaction beating him with sticks.
They beat him, he covered up, but they beat him till he was down. Then one of the
patrollers slid off the mule, right cross his tail, and cracked the slow wit in the
head. I could hear his head crack like you hear dry wood break. (Gaines 22)
The slow wit becomes merely one of the many victims of the patrollers’ brutal attack. Other characters who lose their lives in this outburst of aggression are Big Laura with her baby daughter. Laura’s death is significant in that it is partly witnessed by her surviving son, Ned, who also succumbs to a racially motivated assault later in the story.
Ned’s death is a literary recreation of the psychological observations on the susceptibility to retraumatization in victims already traumatized in life. From Miss Jane’s account, the reader can deduce that Ned suffers from some sort of posttraumatic reaction at the time immediately following his mother’s and sister’s deaths as well as later in his life. Frequently, Miss Jane points out Ned’s solemn character traits, which she associates with his early encounter with trauma. In the next excerpt, Miss Jane addresses Ned’s condition: “Ned was seventeen or eighteen then.
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[…] Very quiet – always serious. Too serious. I didn’t like to see him serious like that. I used to always ask him, ‘Ned, what you thinking about?’ He would say, ‘Nothing.’ But I knowed he was thinking about his mama. He never said it, he never talked about her (he used to call me mama) but I knowed he was thinking about her all the time” (Gaines 75). Eventually, Ned becomes a victim of the same racial hatred which had propelled the patrollers to kill his mother and sister.
Ned’s seemingly fearless conduct as an adult implies his inadvertent exposure to a potential new traumatization. Upon his return to Louisiana, Ned dedicates himself to educating the African
American community already with the prospect of his own possible death. When Miss Jane expresses her concern for Ned’s life, Ned’s wife merely acknowledges the presence of such danger: “He told me when he was coming here he could get killed” (Gaines 111). Although at this point of the story, almost forty years have elapsed since the patrollers’ attack on Big Laura and her daughter, the bigotry of the dominant white society has not abated. The trauma of Big
Laura’s, her daughter’s and the slow wit’s deaths replicates itself in the death of Ned.
Unlike in the case of Big Laura’s and Ned’s physical extermination, the suicide of a
European American plantation owner’s son, Tee Bob, and the assassination of the African
American character Jimmy are reciprocally unrelated. Yet, Gaines’s portrayal of these two characters’ deaths intensifies the presence of Freud’s traumatic repetition in the novel. The death of Tee Bob is the central element of the novel’s third book. In the book’s course, Miss Jane contemplates the social preconceptions which had detrimentally effected both African American and European American populations at the beginning of the twentieth century. The notion of “the rules” for her symbolizes societal oppression and perpetuates the status quo of a racially based divide, an internalization of which both the African American and European American characters acknowledge. According to Miss Jane’s accounts, “the rules” are supposed to
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maintain the two populations separate, and their transgression results in an individual’s traumatization, or, as Tee Bob’s suicide insinuates, in death. The implied racial confines of “the rules” coerce Tee Bob to his voluntary departure from life. The death occurs upon Tee Bob’s realization that the segregated society does not approve of his love for a Creole teacher, Mary
Agnes. After Tee Bob’s death, his friend Jimmy Caya concedes to the implicit existence of the racial boundaries and their implications: “‘She’s [Mary Agnes] there for his pleasure, for nothing else,’ […] ‘I didn’t tell him [Tee Bob] no more than what my daddy told me,’ Jimmy Caya said.
‘What my daddy’s daddy told him. What Mr. Paul told Mr. Robert. What Mr. Paul’s daddy told him. What your daddy told you. No more than the rules we been living by ever since we been here’” (Gaines 200 01).
In his attempt to justify the existence of “the rules,” Jimmy Caya provides an unintended insight into the mechanisms of collective stereotyping of the other. In the case of Mary Agnes, the other is both female and partly African American. Maria Root explains how in a society such stereotyping practices directly translate into a form of oppressive dominance. She quotes Susan
Fiske who observes that “[t]he portrayals of women of color by those in power results [ sic ] in a destructive form of social control” (372). By way of continuing Fiske’s argument, Root addresses the sexual aspect of stereotypic African American women, in which her words bear an echo to Jimmy Caya’s presentation of “the rules:” “Many of the stereotypes portray women of color as sexual objects to possess and conquer though simultaneously having little value” (Root
372). Although Tee Bob’s death differs, in both manner and primary motivation, from all the others depicted in the novel, the larger social context which sanctions his trauma correlates with the context of the deaths which precede and follow his.
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As Tee Bob’s traumatization and subsequent suicide are initiated by the segregation of the American society, so is the last death of the novel. Like Ned, Jimmy is an African American activist engaged in civil rights agitation. His murder is a figurative reenactment of Ned’s death, for Jimmy, too, is shot while struggling for the equality of human and civil rights in the
American society. Whereas the agents of all the previous deaths are explicitly portrayed,
Jimmy’s assassin remains symbolically anonymous. The closest that the story comes to revealing the perpetrator’s identity is through an implied impersonal “they” uttered when Jimmy’s murder is first reported to his family and friends: “‘They shot him eight o’clock this morning.’ […]
‘Who shot him?’ Etienne asked. ‘Who knows?’” (Gaines 258 59). This final instance of a character’s death brings Miss Jane’s story to the middle of the twentieth century and the novel to its conclusion. As yet another example of Gaines’s narrative repetition, Jimmy’s death is the final illustration of the continuity of trauma that the novel explores.
The repeated imagery creates a space which enables Gaines to depict traumatic repetition in African American culture. Although Miss Jane’s narrative reaches only as far as the Civil
Rights Movement, her story is a powerful allegory to the degree of inequality still present in contemporary American society as much as it is a potent testimony to the oppression of the past.
Despite Miss Jane’s singular voice, her narrative is a concoction of a multiplicity of others’ voices. In the multivocality, Miss Jane bears witness to the historical experience of those whose rights or lives have been violated by the ideology of racial dominance of the European American population. In an encounter with the analytical framework of trauma, Miss Jane’s story can be interpreted as a narrative of trauma which depicts the harmful societal structures but which, at the same time, envisions a way forward toward a future where healing is possible. As with trauma survivors interviewed by psychologists and psychoanalysts, it is the articulated story of
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the trauma which provides the prospect of potential recovery. Thus, when Miss Jane finally concedes to the editor’s relentless insistence and imparts her story, she also implicitly expresses her and the others’ belief in a future where the traumas of their lives will cease their replication.
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3.3 From “Insect” to “Incest”: A Trauma Survivor Strives to Reclaim Her Language in
Sapphire’s Push
After looking at novels which examine people’s existential condition in slavery and in the post slavery era up until the second half of the twentieth century, I will now transfer the focus to the more contemporary times. While Gayl Jones draws a parallel between the sexual oppression of women in Brazilian slavery and the equally harmful domestic abuse perpetrated against
African American women by their husbands, and while Ernest Gaines testifies to the brutality of
Reconstruction and the pre Civil Rights era, Sapphire concentrates on the systemic oppression generated by the present day American society. In the novel, the American high school education, the healthcare system and welfare policy, paradoxically, emblematize the agents of suffering of many disenfranchised individuals. Like Jones’s Corregidora , Sapphire’s Push is an emotionally intense text featuring a young female protagonist who shocks the reader with the rage and negative affect that she bestows in her narrative as well as with the narrative’s language itself. In the course of the following analysis, I will examine the trauma of familial violence and systemic negligence from which the protagonist’s rage ensues. This section opens with locating the specific place that Sapphire’s novel occupies in the tradition of African American writing.
Subsequently, it proceeds to discuss trauma and its (un)narratability in the novel and concludes by addressing the wider social structures accountable for the traumatization of the novel’s characters.
Claireece Precious Jones is a sixteen year old African American girl living in Harlem who still attends junior high school. Most commonly she is referred to as Precious, for as she notes with disdain when a teacher addresses her Claireece: “[o]nly muthefuckers I hate call me
Claireece” (Sapphire 6). At her young age, Precious is already a mother of two, the girl Little
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Mongo, who suffers from Down Syndrome, and the boy Abdul Jamal Louis Jones. Both of them were conceived in Precious’s abusive incestuous relationship with her biological father, Carl.
Precious has been subject to Carl’s, and also her mother Mary’s, sexual advances since the age of three and when she gives birth to Little Mongo, she is only twelve. At this age, Precious is still virtually illiterate and innumerate although she spends her days at school and concedes to a strong will to learn. In a silent contemplation, she discloses her innumeracy and contrasts it to her desire for knowledge: “I couldn’t let him, anybody, know, page 122 look like page 152, 22,
3, 6, 5 – all the pages look alike to me. ’N I really do want to learn. Everyday I tell myself something gonna happen, some shit like on TV. I’m gonna break through or somebody gonna break through me – I’m gonna learn, catch up, be normal” (Sapphire 5). Eventually, Precious is transferred to an alternative teaching program where she meets an enlightened literacy teacher,
Ms Rain. Under Ms Rain’s guidance, and in the supportive company of young women who suffer from their own traumas, Precious commences a laborious process of literacy acquisition.
As her education advances, Precious also starts to create a narrative out of her traumatic past and confront her (post)traumatic present. The novel concludes when Precious makes significant progress in her reading and writing skills, but when, at the same time, she is diagnosed as HIV positive.
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Sapphire firmly embeds her novel in the tradition of African American writing, intertextually alluding to several of her predecessors. 64 As literacy is what Precious and all the young women in the alternative teaching program strive for, Sapphire frequently invokes the metaphor of a book as the medium of knowledge dissemination. All the fiction and non fiction
64 As an incest survivor, Precious finds herself in the company of Morrison’s Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye and Walker’s Celie in The Color Purple . In addition, Push shares the theme of father daughter incest with Jones’s Corregidora , and Precious’s last name, in fact, echoes the name of Corregidora ’s author.
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books mentioned to in Push originate within the African American literary tradition and they include texts such as Langston Hughes’s Selected Poems , Arnold Adoff’s Malcolm X , and, principally, Walker’s The Color Purple . Walker’s novel occupies the central position in Push undoubtedly because of the affinity of the texts’ central themes of child sexual abuse and women’s (dis)empowerment. Sapphire’s emphasis on The Color Purple can be also viewed as an act of Signifyin(g), postulated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his The Signifying Monkey . The importance of The Color Purple becomes pronounced when, toward the novel’s end, Precious provides the reader with a list of her books which includes Walker’s novel (Sapphire 80) and when she describes her personal reaction to the text: “We reading The Color Purple in school.
[…] I cry cry cry you hear me, it sound in a way so much like myself except I ain’ no butch like
Celie” (Sapphire 81, emphasis in the original). According to Gates’s conception, Signifyin(g) is defined as a rhetorical practice ( Signifying 52). More specifically, it is “a mode of formal revision, it depends for its effects on troping, it is often characterized by pastiche, and most crucially, it turns on repetition of formal structures and their differences” (Gates, Signifying 52).
By way of illustration, Gates demonstrates how Alice Walker revises and echoes Zora Neal
Hurston’s 1937 narrative Their Eyes Were Watching God (Signifying xxvi). I propose, then, that
Sapphire’s novel can be read as a subsequent allusion to and revision of Walker’s text, through which Sapphire actualizes the process of Signifyin(g) and her novel becomes another element on the literary continuum. The most pronounced reexamination of, and departing from, Walker’s novel resides in the ending of Push . For unlike the happy reunion in The Color Purple ,
Sapphire’s text concludes with the foreshadowing of another trauma, that of Precious’s insidiously developing illness. 65
65 On the relevance of trauma to HIV/AIDS patients, see the conversation between Cathy Caruth and Thomas Keenan, “The AIDS Crisis Is Not Over,” in Caruth’s collection of essays, Trauma: Explorations in Memory .
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However, critics such as Janice Liddell observe that Push can be also perceived as a partial deviation from the African American literary tradition in its unabashed address of issues considered by many as taboos. In this context, Liddell quotes Harris Trudier who wrote in 1982:
“Some subjects, as discovering one’s blackness, first experiencing prejudice, growing up black in the U.S. may be common [in African American literature], but others such as lesbianism, incest, or hateful black mothers, are usually left undisturbed. Incest is especially taboo” (135).
Given the fact that other authors, such as Toni Morrison or Alice Walker, have, too, explored the terrain of same sex relationships, incest, and parental violence, I propose that these topics are no longer entirely “side roads that many black writers in America believe are to be left untraveled”
(Trudier qtd. in Liddell 135). In Push , the author tackles all three of these subjects. Not only does
Sapphire present the reader with the lesbian character of Precious’s literacy teacher, Ms Blue, and with very graphic descriptions of the incestuous scenes. But, moreover, Precious’s mother,
Mary Johnston, is portrayed as a highly abusive parent. Already the first textual appearance of
Precious’s mother is marked by brutal violence against her daughter who, at that moment, is seized by birth labor pains while washing the dishes. About this moment, Precious later recalls:
Sweat was breaking out on my forehead, pain like fire was eating me up. I jus’
standing there ’n pain hit me, then pain go sit down, then pain git up ’n hit me
harder! ’N she standing there screaming at me, “Slut! Goddamn slut! You fuckin’
cow! I don’t believe this, right under my nose. You been high tailing it round
here.” Pain hit me again, then she hit me. I’m on the floor groaning, “Mommy
please, Mommy please, please Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! MOMMY!” Then
she KICK me side of my face! “Whore! Whore!” she screamin’. (Sapphire 9,
emphasis in the original)
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This passage is an overture to Precious’s maltreatment which the mother exerts over the daughter throughout the narrative. However, as a response to Trudier’s and Liddell’s observations, rather than being taboos, the fictional creations of the lesbian Ms Rain, the incestuous father Carl and the abusive mother Mary are the sites of Sapphire’s interrogating the maladies of the contemporary American society.
Thus far, the novel has been critically acknowledged only sparsely. The scholarly articles that deal with Push position the text in the realm of incest narratives (Boyd; Doane and Hodges), or together with novels that explore the African American experience of the urban space (Dubey,
Signs ). To the best of my knowledge, the novel has not been explicitly interpreted within the framework of trauma, despite the traumatic circumstances of Precious’s life and her obvious betrayal of PTSD symptomatology. Also on its formal level, the novel manifests specific structural and narrative disruptions which signal its status of a trauma narrative. The scarcity of scholarly acknowledgment notwithstanding, the novel has been widely discussed by the general reading public, albeit with rather negative associations. In one of the radio interviews following the novel’s publication, the author was accused of perpetuating the harmful stereotype of a dysfunctional African American family and in this respect blamed for acting as the “tool” of
“white people” (Sapphire qtd. in Owen). Sapphire’s response to such allegations may sound as a truism, but at the same time it is a potent characterization of the reading public of today: “How people react to the story tells a lot more about them than about the book” (qtd. in Owen). At this point, I would like to complement that some of the readers’ negative reactions also inadvertently evidence the cultural atmosphere in which they originate and against which Sapphire writes. The readers’ negative reactions and their questioning of the social veracity of the story (Liddell 136) are indicative of the reluctance with which certain social ailments continue to be addressed.
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The novel does not necessarily need to be guided by narrative principles of realism in order to impart its story and criticism of societal mechanisms. As Precious says, “I don’t know what ‘realism’ mean but I do know what REALITY is and it’s a mutherfucker, lemme tell you”
(Sapphire 83). The reality to which Precious refers is her immediate familial background of abuse and also, just as importantly, the reality of being a trauma survivor. Even though the particular descriptions of incestuous abuse can be, to a certain degree, subject to the readers’ scrutiny, I suggest that the imagery of incest in the novel enhances the text’s close engagement with trauma discourse. In terms of trauma, the text primarily explores the difficulties and possibilities of the narrative of trauma itself. Concerning the text’s veracity, it is specifically the paradox of the (un)narratability of trauma to which Sapphire’s novel is a faithful witness. The novel is a collage of prose, poetry, and vernacular, accompanied by illustrations, capitalizations, and alternations in the letter font which are at times interspersed by passages only barely comprehensible. I argue that Sapphire utilizes these seemingly unintelligible fragments, which chronicle Precious’s gradual deliverance to the literacy order, as an allegory of the heroine’s progression through the posttrauma condition. The samples of Precious’s writing attempts start with “li Mg o mi m ( Little Mongo on my mind )” (Sapphire 61, emphasis in the original) and culminate in an almost three page untitled poem that concludes the narrative. The trajectory outlined by Precious’s writings is analogous to her emergence as a trauma survivor who, rather than somatically acting her experience out, is at the end of the novel capable of effectively voicing it.
Similarly to many texts of trauma, Push confronts the fundamental contradiction of trauma’s (un)narratability. Trauma’s defiance of its own narrative is caused by both biological
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and cognitive mechanisms. Biologically, a traumatic experience is said to affect the process of natural encoding and retrieving of memories (van der Kolk and van der Hart 160). From a cognitive perspective, language itself has a tendency to collapse in an encounter with trauma, as
Shoshana Felman demonstrates (“Education” 28). Like other aspects of trauma, trauma’s conspicuous resistance to being narrated is generally theorized in relation to Holocaust survivors.
Particularly with regard to the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale,
Felman invokes the (im)possibility of a testimonial narrative (“Education” 41). She documents the difficulties with which some of the Holocaust survivors imparted their stories of the war sufferings to the interviewers of the Video Archive. Furthermore, on the example of Paul Celan’s poetry, Felman addresses the disintegration of language which precludes a coherent narrative of trauma, yet in its very breakdown bears witness to it (“Education” 42). Felman thus concludes that in his post WWII poetry, “Celan strives to defetishize his language and to dislocate his own esthetic mastery, by breaking down any self possessed control of sense and by disrupting any unity, integrity, or continuity of conscious meaning” (“Education” 37). It would be an exaggeration to claim that in Push , Sapphire entirely disrupts “integrity, or continuity of conscious meaning” (Felman, “Education” 37), although the author’s employment of both vernacular and intentional oral like misspellings, at times, indeed frustrates the reader’s efforts at meaning construction. But it is precisely in these subversive narrative techniques that the text locates its specific meaning and communicates to the reader a subject’s departure from and eventual emergence into language in a posttraumatic condition. In a description of trauma testimony which is the most eloquent at its collapse and verbal incommunicability, Felman speaks about translating “the incomprehensible into some sort of sense” ( Juridical 156). In other words, a narrative of trauma can never be final or entirely comprehensive, yet each telling,
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regardless of its disruptions, generates an idiosyncratic sort of meaning. The very disruptions, then, invoke the fragmentation of a person’s experience brought on by trauma.
In addition, as studies in developmental psychology corroborate, the inability to narrate a traumatic experience is all the graver in incest survivors who have suffered the abuse at an early age; as already indicated Precious is only three when her father attempts their first intercourse
(Sapphire 135 36). Linguistic competence of a young victim is still insufficient to cognitively process and adequately verbalize the complexity of an incestuous experience. In this regard,
Elana Newman elaborates on the prime importance of the formation of language capacities during childhood, pointing out a potential injury due to an encounter with trauma:
One major developmental task during childhood is to master basic linguistic skills
that are needed to put information into a narrative structure. Over time, children
become linguistically able to temporally sequence such information as person,
action, and place. […] [W]hen a child whose language skills are just forming is
sexually exploited, actual words may not be formed to catalogue this experience.
That lack of a vocabulary may lead to subsequent encoding, retrieval, and
narrative deficits for these events. (23 24)
Newman proceeds to enumerate several other aspects contributing to the constrained narrative capability of a young incest survivor. One of the notable elements in a child’s psychology is the development of the concept of the self. Nevertheless, this development can be detrimentally affected by the presence of trauma. As Newman explains: “indescribable shards of the traumatic experiences may be incorporated into the evolving self structures” (24). Furthermore, the immediate personal and the larger socio cultural contexts are still other determinants informing the victim’s ability to understand and narrate the traumatic condition.
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To a lesser or greater extent, all the areas that Newman addresses can be traced in
Precious’s abuse, the consequences of which materialize in her diminished ability to communicate her traumatic experience. The reader discovers that Precious lacks the desired undisturbed psychological growth as a child in an episode in which a counselor, Ms Weiss, enquires about Precious’s first memory of her mother. Although at this moment Precious continuously resists verbalizing her memory for the psychologist’s benefit, internally she recalls that “I already know what I’m gonna recover, the smell of Mama’s pussy in my face” (Sapphire
117). Only later in the narrative does Precious confide the memory to the journal that she keeps as a part of her literacy education, making the memory potentially accessible to others. On the one hand, the journal entry signifies definite progress in both her literacy acquisition and her understanding of the traumatic experience. On the other hand, it testifies to the overwhelming dimensions of her parents’ abusive conduct. Precious reads from her journal:
whut is my erliest memry memory of my mother? a room that’s small fillt up wif
my parents. it smell. can of mackerel left open in kitchen on hot day that’s what
make me remember. that smell. he put his ball in my face. years like wash
machine aroun and around. mama jaw open like evil wolf. the smell deeper than
toilet. her fingers pick apart my pussy. night. poisoned rat. don’t have dreams.
(Sapphire 132 33; graphics in the original).
The depicted mistreatment, combined with the mother’s frequent violent attacks, comprise one dimension of Precious’s trauma, and account for her hindered psychological development. The trauma is further intensified by the absence of any explicit acknowledgement of the gravity of the situation on the mother’s part. The lack of recognition, evident in the mother’s accusing
Precious of sexually stealing her husband (Sapphire 19), can be paralleled to the atmosphere of
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familial secrecy that accompanies incest (Newman 25). In both the instances, the victim is denied the appropriate acceptance of her victimhood, which aggravates her traumatic situation. As will be demonstrated shortly, the larger socio cultural context proves equally inefficient in acting as the responsive listener for whom Precious desperately yearns.
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Out of the interplay of these conditions, Precious emerges as a traumatized subject with recognizable symptoms of PTSD; her initial medium of communicating the trauma is her own body. The manifestations of Precious’s PTSD encompass her indistinct perception of temporality, unexpected lapses into semi conscious reveries and extraordinary sensual impressions. The reader may encounter similar symptomatology in other characters analyzed in my dissertation, for instance in Jones’s Ursa, Walters’s Willie Begay, Hogan’s Angel and
Alexie’s John Smith. In an inner monologue, Precious, for instance, reveals how entangled her understanding of time is: “I’m twelve, no I was twelve, when that shit happen. I’m sixteen now.
For past couple of weeks or so, ever since white bitch Lichenstein kick me outta school shit,
1983 and 1987, twelve years old and sixteen years old, first baby and this one coming, all been getting mixed up in my head” (Sapphire 21 22, emphasis in the original). Precious repeatedly returns to the non linearity of time when she evokes the metaphors of a washing machine and a swimming pool to indicate her impression of temporal confluence. In light of the biological, cognitive and verbal constraints discussed in the preceding paragraphs, the somatic acting out is the medium which allows Precious to endow her experience with some meaning, no matter how unintelligible the meaning may seem to her surroundings.
The bodily reactions which function as initial communicative channels of Precious’s trauma include urinating on herself (Sapphire 39), states of sudden paralysis (Sapphire 36), and
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most perceptibly, explosions of rage directed at her teacher and classmates (Sapphire 8, 35). It is the last instance of bodily actions which is the most illustrative of how, in the absence of adequate linguistic structures, an individual tends to rely on the visceral (van der Kolk,
“Complexity” 194). The occasions on which Precious physically attacks her high school teacher and her classmates are, albeit indirectly, initiated by references to the traumatogenic stressors of her life. Although inadvertently, the teacher’s and students’ acts remind Precious of her socially impoverished and intellectually impaired situation, and function thus as the stimuli which initiate the acting out of her trauma. The close association between Precious’s status of a trauma victim and her hateful physical responses is apparent in the following excerpt, in which she unawares connects the two: “I hate hear him [the father] talk more than I hate fuck. Sometimes fuck feel good. That confuse me, everything get swimming for me, floating like for days sometimes. I just sit in back classroom, somebody say something I shout on ’em, hit ’em; rest of the time I mine my bizness” (Sapphire 35). Precious’s physical acts against others mark a way of imparting her trauma. As the narrative progresses, Precious’s attainment of literacy is paralleled by the subsidence of the visceral and the emergence of the verbal mode of addressing her trauma.
Thus, the first half of the novel is characterized by Precious’s unconscious desire to represent her trauma coupled with a yearning to be recognized as a human being. In one of the intertextual allusions, Sapphire revisits Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man when she makes Precious deliberate on her self perceived invisibility: “I wanna say I am somebody. I wanna say it on subway, TV, movie, LOUD. I see the pink faces in suits look over top of my head. I watch myself disappear in their eyes, their tesses [tests]. I talk loud but still I don’t exist” (Sapphire 31).
In the same way as Precious is unable to achieve visibility in the eyes of her teachers, her classmates at her former school and the social workers, she lacks sufficient resources to voice her
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multifaceted traumatic experience. The more tacit and introverted her trauma has been thus far, the more powerful the first public utterance thereof is, in both message and form. Whereas at the beginning Precious considers the possibility of being the victim of her father’s rape only introspectively (Sapphire 68), with the unfolding of the story, she ceases to be afraid to utilize the force of her human voice. Upon being threatened with physical violence by her mother yet again, Precious abruptly leaves their shared apartment, at last transforming her condition into words: “I do tell her one thing as I going down the stairs. I say, ‘Nigger rape me. I not steal shit fat bitch your husband RAPE me RAPE ME!’” (Sapphire 74). The capital letters underscore the implications of Precious’s realization and the forcefulness of her pronouncement.
This literal exclamation designates the progressive integration of Precious’s experience into the linguistic order, a development which she later enhances by utilizing other words commonly associated with sexual abuse. Gradually, she starts speaking about being a battered woman and finally also about her subjugation to incest. The words, with which Precious seems to be directly addressing the reader, are illustrative of her intellectual progress and understanding of her trauma: “What is ½way house? I thought I already told you. But anyway I tell you from book I read about battered woman. In a way I was a battered woman but I was not a woman – actually I was a chile. And it wasn’t my husband. I don’t have a husband. It was my muver
[mother]” (Sapphire 83). The process of Precious’s reclaiming her agency and the language for trauma reaches its climax when in class Precious announces her attendance of an incest survivors support group: “‘Plus I’m going to start going to meetings wif Rita for insect survivors–’
‘Incest ,’ girl name Bunny say. ‘Thas what I mean.’ ‘Well, it ain’t what you been saying’”
(Sapphire 123, emphasis in the original). This particular instance of a linguistic slip, of uttering
“incest” only after using a contextually unrelated “insect” first, characterizes both Precious’s
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surfacing to literacy and verbal communication and the novel’s own narrative progression. The text opens, and oftentimes proceeds, as a hardly legible concoction of descriptions, only to culminate in four coherent life stories, in which three of Precious’s classmates and Precious herself narrate their encounters with trauma. Whereas Rita, Rhonda, and Jermaine opt for a prosaic style for their narratives, Precious frames their stories with three poems narrating her life.
The fusion of prose and poetry can be perceived as one of the features complicating the text’s immediate accessibility. At times, Precious’s poetic endeavors interrupt the prosaic passages abruptly, without previous mediation, startling thus the reader’s experiencing of the narrative. The following is an indicative example of how Precious finds refuge in the poetic form to express the complexity of her existence in cases when the prosaic means do not suffice. In hospital, she is relating her story to a nurse, about which she recalls later: “I tell her I not hardly seed Little Mongo since my grandmother tooked her and how Abdul my daddy’s baby too. I don’t feel shamed – Carl Kenwood Jones freak NOT me! / I am Precious
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ / My baby is born / My baby is black / I am girl / I am black / I want house to live” (Sapphire 76). At other places, particularly when Precious consciously attempts a coherent account of her trauma, the text becomes disrupted to a still greater extent. This is most conspicuous in the written exchanges with Ms Rain through the medium of Precious’s class journal. In the journal, Precious’s illegible messages acquire legibility, and thus some sort of sense, only in Ms Rain’s interpretations thereof. What follows is a generic format of various written conversations between the two which intersperse the narrative:
Dr Miz Ms Rain, / all yr I sit cls I nevr lrn / (all years I sit in class I never learn ) /
bt I gt babe agn Babe bi my favr / ( but I got baby again Babe by my father ) / I wis
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i had boy____ but I don / ( I wish I had a boyfriend but I don’t ) / ws i had su me
fucks a boy lke / ( wish I had excuse me, fucks a boy like ) / or girl den i fel rite dat
I have to qk skool / ( other girls then I feel right that I have to quit school ) / i lv
baby abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz / ( I love baby ). (Sapphire 69, emphasis in the
original)
By substituting the missing letters, and with them the meaning of the words, Ms Rain becomes
Precious’s “affirmative audience” (Daly 161). She corroborates Precious’s trauma and, most importantly, becomes one of the agents in the process of generating meaning for both Precious and the novel’s reader. The character of Ms Rain epitomizes the ideal listener or witness of a trauma testimony who is actively engaged in the testimonial process. From this perspective, Ms
Rain has a similar role to the unobtrusive editor in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman .
According to Laub, the listener is a subject who “comes to be a participant and a co owner of the traumatic event […] The listener, therefore, by definition partakes of the struggle of the victim with the memories and residues of his or her traumatic past” (“Bearing” 57 58). Ms Rain transcends her role of a literacy teacher when her corrections of Precious’s journal transform her into a listener to Precious’s trauma.
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Precious’s desire for this kind of an emphatic listener with whom she can verbally encounter the unspeakable is all the graver in the situation when she continues to inhabit the very structures which are responsible for her traumatization. In other words, her character symbolizes
Sapphire’s challenge of the contemporary social structures. Unlike Ursa’s foremothers in
Corregidora or Miss Jane in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman , Precious is less concerned with the causality between the oppression of the past and of the present and more with
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the present day systemic inadequacies. This is pronounced when, during one of her inner monologues, Precious interrogates the near impossibility of her current state: “I am just trying to figure out what is going on out here. How what happen to me could happen in modern days”
(Sapphire 124). Therefore, even though the reader is led to perceive Precious’s parents as those primarily responsible for their daughter’s trauma, toward the end of the novel they, too, are rendered as victims of systemic injustice. Precious’s father, although never physically present but for his daughter’s recollections, departs from the story completely when Precious learns he has died of AIDS (Sapphire 85). Concerning Precious’s mother, she is presented as an abusive person with no sympathy for her daughter’s suffering. Yet, when Mary Johnston comes to a counseling session with a therapist at the novel’s conclusion, the author portrays her as an almost pitiable victim. Sapphire endows the mother with a voice which reveals both her uneducated condition and her perversely displayed desire to be loved and accepted by others. In their own ways, Precious’s parents are victimized by the system in which they are unable to access proper healthcare, education and adequate social services. In Precious’s particular case, then, the very institutions designed to assist her to fully participate in the society are those which contribute to her being a victim.
The systems of public education, healthcare and social welfare, the “damn safety net” as
Ms Rain observes (Sapphire 79), fail to provide Precious with what validates their very existence, that is with education and protection from her violent parents. In the novel’s introductory paragraph, Precious enumerates the instances in which the school had hindered her personal and educational development. As she elaborates, the reader notices that the episodes all correlate, directly or indirectly, with the ramifications of her familial traumatization: “I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver. That was in 1983 […] I had got left
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back in the second grade too, when I was seven, ’cause I couldn’t read (and I still peed on myself). […] I got suspended from school ’cause I’m pregnant which I don’t think is fair. I ain’ did nothin’!” (Sapphire 3). Instead of investigating into Precious’s detrimental parental treatment, her teachers retraumatize her by suspension. Hospital nurses replicate the teachers’ actions when they, too, refuse to address the legitimate cause of Precious’s suffering. After giving birth to Abdul, Precious can thus remark: “I’m waiting. ’Nother nurse pass me, look at me say she remember me from ’83. She skinny, black, I don’t remember her. She say she sorry to see me back here, had hoped I be done learned from my mistakes” (Sapphire 75). Again, a representative of a social institution misidentifies Precious as the subject responsible for her trauma. The social workers in the novel are rendered as no less indifferent. Although they visit
Precious’s household at regular intervals, the trauma of her abuse remains as invisible to them as
Precious perceives herself to be. Undoubtedly, such attitudes of the individuals personifying the social order exacerbate Precious’s trauma as well as contribute to its unnarratability. The teachers, nurses and social workers act as failed listeners of a trauma testimony. But, as Laub emphasizes, the listening subject is an inherent element of the testimonial process, one who enhances the formation of the narrative itself. This implies that the listener’s absence entails negative implications: “if one talks about the trauma without being truly heard or truly listened to, the telling might itself be lived as a return of the trauma – a re-experiencing of the event itself ” (Laub, “Bearing” 67, emphasis in the original). Hence, the systemic negligence creates an environment which renders Precious’s narrative of trauma as a priori impossible and incidentally it aggravates her traumatization.
As a result, only with the help of the supportive attentive others, Ms Rain and other trauma victims, does Precious voice her story, initially in the journal and later also at support
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groups and various survivors meetings. The journey of Precious’s trauma narrative is outlined by voiceless bodily acting out at its beginning and by an explicit statement at its end: “‘I was rape by my father. And beat. […] Mama push my head down in her …’ I can’t talk no more. Beautiful girl whisper to me, ‘Are you through?’ I say yes” (Sapphire 130). Even though the pronouncement is confident and unambiguous, the ellipsis indicate that the narrative generative process is not finished, and probably never will be. The novel’s formal plane parallels Precious’s narrative of trauma which transpires on its thematic level. In the novel’s course, coherent life stories displace the incoherence of Precious’s inner contemplations, the amount of misspellings abates considerably, and so do other textual ruptures such as capital letters, italicized phrases, underscores and hand written signs. Despite the reduced fragmentation of the formal level,
Sapphire concludes the novel with trauma narratives by Precious and her classmates written in both prose and verse, implying thus, yet again, that a traumatic experience is too complex to be confined in one narrative mode only. The variety of modes, ranging from vernacular to pictograms allows Sapphire to address the experience of people inhabiting the fringes of contemporary society. Their systemic oppression leaves such individuals invisible to the eyes of the general public, if not physically then all the more discursively. If the American society is to envision its own future, it is important that people like Precious and her parents are given a platform to share their experience. The platform needs to be manifold, as the formal hybridity of
Push documents, so that the process of healing can be initiated in both the individuals and the society at large.
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Conclusion
The analysis of Gayl Jones’s Corregidora , Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman and Sapphire’s Push delineates a space which allows for a reciprocal approximation of literary criticism and psychology. Hence, in my readings of these three African
American novels, I endeavored to incorporate some of the findings from the domains of both psychology and psychoanalysis. The two predominant devices that I borrowed from the psychological realm are the repetition compulsion, observed in both trauma itself and in trauma survivors, and the concept of trauma testimony. Additionally, I perceive the interpretations of
Corregidora , The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Push as complementing the debate on the limitations of language as described in some traumatized individuals. The repetitive fluctuation of temporality in trauma and trauma’s (un)narratability are, therefore, the dominant frameworks informing most of the afore presented close readings. Consequently, the application of these frameworks demonstrates that, in correspondence with the novels by Hogan, Alexie and
Walters, trauma and its facets operate as relevant critical lenses for reading literatures emanating from historically oppressed cultures.
In this sense, Corregidora , The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Push are one of the constitutive elements in what Alexander theorizes as the trauma process, that is, the novels are parts of a multivocal discourse which constructs a culture’s historical experience in terms of trauma (Alexander 11). Artists, politicians, and intellectuals emphasize the various forms of abuse, hoping for redress and imagining a future embedded in the principles of social justice.
Regarding the three texts under discussion, they bring to the fore the historical oppression of
African Americans in the name of European American supremacy. In retrospectively bestowing the occurrences of historical injustice with the implications of trauma, Jones, Gaines and
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Sapphire contribute to the array of voices within the discourse which addresses the socio historical condition of African Americans as traumatic.
Concerning the novels’ settings, these range from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1990s and geographically span the terrains of Brazil, Louisiana, Kentucky, and New York
City. Yet, despite the temporal and spatial variety, the novels’ fictional representations of the
African American cultural experience as trauma is, to a significant extent, comparable. The indicated differences notwithstanding, the three novels chronicle human and civil rights violations which have transgressed the time of the formal abolition of slavery and continue to thrive today. In the novels, these violations are transformed into concrete situations which induce traumatogenic stress for the African American characters. More explicitly, trauma assumes the form of sexual exploitation under Brazilian slavery and domestic abuse of women today, of outright violence under segregation and beyond, and of systemic oppression at the end of the twentieth century. These are some of the narrative vehicles through which Jones, Gaines and
Sapphire address African American trauma.
Yet, as anticipated, the trauma depicted is not exclusively the trauma of slavery. Neither is it slavery which constitutes the fundamental basis of Jones’s, Gaines’s and Sapphire’s discursive engagement in the trauma process. This is despite the fact that some scholars, such as
LaCapra, McDowell with Rampersad or Carby, commonly regard slavery as the predominant trauma pertaining to the African American culture and as the crucial metaphor inherent in
African American literature. It is inarguable that Corregidora and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman depict slavery and the institution’s physical, psychological and moral impact on the subjectivity of slaves and on the generations of descendants to follow. However, as my analysis suggests, slavery in both Corregidora and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is merely
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one element, albeit brutal and degrading, on the continuum of traumatogenic stressors. The humanity of Jones’s and Gaines’s characters is defied under the oppressive structures of slavery as well as in the subsequent eras. Sapphire’s Push then illustrates this argument still more lucidly. In Push , the author refuses to explicitly draw a causal relationship between slavery and the trauma pervading the existential condition of Precious. Instead, Sapphire indicates that the systemic abuse, informed by the society’s misconceptions about the non European American other, is the original locus of Precious’s trauma. Together, Corregidora , The Autobiography of
Miss Jane Pittman and Push testify to the racial prejudice in the American society which was as traumatogenic in slavery as it was, in some respects, at the conclusion of the second millennium.
If compared to the three Native American texts, the trauma in Corregidora , The
Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Push can hardly be defined as implicitly or insidiously affecting the narratives. Whereas I have located trauma’s presence in Solar Storms , Indian Killer and Ghost Singer primarily on the novels’ formal levels, the three African American texts examine trauma notably on their thematic planes. Traumatized characters and distinct accentuation of coping with trauma are in the center of attention of both Corregidora and Push ; concerning The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman , at a cursory glance, trauma is somewhat less conspicuous in the novel. However, as Miss Jane’s narrative evolves, she, too, concedes to her own physical and psychological traumatization and to the harm perpetrated against others.
However, this is not to say that Jones’s, Gaines’s and Sapphire’s texts are entirely devoid of narrative strategies or formal structures that reflect their characters’ traumas. Each author utilizes narrative techniques which symbolically recreate the mechanisms of psychological trauma.
Respectively, the novels feature a disrupted temporal setting, the structural framework of a trauma testimony and a disintegrated hybrid language derived from a variety of genres. From this
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perspective, the three African American novels bear resemblance to their Native American counterparts. Yet, in terms of thematic encounters with trauma, Jones’s, Gaines’s and Sapphire’s narratives are more overt in their portrayals.
With regard to the specific instances of trauma depicted in the novels, the three authors focus predominantly on the characters’ concrete exposure to traumatogenic stress. That is,
Corregidora , The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Push all present the reader with characters whose confrontations with the current social order develop into harm and the characters’ subsequent traumas or posttraumatic conditions. The given social structures explored in the three texts encompass Brazilian and American slavery, Reconstruction and legally sanctioned segregation, and the era of the Civil Rights Movement. Corregidora and Push also, in part, address the post Civil Rights period marked by more subtle ways of systemic oppression.
Jones and Sapphire describe the social mechanisms in the second half of the twentieth century replete with unequal power distribution and limited access to social institutions. The common denominator of the characters’ traumas and posttraumatic states is the ideology of racism which, despite the undeniable technological and legal advancement of the American society, has not been uprooted from the public consciousness.
Moreover, through the thematic planes of their stories and their formal narrative frameworks, the three African American texts interrogate the multifacetedness and complexity of trauma and posttraumatic periods. The three authors thus fictionally show what the concept of psychological trauma signifies for its survivors. More specifically, Jones’s narrative correlates with what Freud and Caruth theorize as the idiosyncratic temporality of trauma. Like both the scholars, Jones elaborates on the belatedness of trauma, on repetition compulsion related to trauma and on the traumatic return of the repressed. What gets inscribed in the novel’s confluent
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temporal setting is the indistinct perception of time and reemergence of traumatic accidents as studied in trauma survivors. While Corregidora can be interpreted as narrating trauma’s temporality, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is concerned with the very act of narrating trauma. That is, my reading of Gaines’s novel demonstrates the particular ways in which the text assumes the form of a trauma testimony, a testimony recounted by Miss Jane, the survivor, and facilitated by the novel’s editor who performs the role of the listening other. While the episodes that Miss Jane recounts explicitly address the ubiquitous traumatic stress of racism, the narrative of Precious, in Sapphire’s Push , testifies to her trauma indirectly. It is through the fragmentation of language and hybridization of genre, as well as through the disjointed typographical arrangement of the pages, that Precious’s trauma emerges. The ruptured format of the novel parallels the expressive limitations that trauma imposes on a survivor; the narrative’s shattered texture emphasizes trauma’s defiance of its own story. In narrating their respective traumas,
Corregidora , The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Push thus function as relevant contributions to the cross disciplinary discourse of trauma. The novels enrich the discourse and enhance the conceptual understanding of trauma. At the same time, the three narratives become appeals for an initiation of a more just social order, an order in which human beings are spared traumatization on the basis of their otherness and/or historical marginalization.
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Conclusion
The analysis of Sapphire’s Push has brought my dissertation to a close. But, like trauma, which supposedly lacks an unambiguous termination, my work can offer only some summarizing remarks in place of a definite statement of closure. Hence, I divide this section into two main parts. First, I focus on the six novels and show that not only trauma is present in them, but also the themes of psychological posttraumatic growth and healing. This is followed by the second part, in which I highlight the central argumentative lines which I had developed in the preceding chapters and provide additional observations in regard to the comparative aspects of the individual texts. In other words, I bring the six novels, yet again, into a shared conversation. By providing a comprehensive overview of their similarities and differences, I hope to emphasize the variety of the formal and thematic narrative devices through which trauma can make itself perceptible in a literary text.
Posttraumatic Growth and Healing
Any discussion of trauma would be incomplete unless the concept is related to healing, as trauma and healing are inseparable elements on the way from the actual traumatization to a person’s posttraumatic condition and/or recovery. In its extent, my exploration of healing in
Solar Storms , Indian Killer , and Ghost Singer , and Corregidora , The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman , and Push , conforms to the authors’ accentuation thereof in their respective narratives. Given the intertwined character of trauma and healing, each author in his or her own way inevitably envisions the possibility of healing. Yet, the writers devote considerably more attention to portrayals of their characters’ initial traumatization than to their recovery.
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An undeniable parallel can be drawn between the healing aspects of writing itself and the concept of Laub’s and Felman’s trauma testimony. It is generally accepted that published texts of both fictional and non fictional character can be tangible expressions of the authors’ negotiations of their traumas and of the authors’ belief in healing. 66 Besides achieving healing via the means of writing, individual or communal healing may also come by the way of justice, albeit belated.
In her exploration of the African diaspora and historically damaged people of African descent,
Hershini Bhana Young explains that “healing must take the form of an insistent call for delayed justice” (2). Calls for social, historical and legal justice oftentimes emerge in the course of the trauma process, that is, in works of fiction in which the authors discursively construct occurrences of past oppression and imposed sufferings as trauma. Shoshana Felman suggests that in the absence of proper judiciary mechanisms establishing justice, literature and art in general assume the function of courts and the narratives’ emphasis on trauma and healing may transform itself into a distinguished type of justice in its own right ( Juridical ). Appropriating Young’s and
Felman’s contentions, I posit that the six novels previously analyzed are expressions of the respective cultures’ striving for this kind of justice and of the ongoing envisioning of healing.
The concept of healing may be as elusive as trauma itself, and therefore, among some researchers, there is a tendency to deny the possibility of its completion, or of a person’s full recovery, in the periods following trauma. A representative example of this kind of argumentation is Tal who names the last chapter of her study “This Is Not a Conclusion.” As Tal
66 Texts which can be interpreted as expressions of their authors’ progression toward healing include, for instance, the already mentioned Memory Slips: A Memoir of Music and Healing (1997) by Linda Katherine Cutting or Susan Brison’s Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self (2002). Cutting, a pianist, focuses on her involuntary incestuous relationship with her father and on her trauma ridden adult life. In Aftermath , Brison, a philosopher, constructs a meaning out of her “nearly fatal sexual assault and attempted murder” (ix). Both Cutting’s and Brison’s texts are narratives of trauma in the sense theorized by Kalí Tal, that is, the authors are themselves direct victims of a trauma. The situation is more complex in the case of the six novels analyzed in my dissertation, which are, as I have already explained, texts of trauma associated with traumatized cultures, not written by people who are direct survivors of trauma. Nevertheless, the six novels’ engagement of trauma suggests, likewise, the presence of the prospect of healing transpiring in the cultural domain.
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explains, the healing of trauma on the cultural level, a healing conducted through a communal discursive construction of a meaning of the given trauma, is incessant, lacking thus a conclusion in the classic sense (247). The traumas of the Holocaust, the Vietnam War and of rape and incest imply that no healing can be fully attained unless the society interprets these traumas in the first place (Tal 247). Although such radical denial of the prospect of accomplished healing is open to further interrogation, it may prove plausible that in many cases a conclusion to an individual’s trauma can never be located. Still, the absence of a successful healing process does not preclude an individual’s progression toward it. The concept which has entered psychological lexicon only recently and which embraces, among others, one’s striving for healing and personal development, is posttraumatic growth (PTG). The term was coined by Richard Tedeschi and
Lawrence Calhoun in 1995 (Joseph and Linley, “Reflections” 339), based on research that had begun in the early 1980s (Tedeschi, Park and Calhoun vii).
In its very name, posttraumatic growth is a counterpart of posttraumatic stress disorder.
Whereas PTSD indicates an emergence of some kind of psychological harm, the idea of posttraumatic growth implies an advancement of a person’s resilience and positive personal transformation in the posttraumatic period of one’s life. From a psychological perspective, PTG is defined thusly: “changes in personality/assumptive worlds can occur as part of the process of adjustment in relation to new appraisals. When these changes involve a positive reconfiguration of schema, this is referred to as posttraumatic growth” (Joseph and Linley, “Positive” 10 11). As
Joseph and Linley elaborate further, the majority of literature on the effects of traumatic events on individuals has concentrated on “the relationship between appraisal mechanisms and distressing emotional states,” and the shift in focus toward “positive reconfiguration” and growth therefore suggests an important paradigmatic alternation (“Positive” 11). Joseph and Linley
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emphasize that PTG is primarily associated with what psychology knows as psychological well being, a concept which, in short, signifies “engagement with the existential challenges of life,” of which trauma is one (11). As opposed to the pathology of PTSD, posttraumatic growth, manifested in psychological well being, “comprises dimensions of self acceptance, environmental mastery, personal growth, autonomy, positive relations with others and having a purpose in life” (Joseph and Linley, “Positive” 10 11). As will be shown, many of the listed attributes of PTG can be identified in the discussed novels.
Similarly to the conceptual development of PTSD, the development of PTG has suffered from terminological vagueness. Not all scholars use the term unanimously, and one can encounter variants such as “perceived benefits, benefit finding, positive changes, and thriving”
(Joseph and Linley, “Reflections” 339). Given the relative novelty of the concept, redefinitions and terminological imprecision imply discursive activity and promise a more thorough understanding of the category. While in the domain of psychology posttraumatic growth is debated frequently, in literary studies, to the best of my knowledge, no significant study has been published so far. Neither has it been observed that the existence of some works of fiction, like those analyzed in this dissertation, is a certain expression of the posttraumatic growth of a culture. I would like to show that PTG can be applied in literature to a degree comparable to
PTSD.
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As my examination of the six novels documents, the authors’ thematic as well as formal emphasis on trauma differs. In terms of posttraumatic growth, growth which a priori involves healing, the situation is no less diverse. While Linda Hogan, Gayl Jones, Ernest Gaines and
Sapphire guide their characters through trauma toward an almost completely accomplished
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healing, Anna Lee Walters depicts healing ceremonies with ambivalent results, and Sherman
Alexie evades the question of healing nearly entirely, having the trauma affected John Smith commit suicide at the end of the story.
More specifically, Angel in Solar Storms conforms to many of the above enumerated distinguishing features of posttraumatic growth. Her journey from a traumatized insecure individual to a confident young woman culminates in a positive relationship with her physical environment, her family and community, and, primarily, with her self. Another feature of PTG that Joseph and Linley mention is a person’s purpose in life which, in Angel’s case, takes the form of her half sister, Aurora. The powerful act of naming Aurora performed by Angel denotes the latter’s agency and psychological advancement toward well being. About this act, Angel asserts in a self possessed manner: “By the time we returned to Tulik’s, I’d named the baby, my sister, ‘Aurora’” (Hogan, Solar 254). Angel is the most illustrative representative of an individual’s personal transformation following trauma. Angel’s acceptance of herself and others emerges in the very moment of her confrontation with the perpetrator of her physical and psychological traumas, her dying mother Hannah. Upon witnessing Hannah’s death, Angel promises herself to adopt a positive relation to others (Hogan, Solar 251).
While Angel psychologically evolves in the course of Hogan’s Solar Storms , John Smith in Alexie’s Indian Killer remains static and his character shows only little or no progression in terms of psychological growth. This absence also suggests the limited prospect of healing that
Alexie’s narrative offers. While at the end of Solar Storms , Angel enters a romantic relationship with a friend of hers and assists her community in trying to attain environmental and social justice, John Smith leaves the story as traumatized as he was at its beginning. The expression of
John’s unresolved traumatic situation and rejection of others is his attempted murder of the so
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called “wannabe Indian,” the writer of Native American detective novels Jack Wilson. About the final confrontation between John and Jack Wilson the narrator recounts: “With a right hand made strong by years of construction work, with a blade that was much stronger than it looked, John slashed Wilson’s face, from just above his right eye, down through the eye and cheekbone, past the shelf of the chin, and a few inches down the neck” (Alexie, Indian 411). Despite John’s original murderous intent, in the end he turns the adversity toward himself, committing a suicide
(413). The abrupt ending of John’s life in a fatal physical trauma precludes any healing for his character. Yet, the alteration of John’s targeted victim, from Jack Wilson to himself, indicates at least some personal growth and an emergence of empathy with another human being. John’s psychological growth seems almost insignificant in comparison with Angel’s transformation.
Nevertheless, John’s ultimate deed of self destruction which saves Jack Wilson implies that neither Alexie’s narrative is without hope for the healing of traumas leading to the restoration of humanity.
In comparison, although the story of Walters’s Ghost Singer allows for healing to transpire, the narrative does not appear to involve posttraumatic growth. As my reading shows, the healing ceremony that Wilbur Snake performs for the sake of the Anglo curator, Donald
Evans, is one of the crucial scenes in the whole novel; it is a scene in which the worlds of the
Native American and Anglo characters approach each other. However, Donald’s conduct ruins not only the effects of the ceremony itself but, more importantly, the hope for cultural understanding between the two communities. Donald’s disregard of Wilbur Snakes’s ceremony seems to estrange the two groups even more. The only ceremony that achieves the desired impact is the one enacted by Johnie Navajo over his grandson Willie Begay, resulting in Willie’s recovery from his trauma resembling symptomatology. But like in the case of Wilbur’s
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ceremony, Johnie’s act does not present any long lasting positive consequences for a mutual interaction of Native and non Native cultures; Willie regains physical well being only to retreat from the environment of Washington D.C. and the Smithsonian Institution back to the Navajo reservation, preventing himself from any other contact with the Anglo community. In the two ceremonies, the novel documents that despite the textual presence of the concept of healing, a narrative can be void of posttraumatic growth.
As anticipated, the concept of posttraumatic growth is more accentuated in the three
African American texts. Its manifestation in Jones’s Corregidora is, similarly to Hogan’s Solar
Storms , in the development of the main character’s agency and her self possession. Like Angel’s development, Ursa’s progressive behavior in the course of the novel conforms to Joseph’s and
Linley’s observations about self acceptance and autonomy. The absence of Ursa’s control over the moment of her traumatization is fully compensated by the evolution of her agency in the trauma’s aftermath. Ursa develops from a wife who is unable to experience personal happiness with either of her two husbands into an empowered self sustaining woman. By way of culmination of this development, at the end of the novel, Ursa concedes to Mutt’s proposition for a reunion after twenty years of separation. Jones emphasizes the presence of both healing and
PTG in her novel but, at the same time, she implies that the transformative power of trauma only rarely allows for healing without provisions. In spite of Ursa’s acceptance of her self, her life situation and eventually also of Mutt, she acknowledges her doubts about the reunion: “‘I want you to come back,’ he said. I wanted to say I can’t come back, but I couldn’t say anything. I just looked at him. I didn’t know yet what I would do. I knew what I still felt. I knew that I still hated him. Not as bad as then, not with that first feeling, but an after feeling, an aftertaste, or like an odor still in a room when you come back to it, and it’s your own” (Jones 183). The “odor still in
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a room” is Jones’s expression of the omnipresence of trauma, which persists in spite of an individual’s personal growth and psychological development after the lived experience.
The novel which depicts posttraumatic growth in an individual without any significant reservations is Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman , where the very act of Miss
Jane’s testimonial narratives equals her psychological development. Nevertheless, on the communal and historical levels, Gaines, too, challenges the possibility of healing of a culture affected by trauma. Although Miss Jane’s life circumstances improve in the course of the novel, my analysis shows that she testifies to the ongoing trauma of racial prejudice and oppression.
The repetitive imagery of violent death which opens the novel in the first book and concludes it in the last is a demonstration of the harmful continuity of prejudice. Gaines suggests the potential for a positive personal growth instigated by trauma, but at the same time hesitates to fully embrace it in the domain of the whole culture.
A very similar tendency can be observed in Sapphire’s Push . Precious’s personal growth, following after her trauma of incest and parental violence, is counter balanced by her HIV positive status. In spite of presenting Precious’s reintegration into the society, mostly as a result of her own conscious actions, Sapphire refrains from an over optimistic portrayal of a person’s and a culture’s posttraumatic condition. The metaphor of the dormant virus in Precious’s body allegorizes the racial bias which is still latent in the American society, consuming it from within.
Therefore, Sapphire indicates that Precious’s psychological development and relative well being as depicted at the end of the novel can still be destroyed by the same systemic forces which had allowed her original traumatization. Precious expresses her health uncertainties, which parallels her insecure situation as an African American other in a society dominated by European
Americans, and comments on the possible future outbreak of AIDS: “One year? Five? Maybe
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more if I take care of myself. Maybe a cure. Who knows, who is working on shit like that?”
(Sapphire 140). Her words signify primarily the illness, but they can be also read as directed toward the systemic mechanisms operating in the American society which Sapphire locates as the originators of Precious’s trauma.
In spite of the ambivalent and diverse approaches to both healing and posttraumatic growth that I have identified in the narratives, I argue that the physical existence of the texts is a tangible expression of the active process of healing transpiring in the American society. The authors’ open invoking of the traumas of their Native American and African American cultures signals the writers’ hope for reconciliation and communal healing. In this sense, the trauma process to which the analyzed texts contribute becomes, in itself, a demonstration of the respective cultures’ resilience and growth.
Some Concluding Notes on the Comparison of the Six Narratives of Trauma
Before I venture into the comparative approximation of the six narratives for the last time, I would like to revisit central lines of argumentation in the three main chapters of my dissertation. I believe that the chapters’ conclusions will help shed some light on the inter and intra cultural comparisons and on the traumas in their midst. The first chapter, titled
“Psychology, Literature, Culture: Navigating Trauma across the Disciplines,” is conceived as an overview of the debate generated by the concept of trauma. Marking the contemporary tendency to approach trauma as a site of a cross disciplinary discourse, the chapter surveys the realms of psychology and psychoanalysis on the one hand and of literature and culture on the other. It thus functions as an introduction to the two successive analytical chapters, in which I present close
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readings of trauma narratives by Linda Hogan, Sherman Alexie, Anna Lee Walters, Gayl Jones,
Ernest Gaines, and Sapphire.
More specifically, the first chapter traces the historical and conceptual development of the concepts of trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I point out that the notions of trauma and PTSD correlate with each other only partially. Rather, PTSD functions as a successor to such diagnostic categories as railroad spine, hysteria, shell shock, war neurosis and others
(Bracken). In this sense, PTSD is a distillation of the multifacetedness of trauma into a format utilizable in clinical diagnosis and treatment. As the two subsequent chapters reveal, contemporary literature of trauma commonly explores trauma in its cross disciplinary breadth rather than limiting itself to the diagnostic criteria constituting PTSD only. In other words, narratives of trauma, while focusing on concrete instances and accidents of traumatization, usually probe the larger socio historical, cultural and political frameworks accompanying traumatogenic situations. This observation is especially pertinent in the context of the six Native
American and African American novels analyzed. They all examine some particular episodes of trauma and posttrauma of their respective characters and, simultaneously, they implicate the power hierarchies of the American society, the ideology of racism and the project of
(neo)colonialism as the originary stimuli of individuals’ traumatization. For instance, Sherman
Alexie’s Indian Killer introduces the story of John Smith who is personally deeply traumatized by the loss of familial and cultural ties to his people. However, John’s psychological condition is but one facet of trauma’s presence in the novel, as Alexie primarily explores the adverse relationships between the characters of Native and non Native descent which account for John’s and the other characters’ traumatization. Analogously, in Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of
Miss Jane Pittman , the protagonist’s testimony chronicles both hers and others’ traumas and, at
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the same time, the antagonistic social atmosphere from which the traumas develop. These are but two instances of narratives which examine the broader cultural connotations of trauma.
Moreover, trauma’s inscription on the thematic plane of the novels is paralleled by its presence in the textual formal structures. As demonstrated, the six novels’ themes elaborate on trauma in a comprehensive socio cultural context. Simultaneously, the formal frameworks of the texts and the choice of the narrative strategies are affected by trauma as defined by PTSD. I show that trauma narratives are typically characterized by manifest fragmentation, implying multiplicity of narrative voices, tenses and settings and hybridity of genres, by circular, or non linear, chronology, and by repetitive imagery. I argue that these kinds of techniques symbolize, from a psychological point of view, trauma’s sudden recurrences in an individual’s perception, accompanied by the victim’s avoidance, conscious or not, of trauma related memories and stimuli (Amer. Psychiatric Assoc.). Hence, trauma’s reemergence into an individual’s consciousness denotes a certain repetitive pattern which replicates itself in the repetition of literary narrative structures. Furthermore, I suggest that trauma’s unexpected resurfacing into a subject’s awareness, or its involuntary physical reenactment by the subject, can be translated into literature as textual fragmentation, just as the reemergence of trauma fragments a person’s perception of the self and of the surrounding world.
Having said this, the novels interpreted in chapters two and three vary in the extent to which their formal features conform to the fragmentation and repetitiveness contained by the definition of PTSD. Whereas Sapphire’s Push is a striking embodiment of textual fragmentation and hybridity, Hogan’s Solar Storms , Walters’s Ghost Singer and, notably, Gaines’s The
Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman occupy the opposite end of the spectrum. Hogan, Walters and Gaines present the reader with narratives in which deviations from linear development of the
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storyline are virtually absent. Alexie’s Indian Killer and Jones’s Corregidora , then, oscillate between the two poles. Alexie’s and Jones’s novels work with recurring imagery and disruptions of both the temporal and spatial settings, yet, they do not assume the degree of formal incoherence of Sapphire’s Push . Nevertheless, the novels by both Alexie and Jones, and most particularly by Hogan, Walters, and Gaines, provide sufficient evidence that a novel can be interpreted as a trauma narrative even if its formal features are mostly conventional and conform to a linear mode of storytelling. The variations among the six narratives indicate that a literary text can accommodate a portrayed trauma in an array of techniques. The differences also suggest that the healing potential of the narratives of trauma can be achieved through more diverse means than may have been previously assumed.
Apart from an overview of the interactions between trauma and literary studies, the first chapter focuses on some of the associations between trauma and Native American and African
American cultures. As I show, the approaches to studying the existence of trauma in the two cultures under discussion differ. The concepts commonly employed with regard to the Native
American traumatic cultural experience, both past and present, are the soul wound and historical trauma, terms which Duran, Duran and Brave Heart use interchangeably, and so postulate the effects of transgenerational transmission of trauma and the cumulativeness of violence and injustice against Native American peoples. The history of Native American oppression includes land dispossession and peoples’ relocation onto government allocated reservations; physical extermination in the course of the so called Indian Wars of the nineteenth century; cultural and religious eradication complemented by a tendency to instill European American values and epistemologies via the experiment of boarding schools; and stereotyping the image of a Native
American in the media and other venues of the public discourse (Duran and Duran 32 34). As
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Duran, Duran and Brave Heart emphasize, not all the Native American peoples have been exposed to the same extent and form of oppression. As a consequence, the differences in the
Native American historical experience can be considerable. Yet, in the context of trauma and in light of this historical experience, Duran, Duran and Brave Heart deem Native American population as a traumatized collective. This is not to maintain that the majority of contemporary
Native Americans suffer from trauma related symptomatology. Rather, Duran, Duran and Brave
Heart observe that if such symptomatology is present in Native American communities, its origins are to be traced to the oppression sanctioned by the (neo)colonial project.
The transgenerational and cumulative aspects of the soul wound are transplanted into literature in a myriad of forms. In my readings of Hogan’s Solar Storms , Alexie’s Indian Killer and Walters’s Ghost Singer , I accentuate the novels’ thematic and formal negotiations of various instances of Native American historical oppression. My primary argument in this respect concentrates on the fact that Solar Storms , Indian Killer and Ghost Singer fictionally recreate the episodes that Duran, Duran and Brave Heart perceive as the components of the soul wound.
Namely, Solar Storms addresses environmental exploitation and the destruction of natural habitat; Indian Killer revolves around the impact of geographical and social displacement; and
Ghost Singer tackles the injustice of cultural dispossession, both material and intellectual. In this sense, the three novels, each in its own way, bring to the readers’ attention the socio cultural and political circumstances which have historically constituted the, sometimes destitute, present day condition of many Native American individuals and communities. My readings document that the soul wound is as much a relevant analytical vehicle in psychology as in the study of literature. I show that in literary texts, the soul wound can acquire the form of specific imagery
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as in Hogan, a distinct narrative technique of fragmentation and displacement as in Alexie and marked ways of characterization as in Walters.
In the realms of the African American culture and literature, scholars frequently speak about the legacy of slavery and refer to slavery in terms of the founding, national or cultural trauma. However, without the slightest intent to diminish the brutality of slavery, I argue that trauma in African American culture transcends the paradigmatic boundaries of slavery. I propose that African American trauma can be, instead, understood in correlation with the omnipresent ideology of racism which has continuously informed the relationships between African
Americans and European Americans since their first contacts. The prejudice of European
American racial superiority has insidiously affected these relationships and has resulted in such grave human rights violations as the Middle Passage, slavery and eruptions of violence in the
Reconstruction era. Although the gradual legislative advancement of the past century and a half has improved the African American condition, certain distinguished inequalities have persisted.
These may in consequence lead to limited access to adequate societal institutions, such as the system of social security, educational and medical facilities, and generally result in systemic neglect. Specifically the systemic disregard of disempowered individuals and communities constitutes the thematic setting of Sapphire’s Push . As a narrative of trauma, the novel can be interpreted in support of the argument that the trauma of African American culture exceeds the conceptual and temporal limits of slavery. As the fictional account of Precious’s life demonstrates, the hostility of the dominant European American society toward African
Americans may have since slavery abated in its explicitness, but less so in its detrimental effects on individuals.
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My argument about the continuity of African American traumatization, which diachronically spans the Middle Passage, slavery, Reconstruction, and the eras of both segregation and post Civil Rights, becomes apparent in the readings of Jones’s, Gaines’s and
Sapphire’s novels. All the three texts confront instances of people’s oppression emanating from racially informed prejudice. It becomes almost irrelevant that Jones’s Corregidora concentrates on Brazilian slavery, Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman on the period between the abolition of American slavery and the commencement of the Civil Rights Movement and
Sapphire’s Push on the last decades of the twentieth century. As demonstrated in the dissertation’s third chapter, each of the narratives provides evidence, and a criticism, of the diverse traumatogenic stress intrinsic to the American society. Hence, based on my readings of
Jones’s, Gaines’s and Sapphire’s novels, I propose that trauma in African American culture and in literature conceptually resembles trauma in the Native American context. The parallel is most notable in that neither Native American nor African American trauma can be located in a singular historical occurrence, yet it continues to resurface in the extra literary reality as well as in the artistic production.
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In my readings of Hogan’s Solar Storms , Alexie’s Indian Killer and Walters’s Ghost
Singer , I prove that certain works of literature which originate in cultures marked by trauma, historical or contemporary, can be interpreted as trauma narratives. Sometimes this is the case even in a pronounced absence of the formal features which are generally attributed to trauma texts. Out of the three narratives, Indian Killer conforms the most to a typical text in which the author inscribes trauma onto its formal structure; Alexie produces a narrative with purposefully disrupted spatiotemporal setting. In addition, he weaves together multiple parallel stories of his
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Native, non Native and mixed blood characters, which results in numerous narrative perspectives and, in the case of the “Testimony” chapters, also voices. When compared to Indian
Killer , Hogan’s Solar Storms and Walters’s Ghost Singer are formally more conventional.
Whereas Hogan, too, employs several narrative voices, the chronological and spatial frameworks of her narrative do not betray much deviation from conventional storytelling. To the same extent, this lack of formal irregularities is evident in Walters’s Ghost Singer . The narrative of Ghost
Singer develops according to an established linear chronology and fluctuates only between a few spatial settings, which are, however, unanimously pre mediated in the titles of the individual chapters. Nevertheless, I also show that some formal features of all the three novels are affected by the trauma that they discuss. To denominate this kind of implicit influence of trauma on the narratives, I borrow a concept from the domain of feminist psychotherapy and speak about insidious trauma.
The second chapter opens with an analysis of Hogan’s Solar Storms . On the thematic plane, Hogan portrays the trauma of environmental exploitation along with the effects such policy has on those who occupy the land. The formal aspect that I perceive as affected by the presence of the depicted insidious trauma is the novel’s imagery. Hogan’s technique, which I call somatization, consists in paralleling the body of human beings with the body of the land and, even more importantly, in emphasizing the body’s inherent vulnerability. A somewhat similar emphasis on the human body is discernable also in the other texts, whether they are Native
American or African American. For instance, when describing some of the actions of the anonymous killer, Alexie provides the reader with imagery of a damaged body or its parts. In the same vein, mutilated bodily remains and parts play a fundamental role in Ghost Singer .
Concerning the African American novels, without exception, they all feature some imagery of a
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human body seized by the violence of the physical world. In Corregidora , The Autobiography of
Miss Jane Pittman and Push , the injury to the body is mainly conceived as a means of punishment exercised by those in power. The perpetrators can be, for instance, the slave holders as in Corregidora and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman or one’s own parents as in Push .
The centrality of the imagery of a human body endangered by violence can be frequently encountered in trauma narratives. For the breach of an individual’s bodily integrity oftentimes signifies the person’s trauma, trauma that is both physical upon the impact and psychological in a long term perspective (Erikson, “Notes” 184). However, the aspect in which Solar Storms differs from the other five novels is Hogan’s associating the notion of the body with the land, suggesting the land’s susceptibility to trauma.
Although Alexie, too, employs some sort of corporal imagery, I posit that the formal locus of trauma in Indian Killer is Alexie’s narrative technique of displacement. The two predominant metaphors that the author utilizes are adoption and homelessness which a priori denote a person’s displacement from his or her original existential condition. In addition, the concept of displacement is discernable in the sequential progression of the novel’s chapters. The pattern of their progression is such that each successive chapter discontinues the story developed in the previous chapter. I argue that this kind of fragmentation of the novel’s structure brings
Alexie’s text close to the features generally observed in trauma narratives. Yet, my primary argument is that it is not the novel’s fragmentation per se which communicates Native American trauma, but the specific format of fragmentation through displacement. The concept of displacement, incorporated into the very structure of the novel, can be viewed as Alexie’s fictional elaboration on the multiple geographical, cultural, economic and other displacements of
Native American peoples orchestrated by European settlers and the American government.
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In terms of narrative structure, the novels which partly correlate with Indian Killer are
Jones’s Corregidora and Sapphire’s Push . Jones and Sapphire, too, oftentimes disrupt the progression of their narratives, introducing the recollections of their characters’ past in place of their actions executed in the present. However, although formally corresponding, Indian Killer on the one hand and Corregidora and Push on the other, differ in the primary motivation of their fragmentation. While in Indian Killer , the organizing principle of the chapters is their consecutive displacement, the fragmentation in Corregidora and Push can be interpreted as an allusion to the repetition of trauma encapsulated by Freud’s repetition compulsion ( Beyond 19
20), and to trauma’s unnarratability theorized by Felman (“Education” 28). Despite the disjointed organization of the chapters in Indian Killer , the respective stories in the chapters betray a semblance of linearity in their individual development. Which is unlike in Corregidora , and to a lesser extent in Push , where the narrators unfold their life stories in circles, fragmenting the narrative through its very repetition.
The last novel of the second chapter, Walters’s Ghost Singer , manifests neither distinct repetitiveness nor fragmentation of its storyline or formal framework. I infer its status as a trauma narrative mainly from Walters’s construction of the Native and non Native, or Anglo, characters of the novel. In my reading, the Native Americans and Anglos represent the victims/survivors and perpetrators/beneficiaries of the trauma of cultural dispossession. In this sense, Walters’s narrative is a fictional extension of the debate within trauma discourse concerning the relevance of clearly delineating the categories of victims and perpetrators. As
Walters convincingly shows, trauma of such magnitude as committed against Native American populations has a tendency to affect those in the positions of both victims/survivors and perpetrators/beneficiaries. The trope of an offender becoming a victim, or a victim adopting the
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strategies of an oppressor, is a feature one may repeatedly encounter in trauma narratives. Texts like Ghost Singer , but also Hogan’s Solar Storms , Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane
Pittman and Sapphire’s Push , show how fragile, and somewhat arbitrary, the boundaries between these two categories are. The ethnic and epistemological distinctions with which Walters endows her characters notwithstanding, their nuances dissolve when the characters encounter the residue of the past injustice, as the lingering trauma exercises the same impact over Natives and Anglos.
As noted, like Ghost Singer , the narratives by Hogan, Gaines and Sapphire explore the boundaries and potential confluence of those affected by trauma, that is of the victims and the perpetrators. Although Angel’s mother in Hogan’s Solar Storms can be understood as the originator of her daughter’s trauma, which assumes the contours of scars and bodily mutilation, some of the characters’ remarks indicate that Hannah herself is, too, a victim of severe maltreatment and traumatization. Gaines’s repetitive metaphor of a violent death predominantly refers to the death of African American characters, yet, the novel’s third book centers on the suicide of a son of the plantation owner. Like the mysterious suicides of the Anglo curators in the
Smithsonian, Tee Bob’s voluntary death becomes a demonstration of the indiscriminate impact that trauma exerts over all the individuals involved. Sapphire’s Push , too, probes the conceptual borders of the oppressors and the oppressed. However, similarly to Hogan’s novel, Sapphire’s narrative emphasizes the tendency of a victim to become transformed into a perpetrator herself.
As an African American woman, uneducated, and living in the inner city, Precious’s mother is clearly a victim of the systemic forces which render her invisible, invisible even to the societal institutions which are designed to alleviate her situation. The mother’s trauma, emanating from the nexus of her race, class and gender, alters her character into an oppressor of her daughter. In
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Precious’s mother, then, like in Walters’s Anglo curators and Hogan’s Hannah, the confines of a victim and a perpetrator collapse.
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The third chapter of my dissertation concentrates on three texts by African American authors, published approximately at the same time as their Native American counterparts, that is in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Like the novels by Hogan, Alexie and Walters, the novels by Jones, Gaines and Sapphire emerge from in a culture whose presence in the United
States has been historically marked by violence, human and civil rights violations, misrepresentation and oppression. Whereas I argue that the texts by Hogan, Alexie and Walters narrate trauma in an indirect fashion, in Jones’s, Gaines’s and Sapphire’s narratives, trauma’s presence is distinctly more conspicuous. Regardless of their formal and thematic differences, the three novels narrate the trauma of racial prejudice of the European American society and the ramifications thereof. It is a trauma which has manifested itself, alternately, as the inhumanity of the Middle Passage and slavery, as the policy of legal segregation, and as the system which allows for the destitute situation of some of the present day African American communities living in inner city areas.
In the first section of the third chapter, I explore Jones’s Corregidora which explicitly addresses Brazilian slavery as a suppressed part of the history of the Americas. Brazilian slavery in the novel functions as a referent to its North American equivalent. It is the repressed which, in line with Freud’s theory of trauma, resurfaces in the present. The two traumas in the center of the novel, that of slavery and its more intimate variant of Ursa’s miscarriage and hysterectomy, constitute a site in which Jones depicts the temporal condition of a traumatic experience. In the novel, the temporality of trauma is an informing principle, governing the narrative’s fragmented,
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and oftentimes repetitive, structure. Jones poignantly demonstrates the idiosyncrasies of an individual’s perception of time in the course of his or her traumatic and posttraumatic states.
None of the other novels accentuates the dissolving of the boundaries between the past and the present in the proximity of trauma in the way that Jones does in Corregidora . Although
Sapphire’s Push bears notable similarity to Corregidora in terms of the narrative’s disjointed structure, Sapphire’s technique is informed less by trauma’s disruption of temporality and more by trauma defying its own narrative. However, if a dialogue is facilitated between the two texts, they become powerful voices bearing witness to the traumatogenic stress that has been continuously affecting African American culture since the times of the Middle Passage and slavery. The physical brutality and sexual exploitation of Brazilian slavery in Corregidora is paralleled by the cruelty of a malfunctioning African American family living in the present day
New York City depicted in Push . Both the authors explore the traumas which ensue in consequence of the detrimental social, cultural, and familial atmosphere. The posttraumatic condition of Gram and Great Gram in Corregidora is comparable to the posttraumatic, psychologically impaired, state which characterizes Precious in Push . Interpreting both slavery and the poverty and systemic neglect permeating contemporary American inner cities as traumatic constitutes substantial grounds for the social critique that Jones and Sapphire engage in.
In comparison, Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman formally almost elides the paradigm of a trauma narrative. Yet, Gaines’s novel also narrates the trauma of the
African American historical experience. Diachronically, the novel partly covers the era which is in between the poles of Jones’s slavery and Sapphire’s end of the twentieth century. Like
Corregidora and Push , Gaines’s narrative relies on the trope of memory. The private
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recollections of Miss Jane’s life constitute the referential framework of the novel and the protagonist’s memory, thus, the primary means of accessing the past being narrated. However, the narrative itself is devoid of the slips and repetitions that I observe in Jones’s Corregidora , which is, too, in great part recounted from Ursa’s and her foremothers’ memories. Despite the absence of any unconventional narrative techniques per se, Gaines’s fictional editor acknowledges their existence in Miss Jane’s extra textual acts of telling. Most importantly, the very unobtrusive character of the editor is inherent to my interpretation of The Autobiography of
Miss Jane Pittman as a trauma narrative. For if the novel does not testify to the African
American trauma via formal fragmentation, it does so through the format of a testimony that the narrative assumes. Although I argue that all the novels analyzed, in certain ways, bear witness to the continuous traumatization of human beings in American society, Gaines’s narrative is the only one which explicitly embraces the format of a testimony. In my reading, I localize the novel’s fictional editor in the position of the listener to a trauma narrative and Miss Jane in the position of the teller. In reciprocal interaction and cooperation, the two characters produce what
Dori Laub theorizes as a testimony to trauma (“Bearing” 57). The personal narrative of The
Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman epitomizes what the other texts perform only in an indirect way. That is, Miss Jane’s testimony interrogates and bears witness to human suffering resulting from the European, and European American, historical dominance in the present day United
States.
The last novel discussed in the third chapter is the aforementioned Push by Sapphire.
Considered from the vantage point of textual intelligibility, Push offers a contrast to The
Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman . Although Miss Jane’s spoken narrative is originally ridden with slips and recurrences, Gaines’s fictional editor presents the narrative’s transcription to the
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reader in a coherent format, defined by clear progression and consistency. This is unlike
Precious’s story which is from the beginning determined by inarticulateness, verging at times on complete incomprehensibility. Only in the course of the novel does Precious’s narrative acquire more coherent contours; this happens after Precious encounters her literacy teacher, Ms Rain.
Hence, in terms of narrating trauma, Ms Rain performs a role which has for Precious a significance corresponding to that of the editor for Miss Jane. Like Gaines’s editor, Ms Rain mediates the narrative testimony of Precious’s trauma. In addition, via the medium of literacy teaching, Ms Rain also endows Precious’s story with traits of articulateness. In the final effect, the influence of Ms Rain as the listener and facilitator of Precious’s trauma narrative is evident in the novel’s very texture which gradually loses its incoherence and hybridity as it progresses. The initial disjointedness of the language, and even of the text itself, becomes the space for Precious to impart her trauma. The main protagonist’s traumatic experience, and her posttraumatic psychological condition, are of the proportions which can be, at least partly, conveyed via generic hybridity, abrupt fluctuation of the temporal and spatial setting, and brokenness of the language. In this sense, I read Push as an exploration of the extent to which trauma fractures language, yet preserves its narratability in the linguistic disintegration itself.
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There are multifaceted ways in which trauma makes itself visible in a culture’s artistic production and in particular works of literature. In the dissertation, I attempted to demonstrate some of the specific instances in which trauma gets inscribed, overtly or covertly, onto three novels by Native American and three novels by African American authors. Typically, trauma’s influence exerted over a literary text can be observed on the texts’ formal as well as thematic levels. Trauma in the six novels is sometimes only barely discernable; at other times, the text
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literally collapses under the weight of the trauma depicted. What the readings of Hogan, Alexie,
Walters, Jones, Gaines and Sapphire show is that the literary devices of narrating trauma vary extensively. Yet, the presence of trauma in the six novels is undeniable, as it is in the cultures from the midst of which the novels emanate. Through their stories and narrative techniques,
Solar Storms , Indian Killer , Ghost Singer , Corregidora , The Autobiography of Miss Jan Pittman and Push bear witness to the trauma which many individuals have suffered under the exploitative regime of European colonialism and thereafter. Positioning the novels within the discursive context of trauma enables me to accentuate the history of violence and oppression which marks the Native American and African American cultural experience. However, the six narratives of trauma are as much chronicles of human suffering as they are, at the same time, the authors’ pleas for the society’s commitment to social justice. Only the principles of social justice have the potential to facilitate a future marked less by trauma and more by tolerance of the other.
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