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A Comparative Study of Native American and African American Narratives of Trauma Disertační Práce

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A Comparative Study of Native American and African American Narratives of Trauma Disertační Práce 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 2 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. 3 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.
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