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Original Skin: Melancholy Returns, Postcolonial Mourning

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Original Skin: Melancholy Returns, Postcolonial Mourning ORIGINAL SKIN: MELANCHOLY RETURNS, POSTCOLONIAL MOURNING A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Sarah F. Senk May 2011 © 2011 Sarah F. Senk ORIGINAL SKIN: MELANCHOLY RETURNS, POSTCOLONIAL MOURNING Sarah F. Senk, Ph. D. Cornell University 2011 This dissertation takes issue with recent injunctions against mourning in contemporary trauma studies. The critical turn to melancholic or “resistant mourning” is based on the idea that one normalizes and assimilates loss in ethically dubious ways, either denying the loss or denying the alterity of the lost other; as a result, this criticism positions melancholia as the only viable response against a totalizing mourning. In tracing the parallels between this trend and a related valorization of anti-elegiac tendencies in twentieth and twenty-first century writing, I argue that the resurgent discourse of melancholia is based on a perceived breakdown of mourning which paradoxically conceals a desire for a time of perfect, totalizing mourning that this trend ostensibly refutes. This thesis, which most centrally addresses recent trends in trauma studies, opens up to postcolonial studies by examining how contemporary Anglophone writers, shaped by a common traumatic history of English colonialism, attempt to articulate new modes of grief work rather than simply returning to old wounds. Focusing on representations of individual loss and historical trauma in the work of Kamau Brathwaite, J. M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, and Derek Walcott, I explore acts of literature as ways of working-through that do not actually foreclose a dialogic relationship with the past. While all four writers initially seem to participate in a valorization of melancholia, they are actually attempting to work through loss in ways that challenge a reductive binary opposition between mourning as closure and melancholia as openness. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Sarah Senk holds a B.A. in Literature from Yale University, an M.St. in English from the University of Oxford, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. iii To the B. T. and B iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Research for this dissertation was supported by Sage Fellowships and Cornell’s Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines. I thank these sources, as well as the amazing Cornell University Library and document delivery staff, who helped me more than they know during my in absentia year, in which I wrote the bulk of this manuscript. My deepest thanks go out to my special committee: Jonathan Monroe, Dominick LaCapra, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, and Debra Castillo. Not only are they intellectual powerhouses; they are the most amazing, good-natured, generous people one could ever hope to work with. They are and always will be a constant inspiration for my work. I will forever be grateful for Debra Castillo’s insightful comments, warmth, and tireless support, particularly through the job market process. Liz DeLoughrey has always amazed me with her sharp intellect, vibrancy, and humor, and has offered impossibly precise critiques of my work from early on in my coursework through the final days of writing up. I chose to pursue a PhD at Cornell partly because I’d encountered the gushing acknowledgements section in one alumnus’s book, praising Dominick LaCapra’s brilliance and generosity as an advisor. There aren’t words to describe the extent to which those comments proved to be true; from my first day of classes through my dissertation defense, he has been a dedicated advisor and interlocutor, constantly motivating me to be a better thinker and writer. Finally, I feel I should in no small part thank the addictive properties of a certain coffee-based frozen drink for quite accidentally bringing me together with Jonathan Monroe, my soon-to- be committee Chair, almost every afternoon of my first semester of graduate school. Out of those casual conversations grew a project that would never have materialized without his challenging questions and immeasurable support. v At Cornell, I’ve benefitted from informal discussions of this project with several people. In particular, Rick Bogel, my “honorary committee member,” has provided me with valued feedback and wisdom over the years. He is one of the best teachers I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing and I offer him my sincere thanks and admiration. I am also grateful to Cathy Caruth for the careful and perceptive comments she made on an early draft of the introduction during her year as a visiting faculty member. Her work has undoubtedly helped shape this project. My fellow graduate students at Cornell, especially David Agruss and Martin Hägglund, have also been treasured interlocutors. Ben Glaser and Alexis Briley have helped me think more thoroughly about the elegy in the most unlikely of times and places. Jennie Row read drafts of each and every chapter and offered her razor-sharp critique and gorgeous ways with words. Last but not least, I am forever enriched just by knowing Adeline Rother and Beth Bouloukos, and thank them for their stratospheric brilliance, friendship and humor from day one of graduate school. (Play nostalgic montage here). In Oxford, I would like to acknowledge the inimitable Corin Throsby for her thoughtful comments on my chapter drafts, and to Lisa Vanhala, whose work on social justice provided the grounds for many fruitful conversations. Ankhi Mukherjee has been a cherished friend over the years; in addition to discussing and helping me work through some of the key ideas in this dissertation, she provided much needed emotional support during the semesters and summers when I was away from Cornell. This dissertation grew out of my undergraduate senior essay at Yale, and I am grateful to Wai Chee Dimock and Vilashini Cooppan for their early help and encouragement. Wes Davis advised and helped me shape the first inklings of what was to become the Walcott chapter; I blame (and ecstatically thank) him for inspiring all of this. Sarah Morduchowitz, Chris Heaney, Jared LeBoff, Darrell Hartman, and vi Michael Robinson will always represent my foundations in literary study; they have my gratitude for all of their support over the years, as do Zane Selkirk, Fang Chen, Marcus Haymon, and Ayshe Beesen, who will never read this, but had to put up with hearing about it. I can’t thank my family enough for their love and constant encouragement, and for both the formal and informal educational opportunities they made possible from my early childhood. My father came to the United States as a refugee from Germany in the 1930s; it was his and his family’s experiences that first prompted my interest in memory studies, and his sense of humor about both history and the present day that keeps me grounded. Finally, and most importantly, I’d like to thank Adam Auton, who, among other things, had to live with me while I was in the final stages of writing up. I hope the bound and bookended copy of this sitting on our shelf at home will continually inspire forgiveness. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface…………………………………………………………………………………ix Chapter 1: Introduction………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter 2: ‘The Cure that Precedes Every Wound’: Derek Walcott’s Omeros………32 Chapter 3: Kamau Brathwaite’s Poetics of Melancholia……………………………..69 Chapter 4: Mourning as Improvisation in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying…………….104 Chapter 5: Temporality of Care: J. M. Coetzee and the Threat of Future Loss……..141 Chapter 6: Conclusion……………………………………………………………….177 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………183 viii PREFACE This dissertation addresses the application of trauma studies to postcolonial literary and cultural contexts, a trend which in the past decade has become increasingly self-conscious about the risks of both effacing non-western modes of addressing loss and forcing into place a universalizing understanding of traumatic experience. Of course, this intersection of trauma studies and postcolonial studies is not in itself a recent critical development; Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi first brought attention to the damaging psychology of colonization in the late 1950s and 1960s, establishing the foundations for current work that asks how those psychological effects might be explored or perhaps mitigated. Since decolonization, scholars have turned to trauma studies as a comparative framework that might inform historical apprehension of various instances of collective violence, asking, for instance, how work on historical trauma that came out of academic attention to the Holocaust might inform work on the Indian Partition or the transatlantic slave trade, or how insights into how social and legal institutions might initiate a process of collective reconciliation and forgiveness, as in the case of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. It is only recently, however, that concerns have been raised about the ways that trauma theory – a field based primarily in European and American analyses of historical events like the Holocaust or the Vietnam War – might elide cultural difference by promoting a universalizing understanding of psychological trauma. Historicizing the discipline of trauma studies itself, recent work has focused on the field’s participation in “a discourse of memory that emerged at a specific time – in the late nineteenth century – and that is embedded in and inseparable from the particular concerns of western culture.”1 Substantiating or qualifying this assertion 1 Anne Whitehead, “Journeying Through Hell: Wole Soyinka, Trauma, and Postcolonial Nigeria,” Studies in the Novel 40.1&2 (Spring & Summer 2008): 13. ix would require extensive historical and comparative work. Still, looking at the post- colonial as post-traumatic must involve an awareness of the dangers of effacing non- western texts and methodologies and forcing on them a paradigm of memory that may not be universally applicable. This is not to say that the intersection of these two fields is not productive.
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