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Reconsidering Trauma in Literary Representations of the Holocaust, Apartheid and the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda

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Reconsidering Trauma in Literary Representations of the Holocaust, Apartheid and the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda Subversive Survival: Reconsidering Trauma in Literary Representations of the Holocaust, Apartheid and the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda Ayala Sarah Maurer A thesis presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Supervised by: Professor Stephanie Bird Dr Zoe Norridge University College London September 2018 I, Ayala Sarah Maurer, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 Abstract This dissertation examines literary representations of trauma and survival in relation to the Holocaust, apartheid and the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Although the theoretical study of trauma and its relationship to literature is vast and varied, it is simultaneously limited both by claims of the Eurocentrism of the discourse, and by the fact that the field is currently dominated by cultural trends that point towards absence, lack and void as wholly constitutive responses to violence: assumptions that have come to characterise survivors and their writing. My thesis interrogates these two positions. Written in English, Hebrew, and French, the texts I study here demonstrate how testimony subverts the orthodoxies and expectations associated with trauma and its literary aesthetics, suggesting the need for broader discussions around trauma and its representation. My first chapter, which puts Primo Levi’s If This is a Man in conversation with Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy and Yolande Mukagasana’s La Mort ne veut pas de moi, explores how literature demonstrates resilience, and not submission, in the face of violence. Next, I turn to Otto Dov Kulka’s Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death, Ellen Kuzwayo’s Call Me Woman and Révérien Rurangwa’s Génocidé to ask how survival is represented within autobiography in ways that defy the conventions of the genre. Chapter Three develops my discussion of survival by examining how fiction raises difficult questions surrounding victimhood, identity and memory, calling upon Imre Kertesz’s Liquidation, Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Gilbert Gatore’s Le Passé devant soi to do so. Finally, through discussion of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams and Diogène Ntarindwa’s Carte d’identité, I ask how intergenerational trauma might make itself felt – if, indeed, it is transmitted at all. 3 Impact Statement This thesis began with the question of how literary responses to violent limit events might shed light on what is currently a psychoanalytically-inspired canon of theory that positions void, lack and haunting as wholly-constitutive reactions to traumatic encounters. Reading across fiction, autobiography and drama, this thesis carried out a comparative textual analysis of three very different cultural contexts and found that individuals are capable of responding to traumatic events in a far more resilient and complex way than current trends in trauma theory admit. Whilst these ideas emphasise repression, these texts suggest that some victims of extreme violence remember these events all too well; where this theoretical canon claims that silence is a common, yet aesthetically and politically complex response to limit events, these authors – and the aesthetic choices they make – demonstrate a capacity for agency that not only allows them to remember the past with accuracy, but to confront it directly. This study and its findings have strong implications for future academic research. Theoretical discussion around comparative studies, particularly in relation to atrocity, is marked by a hesitancy generated by concerns of specificity and uniqueness. Whilst attention must of course be paid to specific contexts and outcomes, the particular way these texts testify to the benefits of discussing one violent history in tandem with another demonstrates the virtue of comparison; a finding that I hope will encourage more comparatively-led studies of violence in the literary context. A significant contribution to knowledge made by this thesis is to be found in its innovative readings of the texts that constitute its corpus. In addition to providing the first extended critical reading of Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy, this thesis extends the theoretical discussions around each of its primary texts; asking new questions and providing fresh perspectives that are fruitful ground for future research within the discipline. This research has also flagged certain questions regarding representations of alterity and degrees of intergenerationality that point to new directions for inquiries into the dynamics of trauma’s literary representation. Outside of the academy, mental health practitioners might find this dissertation’s argument for the resilience possible in traumatic responses particularly instructive. Whilst clinicians and psychoanalysts 4 currently work primarily with the PTSD definitions as originally outlined by the DSM-IV in relation to trauma, the findings of this thesis argue that the symptomatology and diagnostic criteria associated with this disorder are perhaps too narrow to encompass the breadth of human response. This dissertation’s argument for the agency that individuals are able to retain after traumatic violence calls for expanded thinking not only around diagnostics, but therapies; instead of assuming cognitive inhibition and interpreting silence as evidence of traumatisation, practitioners might look to this thesis for an expanded understanding of the motivations behind survivor silence and work with patients to encourage the resilience that this thesis demonstrates individuals to be capable of in the face of limit events. 5 Table of Contents Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................................. 8 Introduction: Trauma: Conceptions, Constructions and Afterlives ................................................ 9 Trauma: Contested from the Start ................................................................................................ 10 Trauma, Race and Post/Colonialism: A Brief Introduction............................................................ 26 Writing Trauma .............................................................................................................................. 34 Methodology, Corpus and Structure ............................................................................................. 48 Comparative Literature: Moving Trauma Forward ........................................................................ 52 Chapter One: Aestheticizing Anguish: Assumptions & Actualities .............................................. 54 Primo Levi – If This is a Man ...................................................................................................... 60 Levi’s Intertexts: Renegotiating Identity .................................................................................... 60 Pain and Purpose in a World of Inversion ................................................................................ 65 Anguish, Language and the Recognition of Brokenness .......................................................... 68 Mark Mathabane – Kaffir Boy ..................................................................................................... 72 The exceptional banality of trauma ........................................................................................... 72 Familial unfamiliarity.................................................................................................................. 74 Race: destructive from the inside out........................................................................................ 77 Yolande Mukagasana – La Mort ne veut pas de moi ............................................................... 83 Genocide in sights and sounds ................................................................................................. 83 Being female: ruin and redemption ........................................................................................... 86 Emotional questions, ambiguous answers ............................................................................... 92 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 95 Chapter Two: Trauma and Testimony: Whose Life is it Anyway? ................................................. 98 Otto Dov Kulka – Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death .................................................... 104 Between the public and the personal: breaching genre’s bounds .......................................... 104 Between the “I” and the other ................................................................................................. 107 Voices Past and Present ......................................................................................................... 112 Ellen Kuzwayo – Call Me Woman ............................................................................................ 114 Questions, Answers, Actions .................................................................................................. 114 Call Me Woman ....................................................................................................................... 118 Me, Myself and I ...................................................................................................................... 121
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