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History, Trauma and Healing in the Post-Colonial Narrative

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History, Trauma and Healing in the Post-Colonial Narrative Re-Constructing Identities: History, Trauma and Healing in the Post-Colonial Narrative by Ogagaoghene Emerotowho Ifowodo This thesis/dissertation document has been electronically approved by the following individuals: Mohanty,Satya P (Chairperson) Jeyifo,Biodun (Co-Chair) Donaldson,Laura (Minor Member) Spillers,Hortense Jeanette (Minor Member) Gilbert,Roger Stephen (Minor Member) RE-CONSTRUCTING IDENTITIES: HISTORY, TRAUMA AND HEALING IN THE POST-COLONIAL NARRATIVE 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 Ogagaoghene Emerotowho Ifowodo August 2010 © 2010 Ogagaoghene Emerotowho Ifowodo ALL RIGHTS RESERVED RE-CONSTRUCTING IDENTITIES: HISTORY, TRAUMA AND HEALING IN THE POST-COLONIAL NARRATIVE OGAGAOGHENE EMEROTOWHO IFOWODO, Ph.D. Cornell University 2010 This dissertation essays to fill a gap that exists currently in postcolonial theory and criticism: that constituted by the dearth, if not total absence, of a psychological approach. Long before postcolonial studies became a discipline, Frantz Fanon declared that ―only a psychoanalytical interpretation of the black problem can lay bare the anomalies of affect that are responsible for the structure of the complex.‖ Fanon would later emerge as a canonical figure in the field, even spawning an academic cottage industry memorably dubbed ―critical Fanonism.‖ But much of this criticism ignores the essence of Fanon‘s call for a sociodiagnostic, a psychoanalytic interpretive tool informed by social and economic realities. My intervention seeks to answer the question of what it would mean to read post-colonial history as the history of a trauma, of the subversive return of the repressed. Yet, to speak of psychic epiphenomena and social realism in one breath presents, admittedly, an apparent contradiction. To show this problem as more apparent than real, I bring psychoanalysis into dialogue with philosophical realism. I look to the emergent theory of post-positivist realism for a conception of reference that provides the referential link between ―traumatic‖ and ―ordinary‖ experience. In my readings of the primary texts that form this study, I show the link between the traumatic wound of (post)colonialism and the strange and often bizarre effects it produces even today. Thus, for instance, I expand our current understanding of the confounding drama of death and continuity in a colonized world recently voided of its will (Wole Soyinka‘s Death and the King’s Horseman), and of the debilitating symptoms of a repressed past that must be worked- through in order to recover agency (Derek Walcott‘s Omeros). My exegesis serves as a critique of the tendency in postcolonial studies to privilege only the cultural-political mode of interpretation, thereby leaving a crucial dimension of the postcolonial predicament inadequately explored. If asked to restate the goal of this dissertation, I would, for want of a better term, say simply, ―Towards a psycho-social realist theory of the post-colonial narrative.‖ It is a close cousin of ―the political unconscious,‖ the closest that a materialist attempt at probing the repressed strata of postcolonial trauma has yet come. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Ogagaoghene Emerotowho Ifowodo was born in Oleh, Delta State, Nigeria. He received an LL.B (Honours) from the University of Benin in 1989. He worked briefly as an attorney and then for eight years as a rights activist with Nigeria‘s premier non-governmental rights group, the Civil Liberties Organisation. Ifowodo began writing poetry in secondary school where his first poem won first prize in an annual inter-house art festival. In 2003 he received an M.F.A. from Cornell. Prior to that, he had published a prize-winning collection, Homeland and Other Poems (reissued in 2008 by Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ). His second volume, Madiba, completed before he entered Cornell in 2001, was published in 2003. Ifowodo‘s third book, The Oil Lamp, is an autonomous part of his M.F.A. thesis and was published in 2005. A fourth collection, A Good Mourning, is near completion. Ifowodo‘s poetry has appeared in several anthologies, including Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature (John Wiley, 2000); Voices from all Over: Poems with Notes and Activities (Oxford University Press, 2006); Like a Fragile Index of the World: Poems for David Skorton commemorating the installation of Cornell‘s twelfth president; 25 Nigerian Poets (Ishmael Reed, 2000); Dance the Guns to Silence: 100 Poems for Ken Saro-Wiwa (Flipped Eye, 2005), and in the following magazines, The Times Literary Supplement, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry International, Atlanta Review, English in Africa, Mantis, among others. Ifowodo‘s poems have been translated into German, Dutch and Romanian. He was held in preventive iii detention for six months in 1997-1998 under the military dictatorship of General Abacha. Excerpts from the on-going memoirs of his detention have appeared in Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (2002); NW 14: The Anthology of New Writing (2006); Vanguard and African Writing. Ifowodo is a recipient of the PEN USA Barbara Goldsmith Freedom-to-Write Award and of the New Word Award of Poets of All Nations. He is also an honorary member of the PEN centers of the USA, Canada, and Germany and a fellow of the Iowa Writing Program. Ifowodo enrolled in the Ph.D program at Cornell in 2003 and earned an M.A. in English in 2006. He was awarded an International Institute of Education grant and a Cornell University Provost‘s Diversity Fellowship towards the completion of his candidacy and the dissertation process. He is currently on the MFA faculty at Texas State University, San Marcos. iv DEDICATION To Alissa, whose path crossed mine at Cornell, and to Adigheji and Irorezi who came after. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In researching and writing this dissertation, I have benefited tremendously from numerous teachers and mentors, friends and well- wishers, and family members whose intellectual example, thinking, counselling and support helped me come to a better understanding of, and the stamina to complete, this project. But to begin at the very beginning, I should like to thank Professor Wole Soyinka who, in 2000, urged me to think of applying for a Master in Fine Arts (MFA) programme in the United States as a way of gratifying my heart by transiting from law to a relatively more conducive environment for poetry and writing in academia. Soyinka did not stop there but also wrote letters of recommendation for me when I applied a year later to four colleges, leading to my coming to Cornell in the fall of 2001. Professor Biodun Jeyifo (BJ), whose own crucial role in my coming to Cornell I have acknowledged in my last poetry collection, The Oil Lamp, deserves to be thanked anew here. At the end of my MFA in 2003, I applied only to Cornell for a Ph.D in English and it is safe to say that Jeyifo was my most influential recommender. Until he left Cornell for Harvard in 2006, BJ‘s was not only a warm and assuring avuncular presence so far away from our native Nigeria but also a tough and inspiring intelligence that held itself out for emulation. I must next and very quickly thank my special committee: Satya P. Mohanty, who became co-chair upon BJ‘s departure for Harvard; Hortense J. Spillers; Roger Gilbert, and Laura Donaldson. I count myself lucky to have had the personal example and the eager direction vi and encouragement of my committee members. Two seminars on theory with Satya led me, an outsider with the writer‘s scepticism for post-fangled theories, towards a different way of talking about literary theory and experience. A seminar with Hortense caused my second encounter with Frantz Fanon, the psychoanalytic Fanon, who would, unbeknownst to me then when I was only a poet in the MFA programme, inspirit this dissertation. When it became obvious, due to the 2006 departures of BJ and Hortense for Harvard and Vanderbilt, respectively, that I would need to reconstitute my committee, Satya readily agreed to be co-chair and Roger and Laura, whose respective seminars, Whitman and Twentieth Century American Poetry, and Postcolonial America, I had the privilege of taking, very kindly accepted my invitation. In the course of writing, I accepted a position on the MFA faculty at Texas State University but Roger was the first to urge me to complete the dissertation, having come so far. I should also like to thank Professor Eric Cheyfitz, an original member of the committee, who left early on but not before his rigorous questioning had helped to steer me towards a more fruitful line of inquiry. Although not a member of my dissertation committee, Ken McClane, who chaired my MFA special committee, gave me constant support and encouragement. And at a critical moment, Dominick LaCapra, whose work is invaluable to this dissertation, graciously answered my queries on some questions of translation of Freud. In varied and more ways than they know, the following friends and colleagues contributed to this project: the Future of Minority Studies collective, Danielle Heard, Stanka Radovic, Liz DeLoughrey, vii Laura Brown, Fredric Bogel, Tsitsi Jaji, Paola Iovene, Angela Naimou, Akin Adesokan, Yoshiaki Mihara, Bridget Meeds and Kenny Berkowitz, Tejumola Olaniyan, Salah Hassan, Odia Ofeimun, Harry Garuba, Ike Okonta, Obi Nwakanma, E. C. Osondu, Pius Adesanmi, Amatoritsero Ede, Maik Nwosu, Victor Ehikhamenor, Ikhide Ikheloa, Wumi Raji, Kunle Ajibade, the Olorunyomis
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