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Narratives of Recovery : Trauma History and the Use NARRATIVES OF RECOVERY: TRAUMA, HISTORY, AND THE USE OF THE SUPERNATURAL IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURAL PRODUCTIONS By LORRAINE OUIMET A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2003 Copyright 2003 , by Lorraine Ouimet of This document is dedicated to the graduate students of the English Department University of Florida. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project would never have come to completion without the efforts of a group of dedicated dreamers, all of whom believed that I could pull this off. Alan, the biggest being married to a doctor. His dream has come true. His 1 dreamer of all, dreamt of unwavering love, through long separations, fed my soul. Gratefully and with so much this love, I acknowledge my mother's determination to seeing me through academic process. Her constant praises, countless rides to the train station and to the airport, her soothing words of wisdom when loneliness threatened to overtake me and, most of all, her committed editorial help sustained me through the 10 years of undergrad and graduate work. This dissertation is hers and mine. My sister-who always told me that I intellectual was smart and that I could write beautiflilly-and my father-whose love for endeavor inspired mine-must know that their love and support were invaluable. Ariel, my starry roommate, could not help but to shine some of her beautifiil light on this project. Her genuine kindness, so very rarely encountered, and her seemingly endless hidden supply of Milk Duds, carried me through rough and happy times alike. I must thank Brian Meredith, my first support system, my first pillar of strength. Sarah, Meg, Laura, Nicole, Martha, Emily, Nishant, Julie, Todd, Andrew, Brian D.- no one was ever so lucky as to ; have the support of such precious friends. Hamn and Bradley (Nerds!) inspired me every i Kathy, Loretta, Jerry, and Carla - their hugs and i day; I know they'll do great things. many little attentions made my life away from home so much easier to bear. Dr. Leavy's and Dr. Dobrin's guidance made life as a graduate student rich, productive, even noble. iv I I Dr. Maude Hines', Dr. Mark Reid', and Dr. Mikkell Pinkney's brilliant and exciting input injected the project with new life over and over again. The people at the University of Florida's International Students' Office deserve all the praise in the world. They manage to make every international student who walks through their door feel like we belong, despite the cultural and geographical dislocation that often paralyzes us. The competence and devotion with which they solve every last problem - from the quagmire of immigration regulations to the biting pain of loneliness - simply warm the heart. Finally, David Leverenz, who believed in my ideas, who always nudged me a little further, who made me rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, is the intellectual beacon that guided me safely through obstacles, and to the port of call of academia. V TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv ABSTRACT viii CHAPTER 1 1 RECOVERING (FROM) THE PAST Introduction ^ Methodolog(ies) ^4 2 THE MASTER'S TOOLS: AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITING AND AMERICAN LITERARY REALISM 27 Realism(s) in Black and White 28 The Failure of Realism 50 Fantastic Realities-Real Fantasies 55 60 3 TRAVELING (THROUGH) TRAUMA: KINDRED AND SANKOFA Kindred "70 Sankofa ^1 4 TRAUMATIC REPETITIONS IN NAYLOR' S MAMA DA Y, PARKS ' THE DEA TH OF THE LAST BLA CK MAN IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD, AND LEMMONS' EVE'S BAYOU. 99 Mama Day The Death ofthe Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World 120 127 Eve 's Bayou 5 DANGEROUS INTIMACIES: SEXUALITY, SPIRITS AND TRAUMA IN VOODOO DREAMS, MIDDLE PASSAGE, AND OXHERDING TALE 144 Voodoo Dreams 150 Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage 169 6 CONCLUSION 189 vi LIST OF REFERENCES 215 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 226 vii Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy NARRATIVES OF RECOVERY: TRAUMA, fflSTORY, AND THE USE OF THE SUPERNATURAL IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURAL PRODUCTIONS By Lorraine Ouimet May 2003 Chair: David Leverenz Major: Department: English The past thirty years have brought forth a vibrant renaissance of visual and literary art dealing with the horrors of slavery. Clearly, contemporary African American artists are participating in a (re)writing/righting of history. I propose that more than attempting to recover the past, many of these contemporary narratives of slavery also aim at a recovery from the past. Psychoanalytical literature dealing with trauma, when read alongside the African American novels, films, plays, and art exhibition under study in this project, brings out features that reveal the presence of cycles of trauma and recovery. Beyond sharing similarities with psychoanalytic texts, these Narratives of Recovery share a certain device: All make use of the supernatural. These authors/artists use the fantastic to collapse Sboundaries between the past and the present, endowing the past with an immediacy that renders it more accessible, transformable, and ultimately, recoverable. This blurring of temporal boundaries results in a constant "replay" of the viii past into the present, which resembles the flashbacks experienced by victims of trauma, a mechanism triggered naturally by the body in order to prevent the repression of traumatic events and to allow for a process of healing to take place. Through a psychoanalytical framework, this project interacts with literary, dramatic, and cinematographic texts for the purpose of illuminating African Americans' and Americans' relationship(s) to the legacy of slavery. Ultimately, it aspires to enrich the meaning of Narratives of Recovery by juxtaposing their reading against a compatible, perhaps even catalytic, analytical tool that makes salient the injuries scarring the American past and present. This dissertation considers the supernatural as a narrative device that makes visible the presence of trauma in the works of such artists as Terri Adkins, Octavia Butler, Haile Gerima, Charles Johnson, Kasi Lemmons, Suzan-Lori Parks, Gloria Naylor, and Jewell Parker Rhodes. It considers the particular cultural, historical, and social setting from which these Narratives arise. At the core of the project stands the premise that distinctive links exist between the themes and devices found in recent African American cultural productions and specific aspects of psychoanalytical theory, particularly symptoms of trauma and recovery processes. ix CHAPTER 1 RECOVERING (FROM) THE PAST Introduction Recent African American cultural productions and scholarship of African American studies pay much attention to the project of "rewriting history." While the impulse to rewrite the past draws from various sources, many critics focus on the artists' revisionist concern with writing/righting history, and with recovering a past lost in the waters of the Middle Passage and in the horrors of slavery and racism. I am interested in the "why" behind this rewriting of history. I propose that more than attempting to recover the past, many of these narratives also aim at a recovery from the past. Psychoanalytical literature dealing with trauma, when read alongside such texts as Gloria Naylofs Mama Day, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Haile Gerima's Sankofa, Charies Johnson's Middle Passage and Oxherding Tale, Kasi Lemmons's Eve 's Bayou, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Jewell Parker Rhodes's Voodoo Dreams, and Susan Lori Parks's The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, brings out features that signal the presence of cycles of trauma and recovery. Beyond sharing similarities with psychoanalytic texts, these narratives-I refer to them as Narratives of Recovery-share a certain device: all make use of the supernatural. This element constitutes a shift in genre for the black narrative traditions. Most African American artists have consistently demonstrated a commitment to creating art that evokes factuality, starting with the slave narratives of the 18"" and 19* century. Since the 1980s, 1 2 however, there has been a movement away from realism toward a less limiting and constricting genre, one that incorporates elements of the supernatural. To explain the possible causes for this shift, I argue that the use of the supernatural in these narratives fiilfills both agendas of recovery, that of reappropriating the past and that of healing the wounds inflicted by its traumatic events. In the cultural productions between the that I am investigating, the artists use the fantastic to collapse the boundaries past and the present. The past then becomes endowed with an immediacy, one that blurring of renders it more accessible, transformable, and ultimately, recoverable. This temporal boundaries results in a constant "replay" of the past into the present. The process resembles the flashbacks and memories experienced by victims of trauma, a mechanism triggered naturally by the body in order to prevent the repression of traumatic events and to allow for a process of healing to take place. Indeed, memory performs a similar function; the act of remembering also transposes the past into the present, giving it a quality of immediacy, a concept dramatized in such contemporary African American texts as Ernest Gaines' The Autobiography ofMiss Jane Pittman. In Gaines' novel, Miss Pitman, who has lived for 110 years, recollects not only the painfiil memories of slavery, but also the memories of emancipation, reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, and finally the black militancy of the 60s. But Narratives of Recovery differ from such contemporary models of anamnesis. The characters in Voodoo Dreams, Kindred, and Praisesongfor the Widow, for example, do not choose to recollect as much as they are forced to. Like victims of traumatic occurrences, these characters are constantly subjected to a flow of painftil, disturbing, and uncontrollable memories-memories of slavery and of the Middle Passage.
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