Experiencing Loss: Traumatic Memory and Nostalgic Longing in Anne Landsman's The Devil’s Chimney and The Rowing Lesson, and Rachel Zadok’s Gem Squash Tokoloshe (original) (raw)
Related papers
Zoë Wicomb’s novel David’s Story responds to the traumatic conditions of racism, the psychology of the traumatized individual and to the (failed) ‘collective therapy’ of the TRC, which aimed at integrating the trauma suffered under apartheid in a national narrative of reconciliation and progress. Wicomb points out the gaps in the national project of coping with trauma, and complements the ‘monologic’ kind of historiography harnessed by the NP and the ANC by perspectives neglected in their versions of the recent past. The writer does not aim at a transparent imitation of disruptive trauma in an art of commitment, which might invite voyeuristic indulgence in horror or re-traumatize readers. She shuns linear narrative and closure, which would allow for detachment and the return to the ordinary. Wicomb deliberately replays trauma in dialogic aesthetics, which foregrounds the process of negotiating the past and its disruption by trauma. Her self-reflexive explorations of ‘sharing’ trauma reveal the difficulties -- for the traumatized individual as well as for the various groups affected in different ways by trauma -- of coming to terms with the past. I will locate the conditions of trauma in the discursive framework of monologic ideologies and its practices, which have a potentially harmful impact on the bodies and the selves of individuals and groups singled out for discrimination and repression.
Literary responses to the South African TRC: renegotiating ‘truth’, ‘trauma’ and ‘reconciliation’
2017
My thesis examines the intersections between trauma and narrative in the context of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was established in 1995 after the first democratic elections and aimed to assist the country in the transition from the apartheid regime to a democratic order. I investigate how literature responds to the reconciling project of the truth commission by exploring six exemplary post-apartheid novels: Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun, Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit, Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela, and Zoe Wicomb’s Playing in the Light. I argue that these texts supplement the work initiated by the TRC by challenging two core assumptions of the truth commission, namely, that the truth about the past is fully recoverable, and, if recovered would provide effective healing of the South African nation. Through the analyses of the selected novels, I expose the inadequacy of t...
Wor(l)ds of Grief: Traumatic Memory and Literary Witnessing in Cross-Cultural Perspective
2010
Considered in terms of a struggle over definitions of trauma and recovery, the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the criticisms levelled against it, and the literary response it has evoked shed an interesting light on the debate currently being waged by scholars in the field of trauma studies over the perceived monocultural bias of trauma theory in its 'classical', mid-1990s formulation and the fraught relationship between such tendencies and the commitment to social justice on which the field prides itself.
Current Writing, 2003
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission reveals a tension between a desire to open up the story of the past and to " close the chapter on our past ". I explore this tension by considering both the TRC's relation to closure and those of selected fictional narratives that explicitly respond to the TRC. I argue that the tidy closure of reconciliation both excludes the traumatic traces of " deep memory " and fails to account for the presence of the past in the present. Focusing on formal structure and endings, I consider how metaphors of narrative such as Walcott's " cracked vase " and textile images of quilting, tapestry and weaving suggest ways of writing the past that defer closure and complacency in favour of process and creative reworking.
Unhomely Homes: Trauma, Memory and the Loss of Home in Three South African Novels
The paper explores the "unheimlich" ("unhomely") in three South African novels: Gem Squash Tokoloshe, Dream House and October. The novels use the trope of the house to represent the psychological and social traumas of Apartheid and post-Apartheid South Africa. They also use the mythopoeic cyclical journey to describe psychological responses to trauma. This is akin both to the psychoanalytic method and to the mythic journey back into the past to uncover repressed memories. Using Freudian psychoanalysis, we divide the exploration of this trauma into three different parts: Deception, Absence and Substitution. Trauma is not contained in a single event. Its effects are felt in the deception which underpins the original event and furthered by the sense of absence or lack which arises and which must then be alleviated by finding a substitute. This attempt is itself traumatic. Analysing trauma, perforce, demands an analysis of each of these elements.
The Poetics of Loss or Imaginative Redescriptions? Narrative Strategies in Recent Memory Texts
This paper engages with current psychological and social articulations of trans-generational trauma as experienced by both the “second” and the “third” (post-war) generation. At this point, an increasing historical remove contributes to levelling poignant and incontrovertible differences between perpetrator and victim experiences of the legacy of National Socialism. Marianne Hirsch’s seminal conceptualization of transgenerational memory as “postmemory,” for instance, applies to the formation and contradictions of an inherited memory for children and grandchildren of both victims and perpetrators. Yet, I argue, we need to understand the interdependence and terms of these ‘memory symptoms,’ along with the seeming proximity of such disparate subject- positions as part of a far-reaching historical legacy without dissolving them into a convenient and potentially apologetic history of German suffering. The central question posed by the legacy of Auschwitz may be condensed to: Is it possible to express an engagement with that catastrophic legacy without repressing, denying, or nostalgically rewriting painful memories on the one hand, or circumventing complicity by assuming an undifferentiated position of ‘victim of history,’ on the other hand? This question is particularly poignant in light of the fact that such strategies were often employed to articulate war and postwar memories of the first generation tainted by affect and guilt, and as such passed on to the second and third generation. Taking my cue from recent literary studies that have underscored the ability of literature and cinema to express concealed, repressed, or uncomfortable truths about the past, I focus on the aesthetic representation of history as part of what Amir Eshel has called “the poetics of loss.” In fact, I share and want to build on Eshel’s premise that works of literature do not set out to “master” the past but instead present “imaginative redescriptions” (as used by Rorty) , new vocabularies with which to grasp the contradictions and impasses of history. Understood as such “imaginative redescriptions,” the aesthetic representations of history under consideration here no longer allow the question of a ‘proper or improper’ engagement of history and instead their analysis is driven by the desire to understand rather than to know. In a way, these memory texts dramatize history as a Schlüsselszene, as fiction sustained by what Benjamin has called mémoire involontaire, a memory fed by images, “which we never saw until we remembered.” With this premise, I propose to analyze narrative strategies as employed in recent tetxts by Hans-Ulrich Treichel (Der Verlorene) and Katharina Hacker (Eine Art Liebe) as attempts to stage what may be termed a perspective of ‚trans-generational difference’ with respect to the psychological, social and socio-economic effects of war.
"Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga, and Karin Orantes, ed. (2010): Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews." Anglistik 22.2: 198 - 201., 2011
A review of "Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga, and Karin Orantes, ed. (2010): Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews." Anglistik 22.2: 198 - 201.
The ghost of memory : literary representations of slavery in post-apartheid South Africa
2018
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Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature
2017
This book series explores the relationship between cultural heritage and conflict. The key themes of the series are the heritage and memory of war and conflict, contested heritage, and competing memories. The series editors seek books that analyze the dynamics of the past from the perspective of tangible and intangible remnants, spaces, and traces as well as heritage appropriations and restitutions, significations, musealizations, and mediatizations in the present. Books in the series should address topics such as the politics of heritage and conflict, identity and trauma, mourning and reconciliation, nationalism and ethnicity, diaspora and intergenerational memories, painful heritage and terrorscapes, as well as the mediated re-enactments of conflicted pasts.