Trauma and Transformation in African Literature

Writing Wrongs

J. Roger Kurtz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781315467511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book fills a gap in the field of contemporary trauma studies by interrogating the relevance of trauma for African literatures. Kurtz argues that a thoughtful application of trauma theory in relation to African literatures is in fact a productive exercise, and furthermore that the benefits of this exercise include not only what it can do for African literature, but also what it can do for trauma studies. He makes the case for understanding trauma healing within the larger project of peacebuilding, with an emphasis on the transformative potential of what he terms the African moral imagination as embodied in the creative work of its writers. He offers readings of selected works by Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Chimamanda Adichie, and Nuruddin Farah as case studies for how African literature can influence our understanding of trauma and trauma healing. This will be a valuable volume for those with interests in current trends and developments in trauma studies, African literary studies, postcolonial studies, and memory studies.

Introduction
Trauma Theory, Going Global

Three-quarters of the way through Chinua Achebe’s remarkable novel, Things Fall Apart, there is an important homecoming. The headstrong protagonist Okonkwo, who has been exiled from his home village of Umuofia for seven years, returns only to find that things have changed dramatically during his absence. It is the 1920s, and the British are consolidating their influence throughout Nigeria. While Okonkwo was gone, missionaries and colonial administrators have made considerable inroads into this Igbo community, challenging and even outlawing many traditional customs and ways of life, and the village leadership is no longer united in the face of this alien influence. New laws are in place, and community leaders have been arrested by colonial functionaries who are backed by superior weaponry. Okonkwo comes home to a changed world, in which the “abominable religion” of the newcomers is undermining traditional beliefs, shrines have been desecrated, and internal divisions are breaking up villages and families.

For Okonkwo, this is a disastrous turn of affairs that eventually leads to his suicide at the end of the novel. At the time of his return from exile, however, Okonkwo pays a visit to his old friend Obierika, and the two men discuss what is happening to their community. Obierika is a thoughtful character who grasps complexities and moral ambiguities in ways that Okonkwo does not, and his insights are generally a reliable guide to the dynamics of this narrative. In this instance, he offers a telling observation. Colonialism, Obierika points out, has “put a knife on the things that held us together, and we have fallen apart” (Achebe 1958, 176).¹

This observation—that Igbo communal life has “fallen apart” as a result of European incursion—provides the title and articulates the principal theme for Achebe’s novel. Achebe borrowed the phrase from W.B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” applying it in an original and insightful way to West Africa’s experience with British colonialism. For Yeats, writing in 1919, the apocalyptic lines described the collapse of Europe amidst the rubble of World War I: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” For Achebe, however, these words also perfectly encapsulated what was happening to Igbo society in the late nineteenth century. Whereas the British euphemistically referred to these events as the “pacification” of this part of Nigeria, Achebe’s novel reveals them to involve the wholesale destruction of a culture. Things Fall Apart is the story of a community left in fragmented disarray because of an external blow that overwhelms its ability to respond. It is, in other words, a trauma narrative.

But what does it mean to be a trauma narrative, and more particularly what does it mean to be an African trauma narrative? Deploying trauma as a category for understanding literature is an approach that is now several decades old. In her 1996 study, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Cathy Caruth argued that the evolution over the previous century in the vocabulary and concepts relating to trauma and to trauma healing profoundly impacted the manner in which we read both historical as well as fictional texts. The very language of trauma, Caruth argues, and the way it complicates how texts refer to reality, demand a “new mode of reading and of listening” (1996, 9). This new mode arises from the insight that trauma somehow alters our perceptions of reality and how we communicate our experiences of it. Questions about trauma, claims Caruth, “can never be asked in a straightforward way, but must, indeed, also be spoken in a language that is always somehow literary: a language that defies, even as it claims, our understanding” (1996, 5). This conviction, along with the many responses to it, have resulted in the growth of a critical mass of scholarly writing that constitutes the new literary-cultural subfield known as trauma theory.²

Following Caruth’s lead, the critical conversation relating to trauma theory has tended to focus on three main conceptual clusters or discourses. All three have shaped the vocabulary and the conversation around trauma theory, and it is important to note that they are all rooted in the experiences and intellectual traditions of Western Europe.

The first of these discourses is Freudian psychoanalysis, which offers the insight that a traumatic event is rarely remembered or expressed in a direct way. The assumption of this approach is that the workings of the human psyche are such that we can only recall or refer to these events indirectly, often in disguise. Because Freud’s vocabulary of repression and displacement can be readily applied to the dynamics of how texts represent reality, the Freudian model offers a productive metaphor for the way literature represents reality in general, and for literature’s relationship to trauma in particular.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud refers to the story of Tancred and Clorinda, as depicted in the popular sixteenth-century Italian epic poem Jerusalem Delivered [La Gerusalemme liberata] by Torquato Tasso. Tasso’s poem is a fictional account of a battle for the holy city during the first crusade, during which the Christian knight Tancred faces off against the Muslim forces of the female warrior Clorinda. Though they have previously met and fallen in love, he mistakenly kills her in battle. Tancred repeats this mistake soon afterwards when he tries to cut down a tree in which Clorinda’s soul has been contained, wounding her again. This story, says Freud, offers a “poetic picture” (1920, 22) of how trauma returns to haunt its victim, unwittingly and unbidden. Trauma reenacts and repeats the original injury.

For her part, Caruth opens her landmark study with this story from Freud, which she takes to be illustrative of the dynamics of trauma, although the focus of her interpretation is somewhat different from Freud’s. As a result, the tale of Tancred and Clorinda has become something of a literary touchstone not only for exploring the functioning of psychological trauma but also for illustrating “the crucial link between literature and theory” in relation to trauma (Caruth 1996, 3). It is also a reminder of trauma theory’s indebtedness to insights from the field of psychoanalysis.

The claims of deconstructionist literary theory offer a second major influence on Caruth and others, mainly because deconstruction embraces the fundamental paradox that while texts are of paramount importance in shaping our perceptions, the textual representation of reality is never straightforward, always provisional, and perhaps even impossible. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Dominick LaCapra makes the case that “trauma is a disruptive experience that disarticulates the self and creates holes in existence,” an experience that unsettles our assumptions about knowledge and truth, with the result that “the study of traumatic events poses especially difficult problems in representation and writing” (2001, 41). Deconstruction offers an approach that accounts for and even emphasizes these representational gaps and disarticulations, and for this reason there has been a rich engagement with deconstruction on the part of trauma theorists.

A third major influence on literary trauma theory has been the experience of the Nazi Holocaust, which is taken as the quintessential trauma of recent history, the traumatic “watershed of our times” (Felman and Laub 1992, xiv). The Holocaust, argues Kalí Tal, is “the Ur-trauma in the U.S. mindscape” (1996, 22). Miller and Tougaw concur, noting that many historians “assign the Holocaust a privileged place as the paradigmatic event of unspeakable human suffering” (2002, 3). Well beyond the United States, scholars interested in exploring the possibilities, limitations, and ethics of writing about traumatic experiences, whether as history or as fiction, frequently take the Holocaust as their defining case study for trauma theory.³ “Holocaust memory,” concludes Kansteiner, is “still the backbone of our official collective memories” (2014, 403).

Trauma Theory in Africa

If these three discourses—Freudian psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and the Holocaust experience, all of which derive from European origins—have provided the guiding concepts for trauma theory in its early years, more recent work in the field has broadened the conversation, interrogating the usefulness of these concepts beyond European contexts. Trauma may be a universal human phenomenon, but how appropriate is this version of trauma theory in non-Western settings? Are the approaches and assumptions that have coalesced into a tentative “trauma canon” applicable across cultures and through time? Or is it once again the case, as with so many Western intellectual movements, even progressive ones, that trauma theory’s Eurocentric origins and biases lead to untenable universalizing claims, resulting in the imposition of an alien conceptual framework for understanding and responding to trauma? Is trauma theory appropriate and applicable in a place like contemporary Africa? Or is it yet another alien influence—like the newly arrived “abominable religion” that Okonkwo tragically resists in Things Fall Apart—that ends up creating more harm than it heals?

If the latter is true, then we would have to conclude that in non-Western settings trauma theory is probably ineffective and maybe even injurious. A special issue of Studies in the Novel from 2008 highlights precisely this problem, noting that

trauma studies’ stated commitment to the promotion of cross-cultural ethical engagement is not borne out by the founding texts of the field (including Caruth’s own work), which are almost exclusively concerned with traumatic experiences of white Westerners and solely employ critical methodologies emanating from a Euro-American context.

(Craps and Buelens 2008, 2)⁴

The danger with this European bias is its “indifference to cultural specificity” (Luckhurst 2010, 12), to the ways that the experience, meaning, representation of and responses to trauma will vary across place and time. This bias toward thinking of Western experience as universal reenacts the ethnocentric blindness portrayed in Things Fall Apart, where Okonkwo wonders, with some frustration, whether a British magistrate has any appreciation for local Igbo customs and laws when it comes to ruling on land issues. “How can he,” responds Obierika, “when he does not even speak our tongue?” (Achebe 1958, 176). We might pose a similar question today: How can trauma theory speak to African experience when it is a product of the foreign tongues of Freud, deconstruction, and the Holocaust?

Attempts have nonetheless been made to somehow bridge the gap between trauma theory’s European origins and non-European contexts where it might be applied. In this regard, it seems there are two principal tasks involved in what Craps and Buelens call “the rapprochement between trauma studies and postcolonial studies” (2008, 3). The task first is simply to highlight the existence of postcolonial experiences, and to include and account for these experiences in discussions of trauma theory. We need more awareness of non-Western texts and contexts, and of the tongues in which they are expressed. Happily, this labor is well under way, as trauma theorists have been increasingly attending to non-Western texts, particularly to those categorized as postcolonial. These days, to suggest that Things Fall Apart is a trauma novel is no longer original.⁵ While it is necessary, however, this first task is probably not sufficient. As Rothberg notes, “Pluralization alone is not enough” (2013, xiii).

The second and deeper task is to interrogate the relevance of trauma theory’s underlying concepts and approaches for postcolonial settings. This means engaging postcolonial literatures both “in their own terms” and “on their terms,” as Craps aptly puts it, because “breaking with Eurocentrism requires a commitment not only to broadening the usual focus of trauma theory but also to acknowledging the traumas of non-Western or minority populations for their own sake” (2013a, 19). It is this latter task that remains underdeveloped and deserving of closer scrutiny, particularly in evaluating the role of trauma theory in Africa.

“Travelers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves,” writes Achebe in his famously scathing essay in which he indicts Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, for harboring racist assumptions within the trappings of well-intended liberalism (1978, 12). Consequently, when trauma theory travels beyond Europe, we need to ask whether it is sufficiently open and flexible to tell us about more than just itself. Can insights from trauma theory enrich our reading of Things Fall Apart or of other African texts? Do Tancred and Clorinda really have anything in common with Okonkwo? Even more importantly, if engaging recent African literatures through this lens allows us to understand these literatures in a new way, might the inverse also be true? Can we flip the question around to ask how insights from African literatures enrich or complicate our understandings of trauma theory? Does an African perspective alter our understanding of the traumatic nature of the narrative of Tancred and Clorinda, and by extension does it alter our understanding of what trauma might mean?

These are the overriding concerns of this book, which seeks to explore the role of literature—the human art of language expressed in story and lyric—in the transformation of difficult social conflicts and the devastation they cause, by examining the promise, the limitations, and the appropriateness of applying trauma theory to African texts. It makes the case that a thoughtful application of trauma theory in the African context is in fact a productive exercise, and that the benefits of this exercise include not only what it can do for African literatures but also what it can do for trauma studies. The testimony of African writers and cultural critics from the past century allows us to enrich and refine trauma theory in significant ways by offering new insights into some of the thorny problems that trauma theory encounters. These problems include the conundrum of how to represent an experience (trauma) that by its nature resists representation, the difficulties of translating trauma across cultures, and the issue of equating individual trauma with group trauma. African literatures do not necessarily resolve all these problems, but the unique nature of African literary history does offer fresh insights that may lead to a deeper appreciation of the nature of trauma and of the possibilities for transformation and healing.

The hope is that this perspective might encourage trauma theory to “redeem its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement” (Craps 2013b, 46) by opening space for these larger ethical questions: What is the potential for literature and the arts when it comes to healing the harm caused by trauma, especially in a place like Africa? Might they have a role in transcending the cycles of violence and harm that afflict humanity? Is it possible that poems and stories might offer a means to “write the wrongs” of historical violence, especially in postcolonial settings? What evidence of this have we seen in the history of African literature so far, and what are the possibilities as well as the limits of such an optimistic vision for its role in the future?

Trauma and African Literature

The first part of this book, “Trauma and African Literature,” contains four chapters that synthesize the development of recent ideas about trauma and their application to literary studies, with an eye to how they relate to African literature. While this overview includes plentiful allusions to examples from African texts, the focus is principally on broader questions about the nature of trauma theory, its evolution in relation to literary studies, and general ideas about what it might signify in the African context.

Chapter 1 traces the general history of the idea of trauma, beginning with its original definition as a physical wound, and noting how, at the end of the nineteenth century, trauma came to denote a new and different kind of wound, a “thorn in the spirit,” as William James memorably called it. A broad awa...