Postcolonial Witnessing

Trauma Out of Bounds

Stef Craps

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137292117
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Postcolonial Witnessing argues that the suffering engendered by colonialism needs to be acknowledged more fully, on its own terms, in its own terms, and in relation to traumatic First World histories if trauma theory is to have any hope of redeeming its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement.

1

The Trauma of Empire

Broadening the focus

As Rebecca Saunders points out, “while trauma theory has primarily been produced in Europe and the United States, trauma itself has, with equal if not greater regularity and urgency, been experienced elsewhere” (15). However, most attention within trauma theory has been devoted to events that took place in Europe or the United States, especially the Holocaust and, more recently, 9/11. In fact, the impetus for much of the current theorization about trauma and representation was provided by the Nazi genocide of the European Jews (Kacandes 99; Kaplan, Trauma Culture 1; Bennett and Kennedy 3; Douglas and Whitlock 1). Indeed, trauma theory as a field of cultural scholarship developed out of an engagement with Holocaust testimony, literature, and history.

The work of Cathy Caruth, which has been singularly influential in setting the parameters of this new area of scholarship, is a case in point. Her central insight about the incompletion in knowing that is at the heart of trauma is indebted to Dori Laub’s seminal thesis about “the collapse of witnessing,” developed in relation to the Holocaust (Arruti 2). While Caruth acknowledges that Laub’s remarks about the inability to fully witness the event as it occurs define “a specific quality of the Holocaust in particular which we would not wish too quickly to generalize,” she goes on to do exactly that, noting how this Holocaust-specific quality “seems oddly to inhabit all traumatic experience” (“Trauma and Experience” 7).

Together with Shoshana Felman, Laub—a psychiatrist who has worked with Holocaust survivors, is himself one, and co-founded the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University—published the landmark study Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992), which contains the text by Laub to which Caruth refers. Like one of the chapters contributed by Felman, this piece originally appeared in 1991 in a special issue of the journal American Imago, edited by Caruth and later included in her important collection Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995). Though Felman occasionally uses the phrase “history as holocaust” (95; 105), suggesting a broad historical outlook, in actual fact Testimony deals almost exclusively with the Holocaust. Tellingly, the final chapter has a section titled “Heart of Darkness” (240–42), but whereas Joseph Conrad’s novella describes colonial atrocities in the Congo Free State (what Adam Hochschild and others have called “the African Holocaust”), Felman invokes Conrad’s title to refer to Nazi evils—specifically, the darkened interior of Nazi gas vans.

That Dominick LaCapra’s interest in issues of trauma arose out of his engagement with the historiography of the Holocaust is clear from the titles of the first two books in which he turns his attention to trauma: Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994) and History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998). The Holocaust remains the central point of reference in Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001), which, however, explores the role of trauma in history-writing more generally.¹ As LaCapra says in the preface, “The Nazi genocide remains a crucial concern, but often problems are formulated more broadly as they bear on the role of trauma in and across history” (x). Slavery, apartheid, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are occasionally mentioned alongside the Holocaust—for example, as additional instances of “founding trauma” (81)—but in general these other histories play a very limited role in the book. Asked, in an interview for Yad Vashem that serves as the final chapter, whether the “overemphasis” on the Holocaust in the United States is “some kind of denial” of traumas closer to home, such as slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans, LaCapra says that this may well be the case (171). He goes on to note some important differences between slavery and the Holocaust, but concludes that “[s]lavery, like the Holocaust, nonetheless presents, for a people, problems of traumatization, severe oppression, a divided heritage, the question of a founding trauma, the forging of identities in the present, and so forth” (174).

Geoffrey Hartman’s main contribution to trauma theory is his work on Holocaust video testimony, produced in the context of his involvement with the Fortunoff Video Archive, which he co-founded (see, e.g. “The Humanities of Testimony”; “Memory.com” and “Shoah and Intellectual Witness”). The “optics” of testimony that Hartman develops in these writings is informed by his careerlong investment in the poetry of William Wordsworth: video testimony, for Hartman, functions as an update of Wordsworth’s poetical practice for a visual age (Vermeulen). In The Fateful Question of Culture (1997), he makes the rather breathtaking claim that Wordsworth’s poetic intervention in the traumatic transition from a traditional, rural society to a modern, urban one may be credited with guarding England from national socialism and thus preventing an English Holocaust. He speculates that Wordsworth’s mediation “saved English politics from the virulence of a nostalgic political ideal centering on rural virtue, which led to serious ravages on the continent” (7).² While Hartman claims “no more than heuristic value” for his startling thesis, in the next sentence he turns it into an article of faith, invulnerable to empirical attack and beyond the need of proof: “But were my conjectures to be disproved or shown incapable of being proved, I would continue to feel as Mrs. Henshaw does, in Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy: ‘How the great poets shine on …! Into all the dark corners of the world. They have no night’” (7). As Pieter Vermeulen has shown, in his work on Holocaust video testimony, Hartman tends to theorize that genre as “a contemporary instantiation of Wordsworth’s saving mediation,” with the same potential to ward off further genocidal violence (552–53). It is important to note, however, that Hartman’s starting premise about England’s successful avoidance of Holocaust-like trauma ignores the fact that, even if England has arguably to a large extent been spared the extreme violence that the European continent did inflict on itself, this has not prevented it from “export[ing] violence and suffering in the name of imperialism and colonialism or, more recently, a war on terror” (Vermeulen 564). Hartman’s idealization of England as a traumafree zone, which fails to take account of the trauma-ridden history of British imperialism that happened—and continues to happen— overseas, is symptomatic, it seems to me, of trauma theory’s general blindness to, or lack of interest in, the traumas visited upon members of non-Western cultures.

This Eurocentric bias is rarely acknowledged by those subject to it. However, a notable exception is Jenny Edkins, who, in Trauma and the Memory of Politics (2003), admits that her study’s

focus is firmly on western conceptions of personhood and political community in the modern period. It does not examine, except in passing, how practices of trauma or memory may have been exported beyond what might be considered the geographical bounds of a western paradigm, nor does it discuss, except to point out the specificity of a western approach, how people seemingly located outside that paradigm differ in their practices. (9–10)

This lack of interest in the non-Western world is not unique, of course, to cultural critics but is shared by society at large. As Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman point out in an anthropological study of trauma titled The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (2009 [2007]), “trauma—or rather the social process of the recognition of persons as traumatized—effectively chooses its victims. Although those who promote the concept assert that it is universal, since it is the mark left by an event, study reveals tragic disparities in its use” (282). For example, humanitarian psychiatry— which I will have more to say about in the next chapter—for a long time ignored the African continent. While mental health support was already being routinely provided by Western aid workers to Croatians, Bosnians, Kosovars, Armenians, Romanians, Chechnyans, and Palestinians in the wake of natural disasters or political violence, Rwandans, Sierra Leoneans, Liberians, and Congolese—people long relegated to the margins of the circle of humanity—were initially denied such assistance in their hour of need (183–88; 282). Fassin and Rechtman also note that the 2004 tsunami in Thailand resulted in much greater international mobilization, including action around trauma, than the earthquake in Pakistan the following year, mainly because the tsunami affected Western tourists whereas no Westerners were involved in the earthquake (282). They explain these disparities as follows:

Recognition of trauma, and hence the differentiation between victims, is largely determined by two elements: the extent to which politicians, aid workers, and mental health specialists are able to identify with the victims, in counterpoint to the distance engendered by the otherness of the victims. Cultural, social, and perhaps even ontological proximity matter; as does the a priori valuation of the validity of the cause, misfortune, or suffering, a valuation that obviously implies a political and often an ethical judgment. Thus trauma, often unbeknownst to those who promote it, reinvents “good” and “bad” victims, or at least a ranking of legitimacy among victims. (282)

In a thoughtful article on the contexts, politics, and ethics of trauma theory, Susannah Radstone similarly observes that

it is the sufferings of those, categorized in the West as “other”, that tend not to be addressed via trauma theory—which becomes in this regard, a theory that supports politicized constructions of those with whom identifications via traumatic sufferings can be forged and those from whom such identifications are withheld. (25)

Judith Butler spells out the far-reaching consequences of such constructions in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), where she argues that the differential distribution of precarity across populations is “at once a material and a perceptual issue”: “those whose lives are not ‘regarded’ as potentially grievable, and hence valuable, are made to bear the burden of starvation, underemployment, legal disenfranchisement, and differential exposure to violence and death” (25). A one-sided focus on traumas suffered by members of Western cultural traditions could thus have pernicious effects at odds with trauma theory’s self-proclaimed ethical mission. If trauma theory is to adhere to its ethical aspirations, the sufferings of those belonging to non-Western or minority cultures must be given due recognition. As Jill Bennett and Rosanne Kennedy write in the introduction to their edited collection World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time (2003), trauma studies in the humanities “must move beyond its focus on Euro-American events and experiences, towards a study of memory that takes as its starting point the multicultural and diasporic nature of contemporary culture” (5).

The perils of appropriation

This is not to say, though, that any and all attempts by trauma theory to reach out to the non-Western other are necessarily a step in the right direction. After all, such efforts can turn out to reflect a Eurocentric bias just as well. This is true, for example, of the few descriptions of cross-cultural encounters that we are offered in Caruth’s pioneering study Unclaimed Experience. I am thinking of her reading of the story of Tancred and Clorinda, her analysis of Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, and her interpretation of the film Hiroshima mon amour, all of which are central to her formulation of trauma theory, yet which strike me as highly problematic instances of witnessing across cultural boundaries.

Caruth’s treatment of the story of Tancred and Clorinda has been analysed very incisively by Ruth Leys (292–97), Amy Novak (31–32), and Michael Rothberg (Multidirectional Memory 87–96), to whose work the brief discussion of it that I will offer is indebted. In the introduction to Unclaimed Experience, Caruth quotes the passage from Beyond the Pleasure Principle in which Freud discusses an episode from Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), a sixteenth-century epic by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso:

Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders’ army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again.

(qtd. in Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 2)

Freud refers to this moment in the story as an example of the unconscious repetition of trauma: Tancred’s unknowing killing of his beloved not just once, but twice, illustrates the repetition compulsion characteristic of trauma. Caruth expands upon Freud’s reading of this moment, drawing attention to “a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound” (2–3). She reads this scene as an illustration of the latency of trauma and the ethical address delivered through this belated knowing. A troubling aspect of Caruth’s analysis is that in its drive to identify Tancred as a trauma survivor, it tends to obscure the wound inflicted on Clorinda. While Caruth cannot get round the fact that it is Clorinda’s voice that cries out from the wound (“the wound that speaks is not precisely Tancred’s own but the wound, the trauma, of another” [8]), for her reading to work she has to interpret Clorinda’s voice as not exactly her own but as (also) that of the traumatized Tancred’s dissociated second self (Leys 295–96): Clorinda (also) represents “the other within the self that retains the memory of the ‘unwitting’ traumatic events of one’s past” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 8). Caruth thus effectively rewrites the wound inflicted on Clorinda as a trauma suffered by Tancred. Given that this episode concerns the killing of an Ethiopian woman by a European crusader, an orientalist dimension which Caruth does not acknowledge,³ her reading of this tale can be seen to illustrate the difficulty of trauma theory to recognize the experience of the non-Western other.⁴

I should add, though, that unlike Leys and Novak, who reject the very suggestion that Tancred may have been traumatized by his deed, I do not question Tancred’s status as a survivor of (perpetrator) trauma.⁵ As Rothberg points out, Leys makes a “category error” by “elid[ing] the category of ‘victim’ with that of the traumatized subject”: “The categories of victim and perpetrator derive from either a legal or a moral discourse, but the concept of trauma emerges from a diagnostic realm that lies beyond guilt and innocence or good and evil” (Multidirectional Memory 90).⁶ Calling someone a trauma survivor or trauma victim does not in and of itself confer any moral capital on that person, as both victims and perpetrators can suffer trauma. Nor do I share Leys’s and Novak’s tendency to identify Clorinda as the real trauma victim in this case. To quote Rothberg once again, “The dead are not traumatized, they are dead” (Multidirectional Memory 90). What I do find problematic about Caruth’s reading of this episode is that Clorinda’s experience is sidelined if not silenced altogether.⁷

This phenomenon is also noticeable in Caruth’s interpretation of Freud’s speculative account of the origin of Judaism in Moses and Monotheism, whose “central insight,” according to Caruth, is that “history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own,” that “history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (Unclaimed Experience 24). She reads Moses and Monotheism as “the site of a trauma” (Unclaimed Experience 20): a product of Freud’s own situation on the verge of the destruction of the European Jews by the Nazis, the text inscribes the author’s personal trauma, Caruth argues, while also linking it to the history of Jewish monotheism, which Freud interprets as a history of trauma. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud attempts to explain Jewish history through the analogy of the effect of trauma on the individual. He postulates that the Jewish religion is founded on the slaying of Moses, an Egyptian nobleman who adhered to the monotheism of the pharaoh Akhenaten. After Moses led the Hebrews out of bondage in Egypt, Freud maintains, he was murdered by them in the wilderness out of resentment for the harsh laws he had tried to impose on them. Repressing the memory of the murder, the Hebrews reverted to polytheistic idol worship and took on a new leader, also called Moses, who was eventually assimilated to the original Moses. However, after a period of latency, the collective sense of patricidal guilt led to the return of the Mosaic law and the reaffirmation of Judaism as a monotheistic religion by way of atonement. Stressing the aporia of a history propelled by an inaccessible traumatic pre-history, which resonates with the way in which the structure of Moses and Monotheism bears witness to Freud’s own experience of Nazi persecution, Caruth suggests that Freud’s text urges us “to rethink the possibility of history, as well as our ethical and political relation to it” (Unclaimed Experience 12).

According to Leys, however, Caruth “decisively alters the terms of ...