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AFRICAN WOMEN WRITING TRAUMA: THE
REPRESENTATION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA IN
AFRICAN WOMEN’S FICTION

presented by

Emilie Ndione Diouf

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AFRICAN WOMEN WRITING TRAUMA: THE REPRESENTATION OF
PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA IN AFRICAN WOMEN’S FICTION

By

Emilie Ndione Diouf

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirement
of the degree of

MASTER OF ART
Literature in English

2010

ABSTRACT
AFRICAN WOMEN WRITING TRAUMA: THE REPRESENTATION OF
PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA IN AFRICAN WOMEN’S FICTION
By
Emilie Ndione Diouf

The history of psychological inquiry about trauma shows that there has been
an ongoing power struggle over what constitutes trauma, both in experience,
manifestation, and representation. Thus, the desire among different cultural groups to
make visible their traumatic experiences has given rise to numerous important works
in contemporary fiction. As such, this thesis questions the function of fiction in the
representation of African women’s psychological trauma. It also analyzes the place
of African women’s trauma fiction in the development of trauma theory. Building its
analysis on the relationship between trauma theory, women, and literature, this thesis
reads two recent novels and a film by three African women artists who have used
their pens and cameras to represent historical and cultural traumatic events that have
struck parts of the African continent. This thesis’s reading of, Chimamanda
Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Veronique Tadjo’s travel narrative Sous L’ombre
D’Imana: Voyage jusqu’au bout du Rwanda (2000), and Fanta Regina Nacro’s La
Nuit de Verité (2004), has attempted to highlight the motivation of African women’s

fictional trauma stories.

Table of Contents

Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 1
Section 1. Psychological Trauma and Literature ................................................................... 5

1.1 The Ethics, Politics of Trauma Theory and its Representation of Women ........ 10
Section 2. African Women Writers’ Inscription of Trauma into Fiction ............................. 16

2.1 African Women’s Literary Strategies of Representing Trauma ......................... 20
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... .32
Works Cited ............................................................................................... 34

iii

Introduction
The reality of psychological trauma and the striving to conceptualize it are
becoming increasingly visible in a world where local and global conflicts can be
reported. We know that horrible things happen to a great range of people, and we are
gradually more aware of the long term effects on the survivors of such catastrophes.
As such, one can safely say that psychological trauma is becoming a contemporary
condition, as there is unprecedented evidence of its contemporary and historical

occurrence in large numbers of places and cultures.

According to Anne Whitehead, “the desire among various cultural groups to

represent or make visible specific historical instances of trauma has given rise to

numerous important works of contemporary fiction.”l However, despite the
visibility of some violations that cause trauma and the consequences this may have
for the afflicted, there are still largely underdeveloped and silenced aspects of
psychological trauma. Besides, the history of psychological inquiry about trauma
shows that there has been an ongoing power struggle over what constitutes trauma,
both in experience, manifestation, representation and treatment. These aspects have
contributed to the ongoing silencing of trauma experiences.

This is especially true in regards to African women who even before
encountering specific traumatic incidents have experienced silencing through

patriarchal oppression and colonial marginalization. Being already voiceless within a

 

lWhitehead Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2004, p. 01.

given patriarchal neocolonial culture or society, coupled with the additional burden
of experiencing psychological trauma, which by its nature is the “unspeakable story”,
creates a strong conflict in which the challenge to express trauma becomes central.
Finding a means to communicate the experience of trauma is therefore of vital
importance to African women who have experienced traumatic events first-hand, or

those who have witnessed trauma.

As a reader I have been affected, disturbed and intrigued by the many
instances and the great range of expression of trauma in fictional representations of
African women’s experiences by African women writers and film directors. What
has especially fascinated me in their trauma fiction is the continuity of women’s
trauma, the identifiable similarities and differences in the representations, and the

meaning that these trauma stories convey in regards to the female reader.

This thesis questions the function of fiction in the representation of African
women’s psychological trauma. Does writing fictional trauma have any kind of
impact or interface with real life trauma conceptualization, expression and
resolution; in other words, can it contribute to a better understanding of both the
things that traumatize, and the way that trauma affects women, or is fiction merely
an abstract entity that has no bearing on how trauma issues are perceived? What is

the place of African women’s trauma fiction, which Veronique Bonnet calls

“temorgner au feminine, et temorgner du femrnrn” (testifying as a woman and

testifying about womanhood), in the development of trauma theory?

Building my analysis on the relationship between trauma theory, women, and
literature, I will draw examples from two recent novels and a film by African women
artists from West and Eastern Central Africa. These works depict historical and
cultural traumatic events that have struck some parts of the continent. Among them
is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of Yellow Sun (2006), Veronique
Tadjo’s travel narrative Sous L ’ombre D’Imana: Voyage jusqu’au bout du
Rwanda(2000) (The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda), and Fanta

Regina Nacro’s La Nuit de Verité (The Night of Truth) (2004).

The aim of this thesis is to examine the relationship between Afiican
women’s experiences of traumatic events and practices of representation in a socio-
historical and cultural framework dominated by both a patriarchal and a Western
discourse. It also hopes to develop a hypothesis about how African women’s
fictional trauma representations fit in with and support feminist trauma theory’s aim
of using conceptualizations of women’s trauma to express and heal the

traumatization of women.

The thesis is comprised of two sections with each having two subsections.

The first section gives an overview of the evolution of trauma theory in literary

 

2 .
Bonnet, Veronique. La Prise D 'e'criture de Rwandaise Rescapées du
Genocide. Notre Librairie. Revue des littératures du Sud. N° 157.
Littérature et développement. Janvier- Mars 2005, p. 01

studies and its representation of women. It gives an account of the keys concepts of
psychological trauma developed by Freud, Caruth and by other theorists whose work
on trauma is more recent. It attempts to relate psychological trauma’s key concepts
to the texts under analysis. The second section discusses the transcription of trauma
into fiction and the consequences of this act in the understanding and healing of
trauma. It examines the literary strategies through which Adichie, Tadjo, and Nacro
add to the western discourse of trauma the silenced traumatic experiences of some

African women.

Section 1. Psychological Trauma and Literature
The development of literary studies has recently become marked by trauma
theory. In fact, a cursory glance through the trend-setting literary studies journals of
recent years reveals that the relationship between literature and trauma is among the
most vibrant research topics in the field today. Elissa Marder observes that “it might
come as something of a surprise to learn that some of the most influential and far-

reaching new insights about trauma have come from a field that might appear to be

far removed from it: literature and literary theory.”3

According to Marder, over the last twenty four years or so, the emergence of
ground breaking new work on trauma in literature and critical theory has made a
profound impact both within and beyond the field of literature. Scholars generally
agree that the explosion of trauma work in literary studies is due to the path breaking
work of both Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman. “Since the early 1990s, both of

them have been working creatively on the borders of trauma, literature, and.

psychoanalysis.”4

Cathy Caruth’s 1996 Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
is the most comprehensive, and influential, theoretical articulation of a Freudian

account of psychic trauma with literary-critical disciplinary practices. Caruth’s

 

3 Marder Elissa. Trauma and Literary Studies: Some “Enabling Questions.”
Reading On. Vol. 1. January 2005, p.01

4 Ibid.02.

central claim is that “the poetic story can be read...as a larger parable, both of the
unarticulated implications of the theory of trauma in Freud’s writing and, beyond
that, of the crucial link between literature and theory” (03). In other words, for
Caruth, literature should not only be reread as an extension of Freudian accounts of

material and psychic trauma, but trauma should be read in and as literature.

According to Caruth, Freud’s interest in the psychic inscription of violence
was influenced by a certain failure or incompletion in his earlier analyses of
quotidian life. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud notes the “compulsion
to repeat” in many clinical instances. First he finds it in the recurring nightmares of
shellshocked World War I veterans (10-12), then in the repetitive “fort/d3” game of
his baby grandson, who plays the game go away (fort, “gone”) and come back (da,
“there”) as a means of representing and understanding his mother’s periodic
absences (13-17), and in the transference, as the analysands “repeat the repressed

material instead of. . .remembering it” (1 9; emphasis Freud’s).

“The repetition compulsion” is of great interest to Caruth’s reading of Freud
because in no case is the experience repeated as a pleasurable one, and in no case
does the repetition lead to resolution, to remembering an experience such that it can
be understood. For her the compulsion to repeat manifests the latency of a violent
experience which is “beyond the pleasure principle,” beyond psychoanalysis’s power

to explain psychic life according to a rational account of pleasure-seeking behavior.

Regarding his case studies, Freud speculated that experiences of extreme
anxiety and violent excitation overwhelmed the capacity of the psyche to assimilate
them, a capacity that he understood to be physical in nature. In Chimamanda
Adichie’s Yalf of a Yellow Sun which tells a story of the Nigerian Civil War from the
point of view of characters living in Biafra, Olanna is physically and psychologically
disabled after witnessing in Kano the slaughtering of her relatives by Muslim Hausa
nationalists. The psychological wounds of the event resurface in her nightmares. The
narrator tells us that,

Olanna’s Dark Swoops began the day she came back from Kano, the
day her legs failed... That night, she had the first Dark Swoop: A
thick blanket descended from above and pressed itself over her face,
firmly, while she struggled to breathe. Then, when it let go, freeing
her to take in gulp after gulp of air, she saw burning owls at the
window grinning and beckoning to her with charred
feathers. . .Speaking was a labor. When her parents and Kainene
visited, she did not say much; it was Odenigbo who told them what
she had seen (156- 157).

The psychoanalytic name of Olanna’s wound, at once that of the mind and of
the body, is traumas. The repetition compulsion which is implied by her nightmare
(the dark swoop) forces us to consider the possibility of a limit to psychic life itself, a

boundary on what we can represent and understand of ourselves. There is also a

 

5 See Ruth Leys Trauma: A Genealogy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000. for more on the term, origin and usage

7

second way in which the repetition compulsion sends psychoanalysis beyond its own
principles of intelligibility, one rooted in the fort/da game’s status as a practice of
representation, of storytelling. Such stories compel others besides the compulsive

repeater.

This perpetual recurrence of the same thing causes us no astonishment when
it relates to active behavior on the part of the person concerned and when we can
discern in her an essential character-trait which always remains the same and which
is compelled to find expression in a repetition of the same experiences. We are much
more impressed by cases where the traumatized subject appears to have a passive
experience...in which she meets with a repetition of the same fatality. In Freud’s
theory, there is the case, for instance, of the woman who married three successive
husbands each of whom fell ill soon afterwards and she had to nurse them to their
death bed. One way in which this example pertains to our texts is the fact that in
addition to witnessing the killing of his relatives in Kano, Olanna has to experience
again the disappearance of her twin sister Kainene. The impressive cases, the cases
in which the cause and meaning of the repetition are most obscure, generate a
moment of incomprehension, fascination, and repetitious contemplation which Freud

refers to as the uncanny.

In uniting Freud’s clinical cases with the literary instance, Caruth posits the
fundamental identity of this fascination with the process of reading literature. To
wonder about the woman three times widowed is the same as to read Olanna
witnessing the slaughtering of her relatives and the disappearance of her twin sister.

8

Indeed, this makes Caruth claim that individual texts compulsively repeat life’s
incomprehensible wounds. Literature, in other words, does not describe but inscribes

trauma.

Caruth Unclaimed Experiences offers particularly a rich framework for such
' inscription, for it seeks to establish, not merely the presence of trauma in literature,
but an irreducible framework of traumatic representation. The crucial link between
literature and trauma theory is not some more or less arbitrary connection modeled
by the field-definition and field-coverage model of disciplinary expansion, but a vital

imperative generated by the practice of rereading itself.

Insofar as academic literary study is definable as professional rereading,
Caruth aims not merely to influence some sector of the profession, but to reframe all
professional literary-scholarly activity in terms of psychoanalytic and historical
accounts of trauma. From this point of view, reading and criticism, though based in
deep knowledge, are also an encounter, at once ethical and epistemological, with that
which we cannot describe or know. As a literary critic writing on the representation
of African women’s psychological trauma, I first need to locate the nature of the

encounter between trauma theory, its ethics, politics, and women.

1. l The Ethics, Politics of Trauma Theory and Its Representation of Women
Michelle Baleev defines the term trauma as that which refers to “a person’s
emotional response to an overwhelming event that disrupts previous ideas of an
individual’s sense of self and the standards by which one evaluates society. It is the
transformation of the self ignited by an external, often terrifying experience, which

illuminates the process of coming to terms with the dynamics of memory that inform

the new perceptions of the self and world.”6 In its early stage of development trauma
analysis or reading posits itself by analogy with the witnessing or addressing of
testimony to trauma and understands its task as that of facilitating the cultural
remembrance and “working through” of those traumas whose absent presence marks

the analyzed texts.

Trauma theory emphasizes the dialogic nature of testimony. Yet
notwithstanding its analogous relation to testimonial witnessing, trauma analysis and
criticism appear to dispense with the insights of contemporary media and literary
studies concerning the complex processes of meaning negotiation that take place
between texts and their various spectators/readers, and invests the analyst and the
critic with immensely and conclusively authoritative interpretative capacities.7

According to Radstone, “It seems that it is the analyst, and the analyst alone, who is

able to discern trauma’s absent traces. In this regard, trauma theory seems to return

 

6 . . . . .
Baleev, Michelle. Trends in literary trauma theory. Mosaic (Winnipeg) June
I", 2008,p.23

7
See Radstone. Analysts and Readers: the Ethics and Politics of Trauma
Analysis, 22-24

10

us to an almost Althusserian moment, in which the authoritative analyst alone is
invested with the capacity to perceive the truth of representation” (Radstone, 24).
The scenario portrayed by Radstone diverges considerably from that of the opening
or exposing of texts to multiple, contestable, divergent or contradictory readings that
have been bequeathed to the Humanities by readings informed by, for example,
deconstruction. It diverges, too, from the stress placed by cultural studies on the
situated, local and multiple readings of historically specific readers and audiences.
To put it this way, for whom, when, where and in what circumstances are particular

texts read or experienced as trauma texts?

A further and related question that remains unanswered, due to the difficulty
of debating trauma analysis and reading, is centered on which events, experiences
and texts are to be classed as traumatic and which are to be excluded from this
category. Though Anne Withehead claims that “the rise of trauma theory has
provided both novelist and filmmakers with new ways of conceptualizing individual
or collective trauma” (Trauma Fiction, 01); this is problematic since trauma criticism
arguably seems to construct and to control the boundary of what can be recognized
as trauma. The latter position is made powerful by trauma theory’s insistence on the
“tracelessness or invisibility of trauma to all but the most trained of eyes.”8 Why is
it, for instance, the questions of firstly, who it is that gets claimed by trauma theory,
and who is ignored, and secondly, which events get labeled trauma and which do not,

have not been omitted, entirely, from critical commentary.

 

8 lbid. 24.

11

Analysis of historical and contemporary explanations for trauma occurrence,

impact and treatment shows they are informed by existing hegemonic structures. As

“psychiatric explanations and theories reflect the spirit of the age,”9 they represent
the social framework of the dominant gender, race and class. The discourse
established by Western medicalisation of psychology and the subsequent
engagement with psychic trauma revolves around issues of power, specifically the
power to give voice to the studied objects’ experience. The act of naming another’s
experience has the potential to appropriate that experience, thereby molding it into a
controlled discourse of knowledge and effectively silencing, or overriding the voice
of the object of study. Within the history of trauma analysis, the voice of women
naming the “unspeakable” has been obliterated by the voice of patriarchal
knowledge. The Western development of views around mental health has utilized
women as a testing ground for theories, treatment and conceptualization of the other,

meaning the gender that is not male.

However, post-nineteen-seventies evolutions of feminist theory and, more
recently, post-colonial theories within psychology posed a challenge to trauma
studies, highlighting the bias of the predominantly, male-centered history of
scientific conceptualization. New approaches have reconstructed theory, research

methodology and treatment in line with the acknowledgement of socio-political

 

9 Bessel van der Kolk, Lars Weisaeth, and Otto van der Hart, "History of

Trauma in Psychiatry," in Traumatic Stress — the Eflects of Overwhelming
Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, ed. Bessel van der Kolk, Alexander
Mc F arlane, and Lars Weisaeth (New York: The Guildford Press, 1996). 66.

12

frameworks. Central to this is the recognition of trauma as a particularly subjective

knowledge, and therefore impossible to divorce from environmental contexts.

Seeking to depathologize women’s experience and expression of trauma,
“feminist psychology reinforces the “normality” of post-traumatic stress responses,
emphasizing that a multitude of symptoms are in fact reasonable survival tactics,
allowing the victim to function within society.”'0 Widening the notion of what is
traumatic, while acknowledging the contributing role of ideology to the sustaining of
trauma and the subsequent expression and treatment of it, has effectively opened the
doors to previously unheard voices of traumatized women: Feminist theory allows

for the validity of “stories” other than the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA)

. . . 11
story of trauma, created by men and WhICh rs about men’s experiences.

By working towards ensuring that all women’s experiences of trauma are
considered as important and as legitimate as the trauma experienced by males (e.g.

soldiers), Maria Root observes that feminist psychology allows traumatized women
to express their trauma openly. 12 As such, from the theory of trauma discussed above

the question one may ask is how do African women who had been twice the “other”-

in being neocolonial subjects and women- express their experience of trauma?

 

10 See Maria P.P. Root, "Reconstructing the Impact of Trauma on Personality,"
in Personality and Psychopathology - Feminist Reappraisals, ed. Laura S.
Brown and Mary Ballou (New York: The Guildford Press, 1992). 231. Also
Denise Russell, Women, Madness and Medicine (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1995) p. 230

” Ibid. 232
'2 Ibid.

13

African women’s expression of trauma cannot be formulated separately from
the experience colonization. According to Amy Novak in her article Who Speaks?
Who Listens? The Problem of Adressee in Two Nigerian Novels, “Adichie’s novel

situates the civil war and the preceding massacre in relationship to an additional site

”13

of trauma: the lingering effects of colonialism. The novel strategically represent

the trauma of the civil war by critiquing the post in post colonialism that ignores the

way that colonial trauma lingers itself and repeats itself in the present.14 Novak
comments that, “despite independence from Britain in October 1960, individual and
national identity in Nigeria remain scarred by the inheritance of colonialism and
oppression. In 1966, Igbo military officers led a coup, which was followed by a
reprisal against the Igbo. The massacre of the Igbo led to the secession of southeast
Nigeria, the establishment of the Biafran republic, and the beginning of the Nigerian
Civil War.”15 Novak remarks that Half of a Yellow Sun makes explicit the link
between colonialism and the ethnic and political strife of the new nation: “If this is
hatred, then it is very young. It has been caused, simply, by the informal divide-and-
rule policies of the British colonial exercise. These policies manipulated the

differences between the tribes and ensured that unity would not exist” (166-67).

 

13 Craps, Stef & Buelens. G. Postcolonial Trauma Novels. In Studies of the
Novel. Vol 40. Numbers l& 2, Spring and Summer 2008: p. 05
'4 Ibid. 06

15 Ibid Craps, Stef and Buelens. 07

14

. In the same way as Half of a Yellow Sun, Veronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of
Imana bears the marks of colonial and neocolonial trauma. Tadjo traces the origins
of the ethnic prejudice that lead to the genocide in colonization. She writes:
One of the reasons for the persecution of the Tutsis comes from the
theories suggested by European historians, Belgian in particular,
who, towards the end of the nineteenth century, attributed to them
foreign origins. According to those historians, the “watussi”
shepherds, whom they characterized as tall and slender, in contrast
to the smaller Hutu farmers, were not originally natives of central
Africa. Some thought they could have come from as far off as Tibet
or Egypt. But the link with Ethiopia remains the most common
claim. It would even seem that the Tutsis themselves have
confirmed this, for their traditional costume is very similar to that
worn by the Ethiopians. There is no historical proof to verify this
theory. But this claim, initially made as a form of flattery, has had
terrible consequences. During the genocide, thousands of Tutsis
were thrown into the waters of the Kagera River so that they can
return to Ethiopia (The Shadow of Imana, 24).

The cultural and political influence of colonialism still lingers in multiple ways in

many African countries. The legacy of colonialism is not only evident in history but

also in culture. As such, it is relevant to talk about the ways in which African women

inscribes post colonial traumatic experiences into their artistic creation.

15

 

Section 2. African Women Writers’ Inscription of Trauma Into Fiction

For writers and at this moment for women writers in particular, there
is the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to
be explored. But there is also a difficult and dangerous walking on
the ice, as we try to find language and images for a consciousness

we are just coming into, and with little in the past to support

us. 16Adrienne Rich

The process of giving voice to trauma experience is fundamentally an act of
re-telling, re-structuring and re-forming, as something internal is forged into
something external through the use of language. The psychological benefits of this
action have already been expounded as formidable in the sense that confrontation,
organization and the opening up of trauma to an audience are instilled with an
attainment of power, which is crucial to the healing of trauma. Re-telling is the
freeing of formerly unarticulated material, which the teller of the trauma story then

owns as a new narrative that has been constructed from out of darkness.

According to Felman and Dory Laub, “the subject of trauma is one that is not
caught up in desire, but a subject constituted by forgetting...The traumatized subject
can remember its having forgotten in presence of a witness who can acknowledge the

gap and absences” (Testimony, 1-5). As such, the nature of the writer’s encounter

 

l . .
6Rich, Adrienne. (1971). When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re- Vision. 0n
Lies, Secrets and Silence - Selected Prose 1966 -I 978. New York,
Norton.35.

16

with the traumatized subject is characterized by two distinct and leading features,
testimony and witnessing. In Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma,
Kali Tal writes, “accurate representation of trauma can never be achieved without
recreating the event since, by its very definition, trauma lies beyond the bounds of
normal conception” (15). In Half of a Yellow Sun as well as in Veronique Tadjo’s
The Shadow of Imana, the representation of the trauma of the 19608 Nigerian Civil
war and that of the Rwandan Genocide only takes place when witnesses to the
traumatic event started to confess their stories in front of a writer. While giving an
account of a mother who carried the decapitated head of her daughter in her wrapper,
the narrator of Half of a Yellow Sun depicts to the reader the conditions in which
Olanna testifies about that story. The narrator writes, “Olanna tells him the story and
he notes the details. She tells him how the blood stains on the woman’s wrapper

blended into the fabric to form a rusty mauve” (82).

In fact, theories of trauma involve testimony and witnessing and they share in
common a desire to engage with or reveal trauma’s absent textual presence.
Radstone observes that “though not always taking as it subject texts explicitly
concerned with personal or collective catastrophe, trauma analysis aims to
demonstrate the ways in which texts may be engaged with the belated remembrance
of trauma.”17 As a result, the writer and the reader stand as witnesses to the

traumatized subject’s account or remembrance of its dissociated memories.

 

‘7 Radstone, Susannah. Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics. Paragraph.
Vol.30, January 2007.p 09-29

17

The ability of literature to lift the trauma story out of shadow means that it
plays a vital role in the issues surrounding trauma experience and expression. Van
der Kolk and Mc Farlane comment on creative representation of trauma as being
more accessible than psychological theory and practice itself: The study of trauma
inevitably confronts us with issues of morality and social values...ln this regard,
artists have traditionally fulfilled the function of holding up a mirror that contrasts

sharply with the traditional obfuscation of the subject within a society’s dominant

ideology. 18 In Trauma Fiction, Whitehead comments that:
The term trauma fiction represents a paradox or contradiction: If
trauma comprises an event or experience which overwhelms the
individual and resists language or representation, how then can it be
narrativized in fiction? ...there are various ways of thinking through
the relation between trauma and fiction. Attention has been shifted
away from what is remembered to how and why it is remembered.
This raises, in turn, the related issues of politics, ethics and

aesthetics (01).

The theorizing about trauma in fiction has stressed that the reading of a

fictional trauma representation can take us to places that are otherwise difficult to

 

18Mc Farlane, A. and B. Van Der Kolk ( 1996). Trauma and its Challenge to
Society. Traumatic Stress - The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on
Mind, Body, and Society. B. van der Kolk, A. Mc Farlane and L. Weisaeth.
New York, The Guildford Press. 45.

18

access. It is therefore the role of the trauma story to reflect both the personal and the
political, in the sense that the depiction of trauma in literature and its status as re-
formative initiates re-thinking about the history which contextualizes the
“inconceivable” of the trauma experience. In terms of re-situating history, the
deconstruction of the fictional trauma text points to ways in which ideology has
traditionally obscured, or left gaps, in the whole story. According to Jane Kilby,
“trauma provides the necessary language and reading skills to produce a different

political story, a story not tied to the individual as such nor a story told in the general

terms of gender, patriarchy and power.”19

The growing acknowledgement of the depiction of trauma in fiction and its
double role in representing personal and political issues raises many questions as to
the motivation of African women’s fictional trauma story. What is the value of their
representations? Is the benefit that trauma theory ascribes to the voicing of a trauma
survivor’s story applicable in any similar manner to the fictional trauma narrative,
created by authors like Adichie and Tadjo’s who may or may not have experienced

what they are depicting?

 

9
1 Kilby, Jane. Violence and the Cultural Politics of Trauma. Edingburgh:
Edingburgh University Press, 2007: XIII

19

2. 1 African Women’s Literary Strategies of Representing Trauma

In his article, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma, ’ 20 Jeffery Alexander
presents three critical representations essential in the creation of a compelling trauma
narrative:
1. The nature of the pain. [Or] what actually happened — to the
particular group and to the wider collectivity of which it is a part?
2. [The] Relation of the trauma victim to the wider audience. [Or]
To what extent do the members of the audience for trauma

representations experience an identity with the immediately

victimized group?

3. [The] Attribution of responsibility. Who actually injured the

victim? Who caused the trauma (01-02)?

Inscribing trauma into a fictional narrative requires strategies of
representation that show that the author “knows” the nature of trauma and its
manifestation. Alexander measures the accuracy of the trauma narrative through the
latter’s ability to convey the pain of the experience and its appeal to the community
that has ties to the context of the trauma. Literature may experience difficulties in

recording the language of pain, which Elaine Scarry qualifies as “inexpressible,

 

2
Oln Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Ed. Jeffrey Alexander, Ron
Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil Smelser, Piotr Sztompko. California:
University of California Press. 2004

20

incommensurable and unushereable.”21 Yet to put an end to atrocities and depict
human sufferings, literature must enable readers to understand as Scarry claims the
“aversiveness being experienced inside the body of someone whose country may be
far away, whose name can be barely pronounced, and whose ordinary life is
unknown except that it is known that the ordinary life has ceased to exist.”22 Though
true knowledge of trauma cannot be pretended, the crafting of literary techniques to
capture and convey this knowledge is essential in providing a pathway into the

elusive internal wounding that is trauma.

To successfully achieve the reader’s identification with and empathy to the
traumatized protoganist, the language narrating violence in Yalf of a Yellow Sun, The
Shadow of Imana, and La Nuit de Verité, conveys a sense of immediacy. In The
Shadow of Imana, Veronique Tadjo, asserts that corpses:

...bear witness, and will have no burial. They are nothing but bones.
. . . But these dead are screaming still . . . This is not a memorial but
death laid bare, exposed in all its rawness. The horror of the sullied
earth and of time laying down layers of dust in its passage. The
bones of the skeleton-corpses are disintegrating before our very

eyes. The stench infects our nostrils and settles inside our lungs,

 

2| Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 09.

22 Ibid.

21

contaminates our flesh, infiltrates our brains. Even later on, far

away, this smell will linger in our bodies and our minds (12).

The decomposing and smelling bodies that Tadjo describes echoes Ranciére’s
“naked images”23 which through their traces, repel, interpellate and challenge the
reader or viewer to act and say never again. Those bones are images that witness
humans’ will to power. At the same time, they speak to humans’ injustice and
immunity to pain so that, as Tadjo writes, “the fruit of peace” can “be gathered from I

the tree of suffering” (27).

Sharing an attention to detailed realism combined with narrative techniques
drawn from African storytelling and cultural practices, Tadjo, Adichie, and Nacro’s
works seek to create a voice that is not reliant on a Western subject for testimony but
instead disputes the objectivity and knowledge of such a subject. Through a journey
across Nigeria, Rwanda, and a mythical African country, The fictional trauma
narratives of Chimamanda Adichie, Veronique Tadjo, and Fanta Nacro demonstrate

a range of innovative literary strategies in response to the task of the “directing

24 . .
” The narratives evoke the experience of

outward of an inward, silent process.
trauma for women through the construction of metaphors, symbols and tropes that

link the symbolic aspects of writing trauma to the female body.

 

23 See Ranciére, Jacques. The Future of the Image. London & New York:
Verso, 2007, 22-23

4
2 Vickroy, L. Ti'auma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville,
The University of Virginia Press, 2002: p. 03.

22

All three African women’s representation of trauma focus on physicality of
the latter and suggest the need to rethink the very possibility of “working through”
by demonstrating that the obstacle in comprehending the event is not simply a
cognitive one. Their works represent traumatic experiences with a focus on the
centrality of the body to the understanding of trauma. They portray the body
experiencing trauma, the body remembering trauma, and the body living trauma.
These women’s narratives attest to how trauma is inscribed not only on the body, but
also within the body. The female body which constitutes the main place where

women are oppressed becomes the center of trauma location and representation.

Tadjo, Adichie, and Nacro have depicted the female body as both a site of
women’s traumatic experience through bodily sexual violence. The latter creates in
women’s body a spectral memory that continues to haunt the present. While
describing Anastasie’s memory of her rape by her brother in The Shadow of Imana,
Tadjo writes, “She was trapped in the prison of her flesh. Her tongue felt furry, and
prevented her from uttering the slightest word. Her desires had been worn away like
rocks lashed by a stormy sea. She no longer recognized the inside of her body, felt a

stranger to this heavy mass which was crushing her spirit” (63).

For Tadjo, Anastasie’s body anchors the physical pain of remembering her
rape with her act of testifying. It is her body that bears the record of the past, and the
story it tells is not seamless but disfigured, and even imperfect. In remembering and
testifying about the violence of her rape she loses language and the ability to
mentally register pain. The body’s materiality, an excess uncontained by

23

signification, is nonetheless evoked in the act of remembering, until this too is
crashed by trauma’s pain. Anastasie’s body becomes both the site of enunciation of
her memory and its absence. It is from this site that language originates, and in the

case of Anastasie’s trauma, it is where the wound that consumes her language arises.

The fragmentation of narrative associated with both the body’s materiality
and the physicality of the traumatic experience are something that can be identified
as tools used by these three African women writers to create a sense of the chaos of
the state of traumatization. As Laurie Vickroy states, “writers have created a number
of narrative strategies to represent a conflicted or incomplete relation to memory,
including textual gaps...repetition, breaks in linear time, shitting viewpoints, and a

. . . ,25
focus on vrsual images and affective states.’

In Half of a Yellow Sun and in The Shadow of Imana, the characters’
physical experience of trauma is reflected in the structure of the novels. Like their
wounded bodies, the narratives presented to the reader are scarred and haunted.
Working in counterpoint to the linear storyline that is the narrators testimonial of the
traumatic events are the brief fragmentary sections. For instance, in Half of a Yellow
Sun, the flow of the fiction’s storyline is interrupted by the fragmented historical
account which Adichie entitles, “The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died.”
The latter appears at the end of each part of Adichie’s fictional narrative. Unlike the

rest of the novel the fragmented paragraphs are not in bold print. In contrast to the

 

2’ Ibid. 29.

24

main narrative, these sections of the text are more difficult to understand because
they always start with a third person narrator (He) who is not identified: “For the
prologue, he recounts the story of the woman with the calabash” (Half of a Yellow

Sun, 82).

Though these fragments are mostly told in the present tense, they sometimes
display a temporal quality that makes them look like they have been cut loose of the
ties that bind them to a linear narrative. With the tension created between these
sections and the primary narrative line, the novel does not simply recount the
traumatic event that would resist representation; rather, as Laub proposes,
“knowledge in the testimony is . . . not simply a factual given that is reproduced and
replicated by the testifier, but a genuine event in its own right” (Testimony, 62).
These isolated fragments disrupt the narrator’s account of the civil war and reinforce
the production of a traumatized narrative. They display or rather repeat again a
trauma that the characters’ testimony and the novel conceal. As such, they shed light
on the fictional history by drawing the reader’s attention to what remains hidden and

unseen.

As for Tadjo’s narrative, it is reported into small sections that convey to the
reader the pain she encountered in recollecting those fragments of history. Tadjo’s
eyewitness report in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide focuses both on public
and private spaces. Her report is also linear and very causal. Her testimony is all
recounted in the present tense as she wants the reader to walk with her and see the
horrors of the genocide. Those horrors are comprised of nightmares and memories of

25

testifiers’ missing lovers, dead parents, and dead children. In other words, they

provide a performance of a silent discourse within a text.

Half of a Yellow Sun’s third-person narration which follows closely three
characters - Olanna, a teacher before the war at Nsukka University; Ugwu, her
husband’s houseboy; and Richard, the British lover of Olanna’s twin sister - recounts
the difficulty of exploring the atrocities of the Nigerian civil war. As a result, each of
these characters shows symptoms of disassociation and withdrawal, including the
inability to locate the words to recount their experience. Olanna finds that “[she]
wanted to ask Odenigbo to stop being ridiculous, but her lips were heavy. Speaking
was a labor. When her parents and Kainene visited, she did not say much; it was

Odenigbo who told them what she had seen” (1 5 7).

Olanna exhibits classic characteristics of the traumatized in her struggle and
inability to discuss the past. Similarly, Richard tries to write about his experience,
“but he stopped because the sentences were risible. They were too melodramatic.
They sounded just like the articles in the foreign press, as if these killings had not
happened and, even if they had, as if they had not quite happened that way. The echo
of unreality weighed each word down” (168). Toward the end of the novel, Ugwu,
after he is wounded and returns from his service in the army, also seeks solace in
language:

Ugwu thanked him and shook his head and realized that he would
never be able to capture that child on paper, never be able to
describe well enough the fear that dulled the eyes of mothers in the

26

 

refugee camp when the bomber planes charged out of the sky. He
would never be able to depict the very bleakness of bombing hungry
people. But he tried, and the more he wrote the less he dreamed
(398).

With each of these cases, the novel initiates discussions about trauma’s
representation in fiction. It strategically raises questions such as: what is the impact
on writing when the trauma experience that is being depicted is essentially
fragmentary and silent? And, furthermore, what is the range of forms which trauma
literature by African women and about African women can take, and in which way
are they producing similar or dissimilar means of addressing trauma? Adichie, Tadjo,
and Nacro use their narrative techniques to tell of and “work through trauma.” While
Nacro’s film is purely fictional with a setting in an unnamed African Country,
Adichie and Tadjo’s novels mix fiction with reality to provide the reader with the
historical framework of the traumatic events they portray. Tadjo’s account of the
genocide’s survivor’s testimonies is blended with a fictional narrative in which she
raises questions about the ways in which justice and reconciliation can be
maintained. She contends that peace and reconciliation are possible solely through
the acknowledgment of the evil that must be exorcised otherwise ethnic prejudice
and fear will remain:

Through justice, through an attempt at a true justice. As long as this
attempt is not made, fear will remain. It is there. It has not gone
away. All crime that goes unpunished will engender other crimes.
The Hutus are afraid of the Tutsis because they are in power. The

27

Tutsis are afraid of the Hutus because they can seize that power.
Fear has remained in these bills (27).

The necessity to sustain true justice and reconciliation without forgetting the
wounds of the past has been raised in the two novels as well as in the Nacro’s film.
The recurrence of this theme is associated with the Afiican belief in the reincarnation
of the spirit of the dead in the worlds of the livings, and with Birago Diop and

Aminata Sow Fall’s idea that the dead are not dead.

In The Night of Truth as well as in The Shadow of Imana, the lingering spirit
of the dead in the realm of the leaving is due to the unrealistic modes of
reconcialtions that undermine the sufferings of the dead by casting them into
forgetting. In The Shadow of Imana, Tadjo comments that “the dead point an
accusing finger at the living who are still making use of them. The dead want to
return to the earth. They rise up in protest. They want to melt into the cart ” (16).
Similarly Edna, the President’s wife in Fanta Nacro’s The Night of Truth, feels
uneasy about the whole idea of reconciliation between Nayaks and Bonandes
because the latter killed her son Michel. Her argument is that Michel’s soul won’t be
in peace until his death is avenged. Edna’s striving for revenge along with the wrath
of the dead which provokes the rain in The Shadow of Imana may be interpreted as
the struggle of memory against forgetting the wound of the past; according to
Whitehead, this makes of trauma fiction “a narrative of haunting” (Trauma Fiction,
15). As such, in the following two paragraphs, I would like to offer a reading of La

Nuit de Verité as a narrative of trauma haunting.

28

The central characters in Nacro’s film are Edna and the colonel whom
compared to the other characters seem to be more haunted by the effects of the civil
war between Bonandes and Nayaks. My main focus on Edna and the colonel is on
the effect of trauma on memory. The colonel escapes the past during the day but his
nights are haunted by the bloody human body parts flowing in the river.
Sleepwalking, he re-enacts the civil war and his nights are spent in patrol. Nacro
explicitly shows that the colonel re-experience the war as if it were happening in the
screen. The flashbacks do not look like he is remembering the war; instead they look
like he is actually experiencing it. Like Freud’s shell-shocked World War I soldiers,
the colonel awakens from his nightmares in a state of total terror. The Colonel as
well as Edna cannot escape from the past, and they seem doomed to an interminable
haunting of the past. If in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud develops a theory of
memory that haunts the present and resists assimilation, Nacro emphasizes the

lasting and seemingly unsolvable nature of this possession.

By the end of Nacro’s film, the lasting nature of traumatic haunting memories
caused Edna to barbeque the colonel. Edna’s obsessive focus on her war wound, the
murdering of her son by the colonel, powerfully symbolizes and extemalizes the
resurfacing of her painful memories of the civil war. Colonel Theo’s murder shows
that Edna’s traumatic wound did not heal over time. It is neither susceptible to
recovery nor doomed to regeneration. The film ends with the old Bonande soldier
visiting Colonel Theo’s tomb. The old man tells to the dead colonel that the ghosts of

the civil war have been laid to rest after his death. The sand covered grave which has

29

no name on it suggests the wisdom of forgetting the wounds of the past and offer the

promise of a renewed life embodied by the term Bonandayak.

Throughout the representation of these traumatic events, Nacro as well as
- Tadjo and Adichie hint at hard question centered on the complexity of the justice that
should be rendered in the aftermath of such horrors. However, the central questions
remain those of the work of grief and reconciliation of the traumatized people. How
to forgive without forgetting, how to remember while hoping in a future for the

afflicted community?

Throughout the recounting of individuals’ stories and testimony of the
traumatic events of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and 1960s Nigerian civil war, these
African women artists raise questions about the importance of trauma representation.
If it is so important, both historically and morally, that African women writers like
Tadjo, Adichie and Nacro put their pens and cameras to preserving the memory of
the past, it is even more critical for the survivors themselves to bear witness, as, for
example, the Rwandan women genocide survivor Yolande Mukagasana does in La

mort ne veut pas de moi (Paris F ixo, 1997).

All the texts evoke the role that memory plays in the simultaneous denial of
and exposure of traumatic experience, a role that has only recently been clearly
defined by trauma theory itself. The de-construction of conventional modes of
literary representations, and the creation of specific linguistic and narrative strategies

to capture this emotional and cognitive process, represent how memory both disables

30

and enables trauma expression. This aspect makes the literary, fictional
representations of African women’s trauma depend on constructing a compelling

narrative framework.

31

Conclusion

By recounting the story of civil wars and genocides, Half of a Yellow Sun,
The Shadow of Imana, and The Night of Truth are situated at the intersection between
recent novels of historical trauma and a renewed interest in trauma theory.
Examining issues that confront contemporary societies as they grapple with how to
narrate the proliferating histories of ethnic prejudice and national slaughter, such
novels illuminate the process of trauma as well as examine the ability of literature to
represent or know trauma. The contemporary awareness of trauma, evident in these
works and in the growing field of trauma studies, comes from what Shoshana

3’ 6‘

Felman identifies as a “crisis in witnessing, our era [is] an age of testimony, an age
in which witnessing itself has undergone a major trauma” (Testimony, 206). Such a

characterization underscores how in the act of writing about catastrophic history a

second trauma, a symbolic one, occurs.

The act of writing fictional narratives by African women and about African
women may constitute a personally and politically effective task, as the female
authorial voice writing about trauma can be the liberation of the voice of the “other.”
Kali Tall observes that writing about traumatic experience can serve as a weapon in
the struggle for empowerment. Writing fictional narratives of trauma is an act
contributing to gaining psychological freedom, while also presenting a challenge, a
transgressive, disruptive excess to the ideological structures that create women as an

“other.” The fictional trauma author’s writing as an “other,” about the “other” from

32

within a social, cultural and political framework, in which the “other” experiences

strategic and institutionalized oppression is a journey of expression.

33

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