Literature, trauma and the African moral imagination

Abstract

Trauma theory claims to represent a ‘new mode of reading and of listening’, but its Eurocentric roots lead to the question of whether or not this approach is relevant in postcolonial contexts. This essay makes the case that engaging trauma theory through African literatures is in fact a productive exercise, mostly because of what it does for the former. African social thought, expressed through its writers and critics, allows us to refine and address crucial problems in trauma theory, including questions about the representation of trauma and strategies for trauma healing. African writers' deployment of images such as the railroad, which is closely linked with discourses of trauma and of modernism, illustrates how their works can reframe trauma studies from an African perspective. An appreciation of the continent's traumatogenic contexts, of writers' cultural resources and strategies for speaking to those contexts, and of the intrinsically transformational impulse of the African moral imagination, suggests that African literatures are grounded in the types of imaginative ‘re-membering practice[s]’ that promote recovery and healing from the destructive effects of trauma.

Keywords:

• trauma theory
• postcolonial studies
• African literatures
• modernism in Africa
• moral imagination

Note on contributor

J. Roger Kurtz teaches African literatures at the State University of New York (Brockport). He is the author of Urban Obsessions, Urban Fears: The Postcolonial Kenyan Novel (James Currey, 1998) and Nyarloka's Gift: The Writing of Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye (Mvule Africa Publishers, 2005). He can be contacted at: [email protected].

Notes

1. Seminal texts on literature and trauma include Hartman (1995), Caruth (1995, 1996), Felman and Laub (1992), LaCapra (2001), Luckhurst (2008), Tal (1996), Vickroy (2002) and Whitehead (2004). Trauma theory is now regularly taught either as a discrete topic or as part of a series of theoretical approaches in many university literature courses, and it frequently appears in professional conference presentations. In 2007, the Centre for Literature and Trauma (LITRA) was established at University of Gent, in Belgium. The Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, based at the University of Nebraska Press, published its first issue in 2012.

2. See for example Durant (2012) and Eaglestone (2008).

3. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders constitutes the canonical catalogue of mental illness. The definition of PTSD first appeared in the third edition (1980) and was subsequently revised in both the fourth (1994) and fifth (2013) editions (see American Psychiatric Association 2013).

4. See, e.g., Beaumont and Freeman (2007). In film studies, the 1895 shot by Auguste and Louis Lumiere, L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat [The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station], is famously emblematic of the industrial age and of the new visual images that accompany it.

5. See, for example, the popular novel The Lunatic Express, with its swashbuckling subtitle: ‘The magnificent saga of how the white man changed Africa/The pioneers, visionaries, and politicians – and their crazy railway’ (Miller 1971).

6. ‘I came upon a boiler wallowing in the grass, then found a path leading up the hill. It turned aside for the boulders, and also of an undersized railway truck lying there on its back with its wheels in the air. One was off. The thing looked as dead as the carcass of some animal’ (Conrad 1899, 30).

7. For models of the stages of trauma healing, see Herman (1992, 3) and Yoder (2005, 79–80). An applied training programme called Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Response (STAR), pioneered by the Centre for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University (VA), offers further refinement of these stages through a ‘snail model’ (Barge and Yoder 2011). The latter approach to trauma theory locates it as a component of the broader project of peace-building. This approach links trauma theory to concepts in restorative justice, conflict transformation, forgiveness studies, moral repair and related areas.