Memory and photography: Rethinking postcolonial trauma studies

Abstract

Recent scholarship in trauma and postcolonial studies has called for more wide‐ranging and at the same time more specific paradigms in trauma theory in order to accommodate the complexities of trauma evidenced in postcolonial writing. The work of sociologist Kai Erikson provides a useful model for unpacking the diachronic nature of postcolonial trauma, and for acknowledging the multiple social fractures that trauma inflicts. In a case study demonstrating Erikson's applicability, I show how common tropes of trauma narrative are used as more than an adherence to convention in Marinovich and Silva's memoir, The Bang‐Bang Club, which recounts the experiences of white South African photographers covering Soweto's Hostel War in the early 1990s. These narrative strategies produce a space of non‐resolution in which the trauma of violence and witnessing can appear.

Keywords:

• South Africa
• trauma theory
• postcolonial studies
• photography
• narrative
• The Bang‐Bang Club

Notes

1. See also Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (New York: Palgrave, 2004): 19–23.

2. Erikson is quoting here from his earlier book, Everything in its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (New York: Simon, 1976).

3. Martha Wolfenstein, Disaster: A Psychological Essay (Glencoe, IL: Free, 1957), cited in Erikson (236).

4. Erikson gives the example of communist Romania.

5. We might note similar feelings expressed by those bearing witness to victim testimonials. See Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (New York: Three Rivers): 51.

6. For example, Chapter 2 bears the title “Ah, A Pondo – He Deserved to Die”, and an epigraph from a “traditional Acholi funeral song”, “Death has killed the happiest / Death has killed the happiest / Death has killed the great one that I trusted” (4); Chapter 14 is called “Show us your Dead”, and has an epigraph from Ken Oosterbroek's diary, “I hope I die with the best fucking news pic of all time on my neg. – it wouldn't be worth it otherwise …” (154).

7. See Ato Quayson, “Symbolisation Compulsions: Freud, African Literature and South Africa's Process of Truth and Reconciliation”, Cambridge Quarterly 30.3 (2001): 191–214.

8. See, for example, Mike Creen, “Snapshots of a Hidden War”, The Christchurch Press 23 Feb. 2002: 16.