Hacettepe University Graduate School of Social Sciences Department of English Language and Literature English Language and Literature THE REPRESENTATIONS OF TRAUMA AND TRAUMA COPING STRATEGIES IN GRACE NICHOLS’S POETRY Merve SARIKAYA-ŞEN Ph.D. Thesis Ankara, 2016 THE REPRESENTATIONS OF TRAUMA AND TRAUMA COPING STRATEGIES IN GRACE NICHOLS’S POETRY Merve SARIKAYA-ŞEN Ph.D. Thesis Ankara, 2016 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Prof Dr Huriye REİS for her invaluable comments, attentive re-reading, tremendous support, and generous criticism she has given me throughout this study. Her keen interest, willingness to share suggestions, and faith in me have greatly contributed to the completion of this dissertation. It is owing to her that I have learned how to be a hardworking and meticulous academician. One day, I hope to become as good a supervisor as she has been to me. I also would like to express my gratitude to Prof Dr Burçin EROL for her endless support and faith in me throughout my graduate studies at Hacettepe University. With her grace, energy, and endless expertise, she has always been one of the most important figures in my life—both academic and otherwise. I am also indebted to Prof Dr Susana ONEGA for her kind permission to carry out research work at Zaragoza University, Spain. She has always been willing to read and discuss this study. I would like to thank her warmly for her inspiring suggestions, feedback, and generosity throughout. Prof Dr Burçin EROL, Assoc. Prof Dr Hande SEBER, Assoc. Prof Dr Nurten BİRLİK, and Assist. Prof Dr Margaret J-M. SÖNMEZ have all read and examined this study. I am indebted to them for their constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement. I especially would like to thank Assist. Prof Dr Margaret J-M. SÖNMEZ for her sincere encouragement and insightful questions which have helped me consider this study from a different perspective. I owe many thanks to Assist. Prof Dr Nil KORKUT NAYKI, who has always been ready to encourage. Talking to her is always a source of motivation and inspiration. I also would like to extend my thanks to Assist. Prof Dr Selen AKTARİ SEVGİ for her support and trust in what I do. iv I also owe the greatest thanks to my parents and my brother. They have been a source of peace, comfort, and support throughout. My thanks also go to my friends, Gülşah GÖÇMEN, Silvia PELLICER-ORTIN, and Bilyana VANYOVA KOSTOVA for being good supporters and listeners all the time. I have always felt their positive energy while trying to write my thesis. I especially would like to thank my husband, Serkan ŞEN for always being there to listen and encourage. With his love, patience, humour, and energy, he has always found a way to help me survive. This work was supported by TUBITAK BIDEB (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) under Grant 2214/A, International Doctoral Research Fellowship Programme. I would like to express my acknowledgement to TUBITAK BIDEB for the scholarship I have benefited for six months (September, 2013-March, 2014). v ÖZET SARIKAYA-ŞEN, Merve. Grace Nichols’ın Şiirinde Travma ve Travmayla Başetme Yollarının Temsili. Doktora Tezi, Ankara, 2016. Bu çalışma, Grace Nichols’ın I is a Long Memoried Woman (1983), The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984), Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (1989), Sunris (1996) ve Startling the Flying Fish (2005) koleksiyonlarında travmanın ve travmayla başetme yollarının ele alınmasında kademeli bir evrilme süreci olduğunu savunur. I is, The Fat ve Lazy Thoughts Afro-Karayipli insanların Karayipler’deki kölelikleri boyunca ve Birleşik Krallık’taki diasporik yaşamları süresince yaşadıkları travmayı ve travmayla başetme yollarını temsil ederken, Sunris ve Startling the Flying Fish Afro- Karayiplilerin travmasını daha yapıcı bir biçimde ele alır. I is’de travmatik yaşantıyı temsil etmek için dört farklı yöntem kullanılır; travmanın bastırılması, travmanın sürekli bir sorun olarak ortaya çıkması, travmanın sürekli dışa vurulması ve travmatik pastoral. Ayrıca, Nichols iki farklı travmayla başetme yöntemi sunar; travmadan hayal gücü ya da intikam fantazileriyle uzak durmak ve dini ve/ya da manevi inançlara dayanmak. The Fat ve Lazy Thoughts, Afro-Karayiplilere özgü travmatik geçmişin, İngiliz Afro- Karayip diasporasının 1960’lar sonrası yaşantılarındaki mirasını temsil eder. Bu koleksiyonlarda, Nichols nostaljiyi ve grotesk görüntüleri travmayla başetme mekanizması olarak kullanır. Sunris ve Startling the Flying Fish başlıklı koleksiyonlarda, Nichols Afro-Karayiplilerin travmatik geçmişlerine daha olumlayıcı bir tutumla yaklaşır. Sunris’te Trinidad ve Tobago Karnavalı, Startling the Flying Fish’te ise mitlere özgü yeniden anlatım yöntemi travmayla başetme yöntemi olarak kullanılır. Böylece, bu çalışma Nichols’ın şiirinin travmatik Afro-Karayip geçmişinin gölgesinde kalmayacak şekilde, bu geçmişi tanıdığını ve bu geçmişle uzlaşmaya yöneldiğini savunur. Anahtar Sözcükler Grace Nichols, I is a Long Memoried Woman, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman, Sunris, and Startling the Flying Fish, travma, travmayla başetme. vi ABSTRACT SARIKAYA-ŞEN, Merve. The Representations of Trauma and Trauma Coping Strategies in Grace Nichols’s Poetry. Ph.D. Thesis, Ankara, 2016. This study argues that there is a gradual evolution of the treatment of trauma and trauma coping strategies in Grace Nichols’s I is a Long Memoried Woman (1983), The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984), Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (1989), Sunris (1996), and Startling the Flying Fish (2005). I is, The Fat Black, and Lazy Thoughts represent Afro-Caribbean people’s traumatic experiences and their trauma coping mechanisms during their slavery in the Caribbean and later in their diasporic lives in Britain. Sunris and Startling the Flying Fish treat the Afro-Caribbean traumatic past in a more constructive way. I is presents four different ways of representing Afro-Caribbean people’s traumatic experiences; repression, haunting, acting out, and traumatic pastoral. Also, the collection presents two different strategies of coping with trauma; dissociation in the form of escape through imagination or revenge fantasies as well as religious beliefs and/or spirituality. The Fat and Lazy Thoughts represent the legacies of the Afro- Caribbean traumatic past in British Afro-Caribbean diaspora’s lives in the post 1960s. In these collections, Nichols employs nostalgia and grotesque images as trauma coping strategies. In Sunris and Startling the Flying Fish, Nichols adopts a more affirmative attitude towards the Afro-Caribbean traumatic past. In Sunris, the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, and, in Startling the Flying Fish, mythical retellings act as trauma healing mechanisms. Thus, this study indicates that Nichols’s poetry recognizes the Afro- Caribbean past as traumatic and moves towards a reconciliation with it and the construction of an envisaged future that includes but is not overshadowed by it. Keywords Grace Nichols, I is a Long Memoried Woman, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman, Sunris, and Startling the Flying Fish, trauma, trauma coping. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS KABUL VE ONAY……………………………………………..…….…………….….i BİLDİRİM………..………………………………………………….……………....…ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS....................………………….………….…...……..….....iii ÖZET…………………................……….…………….…………….……………........v ABSTRACT…………………....................………………………………..……..…...vi TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………….………………........vii INTRODUCTION.........................................................................................................1 CHAPTER I: TRAUMA AND TRAUMA COPING STRATEGIES IN A NON- WESTERN WORLD: I IS A LONG MEMORIED WOMAN…………..…………..37 CHAPTER II: TRAUMA AND ITS HEALING THROUGH NOSTALGIA AND GROTESQUE IN THE FAT BLACK WOMAN’S POEMS AND LAZY THOUGHTS OF A LAZY WOMAN………………………………………..………………….…….75 CHAPTER III: GOING BEYOND TRAUMA WITH CARNIVAL AND MYTHS IN SUNRIS AND STARTLING THE FLYING FISH…………….……..106 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………147 NOTES…………………………………………………………….……….................154 WORKS CITED……………..….....……………………………………………...…162 APPENDIX 1: ORIGINALITY REPORTS.............................................................182 APPENDIX 2: ETHICS BOARD WAIVER FORMS………………...…......…....184 1 INTRODUCTION The rise of interest in literary representations of trauma is a recent phenomenon associated with a surge of interest in trauma theory. Roger Luckhurst convincingly argues that today’s world is “saturated with trauma”, traces of which can be found in government inquiries, celebrity culture, academic monographs, and bestseller lists (2). Evidently, the last thirty years mark both the emergence of trauma studies and a great increase in the number of literary works dealing with trauma. 1 Susana Onega and Jean- Michel Ganteau cogently argue that from the 1980s onwards, the representations of trauma in literature have noticeably augmented in a cumulative response to the dismal outcomes of the two world wars, the wars of decolonization, international terrorism, ethnic discriminations, and sexual and physical abuse (“Introduction: Traumatic Realism” 3). More importantly, Onega believes that the rise of interest in literary works representing trauma is a direct result of the belief in the agency of literary texts to heal trauma (“Affective Knowledge” 84). The application of trauma theory in understanding literary texts evinces diverse but at the same time potentially controversial principles, especially for the analysis of postcolonial literary texts. In this regard, Stef Craps contends that trauma theory disregards the traumatic experiences of subordinate groups and exclusively gives voice to the Western society, and at the same time addresses trauma and recovery as universal phenomena: “They [primary trauma texts] tend to ignore traumatic experiences and histories of currently sub-ordinate groups both inside and outside Western society, and/or to take for granted the universal validity of definitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of the history of Western modernity” (2). However, traumatic experiences of subordinate groups must be recognized “on their own terms” (3). 2 This implies that the employment of trauma theory for the traumatic experiences of non- western people may entail a different approach from that used for western subjects. Accordingly, whether in fiction or poetry, the analysis of the representation of traumatic experiences of non-western groups (such as Afro-Caribbeans during slavery and the 2 after-effects of these traumatic experiences in the following generations) necessitates a thorough and culturally accurate formulation. In contemporary British poetry, Grace Nichols is one of the important poets to represent Afro-Caribbean people’s traumatic experiences of slavery and diasporic life in Britain and trauma coping strategies adopted by them, notably in her poetry collections—I is a Long Memoried Woman (1983), The Fat Black Woman`s Poems (1984), Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (1989), Sunris (1996), and Startling the Flying Fish (2005). 3 Since this study focuses on those of Nichols’s adult collections that predominantly represent trauma and trauma coping strategies, her children’s poetry and her last adult collection, Picasso I want My Face Back (2009), which offers various examples of ekphrastic poetry and focuses on art, landscape, and memory, are not included in this study. Consequently, this study adopts a different approach in its analysis of Nichols’s poetry as trauma poetry representing non-western predicament of Afro-Caribbean people and their non-western trauma coping mechanisms. Hence, this study argues that Nichols’s I is, The Fat, Lazy Thoughts, Sunris, and Startling the Flying Fish represent traumatic experiences of Afro- Caribbean people during slavery and the slave trade and their after-effects in the lives of the British Afro-Caribbean diaspora, as well as these people’s trauma coping strategies in the Caribbean and Britain. This study indicates very strongly that Nichols moves from recognizing an Afro-Caribbean past as traumatic to a strategy of reconciling with it and building a future that includes it but is not impeded by it. In this context, Nichols’s first collection, I is (1983), represents Afro-Caribbean slaves’ traumatic experiences caused by the slave trade and slavery in the New Land and their ways of coping with these traumas. As argued below, in I is, trauma is represented through repression, repetition, haunting and traumatic pastoral while healing is represented through a return to religion and spirituality and through dissociation in the form of escape through imagination and revenge fantasies. Different from I is, which focuses on Afro-Caribbean people during the Middle Passage and slavery, in Nichols’s two following collections, The Fat (1984) and Lazy Thoughts (1989), the focus is on Afro- Caribbean peoples in Britain after the 1960s. In fact these two collections represent the fact that, in that period, the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Britain were haunted by the traumatic experiences of their ancestors and developed trauma coping mechanisms such as nostalgia and grotesque to deal with their trauma. Evidently, The Fat and Lazy 3 Thoughts show how different trauma coping strategies were adopted by Afro-Caribbean people in different places and times. Similarly, Nichols’s later collections, Sunris (1996) and Startling the Flying Fish (2005) represent the continuity of Afro-Caribbean people’s traumatic past into the present as well as their trauma coping means. In this regard, far from wandering away from Afro- Caribbean people’s traumatic experiences, Sunris and Startling the Flying Fish rewrite the traumatic history of slavery and the slave trade. In doing this, Sunris has resort to the healing power of the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival while Startling the Flying Fish draws on the power of mythical retellings. Moreover, different from Nichols’s earlier collections, Sunris and Startling the Flying Fish adopt a more affirmative and decisive attitude in their reconciliation with the Afro-Caribbean traumatic past. Accordingly, in Sunris Nichols presents us with an Afro-Caribbean speaker named Sunris who attends the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival and moves beyond her ancestors’ traumatic past of slavery and the slave trade. Similarly, in her attempt to create a new outlook, Nichols, in Startling the Flying Fish, presents us with Cariwoma as a mythical being who has the power to connect the Afro-Caribbean traumatic past with the present and the future and thus achieve a reconciliation with the entire Afro-Caribbean traumatic heritage. Besides, Cariwoma has the agency to connect the sufferings of Afro-Caribbeans with those of others such as the Aztecs. On these grounds, the representation of trauma and trauma coping strategies in Nichols’s poetry collections analysed in this study attests to the fact that reading literary works that represent Afro-Caribbean people’s trauma and healing deserve proper recognition and comprehensive analysis. Grace Nichols stands out as one of the most significant contemporary women poets of Caribbean origin in Britain. Nichols was born in Georgetown, Guyana in 1950 and grew up in a small village on the Guyanese coast. When she was eight, she moved to the city with her family, which was the source of her only novel Whole of a Morning Sky (1986). She attended the University of Guyana and gained a diploma in Communications (Dawes 135; Simone A. James Alexander 716). As a part of her studies in Communications, she visited some remote areas of Guyana, which influenced her writings and started her interest in Guyanese folk tales, Amerindian myths, the 4 Aztecs and the Incas (Ray 399). She worked as a teacher and journalist before moving to the UK with her partner John Agard in 1977 4 . Despite the variety and richness of Nichols’s work, it remains relatively unexplored in terms of trauma theory. After winning The Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1983, Nichols came to public notice. From that point onwards, her poetry has received critical attention mainly from the perspective of gender and postcolonial studies that theorize representations of postcolonial identity and the female body. For example, Gudrun Webhofer seeks to understand the representation of identity in terms of gender and race in a selection of poems written by Nichols and Goodison. Similarly, Cara N. Cilano, in her dissertation explores Nichols’s construction of postcolonial identity, especially in I is. Another dissertation that analyses I is from the perspective of postcolonial identity is Catherine R. Restovich’s which explores it as an example of postcolonial Afro- Caribbean female writing. Similar to Restovich, Özlem Türe Abacı, in her M. A. Thesis argues that I is, as an example of Anglophone Afro-Caribbean poetry, deals with Afro- Caribbean painful past through “the strategic purposes of language variance and mimicry” (63) as well as postcolonial shared memory in “constructing identity and negotiating the notions of home and belonging” (101). In later studies, such as Maija Naakka’s M. A. Thesis, Nichols’s collections have been analysed to see how otherness is constructed through the black female body. From a different perspective, Susheila Nasta focuses on the “creolisation of cultures and languages that define the syncretic nature of the Caribbean history” in I is (xvi). As for The Fats, Nerys Williams argues that Nichols presents a “speaker who negotiates the problems of everyday living in London” (36). In a seminal study on Nichols’s writing, C. L. Innes argues that, in The Fat, the persona of the fat black woman responds lustily, assertively, and unashamedly to British (and Western) concepts of feminine beauty and behaviour, challenging the judges’ preference for the slim and ethereal winners of Miss World contests, issuing invitations to would-be lovers, dismissing ballet and the ballroom for the boogie-woogie. Some poems also cheerfully challenge Western intellectual discourse, whose categorizations of African women can be seen as part of an overall project to justify its patriarchal hegemony. (327-328) 5 Similarly, Innes believes that Nichols’s following collection, Lazy Thoughts, “moves from challenging concepts of femininity that exclude women who are black and joyfully well-fleshed to challenging internalized ideals of the good housewife, obsessed with the care of the house” (329). In other words, The Fat and Lazy Thoughts have been analysed with regard to the agency of female body and writing. Nichols’s Sunris remains relatively unexplored when compared to her previous collections. Fiona Darroch reads Sunris in terms of postcolonial religion in contemporary Guyanese poetry and argues that Nichols provides readers with “a map of how religion should be understood in Guyanese fiction and poetry” (128). Similar to Sunris, Startling the Flying Fish has received very few critical approaches and those extant are mainly in companions to contemporary British poetry. For example, Ian Hamilton and Jeremy Noel-Tod describe Startling the Flying Fish as “a mythological story of the Caribbean” (443). Evidently, Nichols’s later collections have not received much critical acclaim and analysis when compared to her earlier works. Moreover, her poetry has been analysed mainly in terms of their postcolonial and/or gender related elements but not in terms of their trauma and trauma coping representations. Nichols’s poetry collections analysed in this study—I is, The Fat, Lazy Thoughts, Sunris, and Startling the Flying Fish— belong to significant body of contemporary British poetry which variously explores the representation of the trauma of Afro- Caribbean slavery and the Middle Passage. Among poetry collections written by poets of Caribbean origin in Britain who invest their poems with trauma and trauma coping strategies in representing slavery and the slave trade are Kamau Braithwaite’s The Arrivants (1973) and Middle Passages (1992), David Dabydeen’s Slave Song (1984), and Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990). 5 Evidently, there are many poets of Caribbean origin in Britain. This situation is directly related to the plurality of voices and forms that characterize British poetry since the 1980s. Michael Hulse, David Kennedy, and David Morley, in their Introduction to The New Poetry (1993) 6 , define and celebrate the plurality of voices and forms in British poetry after the 1980s as follows: “Throughout the century, the hierarchies of values that once made stable poetics possible have been disappearing. In the absence of shared moral and religious ideals, common social or sexual mores or political ideologies, or any philosophy on the conduct of life, plurality 6 has flourished” (15, emphasis in the original). 7 The new poetry with its plurality in its forms and voices was “the beginning of British poetry’s tribal divisions and isolation, and a new cohesiveness—its constituent parts ‘talk’ to one another readily, eloquently, and freely while preserving their unique identities” (16). In other words, although different voices found the opportunity to speak out, they still kept their uniqueness. The change in the new poetry attests to Eagleton’s argument that “the marginal becomes somehow central” in contemporary British poetry (46). In a similar vein, James Acheson and Roman Huk argue that contemporary British poetry was characterized by the compelling presence of growing numbers of women poets, black poets from a range of differing cultural communities, poets writing out of postcolonial experience or submerged traditions in Scotland and Wales, regional and working- class poets, and poets of all inflections writing in experimental, oppositional and/or ‘poststructuralist’ forms (3). This is mainly because Britain was characterized by its multiculturalism which challenged the idea of a centre and paved the way for the pluralism of poetic voices in the 1980s. Hence, poets of Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and Caribbean origin could find the opportunity to express themselves. Although open to a plurality of voices, contemporary Britain in the 1980s was not very much of a home to poets of different origins, especially those from the Caribbean. Jahan Ramazani argues that poets of Caribbean origin in Britain “have been unhoused by modernity and colonialism, by war and politics, by education and travel, even perhaps by their own artifice” (604). In other words, in the 1980s, for poets of Caribbean origin, Britain was a country in which they could not develop a sense of belonging. Such a sense of exile and lack of belonging to Britain are traceable in the poems written by poets of Caribbean origin such as Fred D’Auguiar, David Dabydeen, and Grace Nichols whose poetries also reflect their vulnerability and deep sufferings rooted in their traumatic ancestral past (Hulse et. al 18-19). 8 Consequently, since the beginning of her literary production, Nichols has been concerned with representing the Afro-Caribbean traumatic past and its legacies in contemporary Afro-Caribbean diasporic life in Britain. Therefore, in order to understand Nichol’s trauma poetry, we need to analyse the application of trauma theory 7 in understanding literary texts, which was an interest and an approach that started to gain prominence in the early 1990s. In fact, the analyses of literary representations of trauma are mainly based on a psychological understanding of trauma. However, the origins of the word “trauma” go back to physical wounds. Luckhurst explains that the word trauma “derives from the Greek word meaning wound” and that it was used in English in the seventeenth century in medicine to refer “to a bodily injury caused by an external agent” (2). In the nineteenth century, the term was extended to describe stressing conditions. Especially, these were associated with the afflictions of women newly starting their careers and urban dwellers who were exposed to new means of mass transportation and industrial manufacture (Baer 9). In the 1860s, an interest in ‘psychic’ trauma began when railway accidents gave rise to long-lasting and painful effects on victims who had not been physically injured. As Kirby Farrell asserts, “[i]n 1866, the British surgeon John Erichsen published On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System, which held that physical shock to neural tissue could result in mental injury” (7). Thus, the concept of trauma started to extend from physical to psychic grounds in the late nineteenth century. This study adopts trauma theory based on a psychological understanding of trauma and conducts an extensive research to arrive at a thorough understanding of the trauma and trauma coping strategies presented in Nichols’s poetry. Therefore, as argued below, this study elaborates on and adopts the arguments of the forerunners of trauma research in the psychical domain who were Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, and Josef Breuer and carries further research into literary trauma theory that has been developing since the 1990s. At the start of psychological investigations into trauma, Charcot drew strong correlations between hysteria and trauma while his student Janet analysed dissociative states resulting from trauma. Charcot’s more famous colleagues, Freud and Breuer wrote works, such as “On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena” (1893), “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” (1895), “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” (1914), “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), and “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), which are among most important works cited in trauma studies. Besides these forerunners of psychological trauma theory, this study mainly draws on literary trauma theory which has been developing since the 1990s. 8 In the late nineteenth century, Charcot, a French neurologist working with traumatised subjects in the Salpetrière hospital, was the first to study the relationship between trauma and mental illnesses. Exploring the causes of hysteria and dissociative symptoms, Charcot found out that hysteria had psychological not physical origins and that it was not limited to women only but inflicted men as well. Charcot analysed six males suffering from hysteria associated with “serious and obstinate nervous states which present themselves after collisions” (221). His aim was to underline the fact that male hysteria was possible although it remained “often unrecognized, even by very distinguished physicians” (221). Charcot argued that “it is usual for these diseases [such as paralyses, contractures, fainting and amnesia] to localise themselves at first in parts where the wound, the contusion, or the sprain is produced” (33). Gradually, however, such symptoms diffused over the nervous system. Charcot explained that they did not have physical but psychical origins and added that “these motor paralyses of psychical origin are as objectively real as those depending on an organic lesion” (289). Among the most important symptoms of such neurotic symptoms was “traumatic retrograde amnesia” (376) which meant that the traumatised subject has “no memory of what had happened to him” (xxxi). Ruth Harris, in her Introduction to Charcot’s study, explains traumatic retrograde amnesia by giving an example. After a road accident, a man is unconscious for nearly six days. When he wakes up, he develops traumatic retrograde amnesia; he does not remember the accident at all but suffers from paralysis in his legs. He believes that this is because his legs have been crushed. The terror he has experienced during the accident makes him erase the traumatic moment in his mind and offer an alternative story in its stead. Thus, he unconsciously avoids remembering the traumatic moment (xxxi). While Charcot emphasized amnesia, it was Pierre Janet who underlined “dissociation” as the underlying tenet of trauma. According to Janet, traumatized individuals “seem to have lost their capacity to assimilate new experiences as well. It is […] as if their personality development has stopped at a certain point, and cannot enlarge any more by the addition of new elements” (“L’amnésie continue” 138). Elaborating on Janet’s arguments, Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart argue that “lack of proper integration of intensely emotionally arousing experiences into the memory system 9 results in dissociation” (163). Consequently, in an attempt to escape from the overwhelming effects of the affects associated with the traumatic experience, the traumatized subject basically represses the trauma to the unconscious, which results in the splitting or dissociation of the conscious and the unconscious mind. In fact, dissociation or splitting of the mind is what constitutes the present situation of the traumatized subject. In keeping with this, the traumatized subjects “undergo affective numbing or avoid reminders of trauma. Re-experiencing and avoidance/numbing may coexist or alternate” (Steele et al. 241). As Leys states, “owing to the emotions of terror and surprise caused by certain events, the mind is split or dissociated: it is unable to register the wound to the psyche because the ordinary mechanisms of awareness and cognition are destroyed” (2). As Leys continues, “all the symptoms characteristic of PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder]—flashbacks, nightmares and other re- experiences, emotional numbing, depression, guilt, autonomic arousal, explosive violence or tendency to hypervigilance—are thought to be the result of this mental dissociation” (2). The traumatized subjects, therefore, cannot remember the traumatic event in precise details but are haunted and/or possessed by it. Therefore, it is not easy to locate the causes and cures of trauma. Following in the footsteps of Charcot and Janet, Freud and Breuer underlined the “repression” of traumatic affects. Drawing on the similarities between hysteria and traumatic neurosis, Freud and Breuer argue that hysteria and traumatic neurosis are not limited to physical degeneration but develop out of psychological reasons: the operative cause of the illness is not the trifling physical injury but the affect of fright—the psychical trauma. In an analogous manner, our investigations reveal, for many, if not for most, hysterical symptoms, precipitating causes which can only be described as psychical traumas. Any experience which calls up distressing affects—such as those of fright, anxiety, shame or physical pain—may operate as a trauma of this kind. (“On the Psychical” 5-6) What is distinctive to trauma is that the traumatic event is “absent from the patients’ memory when they are in a normal psychical state” (7) because they repress it in the unconscious. In other words, “repression” of traumatic affects is the determining characteristic of Freud’s definition of trauma. Drawing on Freud’s arguments of the 10 repression of traumatic affects, Luckhurst contends that “a psychical trauma is something that enters the psyche that is so unprecedented or overwhelming that it cannot be processed or assimilated by usual mental processes” and, therefore, “it falls out of our conscious memory, yet is still present in the mind like an intruder or a ghost” (499). Problematizing the complex status of the traumatic experience, in “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895) Freud underlines the “belatedness” of trauma, too. He coins the term Nachträglichkeit which refers to the fact that “a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma by deferred action” (356, emphasis in the original). In other words, the traumatizing event is repressed to be reactivated after a period of dormancy by a second traumatic event that triggers the traumatic symptoms of the first. In this regard, the dialectic between two events constitutes trauma; the past traumatic event is available, sometimes in fragmentary and incomplete form, through a deferred action of understanding and interpretation (Leys 20). Since the traumatic event is not intrinsically traumatic, we can say that what turns an event into traumatic experience is the way in which the traumatized subject confers meaning on it. Evidently, Freud moves from an understanding of trauma as germane to the collapse of memory to the perception of trauma as the repression of traumatic affects to be activated after a period of inactivity. In Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud describes this process as including an “incubation period” or “latency”, which is the chronological gap between the traumatic event and the emergence of its symptoms triggered by a second event. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud makes the ground-breaking claim that Moses was an Egyptian because “the name Moses derives from the Egyptian vocabulary” (13). Moses was not only “the head of a throng of culturally inferior immigrants”—the Israelites—but also their “law-giver and educator [as] […] the man who forced them to adopt a new religion, which is still today called Mosaic after him” (31). However, Freud continues, Moses was murdered by the Israelites. This murder, a severe act of violence, was repressed by the perpetrating society only to be reactivated later. In fact, nearly one hundred years later, the Israelites—who had killed Moses—came to a place called 11 Meribat-Qades where they met Semitic tribes and started worshipping their god, Yahweh. Most importantly, the leader of these Semitic tribes was also called Moses. Gradually, these Semitic tribes and the Israelites formed a union (54-61). However, as time passed by, the Israelites started turning back to their Mosaic religion: the religion of Moses did not appear without leaving any trace; a kind of memory it had survived, a tradition perhaps obscured and distorted. It was this tradition of a great past that continued to work in the background, until it slowly gained more and more power over the mind of the people and at last succeeded in transforming the God Jahve into the Mosaic God and in waking to a new life the religion Moses had instituted centuries ago and which had later been forsaken. (113) Further, “a feeling of guiltiness had seized the Jewish people” because they remembered their shameful act of killing the Egyptian Moses (138). The chronological period between repressing the memories of killing Moses and remembering it centuries later is what Freud called latency or the incubation period. Hence, Freud describes traumatic neurosis as follows: It may happen that someone gets away, apparently unharmed, from the spot where he has suffered a shocking accident, for instance a train collision. In the course of the following weeks, however, he develops a series of grave psychical and motor symptoms, which can be ascribed only to his shock or whatever else happened at the time of the accident. He has developed a ‘traumatic neurosis’. This appears quite incomprehensible and is therefore a novel fact. The time that elapsed between the accident and the first appearance of the symptom is called the ‘incubation period’, a transparent allusion to the pathology of infectious disease […]. It is the feature one might term latency. (109-110, emphasis in the original) Adopting Freud’s ideas, Onega and Ganteau explain that “it is only after this second event that the symptoms of the trauma are expressed in the form of nightmares or flashbacks” and the traumatic event is “experienced again with full force but perceived as incomprehensible and belonging in the present” (“Introduction” Ethics and Trauma 11). Consequently, such a latency period or Nachträglichkeit, results in “obliterating the distinction between past and present and disrupting the linear model of temporality” (10). In other words, temporality no longer applies to traumatic experiences. According to Freud, the traumatised subject incessantly “acts out” the symptoms of trauma. From 1895 to 1914, Freud did not analyse traumatic neurosis but after the shell- 12 shock of World War I, his interest in trauma was regenerated. During that time, soldiers who were physically healthy but refused to return to the battlefield were treated as runaways and idlers. Although physically well, these soldiers “not only suffered memory gaps, but also repeatedly re-experienced extreme events in flashbacks, nightmares, and hallucinations months or even years afterwards” (Luckhurst 500). Freud explains that what is distinctive to such delayed remembering is acting out one’s traumatic experiences. In other words, instead of remembering the traumatic experiences, the traumatized subject acts out or relives the repressed memories as if they belonged to the present time. The traumatized subject does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He produces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it [...] he cannot escape from this compulsion to repeat; and in the end we understand that this is his way of remembering. (“Remembering, Repeating” 150, emphasis in the original) Freud notes that, as the memory of the traumatic event is repressed in depth, “the patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it […]. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of […] something belonging to the past” (“Beyond the Pleasure” 18). Therefore, the traumatized subject acts out the traumatic memory in the form of flashbacks, nightmares, hallucinatory visions etc. repeatedly and unconsciously instead of recollecting it merely as a memory of the past. However, as Onega and Ganteau explain, the effect of this delayed remembering and acting out is not healing in itself (“Introduction” Ethics and Trauma 11). Contemporary approaches to the possibility of healing trauma are informed by Freud’s arguments of “working through”. The concept of “working through” appears first in Freud’s “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914), and later in his “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety” (1926). As suggested above, in “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through”, Freud elaborates on the repression and repetition of traumatic experiences. Besides, Freud also argues that trauma can be cured by working it through, which involves making the traumatised subject remember previously repressed traumatic affects. According to Freud, the traumatised subject is prone to 13 repeat his/her traumatic experiences incessantly and might resist working it through but the analyst must be patient in allowing him/her to enter the healing phase: One must allow the patient time to become more conversant with this resistance with which he has now become acquainted, to work through it, to overcome it, by continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work according to the fundamental rule of analysis. Only when the resistance is at its height can the analyst, working in common with his patient, discover the repressed instinctual impulses which are feeding the resistance; and it is this kind of experience which convinces the patient of the existence and power of such impulses. The doctor has nothing else to do than to wait and let things take their course, a course which cannot be avoided nor always hastened. (“Remembering, Repeating” 155, emphasis in the original) Freud goes on to say that only through this way of working through the traumatic experiences that the analyst can achieve “the greatest changes in the patient” (155). Similarly, in “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety”, Freud goes on to argue that working through is “the period of strenuous effort” (159) which aims at relinquishing the repetitions of traumatic affects. Freud’s conceptualisation of mourning is among the most important tools used to account for the phase of “working through” in studies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 9 In “Mourning and Melancholia”, Freud defines mourning as “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (243). Freud notes that [p]rofound mourning, the reaction to the loss of someone who is loved, contains the same painful frame of mind, the same loss of interest in the outside world— insofar as it does not recall him— the same loss of capacity to adopt any new object of love (which would mean replacing him) and the same turning away from any activity that is not connected with thoughts of him. (244) The way to mourn is to realize that the loved object/idea does not exist anymore but usually the mourners are not ready to accept this fact. It is only when “each single one of the memories and expectations […] is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it […] [that] the work of mourning is completed, the ego becomes free and uninhibited again” (244-245). Freud 14 argues that the ego gives up the object by “disparaging it, denigrating it and even as it were killing it” (257). Drawing on Freud’s conceptualisation of mourning, LaCapra associates successful mourning with working through traumatic experiences. What makes LaCapra’s arguments different from Freud’s suggestions is his description of mourning not simply as individual grieving but as a social process: Mourning is […] a homeopathic socialization or ritualization of the repetition compulsion that attempts to turn it against the death drive and to counteract compulsiveness—especially the compulsive repetition of traumatic scenes of violence—by re-petitioning in ways that follow for a measure of critical distance, change, resumption of social life, ethical responsibility, and renewal. (Writing History 66) LaCapra argues that working through entails memory work which helps “to distinguish between past and present and to recognize something as having happened to one (or one’s people) back then, which is related to, but not identical with here and now” (66). Furthermore, working through is a way to “assist in restoring to victims the dignity denied them by their victimizers” (66). Thereby, mourning allows for “critical judgement and a reinvestment in life, notably social and civic life with its demands, responsibilities, and norms requiring respectful recognition and consideration for others” (70). Therefore, working through is a social process entailing “not simply alterity in the abstract but actual others—possibly empathic, trustworthy others” (76). It is only in working through that “one acquires the possibility of being an ethical and political agent” (143-4). Thus, LaCapra’s arguments have an ethical and political medium through which the traumatized subject not only comes to terms with trauma but also gains the possibility to alter the others around. In their later writings, Freud and Breuer correlate the phase of “working through” with the concept of “abreaction”: “From a theoretical point of view one may correlate it [working through] with the ‘abreacting’ of quotas of affect strangulated by repression” (“Remembering, “Repeating” 155-156). For the treatment of the traumatized subjects and attenuation of traumatic experiences, Freud and Breuer underline the importance of raising the repressed memories from the unconscious to the consciousness through 15 articulation which “serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be ‘abreacted’ almost as effectively” (“On the Psychical Mechanism” 8). In other words, abreaction is a purging of the excess of affects moulded by the traumatic event by putting them into words. If the traumatized subject cannot react to the traumatic experience “in deeds or words, or in the mildest case in tears, any recollection of the event retains its affective to begin with” (8). Consequently, the symptoms of trauma can only disappear through a process of abreaction aimed at making the subject recall and place the event in its proper time of occurrence which provoked the trauma, by reliving its accompanying affects through a thorough description and expression of that event in minute details (6). In other words, abreaction is a cathartic method of talking traumatic experiences out, in order to heal them. Freud and Breuer’s concept of abreaction, which requires putting traumatic experience into words with the aim of working it through, was also explained by Janet. In this regard, Janet’s most important contribution was his distinction between “traumatic memory” and “narrative memory”. 10 Janet argues that traumatic memory is “a fixed idea of a happening” which does not allow for “the recital which we speak of a [narrative] memory” (Psychological Healing 663). In other words, the traumatized subject is unable to put his/her traumatic experience(s) into words. This is mainly because the traumatized subject “remains confronted by a difficult situation in which he has not been able to play a satisfactory part, one to which his adaptation had been imperfect” (663). However, Janet believes that the traumatized subject needs to be involved in an “action of telling a story” which is, in fact, the “narrative memory” (661). This requires the traumatised subject “not only [to] know how to [narrate the event], but must also know how to associate the happening with the other events of his life” whereby an “organisation of the recital of the event to others and to [him/herself]” and “the putting of this recital in its place as one of the chapters in [his/her] personal history” become possible (661-62). In other words, Janet contends that the healing of the traumatised subject can only begin when he/she manages to organize the fragmented remains of his/her traumatic experience successfully and put them in a chronological order so as to narrate and integrate them into his/her life. As argued below, the 16 possibility of narrating trauma and thus integrating it into one’s life has made it appealing to literary critics and creative writers alike since the 1990s. The ground-breaking work on traumatic neurosis carried out by Freud, Janet, and early psychoanalysts provided a solid basis for trauma studies until the early 1980s when trauma was officially recognized by the medical professors. The American Psychiatric Association acknowledged trauma for the first time only in 1980 after the experience of US veterans of Vietnam who returned home with inerasable psychological wounds. As officially defined by the American Psychiatric Association, trauma is the reaction to an event “outside the range of usual human experience” (236) which involves a “recognizable stressor that would evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone” (238). Drawing on this definition, Irene Visser states that trauma “refers not so much to the traumatic event as to the traumatic aftermath, the post-traumatic stage. Trauma thus denotes the recurrence or repetition of the stressor event through memory, dreams, narrative and/or various symptoms known under the definition of Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)” (272). The symptoms of PTSD include not only “nightmares, flashbacks, depression, but also an increased sensitivity to cynicism, depersonalization, and distinct changes in spirituality or worldview” (272). More importantly, however, these symptoms are diverse and include contrasting specificities from unresponsiveness to extreme vigilance: “The traumatic event may intrude repetitively on everyday activities and sleep, but there may also be a total absence of recall. Symptoms may appear chronically or intermittently; immediately or many years after the event” (272). The transmission of this elaborated concept of trauma from the medical world to interdisciplinary studies came forward in the early 1990s with two very important publications: American Imago (1991), a quarterly journal featuring articles that explore Freud’s legacy across the humanities, arts, and social sciences and Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), an edited volume exploring trauma through essays and interviews with film makers, sociologists, and literary theorists as well as reprinting essays from American Imago. Caruth, one of the most important critics in trauma studies based on Freudian psychoanalysis, explains that the aim of the volume is 17 to “examine the impact of the experience, and the notion, of trauma on psychoanalytic practice and theory, as well as on other aspects of culture such as literature and pedagogy, the construction of history in writing and film, and social or political activism” (“Introduction” Trauma: Explorations 4). Accordingly, Trauma: Explorations in Memory sets out to develop an interdisciplinary approach towards the concept of trauma, which shapes our current knowledge of it. As Caruth contends, “the more we satisfactorily locate and classify the symptoms of PTSD, the more we seem to have dislocated the boundaries of our modes of understanding” and hence a variety of disciplines inclusive of “psychoanalysis and medically oriented psychiatry, sociology, history, and even literature all seem to be called upon to explain, to cure, or to show why it is that we can no longer simply explain or simply cure it” (4). Evidently, although at first trauma was mainly associated with extremely unusual events, it has now become a powerful and complex paradigm that infiltrates contemporary approaches to history, literature, culture, and critical theory. Drawing on Freud’s concepts of belatedness and repetition compulsion, Caruth underlines the unknowability and ungraspability of traumatic experience. Caruth defines the traumatic experience as “the inability fully to witness the event as it occurs, or the ability to witness the event fully only at the cost of witnessing oneself” (7, emphasis in original). In this regard, Caruth brings to the fore the belatedness of trauma: There is a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts, or behaviours stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event […]. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event. (4) Accordingly, Caruth underlines the fact that traumatic experience is suggestive of a paradoxical structure because “the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness” (Unclaimed Experience 92). Echoing Freud’s acting out phase, Caruth problematizes the relationship between the traumatic experience and consciousness; the traumatic event cannot be fully recognized at the time of its occurrence but continues to 18 reappear recurrently in different forms. Hence, to Caruth, what inhabits all traumatic experience is its unaccountability. Since the traumatic event cannot be grasped fully, any attempt to account for it would result in “the collapse of its understanding” (“Introduction” Trauma: Explorations 7). Emphasising “latency” rather than “repression”, Caruth argues that it is the latency of the event that gives meaning to “the peculiar, temporal structure, the belatedness, of historical experience […,] its [trauma’s] blankness—the space of unconsciousness—is paradoxically what precisely preserves the event in its literality” (8). Accordingly, Caruth relates this peculiarity of trauma to the relationship between trauma and history: “A history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence […] what trauma has to tell us—the historical and personal truth it transmits—is intricately bound up with its refusal of historical boundaries; that its truth is bound up with its crisis of truth” (8). To Caruth, then, the truth of trauma is inaccessible and ungraspable, which, paradoxically, constitutes our knowledge of it. Drawing on Freud’s suggestions that traumatic memories are ‘not remembered’ but ‘relived’, Caruth underlines the fact that traumatised subjects develop “amnesia” for the past. In Caruth’s words, “while the images of traumatic re-enactment remain absolutely accurate and precise, they are largely inaccessible to conscious recall and control […] the vivid and precise return of the event appears […] to be accompanied by an amnesia for the past” (Trauma: Explorations 151-2, emphasis in the original). Caruth’s interpretation of traumatic experience as attended by “amnesia” for the past is related to Charcot’s argument that traumatised subjects suffer from traumatic retrograde amnesia where time before the traumatic experience is lost (Charcot 376). The theories of Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida, usually associated with postmodernism and deconstruction, have also focused on the unknowability and unrepresentability of traumatic experience. Regarding Auschwitz as a moment of rupture challenging the paradigms of conventional history, Lyotard argues that the historian “must break with the monopoly of history granted to the cognitive regimen of phrases, and he or she must venture forth by lending his or her ear to what is not representable under the rules of knowledge” (The Differend 57). In this regard, 19 recalling Freud’s ideas about the paradoxical status of the traumatic experience, Lyotard privileges avant-garde, modernist art that has been haunted by what it has repressed in its representations of trauma by arguing that “what art can do is bear witness not to the sublime, but to this aporia of art and its pain. It does not say the unsayable, but says that it cannot say it” (Heidegger and ‘the Jews’ 47). Similarly, Derrida refers to ‘aporetic thinking’ in analysing the representations of trauma in literary texts. It is Derrida’s contention that each text he studies tends to disclose “many aporetic places or dislocations” (Aporias 15). Hence, as Luckhurst argues, Derrida sees “the aporia as a blocking of a passage, a stalling or hesitation, a foot hovering on the threshold, caught between advancing and falling back, between the possible and the impossible” (6). Similar to Caruth, Derrida, and Lyotard, Dori Laub also underlines the difficulty of putting traumatic experience into words. In “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle”, he analyses the traumatic experiences of the Holocaust and argues that there is “an imperative need to tell and thus come to know one’s story, unimpeded by ghosts from the past against which one has to protect oneself” (63, emphasis in the original). However, this is inevitably difficult for traumatized subjects because “there are never enough words or the right words. There is never enough time or the right time, and never enough listening or the right listening to articulate the story that cannot be fully captured in thought, memory, and speech” (63, emphasis in the original). Consequently, the traumatized subjects choose to remain silent about the reality of their traumatic experiences, which results in the distortion of their stories and they even have doubts about the reality of these events (64). Accordingly, what lies at the heart of their experience is “the collapse of witnessing” (65). Evidently, there is an aporetic understanding of trauma which precludes verbalization. However, the tenets of unknowability, ungraspability, and unspeakability of trauma proposed by Caruth, Derrida, and Lyotard along with many others stand in stark contrast to the possibility of putting trauma into words and thus enabling healing and recovery. Dori Laub and Daniel Podell, in “Art and Trauma”, take Freud’s and Janet’s conceptualisations of working through and abreaction further in arguing that it is only 20 through art that the healing process of the traumatized subject begins. They contend that because of “the real failure of the empathic dyad at the time of traumatisation and the resulting failure to preserve an empathic tie even with oneself”, the traumatized subject suffers from the feelings of absence and rupture which can be described as “the empty circle” (as coined by an analytic patient, Mrs. A, the child of two Holocaust survivors 992). According to this view, “[a]rt has the ability to revive the enshrouded past of a trauma through a dialogue in the present” (993). By providing a witnessing ‘other’ that recognizes the existence of the traumatic event in the present time, the artist has the possibility to render “a structure or presence that counteracts the loss of the internal other, and thus can bestow form on chaos. Through such a form the artist can ‘know’ trauma” (993). Felman and Laub also highlight the observation that, in accessing trauma, art and literature have a crucial role “as a precocious mode of witnessing—of accessing reality—when all other modes of knowledge are precluded” (Testimony: Crisis xx). Literature, then, heals trauma by casting a narrative pattern on the traumatic experience. In this regard, Onega draws a similarity between psychoanalytic treatment and the traumatized subjects’ need to share their traumatic experiences through literary writings. Onega asserts that what constitutes traumatic experience basically is “the repression of affects” and “the desire to express affective knowledge” (“Affective Knowledge” 83). The healing of the traumatised subject “cannot be achieved in isolation as it requires the recovery of the repressed memories through hypnosis and the establishment of an analysand-psychoanalyst relationship that may be compared to the I-you relationship of narrator-narratee in testimonial writings” (84). Echoing Freud, Onega underlines the prominence of giving voice to the repressed traumatic memories through narratives and thus “working through” them in Freudian terms: If the symptoms of trauma are manifested in total or partial amnesia, temporal disorientation, and the compulsion to repeat or ‘act out’ the traumatic event in the form of intrusive thoughts, hallucinatory images, or disturbing dreams, the process of ‘working through’ of trauma requires the transformation of these fragmentary and painful ‘mnemonic residues’ into a temporally ordered and comprehensive narrative capable of conferring meaning onto the true nature of the events not only for the traumatised narrator/witness but also for the narratee/the sociocultural group. (84) 21 It is, evidently, through narrative that the traumatic experience is conveyed in the structure of a temporally ordered story which not only helps the traumatized narrators or witnesses to overcome it but also helps build a relationship with the reader and sociocultural environment. In Onega’s words, “the collective component implicit in the need of an adequate addressee to abreact trauma points to the double function of trauma narratives both as cathartic instruments of individual healing and as transmitters of trauma to those who have not directly experienced it” (84). 11 Consequently, it seems that the representation of trauma in art, especially in literature, is of great significance. However, the representation of trauma does not necessarily mean that literary works describe or copy something existing out there. In fact, trauma narratives might present traumatic content when they represent trauma. Laub and Podell argue that “only a special kind of art, which we shall designate ‘the art of trauma,’ can begin to achieve a representation of that which defies representation in both inner and outer experience” (992). Drawing on Laub and Podell’s arguments, Onega and Ganteau underline the paradoxical nature of trauma representation and presentation: It is precisely because of the difficulty to represent trauma through the idiom of traditional realism, on account of the inaccessibility of the causes of trauma and of its absent memory, that new forms have been devised so as to achieve faithfulness perhaps not of representation—a term associated with duplication and a more traditional aesthetics—but of presentation. Tentativeness of presentation seems to be the condition of faithfulness to the symptoms of trauma. (“Introduction” Contemporary Trauma 7) Therefore, Onega and Ganteau further argue that trauma narratives “must renounce the possibility of describing the unassimilated traumatic memory and build their impossibility into the textual fabric, performing the void instead of anatomising it” (10). In other words, trauma narratives “test the limits of representation by testifying to a traumatic content and through an act of witnessing. In such circumstances, they may be said to present or perform (poiesis)—as opposed to represent (mimesis)” (11, emphasis in the original). In this sense, trauma narratives challenge the unrepresentability of trauma by presenting it while at the same time representing it. More importantly, however, trauma narratives “reach towards the pole of anti-mimesis (predicated on the 22 impossibility to represent directly the void of trauma) without completely relinquishing the limits of mimesis” (11). In other words, trauma narratives “never completely jettison the mimetic [representation] even while they tap the incommensurable powers of the inassimilable” (Onega and Ganteau, Introduction Trauma and Romance 7). Hence, literary representations of trauma are characterized by such a contraction between representation and presentation, which warrants the unrepresentability of trauma. The dynamic relationship between trauma theory and literary knowledge enabled trauma and literary critics to analyse and gain new insights into literary texts. One of the forerunners to analyse literary texts in terms of trauma representation is Geoffrey Hartman. In his seminal article, “Trauma within the Limits of Literature”, Hartman argues that “literary verbalization […] remains a basis for making the wound [trauma] perceivable and the silence audible” (259). Elaborating on Hartman’s work, Sonya Andermahr and Silvia Pellicer-Ortin state that “the main purpose of [Hartman’s] discipline was to uncover the traumatic traces in the textual elements of literary works” (1). In contemporary art and literature, there is a great interest in trauma representations which “disclose silenced accounts of history, experiment with the ways in which trauma can be represented, and attempt to deal with these experiences of human suffering” (3). The representation of trauma in literature is similar to the traumatic experience, which acts like a revenant in the life of the traumatized subject. Ganteau and Onega state that “the haunting presence of trauma, its ubiquity, and concomitant elusiveness or ungraspability have come to dwell in contemporary literary production, in the selfsame way as a spectre haunts an individual or a community, through its intermittent though endlessly reproducible visibility” (“Introduction: Traumatic Realism” 4). The literary representations of trauma work not only to put the trauma into words but also give crucial information about the vital problems of individuals and society. Besides, Hartman pays attention to the relationship between traumatic knowledge and literary knowledge, especially with regard to Romantic poetry. Hartman argues that trauma theory “does not give up on knowledge but suggests the existence of a traumatic kind, one that cannot be made entirely conscious, in the sense of being fully 23 retrieved or communicated without distortion” (“On Traumatic Knowledge” 537, emphasis in the original). At this point, literary representations of trauma gain significance because they address “the negative moment in experience” by “provok[ing] symbolic language and its surplus of signifiers” (540). Literature achieves such representation of the negative and/or traumatic experience “in the form of perpetual troping of it [the traumatic experience] by the bypassed or severely split (dissociated) psyche” (537). Literary works such as Blake’s hyperbolic visions and Coleridge’s post traumatic story of the Ancient Mariner act as powerful mechanisms to “heal traumatic wounds” (537). Accordingly, Hartman reminds readers of Blake’s The Book of Urizen (1794), a revision of the primal scene of Genesis, in which Blake presents us with an enigmatic chaos in the heavens; we see that the god Urizen is expelled and/or segregated from the heavens. In fact, the book is a Creation myth that begins before Creation. Therefore, “Creation is itself the catastrophe” and we fall into this “parody-world made in the image of Urizen” (538). In The Book of Urizen, there is also the ancestor figure called Albion who dreams of “a state of unity and self- integration” but is precluded by “a constricted imagination” (538). Drawing a similarity between Albion’s and our dreams of achieving unity and peace after experiencing traumatic events, Hartman states that “we too ask, like Blake’s dreaming giant […]: what happened? Where did the trouble begin? Why is my fantasy-life murky and fearful: why can’t I be rational and imaginative? We try to get back to a genesis- moment that seems to have started a fatal chain reaction and manacled both body and mind” (538, emphasis in the original). Similarly, according to Hartman, Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is “a remarkable externalization of an internal state” (541). Similar to Blake’s hyperbolic visions, Coleridge’s poem “points to something more real than the reality we ordinarily inhabit” (542). As is well known, after killing the albatross, the Ancient Mariner was left in such a vast solitude that even God is absent (Coleridge 370-419). When he meets the wedding guest, the only thing left for the Ancient Mariner is to narrate his traumatic story: “Coleridge makes it clear that the Mariner’s narrative is compulsive as well as compelling” (Hartman 542). In this regard, Hartman finds the Mariner’s need to narrate his story similar to a traumatized subject’s need to put his/her trauma into words. Besides, Hartman finds another peculiarity of “The Ancient Mariner” that makes it a representation of trauma: 24 its temporal disjunction and/or belatedness (542-543). As argued above, in traumatic experiences, the traumatized subject fails to register the traumatic event at the moment of its happening which returns belatedly. In the Ancient Mariner’s case, the traumatic experience of killing the albatross returns belatedly and repeatedly, which accounts for his repetitious story. Thus, Hartman shows that trauma theory can be used as a hermeneutic device to shed light on literary works. Although pluridirectional, the application of trauma theory to literary texts tends to produce dispute over its reliability and validity. This is mainly because trauma theory is usually associated with modernist and postmodernist aspects of literary texts. For example, Patricia Moran states that modernist narrative with an “emphasis on interiority, memory, psychological verisimilitude, and personal isolation, and its development of fragmented, non-linear plots, provides an ideal medium for the transcription of traumatic experience” (3). However, as Visser contends, such an approach to the application of trauma theory is rather “reductive and Eurocentric” (278). Rather than directly applying trauma theory to postcolonial literary texts, Visser underlines the significance of giving due recognition to “indigenous cultural traditions” (278). Evidently, the application of western based trauma theory for postcolonial literary texts is problematic. 12 One of the leading critics to underline the limits of trauma theory’s usefulness in understanding postcolonial literary texts is Anne Whitehead. In an article on Wole Soyinka’s fiction, Whitehead questions if trauma theory can understand the traumatic experiences of non-western peoples, 13 and highlights three basic differences between western and non-western cultures in terms of trauma theory. Firstly, while the extant trauma theory “operates on the basis of a strongly individualist approach to human life, with a marked emphasis on the disengaged self and on intrapsychic conflicts”, non-western cultures function through “alternative notions of the self and its relationship to others” (“Journeying Through” 14). Secondly, Whitehead refutes the idea that the forms of mental disorder formulated by western trauma theorists work in the same way in non-western contexts where “the idioms of distress vary considerably; the emergence of a particular symptom does not necessarily mean that it has the same 25 meaning or significance across different cultures” (14). Lastly, trauma discourse conceptualized by the West “risks ignoring local concepts of suffering, misfortune, and illness and eliding those discourses of loss and bereavement that may fulfil the role for the local community” (14). Therefore, the functions of local perspectives such as rituals, beliefs, and understandings as well as those of social and cultural practises in the process of suffering and recovery need to be understood and taken into account while considering non-western predicaments. Furthermore, and more importantly, Whitehead contends that the differences between western and non-western societies mentioned above have significance in a specifically literary context, as can be observed in postcolonial texts. Firstly, postcolonial texts may “articulate the effects of trauma in terms of the individualist self” or “emphasize alternative notions of the self and its relation to the wider community” (15). Secondly, trauma theory may not directly map onto the postcolonial text. Finally, postcolonial texts may verbalize “local, non-western concepts of suffering, loss, and bereavement or alternatively of recovery and healing” (15). Whitehead concludes that “Soyinka forces us to encounter a response to trauma that asserts the relevance of localized modes of belief, ritual, and understanding, thereby undermining the centrality of western knowledge and expertise” (27). In other words, Whitehead observes that postcolonial literature as exemplified by Soyinka presents the possibility of healing trauma through religious and/or spiritual means as well as through rituals whereby regeneration becomes possible. Drawing on Whitehead’s observations, Visser states that western trauma theory is “inadequate for an engagement with indigenous literatures that explores [sic.] trauma” in a non-western context (279). Therefore, when approaching postcolonial texts in terms of their trauma representation, the significance of cultural rituals as well as beliefs and spirituality needs to be considered in order to understand non-western modes of healing. In other words, rather than its containment in accounting solely for the traumatic experience, trauma theory needs to focus also on local ways of resilience or working through in order to understand non-western traumatic experiences and ways of dealing with trauma represented in postcolonial literary texts. 26 Among the most important traumatic experiences represented in postcolonial literary texts are the eighteenth and nineteenth century European-led enslavement of African and Caribbean people and its legacies in the lives of following Afro-Caribbean generations. The representation of Afro-Caribbean people’s slavery and its legacies has been widely explored and different terminologies have been used to define their trauma of slavery. LaCapra, for example, states that Afro-Caribbean slavery “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” (Writing History 174). According to LaCapra, a founding trauma is “the trauma that is transformed or transvalued into a legitimating myth of origins” which is the result of “a crisis or catastrophe that disorients and harms the collectivity or the individual” (xii). The founding traumas, in LaCapra’s words, “become the valorised or intensely cathected basis of identity for an individual or a group rather than events that pose the problematic question of identity” (23). The fall of Adam and Eve, the life and crucifixion of Christ, and the Holocaust are among the most important examples of founding traumas that LaCapra gives (xiii). Although LaCapra mentions Afro- Caribbean slavery as an example of a founding trauma, his general emphasis is on the Holocaust. Afro-Caribbean slavery can be understood as a form of “massive trauma” or “cultural trauma” as defined by Michel Balaev and Jeffrey Alexander respectively. Balaev defines massive trauma as follows: a massive trauma experienced by a group in the historical past can be experienced by an individual living centuries later who shares a similar attribute of the historical group, such as sharing the same race, religion, nationality, or gender, due to the timeless, repetitious, and infectious characteristic of traumatic experience and memory. Conversely, individual trauma can be passed to others of the same ethnic, racial, or gender group who did not experience the actual event, but because they share social or biologic similarities, the traumatic experience of the individual and group become one. (152) Balaev’s definition of massive trauma resonates with Alexander’s definition of cultural trauma. Alexander contends that “cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing 27 their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (1) In this sense, Alexander’s description of cultural trauma seems to have affinities with Erikson’s definition of collective trauma above. However, collective and cultural traumas are not necessarily the same because collective trauma destroys the prevalence of communality while cultural traumas are more related with constructing a change in collective identities. What is distinctive to cultural trauma is its transmission to the following generations through a socially mediated process whereby the sense of collective identity is altered. According to Alexander, such transmission is possible by raising an awareness of the traumatic event with the efforts of individuals who may or may not have directly experienced the traumatic event but still recognize its importance for the society at large (10-11). Alexander calls this transmission a “trauma process”, which refers to “the gap between [traumatic] event and [its] representation” (11). Throughout the trauma process, there are members and/or agents of a social group who create a “narrative” and make “claims” about traumatic events (11). In this way, these agents demand “emotional, institutional, and symbolic reparation and reconstitution” (11). Drawing on Max Weber, Alexander calls these agents “carrier groups” who “are situated in particular places in the social structure” and “have particular discursive talents for articulating their claims” (11). Carrier groups constitute a great variety of people from different parts of the society: Carrier groups may be elites, but they may also be denigrated and marginalized classes. They may be prestigious religious leaders or groups whom the majority has designated as spiritual pariahs. A carrier group can be generational, representing the perspectives and interests of a younger generation against an older one. It can be national, pitting one’s own nation against a putative enemy. It can be institutional, representing one particular social sector or organization against others in a fragmented and polarized social order. (11) Carrier groups aim to transmit the traumatic event to the public by making use of “the particularities of the historical situation, the symbolic resources at hand, and the constraints and opportunities provided by institutional structures” (12). Alexander calls this transmission “the creation of a master narrative” which involves making a convincing and thorough description of the traumatic event and its after-effects on the 28 individuals and society as a whole (12). The creation of such a master narrative is possible through state bureaucracy and mass media as well as legal, political, scientific, religious, and aesthetic means which include literary representations (15-20). These means of transmission define cultural traumas whereby victims and perpetrators are established, responsibilities are attributed and consequences follow. In other words, cultural traumas constitute remembering and accepting traumatic events in legal, religious, scientific, political, and literary ways and integrating them into collective identity. Accordingly, the literary representations of traumatic experiences of Afro-Caribbean people during their slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and their after- effects in the following generations are apt examples of cultural trauma. 14 One of the pioneers in defining Afro-Caribbean slavery as a form of cultural trauma is Ron Eyerman, who argues that it is a “collective memory, a form of remembrance that grounded the identity-formation of a people” (Cultural Trauma 1). Underlining the difference between individual trauma and cultural trauma, Eyerman states that the former affects individuals while the latter is “mediated through various forms of representation and linked to the reformation of collective identity and the reworking of collective identity” (1). In his comparison of psychological and/or individual trauma to cultural trauma, Eyerman observes that the former “involves a wound and the experience of great emotional anguish by an individual” whereas the latter “refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion” (2). Eyerman’s main argument is that the cultural trauma of Afro-Caribbean slavery not only includes actual traumatic experiences of slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but also and perhaps more importantly the internalization of such traumatic experiences in the following generations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Similar to Alexander’s description of trauma process and carrier groups above, Eyerman argues that cultural traumas are “processes of meaning making and attribution” which provide the opportunity to articulate and transmit traumatic events to the public (“Collective Identity” 106). In this articulation, there are two different carrier groups. On the one hand, there are professional carriers such as artists, writers, journalists, and political 29 and religious leaders and, on the other hand, there are potential carriers such as family members and friends who are central to the articulation and transmission of trauma to their inheritors (106-107). The transmission of the cultural trauma of slavery to the following generations is no exception to this formula in that it is “a process which requires time, as well as mediation and representation” through literary and visual media which involve spatial and temporal distance (Cultural Trauma 2). Throughout its transmission, the aim is “to reconstitute or reconfigure a collective identity through collective representation, as a way of repairing the tear in the social fabric” whereby the traumatic past can be reinterpreted “as a means toward reconciling present/future needs” (4). In other words, the cultural trauma of Afro-Caribbean slavery is not necessarily rooted in directly experiencing traumatic experiences of slavery but in remembering the traumatic period of slavery through the agency of literary texts and visual media. The aim in such representations is to reconstruct the collective identity of the descendants of slavery. Among the literary representations of Afro-Caribbean slavery and its legacies in the construction of the following collective identities of Afro-Caribbean generations is Grace Nichols’s poetry in her collections I is, The Fat, Lazy Thoughts, Sunris, and Startling the Flying Fish. Although the titles of these collections explored in this study imply that their only focus is on women, individual poems in the collections attest to the contrary. In fact, Nichols’s focus is on the entire collectivity of Afro-Caribbean slaves and their descendants in contemporary Britain. To begin with I is, Nichols presents traumatic experiences of black slave men and children as well as black slave women. For example, in “Without Song” (27) we witness black slave children suffering from the traumatic experiences of the slave trade and slavery in the New Land, while in “These Islands” (31) we witness the trauma inherently found all over the Caribbean Islands. Further, in “Of Golden Gods” (59) Nichols presents the traumatic experiences of previous generations such as the Aztecs in the Caribbean; and similar to representations of trauma affecting societies at large in I is, we observe that The Fat and Lazy Thoughts represent trauma without limiting it to a solely female experience. For example, in The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, “We New World Blacks” (30), “Price We Pay for the Sun” (42), and “Sea Timeless Song” (48) present us with Afro-Caribbean people in Britain 30 who are haunted by the traumatic experiences of their ancestors. In a similar vein, in Lazy Thoughts “Dead Ya Fuh Tan” (11) and “Out of Africa” (30) acknowledge not only black slave women’s traumatic experiences but also those of Afro-Caribbean peoples at large. Nichols’s later collections, Sunris and Startling the Flying Fish, are also not limited to the traumatic experiences of black slave women. In fact, Nichols presents Sunris and Cariwoma in Sunris and Startling the Flying Fish respectively as figures who represent not only Afro-Caribbean women but the entire collectivity. For example, in the title poem “Sunris”, the collective speaker Sunris verbalizes the traumatic history of other communities (such as the Aztecs) and the traumatic suicides that took place in Sauteurs (56-69). Finally, Startling the Flying Fish presents us with the traumatic history of Afro-Caribbean peoples (identified as flying fish) as well as other traumatic histories such as those of South America (1-35). Such a diversity of traumatic experiences represented in Nichols’s collections forces us to extend our limits beyond gender issues and embrace Afro-Caribbean people’s trauma within a broad context. Accordingly, Chapter One argues that Nichols’s I is represents Afro-Caribbean slaves’ traumatic experiences of slavery and the slave trade as well as their trauma coping strategies. In this collection, Nichols, mingles history with poetry thence creating a new hybrid form in order to versify the traumatic experiences of Afro-Caribbean peoples. Michael Rothberg, in his analysis of traumatic experiences, states that traumatic realism is “a form of documentation and historical cognition attuned to the demands of extremity” (Traumatic Realism 14) and adds that it “brings together history, experience, and representation” (177) as a way to represent trauma. In keeping with this, Chapter One argues that Nichols’s I is amalgamates historical facts of slavery with the power of poetic imagination in order to represent trauma and trauma coping strategies. Consequently, in reading I is as trauma poetry, Chapter One argues that there are four ways of representing trauma in the collection; repressing the traumatic event, being haunted by the traumatic event, repeating the traumatic experience, and lamenting one’s trauma in a traumatic pastoral. The representation of trauma in I is is obviously a way of verbalizing the traumatic experience by casting a pattern and conferring an arrangement onto it. The speaker in the collection represses her traumatic experiences but is also 31 haunted by her ancestors’ collective traumatic experiences of the Middle Passage and slavery. In close connection with this, the speaker repeats her traumatic experiences and legacies. Also, in order to represent the speaker’s traumatic experiences and/or memories, the collection employs the traumatic pastoral in which “both nature and humans are victims and witnesses of catastrophe”, so they lack the redemptive and consolatory power of pastoral elegy (Coffey 28). In other words, the speaker in I is grieves over her loss of her cultural values and traditions and laments her loss in a traumatic pastoral form. In addition to the representation of trauma, I is also represents trauma coping strategies. The speaker works through her traumatic experiences through two main trauma coping strategies which are a return to religion and spirituality, and dissociation. The employment of religious beliefs and spirituality attests to the fact that, in non-western cultures such as Afro-Caribbean societies, religious beliefs and spirituality play an important role in healing traumatic effects. Besides, the speaker dissociates from the reality of her traumatic experiences whereby she cures herself. Although pathological for the traumatic consciousness, dissociation also has the possibility to act as a defence mechanism because it “serves to attenuate the psychic shock both of the subject and of the socio-cultural group by presenting it in a more tolerable, displaced form” (Onega “Affective Knowledge” 85). Dissociation, thus, acts like a mechanism which helps weaken the effects of the traumatic shock through presenting it in a more endurable form both for the individual and the society s/he belongs to. In I is, Nichols employs dissociation in the form of escape through imagination and developing revenge fantasies. By resorting to these healing strategies, the traumatised speaker transforms from a traumatised subject into a resilient agent, thus providing the possibility of change her/his status as a trauma victim. Chapter Two contends that Nichols’s subsequent collections, The Fat and Lazy Thoughts represent the second generation Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Britain in the post-1960s, haunted by traumatic memories of their ancestors. The difficulties faced by British Afro-Caribbean migrants such as racial discrimination and alienation operated in a constant flux with their traumatic past of slavery and the Middle Passage. 32 According to Elaine Arnold, these unsettling experiences activated “memories of the past and the history of their [British Afro-Caribbeans’] ancestors” (2). As most scholars argue, although slavery ended nearly 150 years ago, it has continued to haunt Afro- Caribbean peoples all over the world. Joy DeGruy-Leary, in “Breaking the Chains”, states that multiple generations are affected by severe traumas such as the Holocaust which lasted for nearly twelve years (150). Comparing the effects of the Holocaust to the trauma of slavery, which lasted for approximately 250 years, DeGruy-Leary argues that slavery left inerasable impacts on the following generations because freed slaves did not have an opportunity for psychological counselling: “Our ancestors learned to adapt to living in a hostile environment and we normalized our injury. And because they didn't get free therapy after slavery, these behaviours were passed through the generations” (150). Afro-Caribbean peoples in Britain are no exception to De-Gury- Leary’s formula in that they suffer from the trauma of their ancestors. As Aileen Alleyne contends, British Afro-Caribbean peoples are seized by the trauma of slavery because “collective memory with its painful imprints can continue to transmit trauma and grief through generations” (294). In other words, being black suggests vulnerability for British Afro-Caribbean peoples because the traumatic past of slavery transmitted through their collective memories is ever-present in their lives. Elaborating on the reasons of this continuity, Alleyne states that “the burden of continuing to carry the historical pain of our past in the form of a persistent post-traumatic syndrome is perhaps the peculiar result of a loud silence that denies and delays the necessary process of giving due recognition to an important aspect of humanity’s history” (294). As a result of this ever-present intergenerational baggage, British Afro-Caribbean peoples suffer from an internalized oppression characterised by “prejudices, projections, inter-generational wounds” which are “kept alive through the transgenerational transmission of trauma” (295). In other words, it is British Afro- Caribbean people’s present situation in Britain that contributes to the continuation of their traumatic ancestry. The transgenerational transmission of the trauma of slavery can be observed in the way Afro-Caribbean individuals treat themselves and others, especially in their treatments of sexuality and feelings of loss and insecurity. 15 Wyatt, in “Breaking the Chains”, argues 33 that the stereotypical description of Afro-Caribbean women prevails in the present and that Afro-Caribbean women react to such labelling in different ways: “many of us continue to react against it by denying our sexuality and being afraid of sex. Others embrace the stereotype [of]…oversexed Black women” (152). Besides their sexuality, the traumatic past of slavery can be traced in Afro-Caribbean individuals’ feelings of loss and insecurity. As Wyatt argues, slave owners created distinct divisions among slaves depending on various factors such as their work places (in the fields or in the houses), their skins (brown-skinned against light), their gender (males against females) along with many other paradigms (150). As a result, slaves developed a feeling of insecurity. More importantly, these feelings passed down to the following generations into the present: women have been taught that you can’t count on men and you can’t trust them on any level—not just sexually, but also economically, emotionally and physically. Men believe they can’t trust women, that women are trying to get into their wallets. Young Black men have learned to be aggressive and hostile toward one another. (150) Besides, slaves were deprived of freedom and control over their lives and responded with fear and a lack of self-esteem. Thus, as Arnold states, “some of the [Afro- Caribbean] immigrants succumbed to feelings of helplessness, of anxiety, fear and anger which were contributory factors to various behaviours such as aggression, detachment, and withdrawal from society” (2). Strictly speaking, for British Afro- Caribbean peoples, the present and the traumatic past are inextricably connected because traumatic experiences of Afro-Caribbean slaves pervade the present and interrupt the lives of British Afro-Caribbean diaspora. In this context, Chapter Two argues that the traumatic experiences of Afro-Caribbean peoples represented in the first chapter continue to haunt their descendants’ lives in the present era, even though centuries may have passed since the Middle Passage and slavery. The starting point for analysing The Fat and Lazy Thoughts collections in Chapter Two is that the latter is regarded as a follow-up to the first and both are concerned with the present situation of the second generation British Afro-Caribbean diaspora haunted by their ancestors’ traumatic history. Evidently, I is addresses traumatic experiences in the Caribbean while The Fat and Lazy Thoughts reflect on the 34 continuity of trauma in the lives of the second generation Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Britain. What activates their trauma is the racial intolerance and social difficulties that they are exposed to in Britain. Consequently, they suffer from the pain of unbelonging in Britain, which triggers their traumatic legacies. Moreover, The Fat and Lazy Thoughts offer strategies for coping with trauma. However, different from I is, nostalgia and grotesque elements are employed in these collections. In The Fat and Lazy Thoughts, a nostalgic reconstruction of the Caribbean functions as a trauma coping strategy for the British Afro-Caribbean diaspora. The description of the Caribbean as an idyllic and nostalgic place they could belong to provides the second generation Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Britain with a productive response to their traumatic heritage. In this way, they can reconstruct their traumatic past at the expense of repressing it. Another trauma coping strategy deployed in these collections is grotesque. Chapter Two argues that, in The Fat, the traumatic experiences of British Afro-Caribbean diaspora’s ancestors are embodied in the portrayal of the Hottentot Venus, who was the South African Sara Baartman, a slave in the nineteenth century. The fat black woman hence uses her grotesque body and gains a place for herself in society on her own terms. Similarly, in Lazy Thoughts, Nichols draws a portrayal of a lazy woman who has recourse to grotesque in order to work through the traumatic memories of her ancestors and gain a place for herself in Britain. Nichols refrains from “reducing the black woman’s condition to that of ‘sufferer’ whether at the hands of white society or at the hands of black men” (Nichols “The Battle” 284-285). Thus, The Fat and Lazy Thoughts represent traumatized subjects as resilient agents who can gain a place for themselves in the host society. Chapter Three argues that, similar to Nichols’s earlier collections, her later collections Sunris and Startling the Flying Fish represent Afro-Caribbean people’s traumatic experiences but in a more decisive and affirmative way. As argued below, postcolonial literature necessitates a different trauma theory which privileges local ways of healing such as employing local rituals and affirming local culture through myths. Nichols’s Sunris achieves this by having resort to the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival in order to move beyond the traumatic history of Afro-Caribbean people. In the long title poem of 35 Sunris, Nichols presents the Afro-Caribbean speaker, Sunris, who has resort to four main aspects of Trinidad and Tobago Carnival as strategies to cope with the cultural trauma of the Afro-Caribbean people. First, “Sunris” relies on the celebratory and hedonistic atmosphere of the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival which goes back to the emancipation period. In doing so, “Sunris” reminds us of and presents us with the possibility of Afro-Caribbean people’s liberation from the traumatic past of slavery and colonization. Secondly, “Sunris” uses the unifying aspect of the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival whereby Afro-Caribbean people combine their agency with other traumatized groups of people. Thirdly, “Sunris” employs the musical elements of Trinidad and Tobago Carnival which are the means of keeping Afro-Caribbean people’s traumatic past of slavery and colonization in a more tolerable and affirmative form. Finally, “Sunris” clinches on the subversive power of the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival which acts as the medium to transcend the limits of Afro-Caribbean traumatic past and head towards reconciliation. In a similar vein, Startling the Flying Fish presents the Afro- Caribbean speaker Cariwoma’s recognition and healing of her ancestors’ traumatic past of slavery and colonization. On the one hand, Startling the Flying Fish acknowledges Afro-Caribbean people’s traumatic past of slavery and colonization as part of their historical reality and identity; on the other hand Startling the Flying Fish moves beyond Afro-Caribbean people’s traumatic past by generating in Cariwoma a mythical being who has the agency to connect past, present, and future and thus move beyond an Afro- Caribbean traumatic past. Accordingly, Cariwoma’s mythical being has two main roles in healing and moving beyond trauma. First, through Cariwoma, Startling the Flying Fish redefines Afro-Caribbean people’s traumatic history of slavery and colonialism. In this way, Startling the Flying Fish presents us with mythical retellings of Afro- Caribbean people’s historical reality of trauma of slavery and colonialism whereby their sufferings are defined and repositioned in the present. Secondly, Cariwoma, as a mythical being, connects Afro-Caribbean people’s sufferings with those of other people from different parts of the world such as those people in South America. Thus, Startling the Flying Fish embraces a sense of affinity and union with the whole world in general and provokes a harmonious and peaceful relationship with the others. Evidently, both Sunris and Startling the Flying Fish recognize Afro-Caribbean traumatic history as an integral part of Afro-Caribbean history and identity and they 36 offer