The Representations of Trauma and Trauma Coping Strategies in Grace Nichols'S Poetry
Özet
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 repres
