Trauma in selected Eastern African fiction and life writing on Civil Wars, 2000 - 2014

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study draws attention to and explores the portrayal of civil war in East African fictional and autobiographical works. Specifically, it examines the various and distinct ways in which East African writers use literature and art to translate and transmit the physical, vicarious and psychological trauma resulting from intra-state conflicts in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda. My aim in embarking on this project is to demonstrate, qua Silvia Pellicer-Ortín, that trauma studies can provide useful methodological tools for the analysis of the representation of trauma in fictional and autobiographical works, bringing to the fore specific narrative techniques in order to represent both individual and collective trauma. Works of a diverse selection of East African authors are selected for this study. These texts indicate that art can provide an enabling forum for retrieving, relieving and re-evaluating violent contexts and their (dis)continuities in East Africa. I build my reading around theoretical aspects on postcolonial criticism and trauma studies. From postcolonial criticism I particularly draw on Homi Bhabha's views to situate the terms hybridity, place/displacement, DissemiNation, enunciation, identity formation, ambivalence, nationalism, alterity and otherness in my study. The main point here is to explore the ways in which the uncanny nature of violence in the selected East African (con)texts reflects the aforementioned terms, which I read as postcolonial realities. In the main, however, I examine the selected works as embodying classic narrative devices of trauma fiction in their mediation of civil war discourse and how it leads to trauma. Thus I draw from trauma scholars working in various disciplines, such Cathy Caruth, Geoffrey Hartman, Dominick LaCapra, Shoshana Felman and Judith Herman, in order to explore how notions of 'the uncanny, 'the unhomely and 'latency are reflected in traumatised individuals, groups and communities in postcolonial East African contexts. The study finds that in many ways, literature and art may be positioned in a discursive space between instruction and enlisting larger publics in the project of redressing harm. To this end, the study proposes that literature and art are good fora for campaign against human rights violations; that such a clarion call as inscribed in the selected texts reflects María Pía Lara's notion of the illocutionary power of literature.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University