Apartheid Haunts: Postcolonial Trauma in Lisa Fugard’s Skinner’s Drift

Abstract

When post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980, it marked breakthrough for those who believed that the condition played defining role in shaping contemporary culture. Since this date, interest in the traumatic, described by Sigmund Freud as any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break the [mind's] protective shield (607), has grown rapidly. Trauma has been called symptom of the age (Miller and Tougaw 1), and the twentieth century has been marked as an era of historical trauma, incorporating occasions for communal mourning too numerous to chronicle (Henke xi). Recognized variously as phenomenon of delayed response; an assault on the categories of identity; a disorder of memory (Leys 2); and spiritual, psychic, or mental injury (Gilmore 25), this new conceptualization of trauma has struck chord within an unsettled society that has experienced countless horrors and tragedies and which finds itself constantly haunted-through the immediate, arresting insistence of the media-by the past. Trauma studies' growth can be attributed to its exposure of the significant long-term effects of traumatic experience on individuals. In highlighting the suffering of various groups of marginalized peoples (for example, oppressed women, war veterans, victims of genocide, the sexually or physically abused, and the terminally ill), trauma studies draws attention to those who are often forgotten. It highlights the importance of addressing the pain of wounds to the psyche in order for individuals and collective groups to recover. This represents natural progression within critical studies, which, since the 1970s, has increasingly highlighted the experiences of minority groups. However, trauma studies have to date been largely pre-occupied with Western experiences of (and Western perspectives on) trauma. This is mainly the