Bridging the Past and the Future: Rethinking the Temporal Assumptions of Trauma Theory in Dionne Brand's <i>At the Full and Change of the Moon</i>

Abstract

Abstract As an account of the descendants of a woman who is enslaved, tortured, and driven to assist a mass suicide in nineteenth-century Trinidad, Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon represents the intergenerational effects of traumatic experience. In accordance with the writings of theorists such as Cathy Caruth or Nicholas Abraham, who emphasize the disruptive – even trans-generational – persistence of traumatic events, this novel traces the haunting recurrence of images or sentiments associated with traumatic experience across generations. However, while some trauma theorists focus on the disruptiveness of traumatic memory when it recurs in the present, Brand's novel represents moments accompanying traumatic memories as pauses in time during which characters exercise agency. I argue that even when Brand's characters seem to be seized by the past, they also, often very subtly, evoke the future. Consequently, Brand's text supports the work of Ruth Leys, E. Ann Kaplan, and Richard McNally, ...