Colonial Trauma, Utopian Carnality, Modernist Form: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Abstract

In the Introduction to his Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning, Sam Durrant makes a powerful case for the salience of trauma to the study of colonialism. Durrant asks us to attend anew to the moment in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks when a child points at the author and says, “‘Dirty Nigger!’ Or simply, ‘Look, a Negro!’” This textual moment, he argues, “memorializes a traumatic event” that interpolates Fanon not as an individual but as a member of a race … apart, other, nonhuman. The experiences of racism that he [Fanon] goes on to recount do not add up to a narrative precisely because they cannot be integrated into a life history; they are repetitions of an “originary” event that bars him from having a life history and from the temporality of the human. (2004: 14)