Drysfeydd y Cymoedd: 1 The Sub-Topographies of South Wales Valleys’ Industrial Crises

Abstract

In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth defines as traumatic our encounters not with life-threatening events but with those that cause a break in our perception of time. She explains that the memory of trauma is always fleeting, leaving connections with the time and place of traumatic occurrence fragile and obscure. Caruth’s definitions shape the work of contemporary geographers who argue that trauma is fundamentally unmappable. Does trauma’s relationship to space change when traumatization becomes repetitive and systematic? To explore systematic traumatization’s relationship to space, I adopt Lauren Berlant’s trauma definition as a crisis of ordinariness and revisit the South Wales Valleys region and its coal mining history as traumatic and contested. Using the exceptional Aberfan 1966 disaster as a starting point, I investigate a more “common” industrial crisis of the same period and explore its relationship to the industrial space by analyzing its discursive and drawing records. In this journey, sketching out the spatial qualities of the colliery’s maze is crucial for understanding the crisis’ occurrence, its belatedness and commemoration.