Mortgaged Futures: Trauma, Subjectivity, and the Legacies of Colonialism in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not

Abstract

Because it ... den[ies] other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces people it dominates to ask themselves question constantly: reality, who am I? Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of Earth I was ... being transformed into a young woman with a future. What I was most interested in was myself and what I would become. Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Book of Not Introduction In World Memory, a collection of essays on trauma, memory, and witnessing in global contexts, Jill Bennett and I argued that trauma studies has been circumscribed by its predominant focus on Euro-American events and experiences and particularly Holocaust. We called for a transformation of field from a monocultural discipline grounded in a psychoanalytic methodology to a mode of enquiry that can inform study of memory within a changing global context. To facilitate this transformation, we advocated that trauma scholars engage with the multicultural and diasporic nature of contemporary culture, and that postcolonial critics engage with trauma studies to develop frameworks for analyzing traumatic legacies of colonialism (5). Our concern was not simply that trauma studies was impoverished by failing to address non-Western memories of trauma and loss. Rather, we were concerned that opportunities for understanding historical traumas and sufferings of other cultures transmitted through truth commissions, literature, film, and visual art were being denied by Western orientation of trauma studies. If trauma's address beyond itself was indeed, Cathy Caruth proposed, to function as a means of moving out of a 'historical isolation,' it would be necessary for literary and cultural critics to engage with diverse testimonial practices and cultural languages of trauma (11). In recent years, trauma studies has become increasingly global, although there is still, arguably, limited dialogue regarding core concepts and frameworks of postcolonial theory and trauma theory. In this essay, I pursue project of wording trauma studies through a reading of Tsitsi Dangarembga's recent novel The Book of Not (2006), which addresses issues of trauma, colonialism, and denial during violent transformation from white-minority rule in Rhodesia in 1970s to an independent Zimbabwe in 1980s. This novel, a compelling contribution to contemporary literature of trauma, expands canon beyond Western experiences, introducing new voices, subjectivities, and legacies of colonial trauma. At same time, it enables critics to ask to what extent Western trauma theory provides a productive lens through which to address issues of postcolonialism, racism, and identity. As I write in April 2007, stories about political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe, desperate state of its people, and brutalities being perpetrated against opponents of Mugabe regime feature regularly in international media, a potent reminder of how unresolved legacies of colonial trauma haunt global future. Along with novels such Yvonne Vera's Stone Virgins (2002), The Book of Not is part of a recent flowering of Zimbabwean women's writing, that is concerned with, among other things, war of liberation and its after-effects. (1) Much of historical and fictional literature of Zimbabwean war has been written by men and has obscured women's experiences of war (Lyons 26). Whereas Mothers of Revolution presents oral testimony from Zimbabwean women involved in war, Dangarembga innovatively uses irony, humor, and farce to dramatize absurdities of racism in a colonial society and impediments to witnessing it, thereby bringing into visibility what is unspeakable in (post)colonial Zimbabwe. The novel dramatizes narrator's struggle to break out of a repetition compulsion, manifested in her obsessive desire for recognition, which continually leaves her deflated and depressed. …