On trauma, or how to bear witness to the quiet violence of dreams

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ABSTRACTThis article explores South African author K Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001) as a narration of personal and national trauma. This narration of trauma, as a disruption of the past in the present, provides insight to an imagination of recursive temporality. Through the temporal insights trauma introduces, it understands a history which is outside of linear progression, a history which occurs recursively, is shared collectively. This kind of trauma – intergenerational, cultural, ongoing – requires a new ethic of witnessing, one which diverges from traditional practices of trauma theory, toward a decidedly decolonial witnessing.