Postcolonial Trauma Theory in the Contact Zone: The Strategic Representation of Grief in Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light

Silvia Martínez-Falquina

doi:10.3390/h4040834

Abstract

This article starts by engaging in a dialogue with the most relevant postcolonial emendations to trauma theory, addressed to both its aporetic and its therapeutic trends, and it goes on to reflect on the state of the decolonizing trauma theory project, critically examining the motivations behind it as well as some of the problems it still encounters, like the risk of objectification and revictimization of postcolonial peoples, the blurring of their trauma particularities, and the appropriation of their experience. Then, it proposes an alternative understanding of postcolonial trauma theory as a contact zone where trauma criticism and the postcolony are interrelated and mutually transformed, and where unequal power relations are also attended to. Acknowledging the postcolony as a site of theory production rather than the object of external definition, it proceeds to analyze Edwidge Danticat’s short story cycle Claire of the Sea Light: its strategic representation of grief—which she achieves through the short story cycle structure and overall in-betweenness and ambivalence in symbols and characterization—puts Haitians on the critical map of trauma, fighting invisibility and oblivion, but it simultaneously resists an appropriation of Haitian experience by rejecting any monolithic view on Haiti and refusing to fit into a predetermined template.

Highlights

This article starts by engaging in a dialogue with the most relevant postcolonial emendations to trauma theory, addressed to both its aporetic and its therapeutic trends, and it goes on to reflect on the state of the decolonizing trauma theory project, critically examining the motivations behind it as well as some of the problems it still encounters, like the risk of objectification and revictimization of postcolonial peoples, the blurring of their trauma particularities, and the appropriation of their experience
All of the above emendations are mainly addressed to the deconstructionist approach to trauma, whose main representatives are Cathy Caruth and Geoffrey Hartman, and which remains the dominant model in mainstream trauma studies today. When it comes to the supposed inaccessibility of trauma, famously identified by Caruth, we find an alternative understanding of the function of narrative, resulting in an important point of contention that made Roger Luckhurst talk about the trauma theory contradiction ([15], p. 82)
Visser’s list of questions in her article on globalization and trauma point at what are still very open issues, when she wonders whether the ever-growing influence of trauma theory in literary and cultural studies in academia worldwide is to be seen as a beneficial development for the critical development with postcolonial non-western literatures

Summary

Postcolonial Emendations to Trauma Theory

In her accurate overview of the relation of trauma theory and postcolonial studies in this volume, Irene Visser examines the current state of the project of decolonizing trauma theory [1]. The project has, already borne some important fruits, mainly because the need to radically question and expand the trauma paradigm is generally assumed by the critics, and a number of articles since 2008 have included a series of emendations, to use Visser’s term [3], to mainstream trauma theory These emendations are a reaction to the inadequacy of trauma theory to properly account for postcolonial experiences and texts, for as Michela Borzaga puts it, trauma may be a legitimate category in the field of psychiatry The questioning of an excessive emphasis on the post-traumatic condition—with a focus on the shattering experience of trauma, the disorder and destitution resulting from it—is present in some critiques of mainstream trauma theory, which underscore the possibility of healing that is obvious in postcolonial literatures and cultures [4,6,12]. The fact that critics analyzing postcolonial texts engage in a critical relation to Western theoretical models before using them is probably the best thing that could have happened to trauma theory, for it has given it a great opportunity to transform itself and improve; and secondly, that the ideal of decolonizing trauma theory is certainly still not a reality, which is why, in what follows, I am offering some further critical reflection on the motivations behind it which are intended to contribute to this ongoing project

The Decolonizing Ideal

Postcolonial Trauma Theory in the Contact Zone

Conclusions