Rape, Representation and Metamorphosis in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night

Abstract

In ‘Trauma Theory and Postcolonial Literary Studies’ (2011), Irene Visser asks to what extent trauma theories are genuinely productive in a postcolonial context. She questions, for example, the apparent Eurocentric psychoanalytical emphasis, contextualised by the trauma of the Holocaust, on melancholia and configurations of aporia; and the related neglect of models of healing and renewal based on non-Western belief systems and practices.1 However, historically, the Holocaust radically undermined Eurocentrism, as it shattered belief in the superiority of European civilisation and evolutionary progress and brought home, as Aime Cesaire cogently writes in his Discourse on Colonialism (1955), the holocausts practised in the colonies, long sustained and justified by the same racist philosophies and ideologies that had fuelled fascism.2 The Holocaust and post-war challenges to European imperialism are implicated in each other. Particularly in the context of Caribbean and former French slave colonies, Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis since the 1950s has consistently informed interpretations by postcolonial theorists, educated in French philosophy and culture, of the traumatised colonial subject, while undergoing revisions and challenges,3 a productive dissonance that has continued and intensified in the context of contemporary postcolonial/neocolonial writing.