Abstract
Rachel Seiffert’s novel Afterwards (2007) explores the ethically challenging and often neglected fact of perpetrator trauma resulting from sustained structural violence. This controversial subject is conveyed through the stories of Joseph and David, two British ex-servicemen belonging to different generations, who attempt to overcome their war traumas years after their respective involvement in The Troubles in Northern Ireland (from the late 1960s to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998), and the Mau Mau Uprising (running from 1952 to 1960), that ended with Kenya’s independence. The novel fittingly organises the narrative around moments of acting-out, when the protagonists feel equally disconnected from self and world, yet deal with their traumatised condition in strikingly different ways. The paper proposes an analysis of Afterwards from the perspective of Trauma and Memory Studies, with a view to exploring how the “palimpsestuous” (Dillon 4) structure of the novel, along with the repetitive use of imagery evoking holes and emptiness (Bloom 210), allow Seiffert to “perform” (Ganteau and Onega 10) the workings of the disturbed psyches of Joseph and David, so that it builds the unrepresentability of trauma into the textual fabric of the novel.
Highlights
Ever since its inclusion in official psychiatric diagnostics in 1980, PostTraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has been traditionally attributed to victims of traumatic experiences or those who helped them
A central tenet of academic perpetrator trauma is that focussing on the aggressors enables critics to demystify their traditional portrayal as monsters and posit
I will briefly analyse the ways in which the experimental structure of the novel, along with the repetitive use of imagery evoking holes and emptiness, allow Seiffert to represent the workings of Joseph’s and David’s disturbed psyches
Summary
Ever since its inclusion in official psychiatric diagnostics in 1980, PostTraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has been traditionally attributed to victims of traumatic experiences or those who helped them. Afterwards narrates the stories of Joseph and David, two ex-servicemen who attempt to come to terms with their traumas years after their respective involvement in The Troubles in Northern Ireland and the suffocation of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya.
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