Trauma Theory as Activist Pedagogy: Engaging Students as Reader-Witnesses of Colonial Trauma in <em>Once Were Warriors</em>

Abstract

A trauma is wound-psychic, emotional, physical, spiritual-and state or condition brought about by that wound. Trauma produces excess. Overwhelmed by external stimuli, traumatized mind cannot process what is happening while is happening. Trauma's story, then, is not cohesive narrative of events, but its aftermath of perpetual conflict between denial and telling. The traumatized can never say what happened, yet they never stop trying to say. As traumatologist Judith Herman, M.D.1 explains, trauma surfaces not as verbal narrative but as symptom that at once signals the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect[s] attention from it (Trauma and Recovery 1). Trauma sets in motion vicious cycle that never resolves: trauma erases possibility of witnessing; yet validating very occurrence of trauma requires witnessing. In interviewing survivors, Dori Laub2 found that the very circumstance of being inside event [. . .] made very notion that witness could exist. No one, neither Nazis nor those they imprisoned, could observe from outside. There was no outside of its coercively and dehumanizing framework. Indeed, Laub concludes, might say that there was, thus, historically no witness to Holocaust (Laub 66).While Laub speaks to impossibility of witnessing from inside, his claim resonates with other historical traumas as well. For example, European colonial expansion across globe-its settlements, missionaries, and policies of forced assimilation-also rendered witnessing from inside unthinkable through its totalitarian and dehumanizing framework of genocide in name of civilizing barbarian nations. If traumatic events effectively erase themselves, as Laub suggests, then witnesses exist only outside events, such as post-event generations carrying passed-down testimonies of those who survived. Witnessing witness, that is, may be only way to tell trauma. Reading traumatic literature is form of witnessing (outsider) witness. Even as outsider witnesses (i.e., writers of traumatic literature) and those witnessing them (i.e., readers of traumatic literature) can never get inside of what happened, literature represents trauma as contends with the of facts and meaning, events and narratives (Roth 93).3Colonial trauma and Once Were WarriorsOnce Were Warriors, Alan Duff's controversial, bestselling novel about colonial trauma in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand4 contends with vexed intersection of facts (Aotearoa New Zealand's history of Maori subjection to European rule)5 and meaning (what those events signify in postcolonial nation). As back cover states, Duff's novel provides a of his country's indigenous people two hundred years after English conquest. Set in fictional Pine Block-a slum on outskirts of Auckland, New Zealand's largest and most heavily populated metropolitan area-Once Were Warriors depicts harrowing vision of one Maori on verge of extinction by poverty, abuse, and alcoholism. In portraying trauma's simultaneous past and present presence, novel offers readers an opportunity to bear witness to post-event generations dwelling both outside and inside of colonial trauma.A prolonged, chronic trauma like colonization involves a history of subjection to control informed by and resulting in genocide (Herman, Trauma and Recovery 121). According to United Nations, genocide is any act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, national, ethnic, racial or religious groups and can include killing, physically harming, and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction of group in whole or in part (emphasis added, Genocide). Traumatic life conditions such as poverty imprison, shatter[ing] attachments of family, friendship, love, and community (Herman, Trauma and Recovery 70). …