Violence and Trauma in Anglophone and Francophone Postcolonial Literature
Session Organizer: Pascale Perraudin
Saint Louis University
perraup@slu.edu

An Injury to All: Toward a Theory of The Similitude

What I will be trying to trace in this paper, mainly in the work of Theresa Kak Kyung Cha, is a rhizomatic network that rests on a network of traumatic pain – shared historical pain, pain that as a political medium of connectivity has the power to transcend restrictive dialectics and open a dialectic that does not posit an immediate political synthesis, since pain (according to Elaine Scarry) in opposition to desire does not take an object.

Much contemporary postcolonial literature engages in a struggle that reveals common emotional ties, affective rhizomes of association that transcend the ideology of the mode of production and that can form connections to groups with similar painful traumatic experiences of a repressive structure – connections that can thus transcend cultural boundaries. The rhizomatic multitude is therefore less a multitude than a “similitude.” This then allows for the existence of an intact cultural difference while still forming connections between different cultures with similar traumatic historical memories. Writers such as Cha, as I will claim, can therefore be classified as “experiential theorists,” making the reading experience a strategically unpleasurable experience for the white, male, Western reader, a painful experience that arises out of historical traumata of the colonized subject and serves to reveal the ideology of the colonizing subject.

Mathias Nilges
University of Illinois, Chicago
mnilge1@uic.edu

Writing Violence: Exploring the Power of Representation

A brief review of the reception of Ouologuem’s Le devoir de violence (1969) [Bound to Violence] articulates, yet exacerbates the role of violence in representation. As some critics have argued that the excess of motifs pertaining to violence is in fact detrimental to the narrative’s credibility, it becomes urgent to examine whether writing violence amounts to a repetition of violence.

Through the study of various examples taken from Francophone texts and films, I will examine how writing violence becomes, in the postcolonial context, a way to re-investigate and undo a process of inscribing power onto the Other, a process intended to result in a complete assimilation. I will show how violence in representation, through accounts of attacks, massacre, torture, and humiliation, attempts to cancel out the very notions exploited by the perpetrators of violence. In the face of a conquering power set out to take advantage of the fundamental lack of referentiality of the body (Scarry), the writing of violence initiates a process of renewed self-representation: graphic references of pain and mutilation gradually help the subject appropriate and secure his/her referentiality of the body. This step may then engender access to a power of address (Oliver), and a reshuffle of the victim/perpetrator relationship. This process, played out through scenes of intense confrontation between the reader and the text, casts out a new understanding of such texts: writing violence in the postcolonial context is not simply a sensationalist endeavor nor a simple cathartic (and aesthetic) experiment.

Pascale Perraudin
Saint Louis University
perraup@slu.edu

Looking Both Ways at Once: Documenting Civil Strife in Charles Enonchong's The Nigerian-Biafran War Parts I, II & III

In this paper I will examine how the gazes operate in Charles Enonchong's set of three documentary videos (2001), which examine the Nigerian Civil War of 1966-69. In examining these videos, I ask a series of questions about the way in which the horror and brutality of the war are described. Why does Enonchong combine official governmental footage with his own recreations of the war to tell his version of the war? What does his technique of voice over narration do to the way the human tragedy is told? What kind of network of looks is created when the images call on us, as Western readers, to get involved in the horror of the war? Even though the videos represent the violence of the war very graphically, yet they fail to draw us in as spectators/readers of the mass murder of Nigerian civilians. Enonchong's point seems to be to show the heroism of the Biafran generals who were ultimately betrayed and he does so by presenting their situation as that of being caught in the middle, looking both ways at once, in the course of the war. Overall, the videos use graphic representations of violence to draw us in, but in the process, make us voyeurs and on-lookers, rather than active responders to the violence.

In the videos, looks exchanged between the survivors and the spectators become what film critic E. Ann Kaplan calls "subject-object gazing, subject-object relating" (23). In such film, the viewing experience, while occasionally causing discomfort for us as viewers, typically conforms to the standards of material, patriarchal, commercial film and fictional codes, codes which actually “abjectify ” the trauma of the survivors and render it an object of consumption. Thus, our looks or experiences as spectators/readers and their looks or experiences as survivors become looks that strive to "know" each other. By looks that strive to "know" the other I refer to film critic Trinh T. Minh-ha's notion that the inter-racial or inter-cultural look in mainstream cinema usually tries to fully know the racial or cultural "other." Enonchong uses such looks in several different ways. In one sequence, he presents the heroism of several Biafran war generals who died, through a combination of official footage and his own recreation of events. In another sequence, he focuses on Biafran peasants celebrating the early victories. All of these looks objectify the survivors, rather than seeking knowledge about their material positions. They keep the differential power relations inherent in looking in place, while failing to create a gaze or strategy through which the survivors may "speak" back to us, so that neither do we interact with them nor do we experience their material positions. As a result, the survivors remain objects of compassion or pity without agency and without proper representation.

Joya Uraizee
Saint Louis University
uraizeej@slu.edu

Violence and Trauma as a Path to Grace?: J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

J.M. Coetzee's novels position themselves against political conditions in South Africa, particularly the traumatic suffering caused by colonialism, apartheid, and post-apartheid violence. In particular, the heart of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace concerns two women, both in their twenties, both of whom have undergone a traumatic experience. David Lurie, the main character of the novel, is a part of these traumatic events. During the course of events, he changes from a perpetrator to a victim. Though he survives the attack by the three toughs, he seems to remain a spectator or a bystander because he fails to make an obvious connection between the two violent events, and because he fails to see his own complicity in this trauma. When an opportunity to see a parallel between the two incidents was given, a story-telling (or connecting via narrativizing) opportunity necessary for trauma victims to rehabilitate themselves, he fails to answer to this opportunity, thus enacting an irresponsible witness (reader). Through David’s via negativa, Coetzee invites readers to claim the “unclaimed experience” (as Cathy Caruth theorized) without losing sight of its singular truth.

In the novel, facing the “disgraced” state of the nation—a nation rampant with violence (“it happens every day, every hour, every minute, he [David] tells himself, in every quarter of the country”), he resigns himself. This portrayal of violence as ubiquity leaves the novel in a state of perpetual mourning, which needs to end, in order for victims to rehabilitate themselves. In short, I will examine the ways in which violence is represented in the novel, as well as David’s (in)ability to witness and answer to the traumatic events in the post-apartheid South Africa, and the complex roles he plays as perpetrator, victim, bystander, survivor, etc.

Chae-Pyong Song
Marygrove College
csong@marygrove.edu