Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-xtgtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T01:32:44.261Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Happiness, The Wound and the Word: Aminatta Forna Joins the Conversation on Trauma

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2019

Oumar Chérif Diop
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Taking into account the interconnectedness of spaces, a number of theorists and writers have investigated the impact of trauma on subjectivities within their social, cultural, and political environments. In postcolonial studies, scholars such as Veena Das (2007)2, Antjie Krog and colleagues (2009)3, and Stef Craps (2012)4 have convincingly argued that postcolonial trauma survivors are not necessarily under the tyranny of the past; to the contrary, they may take advantage of the past event by immersing themselves in the trauma. Jay Rajiva gives the example of those survivors who cannot distance themselves from the past because they are compelled “to perform the grief of the community in both clothing and gesture. Such a submersion in past trauma becomes a way for a trauma survivor to expand and even renegotiate her relationship to that same community… . Essentially, the survivor inhabits the enforced retriggering of her trauma but finds the means—in daily life, over months and years—to make sense of her trauma.”5

Type
Book Forum on Aminatta Forna’s Happiness
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , September 2019 , pp. 388 - 399
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Fink, Bruce, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 28 Google Scholar.

2 Das, Veena, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

3 Krog, Antjie, Mpolweni, Nosisi, and Ratele, Kopano, There Was This Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile, 1st ed. (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

4 Craps, Stef, “Linking Legacies of Loss: Traumatic Histories and Cross-Cultural Empathy in Caryl Phillips’s Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood,” Studies in the Novel 40.1 (2008): 191–202 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Jay Rajiva, PhD_thesis.pdf,” 12. Accessed February 15, 2018. https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/74782/3/rajiva_jay_201411_phd_thesis.pdf.

6 “Rajiva, PhD_thesis.pdf.”

7 Mengel, Ewald and Borzaga, Michela, eds., Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel: Essays (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012), 75 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Bracken, Patrick, Trauma: Culture, Meaning and Philosophy, 1st ed. ( London: Wiley, 2002)Google Scholar.

9 Quoted in Mengel, Ewald, and Michela Borzaga, eds., Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary, 75.

10 Dangaremba, Tsiti, The Book of Not (Banbury, England: Ayebia Clark, 2006)Google Scholar.

11 Kennedy, Rosanne, “Mortgaged Futures: Trauma, Subjectivity, and the Legacies of Colonialism in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not ,” Studies in the Novel 40.1 (2008): 86–107 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Soyinka, Wole, Season of Anomy (Suffolk, England: Arena, 1988)Google Scholar.

13 Whitehead, Anne, “Journeying Through Hell: Wole Soyinka, Trauma, and Postcolonial Nigeria,” Studies in the Novel 40.1 (2008): 13–30 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Forna, Aminatta, The Memory of Love ( New York: Grove Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

15 Forna, Aminatta, Happiness: A Novel ( New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

16 West-Pavlov , Russell, Spaces of Fiction, Fictions of Space: Postcolonial Place and Literary deiXis ( New York: Palgrave, 2010), 86 Google Scholar.

17 West-Pavlov, Spaces of Fiction, Fictions of Space.

18 Forna, Happiness, 120.

19 Forna, Happiness, 121.

20 Forna, Happiness, 229.

21 Forna, Happiness, 229.

22 Forna, Happiness, 157

23 Forna, Happiness, 157.

24 Forna, Happiness, 221.

25 Forna, Happiness, 251.

26 Forna, Happiness, 260.

27 Forna, Happiness, 260.

28 Quoted in Dotson, Kristie, “Tacking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,” Hypatia 26.2 (2011): 237 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Dotson, “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,” 237.

30 Forna, Happiness, 221.

31 Forna, Happiness, 216.

32 Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, 26.

33 Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, 26.

34 Forna, Happiness, 232.

35 Forna, Happiness, 260.

36 Hartman, Geoffrey, “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” New Literary History 26.3 (1995): 546 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Forna, Happiness, 290.

38 Forna, Happiness, 304.

39 West-Pavlov, Spaces of Fiction, Fictions of Space, 85.

40 In Scholes, Robert and colleagues, The Nature of Narrative, (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar, 314, James Phellan argues that “character has three components that correspond to three main kinds of interest audiences develop in narrative progressions: mimetic (character as possible person …), thematic (character as representative of a larger class or an embodiment of a set of ideas), and a synthetic (character as artificial construct). Furthermore, different narrative progressions establish different relations among these components by guiding our developing interests in particular ways.”

41 Forna, Happiness, 231.

42 Forna, Happiness, 227.

43 Forna, Happiness, 227.

44 Forna, Happiness, 228.

45 Forna, Happiness, 244.

46 Presley, John Woodrow, “Neurasthenia and the Cure of Literature: Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Andy Collins,” JAC 30.1/2 (2010): 270 Google Scholar.

47 Presley, “Neurasthenia and the Cure of Literature,” 292.

48 Presley, “Neurasthenia and the Cure of Literature,” 294.

49 Presley, “Neurasthenia and the Cure of Literature,” 296.

50 Presley, “Neurasthenia and the Cure of Literature,” 305.

51 Presley, “Neurasthenia and the Cure of Literature,” 305.

52 Cyrulnik, Boris, Resilience: How Your Inner Strength Can Set You Free from the Past, trans. Macey, David ( New York: MJF Books, 2009), 13 Google Scholar.

53 Friedman, Susan Stanford, “Spatialization: A Strategy for Reading Narrative,” Narrative 1.1 (1993): 13–14 Google Scholar.