LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 17:12 December 2017
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Renuga Devi, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
         Dr. S. Chelliah, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

Language in India www.languageinindia.com is included in the UGC Approved List of Journals. Serial Number 49042.

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Memory and Trauma:
Reconstruction of History in the Novels of
J.M. Coetzee and M.G. Vassanji

Dr. Varsha Singh, Ph.D.


Abstract

Colonialism for Africans is not an event encapsulated in the past, but is a history whose far reaching impact and traumatic consequences are still actively affecting today’s political, historical, cultural and artistic phenomena. Exploring history which brought existential deviation and rupture on Africans through the twin matrix of memory and trauma has become the major area of concern of African writers like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, Steve Biko , Wole Soyinka, Amos Tutuols, J. M. Coetzee, M. G Vassanji, Mandla Langa, etc. The choice for these writers is not whether or not to have a past, but rather ----what kind of past shall one have, and what shall be recollected and what shall be forgotten. This paper examines J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974), and M. G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack (1989) in the light of new historicism and psychoanalysis to expose the traumatic history of apartheid, the post- apartheid aftermath, metafictional experiments in African fiction, gender and identity and imprisonment narratives.

Keywords: Coetzee, Vassanji, Colonialism, Rupture, Trauma, Amnesia, Spiritual liberation, Politics of identity, National consciousness, Counter memory, Diaspora, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism, Deconstruction.

Memory of Colonialism

Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying their brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it (Fanon 169).

Frantz Fanon’s critical discourses aroused a significant insight to reinvent and reconstruct the African history in the light of colonialism which brought an existential deviation and rupture on Africa. Colonialism for Africans is not an event encapsulated in the past, but is a history whose far reaching impact and traumatic consequences are still actively affecting today’s political, historical, cultural and artistic phenomena. The ‘subjugated histories’, as Michel Foucault has termed, has to be documented first before providing visions of a new future. Our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting, declares the South African Freedom Charter. Exploring history through the twin matrix of memory and trauma has become the major area of concern of African writers like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, Steve Biko, Wole Soyinka, Amos Tutuols, J. M. Coetzee, M. G Vassanji, Mandla Langa, etc. The choice for these writers is not whether or not to have a past, but rather ----what kind of past shall one have, and what shall be recollected and what shall be forgotten.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.


Dr. Varsha Singh
Department of English
Deshbandhu College
University of Delhi
Kalkaji
New Delhi-110019
India
tomailvarsha@gmail.com

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