Traumatic Experience and Repressed Memory in Magical Realist Novels [1 ed.] 1527546284, 9781527546288

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Traumatic Experience and Repressed Memory in Magical Realist Novels

Traumatic Experience and Repressed Memory in Magical Realist Novels: Speaking the Unspeakable By

Md Abu Shahid Abdullah

Traumatic Experience and Repressed Memory in Magical Realist Novels: Speaking the Unspeakable By Md Abu Shahid Abdullah This book first published 2020 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2020 by Md Abu Shahid Abdullah All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-4628-4 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-4628-8

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... ix Chapter 1 .................................................................................................... 1 Introduction: Trauma, Difficulty of Representation and Magical Realism Chapter 2 .................................................................................................... 9 Trauma and Repressed Memory: Concept, Development, Types Chapter 3 .................................................................................................. 21 Looking for an Alternative Narrative in Magical Realism Chapter 4 .................................................................................................. 38 Lacking the Language: Magical Realism and Trauma in Holocaust Literature Heavy Silence and Horrible Grief: Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon................................................................................... 43 Personal and Collective Trauma in D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel .............................................................................................. 56 Chapter 5 .................................................................................................. 69 Revealing the Unspoken: Traumatic Histories of Slavery Toni Morrison’s Magical Realism in Beloved: Curing Historical Wounds and Rewriting Identity Loss ............................................ 74 Refusing Racial and Gendered Subjugation: Escaping Marginalisation in Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, Sorcière … Noire de Salem ..... 84 Chapter 6 .................................................................................................. 96 Exploring the Shameful Past and Reinventing the Absent in the Magical Realism of South Africa Moving away from a Violent Past and the Process of Healing in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying.................................................... 102 Accounts of Apartheid’s Bloody Past and Psychological Damage: Magical Realism in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story ...................... 113

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Chapter 7 ................................................................................................ 125 Conclusion: Empathy and Imagination: Linking Historical Trauma, Alternative Narrative and Magical Realism Works Cited ............................................................................................ 134

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am highly indebted to Prof. Dr. Christoph Houswitschka who has encouraged me to complete this book by providing all kinds of assistance and guidance. I am highly grateful to Almighty Allah who has given me the strength and patience to accomplish this task. I would like to thank my parents for letting me run after my dream. Last but not least, special gratitude to my wife for being with me, for providing all sorts of assistance, for tolerating my erratic behaviour and for sacrificing many beautiful moments because of me.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TRAUMA, DIFFICULTY OF REPRESENTATION AND MAGICAL REALISM

Since traumatic events have a long-term impact on the human mind, it is quite difficult to represent them in a narrative form. Traumatisation is not suffered only by being directly exposed to traumatic events but also by indirect experience of those events. Victims and survivors of traumatic events find it extremely difficult to express their experiences. Their traumatic memories are unconsciously blocked and turned into repressed memories. While representing trauma or traumatic events in literature, victims and survivors find their experiences too gruesome to express through a realist narrative. This is where magical realism—which I propose as one of the modes of writing most effective in representing traumatic events—comes into play. By using magical realism, authors turn unspeakable events into speakable tales and reconstruct events which would be as agonising to forget as to remember. The terms traumatic experience and repressed memory can be associated with the Holocaust, slavery, colonisation, war and other events. Victims of these events have horrible memories which they would like to forget but cannot; even if they want to tell their stories to others, they find them too cruel to express. Many authors regard magical realism as one of the most suitable means for representing victims’ inexpressible thoughts in literature. As Langdon believes, magical realism has a strong and unique ability to represent traumatic and horrific events which are considered extremely difficult to express accurately or authentically using objective or realist narrative modes (Langdon 2011, 22). Christopher Warnes, for example, has limited his analysis of magical realism to a postcolonial context in Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence (2009). Jenni Adams has attempted to show the representation of trauma and memory in the context of the Holocaust in

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Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature: Troping the Traumatic Real (2011). Eugene L. Arva has included the Holocaust and slavery along with colonialism and war in The Traumatic Imagination: Histories of Violence in Magical Realist Fiction (2011). However, no one has yet actually dealt with trauma deriving from apartheid and the violent treatment of women during various historical traumatic events. This book aims to discuss the potential of magical realism to analyse the brutality of oppression, trauma, horror and repressed memory in a way which is not completely possible in a realist narrative. While using concepts like trauma, repressed memory, transgenerational trauma, collective trauma and magical realism, my analyses focus on the literary representations of the individual and the collective trauma arising from the Holocaust, slavery and apartheid and the outstanding ability of magical realism to turn unrepresentable and unspoken memories into narratives. Besides depicting various kinds of atrocity, my project will also analyse trauma suffered by female victims—who face multifarious forms of victimisation—during and following those events. This book will focus on magical realism as a particular narrative technique as well as a genre of fiction able to represent the inaccessibility of trauma. Again, by dealing with the above-mentioned events, their specific historical context and universal meaning for humankind, my project aims to reveal a universal experience of trauma. One important aspect of the novels I will analyse is that they all depict structural violence1 which, unquestionably, affects people collectively. In my book, I will work on the literary representations of the Holocaust, slavery and apartheid in order to show that, through the suffering of an individual, these authors actually depict a systematic or organised form of oppression and industrial killing, the plight of an entire community, race or group of people, and thus convey the sense of collective trauma. The Holocaust is an example of systematic and pitiless killing where, for their attempt to exterminate the Jewish race, the perpetrators had the help of all the organs of society to identify and deport Jewish people. Slavery, especially in North America, was also a methodical form of subjugation of the black community in which any newborn baby in a slave family was destined to be a slave. Last but not least, the racial authority in South 1 Structural violence refers to the “violation of normal right or values [through] customs and laws [which] create and perpetrate structures that curb the freedom of subjects unfairly or which discriminate unjustly against certain sections preventing them from attaining full citizenship”. (Degenaar 1990, 78)

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Africa imposed a notorious segregation system which shaped the lives of black and white people in completely opposite ways. People who are exposed to violence and are oppressed have the feeling that others cannot understand their reality. The collectiveness of their victimisation creates a reality of their own which turns them into the ‘other’ in the eyes of nonvictimised people and perpetrators. What is magical or absurd to other people is a perfect representation of reality to the victimised; this demonstrates the otherness of the reality of the victims. The concept of trauma has shifted from its original meaning of physical injury to that of psychological disorder and, recently, to that of cultural phenomenon. In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Cathy Caruth defines trauma as “the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena” (Caruth 1996, 91). According to the American Psychiatric Association (APA), repressed memories are hypothesised memories which are involuntarily blocked by the memory being engulfed by a high level of stress or trauma. Laurence Kirmayer proposes that trauma narratives are full of inconsistency and linearity and often show the “frailty and impersistence of memory” (Kirmayer 1996, 174). These three historical eventsʊthe Holocaust, slavery and apartheidʊare full of extreme and unimaginable violence; the Holocaust, in particular, is regarded by many as unique. Although the world has seen many instances of genocide before and after the Holocaust—and I do not intend to compare them—the unthinkable atrocities, combined with the extermination of Jews, political dissenters and many other ethnic groups such as the Romani during the Holocaust are far beyond human imagination. Instances of slavery cannot be limited by any geographical barrier because it has happened, and is still happening in some parts of the world, in different forms. However, when we talk about the brutal treatment of black slaves and the dehumanising effects of slavery, we mainly refer to the slavery in the United States and the Caribbean. Racial violence has taken place in different parts of the world but nowhere has it come close to the violence against, and inhuman treatment of, black South Africans during the notorious and bloody apartheid regime. Every day somewhere in the world women are either psychologically or physically humiliated or tortured. However, during various traumatic historical events such as war, genocide, racial segregation, slavery, and political, social and religious violence, women suffer from what can be termed ‘institutionalised violence’. Women face a double victimisation of being not only Jews but Jewish

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women, not only slaves but female slaves and not only blacks but female blacks. In order to portray the suffering of victims in literature, authors struggle to find a suitable narrative. They find that the traditional realist narrative lacks potential, and look for an alternative with subversive and transgressive potential. I propose magical realism as this alternative narrative for depicting the pain and horror of these events and giving victims a voice so that they can tell the unspeakable stories of their lives. It is difficult to analyse violent historical events because of the horror they possess. Giving traumatic events a literary representation requires a profound sense of empathy and an act of imagination which is quite useful in establishing an association between trauma, alternative narrative and magical realist writing. Magical realist writing can well be considered one of the most efficient ways of coming to terms with painful experiences and repressed memories. Arva believes that a magical realist representation of trauma “creates empathy through images that recreate the unrepresentable by simulating the extreme affects that must have blocked representation in the first place. Paradoxically, coping with trauma might thus involve creating a virtual opportunity to re-live the same experiences that have caused it” (Arva 2008, 80). ‘Magical realism’—the term was first coined by German art critic Franz Roh in 1925—has been used by writers all over the world as a narrative technique and/or literary genre; authors have used it in their individual ways to serve different purposes. The term is concerned with specific supernatural phenomena, particularly experiences that cannot be grasped or explained in logical terms. Critics like Lois Parkinson Zamora, Wendy B. Faris and Christopher Warnes have placed this particular literary language or narrative strategy at the very heart of postcolonial and postmodern writing, and done so from the perspective of the underprivileged and marginalised. Magical realism has become a common narrative style for novels written from the point of view of the politically, socially or culturally marginalised, and I believe that, because of its transgressive and subversive characteristics and its ability to evoke empathy in readers and writers, it has all the potential to represent violent historical events and the trauma arising from those events. Traumatised subjects look for a suitable narrative to share their traumatisation, and I advocate magical realism as this narrative. According to Arva, in representing traumatic historical events, magical realism is better equipped than traditional realism because “magical realist images and traumatized subjects share the same ontological ground, being part of

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a reality that is constantly escaping witnessing through telling” (Arva 2011, 6). Arva again says, “[B]y transgressing the boundaries of verisimilitude, the magical realist text may both convey the authors’ empathy (through their narrators and/or characters) and at the same time induce empathy on the part of the readersʊnot by appropriating the victims’ voices but, rather, by making them heard for the first time” (Arva 2011, 6). It can be inferred from Arva that although magical realism cannot represent violent or extreme events as a consistent history, it certainly attempts to reconstruct history and it thus provides the victimised and the traumatised an opportunity to include their stories which have been ignored by the dominant history. Slavery, war, the Holocaust and apartheid are regarded as histories of extremely violent and traumatic events, hardly open to rational reflection or understanding. I argue that magical realism is a reconstruction of the above-mentioned catastrophic events, which cannot be properly represented or explained through the traditional realist narrative. It tries to present any brutal event in a graspable manner but does not really distort the truth of it. As Langdon comments, “[…] this narrative style makes those events appear more real, because it positions the reader to feel something specific to or closely aligned with the original experience of extremity” (Langdon 2011, 16). It can be inferred from Langdon that magical realism does not distort truth, but rather presents it to the reader in a way that does not entirely block understanding. As mentioned earlier, this book will analyse the literary representations of three traumatic historical events: the Holocaust, slavery and apartheid. There will be three separate chapters on these three events, each of which will analyse two novels—one will focus on various kinds of atrocities and the other will deal with the oppression and victimisation of women caused by that particular event. Chapter 2, on trauma and repressed memory, deals with origins, definitions, symptoms, types and characteristics of trauma. It analyses contradictory views on the question of whether trauma can be healed or not. Apart from the relation between trauma and history, and trauma and traditional issues of representation, the chapter will also shed light on the concept of memory, particularly repressed memory. Chapter 3 deals with the necessity of an alternative language to depict different traumatic historical events from the perspectives of the oppressed and victimised; here I propose magical realism to be that alternative language. This chapter looks at the origin, development, definitions, features and types of magical realism. It also compares magical realism with other neighbouring genres, and analyses its (magical realism’s) own potential as

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an independent genre. It examines the term’s association with postcolonialism, and its potential to be the voice of the oppressed and an alternative narrative in order to represent trauma, pain and horror. Chapter 4, dedicated to the Holocaust, analyses Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon and D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel. The Holocaust, which is characterised by ineffable violence, death, survival, love, betrayal and trauma, has, according to Arva, “challenged the established beliefs in the moral progress and superiority of the European civilization […] its ‘intrinsic’ goodness, and sense of justice” (Arva 2011, 217). Skibell aims not to give an accurate account of a gruesome event like the Holocaust, but rather to respond to it in his own way as the descendant of a victimised Jewish family. Thomas, on the other hand, depicts the personal trauma of the protagonist Lisa and the collective trauma experienced by the Jewish victims at Babi Yar. In A Blessing on the Moon, Skibell employs magical realism using Jewish folktales in telling the story of one of his forefathers. By using supernatural elements and bringing dead Jews back to life in the novel, Skibell makes the victimised stronger than the victimiser. I will show how the protagonist Chaim represents the suffering of the entire Jewish race through his own grief, traumatisation and obsession with the past, and how Chaim becomes the mouthpiece of the Jewish people. I will also show how Chaim secures a future for the Jewish race—as depicted in the novel—even after a horrific event like the Holocaust by magically returning the moon to its proper place. Apart from depicting the protagonist Lisa’s bizarre sexual fantasies, D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel also deals with the various significant political, historical and social issues of 20th century Europe. I argue that magical realism enables Thomas to convey Lisa’s sexual torture and subsequent death and to speak for the dead, telling their stories and thus conveying the unspoken trauma. By using magical realist phenomena and grotesque sexual fantasies, Thomas foreshadows the future trauma of Lisa’s rape and death at Babi Yar. Thomas creates a magical post-death world for Jews which seems to suggest the renewal of life even after the catastrophe of the Holocaust. Chapter 5 deals with trauma arising from the horrific experiences of slavery, and the role of magical realism in representing those unspeakable experiences in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, Sorcière … Noire de Salem (I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem). Whereas Morrison uses magical realism to reveal unspoken histories of black slaves and to enable them to reassert their identity, Condé employs the blend of

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magic and reality as a means for the protagonist to survive both racial and gendered violence. By placing the officially recorded truth (history) into individual fictional narratives, both Morrison and Condé bring characters and events closer to the reader’s world and imagination. Apart from exploring the trauma of slavery suffered by Sethe and other black slaves who could not express their violent and inhuman treatment, Morrison, through the character of Beloved, ambitiously attempts an imaginative testimony of those who did not survive (Matus 1998, 104). I believe that Morrison blends the magical and the real in order to reveal the unspoken and silenced histories of black slaves, particularly the victimisation, both racial and gendered, of the protagonist Sethe and other female slaves. I aim to identify multiple identities of Beloved and show how she enables Sethe and other ex-slaves to reassert their individual and collective identity damaged by their experience of slavery. In Moi, Tituba, Sorcière … Noire de Salem, Maryse Condé shows the racial and gendered subjugation of Tituba, and her attempt to find a voice and thus an identity. Condé deals with magic or witchcraft in a positive manner and uses it as a means of resistance for Tituba against both white and patriarchal society. She equips Tituba with different magical powers so that she can shake off her marginalised status. In other words, magic is used as a survival tactic on Tituba’s part. By giving Tituba a voice, Condé gives the entire neglected Caribbean community a voice. I will also shed light on the fact that, unlike the ghost in Morrison’s Beloved, Condé’s ghosts and spirits are benevolent and are sources of relief and consolation. Chapter 6 focuses on the atrocious treatment of black people during and after apartheid in South African history, and the representation of those atrocities in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story. Apartheid—the racial separation between black and white South African people—was full of violence, bloodshed, and detrimental treatment of black people. Both transition—the period between the fall of apartheid and the first democratic election in 1994—and the post-apartheid period were characterised by violence but this time it was black against white and black against black. By writing on apartheid violence, authors find opportunities to reimagine and rewrite South Africa’s past which is significant in the process of reconciliation and identity formation. In Ways of Dying, Mda attempts to expose the evil of the anti-apartheid movement and thus presents us a deromanticised version of it. By demystifying the liberation struggle, he comes up with an alternative history much different from the established one. Although Mda shows

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many instances of brutal physical violence, he focuses more on the psychological aspects of trauma than on the physical aspects arising from these instances. Mda uses the supernatural to criticise violence and to highlight the bizarre extent of violence. He also shows the importance of the black people’s communal solidarity and the influence of their ancestors’ spirits and rural rituals on their lives in order to survive violence. In David’s Story, trauma derives from Dulcie’s rape by her fellow male MK 2 revolutionaries during the anti-apartheid movement where violence against women was more common. Although David wants to talk about Dulcie, he knows that doing so will expose the dark side of the anti-apartheid movement. By showing rape, sexual torture and other forms of suppressive actions against female guerrillas perpetrated by their fellow male guerrillas, Wicomb, just like Mda, condemns the evil of the anti-apartheid movement and thus provides an alternative story of the struggle. The arrival of Dulcie’s ghost at the very end of the novel to disclose her story gives the plot a magical aura, and strengthens my argument concerning the potential of magical realism in representing trauma. Victims and survivors of traumatic events are either unwilling or unable to talk about those events because of the brutalities they entail and the lack of a suitable narrative. Expressing traumatic events in literature requires political awareness and, according to Arva, empathy, responsibility and the courage to face what is left uncaptured by reason and logic and what official history and public discourses have considered an unsuitable issue (Arva 2011, 22). In dealing with those issues, writers have to swim against the stream of logic and explore something beyond common perception. In other words, they need to think outside the box. The relationship between trauma and the magical realist writing depends on this sense of empathy and the desire to give a voice to the oppressed and neglected. Magical realism makes it possible for authors to let the silenced voices be heard and to transform those voices into an accessible story or narrative.

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Co-founded by Nelson Mandela, MK or Umkhonto we Sizwe functioned as the armed force of the African National Congress during the anti-apartheid movement.

CHAPTER 2 TRAUMA AND REPRESSED MEMORY: CONCEPT, DEVELOPMENT, TYPES

Trauma entails both physical and mental wounds, which can be individual, cultural, communal and even transgenerational. The origins, causes and symptoms of trauma have been analysed by different academic and scientific disciplines. Trauma has persistently forced those who are affected by it to rethink their past and their identity, to rewrite their history and to anticipate a future which will remain distressingly void and meaningless without an understanding of the past. The attempt to provide literary representations of traumatic events—personal, collective or historical—raises the question of what kind of narrative one should use without insulting the memories of victims and survivors and/or distorting the truth. It raises the question of whether one should stick to the traditional realist narrative of the dominant power or invent an alternative language from the perspective of the oppressed and victimised.

Developing Trauma as a Field of Research The term ‘trauma’ is derived from Greek traûma which can be translated as ‘wound’. It was originally used in the field of medicine to refer to “an injury inÀicted on a body” (Caruth 1996, 3). Initially, the term referred to what we now know as ‘whiplash injury’3 or what people in the 19th century called ‘railway spine’4. By 1885, the concept of trauma had been transferred from the physical to the psychological sphere “when a French medical thesis on trauma could routinely have a chapter on traumatisme morale” (qtd. in Hacking 1996, 76). The term altered its meaning and from then on meant “a wound inÀicted not upon the body but upon the mind” (Caruth 1996, 3). “Jean-Martin Charcot, Freud’s mentor in [Paris], had already used the term ‘traumatic hysteria’, which the Berlin doctor Hermann 3

A type of injury generally associated with motor vehicle accidents. It was used to describe severe back injury taking place during train accidents without any visible injury to the back.

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Oppenheim later renamed ‘traumatic neurosis’” (Arva 2011, 29), “keeping the idea of ‘psychic shock’ but expanding the range of symptoms” (Farrell 1998, 9). However, it was Freud’s earlier essays that played a significant part in defining “psychic trauma as different from and, in principle, unrelated to, physical trauma” (Onega and Ganteau 2009, 9). The recurring evocations of the original event which echo Freud’s description of the “compulsion to repeat” activities of repressed impulses (Freud 1955, 30) became established in the writing of Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub, Shoshana Felman, Judith Herman, Ruth Leys and others in the 1990s. The study of trauma first gained importance after various 19th century wars, especially the Crimean War (1854 ࡳ 1856) and the American Civil War (1861 ࡳ 1865), when soldiers returning from the war started to demonstrate varieties of mental disturbances including phobias, nightmares, nervousness and such like. In the aftermath of World War I, the term ‘shell shock’ 5 was coined; during World War II, studies in the US started to focus on the term ‘combat fatigue’6; finally, in the 1970s and 1980s, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, this concept received growing interest among scholars of different fields, and led to the beginning of trauma research and theory. In the 1980s, the American Psychological Association accepted that a psychological condition prevailed in soldiers of the Vietnam War and called it ‘posttraumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD)7. According to Schauer, Neuner and Elbert, trauma was consequently termed ‘posttraumatic stress disorder’ in the field of psychiatry and was explicitly described in the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Schauer, Neuner, and Elbert 2005, 8). The American Psychological Association acknowledged for the first time that “a psychiatric disorder could be wholly environmentally determined and that a traumatic event occurring in adulthood could have lasting psychological consequences” (Whitehead 2004, 4). This quotation highlights the long-lasting effect of trauma. According to Anne Whitehead, “It is at this point that […] the

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A term coined to describe the reaction of some soldiers to the trauma of battle in World War I. (Hochschild 242) 6 A severe reaction which results from the stress of battle that reduces the fighting skill of soldiers. 7 It is a term consisting of a series of symptoms, which usually manifest as a “preoccupation with the traumatic event in the form of nightmares, flashbacks, or persistent thoughts about the trauma that intrude into everyday affairs; and a general dysphoria, a numbness that takes the meaning out of life and makes it hard to relate to other people”. (Tal 1996, 135)

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concept of trauma is transferred from medical and scientific discourse to the field of literary studies” (Whitehead 2004, 4). In general, trauma refers to a disorder of the mind as well as the body, resulting from horrifying and life-threatening experiences. Trauma’s concrete nature and features have been discussed rather differently since the 1980s. However, one characteristic is mentioned in almost all publications on trauma—the fact that the experience of trauma cannot be incorporated into the victim’s consciousness. In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth, one of the most prominent contemporary trauma scholars, describes the unassimilated nature of trauma. She states that a traumatic event is experienced “too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (qtd. in Caruth 1996, 4). What Caruth suggests is that because of the suddenness of any traumatic event, victims fail to realise the significance of the event when it takes place. The event is repeated either in dreams or the actions of victims, and only then do they begin to grasp that significance. In the introduction to her collection of essays Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Caruth remarks that the pathology of PTSD resides exclusively in the reception of the traumatic event, which, unassimilated when it occurred, comes to possess the experiencing subject through repetition. She concludes, “To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (Caruth 1995, 4 ࡳ 5). Ruth Leys speaks about a disorder of a victim’s memory deriving from a traumatic experience, and her work focuses on the concept of ‘dissociation’, which means that the mind of the victim divides in the course of traumatic experience and that trauma separates itself from the common process of memory: “Therefore, the traumatic events cannot be remembered in the same way as ordinary events, but are instead dissociated from the person’s autobiographical memory” (Leys 2000, 2). Thus, it can be asserted that the primary nature of trauma is associated with the inability of the victim’s mind to incorporate the painful experience into ordinary consciousness.

Symptoms and Types of Trauma Trauma can originate from both physical and psychological violence. Kai Erikson, who approaches trauma in terms of the analysis of its sources, states, “[…] in order to serve as a generally useful concept, ‘trauma’ has to be understood as resulting from a constellation of life experiences as well

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as from a discreet happening, from a persisting condition as well as from an acute event” (Erikson 1995, 185). Arva, however, believes that the structure of traumatic experiences is mainly associated with the actions regulating its forgetting, remembering and repeating, and does not have that much to do with its sources (Arva 2011, 31). In his essay “Recollection, Repetition and Working Through”, Freud states, “It seems to make no difference whatever whether [any traumatic event] was conscious and then was forgotten or whether it never reached consciousness at all” (Freud 1959, 368). Freud again states that a trauma victim “reproduces [forgotten and repressed events] not in memory but in his behaviour; he repeats it, without of course knowing that he is repeating it” (Freud 1959, 369). It can be surmised from these statements that trauma originates not inside human perception but rather from outside it. Quite a large number of scholars working in the field of psychiatry, psychology, medicine and literary studies have described the symptoms and characteristics of trauma, some of which are commonly accepted and frequently discussed by the majority of professionals. One basic characteristic of individual trauma is the act of ‘dissociation’ where victims are unable to permanently repress traumatic memories. This inability to repress traumatic memory gives birth to another essential and permanent characteristic of trauma, its ‘self-repetition’ which, according to Gobodo-Madikizela and Van der Merwe, suggests that the repressed experiences start to harass trauma victims and repeat themselves in the form of flashbacks, nightmares, hallucinations and other invasive phenomena (Gobodo-Madikizela and Van der Merwe 2007, vii). Since victims of traumatic events are unable to remember the events, they “lose personal sense of significance, competence, and inner worth” (Van der Kolk, MacFarlane and Weisaeth 1996, 197). Individual and collective traumas derived from historical calamities last for a long time, and thus victims suffer an intense loss of their self and identity. According to Schauer, Neuner and Elbert, one significant symptom of trauma is ‘avoidance’ in which traumatised persons usually evade situations, places and people that remind them of their traumatising events, and thus become alienated from others (Schauer, Neuner and Elbert 2005, 9). Another important symptom of trauma is ‘hyperarousal’ which, according to Judith Herman, implies that trauma victims overreact even at the slightest disturbance, and often suffer from frustration (Herman 1997, 35). Regarding various violent events such as massacre, war, slavery, racial violence, colonisation and other differing forms of political, social and cultural mass oppression, it is important to explore trauma not only on an

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individual level but also on a collective level. When people from any group suffer from a traumatic event—Jewish people from the Holocaust, black slaves from slavery or black Africans from apartheid—they find themselves in a position of helplessness and anxiety, they do not really want to remember the event; they are dissociated from their past and thus suffer from an identity problem. In “The Next Chapter: Consequences of Societal Trauma”, Volkan identifies five psychosomatic occurrences experienced by victims as a result of communal trauma. First, the members of a victimised group suffer from a common “sense of shame, humiliation, dehumanisation and guilt” (Volkan 2009, 14 ࡳ 15); second, because of this humiliation, traumatised groups face difficulties in expressing their feelings which turn into a sense of frustration and anger (2009, 17); third, “an identification with the oppressor” (2009, 17); fourth, “a shared difficulty or even inability to mourn losses” (2009, 23). Volkan asserts, “Because of the continuation of shame, humiliation, dehumanization, guilt, helpless rage and identification with the oppressor, their mourning process becomes complicated and unending” (2009, 23). The entire community suffers from a never-ending helplessness and frustration. These four consequences of collective trauma result in the fifth, “the transgenerational transmission of trauma” (Volkan 2009, 14 ࡳ 15). The concept of transgenerational trauma implies that if trauma is not settled by the real victim(s), it can be passed on from generation to generation. Thus, confronting the traumatic past and coming to terms with it is crucial in order for the past not to invade the present and disturb subsequent generations of victims or survivors. Scholars like Neil J. Smelser argue that trauma is impossible to remove and is a constant threat to the victimised group(s) (Smelser 2004, 54). According to Alexander, “The experience of collective trauma, however, shatters both the external and the internal representations of culture and thus leads to the collective loss of meaning. With the destruction of its values and beliefs as well as the roles and rituals of the community concerned, its members are left disempowered, disoriented and unable to make plans for the future” (in Pöschl 2011, 32). This quotation refers to the loss of the culture and meaning of a community where its members feel powerless and alienated, and fail to assert both their individual and communal selves. Although most trauma scholars have agreed on some specific aspects of the concept, they have, on the other hand, presented contradictory observations on it—whether trauma occurs from a single exposure to any traumatic event or it needs multiple exposure being one of the issues of debate. Schauer, Neuner and Elbert, for example, believe that apart from

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originating from the single exposure to a particular event, trauma may also be caused by multiple or frequent exposure to catastrophic events (Schauer, Neuner and Elbert 2005, 8). This broader definition of trauma is very important for the purpose of this book because I believe traumatisation originating from various violent historical eventsʊthe Holocaust, slavery, apartheidʊcan hardly be described properly by reducing them to the experiences of a single traumatic event. Since these historical events were characterised by repeated instances of violence and concerned the majority of the population, many people developed trauma even without being the direct victims of a particular traumatic event.

Narrating Memory: Concept, Development, Types Memory does not record the past directly, rather it (re)constructs past experiences. According to Antze and Lambek, memory is also the particular point of the flimsy balance between fact and interpretation, or remembrance and understanding (Antze and Lambek 1996, xxvii). According to Pierre Janet, memory has not only a containing capacity for experience but also a processing capacity which is always organising and synthesising the incoming information based on previous integrated memories (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 1995, 159). Janet differentiates between narrative memory and actual memory, and according to his definition, “[n]arrative memory consists of mental constructs, which people use to make sense out of experience” (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 1995, 160). In showing the differences between narrative memory and traumatic memory, Arva states: By analogy, one may infer that narrative memory (usually attributed to the author) can never be identical with traumatic memory (belonging to the subject of the narrated event) even in cases where the author and the survivor-subject of the story are one and the same entity. For one thing, narrative memory is a social actʊthat is, in the presence of an audience willing to listen, it may be integrated into a collective memoryʊwhile traumatic memory lacks any addressee except maybe the victim himself. (Arva 2011, 56)

It can be inferred from Arva that unlike narrative memory, which can be assimilated into a collective memory, traumatic memory belongs to the subject of the narrated event and finds no audience except the victim himself. In psychology, the issue of ‘repressed memory’ can be interpreted in multiple ways. Victims of traumatic events try not to remember their

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memories, and thus avoid narrating or sharing their experiences of anxiety, sorrow, guilt, depression, shame and such like. Van der Kolk and Van der Hart state that the concept of repression “reflects a vertically layered model of mind: what is repressed is pushed downward, into the unconscious” (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 1995, 168). Gradually, victims fail to remember traumatic events clearly, but rather in a fragmented manner. According to Paul R. McHugh, “There has also been significant questioning of the reality of repressed memories. There is considerable evidence that rather than being pushed out of consciousness, the difficulty with traumatic memories for most people are their intrusiveness and inability to forget” (McHugh 2006, 45–46). McHugh’s quotation thus highlights how victims find it impossible to forget traumatic memories. According to Jennifer Freyd, “[…] victims may need to remain unaware of the trauma not to reduce suffering but rather to promote survival” (Freyd 1994, 307). Unlike ordinary memory, traumatic memory occurs by a process that Janet terms “restitutio ad integrum”, that is, “when one element of a traumatic experience is evoked, all other elements follow automatically” (qtd. in Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 1995, 163). It shows the inter-connectedness of traumatic elements in a traumatic event. Van der Kolk and Rita Fisler state that “traumatic memories may be encoded differently than memories for ordinary events, perhaps via alterations in attentional focusing, perhaps because of extreme emotional arousal interferes with hippocampal memory functions” (Van der Kolk and Rita Fisler 1995, 508 ࡳ 509). Because of its “dissociation from consciousness and voluntary control, traumatic memory [forces] the trauma victim to revisit the violent event as long as his or her control over it is unsatisfactory and until it (the traumatic memory) can be turned into narrative memory” (Arva 2011, 56). Arva thus focuses on the importance of transforming traumatic memory into a narrative. Ruth Leys, following Janet’s study of trauma, distinguishes traumatic memory from narrative memory by saying, “[Narrative memory] narrates the past as past [whereas traumatic memory] merely and unconsciously repeats the past” (Leys 2000, 105). What Leys wants to say is that narrative memory narrates past events in a linear, chronological way so that it can give them new meanings. Traumatic memory, on the contrary, repeats the traumatic experiences without realising the significance of those events.

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Healing Traumatised Memory According to Berliner and Briere, understanding the impact of trauma on memory is complicated by the fact that unproven self-reports often constitute the only possible and accessible data concerning specific historical events (Berliner and Briere 1999, 5). In some cases, survivors of traumatic events seem to forget substantial aspects of their experiences which include being ill-treated, seeing disfigured bodies and witnessing murder (Berliner and Briere 1999, 5). Since they sometimes forget key aspects of their experiences, their testimonies or narratives become inconsistent. Van der Kolk and Rita Fisler divided the impact of trauma on memory into: “traumatic amnesia” which talks about the loss of memories involved with traumatic experiences (Van der Kolk and Rita Fisler 1995, 509); “global memory impairment” which makes it very complex for victims to create an exact account of their history—both past and present (1995, 510); “trauma and dissociation” which refers to the fragmentary aspect of memories (1995, 510); and “the sensorimotor organization of traumatic experience” which states that trauma is organised into memory on sensorimotor and affective levels (1995, 512). Concurring with them, we can infer that since the content of traumatic memory is fragmented, trauma narratives cannot be consistent and linear. In order to provide a literary representation of trauma, traditional narrative, which is linear, has proved to be insufficient. Authors look for an alternative narrative which is non-linear and fragmented. I strongly argue for magical realism as this alternative narrative. There are contrasting views concerning the fact of whether trauma can be worked through and healed or whether it is never-ending and ineffaceable. Trauma scholar Cathy Caruth argues that since a traumatic experience can never be fully grasped, it is also not possible to express it to others. If it cannot be addressed or expressed, it cannot be healed (Caruth 1996, 153). Judith Herman has argued that although it is possible to come to terms with trauma, it can never be fully resolved (Herman 1997, 155). However, in her “Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self”, Susan Brison opines that it is possible to heal or come to terms with trauma through narration: “By constructing and telling a narrative of the trauma endured, and with the help of understanding listeners, the survivor begins not only to integrate the traumatic episode into a life with a before and after, but also to gain control over the occurrence of intrusive memories” (Brison 1999, 46). However, although converting traumatic memory into a narrative memory is a prerequisite for healing traumatised individuals and communities, this transformation is a difficult process mainly because of

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the lack of a suitable language to narrate the events in a tangible way (Gobodo-Madikizela and Van der Merwe 2007, 25 ࡳ 26). It is observed quite often that trauma victims are either unwilling or unable to talk about their victimisation, making it unspeakable. It is essential for trauma victims to confront and thus remember their traumatic events, to share them with others, and to transform them into narratives so that they can regain control over their experiences and initiate the healing process. Brison opines that narrating traumatic events helps to restore memory and brings order to the events until they can be reintegrated into the life narrative of the victim(s) (Brison 2002, 71 ࡳ 72). It also re-empowers trauma victims and helps them reassert their devastated identity. It is important to mention that just like individual trauma, collective trauma can be healed through the telling of traumatic experiences. Regarding the issue of structuring traumatic experiences through narration and thus gaining control over those experiences and over life, GobodoMadikizela and Van der Merwe argue: Turning trauma into literary narrative means turning chaos into structure. A narrative has a topic, and normally keeps to that point; the plot of the story usually creates a causal link between different events; characters act according to their identities, and their actions show some kind of continuity; and patterns are created and repeated to indicate central themes. In all these ways, the shattering effect of the trauma is transformed by the author into (relative) coherence and unity. (Gobodo-Madikizela and Van der Merwe 2007, 60)

The above-mentioned quotation focuses on the importance of turning trauma into narrative, and thus coming to terms with it (trauma) and gaining control over life. Schauer, Neuner and Elbert argue that whereas the experience of trauma is characterised by the powerlessness and helplessness of victims, the conscious narration of the events means that they gradually regain control over their experiences (Schauer, Neuner and Elbert 2005, 2).

Representing Trauma in Narrative Text It is very significant to note that transforming traumatic memory into a narrative is not a simple issue, but rather “a highly complex process marked by the paradoxical relationship between language, memory, and trauma” (Kopf 2010, 43). It may take quite a long period of time and a huge amount of effort until traumatic memories can be reintegrated into the victim’s life narrative. Apart from this, transforming trauma into

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narrative also requires empathetic listeners or readers. Martina Kopf, for example, explains that “active listening and witnessing are of as much importance as the act of narrating itself. […] it is also significant for the reception of literature and art that deal with traumatic experience, as well as for acknowledging their specific contribution to the integration and transformation of traumatic memory” (Kopf 2010, 43). Therefore, it is crucial that traumatic experiences are not only recounted but also listened to and acknowledged by others. Laub states, “[…] if one talks about the trauma without being truly heard or truly listened to, the telling might itself be lived as a return of the traumaʊa re-experiencing of the event itself ” (Laub 1992, 67). It can be surmised from Laub that the act of telling might itself be dangerous if the speaker is not properly listened to and acknowledged. Regarding the representation of trauma in literature and art, Martina Kopf states: “[L]iterature and art contribute to the social recognition of personal suffering and traumatic reality” (Kopf 2010, 56). They are, therefore, ideal fields for the re-establishment and formation of personal and collective identity (Kopf 2010, 56). Literary representation of trauma may do the healing but may also establish a notion that trauma is collective. In other words, collectiveness comes from literary representation because of the involvement of the group of readers. The reader should not only rewrite or actualise the text but should also be involved and be transferred magically into the realm of a text, a process Jon Thiem has labelled “textualization” (Thiem 1995, 235). Thiem sees the textualisation as something that dissolves the reader’s detachment from the literary text: The world of the text loses its literal impenetrability. The reader loses that minimal detachment that keeps him or her out of the world of the text. The reader, in short, ceases to be reader, ceases to be invulnerable, comfortable in his or her armchair, and safely detached, and becomes instead an actor, an agent in the fictional world. (Thiem 1995, 239)

To speak plainly, Thiem underpins the notion that readers should turn themselves into character actors and thus attach themselves to the story. In trauma narratives, Arva says, readers are drawn into the language game and find themselves “traumatized by vicariously re-living the narrated events” (Arva 2011, 50). Trauma, loneliness, contempt and hatred suffered by a survivor can be healed when the reader reads a trauma narrative and empathises with that survivor. He is not isolated, weak and alone anymore; rather he acquires the magical feelings of becoming the member of a group of people.

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In his “Postmodernism as Mourning Work”, Thomas Elsaesser comments, “[…] what makes trauma different from more traditional issues of representation […] is the idea that trauma also suspends the categories of true and false, being in some sense performative” (Elsaesser 2001, 199). According to Arva, any approach to the representation of trauma needs to have two bases: first, a truthful depiction necessarily assumes the ability to recreate the event which was not grasped or understood at the time of occurrence; and second, “representation can never replace the experience itself” (Arva 2011, 42). No matter what kind of language we use to deal with trauma, it always produces new meaning, provides an alternative reality or truth, and thus differs significantly from ordinary usage (2011, 42). It is mentioned by many critics that traumatic events can only be revisited in their literary representations but cannot be recreated. According to Kali Tal, “The horrific events that have reshaped the author’s construction of reality can only be described in literature, not recreated” (Tal 1996, 121). Regarding the nature of representation, Dominick LaCapra asserts that trauma may also cause “a dissociation of affect and representation: one disorientingly feels what one cannot represent; one numbingly represents what one cannot feel” (LaCapra 2001, 42). Is it possible to turn a traumatic event into a narrative without distorting the truth and, if so, how? Which language should we use to deal with various historical traumatic events including extraordinary events that are categorised by many as unique, such as the Holocaust? Language is well associated with power struggle, and is an instrument of dominant and oppressive power structures. In dealing with various traumatic historical events, we have to decide whether we continue to write in traditional narrative—an objective and factual form of representation from the standpoints of dominant authorities (perpetrators, colonisers, oppressors and slave-owners)—or employ an alternative narrative full of emotion, myth and magic and which has subversive and transgressive qualities from the perspectives of the oppressed and marginalised (victims, colonised and slaves). I propose that for the literary representation of violent historical events, the magical realist narrative has the potential to be that alternative language or the narrative for the victimised. Living with trauma does not mean being engulfed or crushed by it. On the contrary, it means to confront the past, to narrate its stories either in speech or in writing, to regain control over it, and to reassert torn identity. The only way to overcome a traumatic past is not to escape from it but to face it courageously. The language used by the trauma victims may

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traumatise the witness, listener or speaker; it is, however, almost essential for their recovery. The alternative language of the victim is able to turn an ungraspable experience into a graspable event, make the invisible visible and make the silence heard. I propose that magical realism has the potential to be the alternative narrative and an instrument of the oppressed with its imaginative power and magical ability to capture the painful qualities of traumatic experiences and to convert traumatic memories into narrative memories.

CHAPTER 3 LOOKING FOR AN ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVE IN MAGICAL REALISM

Language or the hegemony of language has often been associated with power struggle, and has been used by authorities as an instrument of domination and oppression. We may ask ourselves the question of who has power over whom, who uses what kinds of language and who stands in the tradition of the language used. The entire world can be described in an objective and factual form of representations, and it is in these very languages that the dominant mode of rationality is embedded. In writing in this mode, we actually support the authorities by agreeing on a specific realistic narrative mode. We need to ask ourselves whether two groups having contradictory and opposing interests and ideologies—perpetrators and victims, colonisers and colonised, slave-owners and slaves, winners and losers, bourgeoisie and proletariat, and patriarchal authorities and female victims—can use the same mode of narrative. If the answer is “no”, which I believe it to be, it raises a question about the need to have an alternative language for the latter group (the victims) so that they can write against authority and express the trauma and horror of different violent historical events of which they are the victims. This alternative language should be able to articulate a marginalised viewpoint, contradicting social, political and cultural authorities. We have to be careful that this alternative mode of writing should not be a denial or abandonment of the dominant literary tradition but rather the continuation of it by including something new and alternative that ultimately changes the preceding tradition. It should have the potential to access the rigid shell of traumatic events and to represent them in a way that makes the reader empathise with the characters, and, most significantly, to enable the victims to speak by giving them a voice. Again, this alternative narrative should be able to provide the characters with consolation and relief from the traumatic events. So it can be asserted that this alternative narrative can be a means of social and political protest. Since traumatic memories are chaotic, representing them in literature also demands a narrative which

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is non-linear and fragmented. Again, because of the fact that the stories of the traumatised and marginalised are always supposed to go against the official version of history, this alternative narrative should be able to rewrite the official reading of history. I want to show in my thesis that magical realism has the potential to be this alternative narrative mode. The oppressed and victimised express their ineffable traumatic stories and write against authorities by appropriating rather than denying the existing realist tradition. Language conveys the malicious attitudes of the dominant without completely asserting their intentions. Bowers asserts that in the United States, “the dominant culture is assumed to be that of the male AngloEuropean population who have governed the country since its independence” and in the United Kingdom, “it is assumed to be the males of the ‘ruling upper class’” (Bowers 2004, 68). Both these dominant cultures promoted ideas which “assumed that all truth could be known through logic and science without the need for the superstitions of religion” (2004, 68). The alternative narrative challenges the notion of the ruling authorities that realist narrative is the only form of narrative, and it changes the narrative mode by empowering the perspectives of victims. The alternative mode, for which I propose magical realism, is also a means to represent oppression and historical traumatic events—some of which are considered unique by many. Since language is related to power struggle, there should be a dichotomy in the use of language between these two completely opposing groups of people. In literary representations of the Holocaust, Jewish survivors cannot express their pain and trauma in traditional narratives because the very same narratives might have been used by those responsible for the mass killing to describe the way they carried out their industrial killing. In representing slavery, slaves cannot tell their stories in the language of their masters because the same language is used to express the joy in torturing and killing black slaves. The same can be applied to racially segregated people, the colonised, females in patriarchal societies, rebels against totalitarian governments, and the socially, culturally and politically marginalised. So, these people have to invent a narrative mode different from the realist narrative which is rational and factual. The necessity of an alternative language or narrative mode from the perspectives of the oppressed to represent trauma and pain is quite obvious, and I have already proposed magical realism to be the alternative language or narrative mode. Before coming to any conclusive decision, it is important to talk about magical realism—its history and developments, characteristics,

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functions and types—and to observe how far this particular writing mode is able to represent the trauma and pain of victims during different violent historical events.

Tradition of Magical Realism The term ‘magical realism’ has been defined and applied by authors and researchers from different parts of the world in a complex and paradoxical way. It was German art critic Franz Roh who first coined the term ‘magic realism’ in 1925 to depict a trend in German painting, namely the postexpressionist painting movement. Bowers states that this type of painting was characterised by clear, cool, delicately painted, and sharply focused images, consistently portraying the fantastic in a realistic manner (Bowers 2004, 9). Irene Guenther notes precisely: “The juxtaposition of ‘magic’ and ‘realism’ reflected far more the monstrous and marvelous Unheimlichkeit [uncanniness] within human beings and inherent in their modern technological surroundings…” (Guenther 1995, 36). ‘Magic realism’ was later re-termed ‘magical realism’ when the focus shifted from paintings to literature, especially to fiction. Since then, the term has been applied mainly to describe literary works rather than paintings. According to Spindler, the meaning and the application of the term varied substantially from Roh’s formulation when it was later applied by commentators such as Arturo Uslar Pietri to European and Latin American literature in the 1930s and 1940s, and by Angel Flores to the works of Latin American authors like Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes in the mid-20th century (Spindler 1993, 75 ࡳ 76). According to Adams, the term developed to refer to an assimilation of real and magical elements with Alejo Carpentier’s coinage of the term ‘lo real maravilloso’—approximately, ‘the marvellous reality’—in his book The Kingdom of the World published in 1949, “producing a specifically Latin American reading of this shift from a unity to duality of ontological codes” (Adams 2011, 3). Various definitions and applications of the term have shown its versatility and ability in analysing the artistic and literary representations of reality and history. Magical realism is no longer confined to Latin America, but rather has been used by writers from all over the world from the perspectives of the marginalised and oppressed. I have claimed that the magical realist technique possesses the outstanding ability to represent traumatic historical events in literature by turning traumatic memory into a narrative memory.

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In spite of the fact that the Venezuelan Arturo Uslar Pietri persuaded fellow writers with his magical realist short stories during the 1930s and 1940s, it is his contemporary, Alejo Carpentier, who is regarded as the most crucial figure in forming a Latin American understanding of magical realism. Can argues: “By claiming the sole right of a distinctly Latin American magical realism, [both Carpentier and Pietri] shifted the emphasis Roh placed on the aesthetic and stylistic features of the mode to political and cultural issues” (Can 2015, 29). The subversive ability to deal with critical social and political issues has made the magical realist narrative one of the most sought-after narrative techniques from the perspectives of the oppressed. Carpentier coined the term “lo real maravilloso” and suggested “marvellous reality to be the heritage of all of America” (Carpentier 1995, 87). Adams states that Carpentier’s theory makes a significant and decisive shift in the concept of magical realism “towards a dual-code concept that is ontological rather than phenomenological in its orientation” (Adams 2011, 4). The development of the concept from Roh’s definition to Carpentier’s formation through the Latin American scholars has, according to William Spindler, resulted in texts where two contrasting views of the world, namely the rational and the supernatural, are presented in such a way as to convey the notion that they are not contradictory (Spindler 1993, 78). I would like to argue that when they exist simultaneously in magical realist narrative, the magical and the rational worlds are not in opposition to one another but are, in fact, harmonious and complementary. Angel Flores is another influential figure in the discussions of magical realism in Latin American literature. Although he mostly agreed with Carpentier and Pietri, he disagreed with them on certain aspects. For example, Flores offered particular names and dates which are significant for the development of magical realism in Latin American literature and took on a more comprehensive approach in order to identify the sources of magical realism (Flores 1995, 113). Jorge Luis Borges is often considered the pioneer of magical realism. It was, in fact, Flores who first regarded Borges as a genuine magical realist and his A Universal History of Infamy as the earliest example of magical realist writing in Latin America. With Borges’s translation of the short stories of Franz Kafka into Spanish just few years before the publication of A Universal History of Infamy, magical realism reached the other side of the Atlantic. I agree with Arva that in Latin America, the colonial legacy, dictatorship, failed revolutions, capitalism (neocolonialism) and economic dependency, all paved the way for magical realism to enter the region’s literary domain. Flores strongly

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believed that the sense of the marvellous found in magical realist texts was an artistic outcome produced through narrative technique rather than the magnification of Latin American culture (Flores 1995, 115). He believes that texts from any historical, social, political or cultural background can be considered magical realist if they accomplish a “transformation of the common and everyday into the awesome and the unreal” (Flores 1995, 114) and if they have a narrative structure in which “[t]ime exists in a kind of timeless fluidity and the unreal happens as part of reality” (1995, 115). By strongly arguing that magical realism does not necessarily have to possess a cultural, social, political or historical origin, Flores freed the term from Latin American confinement and made it available for all. In response to Flores’s essay in 1955, Mexican art critic Luis Leal wrote an article in 1967, in which he disagreed with Flores’s definition of magical realism as the blending of realism and fantasy, and the group of writers he considered magical realists (Can 2015, 43). Leal notes: “[…] magical realism does not use dream motifs; neither does it distort reality or create imagined worlds, as writers of fantastic literature or science fiction do […]. In magical realism the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human acts” (Leal 1995, 121). According to Taner Can, in his article, Leal also emphasises the comparative discussion of magical realism and other neighbouring literary genres or modes such as fantasy and science fiction based on their aesthetic and stylistic features (Can 2015, 43 ࡳ 44). Although it is a misconception that magical realism is a distinct feature of Latin American literature, it is also true that it is the Latin American writers who were mainly responsible for making this particular literary mode a part of the established literary canon. The globalisation of magical realism is also paralleled by the change in its theoretical discussions. Stephen M. Hart recapitulates the change in the perception of magical realism in three phases: firstly, Angel Flores (1955) and Luis Leal (1967) in their initial works focused mainly on the formal features of the mode (Hart 2005, 5); secondly, critics started to shift the focus to social, cultural and ideological issues related to the mode after the initiation of postcolonial studies in the 1980s, and the most influential figure of the phase was Stephen Slemon with his 1988 essay “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse” (Hart 2005, 5 ࡳ 6); and thirdly, in the 1990s, a new paradigm appeared after the publication of Lois P. Zamora and Wendy B. Faris’s Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, which distinguished magical realism as a universal literary phenomenon and attempted to study the style in its historical background through existing literary theories

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(Hart 2005, 6). Many critics have closely associated magical realism with postcolonialism and postmodernism because of certain similarities between them. The way postmodernism is characterised by scepticism and pluralism matches the way magical realism questions the notion of a singular version of truth and reality and advocates multiple approaches and alternative truths. Just as postcolonialism attempts to depict colonial life or colonial history from the perspectives of the colonised people, magical realism also gives a voice to the oppressed and allows them to rewrite the official reading of the dominant history. It is a difficult task to decide whether a given author’s work shares specific aspects with the magical realist framework. Within the Latin American world, Gabriel García Márquez, with his One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), is probably the most significant practitioner of magical realism. Isabel Allende was one of the very first Latin American women novelists who achieved international recognition with her most famous novel The House of the Spirits (1982). In Europe, the novels of Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis, 1915), Günter Grass (The Tin Drum, 1959), Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children, 1981), Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1982), Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus, 1984), and Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, 1985) are considered magical realist. Nobel Prize-winning African American author Toni Morrison’s prominent work Beloved (1987) deals with a mother who kills her daughter so that she can save her from the clutches of slavery. Leslie Marmon Silko, with her novel Ceremony (1977), remains the most influential magical realist writer in Native American literature. Ana Castillo with So Far from God (1993) and Laura Esquivel with Like Water for Chocolate (1989) deserve to be mentioned as practitioners of magical realism in Chicano and Mexican literature respectively. Haruki Murakami with his Kafka on the Shore (2002) is considered a magical realist in Japanese literature; he is also internationally renowned and his work has been translated into many languages. According to Bowers, in Canadian literature, Jack Hodgins in The Invention of the World (1977) and Robert Kroetsch in What the Crow Said (1978) have introduced “a postmodern postcolonial form of magical realism” (Bowers 2004, 46). In Africa, especially in West Africa and South Africa, magical realism is strongly associated with postcolonialism. British Nigerian novelist Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) focuses on the hardship of an ‘abiku’ child8. Many 8

Abiku is a Yoruba word (a language spoken in West African countries such as Benin and Nigeria) which refers to a child who dies before the age of twelve. The spirit responsible for the death is also known as Abiku.

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South African novelists have used magical realism to portray the violence of apartheid and to rewrite the national history of South Africa. André Brink (Devil’s Valley, 1998), Anne Landsman (The Devil’s Chimney, 1997) and Zakes Mda (Ways of Dying, 1995) are some of the prominent South African magical realists. In writing on the Holocaust, authors such as D. M. Thomas (The White Hotel, 1981), Joseph Skibell (A Blessing on the Moon, 1997), and Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated, 2002) have relied on the magical realist technique. It can be understood from the above-mentioned list of novels, written in the magical realist framework, that this technique has been used by authors from various national and cultural backgrounds but always from a marginalised standpoint.

Types of Magical Realism The magical realist writers, according to Abrams, fuse a sharply carved realism in presenting everyday events and deceptive details along with fantastic elements and materials that originated from myths and tales (Abrams 2005, 196). Bowers states: “The variety of magical occurrences in magic(al) realist writing includes ghosts, disappearances, miracles, extraordinary talents and strange atmospheres …” (Bowers 2004, 21). According to Luis Leal, authors of magical realism do not construct imaginary worlds where we can escape from mundane reality. We should not forget that in their works, authors need not validate the mystery of events the way fantastic writers have to (Leal 1995, 121). Leal further states that, in magical realism, “the principal thing is not the creation of imaginary beings or worlds, but the discovery of the mysterious relationship between man and his circumstances” (Leal 1995, 122) and that magical realism tries “to seize the mystery that breathes behind things” (1995, 123). Regarding magical realism, it can well be asserted that it does not create a separate world of fantasy devoid of the elements of our own world. It rather shows the coexistence between two worlds which cannot be doubted or separated. Chanady states that in magical realism, we find two conflicting but consistent perspectives: one provides the logical observation of reality and the other the unquestioned recognition of the magical as part of a daily reality (Chanady 1985, 21 ࡳ 22). It is quite clear from Chanady that magical realism includes logical observation and that it is not completely devoid of reality. According to Anne Hegerfeldt, the fundamental aspect of magical realism is “the fusion of realistic and fantastic elements” or “the co-

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existence of elements from traditionally incompatible codes” (Hegerfeldt 2005, 50). Some traits of the magical realist trend are identified as the coexistence of the real and the imaginary, dexterous time shifts, complicated narratives and stories, various uses of dreams, myths, magic, rituals, folk and fairy stories, and the use of the opposite or duality. The repetitive narrative in a magical realist novel parallels with a distorted sense of time, space and identity. The use of the opposite or duality analyses any given event from more than one point of view and thus leads the reader closer to the truth or reality. In “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction”, Wendy B. Faris identifies some prime features of magical realist fiction: “an ‘irreducible element’ of magic, something we cannot explain according to the laws of the universe as we know them” (Faris 1995, 167); “descriptions detail a strong presence of the phenomenal world—this is the realism in magical realism, distinguishing it from much fantasy and allegory” (1995, 169); “the reader may hesitate (at one point or another) between two contradictory understandings of events—and hence experiences some unsettling doubts” (1995, 171); “the closeness or near-merging of two realms, two worlds” (1995, 172); and “these fictions question received ideas about time, space, and identity” (1995, 173). All these different statements share one aspect that is very crucial for magical realist writing: a complete blending of the magical and the ordinary or the simultaneous existence of two opposing realities. Magical realism has been classified into different types by different scholars based on various criteria. William Spindler has mentioned three types of magical realism based on the meaning of ‘magic’: 1. Metaphysical magical realism: A type of magical realism which, by depicting a scene as though it were something unseen, unheard and unknown, introduces a sense of unreality and the uncanny but does not clearly deal with the supernatural. 2. Anthropological magical realism: “[T]he survival in popular culture of a magical and mythical Weltanschauung, which coexists with the rational mentality generated by modernity [and] gives popular culture and magical beliefs the same degree of importance as Western science and rationality” (qtd. in Arva 2011, 105). 3. Ontological magical realism: An individual variety of magical realism where the supernatural appears in such a mundane way as though it did not conflict with reason, and where writers exercise absolute freedom in their writing.

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We can claim that the third kind of magical realism gives the author the freedom to deal with sensitive issues like trauma and repressed memory. It enables the author to represent a traumatic event in a more graspable way which might not be possible in a realist narrative. On the other hand, Christopher Warnes has divided magical realism into two types based on the way(s) they respond to causality: 1. Faith-based magical realism: Warnes defines this as an “attempt to supplement, extend or overwhelm causality with the terms of participation” (Warnes 2009, 11). Here, the supernatural “may stand synecdochically or metonymically for an alternative way of conceiving of reality usually derived from a non-Western belief system or world view” (Warnes 2009, 14). 2. Irreverent magical realism: Here, “an event or presence, which is not rationalised or explained away, nonetheless stands in place of an idea or a set of ideas, say, about the ways language constructs reality, or about the incapacities of binaristic thinking” (Warnes 2009, 14 ࡳ 15). The first type of magical realism considers reality as something not absolute, but rather something which can be manipulated. Thus, it advocates the notion of an alternative truth or reality. It challenges the official reading of traumatic history and replaces it with a subversive one from the perspectives of the victimised. The second type of magical realist text employs the supernatural for the purpose of defamiliarisation or estrangement, which is a method normally supported by other metaphorical and metafictional devices. This sense of defamiliarisation or estrangement is evident in One Hundred Years of Solitude where ordinary objects like a magnet and ice are imbued with a magical aura and are thus made unfamiliar. Again, Roberto Echevarría classified magical realism as the ontological and the epistemological: 1. Ontological magical realism: This type takes the source material from the social and cultural background of the place(s) where the text is set. 2. Epistemological magical realism: For the source(s) of its magical realist elements, this particular type does not necessarily depend on the social and cultural background of the fiction or of the writer.

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Jeanne Delbaere identified a similar sort of difference between what she termed “folkloric magical realism” (which is similar to Roberto Echevarría’s ontological magical realism) where magical realism derives from a domestic or folk tradition, and “scholarly magical realism” (which is similar to epistemological magical realism) where magical elements are collected and assimilated from various traditions and cultures to create a specific narrative effect. In both texts, which will be analysed in the chapter on slavery, magical realism originates from native culture and tradition: in Beloved, from African mythology and folk tradition, and in Moi, Tituba, Sorcière … Noire de Salem, from a Caribbean cultural context. In A Blessing on the Moon and The White Hotel, analysed in the Holocaust chapter, magical realist elements are collected from Jewish cultural context, tradition and mythology. Both Ways of Dying and David’s Story, written on the theme of apartheid and transition violence, contain magical realism with an origin in South African custom, ritual, heritage and mythology. For the purpose of this book, I would like to focus on magical realism from three different perspectives: conceptual, structural and functional. From a conceptual or thematic point of view, magical realism is characterised by the coexistence of magical and realistic elements, the presence of ghosts, local rituals and mythologies. Authors of all the texts I will analyse in my book exercise boundless freedom and use their source materials from the local context. From a structural standpoint, the magical realist narrative is a repetitive and non-linear one. From a functional perspective, this non-linear narrative questions the accepted notions of time, space, identity, history and truth. By using narrators who are unreliable, many magical realist novels disrupt the notion of a singular version of truth and provide an alternative version of events and history. The subversive and transgressive power of magical realism enables the oppressed to reverse the power structure. By penetrating the rigid wall of traumatic historical events, the magical realist technique gives them an accessible literary representation. Last but not least, by creating an imaginary realm, it provides the characters with consolation.

Experimenting with Genre and Magical Realism Magical realism is not completely detached from realism, but rather the coexistence and representation of both real and fantastic elements as if they were both real. According to Bowers, it depends on realism but only to extend “what is acceptable as real to its limits”; it is thus connected to

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realism but as a narrative style different from it (Bowers 2004, 22). According to Lois P. Zamora, “[M]agical realist texts share (and extend) the tradition of narrative realism: they, too, aim to present a credible version of experienced reality. The crucial difference is that magical realist texts amplify the very conception of ‘experienced reality’ by presenting fictional worlds that are multiple, permeable, transformative, animistic” (Zamora 1995, 500). Zamora’s statement refers to a subjective world with multiple versions of truth and reality. Unlike realism, magical realism denies the idea of the existence of one reality and one truth, and believes that truth and reality can be interpreted in more than one way. According to Arva, another important difference between realism and magical realism lies in the treatment of “fictional illusion”: while realism assumes that the reader “would suspend their disbelief in the act of reading”, magical realism expects the reader “both to acknowledge and to accept the illusion of the fictional world, but without surrendering to its games of deceit, as if it were a supplementation of their experienced reality” (Arva 2011, 108). Magical realism thus stresses the unquestioned existence and acceptance of the magical in a realistic setting. According to Bowers, some critics have found association between magical realism and surrealism although the early concept of magic realism (applied to paintings) and its relationship with surrealism differs widely from magical realism (the contemporary narrative style and literary genre) which has no real association with surrealism (Bowers 2004, 23). Both surrealist and magical realist writing possess a revolutionary attitude because surrealist writers “attempted to write against realist literature that reflected and reinforced what they considered to be bourgeois society’s idea of itself, and magic[al] realism holds immense political possibilities in its disruption of categories” (Bowers 2004, 23). By using its subversive and transgressive power, magical realism blurs the border between the oppositions, and thus, to some extent, shows its close association with the carnivalesque. Bowers again comments that surrealism is concerned not with bodily or earthly reality but with imagination and mind. Magical realism does not really represent the supernatural in the shape of dreams or psychological incidents “because to do so takes the magic out of recognizable material reality and places it into the little understood world of the imagination” (Bowers 2004, 24). It is the coexistence of the mundane and the extraordinary as if they both were real which distinguishes magical realism from surrealism. Weisgerber states: “While surrealism unites the poles of the everyday and the imaginary, and the fantastic requires (challenges) one to choose one of the two opposites, magical realism simply keeps showing their simultaneity without asking for a solution”

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(qtd. in Arva 2011, 110). It can be surmised from this statement that there is a simultaneous existence between the mundane and the extraordinary without any doubt or explanation and that the magical has always been deep-rooted in the reality. Another genre that is associated with magical realism is the fantastic, where it is assumed that magical realism is a kind of fantasy. Arva believes that magical realist writing is an offshoot of the fantastic genre because of the existence of the supernatural and the extraordinary; he, however, warns that every fantastic work cannot automatically be considered magical realist (Arva 2011, 99–100). According to Tzvetan Todorov, in fantastic literature or narrative, there is a persistent oscillation “between belief and non-belief” in supernatural and extraordinary event(s): “the fantastic depends on the reader’s hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations for the fictional occurrences in the text. This may be a hesitation that is shared with a character in the novel, or it may be stressed in the text to produce a theme of uncertainty and hesitation” (Todorov 1975, 25 ࡳ 26). Amaryll Beatrice Chanady argues that the most basic difference between fantasy and magical realism is that whereas in magical realism characters and readers accept the presence of magical or supernatural elements or events as part of reality without being disturbed by them, in fantastic narrative the same events or elements intrude and deliberately disturb the rational world. In Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomy, Chanady points out differences between magical realist literature and fantasy literature (the fantastic) based on three common dimensions: first, the use of “antinomy”, that is, the coexistence of two contradictory codes (Chanady 1985, 18); second, the inclusion of phenomena which cannot be incorporated into a rational framework (1985, 26); and third, the employment of “authorial reticence” (1985, 30). Chanady explains that although authorial reticence bothers the reader in fantasy, in magical realism it enables the author to present both the supernatural and the natural as equally valid without any hierarchy (1985, 30). Science fiction, which is assumed by many to be a type of fantasy fiction concerned with space and time, differs from magical realism because “it is set in a world different from any known reality and its realism resides in the fact that we can recognize it as a possibility for our future” (Bowers 2004, 30). What Bowers implies is that unlike magical realism, science fiction does not have any realistic setting. Some critics and theorists have also considered the uncanny (originally coined by Freud as unheimlich) as a style of writing. David Mikics, in particular, finds that both the uncanny

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and magical realist writing depend on the continuous interaction between the normal and the extraordinary: Magical realism, like the uncanny, a mode with which it has strong affinities, projects a mesmerizing uncertainty suggesting that ordinary life may also be the scene of the extraordinary. … Both the uncanny and magical realism narrate fantastic events not merely alongside real ones, but as if they were real. What seems most strange turns out to be secretly familiar. (Mikics 1995, 372 ࡳ 373)

What Mikics suggests is that in both magical realism and the uncanny, there is a parallel employment of both the real and the fantastic, where the real becomes uncertain because it appears very much like a dream but the dream is too real to be considered a dream. Mikics says again: “Magical realism is a mode or subset of the uncanny in which the uncanny exposes itself as a historical and cultural phenomenon. Magical realism realizes the conjunction of ordinary and fantastic by focusing on a particular historical moment, afflicted or graced by this doubleness” (Mikics 1995, 373). Mikics’ statement shows magical realism’s close association with historical events. Because it possesses mysterious and magical qualities, magical realism is able to interpret events which are considered ineffable and ungraspable because of their containing a large amount of trauma. The book strongly believes that in order to depict traumatic events from the perspectives of the oppressed, rather than of the oppressors, writers look for an alternative narrative with subversive potential; it argues for the magical realist narrative as this alternative or subversive mode of writing.

Magical Realism as a Genre Magical realism is the very opposite of what is called the absolutist and the traditional. Through magical events, writers can find new viewpoints and open new windows through which they can see the world differently. Magical realist works help us think of the ordinary events or issues we come across daily in a different way; the works thus provide us with a different perception of reality. Simpkins says that, apart from presenting the supernatural in mundane ways, an ordinary object, through the process of ‘defamiliarisation’, becomes unrealistic and magical. This interplay between the supernatural and the ordinary turns magical realism into a unique narrative technique which produces more realistic texts (Simpkins 1995, 150).

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Because of its inherent transgressive and subversive qualities, magical realism has become a common narrative style for novels written from the point of view of the politically, socially or culturally powerless, such as native people living under a colonial system, Native Americans and African Americans in the US, women living in a patriarchal society, or people living with different cultural and religious beliefs in another country where they are the minority. These transgressive and subversive aspects of magical realism have been used, for instance, “in the English feminist Angela Carter’s writing, to subvert the authority of the British ruling classes” (Bowers 2004, 67); “in the case of Salman Rushdie, to bring into question the truth of the British version of Indian colonial and postcolonial history” (2004, 67); in Toni Morrison’s writing to express the cruelties and traumatic experiences of slavery which were largely ignored in the white slave-owners’ history; and in the writing of Jeanette Winterson to write from the perspectives of homosexuals. It is clear from the remarks above that magical realism is a strong blow against a dominant culture and a singular version of truth. It is also a subversive form of writing which is used to challenge the dominant writing (official history) by representing traumatic events from the standpoint of the oppressed. Stephen Slemon has contributed largely to the connecting of magical realism and postcolonialism. In “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse”, he considers magical realism the instrument of “the silenced, marginalized, or dispossessed voices [in their fight against] the inherited, dominant modes of discourse and cognition in colonialism’s ‘phenomenal legacy’” (Slemon 1995, 414). According to Slemon, it is an instrument for addressing social and political issues while turning away from the Western and dominant style of narration and literary tradition, and thus asserting one’s own sense of identity. He also emphasises that “magic[al] realism as a literary practice seems to be closely linked with a perception of ‘living on the margins’ encoding within it, perhaps, a concept of resistance to the massive imperial centre and its totalising systems” (Slemon 1995, 408). So, in this sense, magical realism is not only a simple attempt to see and explain the world in a different way but also a strong protest against the social, cultural and political hegemony of imperial thought (1995, 408). It provides the oppressed with a voice and attempts to recuperate forgotten, silenced or denied histories. Since the atrocities of various traumatic historical events cannot be represented in a realist narrative because of its inability to penetrate the outer shell of trauma, authors need some alternative kind of narrative

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which resists representations. Magical realism is the representation of what language cannot represent. Now, the question is how magical realism accesses and recreates the impenetrable and unreachable reality of various traumatic events from a more apprehensible point of view. Through multiple perspectives on reality and disruption of categories, magical realist writers create a fictional realm, and employ empathy and imagination in turning traumatic memory into a narrative. This particular narrative technique wraps traumatic events under mist and magic, and presents them to the reader in a graspable way so as not to disgust or repel them. I strongly believe that unlike traditional realism, magical realism is able to portray violent and traumatic events by mixing myth and magic with them, but at the same time succeeds in providing the reader with the intended message without distorting historical views. In this sense, magical realism should not, and must not, be considered an escape from violent or lethal situations, rather a universal approach to representing social, cultural and political reality and violent historical events.

Traumatising History and Magical Realism Various traumatic historical events—war, genocide, slavery, racial segregation, colonisation, and social and political upheaval—are extremely difficult to represent in literature, particularly through traditional realist narratives that seem unable to penetrate the inaccessible spheres of violence, cruelty, suffering and pain, all of which cause trauma. Thomas Elsaesser remarks that because “trauma potentially suspends the normal categories of storytelling, it [is] necessary that we revise our traditional accounts of narrative and narration” (Elsaesser 2001, 199). Writers like Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez have dealt with colonial violence and its legacy, as well as social, political and cultural violence in an attempt to heal historical wounds by rewriting history itself. Toni Morrison and Maryse Condé have depicted the violence of slavery along with physical and sexual violence against female slaves. They have attempted to help characters survive oppression (Condé), to heal a traumatic past (Morrison), and to rewrite history from the perspectives of slaves. Jonathan Safran Foer, Joseph Skibell and D. M. Thomas have all represented the Holocaust. They have dealt with the trauma of victims and survivors as well as transgenerational trauma (Foer and Skibell), and established a nexus between the personal trauma of the main character and the collective trauma of genocide (Thomas). André Brink, Zakes Mda and Zoë Wicomb have described apartheid and anti-apartheid violence where they strive to reimagine, reinvent and rewrite South Africa’s past (Brink

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and Mda). They also express a hope for a better future (Mda), and portray institutionalised violence against women (Wicomb). All these authors, from different national and cultural backgrounds, have dealt with ineffable historical trauma where they have written from the perspectives of the oppressed and marginalised and employed an alternative narrative technique for which I propose the magical realist narrative. Writers who aim to depict stories of atrocious events, which official history and/or a dominant narrative have denied, are largely dependent on an alternative writing style. This alternative writing must not be one that merely imitates the traditional narrative, but rather one that challenges the hegemony of the dominant narrative so that it can bring inexpressible and silenced stories to light by giving voice to the oppressed. A magical realist text, dealing with trauma (personal and historical), provides characters with relief through the help of the supernatural but it does not distort our or their sense of reality. It possesses the ability to depict what common perception and the realist narrative tend to ignore. My analysis has shown that the magical realist narrative possesses the potential to be one form of language to represent trauma. Before making any final remarks, I would like to analyse some novels which represent the horrors of the Holocaust, slavery and apartheid, and to observe whether magical realism is really capable of providing a literary representation of trauma and pain that originated from these historical events. Apart from the trauma of mass destructions and atrocities, I will also focus on trauma suffered by female victims during those events in the form of physical, psychological and sexual abuse and torture. I have already talked about the essentiality of empathy and imagination in turning trauma into a narrative through the magical realist technique. This empathy is crucial because a safe and hopeful future for the sufferers cannot be foreseen unless and until the ghosts of the past, the traumatic events, and the forgotten and silenced voices have been confronted and understood. The reader, just like the fictional characters, must learn that they can neither ignore the past nor hide from it. One may question the necessity of remembering and reviving these traumatic historical events, and one may emphasise the fact that we can easily lead our lives without thinking of those past events. The truth is that we cannot ignore or forget our past even if we wanted to do so. Moreover, we should have the courage to remember it properly. To quote Slavoj Žižek: “[I]n order really to forget an event, we must first summon up the strength to remember it properly. […] we should bear in mind that the opposite of existence is not nonexistence, but insistence: that which does not exist, continues to insist,

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striving towards existence” (Žižek 2002, 22). Magical realism writes about trauma and pain, and, through magic and imagination, brings back to our minds traumatic memories of both personal and historical events which we do not want to remember but cannot forget either.

CHAPTER 4 LACKING THE LANGUAGE: MAGICAL REALISM AND TRAUMA IN HOLOCAUST LITERATURE

German scholar Theodor Adorno wrote that “after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric” because it meant “to squeeze aesthetic pleasure out of artistic representation of the naked bodily pain of those who have been knocked down by rifle butts. […] It is transfigured and stripped of some of its horror, and with this, injustice is already done to the victims” (qtd. in Howe 1988, 179). Adorno’s comment raises the question of the problems and difficulties of the literary representations of the extremity, horrors, atrocities, and the resulting trauma of the Holocaust: whether one should talk and write about it or keep silent in order to respect victims who can no longer speak for themselves. Just like Adorno, some other scholars have also been disturbed by the idea of the fictional reconstruction of the Holocaust, which they consider to be insulting for victims. Schwarz says that some have suggested that non-Jewish writers have no authority to talk about the genocide; some have objected to the use of fantasy as inappropriate to represent the events and some are completely against any representation of the Holocaust (Schwarz 2000, 3 ࡳ 4). While acknowledging the validity of Adorno’s objections, scholars like Lawrence Langer have considered his opinions dogmatic (Langer 1975, 2). In supporting Langer, Primo Levi and many other survivors of the Holocaust have mentioned that if people do not want an atrocious historical event like the Holocaust to be repeated, it is essential that they remember the genocide and pay due respect to its victims (Arva 2011, 217). Now, the question is how one can remember the Nazi atrocities and pay due homage to the victims without talking and writing about the event. Again, if one is to talk and write about it, it raises the question of the appropriateness of different modes of representation. Literary representation of the Holocaust is not disrespectful to the victims, rather the opposite. In order not to let the Holocaust disappear with the passage of time, someone should take the responsibility of a proxy witness to talk for the victims

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who did not survive to tell their stories, and for survivors who were not able to do so for one reason or another. Blustein argues that by doing so, proxies may exercise victims’ “right to tell the truth about [their] life and experience, a right which is of fundamental importance for moral agency” (Blustein 2008, 344 ࡳ 345). Blustein’s statement emphasises the necessity of telling someone else’s story who could not do it, and associates the act of telling with moral responsibility. The Holocaust which caused the death of six million Jews between 1939 and 1945 “has not only challenged established beliefs in the moral progress and superiority of European civilization, but also crushed whatever confidence Western society at large might still have had in its ‘intrinsic’ goodness and sense of justice” (Arva 2011, 217). This particular event was part of a master plan of the Nazi administration to oppress and systematically exterminate a range of ethnic and political groups, and it is characterised by extreme ferocity and horror. There are contrasting arguments for and against the literary representation of the Holocaust—an event which many regard as unique. Supporting the literary representation of the horrific events, Daniel R. Schwarz argues that in order to give meaning to an event like the Holocaust, authors need to write about it: “[…] the search for fictions to render the Holocaust, the quest for form and meaning, is different in degree but not kind from other artistic quests, and it does no dishonor to memory to say so” (Schwarz 2000, 37). Schwarz proposes: “If the Nazis succeeded in turning words either into charred bone and flesh or skeletons that survived in terror—bodies almost completely deprived of their materiality—then writing about the Holocaust paradoxically restores the uniqueness of the human spirit by restoring the imaginative to its proper place and breathes new life into the materiality of victims and survivors” (Schwarz 2000, 37). Is a narrative not able to provide an order and sequence to an event, and shape it with meaning and purpose? Schwarz answers: “Narratives have words and a voice. Because of its witness, actual and imaginative, the Holocaust lives as narratives that become part of our lives” (Schwarz 2000, 23). Through the fictional depiction of the Holocaust, we turn it into a part of our life and make sure that the memory of victims and survivors do not fade away. Writing about a unique historical event like the Holocaust is not only difficult but also risky. In his essay, “After the Holocaust”, Appelfeld has written that “the problem, and not only the artistic problem, has been to remove the Holocaust from its enormous, inhuman dimensions and bring it close to human beings” (Appelfeld 1988, 92). He opines that the Holocaust

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“seems so thoroughly unreal [that we] need to bring it down to the human realm” (1988, 92). In Preempting the Holocaust, Lawrence L. Langer remarks: “Holocaust reality limits rather than liberates the vision of the writer, historian, or artist who ventures to represent it” (Langer 1998, xviii ࡳ xix). Berel Lang does not think that the best representation of the Holocaust would be to reproduce it as accurately as possible or to recreate the event itself (Lang 2000, 13). He argues: “The value of historical nonrepresentational representation is exactly here, in its representation of the events that occurred without mediation but also without bringing the events themselves once again to life” (Lang 2000, 13). According to Rothberg, the problems and challenges of the literary representation of the Holocaust have been highlighted by many scholars including Elie Wiesel who asserted that “Auschwitz cannot be explained nor can it be visualized. … [T]he Holocaust transcends history” (qtd. in Rothberg 2000, 5); Claude Lanzmann, who states that his “film Shoah forgoes any attempt to represent the Holocaust, and declares any attempt to understand the events ‘obscene’” (Rothberg 2000, 5); and Arthur Cohen, who uses the concept of the “tremendum”, a “holocaustal caesura” that makes “[t]hinking and the death camps […] incommensurable” (qtd. in Rothberg 2000, 5). Rothberg argues that this discourse of “obscenity”, “tremendum”, and “holocaustal caesura” separates the extreme from the ordinary sphere and seeks to destroy established and traditional means of representation (Rothberg 2000, 5). However, some recent critics have argued that whether the Holocaust should be represented is no longer a significant discourse. Spargo, for instance, has suggested that the anxiety in regards to the representation of the Holocaust has significantly declined in the last few decades (Spargo 2009, 6 ࡳ 7). Susanne Rohr and Sophia Komor point out a shift from the question of whether and how the Holocaust can be represented to the question of how Holocaust discourse functions and what traditions it normally uses (Rohr and Komor 2010, 10). According to Rothberg, two approaches to the literary representation of the Holocaust are dominant, which he labelled as “realist and antirealist” (Rothberg 2000, 3). He explains these approaches: By realist I mean both an epistemological claim that the Holocaust is knowable and a representational claim that this knowledge can be translated into a familiar mimetic universe. … By antirealist I mean both a claim that the Holocaust is not knowable or would be knowable only under radically new regimes of knowledge and that it cannot be captured in traditional representational schemata. (Rothberg 2000, 3 ࡳ 4)

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My observation is that Rothberg refers to the possibility of translating but the impossibility of reproducing the Holocaust reality into language, which actually shows the ability of language to transmit rather than to (re)create historical reality. Rothberg summarises that an antirealist approach “removes the Holocaust from standard historical, cultural, or autobiographical narratives and situates it as a sublime, unapproachable object beyond discourse and knowledge” (Rothberg 2000, 4). Again, regarding traumatic events and their literary representations, Ernst Van Alphen states: “The problem is not the nature of the event, nor an intrinsic limitation of representation; rather, it is the split between the living of an event and the available forms of representation with/in which the event can be experienced” (Van Alphen 1999, 27). Van Alphen’s statement stresses the appropriateness of a narrative mode to represent the Holocaust. I believe neither a realist nor an antirealist approach to the Holocaust is sufficient. This is where magical realism comes into play and constitutes a particular example of what Rothberg terms “traumatic realism” which “mediates between the realist and antirealist positions in Holocaust Studies through a hybrid approach to historical referentiality” (Rothberg 2000, 9). Most of the writers who have written imaginative literature on the theme of the Holocaust have no direct experience with the event: some are descendants of Holocaust survivors; some are Jews but had no Holocaust victims in their families; and some have no relationship with the event at all. Writing a piece of literature on the Holocaust without having direct experience of the event sometimes becomes problematic as most critics of Holocaust literature are inclined to question the authority of a proxy witness’s voice by their background, religion or connection to the event. However, since the survivors’ generation is slowly disappearing and very soon there will be no authentic voices alive to speak about the Holocaust, witness accounts have been replaced by more fictional literary representations of the event. This type of representation might be less reliable than witness/survivor accounts but it still possesses a legitimacy of its own. Although imaginative Holocaust literature, according to Jessica Ortner, “cannot bear witness to the facts of the events, it can bear witness to the reality of the Holocaust by artistically reshaping the incapacity of the human mind to grasp and rationalize the ‘limit experiences’ of extreme violence and atrocity” (Ortner 2014, 83). Ortner argues that representing the Holocaust sometimes becomes problematic for those authors who are the descendants of Holocaust victims or survivors. Although these authors have no direct experience of the Holocaust, they are obsessed with and haunted by a history they have

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never lived and can never completely know (Ortner 2014, 83). Ortner’s statement brings to light the complex condition of the post-war generations and at the same time their responsibility in relating the traumatic stories of their forefathers. Jonathan Safran Foer and Joseph Skibell have described how they inherited the silence over the Holocaust issue from their parents who had inherited the same silence from their parents; they never talked about the Holocaust but it haunted their dining table like a dense layer of fog. Magical realism, according to Jenni Adams, “offers an important strategy in attempts to continue the project of Holocaust representation into the post-testimonial era, permitting a form of literary engagement with these events that nevertheless acknowledges its ethical and experiential distance from the real” (Adams 2011, 1 ࡳ 2). Magical realism can be depicted and employed as a response to the difficulties and risks in Holocaust representation. John Burt Foster Jr. suggested that magical realism “characteristically responded to the harshness of modern history by developing a compensatory vision” (Foster 1995, 271), a response that might be ethically problematic, approaching what Eric Santner refers to as “the construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called that narrative into being in the first place” (Santner 1992, 144). Magical realism provides an artistic and intellectual solution to the issue of understanding and representing the genocide. Fictions written on the Holocaust are full of bloodshed, pain, extremity, unimaginable violence and inexpressible trauma suffered by both men and women. I am not going to compare the literary representation of male and female suffering during the Holocaust, nor am I arguing that the misery of one sex was more catastrophic than the other. However, according to Copeland, there is considerable evidence that apart from suffering racially, women also suffered sexually during the Holocaust (Copeland 2003, 2). She also argues that female suffering and the resulting trauma were largely ignored or underrepresented in fictional Holocaust narratives (Copeland 2003, 2). The writers of the novels that the book will discuss in the Holocaust sectionʊJoseph Skibell (A Blessing on the Moon) and D. M. Thomas (The White Hotel)ʊhave no direct experience of the Holocaust. Skibell is a Jewish-American and was born long after the end of World War II. He is the great-grandson of a Holocaust victim in Poland. Born in 1935 in the United Kingdom, neither D. M. Thomas nor his family suffered in the Holocaust. All his knowledge and understanding of the event came through reading. Since neither of the writers witnessed the

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Holocaust or possessed any memories of the event, they recreated and represented its horrors in their novels. They did this by relying on the magical realist narrative, as I will show in the following.

Heavy Silence and Horrible Grief: Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon In “Making Sense of the World”, Joseph Skibell tells Andrew Beierle about his grandfather’s escape to the United States along with two of his brothers to survive the Holocaust as well as about his (Skibell’s) concern with the horrific death of his relatives during the Holocaust: When I was growing up, my grandfather and two of his brothers were living in my town. They never talked at all about these people, and as a normally sensitive child, I picked up on it. That silence was very palpable for me. As a child, I assumed that there was some sort of shame in it. Instead, I realized later that it was just horrible, horrible grief. (Beierle 1999)

The statement shows the unspeakable trauma of the Holocaust and the survivors’ reluctance to talk about it because of the brutality it entailed. Just like other writers from the second and third generations of Holocaust survivors who have no experience of the horrific event, Skibell attempts to recover a family history which, apart from some photographs, has completely disappeared with the passage of time. Through the ghostly figure of Chaim, he attempts to access a past he has never experienced, to reconstruct this inaccessible past from an imaginative standpoint, and to revive his great-grandfather out of silence. By giving voice to Chaim Skibelski, he has actually given the oppressed and murdered Jews a voice and thus enabled them to narrate their untold stories. A Blessing on the Moon can be considered an attempt to revive the victims of the Holocaust and to place them on the border between fantasy and reality in order to give them a voice. Although Skibell attempted to revive his great-grandfather and other Jewish victims, he received criticism because of his apparently disrespectful style of representing the victims. According to Michelle Ephraim, although Skibell uses the name of his great-grandfather as the narrator in the novel, academics and researchers have criticised the book for going against “the unspoken rules of Holocaust fiction by representing Jewish victims not as heroic martyrs, but as a group laden with human imperfections. … Skibell’s novel fails […] because the author neglects a social responsibility to represent victims

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with the utmost reverence” (qtd. in Kersell 1999, 20). Although Ephraim criticised Skibell for not showing respect to the murdered Jews and for depicting them as a group of people with human errors instead of mythifying them, it is this natural depiction which makes the reader empathise with the victims. Chaim Skibelski’s portrayal as an ordinary human being, no different from the rest of us, wins our empathy for him, thus emphasising rather than reducing the horror of the event. So, it can be claimed that Skibell depicts Chaim as the representative of the oppressed Jews with a voice to provide us an alternative history which is very different from the one written by the dominant authority, and thus unknown to the outside world.

“Everyone I Know Has Disappeared into the Ash”: Traumatic Memories and Alternative Voices The reader encounters the issue of trauma from the very first scene of the novel: the death scene of Chaim and his fellow Jews. Just like the massacre scenes in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (which depicts the Jallianwala Bagh massacre) and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (which depicts the killing of the protesting labourers), Skibell is also short of words: They rounded us up, took us out to the forests. We stood there, shivering, like trees in uneven rows, and one by one we fell. No one was brave enough to turn and look. Guns kept cracking in the air. Something pushed into my head. It was hard, like a rock. I fell. But I was secretly giddy. I thought they had missed me. […] I was lying in a pit with all my neighbors, true, but I was ecstatic. … And later, as dusk gathered, I climbed out of the grave […] and I ran through the forests. Nobody saw me. (Skibell 2010, 3 ࡳ 4)

This quotation shows the brutality of the soldiers and the helplessness of the Jews. It also shows Chaim’s desire to be alive, which is a universal phenomenon. In depicting the entire scene, Skibell relies on physical sensation rather than on language. Everything happens so quickly that, apart from being violent, this scene also seems exciting to Skibell. It is crucial for the reader to admit that, even after his death, Chaim will behave like any normal human being, and that he will be able to communicate with the world of the living in an intelligible way. The

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unconditional acceptance of a dead person as a living one strongly indicates the use of magical realist technique in the novel. Being a dead person, Chaim could well be considered an unreliable narrator: one significant feature of magical realism. Thus, the story he tells from the perspectives of the victimised will obviously be different from that of the victimiser since he himself faced atrocity and even returned to the world of the living after his death. Renders believes that the process of working thorough trauma, which is manifested in Chaim’s suffering and wandering after his death, reaches its peak in the very last part of the novel when Chaim sets out on a mission for the mysterious moon that will finally be returned to the sky (Renders 2010, 10). The accomplishment of his mission will restore not only his life but also the future of the entire Jewish race as portrayed in the novel. Apart from Chaim’s trauma, the novel is also characterised by what LaCapra has called the “contagiousness of trauma” (LaCapra 2004, 81), which is shown by the condition of Ola, a Polish girl; LaCapra terms her situation “surrogate victimage” (LaCapra 2004, 114). The dirty conditions of her room, according to Grimwood, “come gradually to resemble those of a concentration camp’s barracks, rendering visible through her illness what has been covered over by law, society, and her family: the disappearance and murder of the Jews” (Grimwood 2007, 93 ࡳ 94). Comparing the condition of Ola’s room with that of a concentration camp indicates the omnipresence of trauma in the novel. Renders says that magical realist writers eliminate the difference between reality and magic and create exactly the sense of uncertainty and discomfort required to shift the terror of the Holocaust to the reader (Renders 2010, 10). She again states that Skibell takes the reader into a magical world consisting of “the walking dead Jews, the falling moon, Jesus and Mary floating in a carriage, the transformation of a rabbi into a crow, the talking wolves, the magical healing river, the talking head of the German, and other magical elements as if they were really there in the reality of the novel” (Renders 2010, 10). Again, after coming out of his grave, Chaim walks to his village and notices some strange phenomena: “When I got to our village, everything was gone. A dozen workmen were lifting all the memories into carts and driving off. … In front of every house were piles of vows and promises, all in broken pieces. How I could see such things, I cannot tell you” (Skibell 2010, 4). The broken pieces of memories and promises actually refer to the unfulfilled dream or desire of the dead Jews and Chaim is not at all astonished by the magical fact that he can see abstract objects or concepts, such as memories and promises, just like material objects. Another magical event takes place after Chaim’s

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death when he finds himself capable of understanding the language of animals such as pigs and goats: ‘“Can we rely on the villagers for protection?’ one of the pigs says, his voice quavering with rage. ‘Think again, my friends,’ a goat warns, shaking his gray beard, although none of them seems convinced” (Skibell 2010, 7). This quotation might refer to the fact that the unimaginable extent of the atrocity of the Holocaust forces even animals to be concerned and scared, and thus shows their lack of confidence in the villagers. Furthermore, when Chaim realises that he is dead but still able to think and feel, he does not seem to be surprised and accepts this magical fact as a part of reality. He even discusses the ordinary life of the people who have occupied his residence: AT HOME, ANDRZEJ and his cousins are playing cards. A bottle of potato vodka stands in the middle of their green-felt card table. There are small tumblers for everyone. “If the yids want the moon,” Big Andrzej says, removing one of my best cigars from between his teeth, “then what’s it to us?” […] “Let them keep it,” he says. “They’re the only ones who ever used it. It’s not as if they took the sun.” “Now that would be a crime,” his wife says, moving through the room with an armful of dirty plates. (Skibell 2010, 26)

To emphasise the realism of the scene, Skibell seems to describe the ordinary and everyday features of life—a family playing cards, a bottle of vodka, Andrzej’s cigar, a woman washing the dishes—in great detail. The magical or impossible fact that the moon is missing from the sky seems just a part of everyday conversation, a part of ordinary life. This unquestioned coexistence of mundane events and magical issues suggests that the employment of magical realism in the text displays a deeper understanding of suffering and sorrow. It can be asserted that many magical realist elements in Skibell’s novel symbolically convey a sense of trauma. Chaim’s being threatened and attacked by the same soldier who shot him at the beginning of the novel— “‘One step more,’ he says, ‘and I’ll kill you again’” (Skibell 2010, 93)— can be read as a sign of the repetitive compulsion characterising the process of acting out trauma. However, this time Chaim understands that the soldier cannot shot and kill him because he is already dead; he, thus, fights back. The appearance of a dead person—here, a murdered soldier— in the midst of reality is a vital feature of the magical realism. Because of

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the subversive power of magical realism, the power hierarchy is reversed in that the perpetrator (the soldier) depends on the pity of the victim (Chaim). By bringing the dead Jews back to life in his novel, Skibell makes the victims more powerful than their killers. Decavele states: “Since magical realism draws on temporal and spatial confusion to disorientate its characters and readers, it is only a small step for the mode to simulate traumatic disorientation” (Decavele 2014, 25). Chaim loses track of time after his death: “It must be late. Although I carry my pocketwatch, the numbers no longer make any sense to me. The golden sticks whirl around and around chasing each other, but I have forgotten how to understand the little races that they daily perform” (Skibell 2010, 18). Again, after surviving the incineration at Hotel Amfortas, Chaim experiences a complete loss of the sense of space: “I feel like a sleepwalker who awakens far from his home with no idea how he arrived here” (Skibell 2010, 187). This loss of sense of time and space, which is a magical realist element, indicates Chaim being engulfed with the high level of the trauma. Again, the return of the traumatic event gives Chaim the chance to face the event of his death once again, and thus enables him to overcome his trauma. The persistence of traumatic memories is also evident in the scene where Chaim sits with his family members around a dinner table at the gorgeous Hotel Amfortas and talks about the way each of them died: ‘“A medical experiment,’ [Markus] says, and he cannot stop laughing. ‘Doctors from Berlin to Frankfurt are probably drowning their patients at this very moment, and all thanks to me’” (Skibell 2010, 149)! The grandson’s light account of a grave event like a medical killing makes Chaim think of the heinous crime of the victimisers: “How is it possible for men to make laws against another man’s life, so that by merely living, he is guilty of a crime? And what kind of men enforce such laws, when they could be out in a clear day, boating or hiking or running to their mistresses instead” (Skibell 2010, 149 ࡳ 150)? However, these questions are asked not only by Chaim or Skibell, but rather by all Holocaust survivors and scholars. Although initially Hotel Amfortas seems to be a safe place for the Jews, later it is revealed to be a slaughterhouse for them. Chaim loses his dead family members one more time, a magical notion which again indicates his being possessed by trauma: I close my eyes and see only the ovens and their flames, their blue tongues licking across the bodies of my Ester, my Sarah, my Edzia, my Miriam, my Hadassah, my Laibl; consuming my sons-in-law and their children,

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Chapter 4 Markus, Solek, Israel, Pavel, Pola, Jakob, Sabina, Marek and his daughters; devouring my town as well. Everyone I know, everyone I have ever known, has disappeared into the ash. I have torn my clothes and fallen to my knees, but my grief is insufficient. Were the oceans made of tears and the winds of sighing, still there would not be tears enough nor sighs to assuage my crumpled heart. (Skibell 2010, 191 ࡳ 192)

This magical phenomenon also allows him to re-experience the unbearable pain of losing near and dear ones, and thus enables him to look at the matter from a different perspective and to find consolation. By giving voices to Holocaust victims and by making their voices heard, the magical realist narrative emphasises the importance of storytelling in the process of healing trauma.

Individualising Intense Grief, Extreme Traumatisation and Obsession with the Past Unlike other products of imagination, pain may rarely be depicted in language (Arva 2011, 83) because pain is “objectless, it cannot easily be objectified in any form, material or verbal. But it is also its objectlessness that may give rise to imagining…” (Scarry 1985, 161 ࡳ 162). Scarry’s statement is very interesting as it hints at the subjectivity of pain. With regard to Scarry’s statement, Arva remarks: If imagination compensates for the objectlessness of pain, it follows that […] magical realism succeed[s] in stimulating pain by turning it into objects (images) that literary language can convey more suitably (in regard to their unspeakable nature) and more effectively (in terms of their accessibility by both author and reader). (Arva 2011, 83)

It can be surmised from Arva that through the magical realist language, human perception translates an unspeakable or inexpressible condition (pain or trauma) into a decipherable image and tangible reality. This is evident in the case of Chaim where Skibell attempts to turn his sorrow and suffering into a narrative. Dean believes that in his attempt to revive his great-grandfather, Skibell always reminds the reader that Chaim is dead and that although throughout the whole novel the presence of death is explicitly visibleʊthe bullet marks, non-stop bleeding, the decay of the bodyʊChaim shows most of the attributes of the living: he thinks, acts, and shows various emotions (Dean 2012, 92). With the help of magical realist narrative, Chaim, a dead and mutilated Jew, is shown to possess all the features of a living person.

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Skibell shows enormous imaginative power and uses the supernatural and Jewish myth and folklore to access a past which has long been buried, and to depict the sorrow and suffering of Jews during the Holocaust. He thus comes up with a history which is unknown, and has long been unknowable, to the outside world. Janet Burstein notes: A “dead and mutilated Jew,” [Chaim] haunts this world, wishing to leave but unable to let it go. He cannot be healed or restored to life, and before he is released into forgetfulness he will need to wander the earth, listening to the sorrows of others both alive and dead, asking unanswerable questions about forgiveness and responsibility. (Burstein 2006, 125)

Thus, Chaim’s suffering is not only his own but that of the entire Jewish community. He is remembered and magically brought back to life as the mouthpiece of his community. The act of remembering is very significant as a way to access the knowledge and understanding (at least partial) of inexpressible past events. Unless and until a traumatic event is remembered and talked about, people cannot have a comprehensive idea about the event and victims cannot have control over it. Skibell depicts the scene where some non-Jewish people—being motivated by greed and probably by anti-Semitism—assist the Nazis in bringing Jews together (Skibell 2010, 9–10). He also shows how Chaim’s family home was occupied by intruders (Skibell 2010, 12). According to Dean, both scenes represent historical truth: the first scene includes the involvement of non-Jewish people in persecuting and executing Jews; and the second illustrates what happens when survivors return to their homes only to find that their neighbours are living in their houses and are reluctant to return their properties to them (Dean 2012, 94 ࡳ 95). Dean again says that Chaim’s experiences in the novel point to the fact that Skibell’s novel is based on survivors’ tales and historical facts. After returning to their homes, many survivors were isolated from their communities and were unable to regain their former lives. Thus, they faced a sort of legal death in the community (Dean 2012, 95). Cathy Caruth states that in the case of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) “the overwhelming events of the past repeatedly possess, in intrusive images and thoughts, the one who has lived through them” (Caruth 1995, 151). Caruth’s statement refers to the possessiveness of trauma through disturbing images and recurring thoughts. Chaim seems to be full of intense grief over having lost his family members and his town’s people, and an acute sense of guilt for having survived: “That night and for many nights after, I am unable to sleep. I toss and turn in Sabina’s little bed,

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haunted by the queerest dreams” (Skibell 2010, 12). Again, Chaim’s possession by the past and the extreme sense of loss is symbolised by his eternal bleeding. This bleeding is described in quite the same magical realist manner in which Márquez depicted the movement of blood at the mysterious death of José Arcadio in One Hundred Years of Solitude: The bleeding has begun again [and] I feel it gurgling down my neck, leaking from the wounds in the back of my head. … Because I no longer breathe, I’m able to pull the knot remarkably tight. But the blood simply reroutes itself and emerges from the star-like pattern of holes across my back and chest. It drains into my pockets and pools there, eventually cascading like a fountain. (Skibell 2010, 18 ࡳ 19)

Here, a normal object like blood is defamiliarised by the magical realist narrative and thus provides the scene with a magical aura. This is the example of ‘irreverent magical realism’ classified by Christopher Warnes where an ordinary object is depicted as having mysterious characteristics. The weird movement of blood and Chaim’s inability to get rid of it may also refer to his continuous struggle with traumatic experiences. The miserable condition of the headless German soldier also shows the lack of control: “[…] the head shouts frantic commands to its body— ‘Over here! Schnell! Schnell!’—but, of course, the body is deaf without its ears” (Skibell 2010, 94). The constant mentioning of bullet holes also represents the ubiquity of suffering: “The water rises in the tub, seeping through my bullet holes, filling the hollows of my body with its creeping warmth” (Skibell 2010, 67). Chaim even fails to enjoy his food because of the exhaustion caused by the death of his family members and friends: “The steam from the soup rises to fill my nostrils. Despite its tasty aromas, I sink back into my chair, utterly morose, my appetite dwindling away like blown straw. How can we eat and drink when so many have perished? I don’t care if it is the Sabbath” (Skibell 2010, 206)! The intense grief, extreme traumatisation, and the obsession with the past stop Chaim from enjoying food; the faces of his dead family members float in front of his eyes. Arva says: “Chaim’s feelings of estrangement, caused by his unique experience of loss, the continuing sense of guilt for having survived, and the breakdown in communication with non-witnesses, are characteristic of most Holocaust survivors” (Arva 2011, 237).

Restoring Life and Storytelling In order to overcome trauma, we need to remember the past and to turn this traumatic memory into a readable narrative. As Laub suggests:

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The survivors did not only need to survive so that they could tell their stories; they also needed to tell their stories in order to survive. There is, in each survivor, an imperative need to tell and thus to come to know one’s story […]. One has to know one’s buried truth in order to be able to live one’s life. (Laub 1995, 63)

Laub’s statement highlights the fact that it is only through storytelling, and thus confronting the past, that one can have a better understanding of one’s life. However, Laub stresses the necessity of an empathetic listener and/or a reader as he mentions that healing trauma requires “an empathic listener, or […] an addressable other, an other who can hear the anguish of one’s memories and thus affirm and recognize their realness” (Laub 1992, 68). The necessity of narrating one’s story and the significance of an enthusiastic listener is explained in Skibell’s novel where Chaim tries to share his stories with the Polish peasants but does not find any way out. Only Ola is traumatised seeing the sufferings of the Jews and is sympathetic with Chaim. According to Grimwood, Ola suffers from her pangs of conscience: it is “her grief and distress [by realising what actually happened] that lead to her fatal illness” (Grimwood 2007, 93). However, it is interesting to note that Chaim himself is also unwilling to listen to stories of other traumatised people—“Why must everyone I meet tell me his story? It’s as though I wore a sign across my brow: Share with me the tedious details of your life” (Skibell 2010, 222)—which sheds light on the difficulty of being an empathetic listener and the possibility of being vicariously traumatised. However, the healing act does not occur here since Chaim fails to face the past and share his story with others. When survivors—both in real life and magical realist stories—fail to narrate their stories orally, they may resort to writing. Unable to find any willing listener, Chaim starts writing down all his thoughts in an old ledger book. Although initially it seems to work, the longer he is dead, the more his endeavour fails: “[…] but my words are as dry and my sentences are as circular as wood shavings” (Skibell 2010, 39). This sentence also points to the concept of the repetitive nature of trauma, and refers to the necessity of a non-linear or circular narrative capable of representing this circular, repetitive trauma. However, his language fails him when it comes to writing down his traumatisation: “I open [the ledger book’s] covers and find that its pages have been singed and burnt. The remnants of my careful notes and drawings crumble and fall into the forest carpet. ‘Will it never end?’ I shout this question to the trees” (Skibell 2010, 193). Language also fails in the scene where Chaim fails to read a letter written by the rabbi:

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Chapter 4 “Yes, I got your note. Only how could I read it, scrawled in that pigeon scratch, you shouldn’t be offended.” “Chaimka,” the jaw of his beak slackens. “That was Yiddish.” “Yiddish?” I say. Impossible! (Skibell 2010, 67)

He is surprisied to find that the note was written in Yiddish, a language he should definitely understand. Chaim fails to depict his traumatic situation in his native language, which is very much linear and, to some extent, direct. The high extent of trauma demands an extraordinary narrative far beyond the ordinary, a subversive narrative capable of penetrating the strong defence of traumatic events and thus voicing the unspeakable and the unspoken. The desire to tell stories of traumatic events is well associated with the issue of memory and the disruption of identity. By not remembering the past and relating it to the present by means of a suitable narrative, one is more likely to be dissociated from one’s past which may ultimately result in a fragmented self and identity. Traumatised subjects need to create narratives—often filled with myth, magic and imagination—so that they can gain control over their past and present life. Since Chaim fails to bear witness to his traumatic events because of the lack of a suitable narrative, both in speech and in writing, he gradually loses his personal history, all his memories, and, ultimately, his identity: “My history falls away, like sacks of grain from a careless farmer’s wagon. I begin to forget everything. […] I forget my children’s names. Even their faces leave me. I no longer recall how I earned my living or why I died” (Skibell 2010, 256). Chaim has suffered greatly throughout the whole novel but his actual journey begins after the death of Ola. Initially, he spent much of his time within his old home, caring for the sick Ola. When he visits the mass grave of his fellow Jews for the first time, he talks with them; the second time, he sets them free. With sheer astonishment he realises that he can hear the voices of the dead Jews coming out of the pit: […] I’m able to make out the sounds of Yiddish being spoken. […] Directly below me, mothers are clacking out tart instructions to their daughters. I nearly weep to hear it! To my left, there must be a cheder, for a class is clearly going on. […] Below me, to my right, two men argue passionately. […] I understand [that] their disagreement concerns the price of trolley fares in Warsaw. I laugh, holding my sides with joy. I can’t believe it. (Skibell 2010, 24)

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The scene where a Jewish voice from the grave is heard by Chaim, who is also a dead man, defies the order of the rational world but is presented in a matter-of-fact manner in the midst of ordinary reality. The existence, acceptance and the rise of the dead in the midst of reality—a typical characteristic of magical realism—demonstrates the strength of Jewish victims even after their death. Another interesting fact about the narrative is that the protagonist and narrator Chaim dies at the very beginning of the novel and that he continues to narrate his story as a dead man. The fact that our narrator is unreliable since he is dead hints at one significant aspect of the magical realist narrative: multiple versions of truth and reality. Through this unreliable narrator, an alternative history, an unknown world, is exposed to the reader. The reappearance of the soldier who previously killed Chaim gives him the opportunity to deal with the injustice of his death. The head confesses the horror of the soldier’s action: “I have done things, Herr Jude, during the last days of my life, that I never dreamed possible, things which, as a child or as a young man, I would not have believed myself capable. I don’t need to detail them to you. You are only too familiar with the kind of thing I mean” (Skibell 2010, 111). It is significant that the same head that earlier talked with Chaim in a snobbish and derogatory tone—“I’m not prepared to argue the theoretics of warfare here and now with a dead Jew” (Skibell 2010, 98; emphasis added)—is now addressing him as “Herr Jude”, acknowledging the terror of the soldier’s action, and recognising Chaim’s victimisation. Again, since Chaim is addressed in a general rather than a particular name, it might also be possible that the head (the German soldier) has killed more Jews than just Chaim, and that it is now acknowledging the victimisation of all those killed by it or, even, the total number of murdered Jews during the Holocaust. Through the subversive power of magical realism, Skibell disrupts the binary border between victims and victimisers and transforms the vulnerable and weak Chaim into a much more privileged person who is now stronger than the very soldier who killed him earlier. By making Chaim more powerful than his victimisers, Skibell tries to give back to the whole Jewish community their human dignity.

Journey of the Dead Jews: Restoring the Moon and Securing the Future Although initially the luxurious Hotel Amfortas, which Chaim and his fellow Jews encounter during their after-death journey, seems to be a

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resting place for Jews, it is the representation of a concentration camp. Depicting the horror of the concentration camp and the Holocaust in general, even with the help of imagination, proves to be a very difficult task for Skibell since he has never had any access to that realm. In order to recreate the trauma of the concentration camp during the Holocaust, he introduces the elegant Hotel Amfortas in the novel, and shows an association between the two. Just like the real concentration camps of the Holocaust, this fictional hotel is also deceptive. Under the disguise of the sumptuous outer appearance, it is actually a graveyard for Jewish people where all the members of Chaim’s family die for the second time. According to Sarah Dean, Skibell’s purpose in portraying the Holocaust as an event that continues to exist and recur is an endeavour to invoke what Giorgio Agamben states in discussing Primo Levi (Dean 2012, 107): And yet for [Levi], the impossibility of wanting Auschwitz to return for eternity has another, different root, one which implies a new, unprecedented ontological consistency of what has taken place. One cannot want Auschwitz to return for eternity, since in truth it has never ceased to take place; it is always already repeating itself. (qtd. in Dean 2012, 107)

However, the experience of repetition is different for Levi than for the second or third generational witness who feels the existence of the horror in the present day and represents the Holocaust through revivification (Dean 2012, 107). Since the reality of the camps is not accessible to either Skibell or other second or third generational witnesses, Skibell creates the magnificent and seductive Hotel Amfortas “as a means for allowing the intergenerational witness entry into the event by drawing on a more accessible representation” (Dean 2012, 108). What Dean does not include in her discussion is that in order to revive the silenced stories of the ancestors, intergenerational witnesses like Skibell must resort to imagination. However, sometimes ordinary imagination fails to represent events like the Holocaust. Magical realism enables them to use their out of the ordinary type of imagination and to expose the cruelties of the Holocaust, and thus provides us with a marginalised version of history. The story of the absence of the moon is examined frequently in the novel. Ola asks Chaim “to […] take her to the roof to search for the moon” (Skibell 2010, 39) but later she exclaims: “It’s cracked!” (Skibell 2010, 46). The absence of the moon is a recurring topic of conversation among the victimised Jews: “‘Do I have the moon?’[…] ‘Do you have the moon? No, but still, we’re all thieves! We’re all to blame!’” (Skibell 2010, 81).

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Grimwood explains that, since ancient times, the moon and the lunar cycle have played a major role in Jewish tradition and religion where it is considered a symbol for Israel, undergoing the phases of waning and waxing parallel to Israel’s cycles of historic rise and fall (Grimwood 2007, 90). Pamela Stadden notes: The moon is of course the most encompassing symbol in the book. When it falls from the sky, it becomes evident that this is [the] most important struggle in the book. It is not, surprisingly, the conflict between Jews and Nazis. It is the salvation of this life symbol that reinforces the integrity of the character and his quest to return the moon to its rightful place. (Stadden 2005, 156)

In order to represent the trauma of the Holocaust from the Jewish perspective, Skibell makes use of Jewish rituals and traditions, which is also a prominent feature of magical realism. The suffering of Jews is presented symbolically by a magical event—the disappearance of the moon from the sky. In other words, Skibell compares the unimaginable extent of the Holocaust violence with the bizarre incidence of the disappearance of the moon: a magical and to some extent impossible event which is shown in the midst of reality. Now, by giving Chaim the challenging task of returning the moon to the sky, Skibell actually gives him an opportunity to restore the future of the Jewish race despite the Holocaust. This scene of returning the moon to the sky is perhaps the most magical realist scene in the novel. The moon shows the damage of years of war which possibly suggests the burial of hope and faith under the weight of the killing of the Jews: “No, whoever buried it has buried it deep, beneath layers and layers of corpses, so long ago now that the skin and the muscles have stretched and torn away, and there is nothing left but bones” (Skibell 2010, 230). Although hope is restored with the return of the moon to the sky, Chaim’s observation that “the moon’s surfaces are not clear, but have been mottled, as though with dark and purple bruises” (Skibell 2010, 243) signifies the lasting impact of the Holocaust on the history of the Jewish people. Alan L. Berger directly associates the moon with Jewish people when he asserts that the return of the moon to the sky stands for the possibility of the continuation of Jewish history after the Holocaust. Chaim’s ability to “raise [and restore] the moon symbolizes the possibility that Jewish historyʊdespite the trauma of the Holocaustʊhas not come to an end” (Berger 2010, 154).

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At the end of the novel, while restoring the moon, Skibell presents us with the idea of storytelling and returning to Jewish culture. As Berger says: “Responding to the trauma of the Holocaust, Skibell’s novel embraces the cosmos of stories and folklore which, by utilizing the supernatural, defies at least momentarily the murder of the Jewish people and the indifference of the world” (Berger 2010, 155). It can be argued that the use of Jewish culture, myths and folklore enables Skibell to employ the supernatural so that he can defy the anti-semitic attitude of people, make the Jewish people more powerful than their oppressors, and thus present us with a subversive version of the event. Resorting to religious stories and folklore also enables Chaim to confront the Holocaust and its cruelty, and to advocate an alternative world free from violence and oppression. In the novel, Skibell brings Chaim and other dead Jews back to life, and thus allows them to tell the whole world about the atrocities committed against them. I have demonstrated the necessity of an empathetic listener and/or reader in the process of healing, and the significance of fantasy, particularly magical realism, in the act of remembering. By recreating the reality of the Holocaust, magical realism enables Skibell to remember the forgotten souls, to show the unimaginable atrocities of the genocide and the injustice done to Jews, to give voices to those who can no longer speak, to recover a family story out of heavy silence and horrible grief, to access and reconstruct a past he has never had any direct access to, and, most importantly, to revive his great-grandfather.

Personal and Collective Trauma in D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel Unlike A Blessing on the Moon, which describes the afterlife suffering of Chaim Skibelski, D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel focuses on the violent sexual fantasies of the protagonist Lisa Erdman. These fantasies result in her sexual assault, the bayonet rape, and her tragic death at the hands of Nazis in the ravine of Babi Yar where she represents an estimated number of 34,000 Jews who also lost their lives. By revealing Lisa’s sexual fantasies on the one hand and considering her one of the thousands of victims of the Babi Yar on the other hand, Thomas skilfully relates her personal trauma to the collective trauma of the Holocaust. I propose that in dealing with the Holocaust, Thomas employs the magical realist narrative instead of realism, which enables him to draw a parallel between trauma and grotesque bodily metaphors. Magical realism in the novel is also associated with witnesses and survivors’ desire and necessity to tell

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stories. By giving the oppressed a voice, magical realism allows them to come forward with a marginalised and alternative version of history, and to find a place in that history instead of disappearing in the passage of time. Although every victim of the Holocaust was the victim of dehumanising physical and psychological torture, women survivors have described quite different experiences from men in their autobiographical testimonies (Copeland 2003, 2). Copeland again says: “While the sexual exploitation of women and the problems mothers faced concerning their children and child-bearing seem to be important reasons to acknowledge gendered differences during the Holocaust, some scholars argue that it is also important not to marginalize women further by focusing strictly on their uniquely feminine experiences” (Copeland 2003, 2). Lawrence Langer seems to concur with this proposition. He believes that gender roles were impossible to maintain during the Holocaust and concludes that the issue of gender cannot be considered important in the aftermath of the Holocaust (Langer 1998, 49). Copeland again writes that women in forced labour camps and concentration camps had to remain under constant threat of sexual humiliation, torture and rape, and were forced into prostitution. They were forced to kill any resulting infants in order to survive because any woman caught with an infant would immediately be sent to gas chambers (Copeland 2003, 11). I completely agree with Copeland that female trauma and suffering have been largely ignored in Holocaust literature and that although some authors describe female experiences, they do not describe the events from the perspectives of women and thus deny them a voice. Although writers such as Tadeusz Borowski (author of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1959/1967) are often effective in conveying the horror of women’s experiences, they do not investigate the traumatic consequences of their victimisation. Edward Lewis Wallant, a Jewish-American author, shows the predicament of women in The Pawnbroker (1961) in which the protagonist Sol Nazerman fails to save his children from death and his wife from being involved in prostitution. According to Copeland, whereas Wallant shocks the reader through the stunning flashbacks of Saul Nazerman’s dreams and thus brings out the emotions of his characters, Borowski’s narrator speaks in a calm and detached tone, producing almost greater horror in the reader who is ultimately forced to admit that such horrible events could be described in such a matter-of-fact manner (Copeland 2003, 10). In The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick shows that the protagonist Rosa’s memory of her daughter Magda’s murder is so horrible that she cannot forget it, and is

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unable to lead a normal life. William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1979) deals with the protagonist Sophie’s horrible Holocaust experiences through her disturbing memories. The most distinguishing feature of Thomas’s The White Hotel is that it does not deal with concentration camp experiences and that it offers the protagonist a voice to describe her victimisation. I have mentioned earlier that various traumatic historical events—the Holocaust, war, massacre, slavery, and social and political violence—are characterised by psychological and sexual violence against women and The White Hotel can be considered a prime example of this. The magical realist narrative enables Lisa to utter unspeakable and unknown stories of her victimisation to the outside world by allowing her a voice, and it thus provides a marginalised version of history. Most importantly, although she dies, it also saves her from vanishing into historical oblivion. Put another way, magical realism enables her to restore her identity.

Brutality, Eroticisation of Trauma and Hysteria Thematically, the novel can be divided into three sections: the first part focuses on Lisa’s bizarre fantasies and the case study by Freud; the second part provides a historical account of Lisa’s later life; and the third part deals with Lisa’s life after death. According to Busse, structurally, the historical and psychoanalytical aspects of the novel are linked through the figure of Lisa and her exemplary role in both story lines: as a model patient of Freud’s case study and as a representative victim of the genocide at Babi Yar (Busse 2002, 190). Joining the surreal portrayal of Lisa’s bizarre dreams and fantasies with the realist discussion of the Holocaust, the novel “links the personal psychic scars of the protagonist to the general traumatic impact of the Holocaust” (Busse 2002, 190). In other words, the novel is an attempt to associate individual trauma with the collective trauma of the Holocaust. In contrast to the established understanding of trauma as the suffering of victims from a past traumatic event, Lisa’s bizarre traumatic symptoms occur from a yet-to-be experienced traumatic future. By using magical realism, grotesque realism and weird bodily fantasy, Thomas employs a concept of future trauma where the protagonist’s pain in her pelvic and respiratory areas actually refers to her future violence and physical suffering during the Holocaust. The novel also criticises and rejects the traditional forms of understanding violence and advocates an alternative one. According to Tanner, “The White Hotel forces the reader to question

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not only the particular definitions of violence that the text appears to endorse but also the very process through which fiction simultaneously creates and disguises its own ideologies” (Tanner 1991, 131). For instance, symbolic structures employed by Freud in representing violence in the Babi Yar section of the novel obscure as well as exploit violence which is included within the abstract systems of understanding (Tanner 1991, 131). The novel also deals with the issue of anti-Semitism in the post-World War I Europe and Lisa’s eroticisation of trauma. Lisa suffered from sexual assault at the hands of anti-Semitic sailors: “[The sailors] spat on me, threatened to burn my breasts with their cigarettes, used vile language I’d never heard. They forced me to commit acts of oral sex with them, saying all I was good for, as a dirty Jewess, was toʊBut you’ll guess the expression they used” (Thomas 1995, 168). This event is also represented in the fantasy of the White Hotel mainly in the description of Lisa’s experience of oral sex with the young man: It was horribly intimate to be eye-to-eye with that rich tulip bulb, that reeking dewy monster. Actually to take it in her mouth was as inconceivable as taking in a bull’s pizzle. But she closed her eyes and did it, fearfully, to show she loved him more than her husband. And it was not unpleasant, it was so far from unpleasant that she became curious; squeezing, caressing and sucking the shaft so that it swelled even bigger in her mouth and spurted into her throat. In his jealousy he abused her in foul terms, which stirred her most peculiarly. (Thomas 1995, 60)

This imagined act of fellatio permits Lisa’s traumatic sexual assault by the anti-Semitic sailors to be re-enacted and transferred into an act of enjoyment. According to Adams, this instance of eroticisation of trauma, which transforms the sailors’ insults into “foul terms, which stirred her most peculiarly”, on the one hand, must be read as an ethical problem but also suggests remedial possibilities to Lisa (Adams 2011, 101). Such possibilities are also reinforced in the poetic version of the narrative: in “Don Giovanni”, Anna remarks: “My throat drank his juice, it turned to milk” (Thomas 1995, 25). The pleasure and comfort Lisa gets through the eroticisation of the traumatic events of her sexual assault is further evident in one of her letters to Freud: What upset me, what I found unbearableʊand I still don’t understand it: perhaps you can helpʊwas that on looking back at those fearful events I found them arousing. […] I would lie in bed and repeat to myself the

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She eroticises her sexual assaults through bizarre fantasy, and thus associates physical and psychological trauma with imagination or fantasy. She also seems to suggest the necessity of a narrative full of myth, magic, the supernatural and imagination which has the full potential to describe physical and psychological trauma. It then again strengthens my proposition that magical realism is one of the most suitable narratives for representing trauma. The phenomenon of hysteria is very significant in the text. Adams writes that hysteria “provides the locus of the novel’s magic[al] realism and the central means by which [Lisa’s own body] encodes traumatic events that are yet to occur” (Adams 2011, 102). Lisa suffers from “severe pains in her left breast and pelvic region, as well as a chronic respiratory condition” (Thomas 1995, 83). Freud as a fictional character surmises that Lisa’s suffering results from several psychological factors, including repressed homosexuality and a deep identification with her mother. However, Tanner argues, Lisa anticipates the true origin of her trauma by associating her own symptoms with the ubiquitous suffering she senses around her (Tanner 1991, 134): “I have always found it difficult to enjoy myself properly, knowing there were people suffering ‘just the other side of the hill’” (Thomas 1995, 170). According to Tanner, the hill in the Babi Yar section of the novel “assumes a literal presence, while the violent source of Lisa’s pain overwhelms any symbolic interpretation of her symptoms” (Tanner 1991, 134). Although Freud wrongly considers these symptoms hysterical, we come to know that their origin lies in a yet-to-beexperienced future. The symptoms predict injuries in Lisa’s body prior to her death. The pain in the pelvic area symbolises her physical attack by the German soldiers, and the respiratory problem stands for the possibility of being buried alive: He drew his leg back and sent his jackboot crashing into her left breast. She moved position from the force of the blow, but uttered no sound. Still not satisfied, he swung his boot again and sent it cracking into her pelvis. Again the only sound was the clean snap of the bone. … With Semashko’s assistance he found the opening, and they joked together as he inserted the bayonet, carefully, almost delicately. … Still very gently, Demidenko imitated the thrusts of intercourse; and Semashko let out a guffaw, which echoed from the ravine walls, as the woman’s body jerked back and

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relaxed, jerked and relaxed. […] Demidenko twisted the blade and thrust it in deep. (Thomas 1995, 219 ࡳ 220)

The act of violence at last reveals the true reason behind Lisa’s severe pain, but “the stark description of that violence displaces once and for all Freud’s abstract symbolism and the metaphorical forms in which that symbolism cloaks the facts of violence” (Tanner 1991, 145). We understand after her death that she did predict her own death at Babi Yar.

Lisa’s Account of the Grotesque and Obsession with Bodily Fluids One excerpt from the chapter “Don Giovanni” is quite crucial in analysing the association between Lisa’s bizarre fantasy and trauma where she puts together the images of sex with death: It [The blaze from the hotel] outblazed the sky ʊone wing was burning, and the people rushed to the ship’s prow to stare at it in horror. So, pulling me upon him without warning, your son impaled me, it was so sweet I screamed but no one heard me for the other screams as body after body fell or leapt from upper storeys of the white hotel. I jerked and jerked until his prick released its cool soft flood. Charred bodies hung from trees. he grew erect again, again I lunged, oh I can’t tell you how our rapture gushed, the wing was gutted, you could see the beds, we don’t know how it started, someone said it might have been the unaccustomed sun driving through our opened curtains, kindling our still-warm sheets […]. (Thomas 1995, 23)

The description of the young man’s ejaculation is a metaphor which evokes both decay and fertility. I have mentioned earlier that the use of duality or opposites (like regeneration and decay) is an important feature of magical realist narrative where the opposite is used to highlight the gaps within any (historical) event and to provide a (hi)story which is quite opposite to the established one. This duality is also an essential technique for the authors who write in a magical realist narrative to disrupt the notion of border, and thus is an instrument for the marginalised. The ability to transcend border also associates the concept of duality with Bakhtin’s carnivalesque.

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At the beginning of the poem, “I could not stop myself I was in flames” (Thomas 1995, 19) expresses Anna’s sexual desire; later, we find a bizarre scene in which her skin develops bruises and her hair catches fire because of her lust (Thomas 1995, 38): “Over her eyes appeared a small patch of red. It increased in intensity and grew larger. It separated into little spurts of crimson, and he realized her hair was on fire” (Thomas 1995, 38). Her sexual arousal is magically associated with fire where both phenomena are shown to produce heat, smoke and a burnt patch: ‘“You can see how easily roused I am.’ She chuckled nervously. ‘That’s why it’s best for me not to start. It doesn’t take much’” (Thomas 1995, 38). According to Tanner, the violence of sexual impalement is indirectly made equal to the violence occurring around the lovers, and both, ultimately, are made to seem sweet (Tanner 1991, 139). However, Tanner again states, “Violence is not only relegated to the same level of experience as the lovers’ passion but also emerges—through the manipulation of form—as the instrument that sparks their continued desire for one another” (Tanner 1991, 139). It can be surmised from Tanner that violence is used as a device to ignite in lovers a passion for each other. The rhythm of sexual intercourse provides background music, transforming dying women into couples performing a dance. The first poem in the novel deals with Lisa’s futuristic vision where each and every image is associated with her death at Babi Yar: as body after body fell or leapt from upper storeys of the white hotel. I jerked and jerked until his prick released its cool soft flood. (Thomas 1995, 23)

The image of falling bodies brings to mind those people who are later shot on the edge of Babi Yar, and those who jump in order to survive but ultimately fail to do so (Thomas 1995, 218): “She did not see as much as feel the bodies falling from the ledge and the stream of bullets coming closer to them. … It seemed to her that she fell for ages—it was probably a very deep drop. … She had fallen into a bath of blood” (Thomas 1995, 218). The reiteration of ‘jerked’ predicts the insertion of the bayonet into Lisa’s vagina as her body “jerked back and relaxed, jerked and relaxed” (Thomas 1995, 220). Adams believes that the reference to the penis as “prick” brings to mind the picture of bayonet which is also implied in the image of Lisa being pierced by the swordfish (Adams 2011, 98): “[…] I was impaled/upon a swordfish” (Thomas 1995, 23).

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The following passage, anticipating Lisa’s future death, is described by an easy shift between various oppositions: The ice was soft at first, a whale who moaned a lullaby to my corset, the thin bones, I couldn’t tell the wind from the lament of whales, the hump of white bergs without end. Then gradually it was the ice itself cut into me, for we were an ice-breaker, a breast was sheared away, I felt forsaken, I gave birth to a wooden embryo its gaping lips were sucking at the snow as it was whirled away into the storm, now turning inside-out the blizzard tore my womb clean out, I saw it spin into the whiteness have you seen a flying womb. (Thomas 1995, 23 ࡳ 24)

Such an absurd or magical event as giving birth to a wooden foetus may have been used by Thomas to highlight the brutality of an absurd and unique event like the Holocaust. It may suggest that because of the Holocaust, many children could not arrive in this world. Again, the foetus is objectified in exactly the same way Jews are considered objects for torture. The significance of such metaphorical and/or magical realist imagery becomes clear when compared to the brutality of the Babi Yar part: the dream foreshadows the Holocaust violence very closely. Like the dream vision in the poem, the description of Lisa’s experience at Babi Yar is rife with the imagery of penetration, the collision of bodies, and the physical dynamics and textures of violence and sex (Tanner 1991, 144). The “whale who moaned/a lullaby to [her] corset” is replaced by a policeman who “started hitting her with his club, on her back and shoulders” as “she couldn’t unhook her corset fast enough” (Thomas 1995, 212). According to Tanner, the wooden foetus mentioned in the poem turns into Lisa’s child; the flight of the embryo anticipates the little boy’s frightening jump into the ravine; and “the thin bones” mentioned in the poem become part of Lisa’s vulnerable body (Tanner 1991, 144). Apart from these, images of Lisa and her lover’s sexual satisfactions are magically associated with the screaming of the dying people. Lisa discloses being “split open” by her lover while other hotel guests receive a watery grave (Thomas 1995, 20), and being “impaled” while others are burnt to death (1995, 23). Lisa’s friend, being “penetrated to her womb”, screams in joy and bites Lisa’s breast following the avalanche that buries the mourners (1995, 27). Lisa, feeling her lover “burst up through” her,

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never knew her “nipples grow so quickly” when she watches people falling through the sky from the cable car (1995, 28). Images of certain duality—sexual intercourse with death, pleasure with sorrow, and fire with water—create both a magical realist and carnivalesque atmosphere, and help Thomas interpret a bizarre and unique event like the Holocaust. The link between Lisa’s grotesque sexual fantasies and her death is also explicit in the way natural calamities are sensationalised: majestic storms, landslides, flaming sunsets, and mountainous panoramas. The event of the landslide is associated with her fantasies of sexual intercourse between her, the young man and Madame Cottin: […] I pulled up her skirts ……………………………………… and let him finish it in her, it seemed no different, for love ran without a seam from lake to sky to mountain to our room, we saw the line of mourners in the gloom of the peak’s shadow, standing by the trench. (Thomas 1995, 26)

These lines, particularly the last two which depict the dejected appearance of the mourners beside a ditch, refer to the future atrocities at Babi Yar that can be perceived more clearly from the following lines: The mountain peak had dissolved, and giant boulders were rumbling down the mountainside. The mourners had broken into a sustaining hymn, and for a little while it looked as if the music was holding the boulders in midair. The ground was opening under their feet. The young woman saw the mourners fall, one by one, into the trench, as if intolerable grief afflicted them, one by one. She watched as they twitched a little and the earth and rocks began settling on top of them. Darkness fell very suddenly that evening, and they lay, listening to the silence again after the thunderclap. (Thomas 1995, 67 ࡳ 68)

The sudden fall of darkness refers to the experience of victims at Babi Yar who are buried alive, and Lisa’s survival of the shooting. The description of the landslide at Babi Yar also makes a direct but magical realist connection between Lisa’s weird fantasy and the brutality of which she is the victim. A traumatic event is extremely difficult to incorporate into traditional forms of narrative because of its inability to penetrate the rigid shield of the event which is protecting it from being exposed, and thus confronted

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and talked about. Representing trauma requires a narrative possessing subversive and transgressive abilities. Here, magical realism along with grotesque bodily imagery provides Lisa with a voice and thus an accessible representation of the traumatic events of her life. Put another way, both magical realism and grotesque realism work together to exemplify traumatic events in Lisa’s life which are otherwise not possible to represent. Adams believes that magical realism in the novel entails a type of “ontological border transgression, in which the surface of the real is breached, and in this sense is, like the grotesque bodily vocabulary of the text, able to approximate what Freud theorizes as the penetrative force of the traumatic event” (Adams 2011, 110). Adams’ statement highlights the transgressive aspect of magical realism and its potential to approach the penetrative force of traumatic events.

Telling Babi Yar and the Fictionalisation of Testimony According to Foster, The White Hotel attempts to focus on significant events in the German-speaking world. For instance, the Russian Revolution of 1905 is not described in detail, but the setting for Lisa’s breakdown and Freud’s cure, the Austrian experiences of World War I and its consequences—all receive full attention during various sections of the novel (Foster 1995, 270). Based on Foster’s statement, it can well be asserted that although Thomas employs psychoanalysis, magical realism and grotesque realism in dealing with Lisa’s trauma, he has actually grounded the novel in the social and political reality of the 19th and 20th centuries. In other words, he has grounded the magical realist technique in the midst of social and political reality. He thus consolidates the notion that magical realism is not devoid of realism and that this particular technique is well-equipped to deal with traumatic social and political events. The deception of Jews by Nazis in the pretext of a false train journey, which resulted in the death of approximately 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar, is well anticipated in the following excerpt: The order said that all Yids living in the city of Kiev and its vicinity were to report by eight o’clock on the morning of Monday, 29 September 1941, at the corner of Melnikovsky and Dokhturov Streets (near the cemetery). They were to take with them documents, money, valuables, as well as warm clothes, underwear, etc. Any Yid not carrying out the instruction and who was found elsewhere would be shot. (Thomas 1995, 204 ࡳ 205)

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By highlighting the Central European experience, Thomas reconstructed the distinct historical situations which had led to the emergence of magical realism (Foster 1995, 270). Magical realism emerged out of the “tremendous despair” as well as the “crushing defeats” which shaped “the lives of people in and around the German-speaking countries during the two world wars” (qtd. in Foster 1995, 270-271). Foster says, “[…] magical realism has an unspoken historical premise the same or similar experiences of extremityʊof random victimization, of powerlessness, of hysteria and panic before unimaginable eventsʊas the ones Thomas so emphatically foregrounds in the German sections of The White Hotel” (Foster 1995, 271). He goes on to say that, in the final section of the novel, Thomas has reacted to the cruelty of the Holocaust “by developing a compensatory vision” (Foster 1995, 271). After their tragic death at the hands of the Nazis, Lisa and other Jews find themselves in an imaginary camp. Their new world appears to be an alternative as well as a fantastic one since it does not correspond to the norms of the everyday world but to those of life after death. The compensatory vision in the final chapter explicitly associates the novel with the magical realist technique. As a world beyond death, the calm and serene camp differs significantly from the harshness and brutality of the Holocaust in the penultimate chapter. In the transformation from the brutality of the Holocaust to the compensatory vision in “The Camp”, the novel, Foster has appositely remarked, has “re-enacted both the original experience that produced magical realism and the characteristic gesture with which magical realists confronted that experience” (Foster 1995, 272). The place itself resembles Jerusalem from where no Jew “would be turned away […] for they had nowhere else to go” (Thomas 1995, 239): Despite their weariness the passengers exclaimed with pleasure, seeing an oasisʊgreen grass, palm trees, sparkling water. And the building itself looked more like a hotel than a transit camp. Lisa and her son had a room all to themselves. It smelled sweetly of wood. The beams were of cedar and the rafters were of fir. (Thomas 1995, 226 ࡳ 227)

By comparing the building to a hotel (or home) and not to a transit camp, Thomas seems to suggest that Jews will not be deported to any other places, and he thus focuses on the long-lasting—or even permanent— pleasure and happiness of these people. Another magical event that takes place on the last page is the sudden recovery of Lisa’s pain in her pelvis and breast: “[…] and only then did she realize that all day her pelvis had not hurt, nor her breast” (Thomas 1995, 240). Therefore, it can be asserted

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that it is the magical and soothing environment of the camp that helps her overcome her physical and psychological pain. One of the striking aspects of Holocaust writing is the desire of survivors to tell their stories to overcome their trauma and at the same time let the whole world know of the Nazi atrocities. Many Holocaust testimonies employ a collective voice, while at the same time foregrounding individual experience because they are torn between two opposing necessities; they feel the need to speak and at the same time they are well aware of the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of doing so. Through the depiction of Lisa’s bizarre sexual fantasies and psychological illness which have their origins in to-be-experienced historical calamities, Thomas also focuses on Lisa’s personal life out of the concentration camp, provides her with a voice and thus a history from her victimised perspective, enables her to assert her identity, and saves her from being forgotten. Moreover, when reminding us that “[…] every single one of them had dreamed dreams, seen visions and had amazing experiences, even the babes in arms” (Thomas 1995, 220), the author makes it clear that Lisa has become a representative for the sufferers. A magical realist novel like The White Hotel employs multiple voices and contradictory points of view to narrate Lisa’s story, and seems to suggest that there may be only partial, incomplete and provisional versions of reality. With all these in mind, it can also be deduced that Thomas highlights the subjectivity of reality by creating an alternative world through techniques like fantasy, magical realism, grotesque realism and such like. Morales believes that the novel invites us to acknowledge the dichotomy between appearance and reality where each chapter reanalyses and reinterprets the previous one from different perspectives and offers new (alternative) versions of the same story (Morales 2004–2005, 370). According to Morales, it tries “to convey the illusion of verisimilitude through the introduction of real historical events and characters into the fictional world of the novel” (Morales 2004 ࡳ 2005, 370). According to Busse, “Thomas outlines an approach to Holocaust Studies that dilutes disciplinary boundaries as it advances a new understanding of historical writing that is neither subjectively personal nor objectively historical but an amalgam of both” (Busse 2002, 202). It can be understood from Busse that Thomas’s approach to the Holocaust is multidisciplinary where his conception of historical writing is a mixture of subjectivity and objectivity. From this perspective, Thomas’s novel can be considered unique in that it deserves inclusion in both historical and

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Holocaust writing. In The White Hotel, Lisa’s sexual fantasies, grotesque bodily imagery and magical realism all contribute to establishing the prophetic notion of the future trauma of her sexual assault and tragic death as well as the death of 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar. Magical realism in the novel illuminates its relation to the Holocaust trauma and the general traumatic history of time. Like the grotesque, magical realism has the potential to penetrate the wall of reality or, more specifically, that of traumatic events, and to provide us with a comprehensible representation. Adams says, “[…] both magic[al] and grotesque realism in the novel enable acts of traumatic representation that are otherwise impossible, with the temporal displacement of the magic functioning in addition to encode a specific (temporal) aspect of traumatic experience: its nachträglich logic” (Adams 2011, 109). The use of magical realism in the novel is also an essential means of placing the novel’s grotesque occurrences not as “pornographic sexualizations of violence and rape”, but as central to the novel’s investigations of the ways the unspeakable can be spoken (Adams 2011, 111).

CHAPTER 5 REVEALING THE UNSPOKEN: TRAUMATIC HISTORIES OF SLAVERY

The transatlantic slave trade, which carried millions of black people from Africa to the Western world from the 16th to the 19th century, was very lucrative and economically beneficial for the countries involved, namely Portugal, Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands. This particular slave trade, which was marked by greed, violence, barbarism and atrocity, is now considered a crime against humanity. According to Hilary Beckles, the popular belief that black skin symbolises inferiority helped to justify the transatlantic slave trade: “Racism […] became not only a way of rationalizing slavery, but also a whole way of life, complete with its own psychological, social and economic support systems” (Beckles 2002, 16). Historian Joseph Miller describes the transatlantic slave trade as the “way of death” mentioning that the slave ships were seen as “floating tombs” and the confined Africans as a “commodity that died with ease” (qtd. in Beckles 2002, 17). In The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, John W. Blassingame described the journey of slaves during the Middle Passage: The foul and poisonous air of the hold, extreme heat, men lying for hours in their own defecation, with blood and mucus covering the floor, caused a great deal of sickness. … A number of [the slaves] went insane and many became so despondent that they gave up the will to live. … Often they committed suicide, by drowning or refusing food or medicine, rather than accept their enslavement. (Blassingame 1979, 7)

The quotation above describes both the physical and psychological torment of the slaves during the transatlantic slave trade. Although slavery prevailed in Spain, Portugal and the Caribbean as well as in America, there were differences in the ways slavery was perceived in those countries. Unlike in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies where

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slavery was a class category or a form of indentured servitude9, slavery in the US was something hereditary, centrally associated with race. In comparing the situations of American and West Indian slaves, Engerman says: Slaves in the US had more extensive contact with white society in their daily lives. Moreover, in the US, even in the South, the slaves were basically in a white society: even in those states with the heaviest concentrations of slaves, whites represented one-half of the population. In the West Indies, the share of whites was generally on the order of 10%. These distinctions, including the fact that more US slaves were native-born than were West Indian slaves (90% in US, versus less than 75% in Jamaica), make clear the marked differences in the conditions of slaves in the New World. (qtd. in Aljoe 2004, 2)

It can be inferred from the quotation above that slavery in America was more institutionalised and hereditary than in the West Indies. Edouard Glissant argues that for more than half a century Caribbean authors have been writing their own versions of Caribbean history defining the cultural identity of the geographical space where they were born. Most of them had left this space in their youth but always dreamed of returning there at some point in their lives. George Lamming considers the situation contradictory since it simultaneously persists in roots and rootlessness, home and homelessness (Lamming 1978, 25). The desire to discover a long-forbidden and long-neglected Caribbean identity has proved to be a formidable task “not only because of a violent history but also because of the inherently elusive character of the original referent” (Arva 2011, 118). The inaccessibility of the past to the black slaves, the erasure of their African cultural identity, and the near complete physical erasure of the native population that lived before them have made the construction of a Caribbean national identity quite impossible, considering that, from a 9 Indentured

servants were individuals who bargained away their labour for a period of four to seven years in exchange for passage to the New World. In the 17th century, indentured servants made up the mass of English immigrants to the Chesapeake colonies and were central to the development of the tobacco economy. Large numbers of indentured servants could also be found in the English West Indian colonies, but they were replaced by enslaved African labourers by the end of the century as cash-crop agriculture (particularly sugar) and plantation slavery gradually minimised the overall demographic and economic importance of indentured servitude as a labour system. Regardless, indentured servitude continued to be an important institution in the Atlantic world until the 19th century. (Guasco 2011)

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European perspective, the term ‘nation’ refers to a group of people sharing the same territory, language, customs, culture and suchlike (Arva 2011, 118). My argument concurs with Arva that the rewriting of the dominant version of history to remove the silence of almost two centuries and the reclamation of a Caribbean identity (social, political and cultural) is possible only through writing, particularly through a narrative which is different from that of colonial authorities, capable of voicing the silenced and unrepresentable, documenting the horror of slavery and colonial domination. According to Arva, although Caribbean authors possess a temporal distance from the original traumatic historical events that they were compelled to recall and recreate through their writing, the event of slavery “comes to life as a simulation rather than as a representation of real events” (Arva 2011, 118). Apart from having the temporal distance from actual events, the endeavour to give voices to those who are deprived of their past and are silenced by traumatic events has again and again challenged most Caribbean writers. Quite a large number of literary works have been produced on Caribbean slavery. Although the majority of them are written in English, a number of them are also in French, Spanish, Dutch or one of the many Creoles—a fact which has actually broadened the scope of Caribbean literature on slavery. My selection of Moi, Tituba, Sorcière … Noire de Salem over Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (which was written in English) points to the diversity of languages in Caribbean literature; it will also add a different dimension to my analysis. According to Aljoe: “Although most West Indian slave narratives were published in England, they are very much grounded in a Caribbean context” (Aljoe 2004, 3). Narratives such as The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) and Negro Slavery Described by a Negro: Being the Narrative of Ashton Warner, a Native of St. Vincent’s (1831) mainly dealt with the experience of slavery in the British West Indian colonies. According to Aljoe, Caribbean slave narratives have certain formal and structural characteristics in common: anchored in the Caribbean, they all describe local slavery which is distinctive from US slavery; they deal with the desire to return to the islands; they put emphasis on orality, and are concerned with religious discussion and imagery, black subjectivity and ethics; and they basically aimed to provide readers with reliable evidence regarding slavery in the Caribbean (Aljoe 2004, 3).

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The genre of slave narratives in American literature provided accounts of horrific life stories in slavery and sexual abuse of black women. According to Carla Peterson, there was, however, a difference between the literature of the freed slaves and that of the free blacks. Unlike the freed slaves, free blacks used spiritual narratives to raise a voice against slavery and racial discrimination (Peterson 1995, 4). Out of the many slave narratives, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), and Harriet Ann Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) are the most popular and influential. They deal with the hardship of both male and female slaves and the sexual abuse of female slaves on plantations. Both Toni Morrison and Maryse Condé have grounded their novels on real historical figures: Condé on Tituba from the Salem witch trial and Morrison on a fugitive slave whose name was Margaret Garner. Condé’s Moi, Tituba, Sorcière … Noire de Salem brings Tituba back to the world of the living, gives her a voice, and thus allows her to narrate her silenced story from beyond the grave. By magically bringing back her dead daughter to her, Morrison’s Beloved attempts to provide Sethe a voice and thus a reality of which she has been deprived because of her colour and gender. Both Condé and Morrison recreate a fictional account of the lives of the women involved in these actual events, and deal mainly with the harrowing history of slavery expressed through the personal stories of the characters. Thus, both authors come forward with a subjective and more marginalised version of history which goes against the documented history written by the whites. Although both Condé and Morrison started rewriting the history of slavery by writing novels about it, after researching the theme of slavery for more than two decades, Condé felt the urge to drop the theme and move on. In an interview with Doris Y. Kadish, Condé said, “I have decided sometimes in my life to stop remembering slavery. I have often decided: I am not going to write even one line about slavery any longer, and let’s go forward. As long as you keep looking at the past you cannot go forward” (Kadish 2000, 220). Her statement emphasises the risks of sticking to the past and suggests the necessity of moving forward. As Arva says, she strongly believes that living on memories of pain and suffering might cause a state of never-ending melancholia and a paralysis of will and desire (Arva 2011, 159). Morrison, on the other hand, wants to keep working on the theme of slavery in order to show its atrocities to the present world and thus to

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empathise with its victims. According to Samuels and Hudson-Weems, Beloved serves the important goal of Morrison to portray the lives of slaves in such a way that has not been done before; it is an endeavour not to portray “what history has recorded in the slave narratives but what it has omitted” (Samuels and Hudson-Weems 1990, 96). It is thus an effort to bring denied or neglected stories to light. Samuels and Hudson-Weems again say that Morrison seeks to find and reveal a truth about “the interior life of people who didn’t write it (which doesn’t mean that they didn’t have it)”; to “fill in the blanks that the slave narratives left”; to “part the veil that was frequently drawn”; and to “implement the stories that [she] heard” (Samuels and Hudson-Weems 1990, 97). I argue that in order to recuperate a traumatic history and to give voice to a marginalised group, Morrison employs the magical realist narrative and presents a view on slavery previously unheard of. Both Condé and Morrison feel the urge and the need to challenge the white, dominating voices, and thus develop an alternative narrative which has the potential to express their experiences. Although both authors attempt to rewrite the historical accounts of slavery and to give voices to the slaves, they do not replace them with a fictional version. Through the protagonists and other female characters, they also demonstrate that during slavery it is women who suffer most. They suffer physical and sexual assault: Sethe was beaten severely in spite of being pregnant, and her breast milk was stolen; Ella—a female black character in Beloved—was captured and sexually tortured by a white father and his son; Tituba’s mother Abena was raped by a white sailor, and later faced another rape attempt by her master. I argue that both authors employ the magical realist narrative—consisting of myth, magic, the supernatural and ghosts—in recuperating the traumatic history of slavery as well as exploring the transgenerational transmission of trauma. In Beloved, Morrison attempts to reinterpret the official history of white slave-owners and offer an alternative one from the perspectives of slaves, and to re-establish an identity lost through slavery. Lobodziec believes that Morrison’s alternative narrative stresses the distinctiveness of the experience of the black slaves and that “the ‘magical’ dimensions of that experience is an effective survival strategy which enables black people to physically, psychologically, and spiritually endure” (Lobodziec 2012, 117). Lobodziec’s statement highlights the use of magical realism as a survival tactic for the oppressed black people. Condé, on the other hand, rewrites the official history of the slavery of the region and uncovers the cruelty of slavery (especially on women). Tituba’s ability to communicate

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with the world of spirits despite being a living person and to keep residing in the real world of the islands among slaves even after her death underscores the use of techniques of magical realism in the novel, offering an alternative to traditional narratives. The presence of the spirits of Tituba’s loved ones and her communion with them to receive guidance and her power of magic and witchcraft to resist violence and oppression and to (re)assert her identity unsettles the traditional sense of logic and the notion of a traditional narrative. By getting back to the criteria of magical realism introduced and developed above, I will try to answer in the next two sub-chapters on slavery whether this form of alternative narrative used by both Morrison and Condé can actually be considered magical realist.

Toni Morrison’s Magical Realism in Beloved: Curing Historical Wounds and Rewriting Identity Loss Writing a novel like Beloved was difficult for Morrison as a result not only of her own aversion to writing about slavery but also of the national forgetfulness on the subject. In an interview with Time magazine, Morrison said, “I thought this has got to be the least read of all the books I’d written because it is about something that the characters don’t want to remember, I don’t want to remember, black people don’t want to remember, white people don’t want to remember. I mean, it’s a national amnesia” (qtd. in Matus 1998, 103). Morrison’s statement exposes American people’s reluctance to talk about slavery. However, Morrison believes that remembering the horror of slavery is crucial for the nation: “There is a necessity for remembering the horror, but […] in a manner in which it can be digested, in a manner in which the memory is not destructive. The act of writing the book, in a way, is a way of confronting it and making it possible to remember” (qtd. in Matus 1998, 32). Morrison wants to remember the unremembered and to speak the unspoken, and she attempts to reveal the wrong and to correct the full story. Apart from exploring the trauma that slavery wreaked on those who survived into the post-Civil War period, Morrison, through the figure of Beloved, ambitiously attempts an imaginative testimony of those who did not survive—“those sixty million and more to whom the novel is dedicated” (Matus 1998, 104). By dedicating the novel to the sixty million and more, she focuses on the history of slavery as a Holocaust (Matus 1998, 104). In order to reveal the silenced, marginalised and untold histories of black slaves, Morrison uses a non-realist narrative, where she introduces her ghost-like character Beloved and exposes shocking histories

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of slavery that contradict the authoritative history. According to Bowers, in her effort to provide the history of black slaves from their own perspectives, Morrison “use[s] oral storytelling as a source of alternative perspectives on history, as the oral tale was often the only way in which alternative versions of events […] survived” (Bowers 2004, 94). Since the magical elements in a magical realist text are grounded on the local beliefs, rituals or practices of the place where the text is set, it certainly possesses the sense of orality, and thus shows its potential to provide us an alternative and marginalised version of (hi)story (Bowers 2004, 95). Morrison has conceived and written Beloved from the marginalised standpoint of African Americans who are devoid of any kind of social, cultural or political authority. According to Samuels and Hudson-Weems, “Beloved records the cruelty, violence and degradation—whether the physical or psychological fragmentation of the black family—that often victimised slaves, irrespective of age or gender” (Samuels and HudsonWeems 1990, 96). Morrison thus focuses not only on the physical but also on the psychological disintegration of the slave family. Apart from depicting the cruelty of slavery, the novel also shows the necessity of confronting and sharing the past so that the characters can initiate the healing process. Ashraf Rushdy appositely remarks: “What Morrison does in Beloved is to remember in order to revive, to survive, to rename, to repossess” (Rushdy 1999, 61). Morrison gives us an access to Sethe and other black slaves’ past by introducing the character of Beloved, and thus enables us to understand the brutality of slavery that has long been suppressed in the documented history.

Disruption of Time and Space According to Zamora and Faris, the supernatural in a magical realist text is “an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence—admitted, accepted and integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism. Magic is no longer quixotic madness, but normative and normalizing. It is a simple matter of the most complicated sort” (Zamora and Faris 1995, 3), or where there is, according to Faris, a combination of “realism and the fantastic in such a way that magical elements grow organically out of the reality portrayed” (Faris 1995, 163). Both statements refer to the harmonious and unquestioned coexistence of the magical and the real. In Beloved, the inhabitants of house 124 take the presence of a ghost for granted. Both Sethe and Denver have “a perfunctory battle against the outrageous behavior of that place; against turned-over slop jars, smacks on the behind, and gusts of sour air. For they understood the source of the outrage as well

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as they knew the source of light” (Morrison 1988, 4). Neither Sethe nor Denver is surprised at the ghostly atmosphere; they, rather, consider it a part of reality and continue their normal activities. In an interview with Taylor-Guthrie, Toni Morrison states that the most distinguishing difference between African American folk culture and Latin American magical realism lies in their different origins; she shows her inclination towards the black people who had to invent their magic in the unknown American reality (Taylor-Guthrie 1994, 243). She considers “their magic […] discredited because it was held by discredited people” (Taylor-Guthrie 1994, 243). The way disgraced black characters in the novel react to extremely violent events can well be considered a magical realist motif. Sethe’s act of infanticide to save her daughter from the clutches of slavery is shown as the final act of resistance. The use of myth, magic and ghosts enables black slaves to fight the traumatic situation they face, and thus develops a compensatory vision which echoes Menton’s statement that the magical realists “characteristically responded to the harshness of modern history [historical events] by developing a compensatory vision” (qtd. in Foster 1995, 271). In the novel, the non-linear and repetitive narratives question “received ideas about time, space, and identity” (Faris 1995, 173)—one very significant feature of magical realist text. According to Faris, the “sense of time is shaken throughout” the text (Faris 1995, 173) and “[r]epetition as a narrative principle, in conjunction with mirrors or their analogues used symbolically or structurally, creates a magic of shifting references” (Faris 1995, 177). Characters in the novel find themselves in a position where both past and present overlap: blurring or transgressing borders between phenomena is also a magical realist feature. Sethe’s painful account reflects her distorted sense of time: I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory. But out there, in the world. (Morrison 1988, 35–36)

Characters’ memories in the novel seem to be very selective, revolving around the most traumatic images: “Unfortunately her brain was devious. She might be hurrying across a field, running practically, to get to the pump quickly and rinse the chamomile sap from her legs. Nothing else would be in her mind. […] and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling,

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rolling, rolling out before her eyes” (Morrison 1988, 6). This quotation shows how a traumatised person is engulfed by their trauma through the repetition of the past. A distorted sense of time can originate from traumatic experience(s)—a notion which strengthens my argument concerning the close association between magical realist narrative and traumatic experiences. In the novel, the perpetual sufferings of black slaves destroy their sense of time. Concerning the disruption of spatial sense, Rawdon Wilson writes, “[…] literary space, in being conceptual, cannot be measured, but it can be experienced” (Wilson 1995, 215). Paul D’s condition at 124 refers to a lack of space: “I go anywhere these days. Anywhere they let me sit down” (Morrison 1988, 7). His sense of dislocatedness is described in a cyclic narrative: “It went on that way and might have stayed that way but one evening, after supper, after Sethe, he came downstairs, sat in the rocker and didn’t want to be there” (Morrison 1988, 115). Last but not least, the novel also deals with the disruption of the notion of identity. Here, Beloved is not only shown as Sethe’s own daughter but also as the missing child of any black slave, and as such can be considered the representative of the traumatised black people and their collective memory. Because of the transition from individual to communal, “one space can contain other spaces” (qtd. in Lobodziec 2012, 109) in literature, and in Beloved, 124 seems to include several spaces (Lobodziec 2012, 109). While approaching the house, Stamp Paid hears voices of people coming from or living in other unrecognisable spaces (Morrison 1988, 172). Later, Stamp Paid thinks “the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead. Very few had died in bed, like Baby Suggs, and none that he knew of, including Baby, had lived a livable life” (Morrison 1988, 198). Thus, the voices heard by Paul D seem to belong to those who had lost their lives during the slave trade. The potential relationship between Morrison’s “metatextual dedication” and the otherworldly “voices heard by a fictional character” also demonstrate a magical realist characteristic (Lobodziec 2012, 109) as Wilson notices, “[n]ot only do fictional worlds overlap, in some sense, the actual world, but they also overlap each other, each superimposition being radically divergent from the others” (Wilson 1995, 216). Apart from all this, the fragmentary and repetitive nature of the narrative provides the characters with enough opportunity to disclose traumatic and painful past event(s) in their lives, and thus helps to enhance the intensity of the stories.

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Exploring the Multiple Identities of Beloved In Beloved, the presence of a ghost in Sethe’s house at 124 is described as if it was a normal and mundane event. Beloved’s appearance after the exorcism of the baby ghost, according to Spaulding, “signals a shift away from spectral haunting to concrete confrontation with the history of slavery and its effects” (Spaulding 2005, 68). Beloved is the manifestation of the past for the black people, which inspires or, probably, instigates them to confront their past and to recover their memories. The appearance of Beloved as a ghost in the novel troubles “the scientific and materialist assumptions of Western modernity: that reality is knowable, predictable, controllable” (Zamora 1995, 498). Zamora’s statement shows the doubt towards Western notions of reality by including a ghostly character like Beloved. However, it is the inclusion of Beloved in the story which enables Morrison to reveal the extreme cruelty of slavery and thus to provide an alternative version of history. As a character given magical abilities by Morrison, Beloved is a way for characters to reunite with the past and to reassert identity. According to Matus, Morrison links her interest in memory and its operations to the tradition of the ghost story through the concept of rememory, which asserts the reality of past ideas and experiences (Matus 1998, 114). Sethe tries her best not to remember her gruesome past but her brain deceives her; she is overwhelmed by her memories and does not even need a catalytic event. Matus argues that by allowing Sethe to remember the past so thoroughly, Morrison shows the trauma in different ways than through the malfunctions of memory. This makes the past vivid to the reader but reveals that Sethe lives in a world deprived of sensation (Matus 1998, 106). Until the arrival of Paul D, Sethe has been living enslaved and suffocated by her memories. When Paul D offers her a new life with him, she does not seem to be very interested in life: “Maybe I should leave things the way they are,” she said. “How are they?” “We get along.” “What about inside?” “I don’t go inside.” (Morrison 1988, 45 ࡳ 46)

Because of their failure to express the history of slavery, Sethe and the other black characters are haunted by Beloved. Barnett states that after returning against Sethe’s will like repressed memories, Beloved is hungry for more than just the love and affection of Sethe: she has an insatiable

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appetite to hear the rememoried stories, a hunger for articulating the unspeakable (Barnett 1997, 420). Sethe discloses, “Everything [in her past life is] painful or lost”, and that “it [is] unspeakable” (Morrison 1988, 58). The arrival of Beloved forces Sethe to speak the most unspeakable stories of her life which have been excluded from the white slave-owners’ history. Sethe can thus be considered a historian as well as the mouthpiece of the marginalised. Henderson appositely remarks: “Like the historian, Sethe is able to ‘re-enact’ or ‘rethink’ a critical moment from the past and is consequently able to demonstrate her possession of rather than by the past and to alter her own life history. […] it is precisely the (re)configuration of the past that enables her to refigure the future” (Henderson 1999, 99). Henderson’s statement emphasises Sethe’s ability to rearrange or restructure the past in order to anticipate the future. According to Shannin Schroeder, Beloved deals with the official account “of slavery by revisiting the past, by proposing ‘an alternative to [that] past’, and by revising slavery’s effects on individuals” (Schroeder 2004, 106). By revisiting the past, the novel reveals the inadequacies of the official account of slavery and proposes an alternative to that past. Again, Paul D’s contact with Beloved causes all the unpleasant memories to reappear: “[Beloved] reminds me of something. Something, look like, I’m supposed to remember” (Morrison 1988, 234). Barnett believes that although characters desire to shake off the clutches of the past, Beloved, like a traumatic nightmare, invades the present and forces Sethe and Paul D to remember the occurrences they have been trying to forget (Barnett 1997, 420). She goes on to say that apart from unleashing traumatic memory, Beloved’s arrival crystallises issues of masculinity and questions traditional gender roles. Paul D’s sexual relationship with Beloved only enslaves him more as he is asked and forced to do something he does not want to do (Barnett 1997, 420).

Restoring Individual and Communal Identities Like other ex-slaves, Sethe wants to forget the past but fails as she always lives in the past. On the other hand, she wants to remember the past but fails to do so because of the brutality it possesses. The desire of Sethe and other people in the community to forget the brutal treatment they received as slaves ultimately shatters their true identity. As the magical realist instrument, Beloved helps Sethe assert her identity and, by healing the rift between her and the black community, also enables them to form their communal identity. Morrison thematises the unwillingness of the community to confront the past directly in two significant ways: first, by

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showing the community’s reluctance to remember an eighteen-year-old event which ended in Sethe’s act of infanticide; and second, by showing how quickly Beloved is forgotten: “Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her” (Morrison 1988, 274). Those who study magical realism and use it in their writing also emphasise the important role of community. According to Faris and Zamora, magical realist narratives or texts “may encode the strengths of communities even more than the struggles of individuals. Societies, rather than personalities, tend to rise and fall in magical realist fiction” (Faris and Zamora 1995, 10). Morrison shows the way(s) in which black people confronted the reality as a group, a community: it is the black women who gather in front of 124 and assist Denver and Sethe to rid themselves of the ominous presence of Beloved. It is the communal bond which saves Sethe and Denver from the ghostly presence of Beloved. In order to help Sethe and Denver, Lady Jones invites other people of the black community who later share their food with the helpless mother and daughter (Morrison 1988, 248 ࡳ 249). All these events emphasise the importance of community in the novel. Although critics attempt to fix Beloved’s identity as Sethe’s daughter or as a fraud, it is clear that she has multiple identities. Although she apparently returns as the murdered daughter of Sethe who has been forgotten by the black community, she also represents many other repressed memories of Sethe and Paul D. Morrison wants her characters to remember their inhuman treatment as slaves, and thus introduces the character of Beloved in the novel. However, Karla Holloway believes that Beloved’s connection to enormous suffering can be read not only as an overwhelming loss but as the prospect of healing: “If Beloved is not only Sethe’s dead daughter returned but also the return of all the faces, all the drowned but remembered […], then she has become a cultural mooring place, a moment for reclamation and for renaming” (qtd. in Peterson 2008, 54). By reminding the black characters of their brutal past, the magical realist character Beloved allows them to confront the past and thus provides them with some sort of relief. Beloved’s return not only stands for Sethe’s past but also the collective past of the entire black community; it also brings many memories of how atrociously the ex-slaves had been treated under slavery. Razmi and Jamali argue that by acknowledging this collective “history and pain, Sethe sets the basis for Beloved’s appearance in physical shape in the novel. …

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Beloved’s return, represents not just Sethe’s past, but also the community’s past. It represents Ella’s child, the runaway captive from Deer Creek, and above all Middle Passage” (Razmi and Jamali 2012, 117). The presence of Beloved allows the black characters a voice through which they can provide unheard-of stories of atrocities and come forward with an alternative history, significantly different from that of the white slaveowners. The appearance of Beloved enables people of the community to feel the need to help Sethe overcome her suffering and assert her own identity. According to Foreman, “Beloved’s most basic premise lies in the magical: it is the community’s shared belief in magic that enables them to save Sethe from its negative effects” (Foreman 1995, 299). Seeing Beloved and the singing women face Sethe’s as well as their own past: “When they caught up with each other, all thirty, and arrived at 124, the first thing they saw was not Denver sitting on the steps, but themselves. Younger, stronger, even as little girls lying in the grass asleep. Catfish was popping grease in the pan and they saw themselves scoop German potato salad onto the plate” (Morrison 1988, 258). The appearance of Beloved causes them to see their younger selves and makes them admit how their experiences as slaves have destroyed their sense of spirituality. When Denver rushes to the community people for help, they do not want to repeat the same mistake they committed eighteen years before, when they, out of jealousy, failed to inform Sethe of the arrival of Schoolteacher and his team. It resulted in a tragic case of infanticide and Sethe’s alienation from the community. Besides this, Beloved seems to be pregnant because of her heterosexual assault on Paul D, which also suggests the possibility of the rape in the past intruding into the present and the future. The need to rid themselves of Beloved and the desire to reorganise the past once again gives the people of the community a chance to amend their mistake, and they decide to exorcise her for the final time. Beloved enables Sethe and other people of the community to be reunited. The demonic characteristics of Beloved enable Morrison to draw our attention to historical atrocities but she must be exorcised in order for a history of trauma to let loose its hold and allow African Americans to go on living (Razmi and Jamali 2012, 118). According to Barnett, the conclusion of the novel suggests that if the community fails to realise that it is actually the forgetting or repressing rather than the communal memory itself which causes the trauma to return. Only when they understand this will Beloved have the chance to return (Barnett 1997,

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425). The end of the novel emphasises the need to anticipate a fruitful future: ‘“[M]e and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow’” (Morrison 1988, 273).

Signifying Trauma in Experiences of Rape and Sexual Abuse Through rape and various other forms of sexual violence, Morrison has shown the individual as well as collective traumatisation of black people. Robin E. Field argues that rape or sexual torture, experienced by many characters including the two main characters, Sethe and Paul D, label Beloved “as a recovery text, one that paints both the individual and the communal trauma and recovery from the atrocities of slavery and Middle Passage” (Field 2007, 2). According to Barnett, sexual torture is the “trauma that forces Paul D” (in his case, homosexual torture) to lock “his painful memories in a ‘tobacco tin’ heart”; that Sethe remembers more clearly than the beatings that leave “scars on her back”; that destroys Halle’s mind; that compels Sethe’s mother to desert the resultant child; and is that “against which Ella measures all evil” (Barnett 1997, 418). However, like Field, I also argue that Morrison does not give any graphic descriptions of scenes of rape or sexual humiliation, but rather, employs oblique language to imply rape. In the novel, there are numerous incidents of rape and sexual assault against female slaves and, in a few cases, against male slaves: the stealing of Sethe’s breast milk (Morrison 1988, 16 ࡳ 17); Paul D and other prisoners’ performing oral sex on white guards (1988, 107 ࡳ 109); Stamp Paid’s wife Vashti’s forced sexual relationship with her enslaver (1988, 184); and Baby Suggs’ coerced sex with a straw boss (1988, 23) and then with an overseer (1988, 144). According to Barnett, there are also instances of helpless prostitution which are quite equal to rape or forced sex: Sethe’s offering her body to the engraver in order for her baby’s name to be engraved on her tombstone, and the girls’ work at the slaughter house are a few examples (Barnett 1997, 419). Sethe passionately emphasises that by murdering her daughter, she has saved her from undreamable dreams in which “a gang of whites invaded her daughter’s private part, soiled her daughter’s thighs and threw her daughter out of the wagon” (Morrison 1988, 251). For Sethe, killing her daughter is much better than allowing her to be overworked and physically and sexually tortured by the white masters. So, she murders her baby daughter to save her not only from being overworked and brutally punished as a slave but also from being sexually assaulted by white men.

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The theft of Sethe’s breast milk is traumatising for her, and she repeatedly uses the words “[a]nd they took my milk” (Morrison 1988, 17) to depict her exploitation. As Barbara Schapiro writes, “[s]he feels robbed of her essence, of her most precious substance, which is her maternal milk” (Schapiro 2000, 159). Although Sethe’s obsession with her milk emphasises the fact that she regards her milk as more important than her body, it might also be a technique to hide or forget the trauma of being raped by white boys, an event which was not clearly narrated but can only be assumed from her later reaction. Field argues that Morrison not only highlights the atrocity committed against black slaves but also shows the potential ways in which the slave community will be able to overcome their individual and collective trauma (Field 2007, 6). For this purpose, Morrison introduces Beloved, a magical realist instrument, who inspires and, to some extent, forces the slaves to remember the repressed memories of many of their individual and collective traumatic stories; she allows them to speak up and share those stories, and thus enables them to rewrite the dominant history and to heal their psychological trauma. The inability to forget the various instances of past violence (sexual, physical and psychological) hinders Paul D from forming a meaningful present. According to Barnett, he is the victim of an unwilling but supernatural sexual assault which has rendered him powerless as if from the white guards in Georgia where he and other prisoners had to say “Yes, sir” (Morrison 1988, 107) or face death; however, they “articulate the choice as a choice between manhood and impotence” (Barnett 1997, 424). Although the unwilling but unavoidable sexual act with Beloved traumatises Paul D, it forces him to confront the repressed traumatic past, “restores his heart to him”, forces him to re-experience the sexual torture and humiliation he suffered as a chain-gang prisoner and thus functions as a process of healing (Barnett 1997, 424). By experiencing an unwilling act of sexual intercourse and the humiliation resulting from it, Paul D reexperiences his trauma as a slave and thus initiates the process of healing. Morrison was very interested in developing new types of narrative which have the ability to express the historical trauma of slavery experienced by the characters. I have already analysed how she blends African American myth, tradition, folklore, belief and, most importantly, ghosts, and how she develops an alternative narrative (magical realism) from the perspectives of the disgraced black slaves. The ghostly character of Beloved enables Sethe to reveal her long-repressed traumatised memories by encouraging her to tell stories about her brutal life as a slave and about her act of infanticide. Beloved, thus, helps Sethe adjust to her past and overcome her

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sense of guilt. Again, I have also analysed the issue that the magical realist narrative technique provides Morrison with the opportunity to considerably rewrite and recover a silenced history by showing that a past which is not acknowledged or incorporated into the present can continue to be a haunting presence.

Refusing Racial and Gendered Subjugation: Escaping Marginalisation in Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, Sorcière … Noire de Salem Unlike Toni Morrison’s Beloved which portrays Sethe’s obsession with her past and her inability to live a present and hope for a future, Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, Sorcière … Noire de Salem (I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem) represents the legacy of violence and atrocity committed by whites. The novel, on the one hand, depicts the atrocity of slavery and, on the other, comments on the evils of patriarchal society and the subjugation of women by men. Condé provides the neglected Caribbean slave community with a voice so that they can rewrite documented history from their own perspective. For this purpose, she has employed an alternative narrative technique (magical realism) different from the traditional narrative employed by authorities (in this case, the white slave-owners). Condé provides Tituba with magical and spiritual power, and also uses witchcraft as a means of raising her voice against the hypocrisy and oppression of the white world. The use of ghosts, magic and witchcraft alienate her from the community because she challenges society’s norms and expectations; however, they are also used as a means to escape both racial and gendered violence. Moi, Tituba, Sorcière … Noire de Salem tells the personal story of Tituba and the collective story of black slaves and French Caribbean women. Based on the real historical events of the Salem witch trials, the story strives to create an alternative history of the northern United States and the Caribbean. The novel deals with violence, trauma, sexual and physical torture, rape, execution and other forms of brutal treatment of women under both slavery and patriarchal society. Tituba’s narrative rewrites official history from the perspectives of female slaves in order to reveal the cruelty of slavery on women. Condé provides her protagonist with the power of magic and witchcraft to resist and escape the oppression of white authority. Magical elements in Condé’s novel are thus used as a survival tactic from the perspectives of the marginalised women.

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Using Magic and Witchcraft in Resisting Patriarchy Tituba was born in Barbados in the late 17th century as the daughter of an Ashanti woman raped as a salve. She was exiled to New England as the slave of a Puritan minister, and jailed as a witch during the 1692 Salem trials. Although Tituba suffers from the double victimisation of being both black and a woman, she does not see herself as a slave in the same way her husband John Indian does, and thus possesses a much greater sense of self and honour than him. Pitt says that Tituba assumes different social and narrative positions during her life, which provide her with the ability to gain individual freedom and social justice, “constructing alternative narratives and communities that challenge foundational fictions designating black bodies as destined for servitude and female bodies as abject receptacles of male desire” (Pitt 2007, 9 ࡳ 10). The theme of violence and oppression is ever present in the novel. It starts with the horrific and violent rape scene of Tituba’s mother Abena: “Abena, ma mère, un marin anglais la viola sur le pont du Christ the King, un jour de 16** alors que le navire faisait voile vers la Barbade. C’est de cette agression que je suis née. De cet acte de haine et de mépris…”10 (Condé 1986, 13). The birth of Tituba always reminds Abena of her own shame at being raped by a white sailor: “Ma mère ne m’aimait pas [...] je ne cessais pas de lui remettre en l’esprit le Blanc qui l’avait possédée sur le pont du Christ the King au milieu d’un cercle de marins, voyeurs obscènes” 11 (Condé 1986, 18). Tituba can be considered a symbol of humiliation and shame not only for Abena but also for her entire race. Abena’s indifferent attitude towards Tituba reminds us of Sethe’s mother in Beloved who deserted all her children except Sethe because she was her only child conceived out of love with a black man and not as the result of rape by some white man. Tituba can well be considered a product of violence, as Felix Shapiro states, “[…] we can read Tituba not just as the child of an English sailor’s rape of an African slave; not just as a child of the metaphor of colonial violence; but we can also read her as the child of 10 “Abena, my mother, was raped by an English sailor on the deck of Christ the King one day in the year 16** while the ship was sailing for Barbados. I was born from this act of aggression. From this act of hatred and contempt.” (Condé 1994, 3) 11 “I never stopped reminding my mother of the white sailor who had raped her on the deck of Christ the King, while surrounded by a circle of obscene voyeurs.” (Condé 1994, 6)

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rhetorical figuration, disfiguration and violence” (Shapiro 2012, 29). After coming back to Barbados, she is again objectified and later betrayed by her fellow revolutionary, Christopher, and is ultimately hanged. Therefore, Tituba suffers from both racial and gendered discrimination. Tituba receives her name from her adoptive father Yao, an Ashanti slave, who has received Abena from her master as a punishment for concealing her pregnancy: “Ce n’est pas un prénom ashanti. Sans doute, Yao en l’inventant, voulait-il prouver que j’étais fille de sa volonté et de son imagination. Fille de son amour” 12 (Condé 1986, 17). Although Yao knows that Tituba is not her biological daughter, he invents the name to show his love for her. According to Arva, “this act of naming suggests that the surrogate father’s will and imagination […] give the child a second chance at being born, but this time out of love, and not of hatred and contempt” (Arva 2011, 160). The act of naming provides Tituba a sort of agency which she later uses against the white patriarchal society. It also gives her a second chance at birth. From this perspective, his act of naming can be considered a resistance against ideas of white superiority. At the age of seven, Tituba witnesses her mother’s public execution for defending herself against her master’s sexual assault. Mama Yaya, who is a clairvoyant, a healer or a prophet, raises Tituba after she is driven out of the plantation. Mama Yaya has an outstanding ability to constantly communicate with the invisible world while herself residing in the mortal world. The narrator’s statement, “En réalité, elle avait à peine les pieds sur notre terre et vivait constamment dans [la compagnie de son compagnon et ses fils], ayant cultivé à l’extrême le don de communiquer avec les invisibles” 13 (Condé 1986, 21), refers to two completely different but simultaneously existing worlds—the real and the paranormal—and thus strengthens my proposition of the use of magical realism in the novel. The reader, irrespective of race and gender, considers that the representations of the magical and the mundane do not collide: they rather consider magic to be the indispensable part of a real world in the novel. This statement also refers to Mama Yaya’s magical ability to simultaneously reside in two worlds. This magical ability allows her to assert her individuality and to

12

“It’s not an Ashanti name. Yao probably invented it to prove that I was the daughter of his will and imagination. Daughter of his love.” (Condé 1994, 6) 13 “In fact, she was hardly of this world and lived constantly in [the company of her dead man and sons]. She had cultivated to a fine art the ability to communicate with the invisible.” (Condé 1994, 8–9)

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fight the oppressive forces; she, however, never uses her power to harm innocent people. Tituba acquires the power to transform herself into other life forms, such as a bird, an insect or even a frog. However, it can be argued that Mama Yaya’s instructions depict magic in a positive manner: “[…] tout doit être respecté. Que l’homme n’est pas un maître parcourant à cheval son royaume”14 (Condé 1986, 22). By stressing the fact that magic is meant for the welfare of humankind, Mama Yaya distinguishes it from black magic. According to Lovasz, the way in which Mama Yaya introduces Tituba to the realm of spirits and starts teaching her the ways of witchcraft indicates a new perception in the novel towards superstitious tendencies, presenting “sorcière in a positive manner” (Lovasz 2002, 22). Under her appropriate guidance, Tituba learns to communicate with the dead: “Les morts ne meurent que s’ils meurent dans nos coeurs. Ils vivent si nous les chérissons, si nous honorons leur mémoire” 15 (Condé 1986, 23). The above quotation clearly articulates the proximity between the human and the spirit worlds. The dead continue to live if we consider them alive; they gather around us, waiting for our attention and affection. Most importantly, the quotation shows the representation of the presence of a magical world in a realistic setting—one of the most significant traits of magical realist narrative. Later on, Tituba will often communicate with her deceased loved ones— Abena, Mama Yaya, Yao and others—whenever she wants. Being exultant over her own “[…] faculté de communiquer avec les invisibles, de garder un lien constant avec les disparus, de soigner, de guérir”16 (Condé 1986, 34), Tituba considers her alliance with spirits “[…] une grâce supérieure de nature à inspirer respect, admiration et gratitude”17 (Condé 1986, 34). The above statements consider the ability to communicate with the world 14

“That everything must be respected. That man is not the master riding through his kingdom on horseback.” (Condé 1994, 9) 15 “The dead only die if they die in our hearts. They live on if we cherish them and honor their memory, [if we place their favorite delicacies in life on their graves, and if we kneel down regularly to commune with them. They are all around us, eager for attention, eager for affection. A few words are enough to conjure them back and to have their invisible bodies pressed against ours in their eagerness to make themselves useful].” (Condé 1994, 10) 16 “[…] ability to communicate with the invisible world, to keep constant links with the dead, to care for others and heal.” (Condé 1994, 17) 17 “[…] a superior gift of nature that inspires respect, admiration, and gratitude.” (Condé 1994, 17)

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of spirits to be a gift of nature which earns respect and appreciation, and they thus depict sorcery in a positive manner. Lovasz believes: “Although the label sorcière isolates [her] to some extent, [she takes advantage of her] isolation to escape oppression, and to refuse traditional roles that would otherwise have been delegated to [her]” (Lovasz 2002, 21). Tituba’s communication with the spirits of her loved ones, which is also a magical realist phenomenon, enables her to raise her voice against female subjugation. In this sense, her magical power can be considered a survival strategy against the perpetrators. In discussing magic, Karen S. Wallace claims that “[the] linkage between woman, magic and sorcery is characteristically seen in black francophone literatures of the Caribbean and Africa” (Wallace 1986, 433). In analysing the relationship between women and witchcraft, it can be said that witches become estranged because they go against society’s traditions and expectations. Rather than permitting her alienation to subdue her, Tituba uses magic and witchcraft to refuse established customs and expectations, and to raise her voice against inequality and the oppression of both the white world and the patriarchal society. Put another way, the power of magic is a form of protest and thus a survival tactic on the part of marginalised Tituba. Again, Jean Franco talks about the association between women and witchcraft when he argues that mysticism “has been considered the space of the feminine in some contemporary theory” (qtd. in Lovasz 2002, 28). Through mysticism and magic, marginalised women find a voice and space for themselves in the antagonistic society, and assert their own identity. Tituba’s identity as a witch gives her a platform and thus a voice, and enables her to go against all kinds of expectations society has placed on her. Both violence and magic are interconnected and omnipresent in the novel. Arva rightly states: “Images of physical violence suggesting unspeakable pain and images portraying unexplainable events meet on the literary playing field of the extraordinaryʊultimately, an extraordinary that surreptitiously enters the everyday and undermines its stability and coherence, and whose affect can possibly and quite easily traumatize readers” (Arva 2011, 165). It can be inferred from the above passage that Arva is actually talking about a playing field of the extraordinary, where images of physical violence and images of inexplicable events meet, and which sneakily enters the everyday realm and thus exerts a traumatising effect on both characters and readers of the novel. The hanging scene of Goody Glover is quite significant for Tituba because it reminds her of the traumatic event of her mother’s execution. Later, when she is accused of

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witchcraft in Salem and brought to trial, four white Puritan men use extreme physical violence on her: “L’un des hommes se mit carrément à cheval sur moi et commença de me marteler le visage de ses poings, durs comme pierres. Un autre releva ma jupe et enfonça un bâton taillé en pointe dans la partie la plus sensible de mon corps en raillant:—Prends, prends, c’est la bite de John Indien” 18 (Condé 1986, 144). This scene symbolises the racial, religious and gendered discrimination of Caribbean women. In the novel, we also find tragic instances of infanticide, which point at a motif familiar to many readers from Morrison’s Beloved. The high extent of the atrocity of slavery compels slaves to kill their newborn babies rather than let them experience an animal-like life19. Tituba herself also believes that a slave mother can never feel happy about her motherhood: “Pour une esclave, la maternité n’est pas un bonheur”20 (Condé 1986, 83). Tituba’s thought that motherhood is not for a slave resembles the thoughts of all the female slaves who are unwilling to let their babies suffer from slavery. For a slave, who has no identity, the act of suicide, abortion and infanticide are all various forms of resistance and assertions of suppressed identity.

Providing an Alternative History and a History of Her Own Minto asserts that Condé recovers the real-life figure of Tituba from the footnote of history because she feels the role of black women in the Caribbean is incomplete (Minto 2007, 80). In the “Afterword” to the novel, Condé states that she wanted to “turn Tituba into a sort of female hero, an epic heroine, like the legendary ‘Nanny of the maroons’” (Scarboro 1994, 201). She also felt the need “to give her a reality that was denied to her because of her color and her gender” (Scarboro 1994, 204). However, in order to give voice to Tituba, Condé knows very well that she will have to write an alternative history, find a new form of literature, and 18

“One of the men sat squarely astride me and began to hammer my face with his fists, which were as hard as stones. Another lifted up my skirt and thrust a sharpened stick into the most sensitive part of my body, taunting me: ‘Go on, take it, it’s John Indian’s prick.’” (Condé 1994, 91) 19 “Throughout my childhood I had seen slaves kill their babies by sticking a long thorn into the still viscous-like egg of their heads, by cutting the umbilical cord with a poison blade […]. Throughout my childhood I had seen slaves exchange formulas for potions, baths and injections that sterilize the womb forever and turned it into a tomb lined with a scarlet shroud.” (Condé 1994, 91) 20 “There is no happiness in motherhood for a slave.” (Condé 1994, 50)

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employ an alternative narrative technique from the perspectives of the oppressed. Glissant believes strongly that the suffering of Caribbean people, which has not only a present but also a historical aspect, cannot be entirely represented through realism (Glissant 1989, 105). I claim that the device of the fantastic in Condé’s narrative exemplifies the use of magical realism to offer an alternative to Western realism. Again, the fact that a dead woman, that is to say a ghost, tells the story also emphasises the significance of magical realism in offering an alternative history. The marginalised version of history which we get from the ghostly figure of Tituba focuses on the violence of both white and patriarchal society, provides victims with a voice and thus allows them to talk about their suffering. It can thus be considered a strong blow against the official (white and patriarchal) version of history. By convincing one of the descendants to rewrite her story from her own perspective, Tituba proves the entire history of the colonisation process to be imperfect and incomplete. According to Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, Condé’s novel produces an alternative history, “a victory over voicelessness and erasure, over effacement and exclusion” (Mudimbe-Boyi 1993, 756). In her novel, Condé includes Tituba who was excluded in the official history, and gives her a voice which she was denied before. Tituba argues about the significance of memory in producing history, particularly an alternative one, as both memory and history are intertwined. Ségeral argues that, by making a conscious effort of memory every time she is asked to tell a story, Tituba distinguishes herself from Morrison’s Sethe whose memory seems to be telling her an unwanted story (Ségeral 2012, 85). According to Ségeral, unlike in Beloved where “memory makes for an entirely analeptic, inward-looking narrative, through the re-enactment of the traumatic past over and over again”, in Tituba’s narrative, “memory serves for the creation of a myth, a creolized version of history, and a discourse on the present and the future” (Ségeral 2012, 85). It can be surmised from Ségeral that, whereas Tituba’s memory works voluntarily, Sethe’s memory re-enacts traumatic past events. The narrator Tituba is aware of the survival of Tituba, the historical figure, because she knows that the official history of the Salem witch trial will never represent her appropriately: “Il me semblait que je disparaissais complètement. […] On ne se soucierait ni de monâge ni de ma pérsonnalité. On m’ignorerait”21 (Condé 1986, 173). This quotation refers to Tituba’s 21 “It seemed that I was gradually being forgotten. … There would be no mention of my age or my personality. I would be ignored. [There would never, ever, be a

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desire to have a voice and thus an existence; she does not want to be forgotten. Geta LeSeur states: “Although Tituba reclaims herself as subject upon her return to Barbados after the ordeal of the Salem witch trials, she seeks historical ‘marronage’ as a subversive or transgressive act to assert her place in the history of the Caribbean” (LeSeur 1998, 98). Tituba’s determination to have a song for her and to continue the rebellion against the white society even after her death, which is a magical realist notion, strongly represents her desire to alter her as well as the community’s marginalised status, and to have a place in history. By using her magical power and association with spirits, she continues to encourage black resistance against white, colonial oppression; thus, her story continues even after her death: “Aguerrir le cœur des hommes. L’alimenter de rêves de liberté. De victoire. Pas une révolte que je n’aie fait naître. Pas une insurrection. Pas une désobéissance”22 (Condé 1986, 268). This statement refers to the strength of Tituba’s character: she is the source of inspiration and insurrection for the black people. Pitt believes: “Because of this challenge to national narratives, Tituba’s tale is not readily included in the history of Salem; […] the written historical record relegates her to a marginal note” (Pitt 2007, 17). Tituba’s prediction of the series of future oppression and suffering at the hand of white people—“[b]ientôt, ils se couvriront le visage de cagoules pour mieux nous supplicier. Ils boucleront sur nos enfants la lourde porte des ghettos. Ils nous disputeront tous les droits et le sang répondra au sang”23 (Condé 1986, 271)—symbolises suffering not only of black people but also of any marginalised group anywhere in the world. The reference to ‘ghettos’ vividly places in front of our eyes the inhuman treatment received by Jews during the Holocaust. However, I argue that by narrating her story, Tituba intends to free her people, hoping for a better future where she foresees the abolition of slavery: “Oui, à présent je suis heureuse. Je comprends le passé. Je lis le careful, sensitive biography recreating my life and its suffering].” (Condé 1994, 110) 22 “I am hardening men’s hearts to fight. I am nourishing them with dreams of liberty. Of Victory. I have been behind every revolt. Every insurrection. Every act of disobedience.” (Condé 1994, 175) 23 “Soon they will be covering their faces with hoods, the better to torture us. They will lock up our children behind the heavy gates of the ghettos. They will deny us our rights and blood will beget blood.” (Condé 1994, 177 ࡳ 178)

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présent. Je connais l’avenir. A présent, je sais pourquoi il y a tant de souffrances, pourquoi les yeux de nos nègres et négresses sont brillants d’eau et de sel. Mais je sais aussi que tout cela aura une fin”24 (Condé 1986, 271). Tituba’s statement reveals a sense of optimism concerning the future of black people. It is also obvious from the statement that Tituba not only thinks about herself but also all her people. Her communion with the world of spirits enables her to foresee the future and thus come forward with a different, marginalised version of history. Pitt believes that although her song, sung by slaves, will not cause the fall of tyrannical political structures and social practices, it will “refute the narrative webs that allowed these systems to come into existence in the colonial era and which continue to support their dominance in postcolonial nations” (Pitt 2007, 18). It can be understood from Pitt that Tituba’s song will create an alternative narrative from the perspective of black slaves, refuting the official narrative structure. Condé attempts to rewrite the reading of official history by using literary techniques such as the presence of fantastic elements. The unconditional acceptance of Tituba’s ghost in the midst of the real life of the island— which emphasises the employment of the magical realist technique in the novel—provides the slaves with the power to fight and survive. Ségeral believes that Condé’s novel attempts to “challenge the dominating white, western, linear discourse on history and the traditional western historical novel, first through their use of the fantastic,” then “through the staging of ghosts and spirits” and, finally, “through a questioning and gendering of Western misogynistic narratives and the blurring of lineages and of gender categories” (Ségeral 2012, 28). By providing Tituba with an eternal life, Condé retains hope for the black community and, thus, finishes the novel with an explicit touch of optimism. This issue of restoring hope reminds us of Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon where the protagonist Chaim’s magical ability to return the moon to its appropriate place actually restores hope for the entire Jewish community. Both occurrences strengthen my argument that magical realism has the potential to provide hope, relief and consolation to an individual or a group of people. If Condé rewrites the past, she does it by keeping the present in mind. She does not like to be lost in the past although one needs the past to find the 24 “Yes, I’m happy now. I can understand the past, read the present, and look into the future. Now I know why there is so much suffering and why the eyes of our people are brimming with water and salt. But I know, too, that there will be an end to all this.” (Condé 1994, 178)

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present and to anticipate the future. In the “Afterword” to the novel, Condé states that she is not involved in any kind of scholarly research but admits that her imagination is based on history: “Being a black person, having a certain past, having a certain history behind me, I want to explore that realm and of course I do it with my imagination and with my intuition” (Scarboro 1994, 201). Condé discovers Tituba from the oblivion in history, allows her to live among the living even after her death, gives her a voice to tell her own version of history, bestows her with magical power, enables her to commune with the world of spirits, and thus attempts to elevate her marginalised condition. Condé’s use of the phrase ‘Moi, Tituba’ (I, Tituba) in the title refers to her claiming a life, an identity for herself and for other marginalised women like her, something which has long been denied to them.

Relief and Guidance through Ghosts and Spirits I have pointed out before that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to represent the suffering of the marginalised and give them a voice by using the same language or narrative used by their oppressors (here, white slaveowners and the patriarchal society). I am again proposing that magical realism—because of its subversive and transgressive nature—has the potential to be the alternative or new form of narrative. By the time Tituba has started her narrative, she is already dead—the narrator Tituba is a ghost. The fact that we are following a narrator who is already dead, and is thus unreliable, can definitely be considered an example of magical realism. The use of the fantastic, of ghosts and spirits, in Condé’s narrative to rewrite the reading of Tituba’s history and to give her a voice, exemplify the employment of magical realism to provide an alternative to the traditional realist narrative. The presence of the spirits of Tituba’s loved ones and her communion with them, which she narrates in a matterof-fact manner, unsettles the traditional codes of reason and the Western realist novel in general. During all his trouble and pain, magical realist elements such as ghosts, spirits, black lore and local rituals provide Tituba with comfort and guidance. The spirits of her favourite people—Mama Yaya, Abena and Yao—interact with her just like any other real-life person whenever she remembers them. On one occasion, Tituba is greeted by her beloved ghosts as if they were real characters.25 Just like Arva, I also think that the 25 The […] trio was there among the crowd of slaves, sailors, and idlers come to welcome me. … Mama Yaya, the tall Nago Negress with sparkling teeth. Abena,

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inclusion of ghosts in the text, which is a typical feature of magical realism, certainly provides the narrative with a tone of optimism and confidence. Arva says, on a different level, ghosts may also remind us that our known world contains more than what our naked eyes can see, “maintain[ing] the doubleness of the text’s ontological structure, the magic (the unexplainable) in the midst of reality (arguably conceived as the exclusive realm of the unexplainable)” (Arva 2011, 167). The quotation thus refers to the existence of multiple versions of truth and reality. According to Scott Simpkins, “Within this arena of uncertainty, magic[al] realism demonstrates its hopeful scheme to supplement the realistic text through a corrective gesture, a means to overcome the insufficiencies of realism” (Simpkins 1995, 153). Thus, magical realism endeavours to cover up the inadequacy of realism. Zamora considers ghosts the representation of the past and thus of history and, according to her, they either “[carry] transcendental truths, as visible or audible signs of [a temporal, transhistorical] Spirit” or they may “carry the burden of tradition and collective memory” (Zamora 1995, 497). Zamora’s statement shows the association of ghosts with memory and history. However, Ségeral claims that, unlike the ghost in Morrison’s Beloved which is depicted as destructive and is later exorcised by the black community, the ghost of Tituba needs to “recover a voice and to reappear, in order to repair what has been omitted in history” (Ségeral 2012, 63). Whereas the ghosts in Beloved are vengeful, in Moi, Tituba, Sorcière … Noire de Salem, they are used as a means to recuperate an omitted history. The spirits of Tituba’s loved ones are her guides, counsellors, and sources of confidence. Tituba’s gaining force and courage to survive and to help others, and her escaping violence and oppression with the guidance and support of these spirits validates my claim that magical realist elements can function as survival tactics on the part of characters from traumatic events where ancestors’ spirits and ghosts, along with folk tales can offer consolation to them. Again, the different nature of ghosts in both novels also points to the different ways history is represented in both novels: whereas the recovery of history seems quite passive in Beloved, in Moi, Tituba, Sorcière … Noire de Salem it is presented as a deliberate act on Tituba’s part so that she can have her place in history.

my mother, the Ashanti princess with her jet-black skin and ritual scarifications. Yao, the silk-cotton tree with large, powerful feet. I cannot describe my feelings while they hugged me. (Condé 1994, 141)

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In his article entitled “Trauma and the Specters of Enslavement in Morrison’s Beloved,” Clifton Spargo regards “the explicit tension between trauma as a trope for recovered history and those therapeutic, empiricistminded narratives that require a subject to progress beyond and locate herself rationally outside the traumatic moment” (Spargo 2002, 113). He argues that writers like Morrison and Condé use the tradition of the ghost story to revive an unspoken history (Spargo 2002, 113). The act of giving the ghost of Tituba a voice and allowing her to narrate her story suggests the insufficiency of a rational narrative and the potential of magical realist narrative in relating a traumatic history. It can be asserted that Tituba’s stable optimism depends on her association with the spirits of her loved ones and her native land and its culture, as opposed to Sethe in Morrison’s Beloved who is completely absorbed in her traumatic past. Moi, Tituba, Sorcière … Noire de Salem defies the official Western version of history by producing an alternative one, a new approach to history. The use of magic, witchcraft and the fantastic enables Tituba to narrate her story and it thus reveals the unheard-of atrocities of slavery. Condé also uses magic, witchcraft and ghosts to resist white supremacy, to escape oppression and to survive, to challenge society’s norms and expectations, and to help other black slaves and to heal their wounds. By giving voice to Tituba and thus to an entire neglected race, Condé emphasises the need to reassert or reconstruct their lost identity. By remembering the brutality of slavery, Condé paves the way for us to face the ineffable past, to come to terms with the trauma of slavery, and to find a way to live with it. Magical realism, therefore, has the potential to make the ineffable history of slavery accessible and tangible to the reader.

CHAPTER 6 EXPLORING THE SHAMEFUL PAST AND REINVENTING THE ABSENT IN THE MAGICAL REALISM OF SOUTH AFRICA

After the end of the notorious and traumatic apartheid era in South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established to “promote national unity and reconciliation in a spirit of understanding which transcends the conflicts and divisions of the past” (“Promotion of National Unity” 1995, 4). However, the TRC hearings failed to make victims talk and reveal their stories. According to Annalisa Oboe, the TRC attempted to support national healing, revealing violence and heinous crimes that took place during apartheid but it did not work because of the problems of memory and trauma and the reluctance of victims and witnesses to testify (Oboe 2007, 60). Both David’s Story and Ways of Dying deal with the anti-apartheid struggle and attempt to heal a traumatic past. In David’s Story, Zoë Wicomb demonstrates the trauma and suffering of the guerrillas of the anti-apartheid movement, and questions the notion of trust and truth. On the other hand, in Ways of Dying, Zakes Mda demonstrates how people continue their lives in the midst of violence, hoping for a better future. Both writers deal more with black-on-black violence and reject the idea of a unified freedom movement by revealing its dark side. Apartheid26 was a systematised process of racial separation imposed by the National Party (NP) in South Africa in 1948. According to Joseph Lelyveld and Ernest Cole, during apartheid South Africa became “a land full of signs” 26 In South Africa, apartheid was an oppressive system requiring black Africans and dark-coloured Indians to follow a set of laws and regulations that kept them separated and clearly stationed as inferior to whites. Restrictions on their right to vote, to move, to practise a trade, to inter-marry, even to walk on certain beaches were imposed on all but white South Africans. It was a system that gave a legal structure to the most vile form of racism; its purpose was to establish—in a legal and permanent way—white supremacy over Africans, Blacks and Indians.

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(qtd. in Bonner 2006, 12)—“signs prohibiting, obstructing, channelling, discriminating” (Bonner 2006, 12). One of the vital characteristics of apartheid was to make blacks vulnerable and to place them at the whim of whites. These types of experiences were dehumanising, brutal and disempowering for black people, which was, at once, both a heinous crime as well as a great triumph for apartheid. Apartheid, which was in force for a period of more than four decades, went through different phases. According to Bonner, its early phase in the 1950s was accompanied by die-hard resistance; however, in its prime in the 1960s and the early 1970s, it became stable mainly because of the passive acceptance by victims who were too frightened to imagine how the system could be brought down (Bonner 2006, 16). Both statements show the passivity and anxiety of black people behind the stability of the apartheid regime. Clement Twala, a municipal policeman, used to round up rent defaulters whom he thought to be very passive, subservient and obliging (Bonner and Segal 2000, 69). This scene of rounding up has been compared by many, e.g. Anthony Löwstedt, with the situation of Jews in the ghettos, with concentration and extermination camps during World War II, and with the roll-call of North American and Caribbean slaves early every morning just before going to their work. Like slaves and Holocaust survivors, those who survived apartheid are also considered victims who were denied a voice. The end of apartheid brought rapid change in the life of each and every South African. The transition period in South Africa refers to a period starting from the late 1980s to the first democratic elections in 1994, which symbolises the nation’s journey from apartheid to democracy. The political upheaval in Europe and the ending of the Cold War augmented pressure on the cruel apartheid government. According to Ibinga, the fall of apartheid has caused new problems in South Africa. In the newly democratised South Africa, class relationships and social evils like drugs, xenophobia, homophobia, prostitution, gangs, rape, homelessness and HIV/AIDS—rather than race—have been brought into focus (Ibinga, n.d.). After the end of the apartheid, the whole country had to face the consequences of an age of violence and deal with social unrest. The TRC, according to its own website, “was set up by the Government of National Unity to help deal with what happened under apartheid. The conflict during this period resulted in violence and human rights abuses from all sides. No section of society escaped these abuses” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, n.d.). The commission failed to construct a revised national

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history because of the diverse groups and ideologies, and the inability and/or reluctance of victims or survivors to testify. According to Oboe, the TRC attempted to give a voice to the silenced and marginalised. As a part of the process, it emphasised the role of women in giving an alternative version of their suffering and in rewriting the official reading of national history and thus reshaping both individual and national identity (Oboe 2007, 61). However, according to Oboe, it failed to encourage women to talk about their own experiences as women under the apartheid regime: “The vast majority of the testifiers were women who often talked about what had happened to someone in their family or community but were reluctant to disclose what had happened to them” (Oboe 2007, 61). This inability of the TRC to make people, especially women, talk about their suffering and trauma necessitates the role of literature or narrative 27 as one of the effective means of conveying ineffable stories of both personal and collective trauma. Ibinga states that the beginning of South African democracy featured a new form of writing called “honeymoon literature” or “the literature of celebration” (Ibinga, n.d.). She argues that honeymoon literature attempted to uphold forgiveness and compromise between victims and victimisers by stressing the significance of dealing with the truth about their traumatic past. However, the depiction of euphoria is followed by a sense of disappointment since the past keeps haunting the everyday lives of people (Ibinga, n.d.). Ibinga remarks that many post-apartheid pieces of literature are influenced by apartheid era writing, and can be recognised by three leading trends: “an obvious interest in political issues, resistance to oppression and the obsessive reference to race” (Ibinga, n.d.). Ibinga’s statement hints at how post-apartheid writings fail to free themselves of apartheid issues; political violence, oppression and race were still major trends in literature. The end of apartheid created many new troubles in society, and postapartheid writing might potentially reflect many of these, “ranging from ecologically sensitive to gender conscious literature as well as carnivalized forms of literature” (qtd. in Ibinga, n.d.). Concerning the criticism of the lack of artistic magnitude in South African literature, Nadine Gordimer has made it clear that “the overriding tendency towards the realist 27An

alternative one with repetition, fragmentation, non-linear plot, time shift and the inclusion of the supernatural in realistic setting. I propose magical realism as this alternative literature or narrative.

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perspective in apartheid narratives was a result of the urgency of coercive political measures used against those in South Africa who struggled for freedom from oppression” (Ibinga, n.d.). Writing in the transition or postapartheid era on either apartheid or new themes provides South African authors with an opportunity to analyse oppression against black people, to give voice to the marginalised, to revisit their history, and thus to reinvent their past. However, in order to do so, writers in the transition and postapartheid period employ an alternative or new type of narrative, which is a mixture of folklore, myth, magic, and local and tribal legends, and which I propose to be magical realism. André Brink considered the magical realist technique an appropriate trait of African storytelling, and Mandla Langa emphasised the necessity of discovering the legends, myths and rituals of South Africa in a new period in order to understand and thus rewrite the past. Regarding the appropriateness of magical realism in a South African context, Brenda Cooper opines: “Magical realists inscribe the chaos of history not by way of unity, but by means of plots that syncretize uneven and contradictory forces” (Cooper 1998, 36). André Brink, for example, was inspired by a desire to master new modes of “fictionalising history” or “historicising fiction” (Ezeliora 2008, 87). The employment of the magical realist technique in some of his novels refers to his interest “in constructing historical mysteries through his imaginative concatenations of the marvellous” (Ezeliora 2008, 87). In order to shed light on a gruesome past, to bring it in front of the reader/audience in an approachable way, to learn from the past and, most importantly, to re-establish a shattered identity, South African writers had to depend on imagination, and black lore and rituals, and to employ a circular, overlapping narrative from the standpoint of the oppressed black people: magical realism. Regarding the development in South African writing during apartheid, Jabulani Mkhize cites “white writing” and “black writing” as two central styles in South African literature (Mkhize 2001, 173). Although the terminologies may seem racial, they suggest two different modes of writing. Whereas ‘white writing’ refers to the modern or postmodern approach to the past, ‘black writing’ stresses the neo-realist approach to depicting the past. Black writers tended to avoid experimentalism in their writing and thus avoided the risk of being alienated from society as Mothobi Mutloatse remarks: “No black writer can afford the luxury of isolation from his immediate audience” (Mutloatse 1980, 1). Paulina GrzĊda argues, in the context of the anti-apartheid struggle, that black writing became a manifestation of one’s ideological association and thus a

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political act, and the agenda of protest writing was explicitly engaged with the contemporary environment (GrzĊda 2013, 155). Borrowing from Anton Chekhov, Gordimer, who was doubtful of non-realist narrative techniques, states that the vital function of any writer, black or white, during apartheid was to “describe a situation so truthfully […] that the reader can no longer evade it” (qtd. in GrzĊda 2013, 155). Gordimer’s statement thus focuses on a minute description of any brutal situation. Lewis Nkosi, one of the first black writers to object to the realist tradition, considered black writing of the apartheid period more journalistic than creative (Nkosi 1965, 126). According to him, protest literature28 is merely a “journalistic fact parading outrageously as imaginative literature” (Nkosi 1965, 126). GrzĊda says that Jabulani Ndebele argues for a new mode of narrative, having the potential to “come closer to the orality of black communities” by focusing more on “the storytelling traditions of rural life” (GrzĊda 2013, 157). I strongly argue that the magical realist narrative has the potential to be the new mode of narrative technique, and is apposite for Ndebele’s plan since it can provide the marginalised a voice and enable them to be the creators of their own history. I would like to suggest Ndebele’s approach to what has been said about magical realism. I agree with Paulina GrzĊda’s argument that “[…] magical realism relies heavily on African oral traditions, and in doing so, it not only constitutes a point of confluence for black and white writing as distinguished by Mkhize, but it also epitomises the reconciliation of Eurocentric Western rationalism and African tradition” (GrzĊda 2013, 157). Based on GrzĊda’s statement, it can be said that magical realism amalgamates both white and black writing and at the same time makes a compromise between Western rationalism and African belief in tradition. Again, magical realism originates from specific societies which are marked by the simultaneous existence of opposite worlds. In other words, a magical realist world is characterised by the existence of contradiction, duality or opposition. Derek Barker proposes more specifically that “the narrative strategy of magic[al] realism is most apt when the subject matter treats of the struggle to re-shape an appalling present infused with contradictory ontologies and burdened by the continued effects of a traumatic past” (Barker 2008, 2). Barker’s statement shows the potential of 28

Protest literature has to be particularly written for change. Put another way, the author needs to have specific goals for change in society or in individuals from the very beginning. Here, protest literature refers to literature containing an antiapartheid theme or sentiment.

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magical realism in restructuring a present infused with a traumatic past. He continues to say that such a simultaneous existence of dissimilar ontologies “occurs where a particularly wide gap or incompatibility between ways of being” can be seen (Barker 2008, 12). GrzĊda suggests that the magical realist narrative is appropriate to analyse two kinds of South African past: first, the pre-colonial period or the pre-capitalist period of colonial settlement; second, the recent history of the apartheid and transition periods (GrzĊda 2013, 169). It can be surmised from GrzĊda’s statement that magical realism has the full potential to represent the trauma of brutal historical events and be a crucial instrument for the oppressed. Many black South Africans were uprooted from their lands and displaced through colonisation, slavery and later apartheid. The collective (traumatic) memories of black people are alive even after the hearings of the TRC, and twenty years after the first free election. Both Ways of Dying and David’s Story deal more with black-on-black violence and gendered humiliation at African National Congress (ANC) training camps, and less with white against black violence. In order to show the sufferings of victims and to rewrite the dominant version of history, both authors turned away from a realist narrative and employed an alternative one comprising flashbacks, dramatic changes in time and voice, various supernatural events, dreams and, last but not least, the presence of ghosts. By questioning the truth and attempting to convey the histories that are less well known to the Western world, Wicomb, in her work, gives voice to the oppressed and marginalised. She deals with the anti-apartheid struggle and focuses on the history of the Griqua people; she thus attempts to narrate an alternative past not in a realist narrative but in a fragmentary and repetitive one. Shane Graham argues that “one of the central concerns of David’s Story is the impossibility of telling stories about apartheid’s bloody past and the superficiality of linear telling as a mode of conveying psychological damage” (Graham 2008, 130). The story is an abortive attempt to talk about Dulcie’s trauma; the story of the sexual torture and murder of Dulcie cannot be fully exposed because it will tarnish the reputation of the ANC’s freedom movement. Wicomb thus attempts to bring Dulcie’s ghost back to life in order to hear her ineffable stories. Unlike David’s Story, which ends with a pessimistic tone and the inability of the protagonist to relate the inexplicable story of Dulcie, Mda’s Ways of Dying expresses the desire for a greater future, and shows a way to live in the midst of violence. By doing her best for the community while living in dire distress, Noria shows that in order to heal trauma, one should know

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how to live with pain and loss. By including a strong, black female protagonist, Mda tries to promote racial and gendered equality. Mda’s alternative narrative, which is essentially a subversive one, rewrites the experiences of traumatic events, and emphasises the necessity of remembering and sharing the characters’ traumatic past as a precondition for healing.

Moving away from a Violent Past and the Process of Healing in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying In Ways of Dying, Mda raises the issue of violent and brutal practices committed not by oppressors but by the oppressed. He thus doubts that the fall of apartheid will lead South Africans to freedom. Besides focusing on victims as perpetrators, Mda’s novel condemns violence and finds new approaches to relating violent experiences. According to Sue-Ann Foster, “[T]he psychological dimension of trauma and the victim’s personal response to it, which constitutes a large part of the experience of violence, is glaringly absent in Black South African literature” (Foster 2007, 2 ࡳ 3). In order to cover the hole, Mda examines themes like memory and trauma, employs techniques such as myth, magic, dreams, ghosts and the supernatural, provides the marginalised characters a voice, and thus allows them to come up with an alternative history of the anti-apartheid movement. Apart from the magical realist elements, Mda also includes the carnivalesque, elements of witchcraft, rural legends and African folk culture and belief in his discussion of violence. Ways of Dying describes the period between the the initiation of political negotiations in South Africa in 1990 and its first democratic election in 1994—a period characterised by violent and gruesome events and the pervasiveness of death. The novel is pervaded by various violent incidents: the death of Noria’s two sons (one was burnt and the other was brutally abandoned); Jwara’s frustration and verbal violence towards Noria’s mother; the obsessed killing of black labourers; and many politically and racially-charged killings. The novel also depicts how children become innocent victims of social and political violence which they are incapable of understanding. Children like Vutha are influenced by the Young Tigers to become dedicated fighters: “At the age of five, Vutha was already a veteran of many political demonstrations. … He could recite the Liberation Code and the Declaration of the People’s Rights. Of course, he did not understand a single word, since it was all in English. He mispronounced most of the words, too” (Mda 2002, 179). He also asserts, ‘“But mama, I

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am a cadre. I am a freedom fighter’” (Mda 2002, 181). By pointing out the inability of children to distinguish good from bad, Mda unfolds the evil of the liberation movement and criticises it. However, the novel also reflects the hope for a peaceful future, which is only possible if people are prepared to recognise the role of the omniscient ancestral spirits.

Deromanticising the Liberation Movement In an interview with Naidoo, Mda pointed out that the instances of death in the novel refer to actual murder cases prevalent in the years leading up to South Africa’s first democratic election: “So, all those deaths actually happened, and all I did was to take these deaths and put them in an imaginary story with a professional mourner” (Naidoo 1997, 253). Naidoo’s statement points out the impossibility of escaping the daily violence in the transition period in South Africa. However, in order to depict a society full of bloodshed, authors have to go beyond the literary realism and employ a narrative having the potential to represent the bizarre, the extraordinary. I claim that in this novel, Mda employs the supernatural or, more precisely, African traditions and rituals, to deny the Western concept of the real, and to reinstate violence to the sphere of the extraordinary. As Benita Parry suggests, literary modes like magical realism would fittingly represent the harassment of black South Africans and their opposition to apartheid (Parry 1994, 15). Dambudzo Marechera talks about a special narrative technique in order to depict a society characterised by an abnormal extent of violence: “For me the point is if one is living in an abnormal society then only abnormal expression can express that society. Documentary cannot” (qtd. in Shaw 1999, 17). Marechera’s statement emphasises the need for an abnormal narrative where I claim that magical realism, which has been used by many as a subversive and transgressive narrative style, can be considered to have full potential for this abnormal expression. Mda has used this particular technique to criticise violence and to expose the evil of the antiapartheid movement. In discussing the use of magical realism in his novels, Mda stated: After I discovered magic[al] realism as a literary mode I became quite fascinated by it. As I have said I had been writing in this mode without knowing that it existed as a literary movement, or how it actually worked. … The unreal happens as a part of reality. […] and is accepted by the other characters as a normal event. This is what I try to do, and this is in contrast

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In this passage, Mda points out that in his novels the unreal or magical is not considered bizarre by the characters, making magical realism a literary mode particularly apposite for interrogating the opposing realities of history and the individual stories of people in a shifting society. According to Roos Burmanje, instead of concentrating on apartheid violence, Mda chooses to focus mainly on general changes in South Africa, and the constant violence among various tribes that terrorises the poor, black community in rural areas (Burmanje 2012, 14). Mda seems to say that people of South Africa will not get the essence of freedom unless and until the main reasons behind violence have been eradicated from society. Toloki’s attempt to find out the way Noria’s five-year-old son died tragically exposes the evil of the anti-apartheid movement. The Nurse’s speech during the funeral of Vutha II—“This our little brother was killed by those who are fighting to free us!” (Mda 2002, 7)—in a sense, deglorifies and deromanticises the liberation struggle. By exposing the evil of the liberation movement, Mda, contrary to popular perception, comes forward with an alternative version of what actually happened inside the movement. In the novel, the fighting parties are two groups: first, the tribal chief and his supporters; second, supporters of the anti-apartheid movement. The tribal chief cooperates with the apartheid authority to weaken the antiapartheid struggle where he uses ethnicity as an instrument: “[He tells] people of his ethnic group that if they don’t fight they will be overwhelmed by other groups which are bent on dominating them, or even exterminating them” (Mda 2002, 55). Foster believes that “the novel contradicts Black South African literature’s representation of the oppressed as a unified force fighting against the ruling class” (Foster 2007, 26). Based on Foster’s statement, it can be deduced that Ways of Dying allows us to have a deeper understanding of the anti-apartheid struggle, and provides us with stories unknown to the outside world. By going against the traditional representation of the struggle, the novel comes up with an alternative version of history. Mda depicts a brutal scene in which soldiers, supported by some migrants from a nearby hostel, invaded a settlement, raping and killing its inhabitants: They entered some shacks, and raped the women. The cut the men down after forcing them to watch their wives and daughters being raped. In one

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shack, a woman who was nine months pregnant was stabbed with a spear. As she lay there dying, she went into labour. Only the head of the baby had appeared, when it was hacked off with a panga by yet another warrior. (Mda 2002, 182)

Here, both victims and victimisers were black: a phenomenon or feature which explicitly exposes the evil of the anti-apartheid movement, and thus presents us with a deglorified version of it. The novel also shows that during the transition period, the law enforcement agencies were involved in killing and bloodshed in order to divide the people who were fighting for freedom, which is evident from the torture of one of Noria’s friends. All these incidents refer to the ubiquity and high level of violence in the transition period, and advocate an apposite narrative to depict them. Mda criticises the freedom struggle by exposing the selfishness of the national and local leaders of the struggle and thus its loopholes. The leaders believe that if they apologise publicly for the death of Noria’s son, it will definitely tarnish the reputation of the liberation struggle. They thus warn her against discussing the death of her son, “especially [to] the newspaper people, because this would take the struggle for freedom a step backwards” (Mda 2002, 173). This incident exposes the hypocrisy and repressive behaviour of the leaders of the struggle and offers a stark contrast with the glorified public perception of the struggle with its real, wretched situation. We will see a similar sort of incident in David’s Story where Dulcie hides the scars of her physical and sexual torture committed by her fellow male guerrillas, fearing that it will weaken the freedom movement. Both scenes vividly portray the multifarious victimisation of women during apartheid and the transition era. The reactions of the leaders of the anti-apartheid struggle to the death of Noria’s son expose their manipulative skills. Amilcar Cabral deals with a similar point but his concern was the participation of conventional and religious leaders in the anti-apartheid struggle: “[…] individuals in this category generally see in the liberation movement the only valid means, using the sacrifices of the masses, to eliminate colonial repression of their own class and to re-establish in this way their complete political and cultural domination of the people” (Cabral 1973, 46 ࡳ 47). Cabral’s statement seems to suggest that it is only by sacrificing the interests as well as the lives of fellow people that repressive power can be eliminated. However, people very often fail to realise that instead of providing them freedom, the liberation struggle actually takes freedom away from them, and makes them more and more dependent or handicapped. The novel also

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highlights class distinctions by contrasting the grand arrival of the leaders at the informal settlement with the shabby conditions of the settlers. By doing so, Mda again deromanticises and demystifies the freedom struggle. Although Ways of Dying depicts the black-on-black violence, it also captures the humiliation and marginalisation of black people under apartheid. Through the life experiences of Toloki and Noria, the novel exposes the evil of the apartheid system and tells us of the ways black people in South Africa adjusted to the aftermath of institutionalised violence in their lives. Mda uses vocations like ‘Professional Mourner’ and ‘Coffin Maker’ and shows the profitability of these vocations in a mocking manner to depict and criticise the high extent of violence. The inhuman attitudes of the white people towards the black people suggest that oppressors can never feel the extent of violence against the oppressed. The collectiveness of black people’s victimisation creates a perfectly natural reality of their own, unrecognised by the oppressors and other groups.

“It’s Noria Who Knows How to Live”: Surviving amidst Violence Although the title as well as the opening sentence of the novel imply little opportunity for happiness and optimism—“There are many ways of dying” (Mda 2002, 7)—victims are able to cure their past trauma and to reconstruct their future. By sharing their distressing memories of childhood, both Toloki and Noria realise that it is laughter and sharing which can heal deep wounds: “The stories of the past are painful. But when Toloki and Noria talk about them, they laugh. Laughter is known to heal even the deepest of wounds” (Mda 2002, 95). The multi-coloured shack, which Toloki helps Noria build after the destruction of her home, arouses laughter and provides her fellow residents with relief from pain and suffering. They believe that Noria’s shack disturbs the surroundings of the settlement by exorcising the ghost of brutality and damage. Thus, this magical shack serves a remedial purpose. Noria’s choice to spend her days working at Madimbhaza’s shack for abandoned children shows her mental strength and commitment to her community and makes Toloki wonder, “[i]t is Noria who knows how to live” (Mda 2002, 169). According to Roos Burmanje, “[T]he fact that Ways of Dying includes a strong, black female character that carries the weight of the story can be interpreted as a resistance against [racial and gendered] inequality and oppression” (Burmanje 2012, 15). Burmanje’s

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statement, to some extent, uplifts the female characters in the novel. Noria explains to Toloki that she became pregnant not by any real-life person but by strangers who visited her in dreams and had sexual intercourse with her. By showing Noria’s magical pregnancy without the necessity of any male, Mda denies the importance of man in the procreation process and places Noria on a much higher platform to defy patriarchal constraints. In other words, the subversive aspect of her magical pregnancy disrupts the typical notion of gender hierarchy by allowing her to look beyond her marginalised status and by providing her with a strong position in a society dominated by patriarchal constraints. Again, the magical instance of the birth of Vutha II and the courageous act of naming enable her to assert her own opinion and thus consolidate her position in her society which is extremely patriarchal. Even after the death of her sons and the destruction of her shack, Noria remains optimistic and attempts to restructure her own life and to assist others, which shows communal solidarity: “We are like two hands that wash each other” (Mda 2002, 69). Just like in Beloved, community plays an important role in Ways of Dying. Community solidarity can be seen in: the community’s assistance for Noria, providing her with many essential accessories after her house has been burnt down (Mda 2002, 69); both men and women’s active part in the anti-apartheid movement (Mda 2002, 175); and Madimbhaza’s taking care of deserted children who are victims of war (Mda 2002, 168). The mutual sharing and interdependence of the settlement people provide them with a magical strength to survive amidst all the hardships and atrocities. Toloki’s observation that women are socially and politically more aware and pragmatic than men shifts Noria as well as all other women of the settlement from a marginalised and neglected state to a central and independent one. Toloki’s statement—“[f]rom what I have seen today, I believe the salvation of the settlement lies in the hands of women” (Mda 2002, 176)—signifies the active contribution of women in rebuilding the nation. Mda thus provides a voice to the neglected part of the society (women), and considers them, at least partially, to have more potential than men. This generous treatment of women distinguishes Mda from many other South African authors who portray women as merely victimised and voiceless. He thus provides a different version of the antiapartheid movement where women are, to some extent, superior to men. Although Toloki mourns for his community, he deliberately avoids funerals of people from his own village, which shows his ambivalent attitude

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towards his community: “Toloki avoided funerals that involved homeboys and homegirls. […] Toloki has never wanted to have anything to do with any of the people of his village who have settled in the city” (Mda 2002, 13). In the terminology of Carl G. Jung, Toloki can be the “representative of the archetypal figure of the individual consciousness that constantly shifts between the singular and the collective” (Naidoo 1998, 157). As Zamora points out, “[t]his shifting relation of individual to archetype often attends the psychology of magical realist characters, making them the offspring of Jung […]” (Zamora 1995, 502). Naidoo again states that Toloki considers his eccentric lifestyle to be in harmony with that of monks from the East, and that his search “for a consciousness that transcends the mundane reality of his life is made possible by his ability to experience the realities of other worlds through ‘magical’ means” (Naidoo 1998, 157). Naidoo also believes that Toloki represents the opposing or contrasting nature of life: birth and death, pleasure and pain, old and new, beauty and ugliness, and such like (Naidoo 1998, 158).

Aspects of Alternative Reality: Dreams, Ghosts and Magic It is not an easy task to provide the oppressed and marginalised like Toloki and Noria with a voice to speak up against the violence perpetrated against them, and with the strength to heal trauma and to hope for a better future. Noria’s magical overlong pregnancy of fifteen months after having sexual relations with strangers in her dreams, through which she conceives Vutha II, can be a means to heal the trauma of the death of Vutha I who was left to die by his father. Foster argues that “[b]y having the same child killed twice, Mda effectively captures the extraordinary and excessive nature of violence in Black South African communities [where] violence has become a quotidian and normalized phenomenon” (Foster 2007, 39). The nurse’s statement at a funeral that “[n]ormal deaths are those deaths that we have become accustomed to, deaths that happen every day. They are deaths of the gun, and the knife, and torture and gore. We don’t normally see people who die of illness or of old age” (Mda 2002, 157) vividly portrays the ubiquity of violence. Again, Noria’s magical singing and Toloki’s frenzied painting, and their decorating Noria’s shack like a splendid, glorious mansion give both of them the supernatural strength to come to terms with their ineffable trauma. I argue that in order to deal with the issue of violence and emancipation, Mda uses one significant aspect of magical realism: the disruption of spatial sense. In the novel, the bizarre presence of magical and mysterious golden figurines turns the shabby squatter camp into a

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gorgeous villa and momentarily changes the wretched status of its inhabitants, and thus shows its subversive ability. The magical figurines also provide the black South Africans the opportunity to be reconnected with their African heritage from which they were disconnected due to different periods of violence. Bheamadu states that, apart from the beliefs in the spectres of the relatives, “Mda also focuses on religious rituals and evil spells which link the rural past of the characters to their urban present” (Bheamadu 2004, 34). Bheamadu’s statement highlights the importance of connecting the present with the past as we cannot structure a fruitful present by ignoring the past. Jwara’s creation of strange figurines provides the narrative with a magical aura. The magic that radiates from the figurines symbolises the ancient past of African tribes as there has always been a close association between African people and magic. The presence of the ghost of Jwara, which defies the notion of a traditional realist narrative, haunts the rich coffin maker Nefolovhodwe and orders him to bring the figurines for Toloki. Foster believes that the ghost’s demand that Toloki keep the magical “figurines as a gesture of reconciliation [not only] represents Jwara’s attempt to posthumously reconcile with his estranged son whom he abused excessively but […] can also be interpreted as a call for Blacks to reconnect with their traditions in order to be healed from years of repression under the apartheid regime” (Foster 2007, 39 ࡳ 40). It is also suggested in the novel that, like our ancestors’ spirits, the figurines also possess the ability to save our children and thus to offer us a peaceful future. According to Foster, Toloki and Noria’s dream of a majestic home symbolises their desire for social, economic and political freedom in South Africa: “Thus, by dreaming of a home or, more accurately, their rightful place in South Africa, Toloki and Noria do not attempt to escape their lot but develop the radical consciousness that will enable them to change their political and material circumstances” (Foster 2007, 41). By dreaming of a home and by magically turning the shack into a rich mansion, Mda makes Toloki and Noria equal to rich (white) people of society, reverses their oppressed status, and subverts the dichotomy between the white and the black, the coloniser and the colonised, the oppressor and the oppressed. From this perspective, the act of dreaming can be considered a political one. Toloki’s imagination magically transforms the real and thus provides the oppressed with a temporary relief from their wretched conditions. The appearance of Jwara’s ghost, the large number of magical figurines, and the magical transformation of Noria’s shabby shack into a gorgeous

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mansion bring rare occasions of joy and happiness to Toloki, Noria and other children and inhabitants of the informal settlement as well as allowing the marginalised a long denied voice: “The children are falling into such paroxysms of laughter that they roll around on the ground. Toloki is amazed to see that the figurines give pleasure to the children [as well as to the men and women of the community] in the same way that Noria gave pleasure to the whole community back in the village” (Mda 2002, 210). These events ultimately help them come to terms with their violent past, escape their sordid present (albeit temporarily), and hope for a brighter future which they have all been longing for. Mda invents a quite uncommon occupation of ‘Professional Mourner’ for Toloki to enable him to fight the abuse he faced as a child in his village. By attaching enormous social values such as dignity and austerity to his magical and mystical profession, Toloki heals his tortured soul and brings himself from the corner to the centre of society: “What self-respecting Professional Mourner wouldn’t be? … He is well known and well-liked all over the city cemeteries. Only yesterday he surpassed himself at the funeral of a man who died a mysterious death” (Mda 2002, 16). In order to uplift the value of his profession, he even plans to “have a fixed rate of fees for different levels of mourning, as in other professions [doctors and lawyers]” (Mda 2002, 17). Through his magical performance, he creates a solemn environment and arouses a communal feeling of grief, helplessness and frustration. Characters in Ways of Dying challenge the realism of official history and provide an alternative one from their own marginalised perspective. Naidoo points out that the characters attempt to provide their own story and to be creators of history in order not to vanish into historical anonymity (Naidoo 1997, 258). By writing their own stories, socially, politically and culturally marginalised characters assert their individuality and identity, and thus create their own world. From this perspective, finding a voice is also a survival tactic for the oppressed. Toloki and Noria provide us their own version of the anti-apartheid struggle, revealing its cruel sides, which starkly contrast the glorified notion of the struggle. Toloki is not fashioned in a realistic tradition of novels, but rather through his fantasies. He embellishes himself with a mourning costume including a hat, “tight-fitting pants [and] a knee-length velvety black cape buckled with a hand-sized gold-coloured brooch with tassels of yellow, red and green” (Mda 2002, 26). Toloki’s outfit and expression suggest the spirit of carnival as well as the transgressive and subversive aspects of magical

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realism, which “celebrate temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order [and] mark the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (Bakhtin 1984, 10). According to Foster, “Toloki makes a travesty of mourning, exposing Mda’s aversion to violence. He disrupts the solemnity and piety of funerals with his theatrical costume and aberrant antics, transforming these proceedings into comic spectacles” (Foster 2007, 43). The subversive notion of his vocation and attire disrupts the existing notion of funerals, and thus poses a challenge to existing societal norms. In Ways of Dying, Naidoo says, “images of the apocalypse and carnival combine to portray the eternal dualism of life and death” (Naidoo 1998, 180). Bakhtin suggests that death “brings nothing to an end, for it does not concern the ancestral body, which is renewed in the next generation. … One body offers its death, the other its birth, but they are merged in a twobodied image” (Bakhtin 1984, 322). Bakhtin’s statement also suggests the notion of renewal. Naidoo again states that in the novel, “the death of apartheid is followed by the birth of violence [which] evokes images of both the apocalypse and carnival” (Naidoo 1998, 180 ࡳ 181). The narrative voice explains: Today […] there are funerals every day, because if the bereaved were to wait until the weekend to bury their dead, then mortuaries would overflow, and cemeteries would be overcrowded with those attending funerals. … Often there are up to ten funeral services taking place at the same time, and hymns flow into one another in unplanned but pleasant segues. (Mda 2002, 145)

The quotation refers to the extreme extent of violence and death; Mda, however, describes the ubiquity of violence and death in a comic and, most importantly, in a graspable manner. Again, the bawdy jokes about the deceased made by the Nurse during a funeral make everyone burst into laughter: [The Nurse at the Zionist funeral] made a naughty joke about the deceased, and everyone at the various funerals in the cemetery burst out laughing. This happened at the same moment that the priest at the funeral where Toloki was mourning was engaged in the most serious part of the ritual […]. Even the priest couldn’t help laughing. Everybody laughed for a long time, for it was the kind of joke that seemed to grow on you. (Mda 2002, 163)

This instance of a joke and the resulting laughter subverts the seriousness of the funeral as well as showing its importance in the daily life of the

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people who are burdened with the omnipresence of violence and death. This laughter creates some sort of transgressive and carnivalesque aura at funerals, which makes Toloki state that “[i]n death we laugh as well” (Mda 2002, 163) and that “[i]n our language there is a proverb which says the greatest death is laughter” (Mda 2002, 164). The use of laughter at sad events like funerals suggests a chaotic past and the hope for a peaceful future. It also refers to a certain aspect of the magical realist novel: the use of opposites. In the novel, the carnivalisation of pregnancy is shown in the case of Noria’s mother. Although Noria’s mother is marginalised as a woman in the patriarchal South African society, she uses her bodily function as a means of empowerment. Carnivalesque aspects are also seen in the way instances of death are commercialised. We come to know that Toloki wants to benefit from death like Nefolovhodwe whose wealth derives from his coffin business, especially his invention of the “Nefolovhodwe Collapsible Coffin” (Mda 2002, 125) and the “Nefolovhodwe De Luxe Special” (Mda 2002, 126). The second type of coffin negates the seriousness and horror associated with death when it is discovered that a single coffin is used many times: “[A]t night, unscrupulous undertakers went to the cemetery and dug the de luxe coffin up. They wrapped the corpses in sacks, put them back in their graves, and took the coffins to sell again to other bereaved millionaires. An undertaker could sell the same coffin many times over, and no one would be the wiser” (Mda 2002, 126). The contrasting juxtaposition of a serious issue like death with a funny incident of stealing a coffin arouses a sense of the carnivalesque. Again, Jwara’s appearance in Nefolovhodwe’s dream and his threat to kill all his fleas turn Nefolovhodwe into a sort of carnivalesque figure. By making the arrogant Nefolovhodwe docile, Jwara’s ghost transgresses the boundary between the poor and the rich and makes the poor more powerful than the rich. Ghost in a magical realist narrative thus has the potential to alter the status of the socially, culturally and politically marginalised. Mda strives to find alternative ways of describing the experience of violence in South African society. He portrays violence in the text not with a realistic narrative but with a magical realist narrative consisting of myth, magic, ghosts and African beliefs, oral culture and traditions. He also employs the magical realist technique to give the oppressed black people a voice so that they can depict the violent period they underwent from their own perspectives. By using the concept of vocations like professional mourner and coffin maker, and showing the prospect of these vocations, Mda makes a parody of violence but at the same time depicts the real

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extent of violence. However, the magical transformation of Noria’s shack into a mansion, the soothing power of art (Toloki’s frenzied drawing and Noria’s magical dancing), and the presence of ghosts and the magical figurines, all provide the inhabitants of the informal settlement with relief from violence and, most significantly, enable them to hope for a peaceful future.

Accounts of Apartheid’s Bloody Past and Psychological Damage: Magical Realism in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story In David’s Story, Zoë Wicomb depicts sexual and physical torture of female cadres in the ANC recruiting and training camps during the antiapartheid struggle. Aligning with Zakes Mda, she points out the evils of the anti-apartheid movement and presents a deromanticised version of it. Through her unreliable narrator, Wicomb attempts to unearth concealed and buried truths about the movement. She thereby creates a counter or alternative history from the perspective of the oppressed black people, particularly black women. Dulcie’s appalling story cannot be told or disclosed not only because it has a ghastly effect on David but also because it troubles the apparently glorious records of the anti-apartheid struggle. By showing the gendered dehumanisation during apartheid, Wicomb reinforces the fact that apartheid is not only racial but also gendered. Since the traditional realist narrative is not fully equipped to convey or reveal the ineffable stories of Dulcie, Wicomb introduces a fragmentary and repetitive narrative with two parallel stories, employs African traditions, rituals and magic, and, most importantly, brings back the ghost of Dulcie to serve her purpose. David’s Story has two plot lines: one is set in 1991 and deals with the antiapartheid guerrillas and the other is set at the beginning of the 20th century and deals with the Griqua community. According to Giuliana Iannaccaro, dealing with the history of the Khoi peoples of Southern Africa (especially the Griqua) and the marginalised position of colouredness in the apartheid state, the novel avoids the conflict between the black and the white in order to probe more subtle social and political conflicts (Iannaccaro 2015, 43). In searching for his origins and justifying his role as a revolutionary, David tries to record his lifestory in written form and thus hires a female amanuensis. The character of Dulcie—David’s fellow revolutionary—is complex because she does not speak for herself, but is rather always suggested or remembered by someone else, mainly by David and the amanuensis. By showing the dominance of men over, and the sexual

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torture of, women, the novel reveals the gendered violence within the freedom movement, exposes the evil of it, and thus deromanticises and demystifies it.

“A Kind of Scream Somehow Echoing through My Story”: Risks and Difficulties in Depicting Dulcie David Dirkse, a former MK guerrilla, attempts to recount the story of his life to an amanuensis, which focuses on his unsuccessful relationship with his fellow female guerrilla Dulcie Oliphant. From David’s fragmented information, we can assume that Dulcie was a distinguished military officer in the anti-apartheid movement. However, Dulcie is depicted as “the necessary silence in the text; she can’t be fleshed out precisely because of her shameful treatment which those committed to the Movement would rather not talk about” (Meyer and Olver 2002, 190 ࡳ 191). According to Shane Graham, having attempted and failed to describe Dulcie’s role in his story, David decides to change her by concentrating on the figure of Saartjie Baartman and the Khoi woman named Krotoä (Graham 2008, 130). Graham goes on to say, “Both women’s stories become ur-texts of a sort for the situation of women in David’s life—in other words, they are phantoms whose later incarnations include Dulcie, the narrator, and David’s wife Sally” (Graham 2008, 130). By saying this, Graham actually links women who suffered during apartheid with women who suffered from colonisation, and asserts that the victimisation of women in South Africa is deeply rooted in time. Seeing David’s troubled and confused mind about Dulcie, the narrator advises him “to displace her by working on the historical figure of Saartjie Baartman instead” (Wicomb 2001, 134). Since David refuses to answer most of the questions regarding Dulcie, the narrator feels that she must place all the snippets together as meticulously as she can and imagine the entire story. She even considers “Dulcie […] a decoy. She does not exist in the real world; David has invented her in order to cover up aspects of his own story” (Wicomb 2001, 124). On the contrary, Graham points out that for David it is Dulcie’s corporeality—the materiality of her body and the atrocities perpetrated on it—that makes her story so essentially ineffable (Graham 2008, 132). David wants the story to be written by an amanuensis but he is not able to talk about Dulcie at all. Regarding David’s need to have an amanuensis, the narrator says in the “Preface”, “He wanted me to write it, not because he thought that his story could be written by someone else, but rather

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because it would no longer belong to him. In other words, he both wanted and did not want it to be written” (Wicomb 2001, 1). This quotation clearly expresses David’s desire and at the same time reluctance to write about Dulcie. He gives the narrator a page which she describes as “a mess of scribbles and scoring out and doodling of peculiar figures that cannot be reproduced here” (Wicomb 2001, 135). Seeing these scribbles, the amanuensis gets lost and realises that it is not possible to “cast Dulcie and the events surrounding her as a story” (Wicomb 2001, 150). In supporting the amanuensis, Dorothy Driver explains: “For David, Dulcie remains at a stage of unrepresentability, not least because certain aspects of her treatment cannot be faced, since facing them would force him to confront his own past not only as victim but also as victimiser” (Driver 2001, 232). His (sense of) victimisation stems from racial subjugation and resulting colouredness, and his role as a perpetrator arises from his alleged involvement in Dulcie’s physical and sexual torture. The duality of being both a victim and perpetrator demonstrates the multiple selves of David, and signifies the complexity of trauma under such conditions. David describes Dulcie as a woman with “legendary activities” (Wicomb 2001, 125) and “her quiet, forceful manner, the way in which even the old people echoed her words and nodded” (2001, 128). Although David wants to write about Dulcie, he shows his unwillingness in revealing information about the anti-apartheid movement. David subsequently realises that “truth is too large a thing even for those who take on vast projects like changing the world, that it can only be handled in tit-bits” (Wicomb 2001, 141). Instead, there is the ‘trurt’, which cannot be understood but can only be memorised like “a half-remembered Latin lesson” (Wicomb 2001, 136): “TRURT … TRURT … TRURT … TRURT … the trurt in the black and white … colouring the truth to say that … which cannot be said the thing of no name …” (Wicomb 2001, 136). Wicomb’s statement indicates the difficulties and, to some extent, the impossibilities of representing truth in language since language is subjective and manipulative, and thus produces more than one version of truth. Throughout the novel, several magical realist elements—non-linear narrative, parallelism, myth and magic, and, most importantly, ghosts—are used by the author to unsettle any reliable access to the truth and to advocate the possibility of the existence of many versions of truth. Loocke says, ultimately, that David gives up on the truth and “is especially troubled by the concept of ‘false memory’” (Loocke 2008, 45). According to Laub, it is indeed very common that “[those] who do not tell their story become victims of a distorted memory […]. The longer the story remains untold, the more distorted it becomes in the [person’s] conception of it, so much so that the [he/she] doubts the reality

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of the actual events” (Laub 1995, 64). Laub’s statement highlights the distortion of memory or story over time. Here, even the narrator becomes doubtful of her story. Since David fails to reveal all the necessary information, the amanuensis has to speculate to write the story and at times give her own views. Thus, whatever she writes might be unreliable. Again, the freedom to write someone else’s story allows her to use her imagination and thus provide us with a different version of David and Dulcie’s life story, and an alternative history of the anti-apartheid struggle by revealing its lacking. Since Dulcie cannot be represented, it is not possible for the narrator and thus the reader to know more about her. It can also be said in the opposite way: since it is not possible to know more about Dulcie, she cannot be represented. She remains more like a spirit or “a protean subject that slithers hither and thither, out of reach, repeating, replacing, transforming itself” (Wicomb 2001, 35). Despite acknowledging the fact that Dulcie is “a kind of scream somehow echoing through my story” (Wicomb 2001, 134), David says that “even if a full story were to be figured out by someone, it would be a story that cannot be told, that cannot be translated into words, into language we use for everyday matters” (Wicomb 2001, 151). It can be deduced from the above quotation that Wicomb is advocating a special type of narrative or language significantly different from what we use in everyday conversation. This type of narrative should have the potential to penetrate the walls of traumatic events and to bring unimaginable and untold stories to light. Wicomb seems to have considered the freedom struggle an evil, however a lesser one compared to apartheid. By exposing the evil of the movement, she seems to be saying that the movement fails to fulfil its target, and instead facilitates discord among black people. Since David is unwilling and/or unable to expose stories about Dulcie, and the amanuensis’ speculation and invention of Dulcie is not sufficient to write a story, Wicomb brings back the ghost of Dulcie and lets her reveal her own story. The appearance and acceptance of Dulcie’s ghost in the narrative defies the scientific logic or order, and underpins the employment of the magical realist narrative. Magical realism in the novel, thus, provides the subaltern (here, women) a means to make their voices heard. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Spivak states that “[i]f in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow” (Spivak 1988, 287). Her statement refers to the double victimisation of women.

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The female amanuensis is certainly frustrated by this dilemma and thus poses the question: “Will I never know what’s going on? Does no one care what I think? Will I ever be heard above the rude buzz of the blue bottles?” (Wicomb 2001, 213). Being asked by the narrator concerning the reason behind Dulcie’s silence, David replies: “Belief. Pride. Pride in belief. The virus of secrecy” (Wicomb 2001, 204). Dulcie’s refusal to speak up is directly associated with her sense of oppression and victimisation. She does not want to ascend the military hierarchy because she knows that doing so will not only endanger her self-identity but could ultimately cause fatal opposition from her male comrades. Shane Graham believes that the narrator’s account of Dulcie is probably made up, even fantastic, but it is notable for the importance it places on her physical body, particularly on “the scars on her back” (Graham 2008, 132). The image of the “criss-cross cuts on each of her naturally bolstered buttocks” (Wicomb 2001, 19) provokes traumatic memories that she cannot forget (Graham 2008, 132). According to Driver, Dulcie is the “unrepresentable body in pain [which] absorbs and gives back the threats and promises of a violently oppressive and violently revolutionary past, a past that has not yet quite passed” (Driver 2001, 218). By saying this, Driver actually sheds light on the cruel colonial past of South Africa and its intrusion into the present, and demands a possible way to overcome it. She also finds an association between the representation of Baartman and Dulcie’s body. Bodies thus become a manifestation of the nation: Baartman and Dulcie’s violated bodies stand for the devastated condition of South Africa under colonisation and apartheid respectively and can be considered a part of South African national historiography. Mary Douglas asserts, “[T]he human body is always treated as an image of society and […] there can be no natural way of considering the body that does not involve at the same time a social dimension” (Douglas 1973, 98). By saying so, Douglas associates the human body with society and thus finds the social dimension of the human body. The act of associating disfigured bodies with the nation as a whole alludes to Midnight’s Children where Saleem resembles the nation, his birth parallels the emergence of independent India and Pakistan, and he embodies the pain, uncertainty and identity crisis of a newborn nation and becomes a microcosm of postindependence India.

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War and Sexual Violence: Reproducing the Vulnerable Female Body Just like David, Dulcie is a soldier of the MK—the military wing of the ANC—where she was revered for her legendary military prowess. Loocke argues that since South Africa is a patriarchal society where women are restricted to the traditional roles of wife and mother, Dulcie’s fellow male guerrillas could not tolerate their inclusion in the army and thus showed them what they considered to be their rightful and apposite place through rape and other forms of sexual torture (Loocke 2008, 26). Regarding Dulcie’s silence, Loocke states, “Her absence draws attention to the other absences, such as the experiences of all those female ANC members, and it also challenges our understanding of language as a means to represent reality” (Loocke 2008, 26). Dulcie and her trauma can never be expressed through our everyday language or in a linear traditional narrative, and that is why Wicomb uses two parallel fragmentary narratives, employs African mythical and historical figures, and, most significantly, brings Dulcie’s ghost back to life. It is striking that what seems to be important and is acknowledged in the novel is completely absent in South African history. Stories of sexual torture and rape during the anti-apartheid movement can be found in public discourse but are completely absent in the nation’s collective history. By exposing the violence Dulcie underwent during the movement and by giving her a voice, Wicomb allows all the tortured and marginalised women in the history of South Africa to depict their untranslatable trauma. Since David fails to expose all the events of Dulcie’s life, the female narrator has to imagine and speculate to write the story. By giving the amanuensis the freedom to imagine, Wicomb emphasises the notion of the unreliability of a single or absolute version of truth and advocates the existence of many versions of truth beyond our own—a significant feature of magical realism. David’s Story strives to do what the TRC hearings attempted to do but failed. Through a fragmentary narrative, the inclusion of African traditions, beliefs and rituals and the presence of ghosts, David’s Story attempts to discover the veiled history of the TRC. By striving to create a story out of silence, Wicomb attempts to reveal the dehumanising treatment of women, show what is lacking in official historiography, and find a way to get closer to the truth. Mengel proposes that truth or reality can only be narrated through “indirection, approximation, circumlocution or substitution [and] by simultaneously reflecting on the difficulty of coming

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to terms with it […] to express the inexpressible, to speak about the unspeakable” (Mengel 2009, 315). However, I think there are also devices of magical realism that speak the unspeakable. Although the novel sets out to write about Dulcie, it hints at the potential difficulties and risks of doing so. Meg Samuelson remarks that the novel “is keenly aware of the powers and dangers of representation and of what is risked in writing about women in the war zone and its aftermath: a representational minefield in which women are cast as idealized warriors, silenced victims, and emblems of the domestic world toward which the male warrior ostensibly directs his efforts” (Samuelson 2007, 835). Samuelson’s statement refers to the difficulties of writing about women who are always directed by the males. In other words, giving a literary representation of Dulcie’s tortured body also risks inflicting more torture on her body. As Mike Marais notes, “Dulcie cannot be represented in language, because it is in and through language that the body of the black woman has been dismembered by being reduced to a vocabulary of signs” (Marais 2005, 28). There are some scenes of Dulcie’s physical, sexual and psychological torture committed by her fellow male guerrillas: The men in balaclavas come like privileged guests into her bedroom, in the early hours, always entering the house by different routes, ridiculing her reinforced bolts and locks, the secret code of her Securilarm system. … Now, they come without a sound […]. Then she arranges herself on her back with her eyes open, her hands folded behind her head, looking straight ahead at the door. … One of them carries a doctor’s Gladstone bag filled with peculiar instruments and electrical leads. (Wicomb 2001, 81 ࡳ 82)

The above quotation refers to the intimidating presence of the male antiapartheid guerrillas in ANC training camps, and the helplessness of female guerrillas and the passive acceptance of their own suffering. I agree with Pipic’s observation that “one of them is carrying a doctor’s bag with instruments implies that Dulcie might have been the victim of sexual torture” (Pipic 2017, 197). Dulcie understands the fact that “fucking women was a way of preventing them from rising in the Movement” (Wicomb 2001, 179) and that it is “this unspoken part of a girl’s training” (Wicomb 2001, 123) that has not been revealed in the TRC hearings. The history of the anti-apartheid movement is all about the marginalisation of black people; however, Wicomb probes deep into the movement, exposes

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the double victimisation of women within it and in this way provides us with a more marginalised version of it. Concerning the issue of fully addressing the violence perpetrated against women during the TRC hearings, Joyce Seroke said, “We only began to scratch the surface” of the violence against women, but still there were piles of “gruesome stories of sexual torture and violence” (qtd. in Farr 2000, 28). Seroke’s statement shows the failure of the TRC hearings to bring ineffable stories of suffering to light. Wicomb thus attempts to show the failure of the TRC to provide women or, more specifically, soldiers like Dulcie with a voice and platform to address their sexual torture. As Driver comments, “Dulcie’s is the unwritten, pressing story of our times. Dulcie’s story is a story of what has not yet been said about violence and betrayal, political commitment and love, about writing and representation and truth” (Driver 2001, 232). Wicomb’s novel is thus not an attempt to show what history has written rather what history has omitted. Since these stories of violence will tarnish the reputation of the ANC and the liberation movement, they cannot be revealed. Pipic argues that, in order to uncover “bodies that serve as landscapes of memory”, David’s Story reviews history. Bodies, particularly female bodies, preserve the memories of a traumatic past, and thus convey a sense of brutality and loss (Pipic 2017, 201). Pipic’s statement associates female bodies with traumatic past events. Since women are not given a voice and thus freedom, they are more vulnerable at the hands of the male. Michelle Brown opines, “Censoring women from the social text makes naturalizing violence against them possible, and David’s androcentric recitation cannot obscure the gendered dehumanization that underpins the Movement’s opposition to racialized dehumanization” (Brown 2008, 109). Brown’s statement thus hints at the institutionalised violence against women, gendered violence ‘underpinning’ the attempt to fight racial violence. Brown again opines that since censorship mutilates the text, the mutilated text tries to hide the mutilated physical body (Brown 2008, 109). Dulcie also symbolises the possibility of rape within the anti-apartheid movement. By focusing on the unspeakable story of Dulcie, Wicomb attempts to confront official accounts of history and to undermine the hegemonic perspectives of history. Guerrillas like Dulcie find themselves in a position where they are oppressed by those they are fighting against as well as by those they are fighting for. According to Loocke, both Dulcie and Sally not only remain silent about their torture but also seem to have accepted what happened to them because they grew up in a patriarchal

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society and are well aware of their helplessness (Loocke 2008, 34). Loocke’s statement thus shows the docile upbringing of women in the patriarchal South African society. However, Meg Samuelson argues that there are more particular reasons behind their silence: “Dulcie complies, veiling her disfigurement beneath clothing that symbolizes her dedication to the cause of freedom and her belief in the necessity of violent struggle to effect it, as well as her refusal to advance this freedom by playing a woman’s part” (Samuelson 2007, 849). Samuelson thus points out the fact that it is Dulcie’s dedication to the movement which compels her to be silent. Being herself a die-hard revolutionary, Dulcie does not want to stigmatise the movement by exposing her victimisation.

Resisting Linear Narrative and Reshaping History According to Dorothy Driver, for much of the Griqua history David’s major sources are official histories but these incomplete accounts must be supplemented by “stories told to David by his mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother” (Driver 2001, 226). This statement considers official written history incomplete and seems to focus on the importance of oral tales as a means of finding the truth. Driver further points out: It is through the stories of women (by women and about women) that another set of connections opens up between the past and the present, and looking at the text’s reinvention of history through the stories of women will allow us to consider the narrator’s suggestion that David may be using his interest in Griqua history to displace a memory of the more recent past, and even of what is happening in the present. (Driver 2001, 226)

It can be deduced from the passage that David is interested in his Griqua origin not only because of his search for origin but also because of his attempt to forget the trauma he has faced as an MK soldier. Driver also mentions that through women like Krotoä (also known as Eva) and Saartjie Baartman, Wicomb confronts, “the shameful attitudes to body shape that pervade racist South African thinking” (Driver 2001, 228) since it is “steatopygia”29 “that has set the story on its course” (Wicomb 2001, 17). David’s Story not only attempts to give the marginalised a voice but also focuses on the difficulties of retrieving history and giving someone a 29

Piling up of large amounts of fat on the buttocks of the Khoikhoi and other tribal people of Southern Africa.

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voice. As Driver points out, “[It] does not try to simply ‘give voice’ to those who were marginalised, oppressed, and disinherited by colonial and apartheid powers, or those who may now feel (like the Griqua) that they are still silenced. Instead, [it] dramatises the literary, political, philosophical, and ethical issues at stake in any attempt at retrieval of history and voice” (Driver 2001, 216). Unlike a realist narrative tradition, the novel does not depict the past as chronological and linear but rather fractured and non-linear. There are two parallel narratives of different time-settings, with the use of flashbacks, repetitive and fragmentary language, and even with disruptions to the sense of time, space and identity—which are all the features of the magical realist narrative. The narrative keeps shifting between past and present, and the reader loses the notion of time and space. The simultaneous existence of two worlds—one dealing with the Griquas and the other the transition period—disrupts the concept of a singular version of reality, and helps the reader compare the past and the present of South Africa and form their own subjective version of the concept of history and nation. The arrival of Dulcie’s ghost at the narrator’s garden to reveal her ineffable story—since neither David nor the amanuensis were able to piece together her fragmented stories—defies all scientific logic of the world but is considered by the narrator to be an ordinary occurrence, and thus undermines the use of a traditional narrative. David and the narrator argue over the way Dulcie might be represented. David knows that even if he wants the story of Dulcie to be written down, revealing the secret stories might get him into trouble and destroy the reputation of the movement. Being a woman, the amanuensis, however, wants to reveal the sufferings of Dulcie and with this the traumatising history of women in the history of South Africa. Since Dulcie’s story has “no progression in time, no beginning and no end”, it cannot be called a “story” (Wicomb 2001, 150). It is made up of “the thin anecdotes, the sorry clutch of hints and innuendos [that] do not lead to anything” (Wicomb 2001, 151). Dulcie’s story provides an alternative perspective on narrative, and thus an alternative history, revealing the voice of the marginalised which has been left uncaptured by the official history. However, giving voice to the oppressed is a risky task as the dominant authority is always there to silence it. The attack on the amanuensis’ computer with the message “this text deletes itself” (Wicomb 2001, 212) can be considered an attempt by dominant authority to block marginalised voices because the text becomes a threat to the apartheid or oppressive system. In order to protect and preserve the memory of Dulcie, since many people want to erase her story of struggle, we have to save her from disappearing into historical oblivion.

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I have mentioned and explained earlier that magical realist narrative possesses the potential to provide characters with relief from distressing events. There is a scene on the penultimate page of the novel which suggests the ways in which magical realist language might possess a healing effect: Only when I turn to go back to work do I see her sturdy steatopygous form on the central patch of grass, where she has come to sunbathe in private. She is covered with goggas crawling and buzzing all over her syrup sweetness, exploring her orifices, plunging into her wounds; she makes no attempt to wipe the insects away, to shake them off. … She yawns and stretches in the warm sun. Is this no longer my property? I ask myself. I have never thought of Dulcie as a visitor in my garden. (Wicomb 2001, 212)

The narrator clearly sees Dulcie in her garden with all her bodily wounds. She even describes the goggas explicitly. Although the narrator has never expected to see Dulcie in her garden—this would be impossible as Dulcie is dead— she is not surprised to see her. The unquestioned acceptance of magical events in reality, which is the most prominent feature of magical realism, takes place exactly here. Since Wicomb fails to represent Dulcie, who is dead, with the help of a realist narrative, she finds an alternative way to represent her by the help of a fragmentary narrative, Dulcie’s ghost, African myths, magic and epistemology and, most importantly, imagination. David’s personal way of plotting history can be seen in the Griqua family tree at the start of the book. According to the tree, the first five generations of Kok men have been born without women. The absence of women in the procreation process—a phenomenon that defies the logical order of the universe—also exemplifies the less significant position of women in David’s own linear narrative. By allowing David’s family tree to stand at the beginning of the novel with all its errors, the narrator silently shows that his one-dimensional and genealogical understanding of history fails to grasp the significance of his historical moment. The narrator thus addresses the necessity of an alternative narrative from the viewpoint of the oppressed in order to provide an approachable version of historical trauma. Magical realist narrative which is non-linear and multidimensional has the full potential to be the voice of the oppressed in representing violent historical events. David’s story can be considered, as phrased by Walter Benjamin, the “document of civilization”, but its attempt to silence Dulcie’s story also

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makes it a “document of barbarism” (Benjamin 1969, 256). The employment of two parallel narratives helps David confront the past and his ancestry, and thus repair his torn identity. In spite of his imprisonment at the ANC concentration camp, he still aligns himself with the ideology of the antiapartheid movement and asks for a narrative which does not include violence and suffering, thus concealing the truth. Although David keeps opposing the inclusion of women in the amanuensis’ story, her story in fact defantasises the anti-apartheid movement by revealing the gendered violence and other evils within it, and provides us with an alternative version of history from a female perspective by providing Dulcie and the entire neglected female community a voice.

CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION EMPATHY AND IMAGINATION: LINKING HISTORICAL TRAUMA, ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVE AND MAGICAL REALISM

If there is any close association between historical trauma, alternative narrative and magical realism, it requires a strong sense of empathy and a desire to give voice to the oppressed. I have already talked about the issue that giving a literary representation of a traumatic event—personal, collective or historical—from the standpoint of the oppressed demands immense imaginative power. Traditional realistic narrative writes a traumatic event from the perspective of the dominant authorities without revealing the voices of the oppressed. Thus, the same narrative is not fully capable of providing the oppressed with a voice and thus an alternative story from their own standpoint. Put another way, providing an alternative history is possible only through an alternative narrative. This alternative narrative must have the potential to penetrate the rigid defence of traumatic events and to present them to the reader in a way which is not appalling or repulsive to them. Writing a narrative on trauma and/or marginalisation involves the issue of ‘empathy’ from both the author and the reader. They should not merely feel for the traumatised people but also empathise with them and thus build a psychological rapport with them. I have advocated the use of magical realist narrative as this alternative narrative. Again, since traumatic memory is inconsistent, representing it in literature requires an equally non-linear narrative full of contradiction and a personalised history or reality. Magical realism enables authors to provide a personalised, communal or marginalised story, and thus to create their own version of history, left untouched by the dominant, linear narrative. Victims of traumatic events have the general tendency to forget those events and thus be disconnected from them. As I have already mentioned,

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this desire to forget the past creates a sort of repressed memory and identity crisis for the victims. However, while coming to terms with trauma, it is essential that victims remember and thus confront ineffable past events. In the literary representation of traumatic events, mimetic realism depicts those events the way they already are, and thus frightens and repels the readers, rather than making them empathise with victims. Magical realism, on the other hand, conceals traumatic events under the mist of myth, mystery, magic and imagination, and thus represents the events in a more accessible way. In doing so, however, this particular technique does not destroy the solemnity or authenticity of the events. On the contrary, it makes the reader understand the suffering of victims and thus empathise with them. Like many other researchers of magical realism, I also argue that by believing in and employing myth, magic, ghosts and the supernatural, practitioners of the magical realist technique fuse the real and the supernatural in a coherent structure. In spite of the presence of fantastic events, the narratives are always firmly anchored in social, historical, cultural and political realities. The present thesis has dealt with the literary representation of trauma arising from three different calamitous historical events—the Holocaust, slavery and apartheid—and showed the potential of the magical realist narrative to depict ineffable trauma from the perspectives of the victimised. All six novels that I have analysed belong to different cultural and literary traditions. All novelists, except D. M. Thomas, are from marginalised backgrounds (Joseph Skibell is an American Jew; Toni Morrison is racially underprivileged; Maryse Condé is marginalised racially and culturally; and Zakes Mda and Zoë Wicomb are racially and ideologically marginalised—Mda is black and Wicomb is coloured). Concerning the use of magical realism by authors from different cultures, multiple resemblances and differences can be found in them, which, according to Sánchez, suggests both the existence of a flourishing literary mode and the establishment of a reading model that combines trauma, ethnicity and gender (Sánchez 2011, 186). It can be deduced from Sánchez’s statement that magical realism is not only a popular narrative technique or genre of fiction but also a study of the marginalised sectors of society and a way of giving them a voice with which to speak out. In other words, where there is a story of trauma or oppression, magical realism is there to represent it and to give it a narrative shape. Whether literary representation of the Holocaust is ethical or not is a much debated issue and the present book has already shed light on it. Adams

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believes that some authors’ desire to engage themselves in the project of Holocaust representation is closely associated with the postmemorial urge to reimagine the Holocaust experiences of previous generations as well as the ethical and representational challenges and risks encountered in reconstructing the traumatic experiences of others (Adams 2011, 173). Authors talk about the Holocaust because they want to reimagine the event out of absence and silence. They are, however, aware of the difficulties of doing so. Again, magical realism fulfils the urge to provide elements of consolation to the characters. However, in doing so, it does not misrepresent or deny historical horror. It rather represents traumatic history in a graspable manner. In The White Hotel and A Blessing on the Moon, magical realism is a potentially effective means of representing the Holocaust because of its presentation of elements of consolation and escape. I have mentioned earlier that in A Blessing on the Moon, Skibell has tried to make an imaginative reconstruction of his family story out of void and heavy silence. According to Adams, by giving an imaginary afterlife to his greatgrandfather, Skibell places the reconstruction in an inconceivable sphere, suggesting the distance between the experiences of an individual and the reconstruction of these experiences (Adams 2011, 177). Since his novel is an imaginative reconstruction of the Holocaust and not a historical one, Skibell feels that it is to some extent truer than reality itself (Skibell 2010, 262). In order to remove the family silence over the Holocaust issue by turning it into an imaginary story, Skibell employs fairy tales, Yiddish folk tales and culture, myth and magic—all of which are elements of magical realist narrative. Skibell finds an interesting association between the imaginative reconstruction of the Holocaust and its foreshadowing in the tales of the Grimm Brothers: “[I]t always struck me how much the Holocaust […] seemed foreshadowed in the tales of the Brothers Grimm: [T]he oven in Hansel and Gretel becomes the ovens of Auschwitz; the pied piper […] of Hamelin is […] the story of World War II” (Skibell 2010, 261). Just like fairy tales, the magical Hotel Amfortas also stands for concentration camps and gas chambers. The burning of Jews in the ovens of the hotel bakery is a clear allusion to the gas chambers of extermination camps. Let me return to the healing and consolatory aspect of magical realism in A Blessing on the Moon. The magical realist concept of hiding the moon and later returning it to its proper place through the courageous act of Chaim actually gives hope for restoration to Jews as imagined in the

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novel. Again, at the end of the novel, Chaim finds rest on the enormous lap of a young woman (probably his mother), which provides a potential suggestion of rebirth. The reference to the sense of peace Chaim achieves at his rebirth—“My small body is flooded with well-being” (Skibell 2010, 256)—underpins the consolatory potential of the magic in the novel, and develops an idea of redemption for Jews who suffered during the Holocaust. Again, through the subversive characteristics of magical realism, Skibell unsettles the traditional power hierarchy and thus makes victims more powerful than their oppressors, which is evident from the wretched condition of the headless German soldier and the victorious status of Chaim. Like Chaim’s heroic act of returning the moon to the sky, Thomas’s creation of a soothing atmosphere in “The Camp” section of The White Hotel brings back comfort and happiness for the victims. In the magical atmosphere of the imaginary camp, the characters forget the brutal treatment they received in the penultimate chapter, and seem to start a fresh beginning. Thus, magical realism creates an imaginary world where they find themselves to be alive even after their tragic death. Again, Lisa’s arrival at the camp relieves her of the pain in her pelvis and breast, and thus makes her joyous and a different person. Last but not least, the novel underscores the role of magical realism in representing trauma through the connection between trauma and grotesque bodily imagery. By showing the bizarre symptoms of trauma which have their origins in the future rather than in the past, Thomas adds a new dimension to the discourse of trauma and the Holocaust. The issue of slavery is directly associated with the notion of amnesia: both individual and collective. Neither white nor black people want to remember the history of slavery. It reminds the black community of their oppressed past, and the white community of their oppressive past. Although most of the literary works on slavery belong to American literature, British and Caribbean authors, along with many others from postcolonial countries, are also worth mentioning. In the chapter devoted to slavery, the book has shown how Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Condé’s Moi, Tituba, Sorcière … Noire de Salem challenge white, patriarchal history in various ways. By giving voice to the protagonists, both novels provide an alternative narrative and thus an alternative history not only from the viewpoint of the marginalised black slaves but also female black slaves who suffer from both racial and gendered violence. The presence of the fantastic, especially the ghosts or ghostly characters, enables both

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protagonists to face their traumatic past and to come to terms with it, and to fight the oppressive white and patriarchal world. Showing how Caribbean folklore became a way of redefining the slaves’ universe, Condé suggests that another kind of literature was required, an epic, historic literature, which she and others are writing today, with other values (Scarboro 1994, 191). Edouard Glissant explains that contemporary writers should feel the need to fill in the holes left by past historiography and bring forth the collective traditions after ages of silence. By giving Tituba a voice, Condé allows her to reveal stories of her racial and gendered dehumanisation, which were excluded in history, and thus gives her entire community a voice. The subversive aspect of the magical realist narrative gives her the strength to challenge society’s norms and expectations, and enables her to fight both patriarchal and white authority. The contact with the world of spirits provides Tituba with all sorts of comfort, consolation and healing, gives her a place in society and helps her assert her identity. In Beloved, Morrison has dealt with the heritage of slavery from the perspective of marginalised slaves. She gives them a voice through Sethe and thus comes forward with an alternative version of history. I have analysed the role of magical realism in her novel mainly through the means of magic, myth, ghost, black lore and rituals, and a strong sense of communal bonding. In the novel, memories of characters move back and forth, creating a fragmented, non-linear narrative, and thus pose a question concerning received ideas of time and space. Because of their dissociation from the past in order to forget their brutal treatment as slaves, the exslaves of the novel suffer from a sort of identity crisis. Instead of employing any realist narrative to deal with both healing and identity issues, Morrison brings back a dead person, gives her a bodily shape and allows her to inspire the characters to remember their past, to talk about it and thus to undergo a process of healing and reassertion of identity. Through the shared stories of slaves, Morrison challenges traditional white history and provides one unheard of. According to Tommaso Bassan, “The essential thing in a process of nation-building is the establishment of a collective myth, a great narrative of the nation that serves as an ideal image to give the coherent and unitarian form of history to the past events that contributed to create the present” (Bassan 2013, 21). This statement highlights the importance of an all-encompassing narrative and of knowing the past and linking it with the present in order to establish a better present and anticipate a fruitful future.

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In other words, it is not possible to form a present or a future unless and until one faces the past, no matter how traumatic or painful, and comes to terms with it. Narrating the past helps to unite a group of people who would otherwise be just a sum of unconnected individuals, and to create a community based on a collective interest or ideology. Philip Bonner argues that the new national construction in South Africa was drawn from the opposition between the present self and the past other—the past was no longer a past of pride, but rather a past of cruelty and shame (Bonner 2006, 19). Bonner appositely remarks that apartheid not only prevented “most racial groups from meaningful contact with one another [but] also gradually effaced most memories of other non-racial, multi-racial and multi-class ways of being” (Bonner 2006, 19). The total abolition of apartheid was then essential for creating a single national culture. The simultaneous presence of the supernatural and the real in a text expands the imagination of both writers and readers. They can see the world in different ways through new lenses and interpret events from multiple viewpoints. Mda’s use of magical realism in Ways of Dying points to his interest in extending boundaries of imagination and interrogating conventional attitudes of representation. Mda attempts to use the magical realist technique in order to rewrite the official history and to present an alternative one from the standpoint of the marginalised. In David’s Story, Wicomb, on the other hand, focuses on the need to tell concealed stories of the anti-apartheid movement but at the same time hints at the risks and difficulties of writing against a dominant history. In David’s Story, Wicomb provides us with an unspoken and unknown story—a sort of alternative history—of the anti-apartheid struggle through a non-linear narrative, myth and magic and, most importantly, through Dulcie’s ghost. I have mentioned earlier that Wicomb has come forward with a deromanticised version of the anti-apartheid struggle. She has shown the lack of democracy in the movement and compared it with apartheid itself. Wicomb attempts to unearth the story of physical and sexual violence of cadres of the anti-apartheid movement, which David and Dulcie did not want to reveal because of their allegiance to the movement. In order to do so, Wicomb employs an unreliable female narrator who has to form a story with a beginning and an end out of a narrative which keeps moving back and forth and touches on different physical settings at different periods of time. At the end of the story, the ghost of Dulcie appears in the garden of the narrator to reveal her stories and to protect them from destruction. Since Dulcie is the representation of all the oppressed South African women, preserving her own story actually

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preserves the collected stories of violated women and thus functions as an alternative history, revealing what has been denied by the official history. Ways of Dying also deals with the evils of the anti-apartheid struggle and thus demystifies it. However, unlike Wicomb, Mda has shown the importance of sharing and laughter in living amidst violence. He has also focused on native beliefs, ghosts of ancestors, and art and craft in healing trauma and anticipating a brighter future. In an interview with Elly Williams for The Missouri Review, Mda talks about the presence of magic in everyday life: [T]he sources of my magic[al] realism—if you can call it that—are really in the traditional literatures of the various peoples of southern Africa. In our oral traditions the world of the supernatural and that of objective reality exist side by side in the same context. You do not find a line of demarcation between what in the west is called magic and what is empirical reality. (Williams 2005, 71)

This quotation refers to the inseparability of the real and the supernatural. It also emphasises the significance of oral traditions in preserving stories of oppression and marginalisation, generation after generation. We should not ignore the point that by stressing the significance of oral storytelling, Mda shows his distrust for the traditional realist narrative and at the same time his interest in magical realism. Mda places several supernatural events—Noria’s fifteen-month-long pregnancy, her getting pregnant in a dream, Vutha’s resurrection and such like—in the harsh realities of social and political violence and shows the realistic foundation of magical realism as well as its ability to represent historical trauma. The novel also focuses on the issue of storytelling and sharing as a means of overcoming past trauma. Put another way, in order to come to terms with a violent past, one has to confront it and then share the stories with others. Their individual stories eventually become a collective one, portraying the weal and woe of an entire community. Since both Noria and Toloki represent the oppressed black people in South Africa, their relief from the past symbolises the relief of the entire nation from a brutal history. I have also shown the power of magic, imagination, and folk-belief in changing one’s marginalised status. The magical transformation of Noria’s shack into a gorgeous villa, the appearance of Jwara’s ghost in Nefolovhodwe’s dream, the pile of magical figurines—all empower Noria and Toloki and thus dissolve the dichotomy between the white and the black, the oppressor and the oppressed.

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Although magical realism had for a long time been considered typically Latin American, it later outgrew the boundaries of Latin America and reached out to other nations, particularly to many postcolonial nations or nations which were struggling against their colonial masters. Magical realist novels were often not included in mainstream literary canons. As well as being associated with the perspectives of the marginalised and oppressed, magical realism was also associated with a non-Western perspective. For instance, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende and Jorge Luis Borges have all written from a Latin American perspective. After the technique gained acceptance in other postcolonial countries, starting in the 1980s, writers like Salman Rushdie (Indian perspective), Ben Okri (West African tribal perspective), and others came into our focus. Again, authors from many other non-Western cultures also started to depict their victimisation by dominant cultures. Ana Castillo (Chicano perspective), Leslie Marmon Silko (Native American perspective), and Zakes Mda (anti-apartheid perspective) are a few others worth mentioning. Along with cultural marginalisation, authors like Laura Esquivel also write about the personal struggles of women living on the edges of family and society. It should be borne in mind that all the above-mentioned novelists have written from a non-Western as well as a marginalised perspective and, most importantly, dealt with human suffering that originated from various traumatic historical events. However, magical realism did not end there. Rather, it made its way to the mainstream Western literary canon and at the same time retained its marginalised point of view. British novelist Angela Carter, for instance, has written from the standpoint of women fighting the patriarchal society in Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991). She has also parodied traditional concepts of gender, sadomasochism and identity in The Passion of New Eve (1977). In these novels, Carter has employed magical realism from a marginalised but Western perspective, and thus paved the way for the narrative technique and/or genre to enter the Western literary stream. Jeanette Winterson, another British novelist, in her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) has written from the viewpoint of a lesbian teenage girl, standing against traditional values, and religious and social constraints. British novelist, playwright and translator D. M. Thomas in no way bears a marginalised identity and his The White Hotel (1981)—written with the means of magical realism, grotesque realism and weird bodily imagery—is also a significant addition to mainstream Western literature. Two Jewish-American writers Joseph Slibell (A Blessing on the Moon, 1997) and Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated, 2002) have also contributed to the inclusion of

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the magical realist novel in mainstream literature. Because of its subversive, transgressive and consolatory aspects, authors from different national and cultural backgrounds have found magical realism an outstanding means to represent trauma (traumatic events) whether that be individual, collective, social, political, cultural, structural or transgenerational. Magical realism has not only made its way from Latin American literature to world literature but also secured its position there. However, during its entire journey, it never ceased to speak for the oppressed, to depict their suffering, to provide them with consolation and healing from trauma, to give them voice and identity, and to provide an alternative history from their own perspective.

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