Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response

Andre Schwarz-Bart's slim novel A Woman Named (La mulatresse Solitude, 1972) tells an epic tale of trans-Atlantic slavery with implications for contemporary trauma studies. Over the course of Solitude, the descendants of a pastoral African landscape depicted at the novel's opening become diasporic subjects in the Caribbean-still tilling the land but under significantly different conditions. Captured, deported, and raped during the Middle Passage, the novel's protagonist Bayangumay gives birth to a daughter, la mulatresse Solitude (the mulatto Solitude), a legendary figure in Guadeloupe's history. is later executed for her role in a slave rebellion the day after giving birth to her own child, who is also destined to live as someone's property. In the novel's brief epilogue, the narrator breaks the historical frame of the text and imagines that a tourist will one day come to visit the plantation where and other rebels fought against their enslavement--a site that was dynamited in desperation by the rebellion's leader: If the traveler insists, he will be permitted to visit the remains of the Danglemont plantation. The guard will wave his hand, and as though by magic a tattered black field worker will appear. He will greet the lover of stones with a vaguely incredulous look, and they will start off.... They will stroll this way and that and ultimately come to a remnant of knee-high wall and a mound of earth intermingled with bone splinters.... Conscious of a faint taste of ashes, the visitor will take a few steps at random, tracing wider and wider circles around the site of the mansion. His foot will collide with one of the building concealed by dead leaves, which were dispersed by the explosion and then over the years buffed, dug up, covered over, and dug up again by the hoes of the field workers. If he is in the mood to salute a memory, his imagination will people the environing space, and human figures will rise up around him, just as the phantoms that wander about the humiliated ruins of the Warsaw ghetto are said to rise up before the eyes of other travelers. (A Woman 149-50) In these concluding sentences of the novel, Schwarz-Bart depicts a landscape of trauma replete with ruins, bone splinters, ashes, and phantoms. (1) He mobilizes various forms of anachronism and anatopism (spatial misplacement) in order to depict multiple traumatic legacies. (2) Like the novel's opening paragraphs, this passage mingles the mythical and the mundane. But in the place of the opening's invocation of the fairy-tale (Once upon a time, the novel begins 3), more gothic, even traumatic, temporalities emerge in the epilogue. Like the fragments of bone, time is literally splintered. While the novel proper moves continuously from Africa to Guadeloupe and from the mid-eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth, the epilogue jumps to the contemporary moment of the novel's enunciation and to a hypothetical, layered European/ Caribbean space. Both the presumably European traveler and the West Indian guide appear equally displaced spatially and temporally--the former because of his perplexing love of old stones, the latter because of his magical emergence and tattered appearance. As ruin, the site of the plantation is itself disjoined from the present, half-buried by nearly two centuries of innocent activities but still testifying to a violent past. If, as many of the contributors to this important special issue of Studies in the Novel convincingly argue, turn-of-the-millennium trauma studies has remained stuck within Euro-American conceptual and historical frameworks, Schwarz-Bart's work demonstrates another tendency: for sixty years (at least), certain writers and intellectuals have been seeking to articulate traumas within Europe with traumas in colonial and postcolonial space. …