- Title
- "The wings of whipped butterflies" : trauma, silence and representation of the suffering child in selected contemporary African short fiction
- Creator
- Njovane, Thandokazi
- Subject
- Children in literature Psychic trauma in literature Short stories, African (English) -- 21st century
- Date Issued
- 2013
- Date
- 2013
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Masters
- Type
- MA
- Identifier
- vital:2253
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004214
- Description
- This dissertation, which examines the literary representation of childhood trauma, is held together by three threads of inquiry. Firstly, I examine the stylistic devices through which three contemporary African writers – NoViolet Bulawayo, Uwem Akpan, and Mia Couto – engage with the subject of childhood trauma in five of their short stories: “Hitting Budapest”; “My Parents’ Bedroom” and “Fattening for Gabon”; and “The Day Mabata-bata Exploded” and “The Bird-Dreaming Baobab,” respectively. In each of these narratives, the use of ingén(u)s in the form of child narrators and/or focalisers instantiates a degree of structural irony, premised on the cognitive discrepancy between the protagonists’ perceptions and those of the implied reader. This structural irony then serves to underscore the reality that, though in a general sense the precise nature of traumatic experience cannot be directly communicated in language, this is exacerbated in the case of children, because children’s physical and psychological frameworks are underdeveloped. Consequently, children’s exposure to trauma and atrocity results in disruptions of both personal and communal notions of safety and security which are even more severe than those experienced by adults. Secondly, I analyse the political, cultural and economic factors which give rise to the traumatic incidents depicted in the stories, and the child characters’ interpretations and responses to these exigencies. Notions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, identity and community, victimhood and survival, agency and disempowerment are discussed here in relation to the context of postcolonial Africa and the contemporary realities of chronic poverty, genocide, child-trafficking, the aftermath of civil war, and the legacies of colonialism and racism. Thirdly, this dissertation inspects the areas of congruence and divergence between trauma theory, literary scholarship on trauma narratives, and literary attempts to represent atrocity and trauma despite what is widely held to be the inadequacy of language – and therefore representation – to this task. There are certain differences between the three authors’ depictions of children’s experiences of trauma, despite the fact that the texts all grapple with the aporetic nature of trauma and the paradox of representing the unrepresentable. To this end, they utilise various strategies – temporal disjunctions and fragmentations, silences and lacunae, elements of the fantastical and surreal, magical realism, and instances of abjection and dissociation – to gesture towards the inexpressible, or that which is incommensurable with language. I argue that, ultimately, it is the endings of these stories which suggest the unrepresentable nature of trauma. Traumatic experience poses a challenge to representational conventions and, in its resistance, encourages a realisation that new ways of writing and speaking about trauma in the African continent, particularly with regards to children, are needed.
- Description
- Adobe Acrobat 9.54 Paper Capture Plug-in
- Format
- 117 leaves
- Format
- Publisher
- Rhodes University
- Publisher
- Faculty of Humanities, English
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Njovane, Thandokazi
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RU Department of Literary Studies in English
Njovane, Thando (Dr)
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