Trudi Tate, Clare Hall, Cambridge

'Bill Arthur' is an Australian veteran of the Viet Nam War. Now 53, he is a big, sturdy man with a hearty laugh, although his hair is completely white. For twenty years he has suffered from war trauma, and recently he was diagnosed with leukaemia. Both ailments were caused by his war service.

I am writing a book about Bill Arthur's memories of the Viet Nam war and the effects of war trauma upon his life and his family. (All the names have been changed.) The biographical material is interwoven with reflections upon writings about the war - medical work on trauma; psychological writings; military histories; newspaper reports; war memories by Australian, American and Vietnamese veterans. I am interested in questions of bearing witness to events one cannot see or control, yet in which one is implicated in some way.

The conference paper will present material from interviews with Australian veterans, interwoven with analyses of published memoirs about the war. It will also offer some reflections upon the project. How does one write about someone else's experience of trauma without turning the experience into a spectacle, on the one hand, or a commodity, on the other?

The book is informed by my academic and theoretical knowledge (mainly of psychoanalysis), but I have deliberately chosen to write it as a non-academic, non-theoretical work. The paper will explore the reasons for this choice, and will consider some of the political implications of this kind of project.

Chris Colvin, University of Virginia, USA

Since the inception of the TRC, "storytelling" has become a privileged mode of communicating experiences of apartheid. Part confession, part psychotherapy, part legal testimony, "telling your story" has become a powerful, if ambivalent form of social and political action. From the very beginning of my fieldwork with a Cape Town survivor support group, a key problematic has been what to do with and how to think about the constant flow of "stories" that come from those I am working with. Documenting the experiences of group member's was not part of my original project proposal. I am not interested in finding and giving "voice" to stories and experiences that have been "silenced." Nonetheless, I am faced with the problem of how to write about this group and its storytelling, how to describe their experiences of trauma counselling (the project's original aim) and how to describe the "marketisation" of storytelling that has become part of South African political culture, without doing a great injustice to the experiences of those I am working with. This is more than a problem of differing, potentially conflicting theoretical agendas. It concerns the politics of empathy and witnessing. And it is about how to value and represent something that has been commodified without participating in that commodification and without closing my ears to what people are telling me. This paper explores the problems, methodological, theoretical and oral, of working with and writing about people whose stories have become something not quite familiar to themselves.

Jared Stark, New York University

In her second novel, Sula (1973), Toni Morrison raises the question of how the particular traumatic experience of one individual, in this case a shell-shocked veteran of World War I, is or can be related to a community with no direct access to that experience. Although the war veteran remains possessed by a past that he cannot communicate in narrative form, Sula suggests that his wounded identity and history nonetheless have a significant impact on the larger community of characters, as they in turn are exposed to a shared traumatic history of American slavery, racism, and apartheid. In Sula, then, a community encounters its own history through another’s traumatic symptoms, that is, through an experience that reaches them only in the form of a fiction. In plotting a connection between unrelated traumas, Morrison’s novel thus argues that a fictional representation of trauma might shed light on historical and political actuality.

In this paper, I address the implicit claims made by Morrison’s work through examination of Sula as well as Morrison’s critical writings. How can literature bear witness to trauma? Why and to what effect does traumatic experience become a privileged figure for literary experience? How can a reader or critic relate to a work that not only seeks to represent traumatic experience, but that sees itself as "traumatized" and, potentially, traumatizing? To develop these questions, I discuss Sula’s allusions to prior models of historical witnessing, in the Hebrew Bible, in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and in the writings of Black Panther founder Huey P. Newton, as well as its relationship to a psychoanalytic model of trauma. As it negotiates among culturally significant images of trauma and survival, the particular histories to which it attempts to bear witness, and its own literary strategies, Morrison’s novel seeks to redefine what it means to read and think about another’s pain.

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