Trauma, disability and insight in African literature
Creators: name: Shiroma, Yumi Dineen
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2024

description: This dissertation argues that depictions of trauma and disability appear in African literature not only as indexes of damage, but as key sites of critique and utopian thought. In my first chapter, I argue that several major concepts from Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary theory can be traced back to his work as a clinical psychiatrist. To stage this argument, I consider Fanon’s published psychiatric research (which includes work in neuropsychiatry and institutional therapy), as well as the psychiatric case studies found in “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” the final, fragmentary chapter of The Wretched of the Earth. First, I argue that Wretched puts forth a physicalist theory of revolutionary agency derived from Fanon’s work with patients suffering from degenerative neurological disorders—a chain of influences with surprising ideological effects, figuring disability and colonialism as analogous restrictive forces while simultaneously turning Fanon’s disabled patients into figures for the development of revolutionary agency. From here, I turn to Fanon’s more psychoanalytically-inflected work, arguing that Fanon’s case studies of traumatized combatants in the Algerian War of Independence significantly trouble the Manichaean account of anticolonial struggle found in the early chapters of Wretched. If anticolonial war is thrilling and cathartic in “On Violence,” by “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” it is structured instead around dynamics of guilt and ambivalence. Furthermore, Fanon’s case studies of traumatized perpetrators of violence suggest that while trauma can act as a source of structural understanding, it has no inherent connection to victim or perpetrator roles, appearing instead as an ethically ambivalent condition. I argue that while theories of trauma have tended to equate it with victimhood and therefore with political right, a view of trauma as a category with no predetermined ethical status is key to understanding the colonial encounter. From here, I turn to a set of texts by postcolonial African novelists—Ousmane Sembène, Rebeka Njau, and Yvonne Vera—which engage the same questions of trauma, disability, structural understanding, and perpetration raised by Fanon. In two novels by Sembène and Njau, crowds of disabled people signify the failure of the liberatory project of decolonization, their damaged bodies and psyches testifying to the ongoing violence of neocolonial capitalism. Reading Sembène’s and Njau’s work through the Marxist category of primitive accumulation, I argue that primitive accumulation appears in these texts as a mass disabling event. Furthermore, the weakening of pre-capitalist social ties associated with primitive accumulation weakens the communal structures which would otherwise have provided care for disabled populations. Ultimately, for both authors, disability acts as an entry point into questions of interdependence and collective life, and disabled characters figure the possibility of collective life outside these processes of violence and exploitation. From here, I turn to Vera’s work, which extends and critiques Fanon’s ideas about postcolonial trauma. Vera, I argue, is centrally concerned with dissociation and dissociative mental states, which hide traumatic histories from view while simultaneously ensuring their survival within the psyche. Thus, trauma and dissociation act as mediating forces between the individual psyche and history. Finally, I consider Vera’s ambiguous portrait of a traumatized perpetrator of violence, arguing that this portrait challenges trauma theory’s typical equation of trauma with victimhood and ethical right. Nonetheless, trauma appears as a means of excavating difficult historical truths, and as a source of utopian vision.