Cross-Traumatic Affiliation

Abstract

If, as Cathy Caruth observes in Unclaimed Experience, “history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, … history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (24), then traumatic colonial histories not only have to be acknowledged more fully, on their own terms, and in their own terms, but they also have to be considered in relation to traumatic metropolitan or First World histories for trauma studies to have any hope of redeeming its promise of ethical effectiveness. In Chapter 1, we already briefly touched upon the problems involved in (interpreting) encounters between different individual or collective traumas in relation to Caruth’s analysis of Hiroshima mon amour, and Chapter 4 explored the bonds of sorrow that unite a privileged white American mother and a poor black South African one in Sindiwe Magona’s novel Mother to Mother. The current chapter investigates the inherent relationality of history and trauma by tracing memorial connections between the Holocaust—the historical calamity that has attracted by far the most attention from the Euro-American academy—and histories of colonial suffering as forged in various theoretical writings. As Karyn Ball has argued in relation to the United States context, “If trauma studies might be said to have a political and ethical task, it would be to continue to move beyond the iconic logic of the ‘unprecedented’ [associated with the Holocaust] and to employ the strategy of comparison in order to forge links among traumatic histories that would raise Americans’ historical consciousness and promote their sense of civic responsibility” (15).