The Seduction of Ash: " Mia Couto's" The Day Mabata-bata Exploded" and" The Bird-Dreaming Baobab
- Authors: Njovane, Thandokazi
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/142702 , vital:38103 , 10.4314/eia.v41i2.2
- Description: Chesca Long-Innes argues that Mia Couto's installation of the fantastic in his short story collection, Voices Made Night, may best be understood "not so much as a product of any 'magical realist' poetics, but as 'naturalised,' or motivated as a function of the collective neurosis of a [Mozambican] society traumatised by its continuing history of poverty and extreme violence". Couto's use of the fantastic, she adds, encompasses both empirical and psychic reality, and both are characterised by instability and elusiveness. The collection, she then maintains, constitutes a reinvention or reimagining of subjective realities constructed and perpetuated by the social trauma underpinning what she terms the "psycho-pathology of post-colonial Mozambique, in which the society as a whole is [. . .] caught in the grip of a profound depression or melancholia".
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
- Authors: Njovane, Thandokazi
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/142702 , vital:38103 , 10.4314/eia.v41i2.2
- Description: Chesca Long-Innes argues that Mia Couto's installation of the fantastic in his short story collection, Voices Made Night, may best be understood "not so much as a product of any 'magical realist' poetics, but as 'naturalised,' or motivated as a function of the collective neurosis of a [Mozambican] society traumatised by its continuing history of poverty and extreme violence". Couto's use of the fantastic, she adds, encompasses both empirical and psychic reality, and both are characterised by instability and elusiveness. The collection, she then maintains, constitutes a reinvention or reimagining of subjective realities constructed and perpetuated by the social trauma underpinning what she terms the "psycho-pathology of post-colonial Mozambique, in which the society as a whole is [. . .] caught in the grip of a profound depression or melancholia".
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
Trauma, (Mis) Perception and Memory in Uwem Akpan's ‘Fattening for Gabon’:
- Authors: Njovane, Thandokazi
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/142726 , vital:38111 , https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2012.731303
- Description: It is a generally accepted principle in contemporary poststructuralist literary studies that language can only ever partially succeed in signifying that which it purports to signify. Where the profoundly dislocating experience of trauma is concerned, language loses even this partial success, and the victim of psychic violence is forced to resort to silence, a silence which is all the more expressive precisely because it overwhelms language. Thus, trauma fiction reveals what Steiner refers to as ‘the revaluation of silence’ which emphasises ‘the conceit of the word unspoken’ (67). Uwem Akpan's short story, ‘Fattening for Gabon’, from his collection Say You're One of Them (2008), is concerned with the culpability of socio-economic structures in giving rise to and perpetuating trauma in children. This paper will examine the retrospective narration of the protagonist by paying particular attention to the motif of memory. A discussion of the painful ambivalence of the experience and textualization of trauma, as conveyed through the story's use of silence and the disruption of the conventional bildung typical of narratives of remembrance, will form a substantial part of the paper.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2012
- Authors: Njovane, Thandokazi
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/142726 , vital:38111 , https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2012.731303
- Description: It is a generally accepted principle in contemporary poststructuralist literary studies that language can only ever partially succeed in signifying that which it purports to signify. Where the profoundly dislocating experience of trauma is concerned, language loses even this partial success, and the victim of psychic violence is forced to resort to silence, a silence which is all the more expressive precisely because it overwhelms language. Thus, trauma fiction reveals what Steiner refers to as ‘the revaluation of silence’ which emphasises ‘the conceit of the word unspoken’ (67). Uwem Akpan's short story, ‘Fattening for Gabon’, from his collection Say You're One of Them (2008), is concerned with the culpability of socio-economic structures in giving rise to and perpetuating trauma in children. This paper will examine the retrospective narration of the protagonist by paying particular attention to the motif of memory. A discussion of the painful ambivalence of the experience and textualization of trauma, as conveyed through the story's use of silence and the disruption of the conventional bildung typical of narratives of remembrance, will form a substantial part of the paper.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2012
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