Memory, Trauma and Narrative in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins and Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen &Me

Abstract

The notion of memory is a core fabric of identity and navigating human life both at individual level and collective levels. Therefore, when everyday life is disrupted by traumatic events such as wartime conflict, individual and shared memory becomes highly contested, especially when subaltern voices compete with dominant narratives. This thesis explores the role and power of memory in narrating trauma and violence in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002) and Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen & Me (2005). By depicting how memory is at the centre of both texts, the study interrogates the ways in which the authors use memory as a narrative device to mediate healing, reconciliation and reintegration, or as a weapon of silencing survivors of traumatic wartime experiences. Using Sigmund Freud’s argument that trauma manifests both at the moment of distressing event and at the moment of recall of that event, the thesis interrogates the ways in which Vera and Jarrett-Macauley narrate trauma by cross mapping the representation of the Gukurahundi civil war in Zimbabwe and the decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone to the national politics of the respective countries. I argue that while the authors’ approaches to historical conflict differ — with Jarrett-Macauley utilising an expatriate narrator who takes on the role of mediation while Vera draws on history, art and landscape — both authors are concerned with inventing alternative routes to stitching together forms of multidirectional memory.