i Memory, Trauma and Narrative in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins and Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen &Me Lutho Mtongana (462481) SUPERVISOR: Professor Grace A. Musila A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, School of Literature, Language and Media, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in African Literature. ii DECLARATION I, Lutho Mtongana, declare that this dissertation is my own work. It is being submitted for the degree of Master of Arts in African Literature, at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. I confirm that the work has not been submitted before for any degree or examination at this or any other university. Signature: Date: 22 March 2024 iii DEDICATION To my sister, Alunge Mtongana, I love you, I love you, I love you. I am sorry for all the parts of you that never stop aching and all the invisible scars that keep difficult memories alive. Then to the rest of my sisters, Nikita, Amandla, Xola, Nomvuyo and Vuyisanani the ball will get smaller and even if it does not completely disappear, we have each other to ensure a soft landing. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This journey has not been an easy one, but having the support and guidance of my supervisor, Prof Grace A Musila, has made it smooth and worth every tear. Thank you, Prof, for your detailed care in elevating the quality of my work and for restoring a confidence I lost a long time ago. Your patience and generosity will stay with me beyond the four walls of a classroom. I also acknowledge the contribution of all my lecturers whose insights and wisdom were most valuable to me since I began this journey. Lecturers both at Wits and at UCT, your contribution has been invaluable, I have learned a lot from you all and I will forever be grateful for it. To my Masters classmates, thank you for covering me in class when life got hectic, for tirelessly checking in, for rigorously reviewing drafts, sending references my way and keeping us all accountable to each other. A special thank you to Gilbert Nchabeleng for the late night phone calls and the early morning texts, the numerous debates, the fun and laughter even at moments of crisis and mostly for sharing and halving my burdens. Xola, Leo, Soso, Nono, Sandile, Palesa, Dina, Mary-Anne and Tumelo, the little things were the big things that mattered the most, thank you for holding my hand and for the prayers, iNkosi yongeze apho nithathe khona. Then lastly, to my family, and most importantly both my mothers: what an honour and privilege it has been to stand in your prayers. Thank you all for pushing me and uplifting my spirits. This achievement is definitely not mine alone, it belongs to all of us. v 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. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION......................................................................................................................................... ii DEDICATION............................................................................................................................................ iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................................................................................................... iv ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................................. v 1. CHAPTER 1: Introduction ........................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Warring Contexts ................................................................................................................ 2 1.1.1. Seirra Leone and the SLTRC as a Cornerstone for National Healing ................................ 2 1.1.2. Zimbabwe and the Loud Silence of the Gukurahundi Civil War ........................................ 3 1.2. Mapping Existing Conversations on Moses, Citizen & Me and The Stone Virgins ............ 4 1.3. Memory, Trauma and Narrative ......................................................................................... 8 1.4. Chapter Framework .......................................................................................................... 10 2. CHAPTER 2: Memories, Memorising and Memorialising in Moses, Citizen & Me and The Stone Virgins .............................................................................................................................................. 12 2.1. Contextualising History and the African War Novel ........................................................ 12 2.2. Memory as a Literary Device in The Stone Virgins .......................................................... 14 2.3. Memory as a Literary Device in Moses, Citizen & Me .................................................... 17 2.4. Memorising and Memorialising the Landscape ................................................................ 25 2.5. Memorialising the Nation and its People .......................................................................... 27 3. CHAPTER 3: The Impossibility of Trauma on Memory ......................................................... 30 3.1. Contextualising History: Memory Tropes in Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe ...................... 30 3.2. Nonceba’s Traumatic Experience in The Stone Virgins ................................................... 32 3.3. Citizen’s PTSD in Moses, Citizen & Me .......................................................................... 35 3.4. Sibaso and the Spider Effect in The Stone Virgins ........................................................... 40 3.5. Cephas’ Mission Impossible ............................................................................................. 43 3.6. Moses’s Traumatic Experience and Julia’s Baton in Moses, Citizen & Me ..................... 47 4. CHAPTER 4: Imagining Healing, Reconciliation and Reintegration ..................................... 54 4.1. The alternative forms of journey towards healing in Moses, Citizen & Me ..................... 54 4.2. Postmemory, Reconciliation and Community Reintegration in Moses, Citizen & Me .... 59 vii 4.3. From Ruin to Restoration in The Stone Virgins ................................................................ 62 4.4. Restoration and the Reintegration in The Stone Virgins ................................................... 64 5. CHAPTER 5: Conclusion............................................................................................................ 67 6. BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................ 70 1 1. CHAPTER 1: Introduction Focusing on Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002) and Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen & Me (2005), this study explores the role of memory in narrating trauma and violence. Interrogating the ways in which memory can be both a tool for healing from the gruesomeness of war, as well as a weapon of silencing survivors of traumatic wartime experiences, the study demonstrates how both authors explore alternative ways of working through traumatic experiences. For Jarrett-Macauley, the narrator’s expatriate perspective makes her distant from the frontlines of the trauma experienced by civilians and this in turn enables her to exercise a degree of empathy towards victim-perpetrators, effectively making her the right mediator for healing and reconciliation for her family and community. On her part, Vera uses metaphoric prose that links the landscape to its people, while healing and restoration is mediated through the historian figure’s care labour and the reconstruction of the Lobengula’s kraal as a gesture towards national recovery. Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s (qtd in Ato Quayson, 2001) argument that trauma registers both at the moment of distressing event and at the moment of recall of that event, the thesis explores how both authors 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. In essence, the study interrogates Vera and Jarrett-Macauley’s reflections on the power of memory in either subverting people’s experiences of trauma, which in turn manipulates the details of the event, or empowering them to process the trauma thus mediating healing. Although the portrayal of trauma and violence in Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002) and Jarrett- Macauley’s Moses, Citizen & Me (2005) has previously been studied, existing analyses do not read the two texts comparatively; nor do they zoom in on the distinct roles of memory in both texts. Therefore, I argue that memory in all its forms is at the centre of these novels and is used as a critical mode in narrating trauma and wartime conflict by both authors. This prompts us to explore how Vera and Jarrett-Macauley use different forms memory in their respective narrative frameworks, and what the implications of this use of memory are. Secondly, the two texts offer women-authors’ representations of trauma from the vantage points of women characters and children — two categories of people who are often marginalised from narrative authority in war novels, despite being the most vulnerable groups in wartime. I posit that by placing women and 2 children at the centre of their texts, without altogether excluding men, both authors reveal the disruptive impact of trauma on marginalised groups while showing their resilience in overcoming wartime atrocities, mediating healing in the aftermath. Lastly, my choice of these two novels is prompted by their narrative frameworks, which offer alternative ways of narrating horrific wartime atrocities without resorting to spectacle. 1.1. Warring Contexts 1.1.1. Seirra Leone and the SLTRC as a Cornerstone for National Healing The decade-long Sierra Leone Civil War which occurred between 1991 and 2001 is well documented across media and academia. The war, which started when two political parties, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NFPL) joined forces to overthrow the government of Sierra Leonean President, Joseph Momah, killed over 50,000 lives, while 2.5 million other people were displaced, and tens of thousands were wounded or maimed. In the nation’s attempt to promote post-war national healing and reconciliation, the Sierra Leone government established the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SLTRC) following precedents set by South Africa and Rwanda. The SLTRC was “designed as a set of public venues where victims could testify to their experiences of violence as a mode of release and validation; while perpetuators could confess their crimes and seek forgiveness without fear of legal prosecution” (Imma 129). Scholar Zetoile Imma notes that the Sierra Leone TRC project became the “cornerstone of national reconciliation processes to promote healing and peace” (130). With this history in mind, Delia Jarrett-Macauley writes Moses, Citizen & Me and centers her story around an eight-year-old former child soldier who is journeying towards healing and reconciliation following his experience of trauma and violence during the war. This study explores how Jarrett-Macauley uses different forms of memory to foster healing, reconciliation and reintegration from the gruesomeness of war borrowing from the ideology of the national project. Furthermore, it interrogates the alternative and unique interventions Jarrett-Macauley proposes to reimagine the future of Seirra Leone in the text. 3 1.1.2. Zimbabwe and the Loud Silence of the Gukurahundi Civil War In Vera’s case, The Stone Virgins (2002) responds to the Gukurahundi Massacre of 1983 - 1987 in Zimbabwe. The war is historically remembered as having begun with the two rival nationalist parties, Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) challenging the predominantly white government of Rhodesia but then ending up becoming a post-independence civil war that was driven by Robert Mugabe’s desire to have a one-party state rule under him as president for life. The civil war saw the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) in 1983, enter Matabeleland and go on a killing spree. Matabeleland was home to Ndebeles and Kalangas who were mostly ZAPU supporters, and during the course of 1983 and 1984, people were raped, killed and detained. This war, which is riddled with controversies regarding its historical context and the chronological order of events, also has scholars and the media debating about the impact of the violence and the actual number of deaths (Mpofu 40). It is on the back of this historical context that Mpofu in his paper “Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe: An Epistemicide and Genocide” notes that the “genocidal wish is in actuality a desire that other people, as individuals and organisations, did not exist. If they exist, as Nkomo and ZAPU did, the determined desire becomes not only murderous but epistem-icidal” (42). Therefore, when Yvonne Vera writes The Stone Virgins, similar to Jarrett-Macauley, she borrows from this controversial and mudded history to narrate the story of two sisters, Thenjiwe and Nonceba who find themselves in the middle of a civil war. The thesis explores how the author, through narrative, uses the incomplete, incoherent, emotionally chaotic and unreliable memory of the characters to reflect on the military assault by the Zimbabwean state which attempted to silence, suppress, and annihilate any knowledge and truth about the war. Furthermore, I examine how Vera uses different forms of memory to not only reflect the silencing of women who survived the traumatic experiences of war but also to offer a reimagination of the story of trauma and wartime violence in Zimbabwe through the lens of her main characters. 4 1.2. Mapping Existing Conversations on Moses, Citizen & Me and The Stone Virgins Existing analyses of Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen & Me focus on re-writing the narrative of the Sierra Leone civil war from the perspective of the child soldier. Commentary from Stefanie De Rouck in, “Moses, Citizen & Me by Delia Jarrett-Macauley: A Novel about Child Soldiers, Dealing with Trauma and the Search for Identity” unpacks how Moses, Citizen & Me is also a story about identity, especially from the perspective of the woman narrator, Julia. De Rouck draws from Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory to explain Julia’s pursuit of identity, noting how Julia’s past memories of herself as a child and of her relatives from the previous generation influence her present and will change her future. Additionally, De Rouck also notes the use of postmemory in Moses’ old photographs that have an image of a child solider holding a gun and posits that this has continued two generations later through Citizen who also becomes a child soldier. For the purpose of my focus area, I draw from De Rouck’s insights on how Jarrett-Macauley narrates traumatic memory through the concept of postmemory. I also examine the narrator’s role as an expatriate and how her reminiscing of childhood memories and past memories in general shapes her identity and enables her to mediate healing for traumatised victims such as Moses and victim-perpetrators such as Citizen and other child soldiers. Ken Junior Lipenga elsewhere notes that Jarrett- Macauley’s second generation Sierra Leonean identity which she shares with her narrator, Julia, enables her to be both “fuelled by the desire for re-attachment” (97) to Sierra Leone while also maintaining an objective perspective about the country that is not “sanctioned” (97) by the country’s dominant narratives. I borrow and build on this point highlighting that it affords the narrator, Julia, an integral and unique ability to mediate healing for her family and other child soldiers. De Rouck’s thesis unpacks the figure of the child soldier in Africa, its representation in the media and the global response to this humanitarian crisis. She also analyses the impact of trauma on the child soldiers and how they deal with it to achieve healing, reconciliation and reintegration back into society. It is acknowledged by multiple scholars, including De Rouck, that texts about child soldiers, whether fictional or autobiographical, operate in the context of and are consumed by Western audiences. Elsewhere, Allison Mackey notes that child soldier narratives are not only didactic in nature but they are also a tool for the Western audience to be empathetic about Africa 5 and Africans (192). For her part, Eleni Coundouriotis highlights that child solider narratives are categorised under the genre of war literature and even more specifically under the genre of human rights literature in pursuit of the recovery of the child soldier’s innocence (192). Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen & Me can be read along similar lines. However, Mackey notes that if child soldier narratives are only viewed in this manner, then the reader would be exercising a linear approach to understanding the deep work that the authors are also doing. In the case of Moses, Citizen & Me, my research supports this notion that although such texts may be viewed as a human rights literary form to generate humanitarian empathy for the global South, the author through narrative is also critiquing unjust socioeconomic relations and stereotypes imposed by the West (105). In her paper “Troubling Humanitarian Consumption: Reframing Relationality in African Child Soldier Narratives”, Mackey further argues that Jarrett-Macauley chooses to write in past tense and to narrate half of the book in the magical world of the protagonist’s mind, Julia, because its only in the imagination that a “creative healing process” (114) can be forged and “alternative ways of working through trauma” (115) are successfully recognised. I draw on these ideas in examining the power of memory as a narrative technique the author uses to move between multiple spaces which in turn enable the characters to navigate experiences of trauma and wartime atrocities. I also examine the use of memory as a vehicle to reimagine a future where traumatised victims journey through healing and are reconciled with each other and reintegrated into the community. Coundouriotis in “The Child Soldier Narrative and the Problem of Arrested Historicization” notes that war novels, such as Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen & Me have a representation of a child soldier that is both the victim and perpetrator but largely represented as the victim. For Coundouriotis, these texts are retrospective in nature, and are perceived as articulating liberation politics with postcolonial resistance (195). Therefore, when individualised, these war novels obscure the national context as they already sit outside of mainstream African literature, because they are identified with national audiences from the West and are taught there (192). She further notes that “child soldier narratives are symptomatic of an arrested historicisation in part because they become trapped in a rhetorical effort to restore the childhood innocence of their narrator and as a result produce a metaphor of African childhood that is politically limiting as a characterisation of the historical agency of the continent’s peoples” (192). My reading of Moses, Citizen & Me is attentive to the ways in which Jarrett-Macauley overcomes these limitations by subverting the stereotypical assumptions of Africa and the African child through the use of memory and narrative 6 frameworks that become vehicles for producing alternative discourses on Africa and the African child. In a slightly different direction, Cecilia Addei’s “Reversing Perverted Development: Magical Realism in Moses, Citizen & Me” argues that the text by Jarret-Macauley is about restoring the childhood of the child solider through re-education and re-formation; and that magical realism as a narrative technique offers a therapeutic experience that represents a form of healing for child soldiers (68). Addei additionally notes that while some scholars touch on the novel as being a magical realist text, the significance of magical realism lies in presenting a “more ethical technique for conveying traumatic experience that could be sensationalised and turned into voyeuristic spectacle” (68). In agreement with this point, I propose that Jarrett-Macauley uses magical realism to endorse the work of memory which re-humanises child soldiers. Imma’s afore-cited essay explores the multiple forms of memory with keen emphasis on the art of forgetting. She maps how individuals and communities with a historical experience of war and violence use re-membering to insert themselves back into community and life. She is also preoccupied with the subversion of masculinity, and how male figures in the novel do this by employing memory in intimate spaces (132-134). She describes how memory is used in this manner in the novel as a form of rejecting the project of the SLTRC and the nation in favour of a more intimate and safe space around community and family. In this research, I extend this discussion by looking at how characters in Moses, Citizen & Me resist perceptions of memory as one dimensional and rather create their own multiple and alternative history and memories. While Jarrett-Macauley’s text is seen to re-write the nation from the perspective of a woman and a child solider, Vera’s work is known for its critique of Zimbabwe’s colonial and postcolonial state. Vera’s preoccupation with ordinary people’s everyday experiences is therefore perceived as anti-nationalist, particularly with her narration of the Gukurahundi civil war in The Stone Virgins. In her essay “‘The Body is His Pulse and Motion:’ Violence and Desire in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins”, Sofia Kostelac notes that Vera deliberately goes against the uni-vocal and patriotic national narratives forced by the state and in doing so, she reclaims the suppressed narratives that do not fit the dominant national discourses. Kostelac notes that women are used as scapegoats by the state; and women’s bodies specifically have to carry the burden of the nation, becoming the sacrificial lambs that are “necessary for the re-establishment of natural and sociocultural order” 7 (79). I further this argument by proposing that the same women’s bodies that are meant to restore social order, even as their stories remain unacknowledged in Zimbabwe’s history, retain the embodied memory of the war and its gruesomeness. Kostelac emphasises that “Nonceba’s lingering scars refute the narratives of post-independence nationalism which claim that colonised subjects have been restored by the new nation-state and the novel asserts that traumatic histories must not be concealed by idealised mythologies” (85). This reading invites us to delve deeper in examining other implications of the body as a form of resistance. I argue that Nonceba’s wounds are a statement that ensures the remembrance of the war and validates the unacknowledged stories omitted from this history. For its part, Annie Gagiano’s “Reading The Stone Virgins as Vera’s Study of the Katabolism of War” notes that Vera is “less concerned about narrating the strategy and tactics of war, the male camaraderie or the demonstrations of endurance as most war stories are told but is more interested in recording the parts of war that will not be recorded on history books,” (70) the more complex, more nuanced and not easily identifiable parts that expose the gruesomeness of war. Therefore, Vera’s style of writing de-normalises war and reveals its complexities. I draw on Gagiano’s insights as a backdrop to hone into the author’s preferred multi- narration and explore how she uses this to blur simplistic lines between good and bad characters in The Stone Virgins yet also provide a voice to those that would otherwise not be remembered in history books. I interrogate the different uses of memory in the context of first and third person narration to reveal the silencing or healing of characters. I am also interested in how, through her often incomplete nonchronological narration, Vera depicts how women and other marginalised groups were silenced from sharing their stories of the impact of trauma caused by the war. An additional area of interest is how she uses memory not only as a tool to narrate the nation and stories of marginalised victims of the war, but also as a device to reclaim the landscape as well as women’s bodies. Lastly, I explore the narrative techniques employed in both texts to depict trauma, while interrogating the ways in which both texts invent alternative ways of working through traumatic experiences and memories in order to achieve reconciliation and reintegration. I also further draw parallels between Moses, Citizen & Me and The Stone Virgins with regard to how Delia Jarrett- Macauley and Yvonne Vera place marginalised groups (women and children) at the centre of their texts to interrogate the place of the marginalised in their societies and the role women play in mediating healing, reconciliation and reintegration for traumatised victims of war. 8 1.3. Memory, Trauma and Narrative Grounded in literary theories that frame memory, trauma and representation, this research report interrogates the authors’ choice of narrative frameworks and their implications. Being central to the narration of any story or experience due to its ability to transcend time and space, moving back and forth between past, present and future, memory offers a unique opportunity for both reader and writer to travel through temporalities and spaces in narration. Vera uses multiple narrators that oscillate between present and past tense narration while Jarrett-Macauley uses a first person narrative mode that tells the story purely in past tense. Therefore, utilising literary theories on memory, I draw from scholars such Maurice Halbwachs and Aby Warburg who offer a distinction between shared memory, collective memory and individual memory; and Michael Rothberg who coins the term multidirectional memory. Aby Warburg notes that memory is uniquely individualised and also “deeply relational” (qtd in Mueller- Greene), while Maurice Halbwachs in The Collective Memory notes that “we always carry with us and in us a number of distinct persons” (qtd in Mileveski and Wetenkamp). These perspectives point to the complexity of individual and collective memories co-existing and in the two novels, as I demonstrate later in the study. Using Michael Rothberg’s theory of multidirectional memory, the thesis explores how Jarrett-Macauley and Vera interrogate one-dimensional notions of collective memory and dominant narratives of memory which seek to exclude certain memories and stories by creating a linear understanding of history. Rothberg notes that multidirectional memory is “not simply a one way street, its exploration necessitates the comparative approach” that ensures that other stories that carry histories of victimisation are equally necessary as the more dominant and public discourses of memory (6). With regards to trauma theory, the research draws on Cathy Caruth’s perspectives in Unclaimed Experience (1996) and Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) which attend to the complexities of traumatic experiences of survivors. Caruth foregrounds the impossibility of a comprehensible story, not because the trauma survivor’s story is untrue, but because it is impossible to tell and the desire for comprehension is in itself obscene (154). She writes that “for the survivor of trauma, then, the truth of the event may reside not only in its brutal facts, but also in the way that their 9 occurrence defies simple comprehension” (154-155). The thesis uses Caruth’s thinking as a launch pad to explore the ways in which the two authors narrate their characters’ trauma and memory, with keen focus on Nonceba and Citizen’s responses to traumatic experiences in The Stone Virgins and Moses, Citizen & Me respectively. While borrowing from Freud’s argument that trauma pertains to the moment of traumatic event as well as the moment of recall, the research unpacks the narrative frameworks that both authors utilise for the representation of their historic traumas as well as their characters’ individual experiences of these conflicts. I then draw on Marriane Hirsch’s concept of postmemory and how fiction articulates intergenerational trauma. Hirsch coins the concept of postmemory as a cross-generational reconstruction of memory, where an individual has no direct experience of the trauma but rather through dominant discourses or storytelling or hereditary behaviours, stories are passed down by parents or grandparents or society, and the individual uses the memories imaginatively to document the story (21-22). I draw on this concept of postmemory to examine how Jarrett-Macauley uses photography and narrative to retrieve and retell multi-temporal histories of Sierra Leone through Moses who owns a photography studio. In this way I suggest, Jarrett-Macauley creates space within the text to archive and recirculate pre- war memories as a redemptive and communal method to healing. By capturing photographs for the next generation, Moses’ photography mirrors the project of capturing stories of the civil war for the next generation of Sierra Leoneans. Finally, throughout the thesis, I apply Lewis and Wawrzyniak’s concept of regions of memory, to explore commonalities between Vera’s The Stone Virgins and Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen & Me. The concept of memory regions speaks to memory in and between nations and aims to broaden the study of memory beyond geographical areas in order to identify conceptual spaces, whether cultural, historical, political or all of the above, that unite particular nations (Lewis and Wawrzyniak 2). This in turn allows multiple forms of dialogue across different jurisdictions to take place more broadly than national discourses (Lewis and Wawrzyniak 7). Therefore, although, The Stone Virgins and Moses, Citizen & Me have regions of memory that are geographically diverse, they can be thematically defined as postcolonial memory regions. Further to this, both texts associate particular memories of trauma with particular geohistorical regions. In Moses, Citizen & Me, the Gola Forest is the zone that witnesses traumas and it becomes central to the memories carried by the characters and subsequent attempts at healing, whereas, in The Stone Virgins, it is Kezi and the Gulati Hills in Matabeleland. I further reflect on the two victim- 10 perpetrator protagonists in the respective novels— Citizen in Moses, Citizen & Me and Sibaso in The Stone Virgins — and their possibilities for redemption. According to Simon Lewis and Joanna Wawrzyniak “societies that have historically strong ties or have been affected by similar historical events are more than likely to cultivate and exchange memories about the shared past” which in turn creates opportunities for chains of dialogue (8). In the case of the two texts, the concept of memory regions will be particularly helpful in examining points of similarities and divergences. 1.4. Chapter Framework This research report is divided into four main chapters. Chapter one sets the tone for the study, providing the aim, rationale, historiographical contexts and the theoretical framework that underpins the study. In Chapter two, I interrogate how the two authors use the affordances of fiction to offer specific commentaries on actual historical contexts of traumatic violence. I examine their use of multiple narrative perspectives (Moses, Citizen, Julia in Jarrett-Macauley’s novel vs Sibaso, Cephas, Nonceba in Vera’s) to imagine the complex subjectivities that are meshed together in contexts of war, and that demand acknowledgment of traumatic events, as a precondition to piecing together the past and imagining a future where healing is possible. Chapter three explores the tensions between individual memory and the multiple versions of collective memory in the two novels, and how the two authors problematise these as tensions central to the civil war in Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone. I also probe the authors’ use of memory to articulate the forms of silence that trauma imposes on their characters. Further, I draw on the notion of postmemory to analyse the impact of trauma on its victims across generations in Jarrett- Macauley’s text, while for Vera’s novel, I unpack the use of photography as a means of remembering the experiences of ordinary lives and displaying the disruptive nature of war on civilians. Lastly, through the use of Moses and Cephas who play the role of archivists in Jarrett- Macauley’s and Vera’s novels respectively, I analyse the ways in which both authors memorise and memorialise their nations’ gruesome histories. In chapter four, I explore how Jarrett-Macauley and Vera showcase the promise of artistic practices as vehicles for memory-making and healing. Jarrett-Macauley depicts the use of photography, wood sculpture and drama to mediate traumatic memory, while Vera mobilises studio 11 photography, rock art painting and architectural art (Lobengula’s Kraal) to showcase different forms of memory, cross generational histories and healing. The concluding chapter hones in on the importance of women’s voices in narrating trauma. It also illustrates that by making women the centre of the texts, the authors display both the disruptive impact of trauma and modes of mediating healing and reconciliation for national healing in collaboration with men. 12 2. CHAPTER 2: Memories, Memorising and Memorialising in Moses, Citizen & Me and The Stone Virgins 2.1. Contextualising History and the African War Novel In this chapter, I explore the ways in which Delia Jarrett-Macauley and Yvonne Vera use memory as a narrative technique to articulate their characters’ experiences of trauma and violence. By looking at the African war novel, I interrogate how the authors’ narrative choices enable them to articulate their characters’ trauma in ways that index their resistance to national memory and resilience. I further tap into the afore-discussed concept of regions of memory to interrogate how Vera and Jarret-Macauley use landscapes as key narrative sites in conversation. Here, I am interested in the respective landscapes of the Gola Forest in Sierra Leone and Matebeleland in Zimbabwe as both sites of atrocities and of reimagination for the possibility of livable futures. As war novels, both The Stone Virgins and Moses, Citizen & Me are set against a backdrop of real historic conflicts, therefore although fictional, the reader cannot fully escape the historiographical contexts and the counter-discursive nature of the texts. As African war fiction, the texts are interested in a specific positionality of Africa and its people, which has at its core a critique of the postcolonial state. In The People’s Right to the Novel, Coundouriotis notes that African war fiction authors are interested in highlighting the suffering of African people and their resistance and resilience to the trauma as well as the impact the war has had on community and everyday life (4). Jarrett-Macauley and Vera’s texts exemplify this perspective. The authors give an account of the people’s perspectives during the historical events, focusing on ordinary and marginalised voices. Although narrating war in the form of suffering runs the risk of sentimentality that is largely seen in humanitarian discourses, the authors through their narrative styles and literary shrewdness, depict the gruesomeness and senselessness of war without making it a spectacle. Therefore, both authors use literary narrative to redress inequalities about Africa and national discourses about war and liberation struggles by highlighting memories that resist the flattening predilection of some forms of collective memorialisation. As Coundouriotis notes, African war novels often “treat with suspicion nationalisms that promote political myths of unity” or support democratic ideals of reconciliation without adequately addressing the trauma (4). Vera 13 and Jarrett-Macauley also push against such nationalist myth-making by showcasing their characters’ traumatic experiences of war and their paths to healing and reconciliation with each other and their communities. While both authors’ characters are poor, politically marginalised people, Vera and Jarrett-Macauley are delicate with the portrayal of their lifeworlds and use the affordances of narrative to bestow dignity and agency on them. This dignified depiction extends to victim-perpetrators too — Citizen and Sibaso — who are granted complexity that deepens our understanding of their horrific brutality beyond simplistic demonisation. As counter-narratives, the stories of the marginalised are then placed “at the centre of the nation’s concerns” (Coundouriotis 11) and force the national audience to introspect on its social, political and cultural moments. Both authors also write in the context of temporalities which order time in the chronological format of past, present and future memories. The use of the word “memories” even for present and future perspectives is rationalised by the Greek etymology of the word “mneme” or “merimna” meaning “care” or “thought,” or the Old English word “mimor” which means “mindful.” Therefore, memory can mean the “mindfulness” of time as either past, present or future. This narrative strategy renders memory central to both texts, particularly when memories are jumbled up following characters’ traumatic experiences, to signal the impossibility of chronological unfolding of time in the aftermath of trauma. Here, Bhekizizwe Peterson’s exploration of trauma on memory in post-apartheid South Africa is instructive. According to Peterson, survivors of apartheid brutality continue to grapple with the country’s haunting and oppressive past and “do not always apprehend time as a neat and chronological sequence nor do they attach the same significance to the relation between time and experience as metaphors of the book and state ideologues do” (Peterson 227). I argue that similar pattens obtain for Vera’s traumatised character, Nonceba in The Stone Virgins and Jarrett-Macauley’s Citizen in Moses, Citizen & Me. Effectively, after a major traumatic event, one’s perception of time becomes disrupted as memories are no longer ordered chronologically but are sorted by categories of before or after the life changing event. (The next chapter expands on the use of memory to narrate these individual’s trauma and Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)). 14 2.2. Memory as a Literary Device in The Stone Virgins The Stone Virgins is a story about the 1982-1987 Gukurahundi massacre in Zimbabwe. The conflict, barely two years after Zimbabwe’s independence, was precipitated by the unsuccessful integration of two military wings of the anti-colonial resistance in Rhodesia — Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) and Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA). At independence, integration of the two armies became challenging owing to deep distrust between them and perceptions of unjust distribution of political power, following Mugabe’s ascent to power as prime minister under Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) party ticket. Subsequently, the Mugabe regime unleashed a special unit of the national army — the Fifth Brigade — on Matabeleland and the Midlands provinces, ostensibly to combat ZIPRA dissident soldiers who were threatening national stability; but in reality, civilians bore the brunt of the tensions between the Fifth Brigade and ZIPRA. The Stone Virgins follows the lives of the ordinary people of Matabeleland and focuses on two sisters, Thenjiwe and Nonceba, whose lives change in an instant when war erupts. While Thenjiwe ends up brutally murdered through beheading by Sibaso, a ZIPRA soldier who randomly intrudes into their rural home, Nonceba who survives, is mutilated and raped by Sibaso. Subsequently, Nonceba has to learn to live through her trauma by rediscovering herself and finding ways to heal, and literally re-discovering her voice, after Sibaso mutilates her mouth. Vera narrates this story from multiple character perspectives before, during and after the war. In the first half of the book which focuses on colonial Bulawayo, Vera uses a chronologically fashioned third person narrator, whose slow and steady narrative pace builds up to what is to come. She lingers on the mundaneness of life in colonial Bulawayo and rural Kezi, as well as the love story that builds up and then collapses between Thenjiwe and the itinerant Cephas, a Bulawayo-based archivist at the National Archives. Vera is especially attentive to how communities interact and respond to their surroundings. She showcases the difficult reintegration of former women liberation struggle soldiers who have returned from service at independence, spanning three pages to unpack their arrival and reception at Kezi, as a pre-curser to Sibaso’s irredeemable acts that result in his incapability of integrating back into society. The community, fascinated by the phenomenon of women war veterans, “have read enough to know that these women are not mere pictures from newspapers folded under their arms” and “they could greet with care and respect. But they don’t” (60). These women “carry this dark place in their gaze. 15 They are so impenetrable. The Bulawayo men can only wait for them to say something first but they meet a dead silence” (60-61). The women are so intriguing and mysterious to them that some started wondering: “did they kill doves and if so, how? If they started asking about the doves, could it not be that some other revelation would tumble out…?” (61). The men stared “and let themselves be enamored by the possibilities of freedom. Who would have thought that one day, within this confined place they would congregate with women fighters” (62). The sentences are long and the pace is slow, with the reader as intrigued by the women as the men are. However, once the war resumes: A curfew is declared. A state of emergency. No movement is allowed. The ceasefire ceases. It begins in the streets, the burying of memory. The bones rising. Rising. Every road out of Bulawayo is covered with soldiers and police, teeming like ants. Roadblocks. Bombs. Land mines. Hand grenades. Memory is lost. Independence ends. Guns rise. Rising anew. In 1981. (Vera 65) Changing the pace and the tempo of her syntax to deploy short, precise, methodical and abrupt starts and stops, Vera mirrors how clinical, emotionless and invasive the war was to the victimised characters. The short sentences seem to mirror the rat-a-tat of gunfire while capturing the general panic and confusion in the air. She also starts switching between first and third person when narrating the traumatic violence Nonceba and Thenjiwe experience at the hands of Sibaso, showing the disruptive nature of war on traumatised victims’ sense of time and identity. What follows as the traumatic events unfold, is a chaotic and incoherent narration that reflects the disrupted memories and lives of the community. Vera uses the phrase “the ceasefire ceases” to allude to the First Chimurenga in 1896 where an unsuccessful attempt at reclaiming land appropriated by white settlers led to the bombing of thousands by the Rhodesian government (Coundouriotis 197). It is as if the First Chimurenga was on pause all this time and now was picking up from where it had left off. The words “the bones rising. Rising” acknowledge the historic figure of Nehanda, the spirit medium associated with the First Chimurenga, who is reported to have said ‘my bones will rise again’ before being hung by the British. However, far from revitilising the spirit of Nehanda’s anti-colonial resistance, in this instance, Coundouriotis notes that Vera is critical of the appropriation of Nehanda by violent patriarchal figures like Robert Mugabe and Sibaso who use her as an instrument for “suppressing” historical memory (157). As if the repetition of history was 16 not enough, Vera also notes that “the burying of memory” begins and that “memory is lost.” This connection to memory is both a physical representation of the murder of people who die with their memories and the stories they would have told; and a symbolic one that references the violent repression of Zimbabwe’s history and ZAPU’s discontent with the Mugabe regime’s handling of the post-independence transition. It alludes to the attempt to wipe them out of their history, memories and existence. At the time of publication, two decades after the onset of Gukurahundi, neither Mugabe nor the Zimbabwean government had formally acknowledged the Gukurahundi massacres. Coundouriotis notes that Zimbabwe’s history is complex and carries a dualistic paradigm of colonialism and resistance therefore one must be careful not to attempt “to make invisible the complexities of internal political divisions” (158) and writers like Vera are careful to resist the “simplistic notion of a preexisting Zimbabwean identity” foregrounded by one party and one ethnicity. In her narration, Vera also employs a poetic prose filled with metaphors and rhythmic style. We see this throughout the novel. Right from the novel’s opening, Vera’s portrayal of the landscape and the vibrancy of the people and the community offers a lyrical scene-setting of the conditions of living before the war broke out. Bulawayo’s Selborne Avenue heads “all the way to Johannesburg like an umbilical cord” (Vera 5), the secluded bar has a black man whose “gaze on this woman, on this skirt, on these knees, is solid. He says nothing. He wants nothing. He lets her be” (9), Ekoneni is a place where “love soars or perishes when lovers meet” (13) and when Kwakhe River in Kezi swells following heavy rains, preventing the bus from crossing the bridge, “people have to spend a day and maybe half a night waiting on the other side, nestling their treasured wares gathered from the city, while listening to the river sulk” (Vera 19). These examples and others offer detailed memories of lives and livelihoods that fall apart when war erupts. Vera provides the detail as if to imprint a lasting memory on the reader that evokes a deep sadness at all that is lost when war erupts. Selbourne is not just any road leading to Johannesburg, Ekoneni is not just a corner of any building nor is Kwakhe River a random geographical feature. Vera inscribes each of these places with memories of people whose lives happen there. Additionally, the colour and the attention Vera affords her characters, demands insertion into the reader’s memory, making us recognise their full humanity amidst the mundaneness of life, as a precursor to the gruesomeness of war’s upheaval of these lives which we have come to care about. This invitation by Vera to remember becomes a microcosm for the nation to remember the violence of the Gukurahundi 17 massacre, which has been described as “uniquely humiliating, tribalistic and political” (Alexander et al 204); a collective memory that the Mugabe regime preferred to forget and mute out of official history. 2.3. Memory as a Literary Device in Moses, Citizen & Me In Moses, Citizen & Me, Jarrett-Macauley pens a story about the aftermath of the 1991 civil war in Sierra Leone particularly on child soldiers and the communities impacted by war. She narrates the story from the perspective of Julia, a London-based Sierra-Leonian, who travels from London to Sierra Leone following news that her aunt, Adele, has died. When she arrives at her uncle Moses’ house in Freetown, Julia is confronted with news that Adele was shot by her eight-year- old cousin and child soldier, Citizen, who is also Adele’s grandson. Horrified by this, Julia has to find a way to mediate healing for her grief-stricken uncle, Moses, and his grandson, Citizen, all while navigating her own dual identity that has left her feeling displaced between two worlds, Sierra Leone and London. Jarrett-Macauley employs various narrative techniques that place memory at the centre of her story and her characters. First, she uses a first person expatriate narrator, Julia, who tells the story in past tense. Therefore, not only does the reader have limited access to the other characters’ viewpoints and is forced to observe thoughts and actions from the perspective of the narrator but, because of the past tense narration, the reader also has to rely heavily on Julia’s memories to piece together other characters’ identities and stories. However, as an expatriate narrator, Julia is able to walk the reader through the scale of the damage caused by the war from the landscape, the infrastructure and the people, all while using her memory to help the reader contextualise life in Sierra Leone before the war. This is seen in the below scene: The place is not like everywhere. Normally as you walk through the city, from Kissy by the harbour up to Murray Town at the top, you can hear various greetings; some say Indireh, others Buwa, occasionally you might get a Bonjour, and many people just say; Morning ma. It is a city where everyone speaks at least two languages and meeting and greeting is not necessarily a quick and simple thing. That is how different people have lived together there for a long, long time. But war came, and greeting near strangers became a fool’s pastime. (Jarrett-Macauley 1) 18 Although Julia is familiar with Sierra Leone as a person with memories of how it was before the war, she tells the reader: “I should make something clear. I have never been good at West African politics. I know that had I been there I would have interpreted the conflict differently” (5), flagging to the reader that she is no different to the reader who has probably only encountered the war politics of Sierra Leone in newspapers and on the television. This declaration signals to the reader that they can trust Julia’s perspective as she will be a sincere and reliable narrator despite her poor knowledge of West African politics or how unreliable memories can be, enabling the reader to learn with and navigate Julia’s journey alongside her. Ken Junior Lipenga notes that the ex-centric position shared by both narrator and author (Jarrett-Macauley, like Julia, is a second generation UK- based migrant), allows for a perspective of Sierra Leone’s history that is not threatened by the dominant collective memory of war constructed by the nation: “in a way, that explains the emotion in the narrator’s description of the land and its people - it is partially fueled by the desire for re-attachment to the country and shock at finding that the very fabric of society has altered” (Lipenga 97). Therefore, with the simple pleasures of greeting and chatting to neighbours gone, the landscape invaded by “darkness”, homes “ransacked, torn down and burnt” and families uncertain of “who was a friend and who was not” (2), the reader starts to get a sense of the severity of the loss and mourns the life of Sierra Leoneans before the war, along with Julia. As an expatriate narrator, Julia is not at the frontline of the trauma experienced by others. This enables her to exercise a degree of empathy towards Citizen and other child soldiers, which is impossible for those who bore the brunt of the war and those who inflicted pain and harm on others. This also allows her to be the perfect mediator for healing and reconciliation between Moses and his grandson, Citizen, who have not lived under the same roof nor spoken with each other since Adele was killed. That is why on Julia’s arrival at Moses’ house, “there was no one about, but a chicken came to look” (6). Citizen was outside the house next to a tree looking for something and Moses, after meeting Julia briefly, “left her standing alone in the kitchen” (13) and retreated back to his photography studio. After three days, Julia notes that she had not spent much time alone with Citizen and so “had no way of knowing what he was thinking, what he liked, what he wanted or what he would do next” (8) and so “silence cut” (8) between the two of them. As for Moses, she notes that he was at his photography studio where he lay on the floor and “has cried himself into the shape of a foetus. When he wakes in the morning, he will remember they said Adele is dead. Then he will remember how. He will return to the shape of a foetus in vain” (8). Here, the reader 19 sees how Moses’ grief and trauma has reduced him to a state of utter dependency like that of a foetus in a mother’s womb, unable to do anything for himself. Further, Moses’ denial of his wife’s death creates a repetitive cycle of the traumatic event that is in line with Freud’s observation about the moment of recall as reiterating the trauma. Moses and Citizen have been elsewhere for the last three days and the trauma experienced by both had rendered them incapable of interacting with anyone, especially each other. Therefore, with Julia’s arrival, over time Moses was clearer and stronger in voice and calmer; Citizen could utter a word or two (10) showing that Julia’s presence was already making a slight difference. Jarrett-Macauley narrates the story in past tense, focusing on the aftermath of the war. This enables her to use the shared past memories and experiences of her characters as a bridge to slowly reconnect, heal and reconcile them to one another. The reader first encounters these shared past memories and experiences when Julia and Moses are in the kitchen together for the first time since Julia’s arrival; and they have difficulty speaking about what happened. After pulling a chair to sit next to Moses who was nibbling on “bread without any kind of spread” (14) and sipping tea, Julia joined in and so: for some time the two of us sat mashing bread in hot tea, like two toothless old people. It was something we had in common: the love of a good strong cup in the morning…In the three days we had not said anything much. It seemed enough to be coming through this in silent company, a hushed post-mortem. (Jarret-Macauley 14-15) At this point, the trauma of Adele’s death and how it happened is still hard to talk about, meaning Julia has to find other ways of connecting with Moses. With a shared past memory and experience of being tea lovers, the act of waking up to drink tea and nibble on bread together is enough to get Moses out of the studio and bonding with Julia again. The reader sees Julia use shared past experiences and memories and photography to reconnect and reformulate a bond with Moses after 20 years of being apart. Julia also uses reminiscences of her childhood to understand Citizen, and other child soldiers and help restore their lost innocence and navigate her own self-identity by grounding herself in the familiar while treasuring and archiving old photographs of Sierra Leone with Moses. The retrieval of past memories as a tool to heal and reconcile can also be read as the author’s way of placing personal memories and experiences of the war alongside the national 20 objectives of Sierra Leone, demanding an insertion of other alternative stories into existing national narratives. Jarrett-Macauley additionally uses dreams, visions and the magical to blur the lines between what is real and what is imaginary, enabling her characters to oscillate between spaces and temporalities in order to constantly retrieve from the past to contextualise the present and use the present to reimagine the future. Ato Quayson notes that “the world’s liminality and changeableness is not asserted merely as an article of faith but is actualized in a literary form of writing that oscillates constantly between the real and the magical and thus seeks to obliterate the boundary between them” (162). This blurred boundary is what ensures that both the reader and the characters in the story perceive the narrative as a single story with no hierarchy between the real and the magical discourse, where the reader and the characters are acutely aware of the shift. The reader first sees Jarrett-Macauley use magical realism when Citizen has a nightmare shortly after Julia puts him to sleep after bathing him: Gently pushing to open his bedroom door, I was alarmed to see the room on fire. I rushed to his bedside. Citizen was deeply asleep with his head still on the pillow and his face pointed straight at the ceiling, his breath audible and clear. With my fingertips, I touched his brow. He was warm but not especially hot, although flames continued to lick the walls and swirl around the old dresser. But there was no crackle of burning wood, no sign of ash, no hissing of fire. The fire made no impact on the room. Outside rain was pouring more heavily and the night grew fiercer, but inside the house we were safe, dry and comfortable. A stray thought floated into my mind: A child’s bedroom is adapted to his life, his imaginings, his dreams. Oh God, give him peace…Oh God give him peace. (Jarrett- Macauley 48-49) Jarrett-Macauley deploys magical realism to grant the first person narrator Julia, access to Citizen’s and other child soldiers’ inner self (thoughts, dreams, nightmares, visions) in order to understand them better to mediate healing. Witnessing Citizen’s mind in the grip of a nightmare enables Julia to see the extent of the trauma Citizen has suffered with greater immediacy. In seeing and getting a glimpse of the depth of Citizen’s pain and suffering, she too is shocked by the severity of it and cannot utter anything more than to repeatedly say “Oh God give him peace” (49). Another reason for the author’s use of magical realism is that Moses, Citizen & Me is a novel about Africa 21 and its people, who as part of their traditions, cultures and history have always viewed the supernatural, which sits under the genre of magical realism in literary art as very real, and often, even more real than what the naked eye can see. That is why towards the end of the story when healing, restoration and reconciliation takes place in Gola Forest, Julia acknowledges that they were not alone and that all this time, the ancestors were there with them (159). (I return to this point in Chapter 3 when analysing the role of memory in mediating healing and reconciliation). It is not long after this nightmare that Julia’s imaginative mind opens her up to the multifaceted reality of child soldiers, their experiences and memories during war and the Gola Forest in Pandebu, where both the atrocities of the war took place and the journey toward healing begins for Citizen and the child soldiers, enabling Jarrett-Macauley to reimagine the place of ruin as a place of healing and reconciliation. As a result, Julia’s next encounter is when Anita, Moses’ neighbour offers to plait her hair noting that the braids she had on were done “so small-small” (50) but when Anita’s done plaiting her Julia will “see things better” (51). Jarrett-Macauley uses Anita’s plaiting as a ritual for reintegrating the expatriate Julia into Sierra Leone so that Julia can reconnect with Sierra Leoneans and start perceiving things from their perspective rather than in a “small-small” or narrow-minded view or through an expatriate’s London lens. Therefore, while Anita was twisting the cornrows Julia notes that her head, “became a valley lying between green mountains. Downstream, circles organising themselves around my ears transformed into a ravine rushing over yellowed rocks. My head was a map of Sierra Leone, its farmland, diamond mines, mountains, ridges, people, soldiers, fighters, leaders” (51). The twisting of the conrows similar to the map of the country enables Julia to transcend into spaces that allow her to comprehend what Citizen and the other child soldiers have been through. Anita ensures that Julia learns and “see things better” (51) in order to “make a difference” (50) and mediate healing and reconciliation for her family and other child soldiers. Given that hair is seen as bearing sacred and spiritual potency in many African communities, it is noteworthy that Jarrett-Macauley borrows from this cultural knowledge and links it to the head and brain as sites of rationale and memory in Eurocentric science. This allows the author to point to Julia’s recalibrated reliance on both indigenous African and Eurocentric scientific epistemes in navigating the traumatic landscapes of her family and her nation. Julia’s ability to now perceive Sierra Leone, the landscape and its people better, Jarrett-Macauley then opens up a world of wonder and complexities for her to navigate and form a part of. 22 Some scholars consider magical realism as a literary device that offers a therapeutic experience and a form of healing for child soldiers. While this is accurate, Cecilia Addei adds that it also presents a “more ethical technique for conveying traumatic experiences that could be sensationalised and turned into voyeuristic spectacle” (68). African magical realism foregrounds the notion of memory as central to the text, often “the shifts between different notions of space- time within African magical realism are subsumed under the pressures of a national history or familial saga, thus converting the shifts between different modalities of space-time into an idiom of putative historiography” (Quayson 165). As a reader, one sees this on several occasions in the text when Jarrett-Macauley uses moments in the private and liminal spaces of the text to ping a critique to the nation. One such moment is when in the Gola Forest, Ibrahim, a violent 20-year-old lieutenant who is abusive to his wife and the child soldiers, shoots and kills Masu, the brother of another child soldier, Abu, because he had malaria. After shooting him in the head, Ibrahim utters, “That’s the first good-for-nothing bastard!” (64). Abu lays his brother to rest and then in a circle of comfort the child soldiers collectively hold him, sharing his grief: Abu was crying. Dance, shouted Lieutenant Ibrahim, I say dance! He scratched his face, fingered his gun and pulled his khaki trousers out at the knees. He looked as though he would shoot another one of them. His wife scurried away and put on some thudding music, a dull boom, boom spiked with the clinking sounds of percussion. The child soldiers began to move, bodies mimicking those of people in delicious ecstasy of free movement. They danced as if with this performance of contentment they might at last banish the spectre of loss and grief from their lives. This is what had been commanded: to dance like gallant soldiers. Evening approached and the sun’s insistent burn was waning, but the soldiers hurt. In a line, along with others, Citizen and Abu danced after a fashion. Citizen tapped his feet, cautiously deferring his sorrow for later, when he would lie alone at night. Lieutenant Ibrahim climbed on to the gnarled trunk of a tree, from which he shouted, Enough, that’s enough. Not one muscle in his face moved but he emitted a long sigh with the final, Stop, enough. An ominous calm descended on the child soldiers as though the imponderable weight of his regime was a force they could not withstand. The lieutenant touched his wife on the buttocks and kissed her on the neck, indicating that it was time to move on. In eerie silence the child soldiers began to move about looking for their things. (Jarrett-Macauley 64-66) 23 This highly spiritual, highly supernatural and yet highly manic and psychotic scene may be analysed as mimetic of a struggle to be free from traumatic, repressed memories inflicted by war. The text depicts a moment of compulsive symbolism dubbed by Ato Quayson, as “the drive towards an insistent metaphorical register even when this register does not help to develop the action and define character or spectacle or create atmosphere. It seems to be symbolization for its own sake but in fact is a sign of a latent problem” (197) caused by a traumatic experience. Therefore, it is packed with symbolisation, metaphors and meanings that are a microcosm of the Sierra Leone war and a critique of the state’s response to it. It is also a dialogue between complete opposites, Ibrahim versus the child soldiers or on a national level, the State versus The People; perhaps at the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) which was created in 2002 to “try those who bore the greatest responsibility for the decade of violence” (Connolly 15). When using this strategy of opposing dialogues, one can dissect the authority figure of Ibrahim being The State, while the child soldiers represent The People of Sierra Leone. Following the murder of Masu and observing how the child soldiers came together in support and comfort of Abu, Ibrahim sees Abu “crying” and acts out by abruptly putting an end to the mourning, shouting “dance”, “I say dance!” all while the child soldiers were collectively working through the loss they had just experienced. Seconds before they obey, Julia tells the reader that Ibrahim gets in position by scratching “his face” and fingering “his gun” as if prepared to shoot anyone who disobeys him. However, in obedience, Ibrahim’s shouting is met with song when his wife puts on “thudding music” and the child soldiers start dancing. So, while Ibrahim “shouted” the child soldiers “moved” as if they were people high in “ecstasy” in a state of “free movement.” This signals that while Ibrahim was in a state of “command” therefore, authority and order, the child soldiers were in a liberating state, as if releasing any traumatic and repressed memories of the war. In that moment, the child soldiers were “banishing” their traumatic experiences and memories by dancing “with this performance of contentment” making them the “gallant” ones compared to Ibrahim who held on to his trauma like the child soldiers held on to his command. In this liberating moment that seems like the child soldiers were in a trance, charged by what Julia describes as “ecstasy” from the outside looking in, they may have seemed like they were out of control run by the energy of “delicious ecstasy” in them whereas, internally the mental state of a person who is high is a state of excitement which is caused by the overproduction of dopamine, the pleasure hormone that produces euphoria. Symbolically, where the State may think it has control of its people, it is actually people releasing 24 the bondage of State control on them. When “evening” came instead of “waning” like the sun was, or forcing the environment to suit their conditions, like Ibrahim did when he “climbed on to the gnarled trunk of a tree,” the child soldiers collectively and “in a line” continued to “dance after a fashion.” Therefore, while there are People like Citizen who “cautiously defer” their “sorrow for later” when they are “alone,” publicly, they stand united in their goal, with the understanding that there are alternative paths to the desired goal. When Ibrahim (i.e., the State) has had “enough” of the song and dance, everything must come to a halt and so it reverts to using repressive war strategies to erase and forget the memory it gave permission to. At this point, experiencing an “imponderable weight” from Ibrahim (i.e., the State), the child soldiers (i.e., The People) embrace the “ominous calm descending” from the environment above and follow the next order from Ibrahim. This scene becomes a critique of the State for not allowing its people to mourn what they have lost from the war, the way they wanted to and for as long as they wanted to, rather it restricted them to the State- run process of the Sierra Leone TRC and as soon as the process was done, even without adequately addressing and acknowledging the suffering and impact of the war on its people, it commanded the people that it is “time to move on”. Ibrahim’s refusal to join in on the process of mourning as well as the banishment of his traumatic memories and experiences through song and dance implies his system can no longer contain the trauma and suffering and therefore releases itself as a compulsive disorder that leads to him acting out, shouting, having inconsistencies in mental state and behaviour, probably exacerbated by the sound of the music. With Ibrahim unable to transcend to a state of calm and/or excitement like the child soldiers, he is left in a mental and psychological impasse that manifests as the need to erase and stop any interventions to healing and restoration that the child soldiers are in the process of. For the child soldiers, the dancing becomes a progressive step in the stages of mourning for traumatised people following the circle of comfort. The “thudding music,” the “boom, boom” and the “clinking” not only sounds therapeutic but enables a trance into a different realm outside of reality that elevates them to collectively start working through their trauma. Magical realism is able to offer a reading of the war that pays attention to places and practices that sit outside of State authority or public spaces like the SLTRC or Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) and adult mediation of spaces such as the home. Elsewhere, Brenda Cooper also notes that magical realism tries to “capture the paradox of the unity of opposites” (15) and the reader sees this clearly come into effect in the above scene where questions of where the power lies, who benefits and, in whose 25 interest, does this scene work for between Ibrahim and the child soldiers? This magical “third eye” (16) subverts the notion of seeing this scene purely from the literal sense where Ibrahim holds the power and constructs a complicated viewpoint of the power dynamics at play between him and the child soldiers. 2.4. Memorising and Memorialising the Landscape The use of memory as a mechanism for mediating healing and restoration while providing a discursive space for the reimagination of the future is palpable in both texts. In her analysis of The Stone Virgins, Coundouriotis notes that the landscape becomes a symbol of the nation, and this similarly resonates with Moses, Citizen & Me, when Coundouriotis notes that the landscape stands outside history, evoking a sense of identity for both the individual and the nation (28). I add that it is also this idea of the earth replenishing itself that lends the memory of the landscape enduring power beyond the gruesomeness of the war. The concept of regions of memory enables one to set Sierra Leone in dialogue with Zimbabwe, in an analysis of how specific landmarks within the texts memorialise the nation and its people. Both authors narrate their stories as a repository of historical memory, therefore the landscape additionally bears witness to the individual and collective trauma experienced by the country and its people. Jarrett-Macauley uses the magical space of the Gola Forest to not only mediate healing and recovery at the very place of ruin but also as a space where proper examination can be conducted objectively in order to reimagine a new future for Sierra Leone. The Gola Forest therefore becomes a safe haven outside of the city and villages of Freetown that are dilapidated or being burned down by the number-one-burn-unit which Citizen was a part of in the war. This is seen when Julia describes the damage caused by the war in Freetown upon her arrival. She notes that buildings, offices and school buildings were “evacuated” and “weeping” (Jarrett-Macauley 6). Then when Julia first teleports into the magical realm to get an understanding of the war, the burn unit and Citizen’s involvement, Freetown was filled with “devastation on homes, land, people” (58), while in the magical Gola Forest everyone seemed to be shielded from the sound of gunfire heard from a distance (130). The historical memory of Freetown was even worse than how Jarrett-Macauley narrates it. According to Connolly, between the period of 1998 to 1999 during the decade-long civil war, there was “destruction of property in Freetown and its environs as a result of an operation referred to as Operation No Living Thing. An estimated 3000 26 people were killed, women and girls were raped, children were abducted and subsequently conscripted, limbs were amputated and much property in and around Freetown was destroyed” (13-14). The damage caused by the war, especially during this period, shows that livability in Freetown was close to impossible. Anita, Moses’ neighbour in the text whose lean-to was “knocked down and burnt” tells Julia that they were lucky “the whole of Uncle Moses’ house was still standing” (10). As for the Gola Forest which historically is at the centre of the war and recruiting children to the military force, David Rosen’s Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism, notes that the extensive diamond deposits in Sierra Leone are found in the forested areas of the Gola Forest and everyone flocked the area where illegal diamond mining and lawlessness became rife - which in turn led to thievery, banditry, violence and bloodshed (74-75). Rosen adds that when the war intensified in the later years, a military group which was known to be populated with children and youth, also formed in forested areas such as the Gola Forest (88). Jarrett-Macauley uses the Gola Forest as a landmark site where devastation and ruin took place and turns it into a site of healing and restoration at a time filled with despair. Borrowing from Coundouriotis’ observations about the importance of the landscape in The Stone Virgins, I assert that a recognisable landscape, such as the Gola Forest, “encompasses people” (28) and brings forth a “renewed sense of attachment to a place” (28). Therefore, when Julia teleports again into the magical realm and lands at the Gola Forest, the reader begins to see how the Gola Forest becomes a safe space for healing. Julia describes the Gola Forest as an “adventure” with an “intoxicating magical order; scrupulously structured and tinged with babble, unreliable clocks and tracks” (84) and that by the stream “the air was soft” and “children could become themselves again, soft- limbed, soft voiced and free” (130). In her description of the Gola Forest, Jarrett-Macauley reconfigures a historical place soaked with memories of ruin into a place of safety, signaling that it is only upon confronting memories of traumatic violence that national reconciliation and healing become possible. For Vera however, the memory of the landscape serves a dual function. Unlike Jarrett-Macauley, whose landscape is mostly focused on safety and healing of victims of war, Vera’s landscapes of Bulawayo, Kezi and Matopos, endure as sites of harm, memory, as well as the hope of healing. Therefore, these landscapes become closely attached to the identity of both the individual and the nation, aching and bending along with the pains of its people and blossoming and healing along with them. Standing outside its history and witnessing the atrocities of the war, the landscapes in 27 Vera’s novel are also inscribed with the people’s stories, memories and experiences. The reader sees this in the description of the landscape before compared with after Nonceba’s traumatic experience. Before her traumatic experience “trees grow wildly,” and Gulati hills are “the greatest heights, soaring above any of the hills or rocks of Kezi, swallowing the earth around them, beckoning” (18), illustrating a landscape that is growing and flourishing, mirroring the lifeworlds of the people living in it. However, following the traumatic experience, the landscape registers the annihilation of the war when the “hills collapse” and the rocks in Gulati are “plaint, malleable, insubstantial,” they “turn into water” “stone dissolves like salt” and “rocks fade off” and “(139). The marula tree near the Thandabantu Store which the soldiers burnt down with the owner, Mahlathini, inside, on charges of allowing dissidents to convene there, goes into overproduction: “The skin of the fruit swells with the heat, then cracks, and the sweetness spills” (145) and this excessive the fruit registers the anomaly of the war and the spectacle of nature which has since tilted out of the ordinary due to the violence inflicted on victims and witnessed by the landscape. The narrator notes that Nonceba’s “pain is higher than the hills” and just like a rock is “suspended in empty air, smoothly rounded, not falling at all. Simply waiting” (140), so is Nonceba. Just as the traumatised victim is tortured and violated, so is the landscape, as it bore witness to it. Nonceba who then departs for Bulawayo, leaves Kezi in a state that Cephas describes as a “naked cemetery” (159) depicting the lifelessness of the place following the horrific bloodshed witnessed by the land. Elsewhere, Buhlebenkosi Dlodlo in her thesis on an ecocritical reading of the landscape in Vera notes that even five decades after the civil war, “most Zimbabweans live as refugees in foreign lands and are only ferried back to the country as corpses to be buried in the land of their forefathers” (56). 2.5. Memorialising the Nation and its People Both Vera and Jarrett-Macauley’s narrative techniques therefore destablise the nation state’s monologic view of trauma and how it can be overcome. The narrative strategies are not only committed to historical narration and imagining a reconciled collective future of the nations, but they also depict the power of a country’s memory to renew itself and its people long after the war. 28 The narrative techniques place the responsibility and accountability for the war with the state, rather than the people who suffered from it. Moreover, these techniques interrogate the historiographic memories that are filled with contradictions, erasures, forgetfulness, containments and manipulations of the historical events, by showing how this same history of the impact of war is still manifesting long after the wars ended. Using Judith Herman’s stages of recovering for traumatised people, which include 1) the establishment of safety 2) remembrance, mourning and reconnection with ordinary life, the reader can see how Vera and Jarrett-Macauley deploy the same strategies when narrating the road to recovery. However, recovery for the nation requires multiple alternative interventions, rather than a singular, state-led approach to “move forward.” Vera through Cephas shows that even the restoration of the ancient kraal is a long journey but a start to community integration and requires more than the individual efforts to restore a nation. On her part, Jarrett-Macauley only makes intervention possible in the magical realm and the private space, as the SLTRC and the SLSC interventions did little to include the marginalised or explore other restorative interventions. She ends the text open-endedly with Julia who needs to decide whether she will stay in Sierra Leone or return to London. To echo Peterson who articulates the process of healing for traumatised victims of oppression in post-apartheid South Africa: there is no easy walk to healing and not all the paths commence from or lead to official interventions. Ordinary people have embarked on journeys in search of self-preservation and restoration, compassion and dignity, through establishing the appropriate relationships with the divine, ancestors, the land, self and community. (230) Vera and Jarrett-Macauley’s texts resonates with these sentiments by refraining from offering a pre-imposed route to recovery. Rather, they too depict that it is “no easy walk to healing” but healing is necessary for the reimagination of the future of the countries and Africa as a whole. By depicting the gruesomeness of war, its damage and disruption to people and community, both authors critique the nationalist stance of violence as a necessary means for progress, when indeed it is a senseless act that no history can claim to have progressed a nation by, but rather prolongs disaster and damage. In this chapter I explored how the narrative techniques deployed by both Vera and Jarrett- Macauley in their texts were memory-making, memorising and memorialising. Through their narrative techniques, both authors flesh out the memory made by victims of war, memorise in 29 detail through literary form, their stories of resistance and resilience while critiquing the state for its lack of accountability in the wars or its inadequate attempts to address reconciliation and memorialise those whose lives were victimised by the state. Both authors’ narrative techniques retrieve the traumatic experiences and memories of the marginalised, who would otherwise be excluded in history books. Both authors utilise the strategy of the introverted genre where they address their own national audience, ensuring that people’s stories are memorised/remembered as victims whose stories of their suffering, are also stories of their resistance and resilience. In an interview, Vera notes that she found writing The Stone Virgins “emotionally difficult” not because of the scenes in the text but because the history was “even more macabre and gruesome” (Gagiano 71) than what she depicts in her novel. On her part, Jarrett-Macauley indicates that in the writing of Moses, Citizen & Me she borrowed from Paul Richard’s detailed collection of anthropological essays which unpacked the Sierra Leone civil war and the degree of damage the war did to the country and people. Ama Ata Aidoo’s review of The Stone Virgins considers the novel “a song about the author’s people, and the tragedy of their lives and their loves” (Vera i) while The Literary Review describes Moses, Citizen & Me as “a foil to the bleak and disturbing subject matter…Jarrett-Macauley sensitively established Julia’s family as a microcosm of the ruptured nation” (Jarrett-Macauley i). Effectively, the two authors pay tribute to their respective countries and their people by memorialising the victims whose lives were lost in wars. In the next chapter, I focus closely on the role of memory in the face of trauma and how narrative and memory are utilised to either subvert or empower an individual’s experiences of trauma and violence. 30 3. CHAPTER 3: The Impossibility of Trauma on Memory 3.1. Contextualising History: Memory Tropes in Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe On 26 November 2023, the current Sierra Leone government was attacked by several gunmen at its military barracks and at the prison in the capital city of Freetown. Al Jazeera reported that the gunmen shot and killed at least 20 people, among whom 13 were soldiers, and as a result of this, a countrywide curfew was implemented immediately. The initial communication by the government to the public was that this was just a “breach of security” (Al Jazeera) and that the issue had been contained. It was not until two days later that the state came out to say it was a “failed coup attempt” (Al Jazeera) intending to overthrow the recently re-elected current President Julius Maada Bio. This attempted coup was the second in five months following highly contested elections in June 2023. No organised political group has so far been linked to the attacks, and the Interreligious Council of Sierra Leone (IRCSL) came out to say that the attack “threatens the country’s peace efforts” (Al Jazeera). Perhaps not calling the attack a failed coup attempt the first time the government came out was a result of needing to further investigate the issue. However, I propose that the state did not want to trigger the memory of another attack by the opposition political parties who wanted to overthrow the then President Joseph Momah, that resulted in the decade-long civil war in 1991, as this would have caused fear and panic in the country. It is the same civil war that Jarrett-Macauley uses to depict the power of memory in narrating traumatic experiences, whether individual or shared by a collective. It may seem like a distant memory now but in November 2017 in Zimbabwe when the now deceased President Robert Mugabe was forced to resign and step down after 37 years in government, history had come full circle when the political rally at White City Stadium triggered the turn of events that led to his ouster was set in Bulawayo. According to Ray Ndlovu, author of In the Jaws of the Crocodile, Bulawayo is a city “that has never fully embraced ZANU-PF” (4) 31 Mugabe’s political party, as it was always dominated by Joshua Nkomo’s party ZAPU, which occupied Bulawayo and the rest of the Matabeleland region during the mid -1980s and post the Gukurahundi war in 1987. Ndlovu notes that it was the people in this region of Zimbabwe “who bore the brunt of the Gukurahundi campaign of the mid-1980s” (4). Therefore, “for Mugabe and other ZANU-PF leaders, venturing into Bulawayo became a decision not to be taken lightly. Bulawayo represented a political minefield where ZANU-PF and its leadership always had to tread cautiously” (4). Therefore, it came as no surprise that the site at which Mugabe was accused of war atrocities became the site at which his power was annihilated. It is important to note that Mugabe was 93 at this point, and at the rally he had started to position his wife, Grace Mugabe as his successor one day- because even at 93, Mugabe was not planning to retire or step down anytime soon. So, although the booing at the White City Stadium political rally started halfway through Grace Mugabe’s speech, it was the White City Stadium gathering that expeditated the coup that led to Mugabe resigning as President of Zimbabwe on 21 November 2017, 17 days after the rally. Ndlovu notes that “during his final days in office, his fate was ultimately one of rejection. Rejection stared at him from his army, from ordinary citizens who staged street marches against him and from the ruling party, ZANU-PF, over which he had presided for nearly four decades. There was no longer any other option but for him to take his leave” (12). Thus, when one reads Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins, the reader engages the novel in a way that demonstrates the intensity of memory in all its forms to narrate a people whose marginalisation by the state under the leadership of Mugabe has been immutable and inannihilable. These memory tropes both in Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone set in motion an awareness of how traumatic collective memories, inadequately addressed, can continue to repress a people. In Multidirectional Memory, Rothberg notes that collective memory is like shared memory, “it integrates and calibrates the different perspectives of those who remember the episode into one version” (15). He further notes that it is also memories that may have been initiated by “individuals but that have been mediated through networks of communication, institutions of the state, and the social groupings of civil society” (15). Therefore, although the notion of collective memory resonates in these two countries’ contexts, Rothberg outlines that collective memory’s point of convergence into “one version” is overestimated. Instead, he offers multidirectional memory as a concept that encapsulates a memory that is shared by individuals and formed through mediascapes, but also “highlights the inevitable displacements and contingencies that mark all remembrance” (15-16). 32 In other words, multidirectional memory is collective and historical but disrupts the everyday as it juxtaposes two or more disturbing memories whose collective history is in and out of public consciousness, therefore does not converge into one version and rather, can allow for different or multiple possibilities of memory without being “simple pluralism”, demonstrating how “all articulations of memory are not equal” in power or whether socially or politically but rather “psychic forces articulate themselves in every act of remembrance” (16). In this chapter I use the concept of multidirectional memory to explore the ways in which Jarrett-Macauley and Vera critique their respective nations’ one dimensional notions of collective memory. In their critiques, Vera and Jarrett-Macauley explore other possibilities of imagining memory-making in wartime by drawing on individual memory to articulate their characters’ experiences of trauma and violence to enable healing, restoration and reconciliation or repression. The reader therefore sees how the trigger of a war memory in 2023 Sierra Leone can threaten “peace efforts” or booing in a Bulawayo stadium in 2017 following news that another Mugabe would be the next Zimbabwean president can trigger resistance against a system that had been determined to continue repressing its people. Individual memories, which occupy center-stage in the two novels, are uniquely different from collective memories. Aby Warburg who notes that humans are “deeply relational” beings, highlights that all memories are simultaneously individual and collective (15). By implication, there are shared platforms for which the individual can locate or articulate themselves. These shared platforms in the case of Vera and Jarrett-Macauley are located in private spaces such as the home, liminal places such as the imagination and intimate spaces such as thoughts. This chapter follows the individual memories of characters in the texts whose lives have been scarred by traumatic experiences and explore the ways in which both authors articulate memory. 3.2. Nonceba’s Traumatic Experience in The Stone Virgins In The Stone Virgins, a critical analysis of Nonceba whom the reader encounters as she is thrust into a traumatic experience when the reader first encounters her, depicts the brutality of wartime. Before the dissident soldier, Sibaso bursts into the two sisters’ home and kills Thenjiwe in Nonceba’s presence, the reader only knows Nonceba through Thenjiwe’s perspective. Effectively, 33 our first direct meeting with Nonceba is in the midst of a brutal attack that will leave her deeply traumatised to the end of the novel. Nonceba at this point in the novel then becomes a symbol of those victims whose life stories are unknown, but whose experience and trauma of the war must be known. Vera shows the trauma of individuals whose lives get senselessly violated by perpetrators and disrupted from their everyday ordinary experiences. So, when the reader meets Nonceba, whose name means mercy — a seeming nod to the cruel mercy that Sibaso shows her by not killing her but letting her live with a deathly trauma — Vera allows the reader to get to intimately know, see and be present with her in her thoughts as witness to the violent murder of her sister, Thenjiwe. Through naming as a literary device, Vera foreshadows Nonceba’s life for the reader long before Nonceba utters a single word. We learn from Thenjiwe that the sisters are very close and that Nonceba is a schoolteacher in another region of the country. On the ill-fated day of Sibaso’s attack, she is at home with Thenjiwe. When Sibaso rapes Nonceba after beheading Thenjiwe, Nonceba’s memory is disrupted and the reader is left to fill in the gaps to understand the violence inflicted on both her and Thenjiwe. The narration moves from coherent and clear third person narration, to a meshed up, broken, incoherent and incomplete narration that goes back and forth between Nonceba’s jumbled up first-person narration and third person narration, we see this jumbled memory in the scene below: There. With him. He whispers over her neck, heated air. His words move slowly over her. He is close, she opens her eyes and conquers the darkness burning beneath them. She moves into the light. She is floating without direction. She lets her eyelids fall. Darkness descends. Light is sharp. It penetrates. On the other side of the doorway, where the wall curves and disappears, she sees her sister, Thenjiwe. A part of her. Thenjiwe fallen, breasts pressed to the ground, bare soles, blind eyes, bent arms folded, legs stretched out, a body pleading, a stillness visible. I am afraid to close my eyes. I am afraid of myself. I am darkness. He is an ordinary man, wearing a blue shirt with buttons, not white, not black. Gray. Short sleeves. Khaki trousers. A safe attire. A shirt you can trust, with buttons you can trust. Her eyes swallow him whole. (Vera 71-72) In the above scene, Nonceba is left unconscious by Sibaso following the rape and when she wakes, she sees Thenjiwe on the ground and she recalls “I am afraid to close my eyes. I am afraid of myself” (72). Upon her waking, although the description of Sibaso’s outfit is narrated in third 34 person, the reader sees it from Nonceba’s point of view. The reader can therefore track the disturbance to her memory as a result of the violence and trauma when she moves from being afraid to close her eyes, as it would signal that she may die if she does and therefore to stay alive requires a fixation onto Sibaso’s outfit. Keeping her gaze fixed on Sibaso’s outfit, I assert, dissociates Nonceba from the live trauma, enabling her to repress the present memory and shelter her from the gruesome violence of Sibaso’s actions. Caruth speaks at length about how the trauma and the individual’s experience of it becomes like a person who is both witnessing a traumatic event while at the same time being the person the event is happening to. She makes the point that this simultaneous experience of being the witness while also undergoing the violence is what makes trauma inaccessible, as it comes at the cost of memory: “the force of this experience would appear to arise precisely, in other words, in the collapse of its understanding” (Caruth 7). The twelve- page stretch of narrative describing Sibaso’s attack is slowed down by Vera, for the reader to track the traumatic experience as we move from witnessing Nonceba’s rape to Thenjiwe’s