"Something I feel so shamed about still": Postcolonial Trauma in Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe
"Something I feel so shamed about still"Postcolonial Trauma in Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe
"These narratives are the only inheritances that poor people can hand down to their offsprings."
—Austin Clarke, The Polished Hoe (355)
In 2008, the decolonization of trauma theory in the 21st century was recognized by a special issue of Studies in the Novel, with essays that urge not only a turning-away from a Eurocentric model but also the recognition that trauma is not necessarily individual and event-based, as classical trauma theory would have it.1 While the definition of trauma had already been expanded to study the experiences of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, new scholarship has focused on a much more comprehensive form of trauma, including that of the long history of colonization and enslavement, and its lingering effects in the nations of the Caribbean and other postcolonies. Other forms and combinations of trauma have been explored, as has trauma complicated by attributes such as complicity, guilt, or shame that may nevertheless allow agency to develop. Since 2008, trauma theory has continued to evolve, with the contributions of Michelle Balaev, Stef Craps, Irene Visser, and others.2
In this essay, I propose to read Barbadian-Canadian author Austin Clarke's 2003 novel, The Polished Hoe, as a narrative of postcolonial trauma. Postcolonial trauma is a complicated mix of historical or collective trauma; intergenerational trauma within the family; individual emotional [End Page 25] and sexual trauma; the "insidious trauma"3 of everyday life, and what Grada Kilomba has more recently termed "plantation memories."4 In The Polished Hoe we find these various forms of trauma enmeshed in the story of a plantation-colonial system haunting a 1950s British colony in the West Indies. While internal autonomy and independence are not far off, in the world of 1950s Barbados,5 or Bimshire, old social and emotional structures are still in place.6
Trauma Theory and Literary Studies
The 21st century has witnessed remarkable developments in trauma theory since its inception in the 1990s with the work of Judith Herman and Cathy Caruth, and in 2001 with the work of Dominick LaCapra.7 Classical trauma theory's base in structuralism and psychoanalysis has since been recognized as Eurocentric and lacking consideration of cultural, social, material, and spiritual aspects of life, especially those of colonial and postcolonial societies, conflict zones, sites of systemic violence, large-scale migration, famine, and ecological disaster. The psychoanalytic aspect of trauma theory, a Freudian approach that treats trauma as an aporia, something that cannot be spoken or even remembered, has also been questioned by investigators such as Robert McNally, whose 2003 study, Remembering Trauma, directly challenges the notion that trauma results in a type of amnesia that renders an experience as "unclaimed," to use Caruth's term, noting that we should not "extrapolate amnesia from a victim's understandable desire not to dwell on a painful event." While he recognizes the presence of flashbacks, dreams, or physical manifestations of trauma, McNally asserts that such reactions do not preclude the ability to narrate the traumatic event. In fact, he observes, drawing on the work of Lawrence Langer, some survivors of the Holocaust are able to recount specific details of their brutal experiences.8
Psychoanalytic approaches have been found mostly unsatisfactory for the examination of postcolonial trauma, as Jennifer Yusin observes, noting that the "promise of trauma theory … resulted in disembodied abstractions that recuperated prevailing Western modes of production rather than in the accomplishment of the subversion of supposed universals and the claimed contingencies of identities and difference."9 [End Page 26]
Michael Rothberg notes that as trauma theory moves beyond the early psychoanalytic and structural models,
it reveals the specificities hiding under the apparently neutral and universal face of this understanding of trauma—its attention to events and not systems; its assumption of privileged, secure subject positions; [and] its investment in fragmented modernist aesthetics.
Rothberg encourages, instead, a historicized, relational model that connects "apparently divergent sites and moments" and considers the "relationship between trauma and other disruptive forces."10 Irene Visser agrees, noting that future studies should "conceptualize trauma not by theorizing hierarchical structures which would privilege some...
