Decolonizing Climate Trauma Narratives: Eco-Ancestral Connecting in Case's "Animals at the Eve of Extinction" and Indigenous Survivance in Lin's Rise
Decolonizing Climate Trauma NarrativesEco-Ancestral Connecting in Case's "Animals at the Eve of Extinction" and Indigenous Survivance in Lin's Rise
1 Introduction
In recent years, the theory on traumatic impacts of climate change has spread to the humanities, where literary and cultural scholars have been exploring the effects of global warming's impact on narratology. In this article, I will discuss what constitutes a climate trauma narrative. I will critically engage with the dominant notion, as supported by E. Ann Kaplan, that defines climate trauma as being pre-traumatic.1 I will argue that the focus on the future-oriented and individual experience of climate change reinforces Western-humanist, white supremacist perspectives of separation and neocolonial ignorance of experiences that differ from those of the Eurocentric West. In that context, I will analyze two different cultural objects as climate trauma narratives that diverge from Kaplan's narrow focus on Eurocentric, futuristic fiction. The first is a nonfictional short story with stylistic elements resembling the form of a prayer titled Animals at the Eve of Extinction by Jennifer Case; here, I will extend the notion of climate trauma to the interspecies domain connected to the past and present through interspecies memory.2 The second, a video by Dan Lin made in collaboration with two Indigenous poets and titled Rise, extends the notion of climate trauma to a more collective level in which Indigenous traumatization by climate change is seen as embedded in a larger [End Page 101] collective ongoing retraumatization.3 Through ancestral information and grievance, the story becomes simultaneously a narrative of Indigenous reclamation, emergence, and survivance from the past into the future.
2 Climate Trauma Narratives
2.1 Trauma Narratives
To look at climate change narratives as trauma narratives, one must first consider the dominant theory on the topic. The traditional term, trauma, refers to a traumatic or shocking event that is too overwhelming for the psyche to process, usually resulting in a mental health condition called PTSD—posttraumatic stress disorder. PTSD manifests itself in the individual's belated experience of the repressed event, which then haunts the traumatized individual after the initial moment of traumatization. Cathy Caruth, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, writes that even though definitions around PTSD are contested, it is most generally agreed on that it shows in a belated response to an overwhelming event or events in the form of
repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviours stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event . … The pathology consists, rather, solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly.4
She further stresses the nonsymbolic nature of PTSD as flashbacks are "a symptom of history," not of the unconscious; the event is literally reexperienced in the now, making it difficult to cure with traditional psychoanalysis focusing on the symbolic unconscious.5
How does trauma play out in narratology? In the psychoanalytic and medical fields, trauma has emerged from observations of Holocaust survivors and after the Vietnam War, leading to a growing focus on trauma in the 1970s and '80s. Roger Luckhurst, in The Trauma Question, argues that medical innovation has supported the rise of a "trauma paradigm" that transcends the medical field and enters the realm of culture in the form of [End Page 102] narrative formations that reflect posttraumatic symptoms.6 Since the traumatic event itself is what is missing from memory and only emerges in the form of a belated response, trauma narratives do not represent a particular event but reflect the fragmented, nonlinear, belated responses to the event. Luckhurst describes trauma narratives as playing "around with narrative time, disrupting linearity, suspending logical causation, running out of temporal sequence, working backwards towards the inaugurating traumatic event, or playing with belated revelations that retrospectively rewrite narrative significance."7 Thus, trauma narratives are special not only because their diegesis focuses on traumatized characters but also because the narratological, discursive level of the narrative reflects the ruptured belatedness of trauma and its nonlinear time...
