Journeying Through Hell: Wole Soyinka, Trauma, and Postcolonial Nigeria

Abstract

In The Harmony of Illusions, Allan Young questioned whether the category of trauma, which first emerged during the nineteenth century, could be referred back through historical time and identified in, for example, Pepys’s diary, Shakespeare’s plays, or the epic of Gilgamesh as certain literary scholars have claimed. Young concluded that this was not possible, that none of these pre-nineteenth-century texts refer to what we now know as traumatic memory because this form of memory was not available to their writers. For Young, our sense of identity is shaped as much by our conceptions of what memory is as by the memories that we have. Trauma, like other forms of memory, is a historical and cultural product, which is not to deny its reality or the suffering that is associated with it but rather to locate that reality in the individual and collective investments that are made in it and in people’s beliefs and convictions. In sum, Young argues, “This disorder is not timeless, nor does it possess an intrinsic unity. Rather, it is glued together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, treated, and represented and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments that mobilized these effects and resources” (5). The emergence and diagnosis of trauma attracted the attention of clinicians and researchers throughout the western world. Its influence rapidly spread through the Americas, Britain, Australia, Europe, and Israel; and it was used in turn to describe and to shape treatment of responses to extreme events in many different situations. Young reminds us that trauma is not a universal category found in many different places and times but rather a discourse of memory that emerged at a specific time–in the late nineteenth century–and that is embedded in and inseparable from the particular concerns of western culture. Building on the work of Young, a group of professional aid workers articulated in Rethinking the Trauma of War their growing concerns regarding the uncritical export of trauma discourse to non-western societies. Based on their own experience of helping adults and children to rebuild their lives after the devastation of war, the contributors to this volume underline that because the concept of trauma derives from a particular (western) cultural orientation to suffering, its relevance to non-western communities may be limited; that trauma, in other words, should be regarded not as scientifically neutral but as culturally specific in its concepts and interventions. The volume highlights three particular assumptions that are inherent to and embedded within current trauma discourse. First, this discourse operates on the basis of a strongly individualist approach to human life, with a marked emphasis on the disengaged self and on intrapsychic conflicts. However, this notion of the self may not be valid in many non-western cultures, which are predicated on alternative notions of the self and its relationship to others. Secondly, it is assumed that the forms of mental disorder that are described by western psychiatry map unproblematically onto those found elsewhere. However, in non-western contexts, it is likely that the idioms of distress vary considerably; the emergence of a particular symptom does not necessarily mean that it has the same meaning or significance across different cultures. Finally, the emergence of a professionalized trauma discourse has tended towards the handing over of memory to experts to pronounce on its meaning and significance. The assumption that the West represents the center of expertise, which is exported to non-western war zones, risks ignoring local concepts of suffering, misfortune, and illness and eliding those discourses of loss and bereavement that may fulfill the role for the local community that in western cultures is provided by the trauma discourse. While they do not critique the relevance and efficacy of trauma discourse in the West, the contributors to the volume provide a compelling argument that its dominance in approaching the suffering of non-western societies can silence local perspectives on what is important and blind us to alternative ways of helping. Although the critique of trauma discourse articulated in Rethinking the Trauma of War emerges from those engaged in emergency relief work, the issues that are raised also have...