Narratives of Trauma:
Participants, Titles, and Abstracts
Participant
Title
David Murphy
‘Trauma, Narrative and the Person-centred
Therapeutic Relationship’
David Norris
‘Serbia’s Ghosts: Traumatic Memory and
Narrative Fiction’
Gary Winship
‘A Pocketful of Poesy’
Nicki Hitchcott
‘Benjamin Sehene and Father Wenceslas
Munyeshyaka: the Fictional Trial of a
Genocide Priest’
Abstract
Traumatic stress is a consequence of a wide range of events. Narrative provides a useful approach to
understanding responses following traumatic events. Trauma focussed psychotherapy occurs within
the context of a therapeutic relationship through which both client and therapist co-construct a
narrative that can be transformative and relieve distress. One approach to this is person-centred
therapy based on the principles of organismic psychology and Rogers’ notion of the actualising
tendency. This presentation will explore how non-directive person-centred therapy is ideally placed to
facilitate post traumatic change that leads to growth and goes beyond returning people to pre-trauma
narrative functioning.
In the 1980s Serbian prose fiction turned to explore the recent past of Yugoslavia, but outside the
official memory of events sanctioned by the regime. Horrific events from the Second World War and
the early brutality of the Communist regime which had been ‘forgotten’ were brought back. They
were often represented as the return of repressed memories which are resistant to integration in a
historical narrative. Repressed is here understood as the basis of an uncanny or ghostly experience.
Sometimes such stories offer the potential of a cathartic resolution, but are also seen as part of
another, larger framework in which their symbolic resolution is compromised. Such narrative
strategies recur during the 1990s in novels and films representing the traumatic end of Yugoslavia.
How is trauma conveyed in myths, legends and fables? Is there a function to the re-telling of tales of
trauma? Winnicott said that children needed to experience the world in small doses and there are
various cultural artefacts (films, children's literature) that prepare children for the harsh realities of the
world, including the experience of trauma. But what happens when the small dose is amplified in
reality? My title is taken from the children's game: 'ring-o-ring-a-roses', but I have re-configured the
pocketful of poesies for the purpose of my paper. The children’s game ‘ring-o-ring-a-roses’ emerged
as a response to a pandemic and featured elements of superstitious protection: that if you carried a
pocketful of poesies, you would somehow be immune and would not catch the illness. My thesis here
is that telling and re-telling of trauma, that if we carry a pocketful of poesy, that this might offer a
basis for working through trauma, not only at a personal level, but also at a cultural level.
The first Rwandan novel published since the 1994 genocide, Benjamin Sehene’s Le feu sous la
soutane (Fire beneath the cassock) is a fictional exploration of a Catholic priest’s involvement in the
genocide. Despite the historical and cultural importance of this novel, it has received very little
Paul Crawford
‘Trauma Texts: Mind, Disability, and
Fiction’
Susan Billingham
‘I/i is for Incest: The Work of Words in
Poetry by Canadian Women’
critical attention in the academic world. Published in 2005, the novel is clearly based on the true story
of the infamous Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, priest of the parish of Sainte Famille, Kigali who,
having fled to France in 1994, was subsequently indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for
Rwanda for crimes against humanity including genocide and rape. Despite twice being issued with
international arrest warrants in 1995 and 1997, Munyeshyaka has still not been tried in France and
continues to serve as a parish priest there. This paper will analyse the fictional reconstruction of
Munyeshyaka’s story as presented in Sehene’s novel.
In this presentation, I argue that literature dealing with madness (‘Mad Lit.’) offers rich accounts of
psychological trauma or ‘woundedness’. I reflect on theories of trauma and disability in relation to
psychomachy (the battle for the soul) in literature from the mediaeval period and William Golding’s
The Spire and Darkness Visible, novels which revisit and expand the horizon of psychomachy and
trauma from the personal and existential to social and epistemological domains and interanimate these
through dark visions and motifs of combined psychological and physical damage or collapse. I
conclude that ‘trauma texts’ are key literary narratives that afford insights into ‘wounded’ or ‘blighted’
life, society and knowledge.
This paper examines Janice Williamson’s remarkable account of recovering (from) incest, Crybaby!
(1998). The image of a seemingly ordinary childhood growing up on the prairies in the 1950s is
disrupted by memories of abuse recovered as an adult. Williamson addresses “a collective history
longer than my own—one that begins with Freud’s Dora” (11). Working through her account over
more than ten years—a period during which controversy grew surrounding recovered memory versus
“false memory syndrome”—the poet explores tensions between silencing, speaking and writing,
between re-membering and forgetting. Williamson resists therapeutic practices that reinforce “the
psychoanalytic mystification of desire and seduction” (180), exposing “a crisis of language, power
and the body”— for abused women and children, “the problem of legitimacy persists” (176).
Situating Crybaby! in the context of other Canadian feminist or language-focused texts, such as Betsy
Warland’s The Bat Had Blue Eyes and Kim Morrissey’s Dora: a case of hysteria, I contend such
experimental narratives resist abjection and supplement the institutional discourses of medicine and
psychoanalysis that have at times contributed to the problem rather than forming part of the solution.
My reading focuses on the writing strategies Williamson uses to interrogate preconceptions
concerning truth, memory and the “talking cure.” As Kathryn Robson notes, Williamson’s memoir
“knowingly inserts itself into a complex intertext of critical and popular discourses on sexual abuse”
(149). Shifts between first and third person, pronominal play upon the i/I/eye, and lack of subject/verb
agreement mark not only the dissociation common in survivors of trauma, but the dangers of
“sound[ing] victim rather than subject of suffering” (127; my emphasis). Williamson juxtaposes old
Susannah Radstone
Whose memory, which truth?
Vanessa Pupavac
‘Croatian Veteran Politics and Trauma
Advocacy’
Vivien Miller
‘The Traumas of Capital Punishment’
family snapshots, including her father’s inscribed captions, with “Fragments of an Analysis” and her
own reinvention of “Adorable Dora,” to remind us that all memory relies on narrative and all subjects
are partial and fragmented.
Chantal Akerman's entrancing and delightful Demain on déménage/Tomorrow We Move (2004), might
be approached as a trauma text—a text that alludes, however obliquely, to the Holocaust. Charlotte's
grandmother perished in that atrocity, lending credence to a reading of the film's narrative as
referencing the traumas of World War II. The film's mise-en-scène, too, as well as characters’
ruminations arguably refer, however displacedly, to what have become iconic elements of the
cinematic representation of the Holocaust. Taking as its starting point Charlotte’s own story-writing,
and moving on to discuss memory's relations with identity and truth, this paper adopts a different
approach to film and cultural analysis than that proffered by trauma theory, arguing that where
questions of narrative, memory and truth are concerned, the truth is rather more complex than trauma
theory might suggest.
The politics of trauma has been associated with anti-militarism and victim advocacy. Recognition of
PTSD in 1980 was supported by the key figures in the Vietnam antiwar movement in alliance with
veterans opposed to the war (Scott, 1993; Shephard, 2000). International trauma or psychosocial work
really took off in the early 1990s in relation to conflict in former Yugoslavia, initially in Croatia and
then Bosnia, and later Kosovo. International trauma or psychosocial models became linked to
international peace work and conflict management and gained a high profile in international aid
responses to the conflict. International trauma or psychosocial models also influenced national
narratives of trauma in the conflict. This article considers how international trauma or psychosocial
models influenced veteran politics in Croatia. President Tudjman was sceptical towards the relevance
of PTSD models arising out of the Vietnam Syndrome for Croatian veterans fighting a patriotic war.
Initially the trauma models were promoted by the NGO sector, fostered by international aid. However
over the last decade Croatian government bodies and policies have helped promote trauma advocacy.
In particular the current Croatian prime minister has been associated with veteran politics and trauma
advocacy. The article discusses how a feminised therapeutic discourse has helped legitimise veteran
politics and cohere a strong veterans’ constituency following demobilisation. Croatian veteran politics
has been associated with nationalist politics, defence of Croatian veterans accused of war crimes, and
defence veteran pensions and other wide social entitlements. Veterans’ pensions now represent a
significant drain on the Croatian economy. Consequently trauma advocacy, rather than supporting
political opposition, anti-militarism and anti-nationalism it has ironically tended to support more
militarist, nationalist politics.
This paper explores the ways in which different forms of ‘trauma’ are described and interpreted in
Sarah Badcock
'Trauma of the Body and Min in Serbian
Exile'
three key executions in the United States: William Kemmler in New York in 1890, Caryl Chessman in
California in 1960, and Aileen Wuornos in Florida in 2002. All were ‘private’ executions that took
place in designated execution chambers before a limited number of witnesses but the details of the
offenders’ final hours, their appeals, and the details of their deaths were relayed to wider audiences
through media forms, notably newspapers in the Kemmler case and television in that of Wuornos.
The paper examines the ‘trauma’ of the execution event for different audiences: relatives of the
victim, the offender, the witnesses, the executioner and other prison officials.
During the last years of the Tsarist regime in Russia, Siberian exile continued to be used as a
punishment by the State. This paper will explore the ways in which convicts themselves related the
traumas visited on their bodies and their minds, and the responses solicited from the state and from
Siberian society. The mental and physical damage incurred by convicts provided one of the defining
elements of their experience of exile. Attention will also be paid to the narratives of trauma built
around those who voluntarily followed convicts into exile. This group, predominantly women and
children, attracted far greater sympathy and interest from both state officials and local society, and
these innocents’ experiences were narrated by officials and local activists, but not generally by the
followers themselves.