Introduction

This chapter contributes to the decolonisation of trauma studies and to break the stranglehold that psychoanalysis has had on the western understanding of trauma. This is because in seeing trauma as an event with a definite beginning and end and conceiving of violence as an unable to be disclosed, personal pain has political consequences that mitigate against shared responsibility and collective healing. This trajectory of thought broadly responds to the crisis that trauma presents for representational knowledge with the western notion that it is the individual or psychic integrity/memory that is flawed when accuracy and direct representation of trauma do not/cannot occur. The violence and trauma of war and conflict are often represented in a non-fictional form in an effort to pursue historical accuracy. As a result, there are many representations of war that show graphic details of experiences of suffering.