ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 on Aminatta Forna explores representations of multilayered psychological wounding and her critical perspective on the theoretical landscape surrounding such suffering. In all three texts, the characters’ traumatic haunting, compulsive reliving and disintegrated memory attest to trauma which reveals the established trauma category’s insufficient definition of a sudden, singular event with belated symptoms. I argue that her narratives undermine the established idea of a traumatic ‘event’ through portraying political, systemic and familial violence as indiscernible assemblages which cannot be pathologized without disregarding contextual implications. Manipulated testimony and narrative depictions of corrupted institutionalized testimony necessitate a critical discussion of witnessing, which cultural trauma theory regards as a cathartic antidote to post-traumatic haunting. In this chapter, I propose that her narrative engagement with the clinical post-traumatic stress disorder category as well as with discursive and geographical embodiments of the psychiatric discourse reveal its inherent Westocentric hierarchies, transcontextual inadequacy and potential dangers. In doing so, the central argument is that her fictional characters’ responses to extreme violence problematize the clinical notion that suffering necessarily results in diagnosable damage. Within the realm of post-traumatic living, global experiences of extreme violence do not automatically warrant Western diagnostic labels and their political implications.
