Writing Sexual Violence: Words and Silences in Yvonne Veras Under the Tongue.

Martina Kopf
Published in Body, Sexuality, and Gender. Versions and Subversions in African Literatures 1. Edited by Flora VeitWild and Dirk Naguschewski. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2005, 243-253.

I am afraid to listen to Grandmother, to discover her places of silence. I know there is a wide lake in her memory, a lake in which ripples grow to the edges of the sky, a lake in which all our grief is hidden. Her word rests at the bottom of silent lakes but she will find the word and give it to me. (70)1 In the following analysis of Yvonne Veras novel Under the Tongue I focus on its depiction of childhood sexual abuse and some general aspects of the narrative representation of traumatic experiences. Based on the idea that literature as creative medium offers particular possibilities to communicate and transform mechanisms of psychic trauma as they are frequently experienced by victims of violence, I explore the progression of the novel as a type of trauma narrative. The first part of the essay dwells upon the concept of trauma and the antagonism between traumatic experience and narrative memory as a subject of psychoanalytical research. In a second step I discuss the role literary fiction can play as a bridge between individual experience and collective memory. The third part presents a reading of Under the Tongue with respect to the novels ability both to perform the effects of trauma by mimetically reproducing them and to transform them into narrative processes by creative choices. The problem of how to integrate traumatic experiences into individual as well as collective memories constitutes a challenge to various fields of contemporary practice and research. The concept of psychic trauma dates back to the origins of psychoanalysis, when Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, Sndor Ferenczi, and other analysts became aware of the relationship between neurosis and traumatic experiences.2 Its manifestations, definition, and treatment have remained a crucial concern of psychoanalytical theory ever since. The concept of trauma has equally spread into other domains such as history and cultural theory, where it serves as an interpretive pattern for mental, social, and cultural processes linked with the experience of violence and loss on a collective level. Yvonne Vera, Under the Tongue (Harare: Baobab Books & Claremont: David Philip Publishers Ltd, 1996, repr. 1997) All page references in the text are to the second edition. 2 See the first chapter of Judith Herman: Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992) Since the english edition was not available to me all my further references are to the german
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When talking about the relationship between literature and trauma, we have to understand how trauma works. There exists a huge corpus of research on the characteristics and effects of trauma. I can depict only one small aspect here, which is nonetheless a crucial one: its devastating and decomposing effects on language and communication. Please keep in mind that I am speaking of trauma rooted in what the psychoanalyst Frederick calls the interhuman infliction of significant and avoidable pain and suffering.3 In other words, I am speaking of trauma that bears human, in this case sexual, violence at its heart. One of the main characteristics of trauma is its resistance to narrative representation, revealing itself more in a language of symptoms than in a language of words and sentences. Speaking about trauma we find ourselves in the paradoxical situation of speaking about the unspeakable, to look for words for what originally surpassed the signifying power of words. In his essay Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory and Trauma,4 Eric van Alphen shows that already the term traumatic experience proves inadequate. Experience is a discursive process and demands subjectivity. Traumatizing violence however cannot be experienced and therefore cannot be integrated into narrative memory, as it puts the self and its usual functions out of order. Trauma is fundamentally (and not gradually) different from memory because it becomes dissociated from conscious awareness and voluntary control.5 According to Werner Bohlebers depiction of the history of trauma theory we can filter two basic factors from the numerous definitions of trauma present in psychoanalytical thinking today: 1. Traumatic experience always constitutes too much for the self to contain.6 2. It mutes the interior other, the interior good object that mediates between the self and the outside world making confidence and communication possible.7 This overwhelming too much and the loss of the empathic interior other destroy the ability to narrate the trauma. To understand narratives of traumatic experiences we must recognize and understand the absence of language and meaning such an experience originally provokes. An absence that signifies a violent interruption of the interhuman flow of communication, a destruction of ones basic

edition: Judith Herman, Die Narben der Gewalt: Traumatische Erfahrungen verstehen und berwinden (Mnchen: Kindler 1993, repr. 1994), Kapitel 1, 19-51. 3 Quoted in Irene Kacandes, Narrative Witnessing as Memory Work: Reading Gertrud Kolmars A Jewish Mother, in ed. Mieke Bal et al., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover: Dartmouth College et al., 1999): 57. 4 Eric van Alphen, Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, and Trauma, in ed. Bal, Acts of Memory, 24-38 5 Eric van Alphen, Symptoms of Discursivity, 36. 6 Werner Bohleber, Die Entwicklung der Traumatheorie in der Psychoanalyse, Psyche, 54 (September/October 2000): 798. 7 Bohleber, Die Entwicklung der Traumatheorie in der Psychoanalyse, 821-823. 2

confidence in the common grounds of a symbolic order that is at the forefront of any kind of communication. Any kind of traumatizing violence causes what I want to call a soul death. When we talk about childhood sexual abuse we do not always bear this aspect in mind. Usually we associate it only with its sexual dimension, perceiving only the physical, visible part of the drama. The part that is more difficult to discern, also due to the extreme secrecy that usually accompanies family violence, is the violent assault on a childs mental and spiritual growth in the world. This assault is particularly serious as it attacks a symbolic order still under construction, a still flexible and fluid and as such specifically vulnerable system of values and meanings. Furthermore, the perpetrator usually burdens the child with the obligation to keep the secret. The implicit impossibility to tell is crossed by the explicit prohibition to tell. This leads the victim into an involuntary complicity with the perpetrator and overlaps hurt and confusion with feelings of shame and guilt. Since children do not have access to language as an adequate means to transmit what has been done to them, they will experience a loss of confidence in language as something that should be an integrating system of signs and signification at a stage where they are still growing into it. In order to now build a bridge from trauma to literary theory I will refer back to another crucial aspect of trauma. As pointed out, trauma resists narrative representation. At the same time it urges its own narration. In the form of traumatic memory it is characterized by repetition, the impulse to relive an act again and again. Traumatic memory adheres to the subconscious and the body from where it unfolds its catalogue of constrictive and intrusive symptoms, grouped under the medical diagnosis Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD: flashbacks, reenactments, amnesia, dissociation, displacement, numbing, and others. The I that has been overwhelmed by too much fear and excitement at one time will remain prey to the repetitive reenactment of this experience for as long as it is unable to find a way to contain it. Finding this way to contain it seems to lead through the process of narration. In her article Narrative Witnessing as Memory Work, Irene Kacandes integrates a model originally developed in trauma therapy into her reading of the short novel A Jewish Mother by Gertrud Kolmar. Kacandes presents both her reading and Kolmars writing as performances of narrative witnessing, deriving the term from what medical experts have discovered about the unique role of narrative and witnessing in the treatment of psychic trauma victims. She further summarizes this role as follows: [A]s Pierre Janet and numerous researchers and psychoanalysts after him have observed, the relief of traumatic symptoms [...] seems to require the creation of some kind of coherent narrative about the event or events that inflicted the trauma; this process is

sometimes referred to as the translation of traumatic memory into narrative memory.8 A certain kind of memory work is necessary that can result in the production of a healing narrative. Yet simply expressing an experience does not automatically lead to coping with that experience. Especially when sexual violence is concerned, one is easily confronted with the presumption that simply speaking out about what happened will resolve its implications. On the one hand this presumption turns a blind eye to the diversity of possible reactions, shaped by not necessarily supportive interests. On the other hand speaking out can lead to another dead end, when the person who speaks can do so only by following predetermined speech-patterns, effecting a further dissociation through assimilation to preexisting stereotypes. Their words will not transmit personal and contradicting experiences, but will freeze into a confession and can easily be dismissed as such.9 The production of a healing narrative is a more complicated and complex process. Knowledge gained from psychoanalytical work with trauma victims suggests that to effect healing, a circuit of communication must come into being, the components of which are an enunciator [...], a story [...], and an enabler for that story.10 Listening and witnessing play a crucial role in the process of translating into narrative memory what is remembered as wordless hurt, confusion, and numbness. In the absence of a sympathetic listener with whom to construct the story, the trauma continues to surface as symptom-waiting-to-be-narrated.11 The process of narrating itself can be considered as a process of creation and recreation. This consideration leads me to literature as medium of creation and imagination. Like Kacandes, I want to suggest that we transfer aspects of this basic pattern psychoanalysts developed by and for memory work with individual trauma victims to the level of collective memory and collective cultural production. Because, as Kal Tal in her reading of literatures of trauma points out, [o]n a social as well as an individual psychological level, the penalty for repression is repetition.12 My questions would then be as follows: What can the writing and reading of literature contribute in the effort to bring this circuit of communication previously depicted onto a collective level? In which ways can creative writing and reading with their rich potential of imagery, wording, and voicing reconnect a flow of interhuman communication violently interrupted by the impossibility of telling? What does Under the Tongue tell us about these questions? I now want to present my reading of the novel as part of a process of narrative witnessing. Kacandes, Narrative Witnessing as Memory Work, 55. See Hanna Kiper, Sexueller Mibrauch im Diskurs: Eine Reflexion literarischer und pdagogischer Traditionen (Weinheim: Deutscher Studienverlag, 1994): 215-217. 10 Kacandes, Narrative Witnessing as Memory Work, 56. 11 Kacandes, Narrative Witnessing as Memory Work, 56.
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The structure of the novel shows a succession of singular chapters that alternate in a constant rhythm between first and third person narration. The first-person passages lead us into the hidden places of Zhizha, the young protagonist. Close to her narration an auctorial voice unfolds a second narrative trail, following the story of Zhizhas family: the origins of her father Muroyiwa, his path to the township of Umtali where he met Zhizhas mother, Runyararo, and where the three of them lived together. As we learn in the end, Zhizha was born ten years before the ceasefire. The third person narration thus fills in the gaps of Zhizhas narration, it accompanies and backs her and unravels her story from another angle. It mediates between Zhizhas mental language and the reader, introducing a certain distance and adding an outside perspective to the interior drama we are lead to witness. Zhizha, the I of the narration, presents herself as landscape, as an open territory. Her body language is translated into metaphors of water and stone. Her body/soul/spirit landscape is mainly shaped by a river, her tongue, which hides beneath the rock her belly has turned into in fear and defense. A tongue which no longer lives, no longer weeps. It is buried beneath rock. My tongue is a river. I touch my tongue in search of the places of my growing. My tongue is heavy with sleep. I know a stone is buried in my mouth, carried under my tongue. My voice has forgotten me. (1) With her tongue buried, this landscape seems to be an open territory for the uncontrolled coming and going of voices and memories. Zhizhas I moves to and fro in endless shiftings and displacements, the boundaries of her self are indistinct and permeable. At the end of the narrative we learn that she had been literally split open by her father, who entered into her while she slept (105-107). In the opening scene Zhizha does not explicitly say that her father raped her. Her father and the act of sexual abuse are metaphorically represented by her fathers voice, which enters Zhizhas sleep and haunts her, making her own voice hide, disappear. Anne B. Dalton describes a similar narrative figure in her analysis of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Her [the authors] use of the womans ear as the site of the attack is appropriate and evocative because the abused ear is parallel to the silenced mouth of the molested woman and what she cannot tell. Dr. Flint [the protagonist] has the power to speak, but the sexually abused woman cannot name what he is speaking, although she desperately wants to reveal the trauma.13 Right from the beginning, Zhizhas first person narrative is abundant with images that show her tongue as an immobile, frozen, and Kal Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge UP, 1996): 7.
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alienated part of her body. But only several chapters later and from the outside perspective of the third person narrative do we learn that what shows itself as metaphor also literally means that Zhizha does not speak, that she has been muted. If her soul/body/spirit territory is marked by this forced splitting and opening, it nonetheless displays a willing openness to her grandmothers voice and words. Grandmother's voice, which Zhizha recalls and evokes inside her, does not enter or penetrate her. It remembers her, embraces her, follows her (1-2). These terms suggest that this other voice respects and tries to rebuild the boundaries of Zhizhas self. The excessive appearance of voices makes us acknowledge right from the beginning, that whatever happened, it is significant at the level of language. Let me now return to the question of the ways in which the novel and our reading may contribute to collective trauma work. I would like to stress two important aspects: performance and transformation; both means and effects of creative writing. To investigate the performative qualities of the text I recur to one of Kacandes statements:

[W]e can think about narratives of trauma, but also about narratives as trauma. That is to say, literary texts can be about trauma, in the sense that they can depict perpetrations of violence against characters who are traumatized by the violence and then successfully or unsuccessfully witness their trauma. But texts can also perform trauma, in the sense that they can fail to tell the story, by eliding, repeating, and fragmenting components of the story.14 My approach is slightly different in so far as I suggest that through the means of her narrative techniques and composition, Vera relates and simultaneously performs not trauma itself, but how trauma works. Equally, the novel does not fail to tell, but performs the failure to tell. Let me demonstrate this proposal by going into one detail of the text. Judith Herman stresses the fact that chronically traumatized people, as is usually the case with family violence, are often described as passive or helpless. Their environment tends to perceive them as apathetic, quiet, or depressed when in fact they live through vivid and multilayered interior struggles.15 Zhizha, too, seems mute and expressionless to her surroundings. By choosing to unfold the narration from an inside perspective however, leading us into Zhizhas mental language and her ways of perceiving, we as readers become witnesses to an eloquent muteness. A muteness, which in fact is a long and passionate struggle for words, to name what happened and still happens. It is a struggle to remember and to tell what made and makes her mute.
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Anne B. Dalton, The Devil and the Virgin: Writing Sexual Abuse in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in ed. Deirdre Lashgari, Violence, Silence and Anger: Womens Writing as Transgression (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1995): 43. 14 Kacandes, Narrative Witnessing as Memory Work, 56. 15 Herman, Die Narben der Erinnerung, 128-129. 6

Together with Zhizha we find ourselves in a dreamlike state, where we cannot tell imagination from reality, present from past, sleeping from being awake. While reading what happens in her mind we feel the confusion and the urge to find meaning for this confusion. Zhizha searches for a word, which makes remembrance, mourning, and living, flow again. We follow the repeated efforts to make the narration flow and we meet the obstacles and ruptures that incessantly put a halt to the flow, so that another trail must be explored. While moving in Zhizhas body/soul/spirit landscape we get the feeling of flowing on the spot. Maybe at some points in our wandering we feel impatient, have an urge to break through, to finally find a way out of this confusing landscape. Maybe we do not always understand the signification of the images, sounds, and rhythms we encounter. Maybe we cannot explain this ever-threatening deadly silence, just acknowledge its persistence. But whatever irritations we might feel while reading, they are part of the performance of how trauma works. Reading the text as mimesis of trauma and paying attention to the way it elides, repeats and fragments components of the story, leads me to the chapter where we finally witness Zhizhas reconstruction of the abuse (103-110). Just like in Vera's preceding novel Without a Name the act of sexual violence is never named throughout the narrative; words like rape, sexual abuse, or incest that would name the deed are never spelled out. It is obvious that Zhizha herself does not have any such term at her disposal. It would have to come from outside, but her grandmother and her mother also do not seem to have words for it. The impression of flowing on the spot that Zhizhas mental language creates is repeated in the circular structure of her mental narrative: the chapter where we encounter her hidden story for the last time leads us back to its beginning. We leave her right in her remembrance of the incest, which she narrates with one short exception in present, not in past time, just as if it is still happening, as if there is no end to it and no temporal progression from it. This chapter stands apart from the rest of the narrative. Already visually it differs from the preceding text: short sentences, single words, empty spaces between single lines, lacunae. Paragraphs of prose narrative are interrupted and split by paragraphs that consist of torn sentences, short and sharp fragments, flashbacks.

He put mucus here, and blood ... Quiet. He put mucus between my legs ... Quiet. Am I going to die? Quiet. He broke my stomach ... He put blood between my legs. (107)

Fragmented passages like the one quoted alter with moments of coherent narration:

It is like this. He is breathing hard spreading a humid air around my face. A ringing awakening and something enters through my ears, ominous, and it will not depart. It spreads its darkness through me, past me, feigning friendship. [...] He enters through my crying saying very softly sh sh sh. [...] He enters into me, through me. (107) The whole chapter seems to perform the struggle in that it means to translate traumatic into narrative memory. And this performance demands creative skill: the skill to not only talk about incest and the effects and symptoms it produces, but to reproduce these effects on a narrative level. The second aspect I mentioned and want to depict now is the transformative quality of the text. It is true that it can be read as a successful representation of trauma.16 At the same time it is of undeniable beauty. This paradoxical simultaneousness, this balance between beauty and pain17 is not self-evident, in fact it should irritate us. To achieve it the author has to imagine the trauma narrative she is going to tell in a way that fundamentally transforms it. Let me demonstrate this assumption and once again return to the novels use of voices and the motive of listening. In her analysis, Anne Dalton stresses the fact that contemporary theorists on child abuse indicate that molesters consciously choose victims who they feel have the least power to tell.18Among the figures in Under the Tongue this proves true for Zhizha. Yet the narrative composition reverts this powerlessness and makes Zhizhas muteness the driving force for a powerful performance of female storytelling. The first to mention is Zhizhas grandmother, whose voice is predominant throughout the narrative and shapes it. Zhizha is an intense and imaginative listener to her grandmothers own hidden story. In a mutual process of giving and taking words from each other she brings forth her grandmothers power to tell and grows to inherit her voice and words. Once Zhizhas active witnessing has enabled her grandmother to transmit her own story of loss and hurt, which she had been forced to bury a long time ago, a new flow of remembrance is set into motion. This flow leads Zhizha to rebuild an interior image of her mother as the one who taught her to spell.

Mother calls to me in a voice just like mine, she grows from inside of me [...]. I change into me, and I say a e i o u. I remember all my letters. I tell my mother and she repeats after me and I laugh then I repeat after mother who repeats after me and I after her ... I have turned into mother, and she laughs, because she has become me. The Kacandes, Narrative Witnessing as Memory Work, 55. Yvonne Vera in her keynote speech at the conference Versions & Subversions (Humboldt University of Berlin, 1 May 2002). 18 Dalton, The Devil and the Virgin, 50.
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letters flow from me to mother. My mothers voice is resonant and searching. She says we live with our voices rich with remembrance. We live with words. (81-82) This passage maybe belongs to the most beautiful parts of the book: Mother and daughter in front of a mirror, repeating after one another, letting speech and transmission joyously flow between each other in an endless game of shifts and exchanges. Finally, the writer of the story strengthens Zhizhas narration. She shows herself a sympathetic listener to the hidden voice of a girl, who grows into too much avoidable and significant pain and suffering. And she empowers this voice and other hidden voices who have similar stories to tell by writing what she witnesses and communicating it to an outside public. This leads us back to the collective level, where this empowerment is reenacted with each sympathetic reading of the story. With the help of trauma theory I have attempted to depict some of the paradoxes creative writing of sexual violence has to encounter and demonstrate the ways Vera integrates these into the narrative composition of Under the Tongue. While telling the story of a sexually abused girl, the novel simultaneously performs the failing, the impossibility of telling. At the same time it unfolds complex processes of witnessing, listening, and remembering in which our reading actively participates. Apart from their function of allowing suppressed memories flow again, these mutual processes also transmit the power and beauty of transmission itself.19 By recreating these flows of transmission on a narrative level, Vera transforms the isolating, stumbling, and hardly understandable language of traumatic memory into the strength of narrative memory that can be shared.

Works Cited van Alphen, Eric. Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, and Trauma, in ed. Bal, Mieke et al. Acts of Memory, (24-38). Bal, Mieke et al., eds. Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover: Dartmouth College et al., 1999). Bohleber, Werner. Die Entwicklung der Traumatheorie in der Psychoanalyse, Psyche, 54, (September/October 2000) (797-839). Dalton, Anne B. The Devil and the Virgin: Writing Sexual Abuse in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in ed. Lashgari, Deirdre Violence, Silence and Anger: Womens Writing as Transgression (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1995) (38-61). Herman, Judith. Die Narben der Gewalt: Traumatische Erfahrungen verstehen und berwinden (Mnchen: Kindler, 1994/1993), German edition of Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992). See also Minh-has concept of storytelling where she says: What is transmitted from generation to generation is not only the stories, but the very power of transmission. Trinh Thi Minh-ha, Grandmas Story, in Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1989): 134. 9
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Kacandes, Irene. Narrative Witnessing as Memory Work: Reading Gertrud Kolmars A Jewish Mother, in ed. Bal, Mieke et al. Acts of Memory (55-71). Kiper, Hanna. Sexueller Mibrauch im Diskurs: Eine Reflexion literarischer und pdagogischer Traditionen (Weinheim: Deutscher Studienverlag, 1994). Minh-ha, Trinh Thi, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1989). Tal, Kal. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge UP, 1996). Vera, Yvonne. Under the Tongue (Harare: Baobab Books & Claremont: David Philip Publishers Ltd, 1997/1996).

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