As previously argued in my prior posts, a traumatic moment has the capability to stay with the traumatized individual, haunting, shaping, and effecting them for the rest of their life. There are certain moments that have an everlasting effect on us, they shape and form our identity and influence who we will ultimately be. I will prove and argue this through the case study of the character Beli.
I will argue that the traumatic moment where Beli is taken into the cane field and horrifically beaten remains with her for the remainder of her life, a memory that shaped her into the type of mother she is to her children, Lola and Oscar. Yunior, the narrator, states in reference to Beli’s assault: All that can be said is that it was the end of language, the end of hope. It was the sort of beating that breaks people, breaks them utterly. (Díaz 147) This is a beautiful description of the power of a traumatic moment. Here, the narrator is describing a “point of no return” moment, a moment where nothing again will ever be the same. In many ways, Beli was broken by this brutal beating, the traumatic event itself, triggering a reorganization of her brain, a re-mapping of sorts, that opened the gateway to personal haunting. Beli is haunted by her personal trauma, and it is for this reason that she treats Lola and Oscar in the way that she does. Beli is characterized by the narrator as the kind of mother “who makes you doubt, yourself, who would wipe you out if you let her” (Díaz 56). Beli shows the toughest of love to her children, especially to Lola. As a mother, she is portrayed to be the opposite of nurturing. Instead, she is characterized by her insensitive and blunt nature. I will argue that her traumatic past directly shaped her approach to motherhood. Beli acts in the ways that she does because deep down she truly believes her approach is in the best interest of her children, she wants to help them form hard exterior to protect from rest of the world, the same world that stripped her of her hope entirely. Yes, Beli is haunted and shaped the specific traumatic memory, but also, she herself has passed down her own personal trauma to her children. Beli is seen as a haunting force to Oscar and Lola, her children totally fear her. We see the effects of generational trauma in how the traumatic event itself, repeats and manifests itself in the life of Oscar. Oscar too is horrifically beaten in the cane field and after making it out alive once, is taken back to the field and shot down. The fact that both mother and son are taken and beaten in the cane field is so incredibly significant of the haunting nature of the trauma, specifically of the traumatic moment.
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In his book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz demonstrates, through the character of Oscar, several of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s main points found in his essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).”
Oscar is characterized by his love of science-fiction and gaming. The narrator makes it clear in the beginning of the novel that for our protagonist, high school was a “source of endless anguish” for “a fat sci-fi-reading nerd like Oscar” (Díaz 19). Oscar is an outsider, the neighborhood pariguayo, lacking all the power of your typical Dominican male that he should have been entitled to. The narrator describes Oscar: Couldn’t play sports for shit… Had no knack for music or business or dance, no hustle, no rap, no G. And most damning of all: no looks. (Díaz 20) Oscar is described through what he lacks, characterized by his insufficiencies and short-comings. Because of this, Oscar is seen as a mutation, a monster himself. He stands as a representation of the abnormal. To others, he is monstrous. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues in his essay that “The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read…the monster signifies something other than itself (Cohen 4).” The monstrosity of Oscar reveals and unpacks the cultural construct of the Dominican male. Through the description of Oscars lack of masculine qualities and attributes, we learn which characteristics of the Dominican male that are valued. It becomes clear to us which are the attributes that earn an individual worth in society, specifically earn the Dominican male worth in society. Oscar stands in opposition to this cultural construct of who and what a Dominican male should be, and for this reason, he himself is monstrous. Oscar is characterized by the narrator as an abnormality, a monstrous mutation, as seen through his lack of traditional Dominican male traits, as well as by his strange fixation with his sci-fi and supernatural interests. The narrator states: You couldn’t have torn him away from any more of TV show of cartoon where there were monsters or spaceships or mutants of doomsday devices or destinies or magic of evil villains. (Díaz 21) Oscars fixation on the mutated and unnatural goes to further demonstrates Cohen’s monster theory. In his essay, Cohen argues that we stand beside the monster, that the monster is the “abjected fragment that enables the formation of all kinds of identities –personal, national, cultural, economic, sexual, psychological, universal…A product of a multitude of morphogeneses” (Cohen 19-20) After drawing parallels between Cohen’s essay and the narrator’s characterization of Oscar, I came to the conclusion that Oscar’s fascination and fixation with all things sci-fi, mutated, and monstrous is rooted in the perception that he has of himself. The treatment Oscar has received from others, the labels and names that have been placed on him, his short-comings and lack-ofs, have become his identity. It is for this reason he more closely relates and identifies with the supernatural and abnormal mutations and monsters. His fixation and fascination with the monstrous and unreal is a projection of his identity. For my American Horror Story midterm paper, I want to research and write about how the traumatic memories of individuals become living manifestations of hauntings. In order to do this, I will have to pull from multiple texts that we have read and analyzed in the course thus far, Beloved being my main source. I will argue that these traumatic memories that haunt us shape and form our identities. I will use the essay The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma by Van der Kolk and Van der Hart to help in supporting my argument. I will use their essay, in combination with Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sharon Patricia Holland’s “Bukulu Discourse: Bodies Made “Flesh” in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” to further argue the effects of a traumatic past.
The works I have chosen to utilize will provide evidence for my larger argument, detailing how when traumatic experiences are left unprocessed or dissociated, they can return intrusively as hauntings. These haunting can be encoded in our memory as ghosts. Van der Kolk and Van der Hart argue that our traumatic memories must be integrated with our existing mental schemes and be transformed into narrative language in order to heal. We see Morrison do this in Beloved, when she takes the traumatic past of an entire culture and represents it in narrative language. In doing this, she is able to portray a traumatic past as a haunting through her work of literature. I will argue that in order to attempt put to rest the hauntings and ghosts of a traumatic past, individuals must return to the traumatic memory to process and complete it. I will use the hauntings of Sethe and Paul D to illustrate the effects when individuals fail to return to these traumatic memories, when they choose to neglect and isolate their past traumas instead of confronting them head-on. Sharon Patricia Holland’s “Bukulu Discourse: Bodies Made “Flesh” in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” will assist me in illustrating the traumatic past of slavery and how this past has come back as a manifestation of trauma as illustrated by the character of Beloved herself. I will highlight Holland’s point that Morrison, through the character of Beloved, allows words to become flesh. I will argue that in the same way, she allows a haunting and traumatic past to become flesh as well. I will also capitalized on her argument that Beloved stands for every African woman whose story will never be told. This will tie in beautifully with my earlier point that it is healing and therapeutic for traumatic memories to be transformed in narrative language. In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison performs horrors and hauntings through figures of speech such as personification, metaphor, and alliteration. For the purposes of this blog post, I am going to concentrate on Morrison’s use of metaphor to represent the novel’s larger concern with the issues of memory, trauma, and slavery. Morrison uses the comparison of Paul D and the tobacco tin to illustrate not only the traumatic history of slavery, but the effects and hauntings of a personal past that has yet to be processed or come to terms with. Morrison writes: It was some time before he could put Alfred, Georgia, Sixo, schoolteacher, Halle, his brothers, Sethe, Mister, the taste of iron, the sight of butter, the smell of hickory, note book paper, one by one, into the tobacco tin lodged in his chest. By the time he got to 124 nothing in this world could pry it open. (Morrison 133) This beautifully written passage describes in metaphor the traumatic past of slavery and abuse that Paul D has lived through and stored up in his memory. The tobacco tin is used to illustrate how Paul D has compartmentalized his horrific and disturbing past in an attempt to move on in pursuit of a new future. Unfortunately, his past is unforgettable, despite Paul D’s efforts to contain his memories of past trauma, he is unable to put them to rest. His traumatic past continues to haunt him, his memories may be compressed, but they are still ever-present. Through this passage, Morison is describing the consequences of the buildup of unprocessed traumatic memory. The tobacco tin, “lodged in his chest,” replaces Paul D's heart, something characteristically warm and life-giving becomes dead and cold. The heart is the center of human life, our beating pulse reminds us that we are alive, it reminds us who we are. Morrison’s metaphor suggests that the traumatic memories of Paul D’s past have become the center of his life, his past trauma pulsing through his veins and circulating each aspect of his life. The tin is described as sealed and fastened, “nothing in this world could pry it open” (Morrison 133). Often, with unprocessed traumatic memories, our brain has the tendency to store them in a less accessible, “safe,” parts of our brains. Of course, these memories can resurface when triggered. The danger of these unprocessed memories is that we are unable to control when or where they may reemerge. This is where the idea of trauma and haunting intertwine. With her metaphor, Morrison shows how unprocessed traumatic memories can become our hauntings. Collective and individual traumatic memories associated with slavery prove to be the haunting force of the novel, constantly present not only in the minds of the various characters but in the minds of the readers as well. In conclusion, Morrison, through the use of figures of speech, specifically the metaphor, illuminates the reality of living with, and being haunted by, a traumatized past as a result of slavery. Morrison intentionally chose the metaphor of the tobacco tin, its production was so closely associated with, and dependent on, slave labor. The tin itself on a collective level is representative of the way American economy and society centered around slavery. On a personal level, the tin represents Paul D’s traumatic memories and how they became the center of his own life, proving how a traumatized past becomes a force of haunting. Works Cited Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage, 2016. |
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