Literary witnessing: Working through trauma in Toni Morrison, Nuruddin Farah, Wilson Harris, and Chang-Rae Lee

This dissertation argues that careful analysis of texts that center on traumatic events will almost always reveal embedded coping strategies. Specifically, the texts examined here---Toni Morrison's Beloved , Nuruddin Farah's Maps, Wilson Harris's Jonestown, and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker---demonstrate how literary representation becomes an act of witness. These texts may adumbrate alternate methods of working through as well. As "aesthetic witness," they promote/initiate the overcoming of trauma. A common element among these narratives is the trauma of being "Other": each book dramatizes an authorial and communal experience of racism that fundamentally denies empathy. Without empathy, the survivors have no audience to listen to their trauma. In a way, literature provides the ears to hear traumatic stories and to work through psychic damage.;Toni Morrison's Beloved represents the trauma of Sethe and Paul D through "rememory." Through this device, the author creates a text that initiates the healing process. Beloved, then, revolves around four interrelated "sites of healing": the Clearing, the house, Beloved herself, and the novel---a story disjointed and fractured it mirrors psychological pain and reassembly. By the novel's end, Morrison promises normalcy for her characters and the community.;In his novel Maps, Nuruddin Farah shows the effects that exile and war cause on the psyche. Farah uses his text to overcome his own personal experience with exile and separation. Through Askar, his main character, Farah creates a voice to represent his own struggles as well as the communal pains of Somalia. Eventually Askar comes to understand his identity and the complicated relationship between his homeland and the people he left behind.;Wilson Harris's Jonestown presents a cross-cultural aesthetic that promotes individual and collective healing. Harris argues that trans-historical traumas can be worked through by the imaginative power to capture and recreate lost or latent experience. Indeed, Harris's protagonist Bone addresses his feelings of guilt over colonization and the Jonestown massacre.;Chang-rae Lee in his novel Native Speaker demonstrates that Asian American identity formation can be traumatic. His protagonist Henry Park seems unable to understand or mourn for his lost identity, which seems to be accented by his son's untimely accidental death. In the end, Park comes to grieve and erect a promise for future immigrant Americans struggling for identity and meaning.