M.Karthick
Neha
Soman
Complex
Trauma: A Mnemonic Device to Re-experience Cultural Genealogy and
Reconciliation. A Study through Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping and Narrow Road to the Deep North
Post Traumatic Growth
has been researched in a hugely diverse set of traumatic events from divorce
and death to natural disasters or terrorist attacks. The literature on PTG
shows that even though the causes of PTG are vast and the benefits reported
fall into three categories.
·
Feeling
stronger and finding hidden abilities and strengths
·
Good
relationships are strengthened
·
Priorities
and philosophies concerning the present day are altered
Trauma
is no more private but it indicates socio – cultural importance. Not all
experiences regulate overwhelming emotions and lead to trauma related disorder.
Even the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can influence an individual to arouse
his cultural and ethnical identity. The three selected novels of Australian
writer Richard Flanagan elucidate the capability of human beings to overcome
trauma inflicted on them and regulate a sense of meaning from what they have
experienced. A sense of belonging is developed both personally and culturally
and characters re-experience their cultural genealogy by converting PTDS (Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder) to PTG (Post Traumatic Growth).
The
sense of genealogy presents an alternative to usual theories of trauma which
focus on individual pathology. It presents a way to the lineage. Traumatic
realism allows for a re-examination of how the margins of the historical can be
inscribed within the boarder of social and historical trauma. Trauma can no
longer be considered as a taunting feeling that can destroy even the present
and future of an individual. It gives the power to draw new patterns of the
meaning making process. Going through a traumatic experience will definitely
make an impact of psychological shock and rather than in taking it as a
negative drive, the attributes of trauma can be used for re-experiencing
identity.
Every
day we hear grim and grimmer news that suggests we are passing through the
winter of the world. Everywhere man is tormented, the globe reels from
multitudes of suffering and horror, and, worst, we no longer know with confidence
what our answer might be. And yet we understand that the time approaches when
an answer must be made or a terrible reckoning will be ours. The novels of
Australian writer Richard Flagan declare the centrality and necessity of
writing about Australian displacement.
In
a debut novel from Tasmania, Death of a River Guide, a dying man is haunted by
a swirl of ancestral secrets. Protagonist Alijaz’s ancestral secrets –
miscegenation, convicts in the family and get a legacy of violence are of
course the secrets of Tasmanian history. In the 19th century, the
island was settled by criminals, often against their will, becoming home to the
most brutal and desolate prison in the British Empire. The island’s Aborigines
were hunted, herded onto reservations and by the 1850’s all but eradicated.
Thus their past is haunted and traumatic. Giving a narrator the freedom to beam
up stories from anywhere in time and space is a potent and liberating device
for an artist with a strong vision and tight focus. The book struggles to
capture Tasmania on the page and every detail is working to that end. Granted
the legendary ability of drowning men to see their life flash in front of them,
Ajiaz envisions his life, the lives of his parents and also of his ancestors. The story is told in
flashbacks. The visions that he gets comprise a richly layered narrative that
leaps among such events and experiences as Alijaz,s own birth, his troubled
youth and Flagan mixes these heady materials skillfully, focusing on
illustrations of the inherited rootlessness and restlessness that have shaped
the protagonist. And the narrative is enlivened by such magical – realist
particulars as a funeral at which the crucified Christ appears to bleed, and
the spectacle of a bedspread permanently stained by a woman’s tears.
The
second novel, Sound of One Hand Clapping is about an unhappy woman, Sonja Buloh
who returns to remotest Tasmania to revisit scenes of her tortured childhood
and to have a baby. Much of Flagan’s story is in flashback, being comprised of
the tale, set in 1954, of Sonja’s father Bojan and his wife Maria. Bojan and
Maria are immigrants Slovenians who immigrated to Australia so that Maria could
work on backcountry hydroelectric projects, then touted as the great precursor
to prosperity much as such project were in the American West. Maria however is
bored and unsatisfied with her life and wanders off to her death in blizzard,
leaving Bojan to raise Sonja alone. He is a sentimental man who loves to work
with wood, but he is also afflicted by his memories of war and by his eternal
grieving for Maria. Upon her return, nevertheless, daughter and father become
reconciled; it is almost as if Sonja is the reappeared Maria, and her baby
Sonja’s own infant self itself. Everyone is given another chance. Even the land
reverts to its primitive state, the dam breaking at last in concert with these
revitalized lives, as if its violation of nature had caused human woes, too.
In
the third novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Flanagan juxtaposes horror
and love in a contrast that is so stark it can leave a reader breathless. From
the opening, the novel jumps from past to present, from moment to moment,
country to country with the ease of memory. A sophisticated form that asks
attention from the reader, for if they are not careful, like memory, the prose
could blur together. As the story progresses it settles, and this fluidity with
chronology allows for the juxtapositions that give the novel its power. The telling
of Dorrigo Evans, the main character, as a doctor in a prisoner of war camp on
the line, is disturbing and vivid. In opposition to its hellish setting, much
of the novel unfolds as a love story of epic, Grecian proportions, set in
beachside Adelaide. The story does turn on the power of a poem or a letter and
this power of language is returned with a rhythm that is poetic. At moments
throughout the story, books and poems become talisman. They hold a power over
life and death. It also provides a link between Australians and the Japanese in
a story that considering the subject matter, could easily have fallen into the
realm of black and white, good and bad.
These
three novels hold the perfect characteristics of displacement and the followed
trauma. But the characters survive from
their taunting past because they tried to change their post traumatic stress to
post traumatic growth. Everyone has a second chance. But it is important to
understand and analyze how to turn the negative into positive to build up a
perfect future.
