The Performance of Trauma in Fiction
Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash
Priyanka Chakrabarty dives into examples of contemporary South Asian literature to explore the blurred line between trauma and ‘trauma porn’. Can fiction account for lived experiences and realities of trauma without making the plot performative?
In her 2014 TEDx talk at Sydney, disability activist Stella Young coined the term inspiration porn. Her chief purpose was to counter the overarching narrative that differently abled people exist to inspire and motivate the able-bodied.
This form of objectification—when one group of people are spotlighted for the benefit of another—isn’t limited to the differently abled. An extension of inspiration porn is “trauma porn” where a historically-marginalised group is reduced to the wounds caused by physical, emotional, or intergenerational injury.
This reductionist aspect of making trauma as a totalising identity is exploitative at its core. The depiction of trauma in this case is with the specific intent for the benefit of the privileged audience, and to evoke their sympathy by a one-dimensional portrayal of traumatic experiences.
From these theoretical frameworks of trauma theory, we understand that traumatic experiences are often shrouded in the unknown, even when language attempts to capture them. It is something an individual, a society, and even a nation carries.
How do we understand the blurred line between trauma and trauma porn?
Trauma narratives in South Asian literature took centre stage post Partition in 1947. Writers started to write and document the brutal realities of refugees from both sides of the border. In her 1950 novel Pinjar by Amrita Pritam—translated in English as The Skeleton and the Man by Khushwant Singh—the protagonist Puro is abducted and married to Rashid. Puro is a symbol of the emotional and psychological trauma and alienation that women endured due to the larger political climate of Partition. Puro’s family denies to accept her, so she chooses the marriage with Rashid rather than being rehabilitated to India. Thus, she exercises a convoluted sense of agency in this choiceless scenario. This novel captures the pulse of Partition which divided two nations—and the women of both the nations carried its scars.
Nearly four decades later, Urvashi Butalia’s 1998 book The Other Side of Silence documented the oral stories of partition survivors. Butalia recounts that her notion of liberating the women survivors of sexual assault (faced during migration as a result of Partition), was mistaken because some of the women didn’t want to talk about it. The survivors were not silenced, but rather, chose silence as a form of protection against patriarchal norms. This acceptance by Butalia points to an important aspect in trauma narrative that in writing about trauma there is no linear narrative. A trauma narrative, then, needs to hold the story and silence on the same plain, both equally crucial to the telling of trauma narratives.
In contemporary South Asian fiction that centres trauma narratives, there is a pattern of linear storytelling which follows a fixed plot. It begins with silence surrounding stories, which leads to uncovering of a story and the subsequent breaking of silence, which leads to liberation and a post-trauma phase where a survivor dreams of a fresh start. This linear form of storytelling does not find resonance in leading works of trauma theory. In his seminal book on psychological trauma Body Keeps the Score, author and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk writes, “Even years later traumatized people often have enormous difficulty telling other people what has happened to them.” In this book, Kolk claims that trauma is embodied in a person.
This claim finds resonance in My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem. Menakem writes, “The body is where we live. It’s where we fear, hope, and react… When something happens to the body that is too much, too fast, or too soon, it overwhelms the body and can create trauma.” From these theoretical frameworks of trauma theory, we understand that traumatic experiences are often shrouded in the unknown, even when language attempts to capture them. It is something an individual, a society, and even a nation carries. There are ways to heal, but there is no liberation or a closure where a person is over their traumatic past.
When do trauma narratives in fiction then become trauma porn? In A Mirror Made of Rain by Naheed Phiroze Patel, the protagonist Noomi is seething in pent- up anger. In a rare moment of self-reflection, she asks herself, “Why was I so angry then?” We have read this before, not the same plot, but the skeletal structure of what held the book together. Similarly, Girl in White Cotton by Avni Doshi has the protagonist Antara brimming with anger directed towards her mother. Both the novels follow a similar arc of a trauma plot; the protagonist is nursing a story close to their heart, brooding, the arc of the character marked by silence followed by the display of some form of extreme emotion: anger, resentment, and finally, there comes a climactic moment where the complete tale is spilled out. This is a tale specifically set in the past—an incident or a series of incidents—which has become a totalising identity of the protagonist, and the reader is suffocated with this identity.
These writings are not isolated in having this bare structure where the protagonist is under the spell of a singular emotion throughout the book, an emotion so strong that it is hard to imagine anything beyond the one-dimensional character. The trauma is reduced to plot points, where the character is the sum total of their symptoms. As long as their wounds are provoked the stories are believed. The result is a flattened narrative which reduces characters to their wounds.
In Body Myth by Rhea Mukherjee, the protagonist Meera is asking herself, “ask yourself, don’t you carry pieces of your past with you every day? It manifests as fear when standing in a small elevator and sometimes it holds your tongue and warns it into submission. But other parts, they come in the form of memory, mostly for no rhyme or reason”. Mukherjee sums up another plot point in the trauma plot: the flashback. In a trauma narrative, the present is almost non-existent and when it does exist it only serves as a vehicle to transition into the past.
In Illuminated by Anindita Ghose the novel opens with Sashi Mullick doing the cleaning herself, much like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Slowly, the narrative takes the readers into the past and her life till then is shown as a flashback. A Mirror Made of Rain ends with Noomi married, and with a child, with her suffering seemingly behind her looking at a fresh start. The flashback technique is used as a method of catharsis, a symbolic amalgamation of past and present, reiterating the notion that telling of trauma leads to liberation. The crucial aspect of this plot point is the notion that suffering can be neatly summed up in new beginnings and healing can be absolute like the utopia imagined in The Illuminated. Tired of the gendered world and the emotional wound it inflicts, the characters have the luxury of escaping into a utopia. This plot insists that, after trauma, there is always a post-trauma, a new beginning and the notion that the survivors can live their life as if the traumatic events haven’t occurred at all.
A novel with an emotional trauma plot at its centre caters to the white gaze of the global North, where readers can participate in a certain reality of a Third World country without having to challenge their comfortable position as the coloniser.
In Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, the protagonist Nazneen migrates from a village in Bangladesh to Brick Lane in London after marrying her husband Chanu. Ali charts the journey of Nazneen from the claustrophobia of being trapped in a marriage with an older man. Slowly, she transforms from being a submissive wife to an independent woman. The novel ends with Nazneen skating on an ice rink clad in a saree, the symbolic blending of the East and the West. The novel was supposed to be profound, except this trauma plot felt familiar? The transition from overcoming trauma to a sense of freedom and finding her voice, leaving behind a past because once the traumatic events been recounted it loses all redemptive value. The fetishisation of trauma—much like inspiration porn—is a performance of trauma, one group of people set on stage with their stories delivered for the consumption of another group.
In an essay titled I’m Indian. Can I Write Black Characters? Indian-American writer Thrity Urmigar enumerates upon the implicit expectation the audience has from diaspora writers’ about writing books and characters that reflect a certain reality about being Indian or featuring Indian characters. Hence, the primary consumer of trauma plot novel is a person of white descent, somewhere in the global North, demanding to read narratives from the Third World. A novel with an emotional trauma plot at its centre caters to the white gaze of the global North, where readers can participate in a certain reality of a Third World country without having to challenge their comfortable position as the coloniser.
If the trauma plot had to be done differently, how would it look? Anuk Arudpragasam in A Passage North subverts the idea of a neat closure in a trauma-based narrative, holding the idea that trauma survivors—whether through war, politics, or from their own families—are individuals bearing a wound, and there are many dimensions of the wound that remain unknown. For instance, the protagonist Krishan, while attending the funeral of his grandmother’s caretaker Rani, realises that “people also carried more clandestine trajectories in their bodies, their origins often unknown and accidental”. Rani is not just a trauma survivor, but a living breathing human being who is capable of forming human relations despite the survival of trauma.
Another instance of subversion is in Women, Dreaming by Salma, translated to English by Meena Kandasamy. Salma challenges the flashback technique prevalent in trauma narratives. This narrative is deeply rooted in the present, and the past makes an appearance only when it’s crucial to the story. Salma doesn’t indulge her reader with neat resolution, and the novel ends at an abrupt moment, making the readers momentarily uncomfortable with the uncertainty that her character faces.
Is the role of fiction to offer neat and linear narratives of suffering? A linear narrative keeps the audience at a distance, because the author takes the authoritative position of telling the story and providing the resolution. The reader merely has to enter the world of the text and they are liberated through the reading without ever having to participate in the suffering or the uncertainty. The gaze of an audience determines the trajectory of a trauma narrative.
However, through these writings of suffering, illness, and surviving traumatic events, there is an acknowledgement of the unknown that exists in suffering. The root cause of suffering cannot be reached by dissecting the past; sometimes, suffering has no roots. Can fiction be so bold to hold on to this discomfort, this uncertainty?
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Priyanka Chakarabarty is a neuroqueer person and law student based in Bangalore. She aspires to be a human rights lawyer. An avid reader of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, she has been writing in the genre of creative non-fiction. She is a bookstgrammer and regularly documents her reading journey on Instagram: @exisitingquietly.
