Decolonizing Trauma Studies: The Recognition-Solidarity Nexus in Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them

The project builds on the work of postcolonial critics, such as Stef Craps, who have critiqued the traditional trauma theory for imposing a Western understanding of trauma on other cultures, privileging the individual manifestation of trauma, as well as restricting the trauma canon to Euro-American contexts. Craps argues that the trauma theory of the 1990s, with its firm grounding in Freudian psychoanalysis and poststructuralist deconstruction, should be radically revised. He contends that the traumas of non-Western or minority groups must be acknowledged ‘on their own terms’ and ‘for their own sake’ (Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds 19). Should trauma theory refuse to decolonize, Craps warns, it may risk ‘assisting in the perpetuation of the very beliefs, practices, and structures that maintain existing injustices and inequalities’ that are contrary to the field’s promise of promoting cross-cultural solidarity (2).

This article agrees with Craps that trauma theory should be ‘reshaped, resituated, and redirected so as to foster attunement to previously unheard suffering’ (37). I would add, though, that its areas of analysis should equally be extended by broadening the postcolonial trauma canon. Rather than a continued obsession with colonial trauma, most exemplified in the writing-back model, Akpan foregrounds the necessity for trauma critics to pay attention to the ways postcolonial writers engage with the plurality of traumatic encounters in the postcolony. I position Akpan’s text as representative of the current move within postcolonial studies to decentre the West as a constant reference point in the study of non-Western societies (Mwangi, Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality 2009; Schulze-Engler, ‘When Remembering Back is Not Enough: Provincializing Europe in World War II Novels from India and New Zealand’ 2018). Most importantly, the text is significant for how it portrays everyday forms of suffering that do not necessarily conform to the traditional model of trauma, thus challenging the universalist tendencies of the Western trauma model.

Consequently, the article uses the last three stories in the collection to articulate the recognition-solidarity nexus as an important perspective for understanding traumatic experiences in postcolonial Africa. My discussion of Akpan’s text will show that individuals caught up in catastrophic events walk through and survive by recognizing their fellow victims, and establishing cross-cultural solidarity with them. When this recognition fails, the individual can be ‘doubly traumatized’ or risk not surviving the catastrophic event. While this affirms the claim that trauma can create solidarity, it then shows that, by requesting recognition, traumatized victims have moved beyond their individual experiences to align their suffering with an/other, thus underscoring the centrality of the collective – as against the individual – in postcolonial trauma studies. As texts bearing witness to postcolonial violence in Africa, Akpan’s stories invite the reader to recognize the sufferings of the other, and how such recognition leads to cross-cultural solidarity. This is what I wish to explore here, as the recognition-solidarity nexus of working through trauma. Significantly, our articulation of this nexus moves the theorization of trauma from the emphasis on the Freudian death drive canonized in trauma discourse to a vision of life through survival and healing in the aftermath of traumatic wounding. The nexus also shows how trauma in the postcolonial context is inherently collective. As Cajetan Iheka surmised, ‘even when trauma is apprehended in individual terms, it is often done in relation to the collective or community’ (‘Ecologies of Oil and Trauma of the Future in Curse of the Black Gold’ 70).

The centrality of this nexus in working through trauma is explicit in the short stories under study from Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them. The text is a collection of five short stories about postcolonial disillusionment and conflict in Africa. The first story in the collection, ‘An Ex-Mas Feast’ deals with a family’s struggle to survive crunching poverty that leads to the disintegration of the family. It subscribes to the claim that trauma must not necessarily emanate from a single catastrophic event, but from the daily struggle to survive in many parts of the world where not just the future but even the present looks bleak. It is this concern with poverty and survival that connects ‘An Ex-Mas Feast’ with the second story in the collection, ‘Fattening for Gabon’, which deals with the attempt to survive not just poverty but the AIDS epidemic as well. The last three stories in the collection – ‘What Language is That?’, ‘Luxurious Hearses’, and ‘My Parents’ Bedroom’ – however, deal with politico-religious conflicts in post-independent African countries and their aftermaths. Drawing from the historical experiences of Kenya, Benin, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Rwanda, the five stories invite a critical engagement with the dysfunctions in the postcolonial African nation-states and the various socio-political problems on the continent.

In titling the collection Say You’re One of Them, drawn from Maman’s instruction to Monique in ‘My Parents’ Bedroom’, Akpan insists that readers recognize not only how they are implicated in these characters’ trauma, but that they also identify with the characters in their quest for survival. It is this recognition of our shared humanity that will lead to the new egalitarian African societies that Akpan envisages. This cross-cultural empathy might not just result in cross-cultural solidary but may equally lead to political actions against the systems that enable traumatic wounding to persist on the continent.

Through my reading of Akpan’s text, I extend the field’s ethical aspiration by arguing that the recognition-solidarity nexus showcases instances of cross-cultural engagement. I opine that the nexus also places a responsibility on the reader by demanding a sympathetic engagement with the trauma victims. As Dalley posits, ‘postcolonial literature is replete with works that represent traumatic suffering, inviting readers to recognize characters’ pains, and – perhaps – to use that recognition as the basis for cross-cultural, transnational, or global solidarity’ (Dalley 371, original emphasis). The reader of Akpan’s text, therefore, is not passive, but an active witness to the pains and sufferings of these victims.

First published in the United States in 2008, ‘Luxurious Hearses’ represents the perennial ethno-religious conflict in post-independent Nigeria, particularly the Kaduna Sharia crisis of February 2000, and the counterprotest in southern Nigeria. The crisis led to ethno-religious killings, the displacement of thousands of people, and protests in various parts of the country (Suhr-Sytsma, ‘Forms of Interreligious Encounter in Contemporary Nigerian Fiction’ 677). In ‘Luxurious Hearses’, we see traumatized victims pour into the bus park on the outskirts of Lupa. These are primarily southern Christian Nigerians being driven away from the predominantly Islamic northern Nigeria. Their intention at the bus terminal is to go home to the south. This situates the mental turmoil of these displaced individuals as those who have accepted the fictional northern city of Khamfi as a home struggle to understand their new reality. This is even worse for Jubril, who has imbibed the attitude, religion, and even accent of the group he is fleeing from – the place that he has long considered his home – so that identifying with this crowd at Lupa Motor Park becomes very difficult, if not impossible, for him. However, Jubril’s survival depends on how much he can identify with this new group and immerse himself into this new community of Southerners vis-à-vis Christians from his natal home. It is here that we see the complication involved in recognition because forming a new community after traumatic events, which Craps and Buelens argue can be enhanced by trauma, depends on forming a shared identity or at least recognizing each other’s identity.

The most potent form of community formation through the creation of a shared identity, as seen in Akpan’s collection, occurs in ‘Luxurious Hearses’, where the narrative concretizes Hamish Dalley’s argument that by creating the link across cultures, trauma helps to bridge the gaps between cultures, thereby enabling visions of cross-cultural solidarity and justice to emerge from the recognition of pain (374). As the story unfolds, one sees that Akpan’s text is investing in creating visions of ethno-religious encounters in the face of this crisis. While the conflict rages, a Muslim leader, Mallam Abdullahi, and his family entrust themselves with protecting the Christians caught up in this rage by welcoming them into his house where his ‘sacred mat’ creates a new form of community of different people united by suffering. It is this mat which shelters them, hiding their presence in the house. This significantly undermines ‘perceptions of northern Nigeria as a cultural or religious monolith’ (Suhr-Sytsma 672) – a perception that has turned Khamfi into the ‘corpse capital of the world’ (Akpan 235) – as religious fundamentalists go about slitting each other’s throat, while in Mallam Abdullahi’s house are these same diverse groups, working together for survival. Their shared fate as hunted individuals unites them, shattering their hitherto divergent identities. Those who would otherwise not share a cup of water, now share a religious mat. By bringing divergent voices and experiences together, Akpan not only reaches for the commonality of humankind but uses literary imagination to create a new form of community where survival and flourishing happens.

As embattled Jubril notes, the survival of this new community under Mallam Abdullahi’s religious mat depends on how they can steady the mat – collectively. So Jubril’s Christian neighbour extends a hand of empathy to the amputated Jubril and helps him to steady his end of the mat. Interestingly, Jubril’s disability stems from his Islamic religious belief, through which he submitted his right wrist to be cut off in accordance with Sharia law as punishment for theft, thereby proving his faithfulness to the Islamic faith. Ironically, it is not just that this symbol of Islamic piety could not save him from his fellow Muslims; he is here not judged by it. If anything, he shares a mat with southern Christians he would have otherwise considered enemies, if not murder himself in the current conflict. However, it is the unveiling of this stump, and thus, his perceived religious identity, that costs his life on the bus among his southern kinspeople, where the pagan Chief and the Christian refugees are accomplices in executing him. Akpan, thus, satirizes the folly of religious intolerance and makes a case for the recognition of shared humanity and suffering. What makes the difference is identification, nay, recognition of a shared fate. In Mallam Abdullahi’s house, their existence becomes very much tied up so that whatever happens to one affects the whole. By extending empathy to Jubril here, his neighbour is not simply saving Jubril but himself too, as the whole members of the community will be doomed if Jubril’s end uncovers. Protecting Jubril is forced on the collective by their shared precariousness. Solidarity, thus, emerges from the recognition of their collective vulnerability as victims facing a common threat of death.

It is interesting to contrast this to the victims on the bus who bicker over the issue of religion, even though their current displacement is a result of religious conflict. They ban the mention of ‘Muslim’ or anything associated with it on the bus. Even as Christians, they struggle over their differences. The Catholics on the bus raise their voices and talk about the beauty and superiority of their church whenever Madam Aniema temporarily exorcizes the demonized – read traumatized – Colonel Usenetok, ‘“We no be like all dis nyama-nyama churches” one Catholic man said from the back … “Because we’ve been in this church business for two thousand years now”’ (290). However, Madam Aniema herself becomes uncomfortable when Emeka berates the child baptism received by Jubril (and by extension all orthodox Christians) and throws Jubril’s Marian medal through the window. They become only one as Christians in their vexation and collective insecurity when Chief talks of his traditional religion or when Colonel Usenetok ventures into pagan worship. Even Chief identifies with the Christians he condemned earlier instead of supporting his fellow traditionalist in condemning Colonel Usenetok’s open practice of his religion on the bus, even if that is precisely what the Christians do.

This religious squabble, through which the author exposes the fault lines of religious intolerance in Nigeria, disappears in the house of Mallam Abdullahi where all the adherents of disparate religions pray in their different voices for survival. However, to read the disunity in the bus as a contrast to the unity formed by interreligious solidarity in Mallam Abdullahi’s house obscures how the victims in the bus rally together whenever their existence is collectively under siege. This explains why they were readily exploited by the pagan Chief in their collective effort to eject Colonel Usenetok from the bus. Through this story, Akpan critiques religious barriers that inhibit shared human encounters. By elevating religious fundamentalism to the level of the absurd, he satirizes the various ethno-religious borders that afflict post-independent Nigeria. Akpan uses the metaphor of a bus stranded on the road to interrogate and transcend the various shades of differences, biases, and social prejudices that have incapacitated the Nigerian postcolony while cautioning ‘against simplifying the conflict to northern Muslims versus Southern Christians’ (Suhr-Sytsma 679). Deconstructing these barriers, as Akpan’s text does, is constitutive of the process by which recognition and solidarity are accomplished.

Our analysis also supports the claim that trauma can lead to the formation of a new community or increase cohesion and enhance a sense of common identity after traumatic events. As Marilyn Braam reads in ‘Luxurious Hearses’, their shared desperation to survive created ‘a fluid unity’ between the commuters. Such necessary but tenuous unity constitutes a rallying counter-nationalist response (States of Displacement: Voice and Narration in Refugee Stories 58). Braam is referring to an incident in the narrative when the TV report shows the severity of the violence in Khamfi, their erstwhile place of domicile. Since many of the refugees on the bus are from the country’s southern area, with an abundance of crude oil exploited by the central government and the multinationals, they feel a sense of entitlement to the country’s petrol. Nevertheless, there in Lupa Park, they are stranded because of the scarcity of fuel to take them home to the Delta. As the TV reportage shows, the same fuel is a common commodity used by the murderous mobs in Khamfi. This sense of inequality brings to memory years of injustice suffered by the people of the oil-producing Niger Delta region, galvanizing emotions among the stranded commuters. Thus, the ‘refugees rose to their feet at the sight of hungry-looking almajiris running around with fuel and matches, setting things and people afire … In the bus, anger replaced shock and passive complaints … The shouts of the refugees rang out into the approaching darkness and rallied the people outside the bus. The verandas emptied, and everybody came together, milling about the bus like winged termites around a fluorescent bulb’ (Akpan 235). Notice how the refugees on the bus and those outside are united by a shared experience of suffering, victimhood, and economic deprivation. These shared experiences unite them, necessitating a sense of civic consciousness and activism among the refugees in the bus terminal so that ‘for a moment it sounded as if the bus would explode with anger’ (236). The commuters, thus united, discuss how ‘best to stop the government and multinational oil companies from drilling for oil in the delta’ (237). Their determination to execute this plan is only sabotaged by the driver’s inability to secure petrol to take them home.

This collective action supports Kai Erikson’s claim that trauma ‘can serve as a source of communality in the same way that common languages and common backgrounds can’ (‘Notes on Trauma and Community’ 186). After all, trauma has a ‘demonstrable power … in creating communities’ even if ‘volatile and temporary’ (Luckhurst, The Trauma Question 213). Drawing on these trauma critics, I argue for the centrality of the recognition-solidarity nexus in building new forms of communities in the face of trauma. Through traumatic encounters, victims can identify with their fellow victims and thus form a new sense of solidarity which helps to achieve resilience and survival.

But healing is initiated when the friends ‘meet’, and, although unable to hear each other, discover ‘a new language’:

Recognizing the pain of another is the first step towards traumatic survival. As Craps reads elsewhere, postcolonial trauma novels support the ‘idea that trauma provides the link between cultures, and that working towards a fuller appreciation of the nature, extent, and ramifications of the pain of others can, indeed, help efforts to alleviate it’ (58). Best Friend is re-traumatized by her parent’s failure to recognize her pains and thus their neglect of her trauma. Eventually, she cannot embrace the future they envision for her, for addressing her trauma must first begin with recognizing it, which is what Selam offers her. This quest for survival and healing in ‘What Language is That?’ is also foregrounded by Monique in ‘My Parents’ Bedroom’, which narrativizes the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Drawing on the traumatic experience of witnessing her Hutu father being forced to murder her Tutsi mother, Monique transcends the crippling trauma of witnessing the violent collapse of her family by insisting on survival. She not only survives but walks enthusiastically to the future.

Maman has equipped Monique to fight for survival by forecasting the fate that would befall the family. She gradually hands the nine-year-old girl the responsibility of not just surviving but protecting her younger brother, Jean.

In his study of pain and suffering in Akpan’s text, Yildiray Cevik finds in Maman the archetype of the Mother of Sorrows: ‘Maman who awaits her death from her husband’s hands is the ironic version of the conventional representation of the mother as the Mother of Sorrows’ (‘The Pain and Suffering of African Children’ 54). Maman’s death shows Monique the depth of Maman’s love for them, and the sacrifice becomes glaring. Her trauma is underscored by the mind which is no longer hers. As Monique narrates,

Irene Visser writes that ‘postcolonial literary texts often engage with trauma in ways not envisioned in the currently dominant trauma theory, or in ways that reverse trauma theory’s assumptions, for instance by depicting victim’s resilience, resistance, and eventual triumph over trauma, or a community’s increased cohesion and an enhanced sense of identity after a traumatic event’ (Visser, ‘Trauma and Power in Postcolonial Literary Studies’ 130). This becomes explicit in the selected short stories of Say You’re One of Them. The resilience that Best Friend and Monique exhibit in the face of trauma is noteworthy, and this is possible through solidarity with a fellow victim that appreciates the survivor’s pains. Through this, they engage with healing processes and look towards the future. Best Friend, in announcing her readiness to go to Addis after her encounter with Selam, opens a new channel for life – a sort of working through that shows resilience and triumph over the trauma that almost overwhelmed her.

Having learned a new language and a new form of relationship with Selam that transcends the various borders enacted by their parents, she is no longer isolated like Jubril, but finds a more profound sense of solidarity with Best Friend. Monique fights for survival with her brother and announces that she wants to live. This helps her to work through her trauma, thereby validating the claim of decolonial trauma theory that healing is possible in the aftermath of traumatic wounding (Visser, ‘Decolonizing Trauma’ 255). The final page of Toni Morrison’s Home foregrounds this trend, as it reads: