Abstract
Carolivia Herron’s novel Thereafter Johnnie (1991) testifies to incest in relation to a legacy of sexual trauma, placing the familial abuse together with American slavery, thus linking personal history with US national history. Herron’s novel examines the potential liberation of the traumatized and abused gendered and racialized daughter’s body and mind, which become a locus where past silenced traumas are encoded through violence and testified to in the present. An indexical X serves as a testimony and site of conflict between historical time and embodied traumatic temporality, disrupting linear narratives of emancipation that erase the sacrifices and violations of African American lives and bodies. By staging an appeal to readers as witnesses in a belated here and now, Herron’s imaginative testimonial writing challenges the ideology of White supremacy that naturalizes and legitimizes racial, sexual, and gendered subjugation and violence, bringing the personal trauma of incest together with a slavery past, making the intersection of the former with the latter politically productive.
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Notes
- 1.
Although Sigmund Freud was one of the first medical scientists to investigate White bourgeois women’s sexual trauma in the West, his abandonment of the seduction theory suggested the notion of incest as fiction, promoting a tradition of relegating accounts of gendered sexual trauma to fantasy life rather than as bearing witness to reality.
- 2.
Anne Rothe, on her part, explicates that the US is cast in the role of “Nazi evil’s innocent Other” in order to downplay “America’s own past and present crimes” (2011, 11), a strategy that ends up trivializing “all other instances and forms of oppression, victimization, and atrocity” (2011, 14) including slavery.
- 3.
In his book Chambers specifically brings together various kinds of historical traumas encoded in witnessing texts including genocide, trench warfare, AIDS memoirs, and Holocaust writing.
- 4.
Chambers’s elaboration of testimony consequently complicates Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s (1992) seminal theory of witnessing as an alliance of traumatized teller and sympathetic listener by suggesting that one cannot always take the audience’s (or reader’s) sympathy for granted (Chambers 2004, 20).
- 5.
Angelou’s case demonstrates that telling incest and sexual violence was not straightforward in the Black community because of the longstanding history of racial violence in the US: “For decades, the primary concern of the black community was protecting young black men from the specious claims of rape historically made by white women and men, which resulted in the lynching of over 3000 black men between 1882 and 1968” (Field 2020, 113).
- 6.
As Hurley and Hurley point out, constructing an incest narrative whether fictional or factual means facing the same challenges: author’s and narrator’s identities and the relationship between them, the narrating personas’ and characters’ relative instability and credibility, the relative linearity of the narrative, sequencing, the narrative’s outcome, “and the ending that determines its worth within the value system to which we (as readers) subscribe” (2010, 7).
- 7.
Du Bois describes “double-consciousness” in the following way: “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (Du Bois 2021, I. Of Our Spiritual Strivings). Chela Sandoval mentions that the concept of a “split consciousness,” in addition to Du Bois and Audre Lorde, has also been formulated by, for instance, Frantz Fanon (Sandoval 2000, 85). For example, Fanon speaks of the “self-division” of the Black individual who he indicates “has two dimensions,” behaving differently with Black people and with Whites as “a direct result of colonialist subjugation” (Fanon 1968, 17).
- 8.
The other technologies are semiotics, deconstruction, meta-ideologizing, and democratics.
- 9.
As Fanon: indicates, Freud did not consider Black people in his studies which he thinks is a good thing as there is a tendency to forget that “neurosis is not a basic element of human reality” and that “the Oedipus complex is far from coming into being” amidst Black people (1968, 151, 151–52).
- 10.
- 11.
Semiology, as Sandoval explains, is “a mode of perceiving” that Western scholars including Roland Barthes “encoded for our academic understanding” and a “discriminating sensibility… a hermeneutic with content” that “has other names, such as ‘signifyin” in U.S. black culture” (2000, 91) expounded in Henry Louis Gates’s The Signifying Monkey (2014).
- 12.
John Christopher may also himself have been molested as a child by a vagabond, which would link his experience to that of his daughter Eva’s. For instance, Keizer relates that Clare Counihan in a critical essay written for Keizer’s graduate seminar “‘History, Memory, and Subjectivity in Contemporary African American and Caribbean Literature,” interprets the silences in the depiction of John Christopher‘s unexpected meeting with a vagabond as noteworthy instances in which John Christopher may have been molested by the man. The text does not explicitly relate the man touching John Christopher, but the latter becomes ill with chicken pox soon after their encounter (Keizer 2004, 183, n.8; see Herron 1991, 76–83).
- 13.
Sapphire’s point about the unacknowledged sexual exploitation of male slaves during slavery is corroborated by the historian Thomas Foster, who in his 2011 study argues that Black male slaves were sexually assaulted by both White men and White women. Slavery violated Black masculinity in ways that are not “easily spoken of (then and now)” (Foster 2011, 446). Foster indicates that “The rape of slave men has also gone unacknowledged because of the current and historical tendency to define rape along gendered lines, making both victims and perpetrators reluctant to discuss male rape” (Foster 2011, 464).
- 14.
Intergenerational trauma or the trauma-transcendence-legacy model refers to when reactions provoked in victims by collective or group trauma are transmitted to their descendants regardless of the fact that the latter live under different present circumstances from the original trauma period (see Cross 1998, 387).
- 15.
Herron herself confided in a personal interview to Melba Wilson in 1992 that she was sexually abused at three and that she wakes up “to a note pinned to her bed … which says: ‘Remember not to kill yourself today’” (Wilson 1994, 179).
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Rodi-Risberg, M. (2022). Trauma, Temporality, and Testimony: The Enslaved Daughter’s Body in Carolivia Herron’s Thereafter Johnnie. In: Intersectional Trauma in American Women Writers' Incest Novels from the 1990s. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96619-5_2
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