Treatment of Grief, Mourning, and Trauma of a Child Soldier in Chris Abani’s Song for Night
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
This paper examines the Nigerian American writer Chris Abani’s novella Song for Night (2007) using Cathy Caruth’s theoretical texts on trauma studies, Unclaimed Experience (1996) and Literature in the Ashes of History (2013) where she develops Freud’s studies on dream works. A close reading of Song for Night brings to mind the questions of how an innocent child becomes a soldier, what he experiences on the battlefield, how he suffers from haunting memories of trauma, and, finally, whether he can recover from post-traumatic stress disorder, and if yes, how he should be treated. These endless questions reflect the difficulty of the studies of a child soldier’s trauma represented in war narratives. To back up the use of Western- oriented theories of Caruth and Freud, I bring in Alcinda Honwana’s text Child Soldiers in Africa (2006) which discusses specific case studies in Angola and Mozambique that helps to understand the necessity of the local level of healing processes to effectively heal the wounded and traumatized African child soldiers. The latter part of this essay will be devoted to presenting how communal healing, listening, and responding to the crying voices resulting from violence are vital in the treatment of African child soldiers.
Abstract
This paper examines the Nigerian American writer Chris Abani’s novella Song for Night (2007) using Cathy Caruth’s theoretical texts on trauma studies, Unclaimed Experience (1996) and Literature in the Ashes of History (2013) where she develops Freud’s studies on dream works. A close reading of Song for Night brings to mind the questions of how an innocent child becomes a soldier, what he experiences on the battlefield, how he suffers from haunting memories of trauma, and, finally, whether he can recover from post-traumatic stress disorder, and if yes, how he should be treated. These endless questions reflect the difficulty of the studies of a child soldier’s trauma represented in war narratives. To back up the use of Western- oriented theories of Caruth and Freud, I bring in Alcinda Honwana’s text Child Soldiers in Africa (2006) which discusses specific case studies in Angola and Mozambique that helps to understand the necessity of the local level of healing processes to effectively heal the wounded and traumatized African child soldiers. The latter part of this essay will be devoted to presenting how communal healing, listening, and responding to the crying voices resulting from violence are vital in the treatment of African child soldiers.
참고문헌 (16)
- Abani, Chris, "Song for Night" (2007), Akashic Books
- Briggs, Jimmie, "Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go to War" (2005), Basic Books
- Caruth, Cathy, "Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History" (1996), Johns Hopkins UP
- Caruth, Cathy, "Literature in the Ashes of History" (2013), Johns Hopkins UP
- Dalley, Hamish, "Trauma Theory and Nigerian civil war literature: speaking “something that was never in words” in Chris Abani’s Song for Night", Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 49(4), pp.445~457 (2013)
- Fox, Nicole, "Narratives of Mass Violence: The Role of Memory and Memorialization in Addressing Human Rights Violations in Post-Conflict Rwanda and Uganda", Societies Without Borders, 8(3), pp.334~372 (2013)
- Fraser, Jennifer Margaret, "Be a Good Soldier: Children’s Grief in English Modernist Novels" (2011), U of Toronto P
- Harrow, Kenneth W., "The Amalek Factor: Child Soldiers and the Impossibility of Representation", Postcolonial Text, 8(2), pp.1~20 (2013)
- Honwana, Alcinda, "Child Soldiers in Africa" (2006), U of Pennsylvania P
- Mackey, Allison, "Troubling Humanitarian Consumption: Reframing Relationality in African Child Soldier Narratives", Research in African Literatures, 44(4), pp.99~122 (2013)
- Morrison, Toni, "What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction" (2008), UP of Mississippi
- 박지은, "Patchwork Memories of the Past in Beloved", 영어영문학연구, 60(2), pp.41~60 (2018), 한국중앙영어영문학회[DOI]
- Schultheis, Alexandra, "African Child soldiers and Humanitarian Consumption", Peace Review, 20(1), pp.31~40 (2008)
- Singer, P. W., "Children at War" (2005), Pantheon Books
- Sontag, Susan, "Regarding the Pain of Others" (2003), Picador
- 신진범, "아동시기의 트라우마와 『그 아이를 도우소서』", 영어영문학연구, 58(1), pp.135~150 (2016), 한국중앙영어영문학회[DOI]