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'My Skin, a Parchme...
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Duncan, RebeccaIndependent,Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies
(author)
'My Skin, a Parchment of Tales' : Trauma, Wounding and the Postapartheid Gothic in Terry Westby-Nunn's Sea of Wise Insects
- Article/chapterEnglish2013
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Taylor & Francis,2013
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LIBRIS-ID:oai:DiVA.org:lnu-93385
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https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-93385URI
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https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2013.795759DOI
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Language:English
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Summary in:English
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Subject category:ref swepub-contenttype
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Subject category:art swepub-publicationtype
Notes
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In this paper, I read Terry Westby-Nunn's The Sea of Wise Insects as an example of the literary mode identified increasingly by scholars as South African postcolonial Gothic. In line with existing research, I work from a definition of the gothic genre which casts it as highly culturally specific and shaped by the anxieties of the society in which it arises. In Westby-Nunn's narrative these fears are enmeshed in the South African past, and revolve, more specifically, around the extent to which history's bearing on the present has become a dangerous point of repression. My argument traces a transgenerational logic of traumatic transmission, which situates the unspoken crimes of an old generation at the psychic nerve-centre of Westby-Nunn's contemporary protagonist, a strategy which disrupts any illusion of a stable boundary between the injustice of ‘then’ and the liberation of ‘now’. Finally, I suggest that through the deployment of an aesthetic which draws on the gothic sub-genre of horror-writing, Westby-Nunn develops a narrative which, to paraphrase Tabish Khair, does not operate “only in words”. Instead, the text relies in part on visceral reader reactions so that the novel admits of silence in a way that avoids replicating the exclusionary logic underpinning the institutionalised discrimination in South Africa's history.
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IndependentLinnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies
(creator_code:org_t)
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In:Current Writing: Taylor & Francis25:1, s. 76-871013-929X2159-9130
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