Trauma Ebbs and Flows in Kopano Matlwa’s Evening Primrose

Abstract

In consequence of the suffering endured by their country during the colonial era, South African “Born Free” authors have openly output and published their explicit writings as a socio-political critique of the brutal colonial practices. These dehumanizing, brutal actions have violently emerged along various social axes, including abusive gang-violations, slavery, starvation policies, apartheid, and education deprivation, to regard a few. In theory, these severely malicious practices controversially prone the victim, who has been affected by one of them, to trauma. But they are, as investigated by other researchers, not wholly but partly reflected in Kopano Matlwa’s Evening Primrose. The current article, purposely, endeavors to affirm the traumatic agonies from which the fiction’s central persona has been greatly suffered for a number of reasons, gang-rape being the foremost among them. To itemize trauma-agitational ordeals, the paper will referentially invoke Cathy Caruth’s certain correspondent elicitations concerned with trauma and its inveterate memories to draw on. Thus, in the analysis process, the paper will methodologically set out to centralize the scope of its framework on Sigmund Freud’s ‘denial’ and also Dominick LaCapra’s comprehensive views on ‘acting out,’ sticking to different works by these two theorists in addition to making a reference to Caruth’s contributive trauma explorations. This is to conclusively see whether the traumatized characters’ memories will continue to be flowed or coped with throughout the foregoing fiction.