Surviving Time: Trauma, Tragedy, and the Postcolonial Novel

Abstract

Surviving TimeTrauma, Tragedy, and the Postcolonial Novel Samuel Durrant (bio) Experience is necessary for growth and survival. But experience is not simply what happened. A lot may happen to a stone without making it any the wiser. Experience is what we are able to do with what happens to us. . . . I believe that if we are to survive as a nation then we need to grasp the meaning of our tragedy. —Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day Where [Georg] Lukács speaks of a "middle-of-the-road" hero within his besieged Marxist premises I must speak of a middle-of-the-road hole within my iconic middle-of-the-landscape sculpture or waterfall or river or escarpment of jungle or rockface down which a phenomenal erosion happened, quite suddenly, precipitately, of conquered peoples. The Igbo of Nigeria are a terrifying example of the engulfment which can suddenly overtake a people within a trauma of helplessness—external conquest, internal collapse. There is reason to believe that the earliest forms of tragic art were born out of a necessity to compensate such losses within the human psyche. —Wilson Harris, "Interior of the Novel: Amerindian/European/African Relations" Dare to lead the life of tragic man and you shall be redeemed! —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy To state my hypothesis as succinctly as possible, tragedy enables a survival of time.1 More specifically, I argue that tragedy enables a traumatized [End Page 95] body of people to survive the "phenomenal erosion" of time that constitutes the precipitate experience of colonization. As Chinua Achebe points out in the first of my epigraphs, "experience is not simply what happened." Or rather, the kind of experience that simply happens to you is not really an experience at all: it can leave you feeling like a stone, insensate. Survival as a "nation," as the "imagined community" that is itself the product of (de)colonization and a certain arrival into postcolonial modernity, requires "grasp[ing] the meaning of our tragedy." To move less quickly than Achebe, to become a nation, to move beyond mere "survival," "we" (Nigerians and, by extension, Africans) must grasp the tragic patterning of the events that will have come to constitute "our" history. In retelling our history as tragedy we come to experience our being-in-common. Traditionally, it is epic that is tasked with the conjuration of what Hegel famously dubbed the "Spirit of a People."2 Epics perform this task best, as David Quint argues in Epic and Empire, as the history of the winners.3 Losers' epics, he argues, are not really epics at all in so much as they fail to tell the foundational story of settlement. Epic heroes tend to make history happen rather than let history "happen to them." Even if Aeneas (Quint's model epic hero) is "to be hurled about endlessly by land and sea," we are assured from the outset that he will eventually succeed in bringing his gods "home" to Latium and founding his race of empire-builders.4 While the history of African decolonization does, of course, include many heroic acts of resistance that might be turned into the foundational mythos of postcolonial nationhood, Achebe chooses, on the eve of his country's independence, to tell the story of his people's defeat, to tell the essentially passive, "loser's" story of what happened to his people.5 Above all, Achebe senses that he needs a tragic hero, a hero whose actions will turn out not to have been actions at all, in the active, history-changing sense, but rather modes of suffering, ways of fulfilling his—and his people's—tragic destiny, ways of fulfilling a certain prophecy. This tragic destiny is partially announced in the novel's title, to which I shall return, but it is also internally prophesied through characters' repeated warnings about the consequences of angering the earth goddess, Ani. These "prophecies" are analeptic in so far as they refer to a catastrophe (colonization) that has already taken place by the time Achebe publishes his novel in 1958, but they also have a performative effect: to retell history [End Page 96] as prophetically foretold is...

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