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Embodied Memory: A Trauma-Theoretical Approach to Chukwuma Okoye‟s We the Beast
Abstract
Chukwuma Okoye’s We the Beast is a dramatic text which explores the historical trauma of the 1967-70 Nigerian Civil War and the impact of the accompanying violence on the individual and the family. Analogous to writings on the Holocaust, Okoye’s dramatized history, grounded in the victim’s testimonies, enacts a complex politics of cultural memory which collapses the personal and the political, the private and the public, the physical and the psychological, through figured violations of bodies and psyches.
This discussion focuses on the trope of trauma and testimony, deployed in the play as the symbol of the repression of the individual and the communal memories of the war, and the haunting return of those memories that demand the individual and the community’s awareness and attentiveness. Representing creative strength on the basis of the emotional and visceral truth of suffering, the play seeks to break away from the endless cycle of oppressive and prejudicial memoirs and narrative accounts of the war, therefore constructing an alternative mouthpiece of history which, at least, attempts to portray the collective and cultural voices of the traumatized.
Establishing the thematic and stylistic characteristics of the genre proposed, it is argued that the play’s aesthetics is affected by its subject matter. Through its combination of realist dramatic conventions with trauma and hysteria, the play creates a distinct form of realism of performative malady, which is here termed ‘traumatized realism’.
This discussion focuses on the trope of trauma and testimony, deployed in the play as the symbol of the repression of the individual and the communal memories of the war, and the haunting return of those memories that demand the individual and the community’s awareness and attentiveness. Representing creative strength on the basis of the emotional and visceral truth of suffering, the play seeks to break away from the endless cycle of oppressive and prejudicial memoirs and narrative accounts of the war, therefore constructing an alternative mouthpiece of history which, at least, attempts to portray the collective and cultural voices of the traumatized.
Establishing the thematic and stylistic characteristics of the genre proposed, it is argued that the play’s aesthetics is affected by its subject matter. Through its combination of realist dramatic conventions with trauma and hysteria, the play creates a distinct form of realism of performative malady, which is here termed ‘traumatized realism’.
