Images of the wounded mouth : dissonant approaches to trauma in global South literary, visual and performance cultures

Abstract

The image of the wounded mouth is a recurring motif in cultural works both from the Global North and the Global South where it often points at the loss of verbal language in relation to some form of associated trauma. However, there is a decisive difference between language-loss as a symptomatic reaction towards a single traumatic event as explained by Western trauma theorists, and the loss of language as part of an insidious trauma, caused and perpetuated by continuing forms of structural discrimination. Classical trauma theory with its focus on individual events is often not sufficient to explain the various forms of language loss, especially those caused by the insidious trauma of slavery, colonization and other on-going forms of discrimination. This thesis examines literary and visual images primarily from the Global South to understand strategies of trauma confrontation within the ambit of what I term Global South trauma theory. In order to exemplify this paradigm shift between ‘classical’, postcolonial and alternative Global South trauma studies and its relation to language, my project will review a cluster of images around what I call ‘the wounded mouth’. These images may include visual and textual instances of mouths that are distorted, mutilated, elided, erased, or obstructed in such a way as to hint at the violent processes of silencing that go hand in hand with, indeed underpin the colonial and neo-colonial oppression of groups and cultures over long periods of time. In part I of the study, the insidious trauma of displacement and the loss of indigenous languages (tongues) are exemplified with reference to a number of works where language loss as insidious trauma is implicitly contrasted to individual traumas that have led to the ‘wounding of the mouth’. In part 2 of the study, the focus shifts to works of literature and art that focus upon insidious trauma, and teases out the ways in which such works may unintentionally perpetrate the victimization caused by insidious trauma, or conversely, may create empowering affiliations and coalitions that foster resilience. Part I consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on vitiated voices. It takes the Australian novel Sorry (2007) by Gail Jones as a basis for exploring different forms of language loss with regard to the two opposed concepts of trauma theory. The chapter then scrutinizes how, between these two contrasting theoretical poles, affective ties occur that may offer the possibility of empowerment. Chapter 2 concentrates on audible crying during the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and analyses how the three aspects mentioned above (Western trauma, insidious trauma, affective ties) are dealt with in Philip Miller’s multimedial cantata REwind (2011) with regard to the wailing sounds that were heard from those testifying about human rights abuses when language failed to produce speech. Chapter 3 then looks, following the same three-fold structure, at silent weeping in Mute, a video installation by South African Berni Searle, laying bare the ways it links the insidious trauma of apartheid to the xenophobic violence in post-apartheid South Africa. Part II reviews literary and visual texts that perpetuate rather than alleviate victimization, thereby cementing insidious trauma, contrasting them to empowering examples that may evoke the connective ties that oppose such perpetuation. Chapter 4 contrasts a tableau vivant from a performance installation called Exhibit B by South African artist Brett Bailey (Example 1) with a performance installation entitled Iron Mask, White Torture by Brazilian/German Marissa Lôbo and her collective of women of colour (Example 2), showing that Bailey, in contrast to Lôbo, tends to perpetuate victimization rather than offering effective empowerment. A similar phenomenon is presented in chapter 5, entitled “Sealed Lips”, where another tableau vivant from Bailey’s Exhibit A and B displaying an asylum–seeker whose lips are taped (thereby alluding to the suffocation of deported asylum-seekers in contemporary Europe) is contrasted with two artistic works from Australia that are concerned with lip-sewing. Both these pieces, Iranian Mehmed Al Assad’s poem “Asylum” (2002) and Australian Mike Parr’s performance installation Close the Concentration Camps (2002), employ the motif of lip-sewing as an empowering form to protest against current migration policies. The final chapter 6, “Suffocating Silence”, looks at the wounding of the mouth by so-called “waterboarding”. Used as an interrogation method since the Spanish Inquisition, waterboarding was also practised during apartheid in South Africa, and is currently used in the Global War on Terror. In this final chapter, I discuss the perpetuation of victimization on the one hand, and empowerment on the other hand with reference to examples of waterboarding in the context of the Jeffrey Benzien case at the South African TRC and in the US-led Global War on Terror.