Putting intricate human experiences into language and narration is always a complex process, especially those that are beyond one’s own grasp and understanding such as the case of trauma. The traumatic history exists as a fragmented yet convoluted cluster of details, memories, and affects in the survivors, escaping linearity and coherence; therefore, for survivors of relational trauma it is much more intensified. In such cases, the attempts at comprehension of what had happened become a very difficult and complicated process for the survivors themselves. At this juncture, attempts at expression, documentation, and articulation of this complex traumatic history by the survivors become nothing but a trial of working through one’s own trauma, or rather an attempt at healing. The events in trauma being accessible to the survivors in their belatedness entangle the present and the future with that of the traumatic past suspending the linearity and ordering of time and events. The tension between the cluster of traumatic history existing in a temporal simultaneity and attempts at its expression through language and narration traps the survivors in a liminal state of being naturally. Through decent scrutiny of the different relevant aspects of the written testimony of Gayathri Prabhu titled If I had to tell it again, I aim to show that the testimony evidences an affectively concentrated expression of the above-mentioned liminality which becomes a condition of possibility of healing and working through trauma.

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Suspended Liminality Between Life and Trauma: Affective Expressions through Written Testimony

  • V. Vrinda

摘要

Putting intricate human experiences into language and narration is always a complex process, especially those that are beyond one’s own grasp and understanding such as the case of trauma. The traumatic history exists as a fragmented yet convoluted cluster of details, memories, and affects in the survivors, escaping linearity and coherence; therefore, for survivors of relational trauma it is much more intensified. In such cases, the attempts at comprehension of what had happened become a very difficult and complicated process for the survivors themselves. At this juncture, attempts at expression, documentation, and articulation of this complex traumatic history by the survivors become nothing but a trial of working through one’s own trauma, or rather an attempt at healing. The events in trauma being accessible to the survivors in their belatedness entangle the present and the future with that of the traumatic past suspending the linearity and ordering of time and events. The tension between the cluster of traumatic history existing in a temporal simultaneity and attempts at its expression through language and narration traps the survivors in a liminal state of being naturally. Through decent scrutiny of the different relevant aspects of the written testimony of Gayathri Prabhu titled If I had to tell it again, I aim to show that the testimony evidences an affectively concentrated expression of the above-mentioned liminality which becomes a condition of possibility of healing and working through trauma.