A estética do vestígio em contranarrativas: trauma e memória coletiva em Amada, de Toni Morrison e Um defeito de cor, de Ana Maria Gonçalves

Abstract

This dissertation examines Toni Morrison9s Beloved and Ana Maria Gonçalves9s Um defeito de cor from the perspective of trauma studies. I argue that the experience of slavery acts upon the characters in a way that leaves them mentally deranged and physically vulnerable even when they have not faced bondage directly. Besides individual trauma there is also collective trauma that affects the protagonists9 lives and relations, perpetuating the unspeakable pains of severe emotional and mental distress through generations. This dissertation takes a close look at what happens psychologically to an individual when one is traumatized and how the protagonists achieve atonement through the community of women. This approach mainly draws on Gabriele Schwab9s discussion about how violent legacies are difficult to recount or even to remember because usually one represses or buries these contents in an unreachable psychic crypt. A person who refuses to mourn a loss by disavowing it, keeps it inside by burying it in a psychic tomb. Although appearing to be dead, this loss is physically alive and returns as a ghost to haunt the victim. Flashbacks, nightmares and compulsive repetitions are some of the consequences of this seemly alien force that makes these intrusive memories somehow unbearable and, therefore, unspeakable. In this sense, this research discloses how discourse is affected by the traumatic experience. I also regard the way the characters find atonement by finally breaking the crypt having access to their history and putting it into words by telling their story. Furthermore, this study examines how the historical figures of Margaret Garner and Luísa Mahin served as a starting point for Morrison and Gonçalves to create their protagonists. Through traces of scarce documents, both writers drew on the fictionalization of these women to delve into forgotten memories that have never been found in official historiography. Moreover, this work analyzes how the texts highlight the political and cultural dimensions of forms of resistance to modernity, reconfiguring it. These writings subvert the official narratives of colonizers and oppressors, opposing the official history by addressing the unresolved tension between memory and forgetfulness, referencing the thousands of enslaved faces that have been forgotten, disappeared, dead, tortured, and unburied, whose stories remain untold. I conclude that this dissertation moves beyond in the study of trauma literature, for it shows that mourning over individual and collective trauma allows healing to take place in both works through the community of women, enabling the characters to reconsider the wounds of a shameful past in manners that can exorcize the ghosts of trauma.