Rehearsing Trauma: The Reader as Interrogator in Prison Narratives

TLDR: In this article, the authors explore the role of the imagined reader in the complex dynamic at work when writing emerges from a position of woundedness, in a context where the public is both ally and adversary, simultaneously enabling and complicating a survivor's self-construction.

Abstract: Summary Accounts of detention survivors exert pressure on the theoretical framework that reserves a role for the reader in a post-Freudian hermeneutics of catharsis. In analysing the prison narratives of Ruth First and Emma Mashinini, I explore the position of the imagined reader in the complex dynamic at work when writing emerges from a position of woundedness. A reappraisal of the role of the imagined reader is warranted, in order to accommodate both the formative communality that operates in these texts and the complexity of a political context where “the public” is both ally and adversary, simultaneously enabling and complicating a survivor's self-construction.The task of asserting a new self in writing, to contest the criminalising “vocabulary” of the state security system, is both undermined and made all the more urgent by the overwhelming self-doubt which that system induces. Narrative self-construction can be thought of as an appeal as much as an assertion of self. The paradigm of trauma studies p...