Trauma of Displacement in V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men

Abstract

This research considers displacement in Naipaul's The Mimic Men as a traumatic experience. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the subject of my study, it explores the historical and psychological dimensions of the displacement in the novel, as well as its literary representations. In the first step, I depicted the displacement as a traumatic experience for the protagonist by the illness which displacement causes Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In the second step, I suggested two ways the protagonist goes through to remember their trauma. These ways are two different kinds of memory, namely, "acting out" and "working through". I take "acting out" and "working through" as different but not opposite processes. "Acting out" and "working through" may never be totally separated from each other, and the two may always mark or be implicated in each other. In the third step, I also looked at the impacts of trauma of displacement on the structural and formal components of The Mimic Men.

Representation of Traumas of Displacement in Marie Therese Toyi’s Weep Not, Refugee

“…This wound bled as often as crises emerged" (Toyi, 2014, p. 28). Wache narrates the way the displacement has resulted to non-entity beings as Mehni, Omar, Baizura, and Bahar (2017) assert that being displaced and dislocated in many ways renders one with traumatised reduced identities. In the instance "our country had just vomited us out of its bosom, with machetes and bullets, and the hosts had nothing to love in those fugitives, all poor and hungry looking, with no car, no house, nothing" (Toyi, 2014, p. 15).…”