‘The Only Facts are Supernatural Ones’: Dreaming Animals and Trauma in Some Contemporary Southern African Texts

Abstract

Antjie Krog et al.’s There Was this Goat (2009), Jose Eduardo Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons (2006, 2007), and Mia Couto’s The Last Flight of the Flamingo (2004) deal with the violence of colonial or neo-colonial regimes and the resulting trauma. Each text incorporates an animal who functions as a filter for the trauma, and who also embodies an intermediary between indigenous knowledges and a violent modernity. Robert D. Stolorow proposes that trauma not only engenders an ‘isolating estrangement’ which ‘separate[s] the traumatised person from other human beings’ (2007, p. 14) but that the traumatised person ‘long[s] for twinship or emotional kinship.’ This longing may be suggested via the embedding of the nonhuman within what Harry Garuba calls an ‘animist unconscious’ evident in dreams and the liminal.