Effect of Trauma and Memory on the Structure of the Plot - Assignment Example

Effect of Trauma and memory on the Structure of the Plot The English Oxford dictionary describes trauma as “an extremely distressing experience that causes severe emotional shock and may have long-lasting psychological effects”. Trauma can be caused by either physical harm or emotional injury to an individual. Its effects can last long after the individual is no longer under the exposure to the source of the traumatic experience. The worst aspect of trauma is that it is increasingly being caused by loved ones entrusted with the responsibility of parenthood. This is clearly illustrated in the 1996 novel by Sapphire called Push, which describes incidents of horrific incestual rape and molestation faced by a sixteen year-old black-American girl called Precious,. She is molested by both parents and sires two children with her father. The novel is a journal of her traumatic past, recounted in a non-structured format, unlike conventional novels. This lack of conventional plot structure can be attributed to the intrusive memories and repetitive flashbacks of her past that are triggered by her present life. These interfere with her ability to concentrate on the present. This essay, therefore, seeks to demonstrate how trauma and intrusive memories contribute to the non-structured plot to this novel. The psychological need to repress traumatic memories leads to an unsynchronized, bit by bit description of her experiences, triggered by isolated events of her present life. For example, when she is suspended from school because of her second pregnancy, she is afraid to tell her mom. She recalls the way received beating from on coming home just after delivery of her first child. Then the story jumps back to the present where her mother yells at her to answer the door. These suppressed emotions and memories resurface without warning and readers are caught off-guard too and are swayed from one extreme emotion to another. This is emphasized by the use of onomatopoeia, exclamatives (“whump!”) and insults to make readers feel they are suffocating and cannot return to the surface. For example, her flashback about her first pregnancy when her mother almost killed her when she came home after delivery is described in over a dozen pages, and readers may even lose track of the story about her present life, as they are caught by the undertow of trauma experienced by the protagonist. One moment she is talking about her school and the next, about her past. To the protagonist, the past and present are so intertwined that she sometimes cannot distinguish between the two. Thus, the plot is unsynchronized, constantly shifting between the past and present. Trauma of sexual abuse at home leads to her illiteracy at school, which hinders her ability to organize her thoughts and communicate in an orderly manner. She has no basic math, reading or writing skills when the story begins. The molestation started with father when she was only three years old, and from it got a child at twelve years old and her second when she was sixteen. She could not go to her mother for assistance because her mother was jealous of her for “stealing his man” and also molested her. These horrific experiences make her withdraw from others, and her speech is affected, causing her peers to mock her when she says, “Secon’ grade they laffes at how I talk,” (36). In addition, her mother often stuffed her with food till she could not move then molests her, thinking she was asleep. She starts gaining weight, and this gives her peers in school another reason to make fun of her. The use of repetition such as, “ I hate myself HATE myself,” and childish syntax and vocabulary (51-53) emphasizes she speaks in the voice of the seven year old she was when she was being molested by her parents. Her abuse at home and school mirror each other in a relentless chain of pain. She is stuck in the past and uses the present tense to describe her memories, thus making it tough to separate the two. This makes the plot unexpected and non-flowing. Trauma often causes victims to develop dangerous coping mechanisms that may become their “reality”. This makes it difficult to decipher the chronological flow of events in the plot of the story. The protagonist swings between traumatic memories and moments of dissociation. Her coping skills include profanity, daydreams and lying to herself and others. Day dreams and visualizations make her feel better because, in them, her life is great such as being “milky white, cute and has long hair that makes her lovable”. These daydreams occur haphazardly throughout the text and may confuse the reader, who may find it difficult to distinguish between the present, past and future aspirations of the protagonist. However, these dreams are short-lived because memories often crowd them out, and she returns to the treadmill of dread and recalls the night visits to her bed by her dad. This tyranny of the past interferes with her ability to pay attention to both the new and familiar situations and often confuses the two. Another mechanism she adopts is use of profanity, especially when these horrific memories intrude on her present life. For example, she recalls how she yelled at Mr. Wicher on her first day of school and called him “motherfucker” when he told her to open the book on page 122. She did not want him or anyone else to know of her inability to read and identify numbers (5). Her profane language crops up frequently and often makes her digress to the past without preamble, much to the confusion of the reader. Trauma deeply colors all her experiences that she barely notices the positivity in her present life. She finds a new community at the Higher Education Alternative/Each one Teach One School and starts to build a new life of her own (9, 18, 19-24, 38-39 63), yet regresses often into the past and sometimes loses hope of becoming a better person (129,132, 135-36). Writing the alphabet is the start of her written self-expression. When asked to write one word for each letter, this turns out to be an inventory of the pain and degradation she went through such as “dog, evil like mama, fuck and punks” among others, and her emerging feelings of hope such as “Africa, baby, Farrakhan, love and home” among others (66). At this point, the plot shifts to several aspects about her past and the reader may encounter difficulties in staying with the chronology of her present life. Symptoms experienced by trauma victims usually trigger the flooding back of horrific memories that they try to suppress, often making them digress to the past. The protagonist experiences symptoms of trauma such as explosive rages, numbness, depression, feelings of helplessness and closing off of the spirit due to the mind’s attempt to insulate itself from additional harm. Each of these symptoms triggers memories of the past and the plot digresses from the present. Just when she seems safe her mom reemerges to bring her news of the death of her father, who had AIDS. Precious goes for testing and finds out she is also infected. Her helplessness is expressed when she says “There can be no escape from the past, no total closure because of the permanence of the body”. Here the plot digresses to graphic memories of the night visits of her father and she wonders is she will be able to completely overcoming her past, by calling herself a “ticking time bomb”. In conclusion, traumatic experiences such as rape, molestation, and physical and emotional abuse, negatively impact the life and perception of victims and makes them immobile. However much one tries to suppress them, these memories usually find a way of intruding on their present life at the most unexpected moment and the victims find themselves stuck in the horrors of their past once again. The protagonist uses the present tense and first person voice as a move of aggressive self-empowerment, for example, when she says, “My name is Claireece Precious Jones. Everybody calls me Precious (6). This shows her commitment to telling the truth in her own way and depicts graphic details of her molestation without any attempts of covering it up. She speaks the unspeakable, what society is afraid of voicing out. The frequent flashbacks and memories make the plot lack a chronological flow, unlike most narratives. This novel has been criticized by some critics on being too graphic to the point of being unbelievable. This shows the reluctance of the society to acknowledge the reality of increased cases of incestual rape and molestation in families of different status, race or culture. In addition, the dilemmas experienced by the protagonist confront readers with their own fears of loss and dissolution, and provide a potential space within which to address these fears. This is both a success and failure story. The success of the narrator is shown by her heroic efforts of rising above abusive circumstances and striving for a better future for herself and her two children. However, the failure aspect of this story reiterates the long-lasting and fragmenting effects of trauma on an individual. This gives credence to the fragmented memory of the narrator and the unsynchronized plot of the story. Work Cited Sapphire. Push. New York: Knopf, 1996. Print. Read More