Postmodern Feminist Amnesia: De-centering Trauma and Re-defining Subalternity in Elizabeth Nunez’s Bruised Hibiscus

Abstract

In most subaltern narratives, trauma occupies a central position. The subaltern consciousness is often limited to marginal spaces within the hegemonic agency of trauma inflictors. Gendered subalternity, ergo, imposes a further peripheral status for subaltern women. In Bruised Hibiscus (2000), Elizabeth Nunez promotes the voicing of the silent subaltern woman to step ahead of her traumatic confines. This article challenges the essentialized definitions of trauma and subalternity by subverting the totalizing enterprise of dominant centers and highlighting the ‘slippage’ between theory and practice. This movement from centers and back to centers grants the ‘new’ subaltern female characters in Bruised Hibiscus a re-locatable agency that heals neurosis through deliberate amnesiac and mnemonic practices both simultaneously and interchangeably. The women in the novel under study, Rosa and Zuela, become at once the victims and the perpetrators of trauma within a postmodern redefining and de-essentializing narrative of memory and forgetting.