Limited Language; Translating Trauma

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story “Ghosts” from her collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, calls attention to the places that language fails in narrating stories. We have wrestled with questions about Literature’s power (or, ability) to promote peace, and the use of storytelling throughout the structure of a novel as a means to communicate certain experiences related to war/trauma. I find that Adichie’s “Ghosts” is a particularly salient example of the ways in which translating traumatic memories is limited, yet still understood by various audiences. In this case, Western audiences viewing African (Nigerian) experiences. Here, both the Nigerian characters and the Western audiences are limited through the representation of events, but not in understanding the implications of such events.

The main character in this story, The Prof, is not wholly concerned with memories, but “Ghosts” from his past appear throughout the narrative. Of course, this lends itself to a discussion of the real and not real, but for the case of this argument, what is real relies solely on The Prof’s interpretation of events. Furthermore, his interpretation as it is re-presented through his telling of stories when he encounters one of the ghosts of his past, his colleague Ikenna Okoro.

Ikenna Okoro, who was thought to be dead after July 6, 1967 when The Prof and his family “saw him on the day he died” (61). Through conversation, The Prof learns that Okoro went to Sweden, but Okoro “said nothing else” and The Prof “realized that he would not tell [him] more, that he would not tell [him] how he left the campus alive or how he came to be on that plane” (63). This moment of exchange reveals the ways in which story telling is limited by personal trauma. The fact that The Prof does not push for more information reveals the arbitrary nature of the need for traumatic details for an audience to adequately fill in the blanks of a story. In other words, we are satisfied as readers to accept that something traumatic must have happened, yet we can move effortlessly through the story without those particular details present. Perhaps, we can rely on our own memories and representation of our own personal traumas, and recognize in the absence of language the critical moments of our on histories which we cannot translate, transcribe, or otherwise re-live.

Okoro is not the only character in this story that fails an attempt to represent a traumatic life event. While this story is propelled by the dialogue between two re-united colleagues, when Okoro asks The Prof, “’How is your little girl Zik?’”, The Prof’s reply comes through in Igbo, not English which dictates the rest of the conversation (64). “’The war took Zik” he says, and Adichie fills the untranslatable with a poignant declaration that The Prof cannot “[speak] of death in English [because it] has always had … a disquieting finality” (64). Examining this moment, in which The Prof speaks of his daughter’s death with a friend he believed to be dead in Adichie’s story “Ghosts” reveals a tension inherently present in the ways in which different cultures regard death, dying, trauma, and memories. While the failure to represent the trauma may at first seem to be simply a human limitation, thinking of these moments within a larger framework of narrative goals and forms, it really seems to demonstrate the limited relationship between trauma and language.

Despite these critical moments of language failure, the narrative does not lose any of its sense of cohesion or audience understanding. This limitation in language opens a conversation beyond the page, away from these characters, both within and among audiences whose own private experience allows them to navigate and understand trauma.