David's Journey By Jane Wicomb Essay

In David’s Story by Zoe Wicomb, Dulcie, a member of the guerilla unit, represents a traumatic past that “cannot be told, cannot be translated into words, into language we use for everyday matters” (Wicomb 151). Embedded in this trauma is shame, which causes Dulcie to be a shadowy figure throughout the novel. Thus, she becomes an “amnemonic trace” (Potamianou 963) of the past that David continually conceals, but in doing so, makes his involvement with the undisclosed mistreatment of Dulcie in the guerilla detention camps even more evident (Dass 73). David’s inability to depict Dulcie resembles a psychological process known as “repetition compulsion, a process that seeks to control and lessen unpleasant or traumatic experiences” (Potamianou 945).
Dulcie embodies all three characteristics that are manifested in trauma as demonstrated in the quote, “Dulcie and the events surrounding her cannot be cast as a story” because “there is no progression in time, no beginning and no end” (Wicomb 150). Firstly, David is unable to portray time in Dulcie’s story so it cannot be developed into a structured narrative. He leaves his amanuensis with scattered beginnings that do not introduce Dulcie’s story, indicating a rupture in the sense of time. For example, Dulcie is described as “only a middle that is infinitely repeated” (Wicomb 150). Secondly, David finds Dulcie and the injustice she received to be traumatic and as a result, he is unable to talk about her. His inability to put together words reflect a loss of language. His words seem to collapse into individual letters that gather into a “useless heap of play-letters without magnetic backs” (Wicomb 136) that even the educated female author cannot join into words. Finally, the disorganized narrative style of David’s Story, due to his incompetence of language use, presents a highly disoriented mind and disorganized thoughts (Potamianou 946). Both traumatic situations and Dulcie’s experience exhibit the described traits above, therefore Dulcie represents an unspeakable traumatic past for
In other words, traumatic memories and shame share similar properties causing a disruption of feelings and thoughts in the subject’s psychic network by intrusions, flashbacks, and fragmentation of memory (Matos and Pinto-Gouveia 299). Matos and Pinto-Gouveia believed that shame can exist in two forms (300). First, shame can manifest itself as a social event (Matos and Pinto-Gouveia 300). It can also be a personal judgment of our private feelings (Matos and Pinto-Gouveia 300). Given this information, David’s possible involvement with the violence imposed on Dulcie and his relationship and feelings towards her can be linked with the feeling of shame. Dulcie’s nightly torture is a social event and his loyalty towards the Movement causes him to judge his intimacy with her harshly. Both situations are a source of trauma for David, which evokes a sense of shame, inciting a need to deny his associations with Dulcie. When describing the Movement, David argues that “keeping your hands clean is a luxury that no revolutionary can afford” (Wicomb 196). The history of the Movement permeates with shame and David’s unwillingness to discuss these episodes of Dulcie indicates the inability of telling the truth without addressing and acknowledging the shameful events that occurred. David also claims that his