“Traumatic Unrepresentability of Colonial Perpetrators in E.M Foster’s A Passage to India and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” by Alaa Kayed Abu-Rumman & Deema Ammari

In this article, Alaa Kayed Abu-Rumman and Deema Ammari argue that the literary characters in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness portray willing colonizers who experience trauma that stems from their participation in the colonial enterprise which disagrees with their moral values and disrupts their identity. They find that the characters Miss Quested in A Passage to India and Mr. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness are traumatized but that the cause of it remains largely hidden from the reader. Thus, the writers argue that these characters experience perpetrator trauma originating in their participation in the colonial enterprise. Abu-Rumman and Ammari argue that these novels imply colonial guilt but that, as products of their time, they were not able to openly critique the empire.

Abu-Rumman and Ammari define the willing colonizer as “a colonial agent or person who belongs to a colonizing nation who accepts to relocate and settle in the imperial colonies whether s/he is cognizant of or ignorant about the imperial agenda” (43). They identify the characters of Mr. Kurtz and Miss Quested as such, which is why they have chosen to focus on these characters, also because the novels belong to the same colonial period. They argue that these characters experience “moral injury”, meaning that they are morally conflicted because of “a disruption in their moral codes” and consequently in their identity (45). The moral injury emerges internally because of guilt over their behavior. In this case, the characters’ actions comply with the colonial context but this unsettles their morals and self-perception. In both novels, the characters are unable to express their trauma explicitly, which is typical of trauma but also elucidates that “the colonial traumas of Europeans who show willingness to be colonizers are purposefully meant to remain unrepresentable or unspoken, so that not to expose the real image of empire” (52).

This article considers colonial perpetratorship and its literary representability, which is an emerging concern in the field of perpetrator studies. In addition, the authors link the colonial perpetrator to the concept of trauma, which is a rather contested but not less intriguing topic within perpetrator studies. Their theorization of perpetrator trauma and its representation provides a framework that can be tested on other case studies.

Author of this entry: Dewi Kopp

Abu-Rumman, Alaa Kayed, and Deema Ammari. “Traumatic Unrepresentability of Colonial Perpetrators in EM Foster’s A Passage to India and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” International Journal 10, no. 1 (June 2022): 43-54. http://ijll-net.com/journals/ijll/Vol_10 _No_1_June_2022/6.pdf