In general, trauma is often a threat to life when it involves physical harm. However, an overwhelming feeling can also be traumatic. Recovery, on the other hand, is the process in which characters manage to restore their life back to...
moreIn general, trauma is often a threat to life when it involves physical harm. However, an overwhelming feeling can also be traumatic. Recovery, on the other hand, is the process in which characters manage to restore their life back to normal. The main focus of this study is to examine the types of trauma and the stages of recovery that characters in the selected novel go through by using Judith Herman's concepts of Trauma and Recovery. The main concept of Trauma that will be analysed in this study is child abuse while the stages of recovery to be discussed include reconnection and the dialectic of continued trauma. The study examines these issues in the narrative of Daughters Who Walk This Path, written by Yejide Kilanko. This novel depicts ill-fated events that eventually lead to the characters' traumatic experience and later the recuperation that the characters go through. Daughters Who Walk This Path portrays how a traumatised rape victim manages to move on with life after that torture. The book portrays how the traumatised characters managed to recover from their dark past in order to live a normal life. INTRODUCTION The novel, Daughters Who Walk This Path, depicts ill-fated events that eventually lead to the traumatic experiences and later recuperation that the characters go through. Trauma has been depicted as an experience whereby the victim goes through a series of ill-fated events (Caruth 1996). As portrayed in the novel, trauma was shown in the form of child abuse. In the novel, Child abuse was in the form of rape that happened to two school-going children. These two children were left under the care of people their parents had trusted. In order to recuperate from a trauma, the victims must come to terms with the issues which are actually not allowing them to move toward the future. The only way for the victims to have a better future is by working through the residual effects of their traumatic experiences (Schick 37-55). Both the rape victims in Daughters Who Walk This Path had to undergo the stages of recovery in order to restart normal life. They had to come to terms with their attacks and attackers as a way for them to move forward. The stages of recovery that these two characters underwent were those proposed by Herman in his concept of Trauma and Recovery. Generally, African texts have been discussed from a Post-Colonial theoretical perspective. The main focus of Post-Colonial literature's transcultural memory is its colonial past, which can portray important insights into life during that time. Although many of important events that took place and circumstances that existed during the colonial age have been related in Post-Colonial literature, not many themes have emerged depicting the lives of African slaves, although slavery has been a major theme portraying the physical and mental traumatization that the slaves were subjected to by their colonizers (Eckstein 2006) As for the novel used in this study, no prior studies were found to have been done on this book. However, many genres have been discussed using trauma theory in the African context. This study will analyse the novel Daughters Who Walk This Path by using Judith Herman's (1992) Trauma and Recovery concept. The Trauma: Child Abuse