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We need to talk about women’s hidden traumas
Author: Juliana Claassens
Published: 09/03/2020

​Sunday (8 March) was International Women's Day. In an opinion piece for News24, Prof Juliana Claassens, Head of the Gender Unit in the Faculty of Theology, writes about how we can pay more attention to the hidden traumas women all around the world still experience.

  • Read the article below or click here for the piece as published.

Women's lives in brackets …

Juliana Claassens*

In her short story, “Three [Love] Stories in Brackets" published in African Love Stories: An Anthology (2006), South African author and poet, Antjie Krog, powerfully demonstrates the way in which the voices of women are often not heard in literature. Krog tells three local [love] stories: one personal anecdote regarding her own grandmother who almost had been swindled out of her inheritance by her useless husband; snippets from the life of Susanne Smit as represented in her diary; and the story of Nandi, mother of Shaka, King of the Zulus as evident in a praise song. In an innovative literary technique, Krog employs opened and closed brackets in order to signal the silence surrounding what women are feeling or thinking. As she explains:

The brackets are to say: women's lives usually take place in secret, in brackets, in silence, in places that we don't know. They don't tell you about it, someone else tells you about it. So now you have the stories about women told by others, but the brackets remind you that the voice you hear is not that of the women, it is the voice of others.

International Women's Day that comes around once a year on March 8, invites us to pause for a moment and consider how women are doing – in our country as well as around the world. Krog's poignant literary technique of opened and closed brackets reminds us that, when taking the proverbial temperature of the state of women's wellbeing, we need to look closer and deeper to what is “in brackets, in silence, in places we don't know". The truth is that there are all too many stories of pain and suffering in women's lives which are concealed from even those closest to them.

It is these private or hidden experiences of pain that have led feminist psychologist Laura Brown to write that for many young girls and women, most traumas do occur in secret. In her chapter in the book Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), she writes that incest happens “in the dead of night;" spousal abuse and marital rape occurs “behind the closed doors of marital relationships;" forced sexual relations, with young girls lured into having sex with their boyfriends, take place in the backseats of cars; sexual exploitation transpires in doctors' offices.

In my recently completed monograph on reading biblical and contemporary trauma narratives, I explore the various ways in which literature may help to document these seen and unseen examples of systemic violation of women's dignity. For instance, in a March 2017 essay in the New York Times, iconic novelist Margaret Atwood reflects on the significance of her classic novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985) in the time of Trump. According to Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, which so compellingly document the multi-levelled attacks on women's freedom in a dystopian world that more and more seems to overlap with our own, the literary form of the witness forms a central theme. Offred, the main character in The Handmaid's Tale, is said to “record[s] her story as best she can; then she hides it, trusting that it may be discovered later, by someone who is free to understand it and share it. This is an act of hope: Every recorded story implies a future reader."

y reading trauma narratives that document stories of women's hidden suffering, we inadvertently are put into the role of the witness. Being a witness is to be mindful of what is happening in the brackets of women's lives; to become cognisant of women's secret or hidden traumas.

Taking up the task of the witness by way of reading stories documenting women's trauma is important though for another reason. The act of reading fiction has been shown to have a therapeutic quality for individuals who find themselves coming to terms with the effects of severe trauma. Julia Kristeva, in her classic work Black Sun (1989), speaks of literature as a “counter depressant" – in the absence of psychological treatment, helping to lift up individuals trapped in the pit of despair. Trauma narratives can thus be said to connect us to one another. By reading stories of women's secret traumas, especially women who for a very long time may have been suffering in silence, inevitably may find themselves part of a virtual community in which they come to the realization: “I am not alone."

The act of reading trauma narratives that draws our attention to women's lives that occur in brackets, moreover, exhibits distinct ethical implications. Trauma narratives such as represented in the novels by Margaret Atwood, but also Toni Morrison, Penelope Fitzgerald, Anna Burns, and M.L. (Margot) Stedman are an important tool for bringing accounts of secret or hidden traumas experienced by women into the open; to shed light on the injustices that transpire in secret, in the dark, behind closed doors. In this regard, to serve as a witness by reading trauma narratives can be said to serve as an important act of raising awareness, drawing our attention to the manifold forms of violation and humiliation that continue to be experienced by women near and far.

International Women's Day may thus be a good moment to pick up a book that captures in narrative form the hidden traumas of women that are reminiscent of what women all around the world are experiencing in real life. We more than ever are in need of witnesses: brave individuals who may step forward and speak where others are not able to speak; activists who, in an act of solidarity, may represent the violated, the silenced, and the marginalized whose lives all too often are taking place in brackets.

*Prof Juliana Claassens is Professor of Old Testament and Head of the Gender Unit in the Faculty of Theology at Stellenbosch University.