Through the analyst’s intervention, the analysand may be able to speak the signifier to which he or she as subject had been subjected… . By interpolating or bringing the analysand to pronounce the word or words (or conflation of words: assemblage) around which he or she had been circling, that inaccessible, untouchable, immovable cause is impacted, the avoidance of that absent center is mitigated, and the cause is on the road to “subjectivization.”Footnote 1
—Bruce Fink, The Lacanian SubjectTaking into account the interconnectedness of spaces, a number of theorists and writers have investigated the impact of trauma on subjectivities within their social, cultural, and political environments. In postcolonial studies, scholars such as Veena Das (2007)Footnote 2, Antjie Krog and colleagues (2009)Footnote 3, and Stef Craps (2012)Footnote 4 have convincingly argued that postcolonial trauma survivors are not necessarily under the tyranny of the past; to the contrary, they may take advantage of the past event by immersing themselves in the trauma. Jay Rajiva gives the example of those survivors who cannot distance themselves from the past because they are compelled “to perform the grief of the community in both clothing and gesture. Such a submersion in past trauma becomes a way for a trauma survivor to expand and even renegotiate her relationship to that same community… . Essentially, the survivor inhabits the enforced retriggering of her trauma but finds the means—in daily life, over months and years—to make sense of her trauma.”Footnote 5
For Stef Craps, the main flaw of the works of theorists such as Dominic LaCapra, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Ruth Leys, and Geoffrey Hartman is their use of PTSD as a universal, ahistorical, and transcendent concept applicable to all cases of trauma regardless of the specific circumstances where they occur.Footnote 6 Challenging the ahistorical, transcendent approach, Antjie Krog and colleagues, in There Was This Goat, make a compelling case against defining the main protagonist, Mrs. Konile as a traumatized individual; such designation leaves out her status as daughter, sister, wife, and mother. It also overlooks the fact that as a worker, she has been engaging every day in a series of meaningful acts. As a black woman born during apartheid, Mrs. Konile suffered countless restrictions. By failing to capture the complexity of the identities of those it labels as traumatized, the Western psychiatric nomenclature obliterates trajectories and circumstances without which it is quasi impossible to pinpoint the elements constitutive of the trauma that affects the victims.Footnote 7
Based on his fieldwork in eastern Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, Patrick BrackenFootnote 8 expressed his unease while witnessing a number of his British colleagues export PSTD-based approaches in that region to treat victims of torture. He found such cognitivist Western models too “individualistic, mentalistic and based on linear models of time.” Moreover, Bracken opined, they seriously undermined “local traditions of healing and support … which were not focused on an individualized PTSD orientated approach, but were deeply bound up with religious, cultural, social family dynamics and discourses.”Footnote 9
Using different aesthetic features and narrative techniques, writers have drawn attention to the entanglement of the experience of trauma victims with the dynamic everydayness of their existence and their socio-historical trajectories instead of focusing on stressors. In Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not Footnote 10, the main protagonist Tambu rises above her trauma-ridden circumstances plagued by racism, colonialism, and war to assert her agency.Footnote 11 Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy Footnote 12, a deft intertextual underwriting of the myth of Orpheus with the Yoruba myth of Ogun, underscores the importance of indigenous systems of belief in dealing with traumaFootnote 13. In the same vein, Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love Footnote 14 shows how Western psychology’s lack of understanding of postwar Sierra Leone’s socio-cultural environment leads to professional ineffectiveness. Forna questions the validity of the Eurocentric approach to trauma that overlooks specific indigenous circumstances. She revisits the same topic in Happiness Footnote 15 using techniques that are the focus of this paper.
In Forna’s fourth novel, Happiness, a serendipitous encounter at Waterloo Bridge in London between Attila Asare, a world-renowned Ghanaian psychiatrist, and Jean Turane, an American animal biologist, sets in motion a narrative of interconnected human and animal lives. In this tale of generosity, compassion, and love, Attila and Jean challenge the specious views, false assumptions, and prejudices in their respective fields of research.
Throughout the novel, italicized passages reveal snatches of the extreme pressure under which Attila confronted the horrors of wars in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Iraq, Sri Lanka, and Syria. Having worked in these places “lost in moral darkness,” Attila has concluded that some of the psychiatric shibboleths are inadequate. In his keynote speech at an international conference he is attending in London, he challenges them, and suggests an alternative way of looking at trauma.
As for Jean Turane, after tracking coyotes and wolves in the US, she is in London studying the city’s urban foxes. For her research project, Jean has employed street sweepers and other night wanderers to help spot foxes and record their movements. Except for one Bosniak, all her employees are West African immigrants.
Through a number of subplots, we learn that Attila is actively searching for his niece and her son and that he joined the team defending Adama Shariff, a Sierra Leonean woman accused of arson. Concurrently, while working on his keynote speech for the conference, Attila is attending to Rose, his former lover suffering from Alzheimer’s. The novel exudes Attila’s and Jean’s dedication to fight for the truth in their fields of research as well as the generosity and lightheartedness characteristic of the encounters between Jean, the traffic wardens, the doormen, and the street-sweepers, who are helping her with her project.
The typographical changes in Happiness are the first formal features to reveal the intertextual construction of the novel. Another aesthetic feature, the poly-isotopic narrative structure with two essential thematic paths, psychiatry and urban animal biology is foreshadowed by the aforementioned collision between Jean and Attila on Waterloo Bridge. In this paper, I will focus on the psychiatry isotopy in Happiness to explore how Forna uses transuasion and intertextuality to pursue her reflection on trauma.
Transuasion
Charles Sanders Peirce coined the term transuasion to designate the potentially interminable semiotic process inherent in the sign itself. He explains transuasion as a difference within the sign, a sort of resistance or obstinate difficulty, which, far from blocking productivity, spurs it on to creative transformations.Footnote 16 Resistance sets in motion a critical engagement with canonical texts, guarantees the productivity of textual semiosis, and generates an infinite series of interpretations. Concomitantly, it interrupts the smooth reproduction of hegemonic cultural values and paves the way to the possibility of new meanings and novel perceptions of the world.Footnote 17 Transuasion as semiotic change can be a result of adaptation, reappropriation, and transformation of a sign. It can also result from the resistance to or deconstruction of an orthodox or hegemonic sign-system. Concerning the representation of trauma in Happiness, exploring instances of transuasion will lead us to the heart of the controversy surrounding psychiatric practices.
In Happiness, the narrator informs, “the work had proved lucrative for many of Attila’s colleagues as the number of defendants claiming trauma as a whole or partial defence has escalated over the years.”Footnote 18 Cases in criminal courts have involved veterans claiming to suffer from flashbacks at the time of offense; battered wives and abused children who killed the people who had hurt them:
Then and somehow, it seemed, inevitably the no win/no fee lawyers smelled the scent of easy money, the number of civil claims multiplied, fed by the numerous minor workplace accidents, the rear end shunt in the car park, the trip down the marble stairs of a shopping mall, the slip on a restaurant floor, the hours spent trapped in a malfunctioning lift. Suddenly everyone was a trauma victim.Footnote 19
Not only is the meaning of trauma hackneyed, trivialized, and devoid of scientific meaning, it is used in a perverse way in extortion schemes by unscrupulous lawyers and would-be victims. In criminal courts, culprits have cleverly used it to win acquittal from juries. Thus, as a signifier, trauma epitomizes a combination of semantic, ethical, and moral degeneracy. Consequently, it has lost any meaningful and credible denotative value in the medical field.
In the world of psychiatry, Attila’s decades of experience as an expert evaluator in wartorn places like Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and the Turkish/Syria border have convinced him that we become human in the face of adversity. Hence, in his crusade for epistemological and conceptual recalibrations in the field of trauma studies, he points at a couple of logical fallacies: If there is an incident, ergo there must be damage. Equally if there is damage, ergo there must be an incident. These conclusions rest on the assumption that “the absence of adverse life events creates the ideal conditions for human development”; they make professionals treat patients like “damaged goods.” In so doing, professionals “compound the pain of whatever wound has been inflicted and … encourage everyone around them to do the same.”Footnote 20 Based on evidence gathered from different parts of the world, Attila contends that most people who have endured trauma do so without lasting negative effects, but [psychiatrists] overlook the ones who cope because [they] never see them.”Footnote 21
Adama Sheriff’s case report handed to Attila is based on the aforementioned logical fallacies. Its introduction reads: “Post-traumatic stress disorder is defined as a mental disorder that arises from the experience of traumatic life events, which cause pervasive distress.”Footnote 22 It goes on to quote DSM5 that “recognizes the violent death of a loved one as a potential stressor for PTSD.”Footnote 23 This dogmatic approach to trauma, instead of starting with empirical data to draw conclusions, seeks to fit all trauma cases in the same theoretical frame irrespective of the specific circumstances where they happened. Attila, on the other hand, has learned that probing into subjectivities in context matters because people react differently to adversity. He “had known people who could walk through fire. He’d seen them in all places he had been, they withstood what destroyed others, even rose it… . And even such person might yet be undone by the breaking of an egg.”Footnote 24 In light of his worldwide experience, Attila suspects that the truth in Adama’s case is not to be sought in psychiatric manuals or the tragedies that punctuate her life story. Instead, one has to consider the breaking of the egg.
Accurate diagnosis cannot solely rely on psychiatric manuals, which cannot and should not be substitutes for the sufferers’ voices. Neither can effective treatment ignore them. To drive this point home, Forna writes:
In the old days, Bedlam was shrieks and screams, tin bowls banged against walls. Bedlam meant pandemonium. Bedlam had come to mean uproar, anarchy. Yet modern Bedlam had been drugged into silence. The compliant mad shuffled and drooled, keened and slept and when they spoke, they spoke in whispers. Adama Sheriff refused to go quietly.Footnote 25 … The only thing she did which landed her in a courtroom was to externalize her despair instead of internalizing it. If she’d taken an overdose or slit her wrists, the law wouldn’t be bothering with her. Let Bedlam be silent.Footnote 26
In her relationships with the medical apparatus and the judicial system, the patient has to be silent or be silenced; she has to comply with rules, meet expectations, and fit a profile drawn from canonic texts. In his arguments against Greyforth’s that are typical to the profession, Attila remarks “She [Adama] sees the doctor and is offered antidepressants. All along she is treated like there is something wrong with her. Should we be surprised if her grief transposes into anger.”Footnote 27 Attila is concerned with the array of psychiatric theories and practices used to mute Adama’s voice and disregard her interests. Such practice of silencing is the hallmark of epistemic violence. According to Jennifer Hornsby, Footnote 28 what makes “successful linguistic exchange” is “reciprocity.” She explains:
I give the name “reciprocity” to the condition that provides for the particular way in which successful illocutionary acts can be performed. When there is reciprocity among people, they recognize one another’s speech as it is meant to be taken: An audience who participates reciprocally does not merely (1) understand the speaker’s words but also, in (2) taking the words as they are meant to be taken, satisfies a condition for the speaker’s having done the communicative thing she intended.Footnote 29
It is this kind of reciprocity that Attila strives to create between him and his patients. Because of his deep compassion, Attila “didn’t feel as if he were with a patient or client, rather he felt as though he were with somebody it might be interesting to know… . They told him things not because he was a professional full of a professional’s intrigues or dispassion, but because he wanted to know. Somehow in some academic way, he willed their confidence.”Footnote 30 Paramount to this process of confidence building and meaning-making is how the professional listens. The attention required to decode the patient’s message is metaphorically expressed in the woodpecker passage:
“Bloody woodpecker,” said Kathleen Branagan, “I’ve been trying to figure out what the noise was for weeks.” Attila went and look out of the window in the kitchen door. The rat-a-tat had been going on for several minutes… . “Greater-spotted, lesser spotted, I’ve never known enough to tell the difference, said Kathleen.” Attila returned to his chair and continued to follow the mechanical motions of the bird’s head while Kathleen Branagan read through Adama Sheriff’s notes obtained from the solicitor … “The last psychiatrist thought there was an indication of racism. The solicitors seemed very quick to agree, apparently she was shunned by some of her neighbours. One woman crossed the street, that sort of thing. She wasn’t invited to events when others were,” said Attila.
“What does that have to do with PTSD?”Footnote 31
The opacity of the “language” of the woodpecker is suggestive of how cryptic the language of a patient can be if the professional does not show the required patience to decipher it. Walled in its jargon, psychiatry has lost the capacity to decode accurately messages that do not fall under its own communication model; such messages are perceived and discarded as noise. Based on the stipulation made in DSM5 that the death of a loved one can be a potential stressor for PTSD, Kathleen Branagan, gazing at the woodpecker, reasserts her belief that Adama’s trauma was caused by her husband’s accidental death. Attila reaches a different conclusion based on his conversations with Adama. In The Lacanian Subject, Bruce Fink reminds us that “trauma implies fixation. Fixation always involves something which is not symbolized, language being that which allows for substitution and displacement—the antithesis of fixation.”Footnote 32 By making the anlysand verbalize fixation and integrate it in a network of signifiers, it undergoes “dialectization,” “being drawn into the dialectic or movement of the analysand’s discourse and set in motion.”Footnote 33 Attila managed to create a climate conducive to productive communication between him and Adama. Hence, he was able to access her motives and be in a position to challenge the psychiatric paradigm that his colleague Greyforth used to analyze Adama’s trauma. Attila’s diagnosis is enlightening because he understands how the collective unconscious is replete with phobia-induced defense mechanisms, which prevent people from empathizing with those sufferers they perceive as harbingers of doom.
Suffering had become a spectacle that served to warn of the vagaries of misfortune but to remind the audience sitting in warmth and comfort, of their own good fortune. A society went numb … as often from being battered by fate as from never being untouched. The untouched, who were raised under glass, who never felt the rain or the wind, had never been caught in a storm, or run from the thunder and lightning, could not bear to be reminded of their own mortality. They lived in their terror of what they could not control and in their terror they tried to control everything, to harness the wind… . No shadow could be allowed to darken their lives as they imagined them. They were terrified of the slightest hurt, afraid of fear itself.Footnote 34
Phobias may cause trauma. The misrecognition of how they emerge in the social body leads to specious detection of the origins of the trauma they cause and to confusion when it comes to identifying the agents and victims of trauma. Attila’s diagnosis draws his fellow professionals’ attention to the kind of phobia that made Adama’s clients shun her because of her husband’s untimely death. It was not necrophobia, a fear of death, but instead, given their status as “untouched,” they were afraid of life. Greyforth was acquiescent; “he said nothing. He made a gesture, opening and closing his clasped hands.”Footnote 35 The woodpecker metaphor and Attila’s procedure reveal that professionals’ preconceived ideas of trauma are not allowing them to help their patients to express themselves. To reveal the real cause of trauma, the patient must be given a chance to speak. The degree of “untouchedness” that Attila refers to is akin to Geoffrey H. Hartman’s reflection regarding how traumatizing the mother can be. In his article “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” he argues:
The “mother is always traumatizing… . Within the child’s framework of basic trust, or idealization of a nurturing presence, there are infinite chances to be hurt, and the greater the idealization the greater the vulnerability. Since integrated (in the psychoanalytic sense) remains a type of idealization, it cannot totally defend against this daily hurt, which can go very deep, as deep as childhood.Footnote 36
Thus, mother is traumatizing because she leaves the child in us unprepared to withstand life’s multifarious adversity. This vulnerability inherent to the human condition begs the question of how people develop coping mechanisms that can shield them from trauma. After meeting Komba and listening to him, Attila ponders the former child-soldier’s reintegration of society after experiencing the atrocities of the Sierra-Leonean civil war:
The trouble with happiness, thought Attila, was that, perhaps because infants seemed such happy creatures, people were led to believe that happiness came with the mother’s milk, happiness was man’s state of nature, of which all else was warping. The search to return to that state became unending. But they were mistaken for what they desired so badly wasn’t happiness but a state of prelapsarian innocence, the things that babies possessed. They wanted desperately not to know the truth. The thought that, if they knew, if they knew what Komba knew, there would be no return.Footnote 37
As human beings then, we live permanently in a world of fantasy, running away from the harsh truth of life’s inevitable setbacks that occasionally disrupt our central controlling mechanisms. The more those mechanisms rest on the illusory and the unattainable quest for happiness Attila mentioned, the more vulnerable we are. Conversely, Attila argues that our emotional vulnerability to trauma can be transformed into emotional strength if we are mentally prepared to accept that “misfortune can lead to life quality.”Footnote 38 Unfortunately, the myth associating unhappiness with the other is so prevalent and ingrained in our psyche that we unconsciously react to it with terror and rejection.
Attila’s transsuasive revisionism is grounded in his reflections on the human condition and his psychosocial development; it is manifest in the way he defies stagnation, dogmatism, wheeling and dealing, and professional-centeredness in trauma studies. In addition to transuasion, Forna uses an intertextual narrative construction to show what informs Attila’s innovative approach.
Intertextuality
The juxtaposition of different typographies in Happiness signals the intertextual narrative dynamics. Russell-West Pavlov defines intertextuality as:
[a] model of text construction in which available “pre-texts” are used as building blocks for a new text. Furthermore, it also offers a model of reality-construction: texts serve as explanatory templates to deal with emergent social situations. The self-reflexivity of the literary text, by which the text foregrounds its pre-texts and thereby reveals its process of production, is mirrored by movement between story and discourse levels of the text, that is, between narrative material and process of narrative construction. Intertextuality thus necessarily entails a process of reflection upon the ways in which the reader is implied within processes of social meaning-making. In addition, intertextuality reaches back into the past (into the archive of available texts) and into the future (towards textual and non-textual reactivation and dynamization). It is thus a potentially interminable process.Footnote 39
In Happiness a number of pretexts associated with Attila deal with challenging the status quo, critical engagement with canonical discourse, and deconstruction of psychiatric shibboleths. As such, they contribute to thematic character formationFootnote 40 and highlight the main protagonist’s intellectual trajectories and his theoretical perspective.
Attila had come of age as a psychiatrist at a time when the profession seemed to be under attack from every quarter. It was the era of the asylum, of the electroshock therapy, the revelations of the Soviet writers, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn among them, of the use of psychiatric methods to control the political dissidents of the USSR. In Attila’s final year the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was released and his professor paid for the entire class to see it. Attila learned to interrogate his own motives and those of his profession.Footnote 41
Solzhenitsyn was hailed for his 1962 novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in which he laid bare the brutalities in Stalin’s forced labor camps. His 1967 letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers, in which he demanded the abolition of censorship, the “rehabilitation” of many writers killed during the purges, and the restoration of his personal papers confiscated by the KGB (secret police), exacerbated his conflict with the Soviet regime. His further publications led the Soviet authorities to exile him to the West in February 1974. Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest also deals with subversive activities by McMurphy, who manages to undermine Nurse Ratched’s system of control.
The reference to Solzhenitsyn’s and Kesey’s works underscores training geared toward critical appraisal of oppressive systems and orthodoxies. In the paragraph following references to Solzhenitsyn and Kesey, David Rosenhan and Ronald Laing are tangentially mentioned. Rosenhan’s experiment called into question the classification of people as sane or insane, which leads to stigmatization or stereotypes about the mentally ill. Similarly, Laing challenged medical orthodoxy by arguing against the old Bedlam-based system of incarcerating people with mental illnesses. According to Laing, antipsychotic drugs and inhumane electric-shock treatment were part of the problem; they had contributed to people’s psychological and emotional distress. As a prominent figure of the anti-asylum movement, he worked tirelessly to promote self-healing practices and the community-care model. The Rosenhan and Laing intertexts allude to Attila’s critical dispositions vis-à-vis dominant ideas in the field.
While listening to one Columbia/Stanford alumnus speak at the conference, Attila cannot help wondering about the “we” the speaker is so assuredly referring to when he says, “The core assumptions about the world we hold true, in the psyche of the victim of trauma become corrupted, they cannot view the world with the same confidence as before.” And Attila to ask himself, who did he mean by “we”? “We” in this hall or “we” in Stanford? Or “we” wearing $600 suits… . Who’s “we,” white man?”Footnote 42 For Attila, the hall and the gathering of these specialists as a whole are nothing but echo chambers for an elite feeding on elitist views, speaking and hearing their reverberating jargon. The list of the titles confirms the theoretical loops these professionals are captive to: Additions to the Diagnostic Criteria of PTSD, Children and Disaster, The Social and Emotional Effects of PTSD Ten Years On, PTSD Symptoms Following Surgery (emphasis in Happiness).Footnote 43
At lunch, challenging one of his colleague’s specious concepts of trauma, Attila expressed his pent-up aggravation at this circle of elitists far removed from the fields where trauma claims victims:
How did the damage present itself? said the woman with short blonde hair and a voice which possessed no lower register.
“We’ve got to discover it.”
“It’ll be there. I’d be interested to know how it manifests.”
“Maybe it won’t,” said Attila.
The woman swung her head round at the interruption, her hair following fractionally behind. “A person doesn’t go through a trauma of this kind without damage. There’s got to be damage.”
“Suffering, yes,” said Attila. “There will be suffering, but suffering and damage are not the same. In other words, suffering does not equal damage… . The effect may not necessarily be what we have chosen to assume, what we’ve chosen to treat as fact, what we spend our time unearthing more and more evidence to bolster. The effect may even be positive.”Footnote 44
By challenging the PTSD-based school, which seems to be theoretically inadequate and living in a bubble of abstractions, Attila is goading his colleagues to be more empirical in their approach to trauma.
Another intertextual layer transpires in a conversation Attila had with Toure about Adama’s case. Toure brought up Robert Graves’s memoir Goodbye to All That, and then proceeded to say in a completely serious voice, “He [Robert Graves] goes back to the trenches of First World War when he doesn’t have to. He re-enlists. I think I am right. He goes back. He preferred the suffering of war to the insufferableness of civilization. He yearns only to be back among people who recognize the sound of shellfire.”Footnote 45 The inaccuracies of Toure’s account notwithstanding, the reference to Graves underscores a significant shift in the psychology of trauma that overlooked the ability of a patient not to surrender to trauma. Quite early in his literary career, Graves found his juvenile poetry a useful way to deal with emotional stress.Footnote 46 He followed the advice of the psychologist W.H.R. Rivers, who “encouraged him to lay [aside] his ghostly tormentor by raising him again in his poetry.”Footnote 47 His poetry became his “emotional armor against the psychological effects of the trenches.”Footnote 48 “In Goodbye to All That, Graves said that Country Sentiment was “a book of romantic poems and ballads” written “to forget about the war,” and by the time of Whipperiginny in 1932, Graves was still saying the poems in the earlier book were “products of the desire to escape from a painful war neurosis in an Arcadia of amatory fantasy.”Footnote 49 His ultimate efforts to say good-bye to all that was to write his memoir. Graves’s “emotional armor,” his “Arcadia of amatory fantasy,” is the inner resource called resilience that Attila is referring to in his keynote speech.Footnote 50 Regardless of their physical strength and stamina, people are more vulnerable when they lack of “emotional armor” or resilience. Attila gives the example of the college sportsmen “coddled by their coaches, fed a special diet, protected from anything that might cause upset and affect their performance.” Because they were not prepared mentally to deal with environmental hardships, they died when, hungry and sleep-deprived, they found themselves in the heat and humidity attacked by mosquitoes and rats.Footnote 51
Attila’s perspective on resilience in trauma studies is undergirded by Boris Cyrulnik’s Resilience, which is paramount among the intertexts used in Happiness. Taking cues from insights in neuroscience, psychology, and genetics, Cyrulnik argues that resilience—positive behavioral adaptation when faced with significant adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats—can help people overcome trauma and live a highly successful social life. For Cyrulnik, “resilience is a natural process: what we are at any given moment obliges us to use our ecological, emotional, and verbal environments to ‘knit’ ourselves. We might feel that, if a single stitch is dropped, everything will unravel, but in fact, if just one stitch holds, we can start all over again.”Footnote 52 Cyrulnik opines that violence and trauma strike people with different psychic fibers at different junctures in their lives. Irrespective of the force of the blows, the resultant wounds may have differential impacts depending on people’s life-trajectories. Therefore, it is imperative to consider the defense mechanisms victims may deploy in the face of adversity.
The aforementioned intertexts are constitutive of the epistemic space in which Attila’s innovative approach emerged; it is informed by victims’ coping strategies in different parts of the world and theoretical breakthroughs in the field of psychiatry. The spaces associated with these pretexts in Happiness as well as those Attila visited during his professional life—Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Afghanistan, the Turkish/Syrian border—contribute to our visualization of the scope and impact of trauma in the lives of our fellow human beings. The predicaments of the innumerable faceless characters in these spaces are parts of the transformative operations of shifting narrative levels. The intertextual and narrative constructions used to that effect are in line with Susan Stanford Friedman’s concept of spatialization, according to which, the narrative unfolds along vertical and horizontal axes in an intertextual grid. Whereas the horizontal captures the movement of the characters in space and time, the vertical axis accounts for the space and time the writer and reader occupy while getting involved in the signifying practice of the text and its dialogues with literary, social, and historical intertexts. These two axes work symbiotically in the novel’s process of semiosis.Footnote 53
Two major groups of characters are discernible along the horizontal axis of Happiness’s trauma stories. The first group comprises those who experienced firsthand brutalities in wartorn nations: Ibrahim, Komba, and Osman; the second group includes professionals: Kathlyn, Greyforth, Attila, and Quell. The various transactions between members of these two groups shape the contours of narrative dynamics and its underlying semiotic processes. For example, Ibrahim and Attila are involved in direct transactions in Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, and in indirect transactions in London through Kathlyn and Greyforth. These interactions constitute a narrative thread along which trauma-related issues are explored. A stark difference between Attila’s and Greyforth’s approaches is noticeable. Attila’s direct connection to Komba and Ibrahim and his firsthand field experience in postconflict nations allow him to successfully challenge the psychiatric shibboleths Greyforth and his fellow professionals use. Because of such experience, Attila is well poised to pave the way to epistemological breakthroughs in his field. Most importantly, the “signifying practice” of Happiness and its dialogues with scientific and historical intertexts raises questions about the universal and ahistorical dimensions of Western psychiatry. It also cautions against the exclusivism and hyperparticularism of certain critics of Eurocentrist approaches. In Happiness, Attila’s eclectic and critical approach is informed by extensive fieldwork from different regions of the globe and works by Western and non-Western scholars. Such vibrant cosmopolitanism is at the heart of his provocative keynote address that steers trauma studies toward newfound territories where the diagnosis of trauma will be more comprehensive and its treatment more efficient.
