The Architecture of the Unsaid: Mapping the
Caruthian “Unclaimed Experience” in African Refugee Narrative
Kumari Vishakha,
Ph.D. Research Scholar,
Department of Modern & European Language,
University of Lucknow,
Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India.
Abstract: This comparative study applies Cathy Caruth's
concept of "unclaimed experience" from Unclaimed Experience: Trauma,
Narrative and History to African refugee narratives in Sulaiman Addonia's
Silence in My Mother Tongue (2020) and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017).
Through the space of un-articulated trauma- static camp non-places and kinetic
black doors—the somatic voice of crying wounds (Hagos's mute cathedral, Nadia's
robe silence), and the crisis of witness (digital vacuums, cinema sovereignty),
the analysis reveals the hidden morphology of traumatic narratives. Close
readings reveal Caruthian deferral humanized via embodied resistance and
ethical address, filling gaps in postcolonial applications. Findings underscore
literature's testimonial power amid displacement crises, with implications for
de-colonial extensions.
Keywords: unclaimed experience, Cathy Caruth,
refugee narratives, Silence Is My Mother Tongue, Exit West, trauma latency,
somatic silence.
Introduction
The African
refugee predicament poses a profound humanitarian challenge in the modern era.
According to the reports of International Organization for Migration, since1990, the number of African migrants living
outside of the region has more than doubled, with growth in Europe most
pronounced. The definition of “refugee” is an individual who has been
constantly changing homes because of wars, forced military services, and
sometime even due to the harsh condition in refugee camps. The African
continent faces a refugee crisis due to conflict and instability, particularly
in Sudan, Uganda, and Eritrea. The experience of being uprooted lead to not
only stories of physical displacement but also physic rupture – trauma that is
filled in silence , body movement , repetition , resistance to articulation and
deferred realisation. This complex paradigm is represented in Sulaiman
Addonia’s book Silence Is My Mother
Tongue (2020) and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit
West (2017), which provides pivotal frameworks for analysing trauma through
affective expressions. Cathy Caruth’s seminal Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996), offers
a conceptual architecture that discusses trauma as an “unclaimed experience”, a
catastrophic experience that eludes straightforward comprehension and evokes
feelings of horror, fear, shame, and suppression in the survivor.
Cathy Caruth, in
her books, discusses about ‘trauma theory’, which she has reinterpreted from
Freud’s concept of Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (1920). Caruth argues that trauma is not only a medical issue but
a crisis of consciousness. This crisis appears as nightmares, flashbacks, or actions
that repeat the wound against the psyche’s will. Survivors experience a sense
of belatedness, meaning that the pain returns repeatedly. Caruth explains this
as a “death drive” where survivors relive trauma involuntarily. She writes, “Trauma is a history that can only be known
through its repetitive absences." (p. 11). For Caruth, trauma has
an ethical dimension: it is not private pathology, but a call to listen. She
positions literature as a medium where history emerges through referential
slippage—what cannot be directly known or possessed.
In this
discussion, I will show how refugee displacement creates on-going uncertainty
rather than a singular traumatic event. Refugee camps, in this context, are places
of personal and collective losses which remain ‘unclaimed’. Addonia’s "Silence Is My Mother Tongue"
is inspired by his experiences growing up as an Eritrean-Sudanese refugee, is
set in a desert camp near the Sudan-Ethiopia border. Here, teenage siblings
Saba (14) and Hagos (17), both born mute, confront a harsh, patriarchal
environment. They endure several traumatic events: Saba’s assault, Hagos’s
failed circumcision, their mother’s emotional withdrawal, and the silence
imposed by both aid workers and community leaders. The trauma is so
overwhelming that silence becomes the main way it expresses itself. We see this
in Hago’s voicelessness, in Saba’s silence after her assault, and structurally
in Jamal’s silent cinema. Through Hagos’s love for another man and
Saba’s refusal to accept traditional gender roles, Addonia reframes silence as
an act of courage and self-assertion. Silence becomes a means of empowerment
and challenge to gender norms, turning it into strength and resistance rather
than just victimhood.
Mohsin
Hamid’s Exit West elucidates crucial
perspective on war, militant, exile, and refuge with the help of the lovers,
Saeed and Nadia, who have been migrating from an unnamed theatre of civil war
(evoking Afghanistan and Syria) through magical doors, hidden passageways
permitting swift worldview transit to Mykonos, London, and San Francisco.
Indeed, these doors become a medium of trans global passage, but still the
physic trauma persists: the killing of Saeed’s mother, Nadia’s relationship
with the burqa, and their relationship deteriorating due to cultural alienation
and shift of faith between them. Silence in an ‘unclaimed’ ways plays a very
different role through the loss of mother tongue, repetitive gaps, and
stuttering among migrants. It also talks about the racial violence which the
migrant have to face in another country.
Theoretical framework: Caruth’s
“Unclaimed Experience”.
“Traumatic
neurosis” refers to subconsciously re-enacting an event, which Freud called as
“repetition compulsion”. He emphasized it is not a memory but action repeatedly
performed (150). The term, “war trauma’ is important in understanding Caruth’s
theory. Terms like “shell shock”, refers to neurological damage. Caruth
suggests that traumatic experience remain unresolved in the survivor’s
subconscious.
"Trauma is not locatable in the iconic or the linguistic... it is rather
the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell
us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available." (Caruth 4)
In the African
refugee narratives of Sulaiman Addonia and Mohsin Hamid, this 'crying wound'
does not appear as a loud confession but as a deep, paradoxical silence. Cathy
Caruth uses the term ‘crying wound’ to refer to a severe trauma that is
initially unknown but “gets back to haunt the victim of trauma later on” (4).
Trauma is not just the occurrence of an event; it is the part that remains
“unknown” or “unharmed” (18); due to which it distract the survivor from
showing their trauma. The first shock is so deep in memory that it's hard to
fully understand the trauma, even when bits of it come back as flashbacks and hallucinations.
This constant reminder causes many changes in the victim's thinking, which
Freud described as follows:
“one
must suppose rather than the physical stress and trauma-or more specifically
the remembrance and memory of traumatic incident-acts like an unknown element
which after a long time of the actual happening continues to be termed as an
element that is still very active” (6).
The
Topography of Latency: The “Camp” versus the “Door”
Static Latency: The Refugee Camp as a
“Non-Place”
Sulaiman Addonia’s Silence Is My Mother Tongue describes the 1990s Kakuma camp, where
over 100,000 Sudanese and Eritreans endured neglect, rape and trafficking.
Addonia’s present the camp as a ‘non-place’, a landscape where time and
identity are paused, showing Cathy Caruth’s idea of ‘latency’. The
camp is established in an ambiguous terrain: "neither Sudan
nor Ethiopia, a city of tents where the wind carried no one's language"
(Addonia 23). Refugees
are stuck in routines where "the same dust settled on the same plastic
bags" (45), and their trauma remains ‘unclaimed’; unable to be processed because the camp offers no
future and “after." In this static void, silence acts as a protection. For
Saba, during her assault "silence rushed in" (112); it was not just
the loss of power but the withdrawal into sovereignty. Her silence sets a
boundary that the "biopolitics" of the camp—the aid workers and
patriarchal elders—cannot penetrate.
In Silence is My Mother Tongue, when Saba
is attacked, her attempt to cry out is overtaken by a suffocating silence that
arrives before she can even react. Addonia describes this moment: “She opened
her mouth to scream, but silence rushed in first” (112), capturing how trauma
can immediately rob someone of the ability to speak. Living in the stagnant
environment of the refugee camp, Saba is unable to process this horror;
instead, it remains “undigested,” buried within her until it emerges in her
sleep—her only space for release. Drawing upon his individual history, Addonia
shows how the camp’s strict surveillance—from aid workers and patriarchal
leaders—silences refugees, leaving them feeling like empty shells (89). By
withholding her story from a world that reduces her to a mere number, Saba
keeps her experience to herself, preserving her inner life. In a setting where
monotony is constant and nothing changes, her silence becomes a form of
protection—a hidden wound that aches beneath the surface, even if no one else
acknowledges it.
Kinetic Latency: The “Black Doors” as a Narrative
Erasure
Mohsin Hamid Exit West sidesteps the static reality
of refugee camps, opting for pervasive feelings of anxious anticipation. Hamid
uses magical black doors to evade the drawn-out ordeal of conventional
migration timelines. All through the novel, we have seen how Saeed and Nadia move "from room to room across the world in a single step"(76),
effectively erasing the physical trauma of the journey. The migration has left
a significant impact on the victim physically and emotionally, which are
unprocessed and “unclaimed” and it reflect the idea of ‘belatedness’ by Cathy
Caruth. Saeed losing his mother, "the
door took them away, but the mother’s bullet remained unclaimed in Saeed’s
chest" (12), has a very profound impact on his consciousness, and
it has also filled him with vulnerability, and that is the reason that where
ever he goes, he always want to create bond with his own country people. Saeed
and Nadia has migrated to various place and in each new place they wanted to
create a home of their own, which suggest that while the place changes the pain
does not, even the place like London can’t become their home due to violence
and racial discrimination, which lead to the cycle of migration continue "huddled silently as new camps became
old wars" (134), echoing the dust and weariness found in Addonia’s
Sudanese camps.
Hamid has used the phrase
"not safe, not home, not anymore" which resonate with the mind of
migrant who were forced to displace from their homeland. Migrant face problem
like identity crisis and cultural alienation; the pain is heaviest for those
whose identities, like being African or Muslim, make them targets of suspicion
and exclusion, as seen in the racial profiling and raids in San Francisco.
Hamid immerses us in Saeed and Nadia's private struggles; Saeed's prayers
become a means of preserving memories, while Nadia's continual transformations
indicate her desire to find safety in being someone new. No matter where they
go, the pain and longing they experience silently accompany them even as the
enchanted portals transport them to new place.
The Somatic Voice: The Body as a “Crying Wound”
Hagos: The Cathedral of the
Unsaid
Hagos's naturally silent body
serves as the "crying wound" Caruth describes, a living structure
where his body expresses truths that words cannot. Addonia writes, "Hagos
could not speak, but his presence filled the tent like a prayer no one dared
interrupt" (67). This silence is made deeper by his trauma; after a failed
circumcision, his physical scars become a record of the "unspoken war that
birthed the camp" (156). However, his body is not just a site of pain. In
his relationship with the businessman, their physical connection becomes a way
to "claim" a forbidden desire that the elders’ laws try to suppress.
Addonia notes that "their skins whispered secrets" (201), using this
queer, physical bond to show that a refugee's body is more than just a symbol
of victimhood—it is a source of human agency and power.
While violence
may silence a child, the marks left on the body continue to testify to that suffering. This is clear when Hagos watches
Jamal’s makeshift cinema; he has "eyes that saw what mouths could not
say" (134), witnessing the camp’s reality in a way that speech never
could. The "cathedral" presents itself as symbol of Hagos’s anatomy,
into a form of "testimonial architecture.” His ribs, resembling the arches
of a cathedral, embody resilience, while his silence becomes a sacred form of
expression. Hagos’ silence doesn’t make him weak; it defines his strong
endurance, illustrating the resilience of his essence amid legal and social
adversity.
Nadia’s Robe:
The Visual Silence
Nadia uses
clothing as a defensive mechanism:"the
robe hid her body but not the silence it carried from home" (89).
The burqa and black robe become a symbol of ‘visual silence’, and as she and
Saeed moves through the magical doors to various locations, she erodes her
physical and emotional wounds:"she
walked naked in spirit, old coverings left unclaimed behind doors" (210).This
discarding of her burqa is actually a way for her to leave past her physical
and emotional wound, which she has acquired from the identity of a migrant.
Through the journey of migration, she has met other women, the "veiled women who became silent shadows
in Mykonos tents, their robes trailing memories" (102) of the lives
they were forced to leave behind.
Nadia love for
music is her way of transforming her pain to joy; her guitar, and the sound "filled voids words abandoned, notes
claiming what violence took" (245). This is an exemplary instance
of a painful reminder, where silence plays a considerable role. The robe
signify, “dust of, vanished landscape” (78), acting as a fabric of memory that
addresses both Saeed and the reader. It also engages with the person’s pain and
the trauma of their lost environment. . Ultimately, Nadia’s journey is about
moving from a "visual silence" that hides her pain to a physical
reclamation of her own identity and history.
Conclusion
The main idea of
“The Architecture of the Unsaid: Mapping the Caruthian “Unclaimed Experience”
in African Refugee Narratives” is that the books Silence is My Mother Tongue and Exit
West show a deep truth about trauma. Trauma has a paradox: silence protects
by hiding painful experiences that are too hard to say, while speaking brings
those experience back in a haunting way. The pain of the migrant goes beyond
the emotional and physical wound they acquire. Through these stories, we can
understand, what it feels like to stuck between two worlds.
Silence in both books is a manner
of saying "no," not a sign of being a victim. Saba is surrounded by
people in the refugee camp who wish to judge or "fix" her. She keeps
her inner life a secret from them by refusing to talk. Addonia demonstrates how
a wall of protection was formed around her when "silence rushed in
first" (112). In a similar vein, Nadia's black robe in Exit West acts as a
"visual silence" to prevent others from assuming anything about her.
These characters aren't merely "voiceless"; in order to maintain
control over their own narratives, they purposefully refrain from speaking.
The limitation of this study is
that it mainly focuses of books and textual framework; therefore real life
experiences may differ slightly. In my understanding, the readers should be
taught to “respect the sovereignty of unsaid” and should have empathy and understandings
toward the refugee who choose not to share their struggle. These studies
demonstrate that silence keep trauma whole and safe. In Addonia’s book, the
character’s muteness is a strong refusal to speak, while Hamid uses break and
gaps in speech to protect hidden trauma. Comparing the two authors adds to
Caruth’s theory. Addonia writes from inside the experience, focusing on
personal and body-based control. This work transmutes survivors into bearers of
testimony. They turn voices that were once ignored or silenced into strong
stories that stand against global neglect.
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