Why Telling Stories about Black Bodies Matters: Physical Pain, Traumatic Body Memories and the Restoration of the Self in Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys
Summary
The current Master thesis focuses on the concept of traumatic body memories, and
departs from the notion that memories of traumatic experiences with pain can become
encoded on a physical level, a place that does not adhere to the standard rules of discourse.
The impact of pain’s inexpressible nature is that victims are left with a traumatic memory that
cannot exit their bodies, hereby remaining a haunting presence beneath their skins that affects
their daily lives. In addition, because of its inexpressibleness, pain can be appropriated or
dismissed. This is particularly visible with African Americans, whose bodies have repeatedly
been used in popular culture and in political discourses to promote racial stereotypes. It is for
this reason that the actual lived experiences of African Americans must be made available for
sharing and claiming, and literary works by authors of color have offered an avenue for this.
In recent years, the multifaced qualities of literature have also been recognized in the field of
psychotherapy, proponents maintaining that enhanced narrative capabilities will increase
people’s understanding of themselves and each other. By analyzing Colson Whitehead’s The
Nickel Boys (2019), which offers a fictional representation of the abuse of Black youths at the
former Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, this study investigates the means by which physical
pain can and must be made interpretable through narratives, in turn demonstrating that telling
one’s buried truths to a willing listener is imperative to restoring the self that was lost amidst
the traumatic past.