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

Abstract

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.