For my SCE project, I will be looking at three primary texts: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Purple Hibiscus, Mai Der Vang’s book of poems Afterland, and lê thi diem thúy’s novel The Gangster We are All Looking For. These texts differ in form, content, culture and country. Purple Hibiscus is a coming-of-age novel about a young girl, Kambili, living in an abusive Catholic household in postcolonial Nigeria. Afterland is a collection of poems about the Hmong people’s displacement from Laos after the Vietnam War, where there were attempts at colonization through the military. The Gangster We are All Looking For is the story of a young, unnamed Vietnamese immigrant whose family has fled to San Diego. Though these texts are in many ways dissimilar, each of them deals with postcolonial life and the aftereffects of colonialism. I am thinking about the way that each of these texts deals with family, either ancestral or living, and how familiar ties shape and define trauma. I want to look at the reality of hereditary trauma in postcolonial societies, and how family dynamics can be affected by this trauma. In my SCE, I aim to explore how colonial violence spans generations in order to show my audience the importance of heritage and trans-generational narratives.

I will be looking at critical perspectives of postcolonial theory, psychological theory surrounding family trauma, and literary criticism concerning these three texts. Postcolonial criticism will help me to shape my argument and my readings of these three texts. I will suggest that the motif of family in these texts is used to explain trans-generational trauma responses to past and current psychological effects of colonization. This is extremely important to understand not only the history of colonization, but the lasting psychological effects that are passed down in family dynamics. I argue that these effects are not created through genetics but through hereditary trauma, making it possible for children to take on the postcolonial trauma of their ancestors. These texts show this notion through the motif of the family, using metaphor, character, and imagery.

Keywords: Family, Trauma, Motif, Postcolonial

Provisional Works Cited:

Jacob, John. “Hmong American Identity in Literature.” Salem Press Encyclopedia of Literature, 2019.

Quan Manh Ha. “Conspiracy of Silence and New Subjectivity in Monkey Bridge and The Gangster We Are All Looking For.” Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement, 2013, p. 1.

Bhattcharjee, Partha, and Priyanka Tripathi. “Ethnic Tensions and Political Turmoil: Postcolonial Reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus.” Language in India, vol. 17, no. 3, Mar. 2017, p. 433.