AustLit

'Often in immigrant literature, the familial landscape or homeland is considered a traumascape, which as Maria Tumarkin explains, is a place ‘marked by traumatic legacies of violence, suffering and loss’ (2005: 12). For many first-generation immigrants and refugees forced into leaving their homelands, the familial traumascape is also trapped in a past that no longer exists, or exists only in memories that are subject to traumatic ‘visual and sensory triggers’ (Tumarkin 2005: 12). This paper will show how second-generation immigrant writer Alice Pung has used her father’s first generation trigger memories of place in her memoir Her Father’s Daughter (2011) to direct her own writing. A textual analysis of the father’s present day narrative will reveal details of the traumatic events of an unliveable homeland and the intergenerational impact of this familial traumascape on his daughter. It will also discuss how, at the heart of Her Father’s Daughter, is the Barthesian idea of the punctum and its connection with testimony; and how the father’s homeland or familial landscape becomes the traumatic wounded site of painful trigger memories. Examining the writing from the site of the wound, this paper shows how the father’s traumatised memories of his homeland are able to be transformed as postmemories of place and belonging for the second-generation/daughter in her memoir.' (Publication abstract)

'Writing is a crucial process to the understanding of trauma. Whether trauma is represented through literature, fiction, non-fiction, auto/biography, memoir, post-generational and Indigenous narratives, poetry, graphic novels, art, photography, dance, plays, film, or closely observed by practitioners teaching creative writing within a classroom or an academic context, this issue includes the many and varied ways writers are bearing witness to trauma in the written form. Writing trauma offers a way of confronting, unpacking, questioning, de/constructing and navigating, the silence and the space, the gaps and the holes, the aporia, the unrepresentable and unknowable, of the sayable and unsayable, in order to reach a better understanding of how trauma is being re-presented within these diverse narratives.' (Introduction)

'Writing is a crucial process to the understanding of trauma. Whether trauma is represented through literature, fiction, non-fiction, auto/biography, memoir, post-generational and Indigenous narratives, poetry, graphic novels, art, photography, dance, plays, film, or closely observed by practitioners teaching creative writing within a classroom or an academic context, this issue includes the many and varied ways writers are bearing witness to trauma in the written form. Writing trauma offers a way of confronting, unpacking, questioning, de/constructing and navigating, the silence and the space, the gaps and the holes, the aporia, the unrepresentable and unknowable, of the sayable and unsayable, in order to reach a better understanding of how trauma is being re-presented within these diverse narratives. ' (Issue introduction)