AustLit

'In Ken Josephson’s photograph ‘New York State 1970’, a man’s arm stretches out over the horizon. In his hand, he holds ‘a postcard of an ocean going ship out over Lake Ontario’. Yet, the way Josephson’s photograph is ‘made, not taken’, it wants you to believe the ship is out there on the ocean. John Berger in ‘Magritte and the Impossible’ explains this: ‘through the gap behind the appearances of the sea and sky a dark free impossible emptiness.’ On closer inspection of Josephson’s photograph, the ship is floating above the sea, a gap in the (perhaps blue?) horizon. Where is he / Josephson / the hand / the photographer standing? On the shore? A jetty? You read somewhere that Josephson snapped this himself, but how is that possible? In some of his other images, the hands in the pictures look like someone else’s hands. This photograph reminds you of Belgian surrealist René Magritte’s ‘The Treachery of Images’; the oil on canvas painting of a smoker’s pipe with the French statement, ‘Ceci n’est pas un pipe.’ This is not a pipe. Ceci n’est pas un bateau. This is not a ship. It is not sailing over the ocean. But it is also of a ship sailing over the ocean.' (Introduction)

'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)