The Reparative in Narratives

The authors studied in this book are drawn together through their use of narrators who are survivors and, sometimes, inflictors, of unspeakable acts of violence. These authors then repair trauma through the act of writing. The reparative narratives introduced here require that readers be prepared to accept that healing belongs to a whole realm of potential outcomes - and that exposure and denunciation do not exhaust the victim's range of possibilities. The author contends that this context-specific, yet repeating, pattern constitutes a response to our contemporary understanding of both globalized and extremely localized types of traumatic memories.