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Affect and History in Ninotchka Rosca’s
State of War
17
memories
vomited her shame
—
both public and private,
the shame that had driven her to lash saints and horse with
equal cruelty and that which had driven her to embrace
the priest’s corruption until he found himself unable to
live without her contempt. (Rosca, 1988: 191; emphasis
added)
Maya responds to her female heir by making her shame
accessible to the other. The proximity and actual contact of the
two bodies brings out the feeling of shame in such a way that the
out-pouring of feelings become a ritual of healing. At the moment
of the encounter, a Babaylan ritual of interpersonal connection
seems to be reenacted. The reader is reminded that this is not the
only time that a physical communion is conducted across
generations of women. Maya has done the same with her mother
on the eve of her wedding to her first husband the cook: “Through
her mother’s flesh, she had met her own grandmother who was
still raving against what the Spaniards had done” (Rosca, 1988:
191-192). Physical communion is thus a coded ritual of memory
replacing language and historiography. Yet retrieving the memory
of generations of women who suffered violation reopens the
wounds of violation, and brings back her shame in her complicity
with her own violation. The physical communion as a kind of
technology of memory is thus transformed into a scenario of
traumatic reenactment. Theorists of trauma have maintained that
the return to the traumatic is a way to counter the devastating
effects traumatic events impinging on the body and affect
(McWilliams, 2009: 151). Dominick LaCapra describes this
traumatic return as a process of acting out and working through:
“It requires going back to problems, working them over, and
perhaps transforming the understanding of them. Even when they
are worked through, this does not mean that they may not recur
and required renewed and perhaps changed ways of working
through them again” (as cited in McWilliams, 2009: 151). In
Maya’s case, the mark of trauma is not the violation, but the shame