Unclaimed Voices

A Trauma-Theoretical Reading of Scholastique Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile

Abstract

This paper examines Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga to argue that trauma is represented not as a singular response to catastrophic violence but as an anticipatory and cumulative condition produced through everyday practices of exclusion, ideological conditioning, and institutional control. Drawing on trauma theory, the study demonstrates how trauma is encoded through narrative fragmentation, silence, and deferred meaning. The analysis is further informed by Sigmund Freud’s concepts of Eros and Thanatos, which illuminate the tension between life-affirming desires and destructive impulses within the novel’s social and psychological framework. Using trauma-informed close reading and psychoanalytic literary analysis, the paper explores four key dimensions: the construction of Veronica as an erotic–sacrificial figure, the articulation of genocide as a collective death drive, the function of institutional silence as a mechanism of control, and the sexualization of ethnic difference as a form of gendered trauma. It argues that Mukasonga’s narrative reconfigures trauma as a gendered and socially embedded phenomenon that precedes and exceeds the event of genocide, thereby challenging dominant trauma paradigms and offering a nuanced understanding of the psychic and cultural conditions that enable mass violence.