| The hovering bodies of the 'un-dead' dwell in the interstice between life and death, where can neither living body nor dead body fully dwell. In this limit-zone beyond ate (atrocious), life and death encroach upon each other, both living only as trace. The 'un-dead' comes back and lingers on the earth in the form of the ghost figure Beloved in Beloved. The 'un-dead' comfort woman In-Duk keeps on living by possessing the main character Akiko in Comfort Woman who herself carries on a precarious life-in-the-closet, as a hysterical former comfort woman. In Lucy, the allegorical 'un-death' of Lucy's mother and motherland haunt Lucy, consigning her initial exilic life in a new land to that of melancholia.;These figures of the 'un-death' who keep coming back to settle the scores like the ghost of Hamlet's father are the emblems of historical trauma, unspoken, unaccounted for, and un-memorialized. They cannot die properly since they have not lived and dwelt properly. These figures are coming back to claim their lives which have been written off while alive. Hence, they clamor for crying for the dead, for proper mourning and burials for the dead, thus claiming their identities retroactively. For to die well means having lived well. At the same time, then, these figures of the 'un-death' are also the symbolic monads of the history 'blasted open from the debris of the past in the moment of flash'.;The novels and the cultural monument---the Vietnam War Memorial---I analyze participate in giving proper burial and offering the site for mourning for the 'undead.' Morrison, Okja Keller, and Kincaid as 'writers-as-mourners' grapple with the aftermath of the historical trauma of slavery and colonialism, mourning and monumentalizing the un-spoken, offering the site for the silenced to "come-out" from history's closet. Importantly the writers demonstrate the effect of trans-generational haunting as the far-reaching generational effect of historical trauma and offer the daughter-as-mourners a function similar to the writers' function. |
