Trauma And Recovery In Alice Walker's Now Is The Time To Open Your Heart

As one of the most outstanding African-American novelists nowadays,Alice Walker is famous for her ideas of Womanism.She enjoys worldwide fame for her unique writing style and feminist advocacy.In her later works,her focus is not limited on race and feminism.She has gradually broadened the scale of her concerns and pondered over the fate of all human beings.In the novel Now is the Time to Open Your Heart,a group of people who come from different areas and suffer the different traumas have successfully rebuilt their identity through the mutual help and narratives.Walker shows the conflicts and horror in the psyche of traumatized characters and leads us to examine the society.She tries to prove that constructing narratives is an effective therapeutic prescription for traumatized individuals and she also emphasizes the importance of environment and listener's reaction in narratives.In this novel,Walker portrays people of different colors,races,and regions,but they all share a common feature,that is,they have their own indescribable traumas.They are the epitome of modern society.Their traumas are caused by the society and the reasons behind the spiritual plights of those characters trigger us to think on the social issues such as race,colonialism,gender relations,historical identity,capitalism and so on.In addition to describing the trauma of the colored characters,the novel also depicts the trauma of the white characters which also arouses reader's profound thinking.For example,Rick,the rich second generation of white people,and Hugh,the owner of a big ranch.Capitalism and their ancestors' historical identities have completely changed their lives.Facing the cruel deprivation and killing of ethnic minorities by ancestors in the past history,they have to endure self-condemnation of consciousness and self-doubts about their own identity.Based on trauma-related theories,especially Judith Herman's viewpoints in Trauma and Recovery,through close reading of the text,this paper aims to reveal the personal and social causes of the trauma,the traumatic symptoms of the characters,and explore how these traumatized characters get out of their traumas through narratives with self-efforts and the help of others.And ultimately the characters once again achieve the control of their own destinyIn addition to the introduction and conclusion,this paper contains three chapters.The first chapter focuses on the personal psychological trauma of the characters in the work and explores the internal and external causes of the trauma.Through the trauma of the above three characters,this paper illustrates the spiritual dilemma caused by gender discrimination,capitalism and historical identity to modern people.Chapter two discusses the ethnic trauma suffered by minorities.Racism and colonialism have traumatized the African-American community and the Hawaiian community.Colonial deprivation and colonial invasion have deprived Hawaiian communities of their land to survive,followed by the proliferation of drugs,the separation of colonial traditions,the collapse of beliefs,the collapse of personal dreams and the disintegration of families.On the one hand,racism makes the black community suffer from racial discrimination;on the other hand,because of the transmission of the traumatic memory of the black ancestors,a new generation of the blacks fell into new ethnic choices.Chapter three shows that these traumatized people,whether suffering from personal trauma or ethnic trauma,achieve the recovery from trauma through their narratives.Walker hopes to find a way to treat the psychological traumas of modern people and expresses her wish for a harmonious community.This kind of yearning for a better world makes her works full of humanistic concern about all the people in the world.