Testimony and the Trauma of Slavery in Fred D'Aguiar's Novels

This work is an analysis of the fictional testimonies of some of Fred D'Aguiar's outstanding novel protagonists who experienced the dreadful ordeal of the slave trade and who have undertaken to share the burden of recall. All the protagonists, whites, blacks, oppressors, and the subaltern convey their stories to the readers under the form of written accounts in prose, of poems, of thoughts, and of memories. I strive here to dissect the different traumata these characters have gone through and see which impact these have had on their identities, on the way they try to understand and fit into a world that often refuses to listen to their stories, and first and foremost on their narratives. For this purpose, and in a context where many accounts written by slaves are missing, my book backs up and highlights the similarities between fictional and non-fictional testimonial writings. As a response to these stories that went unrecorded, D'Aguiar stipulates that contemporary literature about slavery can be regarded as a form of recuperation of these testimonies - History as roots for fiction, fiction as roots for History.