Unhomely Homes: Trauma, Memory and the Loss of Home in Three South African Novels

The paper explores the “unheimlich” (“unhomely”) in three South African novels: Gem Squash Tokoloshe, The Dream House and October. The novels use the trope of the house to represent the psychological and social traumas of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. They also use the mythopoeic cyclical journey to describe psychological responses to trauma. This is akin both to the psychoanalytic method and to the mythic journey back into the past to uncover repressed memories. Using Freudian psychoanalysis, we divide the exploration of this trauma into three different parts: deception, absence and substitution. Trauma is not contained in a single event. Its effects are felt in the deception which underpins the original event and furthered by the sense of absence that arises and which must then be alleviated by finding a substitute. This attempt is itself traumatic.