Estrangement as Method in Trauma Narratives

In the preface to Imperial Intimacies, a multigenerational memoir of her family, Hazel Carby cautions readers that they should not expect a seamless narrative in the story about to unfold, that “[o]rphan threads have been left broken because I do not know how they should connect” (4). It is advice easy to forget or dismiss as routine authorial modesty while we follow Carby’s journey into public and private archives as she illuminates the lives of familial figures one by one, the details adding up until we are faced with a grand collage of seemingly small moments that stand revealed as the intimate consequences of immense structural forces like slavery and colonialism. But in a short chapter named “Lost,” her prefatory remark proves true. The narrative thread unspools, going nowhere and everywhere as she struggles to cast her glance back to the brutal rape she endured as a nine-year-old girl. The chapter opens with a statement of fact that seems unremarkable: “In the late 1950s, in Mitcham, a girl was lost” (56). That is until we recall how the first chapter of the memoir had begun: “During the first bitterly cold month of 1948 in Britain, a girl was born” (7). This rhetorical doubling, along with the strange use of third person, transforms an otherwise ordinary sentence, striking a note of dread the reason for which is not immediately clear. In an interview, Carby explains the decision to use the third person to refer to her younger self: “The character of ‘the girl’ [young Hazel] was a mechanism that enabled me to create a critical distance and make sense of what the child does not necessarily understand at the time and what it is the adult who’s writing knows—the adult who is