Overcoming Cultural Trauma With Dreams And Memory In Phyllis J. Perry's Stigmata Summary

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Lessons from the Forever People: Overcoming Cultural Trauma with Dreams and Memory in Phyllis J. Perry’s Stigmata In Stigmata, a woman named Elizabeth mentally fights with the inherited past left for her by her great grandmother, Ayo, in the form of a trunk filled with various mementos. Elizabeth is challenged with making sense of the contents of the trunk and the vivid dreams and memories that came with it. The main focal points of the novel are the altered and dream-like states that Lizzie finds herself in and how they relate to her identity as an African American woman. It is from the dreams and altered states and the traumatic weight and history they carried with them that Elizabeth was able to create her own identity. In the novel, …show more content…

In the case of Perry’s novel, we see this type of process directly written out. For Elizabeth, most of the issues and unresolved conflicts, stem from her memory of them. She finds the stories of her grandmother and great grandmother, from them she constructs a dream scape. In her waking state, she sorts through the dream material and primary sources of history left behind to her, which could have various effects on her. As the theory regarding trauma stated earlier, cultural trauma, or issues that are passed down like those in the novel can link the past to the present through representations and the imagination. Elizabeth’s way of sorting through the harsh truth and history of her family and her own identity is through her altered states and dreams. Elizabeth’s memory and the collective memory of those in her family then become tools for her developing identity and her coping …show more content…

Through her dreams and visions, she is able to construct her identity and though it constantly called into question whether or not that these dreams were real accounts from her ancestors, it did not matter. All that mattered was that she was able to recover through exploration of these accounts from both cultural memory and communicative memory. Perry is able to draw out the complex relationship people, specifically African Americans, have to their history and cultural identity and how one avenue that could be used to explore it more lies in the imagination, involving both the waking state and the dream state, utilizing the creative and imaginative aspects of reality as well as the concrete and factual

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