Talking and Writing about Trauma and Ethics

Refugee Women as Narrators in Henning Mankell’s Tea-Bag

• Eila Rantonen Turun yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.143556

Keywords: traumafiktio, pakolaiskirjallisuus, kirjallisuuden etiikka, Henning Mankell refugees, trauma fiction, medical and health humanities, trauma and ethics, cultural appropriation

Abstract

In my article, I deal with the portrayal of trauma and refugee women in Henning Mankell’s novel Tea-Bag (2001). The refugee issue has been little discussed in trauma fiction research. Moreover, the approach has been criticised for the aestheticisation of trauma, where clinical and therapeutic research on trauma has not received enough attention. As such, my article is connected to studies in the medical and health humanities, and I combine research on trauma fiction, trauma theory and therapeutic writing.

Mankell’s novel concentrates on refugee women in Gothenburg, who participate in a writing course led by a male Swedish writer. I focus on episodes where refugee women talk and write about trauma, arguing that Tea Bag activates the practice of empathic and ethical reading. The multi-person and multi-perspective narration of the novel represents pluralism, the ”ethics of voices”, in which refugee women’s narratives are foregrounded. Moreover, I apply Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of the face-to-face encounter with the other in my analysis of trauma. Finally, I discuss the postcolonial issue of cultural appropriation. The ironic portrayal of the writer figure in Tea-Bag can be interpreted to mirror Mankell ́s metanarrative self-criticism as a privileged Western male writer.