War Thoughts from the PeripheryContemporary Perspectives

  1. Lojo Rodríguez, Laura 1
  1. 1 Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
    info

    Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

    Santiago de Compostela, España

    ROR https://ror.org/030eybx10

Journal:
Oceánide

ISSN: 1989-6328

Year of publication: 2020

Issue Title: Oceánide 13-2020

Issue: 13

Pages: 22-28

Type: Article

DOI: 10.37668/OCEÁNIDE.V13I.35 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openDialnet editor

More publications in: Oceánide

Abstract

This article aims at critically examining the contemporary urge to overcome taboos, silence and amnesia both in private and public history as a result of participation in the “Great War” in order to exorcise the transgenerational phantom which continues to haunt the present. To do so, I here examine two contemporary short stories published in the wake of centennial commemorations of the Great War in 2014, Sheena Wilkinson’s “Each Slow Dusk” and Xiaolu Guo’s “Coolies”. These stories articulate from different angles and perspectives women’s necessity to settle accounts with their own family history and with a traumatic inheritance which has been silenced. Unlike many war veterans whose participation in the war was acknowledged by proper mourning and public rituals, the protagonists of Guo and Wilkinson’s stories were deprived of recognition and their participation was silenced within the family and by official amnesia. The political position of Northern Ireland as part of the British Empire is overtly explored in Wilkinson’s depiction of the country’s adherence to the First World War in her short story “Each Slow Dusk”, where the protagonist sees her dreams of entering Queen’s College in Belfast abruptly put to an end when her shell-socked brother returns from the Somme in 1916. In “Coolies”, British-Chinese writer Xiaolu Guo brings to the fore the participation of 100,000 Chinese peasants– or kulis – recruited by the British army to dig European trenches, addressing a topic which already challenges received conceptions of the conflict as a European drama.

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Funding information

This article benefits from the collaboration of the research project Intersections: Gender and Identity in the Short Fiction of Contemporary British Women Writers (FEM2017-83084-P, AEI, FEDER), the research group Discourse and Identity (ED431C, 2019/001, Xunta de Galicia) and the research network in English Language and Literature III (ED431D 2017/17, Xunta de Galicia).

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