Surfing with Jonah: Reading Jonah as a Postcolonial Trauma Narrative

Abstract

Jione Havea observes how over the years Jonah has repeatedly found himself hurled into a swirling sea of interpretative methods, bobbing up and down on waves of traditional, contemporary, mainstream, and marginalized approaches. This article seeks to enter these churning waters and consider how these interpretative waves flow together to form new waves, which invite us to metaphorically surf together with the prophet Jonah, who once more has been tossed into a sea of readings. I propose that several important theoretical perspectives concerning postcolonial trauma theory are valuable for the ongoing conversation regarding what it means to read Jonah in the context of colonization, both ancient and modern. In particular, this article will focus on what postcolonial trauma theorists describe as the ‘material,’ ‘spatial,’ and ‘collective’ aspects of trauma instead of the ‘individual, temporal, and linguistic’ qualities highlighted by earlier (Western) trauma theorists (Visser, ‘Decolonizing Trauma Theory,’ 253)