Wole Lagunju (Nigerian, b. 1966), Spirit Rites, 2017. Oil on canvas, 150 x 122 cm.

“This is dedicated to the lover in you.”

the trauma of the nightmare does not simply consist in the experience within the dream, but in the experience of waking from it. It is the experience of waking into consciousness that, peculiarly, is identified with the reliving of the trauma. And as such it is not only the dream that surprises consciousness but, indeed, the very waking itself that constitutes the surprise: the fact not only of the dream but of having passed beyond it. What is enigmatically suggested, that is, is that the trauma consists not only in having confronted death but in having survived, precisely, without knowing it. What one returns to in the flashback is not the incomprehensibility of one’s near death, but the very incomprehensibility of one’s own survival. Repetition, in other words, is not simply the attempt to grasp that one has almost died but, more fundamentally and enigmatically, the very attempt to claim one’s own survival. If history is to be understood as the history of a trauma, it is a history that is experienced as the endless attempt to assume one’s survival as one’s own.