War Thoughts from the Periphery: Contemporary Perspectives

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.