Zurich Distinguished Lectures 2025

Priscilla Layne

Professor of German; Adjunct Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies; Director of the Center for European Studies

Unveiling the Silence: Exploring Situational Irony and Postcolonial Trauma in Martin R. Dean’s «Meine Väter»

Martin Dean’s 2003 novel, Meine Väter, follows its main character Robert during a moment of crisis. Robert is a middle-aged Swiss man of Indo-Trinidadian origin. He and his wife have just welcomed their first child into the world, a daughter. And her birth has thrown him into an existential crisis. Robert never knew his biological father, Ray. He was raised by his white Swiss mother and an Indo-Trinidadian stepfather, Neil. His daughter’s birth has now led him to realize that he cannot feel wholly secure in his identity, until he finds out more about Ray. But rather than a travel narrative that ends with his encounter with Ray, Robert finds his father at the very beginning of the novel, wasting away in an old folks home in London. But Ray cannot give Robert the answers he’s looking for, because he has become mute; allegedly the result of a racist attack in London. The majority of Meine Väter follows Robert and Ray on a journey, from the UK to Switzerland to Trinidad, representing Robert’s search for his father’s true identity and therefore his own. In this talk, I argue that Dean draws on psychoanalytic concepts of trauma and identity to make Robert’s search impossible. Ray’s mutism represents the physical manifestation of colonial and racial trauma on his body. It not only makes Robert’s search for truth difficult, but impossible. Although Robert is able to track down his father’s acquaintances on his travels and learn more and more about Ray’s past, none of this information leads to a definitive answer. Reflecting the concept of infinite regression, each clue that Robert uncovers about Ray’s past just leads to another uncertainty or mystery without end. By the novel’s conclusion, Robert has realized that he can never identify the core of his father’s identity and therefore his own. To support my reading, I will draw on Homi Bhabha's links between migration, trauma and mutism, Erik Erikson's concept of psychosocial identity and Dan McAdams' theories about life stories.