Childhood Trauma and Remembrance: Weaponised PTSD in Glaydah Namukasa’s The Deadly Ambition

Abstract

Defining crime within the prism of personal responsibility without recourse to its triggers engenders post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in victims of unfair hearings. While literary studies interrogating blame for traumatic reactions on the basis of personal responsibility or choice abound, studies tracing traumatic misdemeanour to a first-cause threshold of vulnerability remain scarce. Relying on the intersection of cause-effect reactions, this study identifies unresolved childhood trauma as the cause of the weaponised PTSD in Glaydah Namukasa’s The Deadly Ambition (2006). Evan Busagwa is identified as a victim of an inerasable childhood trauma which develops gradually into PTSD and unfortunately gets weaponised against the society he believes deprives him of love as a child. Julia Kristeva’s Abjection Theory, which accounts for human reaction to the dysfunctionality of meaning in relational difference, is used to justify the repercussions of a tormented childhood on Busagwa’s adulthood. Namukasa engages the transmogrification of a personal ambition from its benign state to an awful deadly state. Having deferred to his parents as a young boy, Busagwa forces deference on the vulnerable as an adult. Through Busagwa’s characterisation, the writer suggests that a good ambition could mutate into something awfully negative if its formative stage is distorted beyond a person’s control.