Trauma Styling in Athol Fugard’s Sorrows and Rejoicing and Zakes Mda’s The Bells of Amersfoort

Abstract

The study argued that in Sorrows and Rejoicing and The Bells of Amersfoort, Athol Fugard and Zakes Mda render trauma not simply as a thematic preoccupation but as a stylistic tool that determines the plays’ formal and aesthetic contours. Through trauma theory concepts like belated memory, repression, and the compulsion to repeat, the study demonstrates how fragmented temporality, broken dialogue, spectral presences, and the persistent use of silence become stylistic signatures through which the playwrights dramatise the unsettled psychic lives of their characters. In examining these narrative and dramaturgical strategies, the research contends that both texts reveal trauma as an experience that resists linear articulation yet imprints itself on theatrical form, thus reflecting the deeper struggle by contemporary literary artists to reckon with the lingering psychological scars of Apartheid South African.