Drama Triangles in Nadine Gordimer's "Once Upon a Time" and the War in Gaza

Aimé Césaire stated that colonialism “dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that
colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt,
inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to
ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms
himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into
an animal” (Césaire 2000, 41). The dehumaniation bred from colonialism persists in a
pernicious pattern of roleplaying theorized by Stephen B. Karpman in his Drama Triangle,
a model for understanding how game and script roles perpetuate destruction.
Describing his drama triangle, Karpman writes, “A person ‘living in a fairy tale’ usually
has a simplified view of the world with a minimum of dramatic characters, acting in the
destructive roles of victim, perpetrator, and rescuer” (Karpman 1968, 39). The drama
triangle models the players’ actions as they move among the positions of victim, perpetrator,
and rescuer. Nadine Gordimer’s short story, “Once Upon a Time,” brings readers
into the hallucinatory world of the settler fairy tale while exposing its pathological
dynamics. A constructive reading of Gordimer’s “Once Upon a Time” with Karpman’s
drama triangle offer a way out, one that reverses the logic of fairytale roleplaying and
moves toward a fuller sense of humanity. To get there, we must go beyond just mourning
the dead and mourn the loss of our collective humanity to colonial fairytale roles and
the dynamics of violence they entail.