Voicing Trauma and Truth: Narratives of Disruption and Transformation [1 ed.] 9789004399426, 9781848881983

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Voicing Trauma and Truth

At the Interface Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Dr Ken Monteith

Lisa Howard Dr Daniel Riha

Advisory Board James Arvanitakis Katarzyna Bronk Jo Chipperfield Ann-Marie Cook Peter Mario Kreuter S Ram Vemuri

Simon Bacon Stephen Morris John Parry Karl Spracklen Peter Twohig Kenneth Wilson

An At the Interface research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/ The Evil Hub ‘Trauma: Theory and Practice’

2013

Voicing Trauma and Truth: Narratives of Disruption and Transformation

Edited by

Oliver Bray and Peter Bray

Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2013 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/

The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087

ISBN: 978-1-84888-198-3 First published in the United Kingdom in Paperback format in 2013. First Edition.

Table of Contents Introduction Peter Bray and Oliver Bray Part I

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My Voice Fathers and Sons: An Autoethnographic, Performative Reflection on Trauma, Bereavement and Transformation Peter Bray and Oliver Bray

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Trauma and Art Making: Reclaiming a Mother/Daughter Relationship 37 Catherine Barrette ‘He looks at me as if I were a dog:’ Representations of Shame and Trauma in the Fiction of Jean Rhys Jack Dawson

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A Pilgrimage Into the Liminal: The Work of Mourning Christina Lovey

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Part II Their Voice Enlisting Rage and Speaking Place: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) Bridget Haylock

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Public Hearing of Private Griefs’: Investigating the Performance of History in Jane Taylor’s Ubu and the Truth Commission (1998) and John Kani’s Nothing but the Truth (2002) Tamar Meskin and Tanya van der Walt

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A Quiet Horror: Reflections on Performing Others’ Traumatic Narratives in the Context of Contemporary South Africa Awelani Lena Moyo

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Resilience and Implications from Writings of Children Traumatised by the Earthquake: A Pilot Study of Guided Narrative Technique Yinyin Zang, Nigel Hunt and Tom Cox

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A Jungian Approach to Understanding and Treating Adopted Children Who were Traumatised Prior to Their Adoption Mark Bortz

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Part II Our Voice Trauma: Terror in Need of Management Bonnie L. Settlage

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Psychoanalysis and Trauma: Changes in the Theory and the Practice, from Freud to the Shoah Clara Mucci

241

Researching the Jean Pool, or Postmodernist Literature Seen as a Jeanetically Modified Material Danielle Mortimer

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National Trauma following Political Assassination: Diverse Experiences of Adjustment William W. Bostock

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Introduction Peter Bray and Oliver Bray This collection represents a sample of original interdisciplinary work first presented at the inaugural Global Trauma: Theory and Practice Conference, held in Prague in 2011. This is one of two volumes in this series that brings together current examples of the wide array of phenomena and research programmes associated with working with trauma across the world. This collection truly represents the interdisciplinary nature of current research in this area. While the content of this volume is wide-ranging, it demonstrates the dynamic and valuable crossovers between differing research practices. It is with this in mind, that this volume is divided into three sections to provide different perspectives of the experience of trauma: the personal (My Voice), the subjective/objective (Their Voice), and the collective (Our Voice). The first section of the book is particularly concerned with a personal experience of trauma that immediately engages with and recalls firsthand experiences of loss, shame and transformation through texts that utilise the creative exploration of performative, artistic, literal, and cinematic narratives of expression. In the first chapter, father and son, Peter and Oliver Bray share a performative narrative that examines their intergenerational relationship with trauma, loss and grief. In this intimate and sometimes uncomfortable piece of work, we observe how a father and son, challenged by the confusion occasioned by loss, begin to build a new narrative in which they can reconcile themselves to each other and examine and organise their experiences. This reconciliation manifests itself through a real-world contextualisation of their professional and personal research and art practices. Following a serious car accident, visual artist Catherine Barrette, vividly presents her own unique and immediate experiences of physical loss and trauma. In her chapter, she examines surviving this distressing experience and the fundamental impact that this has had on her mind, her body and significantly her relationship with her daughter. Mother and child feature as both the subject and the object of her artwork, and through artistic processes, Catherine redefines and recovers her self and her traumatic experiences in ways that extend personal and creative boundaries. Whilst demonstrating the reconstructive power of art in relationship and in the recovery process, she raises challenging questions about art’s relationship to trauma and the use of experimental art-making strategies. In the third chapter, feeling life through Jean Rhys’s protagonist Sasha Jansen, Jack Dawson enters the dark and suffocating world of shame in Rhys’s trauma novel Good Morning, Midnight. Here Jack focuses on Rhys’s use of ocular imagery to represent shame, which she describes as a singular and total of wounding of the self. Through a close examination of the text she demonstrates that there is a powerful dynamic that threads its way through the narrative. This

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__________________________________________________________________ binds and enmeshes both the experience of shame and trauma and, through participatory reading, the writer leads the reader into a conspiracy of intersubjective shaming and disconcerting voyeurism that floods the reader with affect. Nevertheless, even within this essentialy painful and degrading narrative of shame, Sasha is seen to discover opportunities to transform and liberate her self, and transcend her condition. In our final chapter in this section, film maker Christina Lovey explains how her practice based work with the terminally ill has enabled her to explore her own losses through imagetic representation and music. Christine considers how creative rituals can assist mourning and reposition liminally placed individuals so that they may become more fully integrated and experience a re-engagement with life. In this self-reflexive piece, using parataxic writing and images of Southend Pier, she explores her own journey, her responses and actions to the liminal experience of grief and loss, and defines the processes through which she made her work of mourning, affected her re-integration with self, and returned to life. In the second section of this collection our contributors reflect upon the traumatic experiences of individuals and nations. The first part considers how exposure to intergenerational trauma imposed by colonisation and apartheid continues to challenge the first nation’s peoples of Australia and South Africa, and the second part considers the impact of trauma on children, from a consideration of natural disasters, such as the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, on child survivor resilience, to those where the trauma of war has fractured lives and forced new relationships with adopting families. In her chapter Bridget Haylock provides a thought-provoking narratological analysis of Alexis Wright’s postmodern novel Carpentaria which, in its parody of materialistic Australian settler society, subverts racist cultural assumptions and throws into stark relief the actual genocidal trauma, and its attendant fury, visited upon Indigenous Australians by the marginalising atrocities of colonisation. Inspired by Wright’s powerfully liberating work, Bridget enables us to thoroughly apreciate how the effects of disempowerment and dispossession on traumatised people by corporate colonisation, when tempered by hope, may be reversed by the enlistment of rage and enaction of agency in the service of national change and transformation. In the next chapter Tamar Meskin and Tanya van der Walt discuss the experience of trauma and its representation, and the fidelity of memory in the telling of history in post-apartheid South Africa. Here they interrogate the realistic and expressionistic plays of Jane Taylor and John Kani and investigate the use made of factual material generated by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission – itself a performative event that witnesses and negotiates national and individual trauma. If, as they suggest, the speaking of trauma is a necessary prerequisite to individual and national healing, then speaking the past makes

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__________________________________________________________________ performance, as the role of mediator between contesting views of retribution and reconciliation, central to the rebirthing and unification of a nation. Almost as a companion piece, performer Awelani Lena Moyo personally explores the ethics of representing trauma and violence using theatre and performance socio-politically in South Africa. In this chapter Awelani reflexively examines the creative processes of making in a performance piece by Juanita Finestone-Praeg, and questions the verisimilitude of agency and responsibility in witnessing and testimony, challenging the trust and authenticity that underpins the function and outcomes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Like other contributors to this collection, she argues the artists’ responsibility to distrust truthful representations of trauma but nevertheless continue to create new opportunities and spaces for its reflection, debate and dialogue that are ultimately restorative. In the final two chapters of this section Yinyin Zang, Nigel Hunt and Tom Cox evaluate some of the findings of their continuing study into the effectiveness of a guided narrative technique to reduce trauma-related symptoms in a sample of Chinese children traumatised by the Sichuan earthquake in China. Secondly, therapist Mark Bortz explains how Jungian theory can assist our undertsanding of traumatised children who have been subsequently adopted. Mark demonstrates therapeutic use of sand play and, through the work of Carl Jung, Erich Neumann, Donald Kalsched, and the myth of Oedipus, discusses the impact of unaddressed trauma in development and personality. Far from being passive victims of disaster, children are resilient survivors capable of active paricipation in the reduction of their vulnerabilities and will engage in healing processes that involve high levels of psychological sophistication. These chapters underline the need to provide the sufficient conditions and appropriate interventions neccessary to assist children exposed to traumatic events to begin their own healing. In the third and final section of this collection our contributors consider a number of notable psychological and philosophical theorists and theories that influence our understanding of, and responses to, individual and collective seismic experiences of trauma and the recovery, reparation and transformation of the self. For the first chapter of this section Bonnie L. Settlage provides a description of the underlying psychic mechanisms that give rise to the experience of individual, collective, and transgenerational trauma, traumatic stress response and vicarious trauma. Her account is largely informed by the ideas of philosopher and psychologist Ernest Becker and the subsequent and evolving work of terror management theory. Bonnie’s analysis is set alongside and contextualised in her account of counsellor experiences of working with refugee trauma victims in Cairo, Egypt. In the second chapter from this section, Clara Mucci presents two different positions within the psychoanalytic theory of trauma and then discusses some of

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__________________________________________________________________ their more relevant developments, in response to the genocides of the world wars and the Shoah, and their impact and influence upon the notion of social trauma. In her summary and analyses of the trauma theory and practice of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi, Clara authoratively brings trauma theory upto-date with her discussion concerning the significance of the testimonial process in therapeutic healing, a process of giving and receiving testimony of a lost event, which she links to the work of Dori Laub and Judith Herman. In her chapter, Danielle Mortimer explains how postmodern theorists’ interpretations of Sigmund Freud’s seduction theory can provide a valuable and alternative lens through which to read postmodernist trauma narratives like Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Lunar Park. Danielle suggests that as a seduction-driven text, Lunar Park resists conventional, narrative interpretation. She argues that in postmodern trauma narratives the trauma has become ruptured from its origins, making it impossible to access (even the concept of) the original trauma, through which trauma narratives have generally been interpreted. She suggests that seduction-driven postmodern texts that deal with trauma require acts of ‘rereading’ that enable the reader to approach the annihilation of the traumatic event that may occur within them, implicating them and making them implicit in the narrative. In his final chapter of the section and the collection, William W. Bostock draws our attention to those extraordinary shared collective traumas experienced by nations when their political leaders are assassinated. Using the computer as a metaphor, William’s analysis considers five very different societies in which assassination has ultimately required, and led to, a redefinition or birthing of a new national identity. Like so many of our authors, William’s chapter suggests that these newly vulnerable individuals and societies, in the wake of traumatic events, are formidably challenged to comfortably accommodate altered identities, and to negotiate and adjust to existence in a fragmented world devoid of previous coherence, safety and reliability. We are very grateful to the chapter contributors who have made the editing of this volume such a fascinating job. We think that this compilation of texts is a testament to collaborative and interdisciplinary and scholarly activity. The collating of this work reveals not only the quality and diversity of work being conducted in the area of trauma, but also how these various writings, when placed together, self-contextualise and become textured, fit coherently and logically, and ultimately…become even more interesting.

Part I My Voice

Fathers and Sons: An Autoethnographic, Performative Reflection on Trauma, Bereavement and Transformation Peter Bray and Oliver Bray Abstract Just before Sam died, his son Peter travelled from his home in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, to conduct some preliminary research with his son Oliver who lives in Leeds, Great Britain. With Peter’s interests in loss, post-traumatic growth and transpersonal experiences and Oliver’s in theatre making, performance and pedagogy they began to discover that they share much common ground. Shortly after their time together Peter travelled to Moscow to deliver a paper on Hamlet. What follows is a weaving of the thoughts and recollections of three generations of men touched by loss, trauma and grief. First presented in 2011 in Prague, the Czech Republic, this text was originally conceived as a palliative response to Sam’s death in England a year earlier. In this new text we allow our curiosity to continue exploring those traumatic wounds that have had, for better or for worse, such a significant impact upon our lives as a father and a son. In expressing some of our loss experiences we begin to understand that our lives, people’s lives, far from the normal, predictable and humdrum are essentially and powerfully unique. Bearing and baring the scars of life’s seemingly random and unconscionable wounding, the legacy of lives fully lived, we share the paradox of these unwanted but necessary losses. We discover that traumatic events are significant opportunities for individuals to start again, to re-assemble and re-learn their lives, make important changes, and take on the challenge of a world that has fundamentally changed, become less predictable and comfortable, and more difficult to manage. Key Words: Autoethnography, consciousness, father, ghost, grief, loss, performance, son, transpersonal, trauma. ***** Since Stranger, in this book you chance to read Of this one thing, I would you take heed Simple soldiers penned this natty verse For their own, so thus if their themes be crude Or if their tenor fails to suit your mood Recall they were written for better or worse They ask no blessing, give them no curse. 1 Individual’s and groups’ responses to the ‘choiceless’ events of bereavement and trauma can be rigidly organised by master narratives embedded in culture and

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__________________________________________________________________ subsequently in relationships. 2 3 However, how we respond to these experiences has a direct bearing on how we manage them. In this largely optimistic text a father, Peter, and his son, Oliver, explore their personal narratives of trauma and loss that emerged at the death of Sam, Peter’s father and Oliver’s grandfather. Here we seek to come to a fuller understanding of our lives before and after this event. Intruding into these personal reflections we introduce a number of commentaries that speak for our professional selves and represent those master narratives by which we measure our responses to these difficult events in the world. Not only do these grand overarching narratives govern how we think we should be, they also powerfully influence how others should be towards us. As educators and practitioners we have learned firsthand that in the wake of tragedy we are obliged to reappraise our worldviews and make fundamental life changes. As our own case study, we perform, explore and articulate the possibilities of our intergenerational trauma and bereavement. As much as they are socially constructed and culturally legitimised, we acknowledge that these experiences are also fundamental and visceral. 4 5 However, as with visual artist Catherine Barrette, also in this volume, we find ourselves representing trauma, raising awareness and creating discussion through the deconstruction and remaking of ourselves in this experimental strategy. 6 We demonstrate that individuals and groups can make meaning of their experiences and ultimately move toward change through a creative exploration of the ‘possible’, described by Soyini Madison as a ‘performance of possibilities’. 7 Further developed through Richard Schechner’s concept of ‘performance of everyday life’, suggesting most human acts are a form of ‘performance’ that have specific conscious and unconscious purpose and intent, we ‘perform’ this traumatic aspects of our lives. 8 Thus, as our actions are played out and observed, we find that our perceptions of action and context as participants and performers, observers and audience are extended. To assist in this specific focus we are intentional, and sometimes unintentional, about our reflexive and cooperative employment of the rich and immediate language of context, mutual circumstance, and relationships that encourage an awareness of the possible. 9 As this co-constructed narrative is constantly evolving and being modified by new events, perspectives and experiences, the present text only momentarily serves to organise our experiences of attachment and loss in bereavement. This work represents a blending of material, ‘a tissue of quotations’ and multi-meaningful space of (de)constructed material. 10 Subsequently, our narrative is modified and changed by what is here and what we are living. Therefore, in this autoethographic remnant, you will not find answers or solutions, only future shadows. Simply, in this shared performance of possibilities we self-consciously open our experiences, memories, and responses to the deaths and losses of sons, fathers and grandfather. Unlike Christina Lovey’s phenomenological enquiry, also in this volume, we cannot expect a final destination but, like her, we will integrate some of our difficult experiences along the way and catch glimpses of possible post-traumatic

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__________________________________________________________________ paths to growth. 11 12 13 As self-actualising individuals we cannot avoid questing for healing and closure but our purpose in this performative reflection is to focus on what we can learn more about ourselves through our relationships with others and how that understanding might illuminate the events that brought us both here. 14 15 How you receive our learning is your decision. I knew that Dad was going to die This is my search for healing Call it therapy Call it control Makes it real So I can mourn Loss-shocked and shaken, I am wary of death’s immediate and inevitable presence again. Shuffling up to the next place, nearer to the end of the queue, I want closure and healing but I need a memorial. I have to celebrate my father’s and my son’s lives and become transformed. Worden assures me that my prior traumatic losses have complicated my responses to my dad’s death. 16 They make me too vulnerable to my fears and prevent me from fully experiencing my grief. I am in awe of Death’s unchallengeable and terrifying reach and that fear compels me to ‘do’. But what is it that we men ‘do’?

I knew that Granddad was going to die This is my search for what needs to be healed Call it indulgent Make it holy Makes it holey Understand it wholly It all starts with a question – What do they think of me? Immediately I become aware of the simultaneous perpetuated by difficulties disclosure through ‘writing’ and attempting to pre-empt how my disclosure will be ‘read’. It causes my head to ache. After Aston and Savona explained the appropriation of semiotics to the theatre space there was no going back, the consideration of what we present is unshakable. 43 Every sign will be read and interpreted, there is no escape.

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According to Martin and Doka men’s grief is largely characterised as instrumental rather than intuitive. 17 We don’t cry, we create and recreate!

I am purposely too busy to address the unfinished business of death. I am turning myself into what Doka calls, a ‘disenfranchised griever’. 18 I am preventing myself from mourning and growing.

So, together we ‘do’ life and hastily deny death. Fathers and sons, grandfathers and grandchildren focussing upon making a good life ... and why not? Should we have to make a good death too? Take it or leave Take it. This has been more difficult to recall than I could have imagined. This inevitable loss unpacks all

It’s impossible to consider everything.

So, as a performer and performance maker I am in the habit of reducing that which I can control (stuff) and place a performative bet on the rest (them watching, me performing). It is when my instincts kick in, in the moment of performance that this reading of signs is immediately surpassed by the more phenomenological experience of actually doing it. Perhaps a little selfish in its ideas, phenomenology is the study of understanding the experience of doing something in the moment of doing it. Too complicated to compartmentalise, categorise and signpost, we work on instinct, embodied knowledges – ‘stuff’ that’s there. It is so seductive because it really removes the ‘frames of reference’ that perhaps close down our understandings of how we live. 44

What the hell is ‘a good life’ anyway? But don’t leave it I am in the business of meaning making, quite literally. The theatremaker designs the conditions for

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__________________________________________________________________ previous accumulating losses in my life: the divorces and forced separations from family; becoming an immigrant; and, the accidental deaths of my sons and wife. The death of my father affects me intellectually and viscerally, igniting memory and forcing a reremembering, retelling, and reconstruction of all losses and all traumas. Nothing will be as it was. The ghosts of these events demand attention and there is no going back.

potential meaning. Meaning is slippery, it cannot be projected, it can only be genuinely created by the individual who registers it. Meaning exists only in the moment of perception. I consciously suffer (and therefore understand) bereavement when I think about bereavement. I’m thinking about it now, what my father and I have suffered and continue to suffer - I can’t help but want to think about something else.

I am persuaded to re-member my ‘necessary’ losses and make sense of these traumatic events. 19,20 I can be liberated from the master narratives of trauma and grief and take some control. 21 For this to happen here we must make our own rules and moment to moment create new possibilities, take fresh positions that engage with our experiences differently and make change possible. 22

Have I been led to believe that changing the subject is a bad thing … the quantifying bombardments of what are or are not healthy influences or strategies? Telling me the correct way of dealing and coping and making. Resistant practice is inextricably linked to the practices surrounding it, but is, of course, not the same and so not usual and not right. But people are only people aren’t they, even really smart people? They eat, crap and sleep like everyone else – the briefest of sweeping glances around you at your fellow man, will reveal more interesting potential narratives than you will ever garner from a ‘soul search’ of yourself (provided you look at more than one other person). My father would say I’m being dismissive of self-awareness, but I least I’m aware that he would think that.

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__________________________________________________________________ Now the trick; highlight it, capture it, re-present it. How will you do it? ‘BABY DIES AFTER HAMILTON ROAD CRASH The death of a baby boy in Waikato Hospital has brought to three the death toll in a road crash north of Hamilton...’ 23

Dad, how will you do it here?

The police arrived at lunchtime. There had been an accident... (Politely) ‘Please sit down. I am sorry to have to tell you but your wife has been killed.’ The brain slows down to a single fuzzy note. The air packed with solid objects pounds at my face. I cannot breath. Why is the policeman still talking? Hasn’t he said enough? ‘Your step-son has been killed.’ It’s enough and this is no longer funny! I want it to stop now – to rerun the scene to where the comic policemen in their larger than life uniforms produce a grotesquely floppy summons for an unpaid parking ticket. The air closes in on me. The policeman’s mouth is moving. The words are becoming clumsily dubbed. ‘Your baby son is in intensive care.’

Traumatic events can highlight and bring into sharp relief, in a second, the issue of the ‘split self’ in performance that Deirdre Heddon references. 45 The self that was, immediately challenges the self that is. In an example where the traumatic moment literally severs one world from another and everything that was taken for granted is no longer there in the same way, the selves don’t appear to be cohesive – they no longer match or make sense. The self who is performed then (and here) is not the performing self. The levels of self-consciousness are always shifting, the rules for performance and representation are always changing.

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__________________________________________________________________ I snatch at what remains of his little body in despair. He is alive! ‘I can’t tell you if he will survive but my colleague will radio the hospital again.’ I need a friend badly. The rude mechanicals shuffle. They are waiting for me to decide something but I no longer exist. The bit that still works needs to be with his baby boy. What does that mean? I am fearful that I may have disclosed too much but to paraphrase Carl Rogers, I know what hurts and what direction to go in. 24 Sam’s death challenges us to talk together. Even as I was anticipating Dad’s death I selfishly didn’t want it to interrupt my relationship with my son whom I hadn’t seen for a few months. I had been anticipating and savouring this time together after ten years of fleeting meetings. A wonderful chance to learn from him and share our creativity – to make something of us. The plan was to become reacquainted and map out common personal and academic ground. What unfolded was a shared interest in the

The first time I spoke to Dad he seemed very cool, collected. The second time, he sounded like someone had broken him. What does that mean?

Previous to Granddad’s final decline, we had organised to do some joint research. This meant, curiously, that we all happened to be together in England at the time that Granddad died The influential factors of our lives are created by the environment, us, and those around us – together, all shifting our perceptions and context. That is where the responsibility lies, not on the shoulders of those it involves, but the frame they find themselves in -

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__________________________________________________________________ disclosure and the illumination of reality or truth through creative processes and - that play Hamlet. By performing the self the individual is able to see more clearly and understand his or her self in action. .

In this performance space we are permitted to indulge in therapy by expressing, processing, and redressing the powerful disruptions of trauma on our self-narratives. 25 In the act of writing, presenting, and performing, there is another presence, another less than tangible audience of ancestors. An audience, nonetheless, that presses upon awareness, critics and supporters, who heckle and prompt almost soundlessly from the wings. Death and the loss and trauma literature breathe coldly on my neck but they have no friends in this scene. Having some understanding of other people’s losses I am more than superficially reassured by knowledge of the terrain. However, is mastery of this material enough to protect me from the real impact of these re-remembered experiences? Should I be bothered that I am my own case study and if I am my own client? How am I doing?

and it’s chaotic – too many variables, too much to try and control. This is why the condition of performance is so tantalising. It’s a vacuum, a space where the variables can be vetted and controlled – like the pages of this document – ink and paper, pixels on a computer screen – and that is all. But experience happens live, experience is life. Comprehension is not something that can be recollected or re-collected. We crave the live (lĭv), that’s why we still leave our houses in the morning. Your reading of this account is a live experience for you, I hope you’re enjoying it – and let me make one thing clear – this document was written live, I’m feeling it right now. The dead are gone, brought back only by our imaginations, as good as dead becoming as good as alive, alive…live.

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__________________________________________________________________ I’m here too. I’m just playing a different role to you.

My fear is that you think that I am performing loss.

I thought that I was doing fine until I started this project and now I will have to hold back my judgement. No need to really worry but this is affecting me in ways I am very unclear about!

The conference forced me to return to all of my losses, to make meaning out of what is meaninglost. It is what I wanted to do and I am ready.

I think I’m in something like Augusto Boal’s Invisible Theatre. 46 I’m trying to subvert this form with a little gentle trickery. I can’t convince myself that any of this is for me, it’s definitely for you, the reader, the audience. You’ve not stumbled across this writing but you are decoding it, trying to understand the truth of it – enjoying the responsibility of being witness to my Father’s and my own ‘Voice’. Good. What’s written is written for reading. My fear is that you’ll turn your therapeutic gaze on me. I’m sorry I don’t want it. I spend my time realising and consequently dodging various gazes… bloody filters, don’t take off your sunglasses and look directly at the sun. I’ve performed to thousands of people in theatre spaces and many more in other kinds of performance. I was bothered by the conference presentation more than any other. I have never before sensed, to this extent, the great chasm of interpretation that can exist between performer and audience. Well, I write ‘felt’, I mean ‘feared’ and then ‘resented’. No offence.

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__________________________________________________________________ When the newspapers interviewed me about the death of my immediate family, they carefully asked... ‘How were you able manage the deaths of so many loved ones under such traumatic circumstances?’ There is only so much pain that you can handle and after that you start shutting down.

When multiple losses occur, individuals can suffer from what Kastenbaum has referred to as ‘bereavement overload’. 26 Faced with so much grief and pain one is unable to process the experience and can become psychologically stuck. I experienced my grief in ‘oscillating’ waves. 27,28 In the peaks I confronted and integrated the experience and in the troughs I got on with my life as best I could. Perspective helps too. At the time I was inclined to Herman’s belief that my trauma was not caused by an act of God and so I had something tangible to rail at. 29 Now... it’s so much easier. I get out of bed each morning, silently

Don’t look directly at your source of light. Don’t look at your son. ‘Not so, my Lord, I am too much i’ th’ sun.’ 47 Failure plays a big part in contemporary performance culture. It revolves around the idea that it is within the process, rather than the product, that we can locate the most interest. Often in performance work, the audience are invited into an observation of process, often task based, that exposes the performer as human and real. Failure is a big part of this because the most engaging thing to observe is the ‘attempt’ rather than polished (and then perhaps overrefined, expected and boring) product. But the connotations of the word itself are culturally recognised as negative, and perhaps this is a result of the failure of language to represent the world around us. ‘[T]hat is the difficulty of the world from the point of the writer. It’s not in words. It’s tree-shaped and cloud-shaped and room-shaped. It’s not word-shaped.’ 48 ‘Getting on with one’s life as best as one can’ has unfortunate negative connotations. Like ‘getting on’ is seen as a ‘trough’ in the ‘peaks and troughs’ of a grieving process. ‘Getting on’ feels to me like a rather seductive idea…

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__________________________________________________________________ celebrate my own heroism and mortality, get armoured up and do one more round with fate. Day by day it has got easier to make meaning of this new me in the world. In counselling, the therapeutic space provides opportunities to safely explore the experience of a traumatic event. The counsellor supports clients to reframe experiences and create new meaning and purpose for their lives. My disclosure about Dad’s death here is a purposeful way of acknowledging and understanding the power of sharing the impact of my losses with others.

Unfortunately, as Gale notes, because the practice of Western therapy privileges rationality and labels the irrational or spiritual as psychopathology, it has largely overlooked the human need for meaningful spiritual connection. 30

I have experienced the very real and unfathomable rawness of grief whilst simultaneously understanding that loss is inevitable. To paraphrase Hamlet, sons lose their fathers, it is common. Fathers also lose their sons and it hurts like hell.

‘You’re not grieving right!’ ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ 49 Creative practice is inviting for the control-freak because it is more tangible than the real world. For an hour or so, the environment is mine, I shape it, and therefore I shape what you see. This page has been designed by me; I’ve shaped it and decided the placement and order of the words that you now read. Frustratingly, I cannot control your interpretation and it is the recognition of this hopelessness that is liberating. Your understanding of what I feel about loss is bound up with who you are. You’re altering my grief and you haven’t even read this yet (at the time of writing), you don’t exist yet – but you float around me like a ghost.

Postmodernism is, by definition (a definition that it doesn’t have) unclear – that’s the point. Fragmented, borrowing, being incomplete, denying the possibility of truth and using that denial as a springboard to something else – the unbound, the instinctual, the begged, borrowed and stolen.

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Bonds made are not so easily broken. 31 We cannot just let them go as Freud once thought. 32 The dead father and lost sons must somehow find a home in the living son/father. Truth fragments and reality expands to accommodate new, bittersweet experiences of pain and solace. When I arrived in England I hadn’t allowed myself to realise how sick Dad was. I was a child... so much in denial about his condition and about my own responsibilities. Death was inconceivable and inconvenient, sabotaging my carefully arranged long-term plans, scuppering my ambitious presentation in Moscow, interrupting my new relationship with my son. Trauma tends to be unscheduled. We assume that the world is benevolent, makes sense, and that we are worthy. Janoff-Bulman describes traumatic events as challenging and then shattering these basic assumptions. 33 This is particularly true when the death is perceived as untimely.

I’d like to take more ownership of my grief but I can’t grab it, it’s always someone else’s or a poor imitation – I don’t how to perform it and I don’t know how to stop needing to.

Brecht did not appreciate psychology, he thought it a bourgeois science, focusing too much on internal forces and concerned with the individual rather than the wider notion of others and society. 50 Our concerns with progression and growth are inextricably linked with the desire to ‘save’, and the consequent interest and meaning this generates. We are, after all, only human. However, this new meaning may all too often be confused as definitive truth - we will always believe what is most palatable and most forthcoming. Perhaps this is the problem with therapy, by concentrating on the individual it may be more difficult to discriminate personal, subjective context from external, objective influences.

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__________________________________________________________________ Dad had always seemed so negative about my work and his death at this time seemed like the ultimate act of control. Fearful of unpicking old wounds, I selfishly hoped that everything would go off without the need for me to be present at all. Losing my wife and children seemed to me to be more than enough pain for one lifetime. Automatically I set about colluding with my career plans to thoroughly occupy and distract me. In this way I could separate myself from emotions and deny the fact of death.

In this enactment of the self the pre-trauma narrative, already disorganised and contaminated by traumatic and multiple loss, predicts further revisions and reconstruction with the death of the father. 34 Fortunately, there is no present evidence of complicated grief, although fragments of the old trauma narrative are still being assimilated into the macronarrative of the survivor’s life. Later, I realised that Dad’s decline was not about ‘bad’ timing. My family needed me to see this through. I needed to see this

I think really I’m a positivist; I like structure, organisation, systems and being systematic. This is probably reflective of a career that necessarily bleeds meaning, grapples with concepts of ephemerality – trying always to while simultaneously catch expecting the fumble. The headache of my often conceptual practice makes me strive for the ‘systems’ found everywhere else. Perhaps regrettably, death has always seemed like it’s part of a system to me, the circle of life – something very clear and sensible. When the system is upset, as it was with my brother’s death, it is also challenged and the narrative of life explodes again. I am left to take myself back, over time, to where the structures are, the more linear narratives, so that I may again feel secure, impacting and in control. I wonder how Granddad was changed by his experience of death…

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__________________________________________________________________ through but it was a struggle to silence the child... ‘Why me? Why be there to witness the end? Does Dad really want this?’ Am I less of a son for considering my life before his? This is the realm of responsibility, guilt and conventional expectations. It makes me feel uncomfortable to make these internal adjustments but I find that I need to review my life and examine my priorities. Even in death, is my relationship with my father constructed by others? The fact of death has changed my relationship with dad and I am required to make adjustments as to how I relocate him in my future life. 35 Sometimes it is hard to speak out about a relationship – especially when the listeners have a different take on it. ‘I did not get on with translates into the dad’ conventional battle between father and son, or the excesses of youth versus the conservatism of maturity - a lad who didn’t know when he was well off!

Guilt plays a big part in my life. Almost as big a part as is played by trying to work out why it plays such a big part. Guilt, as a pure emotion, can be separated from any (in)action that it has associated with. That is, a perfectly rational man, who has no reason to feel guilty, may feel exceptionally guilty all of the time. Guilty thoughts… • I don’t really cry much, is that okay? • Why do I care that I don’t cry very much? • I care a great deal about people but I sometimes struggle to empathise. • Why has my Father got so much more to say than I have? • A little part of me assumes that all that ‘stuff’ is just common sense. • What is it to ‘grieve’ and why has some arsehole decided there’s a right way to? Am I the arsehole? Psychoanalysis of my performance practice will, I’m sure, reveal representations of the trauma I have experienced. This represents

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Our relationship was expressed at a fundamental level. We communicated affection in subtle masculine ways. He modelled bluntness and frankness and as we ritually duelled mum’s anxiety would paper over the cracks of our seeming imperfections.

Mum protected us from each other, she put out fires, reframed, mediated and restricted our intemperate male behaviour and made our lives safer and somehow more feminine. Dad and I stopped fighting and almost stopped engaging emotionally for the sake of a perfect world. As an expert witness to our relationship, Mum’s commentaries self-soothing interpreted dad’s behaviour to an audience of invisible onlookers. She has her version of events and I have mine – hers is infinitely more palatable to her than mine. So whoever has the last word or the biggest voice gets heard and that is the prevailing narrative.

that etc. Can one unpack one’s own unconscious mind, or are we too self-conscious for that? I have previously included music in my performance work that reminds me of my dead stepfather, I like to do it as a testament to him. Does that count? Is that how I dealt with, and continue to deal with his death?

Perhaps I’m self-medicating with my art practice without realising. I like that thought because my work is not overtly self-referential or autobiographical - maybe it’s an undercover therapy, visible only to me, not even to me. So in that sense, although I have felt like I have been an audience to the performance of my life – this could have been a far more participatory performance than I ever realised. On reflection (although my life is far from finished) this is probably quite an obvious observation.

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__________________________________________________________________ Sam Bray was a veteran of the Second World War. Like so many passionate and kind men he had lived an unremitting nightmare that deeply changed him and coloured his family life. 36

The Gun 1 Once in a time, in a far off land We lived in a world of rock and sand Stung by the wind, scorched by the sun Our only friend was a gun.

2 We lived as beasts of burden then And toiled to obey our fellow men Till our hearts were stone and our bones were steel And only the gun was real.

3 The Gun was our God, and we it’s crew Bow’d down before its fiery spew We starved to feed its fiery breech And make the monster retch

4 Time passed and Death who paced with war Struck till the world could stand no more And men, with horror over run Turned sickened from the Gun

5 I am but young, I should be gay I should love life, song and play But I’ve left my youth in a far off land Hidden beneath the windswept sand Scorched and scarred by the sun Crushed by a worn out Gun. 51

He was a good man, a warrior, managing appallingly complicated losses. He lived in two worlds simultaneously, parenting us in the best way he knew whilst he relived intrusive horrors and grieved for his fallen comrades in arms. I am his son. He shaped me and I copied his modelling by acting out both his caring and his disruptive anger without being aware of its true significance. His grief was vast, unbearable and largely unspoken. If only he had... If only we had listened...

Samuel Bray, Gunner, 51st Field Artillery Regiment. His love, his wounds and his words are passing down the generations. We are listening... I think about Granddad more now that he is dead. His extinguished consciousness has been raised into mine. I consider him more now. I only properly realised that he was a father (and not just a grandfather) when he was dying - my own

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That’s not just you and me… Pumped full of painkillers and no longer able to communicate except by touch, Dad lingered on a living ghost. After some soul searching mum decided that he would have wanted me to present my paper in Moscow after all, so I went.

That first day was highly charged. I had just left Dad’s bedside, arrived in Moscow at midnight, my luggage lost in transit for three days, and with no change of clothes. Why was I here? For a while I drifted purposelessly around the vast interior of the hotel. Bereft of possessions I had suddenly become a transient, too liminal to be any longer substantial I observed myself as a waiting ghostly presence. I had entered, albeit briefly, the realm of the dead. On day two, with Dad on his deathbed, I too lay down. On a mat in a pre-conference breathing

father started to talk about it in terms I could understand. That’s probably everyone… Fathers and sons - I always thought that you sort of chose the relationship. But, the genetic tie thrusts an instinctual responsibility into a relationship that is destined to be problematic anyway. The age gap is too big (initially) the status is unequal (mostly) and the friendship is fragile (forever). It is impossible for sons and fathers to have a ‘proper’ relationship in the first 25 years of the son’s life and by the end of the 25 years required to ‘fix’ it – the father will be dead, or dying. But we try, and we must. That responsibility, that bond, is one of the strongest we will ever have. The past is a foreign country. We shouldn’t associate memory with absolute truth…just a kind of truth, a personal truth at most. Everything I remember about Granddad is true. Every trip to the seaside, every walk round the lanes, every time he held me as a baby, every photograph that was taken before I was born. Grief allows me to be provocative. You can ‘find’ your ‘Dads’ where you please…

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__________________________________________________________________ workshop, I contemplated being dad, being dead, and practicing being more alive... 37

Shakespeare knew about death... the death of his father John and his son Hamnet at the age of 11... It was commonplace! More than holding a mirror up to our nature he imbues Hamlet with an ‘ever-growing inner self, the dream of infinite consciousness’. 38 Hamlet, his most famous stage son, encounters the spirit of his kingly father who tells him that he has been murdered by his own brother. Grieving and triggered by psychic trauma, he searches for meaning through revenge and finds acceptance and transformation

Relaxed and breathing deeply I meet my Dad. I can see him. His fragile body is awkwardly caged in a vast metal bed buttressed by painfully large pillows, fighting for each rasping breath, unable to communicate. My orientation changes and I become him – his feelings are my feelings. Even as I

Hamlet sits in a special place for me because of my father. There is something seductive in seeing obsession from a distance. My father loves this play and so I have tried to. I’m not especially interested in seeing the play performed. I enjoy the language, I enjoy catching the phrases that are now common parlance – the idea that contemporary vernacular uttered without a second thought, is a quotation – that ghosts of a literary text slide from mouths without a thought for the author or aura of its source. I see death in this way. For all that’s lost, as much remains. We embody information as we spend our lives being saturated by it. Of course we can intentionally learn things, but we also learn and are influenced despite ourselves. You can’t take away what you’ve seen or experienced and there is the legacy. ‘Granddadness’ is in me (regardless of fantastical memories) and I can/need do nothing about it.

I wish I was there

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__________________________________________________________________ experience his painful breathing, fused with him I understand there is so much more. I feel his life’s final struggle torn between the uncertainties of life and death. I lend him comfort with my presence and a trickle of warm recognition comes back. I am understood. Tears of joy stream down my face. A softly glowing globe appears and as I willingly take it, I feel myself lighting up with relief and joy. Dad and I have been together – we are together! We shared an extraordinary moment and he gave me a great treasure, something wonderful and inexplicable. Now I know that he is free in a way that I can only just conceive and I know with absolute certainty that he is alright – that we are alright! I had been ‘breathing’ for over two hours but had no notion of the time. When I looked at my phone I saw that my sister had texted me to say that Dad had died.

I wish I was there

I wish I was there

I wish I was there

Maybe I was Even if that’s not ‘true’, it is true. Even if I wasn’t there, I was. These are things I remember... whether I remember them or not.

Okay, this is not Hamlet... but my father’s ghost, for want of a better word, sought me out to forgive us, reconcile us, and redeem us.

Son...

Dad…

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__________________________________________________________________ You left me Nothing... We never really had that conversation did we? It’s hard to talk, to be truthful when truth hurts others. People you love. People who are absent or lost. It’s fragile enough as it is without creating more misunderstanding, more loss. I was lost

Of course...

Through Sam’s death and now this enactment, I can believe that we are back on track and that makes me very happy.

You left me What does that mean? I know We’re not that dramatic. Funny considering…

I have no doubt that your absence has been a big part of the formation of my identity. Any negativity I associate with that becomes as much about me as it does about you. I’ve been upset…but people get upset, it’s over now. We’re about strength, solving problems, not panicking. We avoid upsetting people. We don’t go on about it though do we? You did leave me though, didn’t you? My happiness is bound up with the happiness of those around me. I’m brightened by seeing joy in those I care about. I can’t claim ownership of happiness myself, or ownership of sadness, actually. That’s really not a bad thing, it means I care – you just can’t make a conventional reading of me – like Granddad, I don’t like squeezing into that

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__________________________________________________________________ mould. I don’t cry and I didn’t cry for Granddad until the memorial service (where the conditions were right).

More than a social construct of grief and mourning this loss plunges us into the very core of who we are – to our fundamental uniqueness and our all embracing sameness. 39

Rationalisation to avoid feeling? You sound like your Granddad

Writing these words makes me feel like the idea of terrible, like they might make someone else sad. Am I grieving for Granddad – I don’t know, depends on what terms, whose terms? Part of me, as I watched him, helpless on his hospital bed, had realised the inevitable. No one was accountable, no one did anything wrong, no one was to blame. Protest to the fact of death (in this instance) is unfounded, unreasonable, and can make the situation worse. Particular kinds of feeling. Is all feeling worth feeling?

Why is it so hard to disclose? What is this uneasy relationship between truth and reality?

Don’t judge me as you piece together the aspects of this text that point to a personality type or behavioural pattern. I know you will. But be conscious of your tarring of me, you own the brush and I never came near it.

No biography replicates any other. To really know someone you must learn the details of their story and how the individual finds his or her identity as the details unfold. 40

When we read a novel we place others and ourselves into the narrative. We complete the detail of every place and person by projecting our personally experienced DNA and filling the 99.99% that the story doesn’t tell us.

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__________________________________________________________________ At the close of his tragedy Hamlet implores his friend to stay alive to tell his story, and ... ‘Remember me!’

This was my story. It is becoming our story, my son’s and my Dad’s. It belongs to us all. Trauma can prevent the full exposition of enriching narratives. Stifled by grief, we are left to measure ourselves against those dominant accounts of suffering that tell us who we should be. Acknowledging who we are/not, or even who we may be, is a journey. Like the hapless Ancient Mariner, we tell or perform our traumatic tail of loss to whoever will listen until it is finally and comfortably absorbed into our new self narratives. 41 In this witnessing, our losses become transformed through our lives. ‘Our’ story is everyone’s. It is the collective telling and reremembering of what we most value.

Remember this, as you construct our identities... I’m happy to become your simulacrum, but over time the simulacrum will become less yours and will grow in distance from me – you’ll forget and I’ll never know. Thanks for letting me into this theatre. I tell you because it’s interesting isn’t it? And that’s enough. That’s enough to legitimise anything…

I once met an artist who was wearing a small white badge with black writing on it that read… ‘EVERYTHING IS INTERESTING’ I couldn’t disagree more. I told the artist that the badge should read…

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__________________________________________________________________ Sam wasn’t rich or any of those superficial things that support a man to feel successful. Instead, his life blossomed with those pedestrian achievements awarded for the work of good parents and citizens. He did his duty and he raised his children like so many men before him. He didn’t think himself special and, although his life was packed with the richness and purpose of service to others, he would have described it as half done or not done at all. I am my father’s son, and feel his discomfort about drawing attention to him. I guess loss and trauma are ongoing – no time limit, no sell by date. Mum still smells his presence. I dream him. How I grieve is mediated. How I buried my Dad was regulated. In our grief did we succumb to the master narrative that burial of the dead is done in such and such a way?

‘NOT EVERYTHING IS INTERESTING. THAT DEVALUES ‘INTERESTING’, BUT SOME THINGS ARE INTERESTING AND THOSE THINGS SHOULD BE NURTURED AND GIVEN TIME, SPACE AND RECOGNITION’ The artist claimed the badge was too small for that.

Grandma still talks to the urn, finding that Granddad in his physical form (however changed) is still the place to go to communicate with him. We’re in a different world now. Never in the history of human existence has it been so possible to understand what other people think about things. The explosion of the phenomena of the internet has added to Walter Benjamin’s prediction of the implications of film in his 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Somewhat prophetically Benjamin predicted that any man ‘may even […] find himself transported into a work of art’ 52 but perhaps he couldn’t have predicted the extent to which he would be right. Not only is it possible to ‘publish’, via

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__________________________________________________________________ The upshot was that dad didn’t want a fuss. He didn’t buy into it... He suggested a black bag, a dustbin. He talked about hiring a skip or a mulching machine. Even a cardboard coffin was too lavish… Retrospectively, had we known of the existence of the Burial Laws Amendment Act of 1880, dad would certainly have declared his intention to be buried in the back garden. We received a lawful death certificate and had the manpower to do a good job. If he had been prepared to define his remains as under the ‘clinical waste’, provisions of the Control of Pollution Act 1974 and the Environment Protection Act 1990, we might have got away with it! 42 It would have darkly amused him.

We were torn between the last wishes of the bereaved and societal expectations to do it right.

the internet, blogs and videos etc, but it can happen instantaneously, to potential audiences of millions of people. Ordinary people. Our interests in representations of ‘normal folk’ are demonstrated within cultural obsessions of reality TV and social networking websites. This edited, heightened normalcy distorts our reality, and we look for healing in the popular and entertaining. How am I supposed to separate the wheat from the chaff/chav? 53 The culturally mediated from the wellresearched? What’s the difference anyway? How is it that people in pop-culture realities can so easily wax in elaborate metaphor to explain their feelings? Why are they still all so unhappy? ‘Spare any expense!’ We’ll take our identities from the multiple impositions thrust upon us. The problem is, funerals aren’t cool. If you’re going to offer up a resistant idea, you’re probably not going to do it at someone’s memorial service – too indulgent, not the right place, even less cool. Events of this kind are for more about the attendees than they are about who’s in the coffin. Yet, there Granddad was in his coffin, on the stage, literally ‘corpsing’. 54

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__________________________________________________________________ We know he’s not going to perform so we turn our attention to the MC, the host, a complete stranger, who, although she has been doing this for years, couldn’t look more uncomfortable or awkward. We should all have been looking at each other as we sat in our rows, that’s who we were there for, not him… us. If doing it ‘right’ is an expression of Dad’s worth… then fine.

He is a part of me now... A part of this... Writing from New Zealand, seven months later, I have essentially removed myself from my European roots and their familial cues. Literally distanced from death, I play the game of knowing and not knowing who has died and what has been lost. In a time and world away it’s somebody else’s problem. I am occasionally curious and a little guilty about my reactions to Dad’s death. Death came and I am not the same but I do find it hard to understand, explain or realise the differences. Has it become a relief to me or an invisible burden? I know that the

You’ve got to do it ‘right’. Fine. I can/can’t sense him. (delete as applicable) A part of us. O Wonder! How many godly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t. 55

I can remember him…

‘Listen to me. You know what your problem is? You lot make everything too complicated. You over think everything!!’

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__________________________________________________________________ rest of the family continue to bear the loss but I cannot do it for them. How carefully I observe myself, how quick to censor my behaviours or excuse them. Could it be that in a world already stiff with consensual regulation, I am being restrained by the very restrictions that I originally put in place, with your help, to protect me from questions like these? Dad did exist but where do I locate him now? He didn’t believe in Heaven or Hell so does that disqualify him from either – Dad a liminal memory blimp drifting the in-between. He was always nonconformist, a bit marginal. He once took a phantom horse onto a bus in London and argued with the driver to sell him an extra ticket! Apparently, it was quite difficult to get it up onto the top deck. Hmm, is that us Oliver! The not quite sure, creatures of the void, of paradox and self-conflict, contentious, fraudulent and wryly amused observers. Where might we feel quite at home? Look at me... I am watching this narrative critically. Everything is as it happened but somehow it also seems embellished and that makes it false. In simple disclosure I must prove myself trustworthy.

‘You say you’re doing extra work but do you get any more money for it... What’s the point then?’

‘I’ve done as much as I can for your grandma... and for you boys.’ ‘If I say I’m married... I am, and not because a posh bloke with his collar turned round the wrong way says so...’ ‘Do you know what it’s like to really live and then to really die?’

Don’t look at me... I could but... it’s just that currently I’m trying really hard to keep my boat afloat while I simultaneously try and sink it! (don’t tell anyone)

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__________________________________________________________________ We chose to birth this textual memory/artefact that, at the time, was one of many ways to do it. But intuitively this predominates. In this subsequent text we have made significant additions and revisions and, truly, it too will be remembered in future telling.

Presently, I do believe that I have performed an acceptable narrative of my grief and, yes, there is some cathartic feeling here. But, is this who I am... To me, my life is familiar, pedestrian, relatively benign, and almost interesting. This is my ‘normal’ and, whilst my particular pain or truth is unique, in the greater scheme of things I live here and it feels as familiar and as reassuring to me as a father’s love. I still feel that my life hasn’t really been traumatic even though I seem to have labelled it that way.

I am an old man in an old relationship with myself – how else should it be, and why am I surprised?

Could this be any less simple I wonder? We have birthed this thing and again I become more concerned about who it’s for. Of course for us – great, well done us, happily healed us. But in reality, if this chapter wasn’t for publication, we would never have written it, so let’s be honest – this document exists because we want people to read it. And do what with it? Judge us? Refer to us? Study us? Feel for us? But, we don’t want any of those things do we? We just want to know this has happened, that this is important, in some small way, outside of us. And it is, look at it, turn away, forget it, remember it, do it again. And why do we always need to know who we are anyway? Once we have recognised the beauty in the everyday, the performance of life, never failing to fail, never hiding its surprises – we can reframe and realise that no one is unique or special, and therefore everyone is. (Frustratingly, that includes the arseholes that wear badges.) I often fly to and from Leeds/Bradford airport (LBA), which I believe is the highest altitude airport in the UK. When landing at LBA it’s often very windy, and on one particular occasion a storm was blowing a significant gale and the plane was being buffeted around

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This text tells me that I own my experiences! And there is comfort in normalising and not diminishing them. But they must still be robust enough to inform who I am. They make me proud of my endurance and oddly quite grateful. These wounds somehow confer on my life some legitimacy. I have lived, had relationships, ideas, children, successes and failures and I still live. There doesn’t need to be a tangible message or an outcome, it is primarily a way to mourn, to celebrate and to learn about ourselves... there shouldn’t be any more pressure than the context provides. What does that mean?

Is that the last word? Give me one more minute... I am listening Thanks Son Thanks Dad

considerably. The cabin was thrown upwards and downwards a number of times as the plane came in to land, people started to scream and the experience was genuinely terrifying. In that moment my body relaxed, my breathing deepened and I accepted my fate. I remember clearly thinking, as my fellow passengers screamed, ‘it’s not been a bad 30 years, these things happen’. I’m not a brave person. I’m not a Samurai who has come to terms with mortality. It was, just, in that moment, I didn’t really mind…I was okay with dying…I could live with it…well, live with it for the ten seconds I would still be living anyway. The world is dramatic enough, even without my contribution. The fact that I ‘perform’ professionally means I add to the pot more than my fair share – that’s why, most of the time, I just want to sit quietly, observe the world and read Sherlock Holmes. It’s elementary Dad, I need a baseline. A constant in the madness Yes. Call me You can talk Thanks Dad Thanks Granddad.

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Notes 1

Samuel Bray, ‘An Anthology of Poems’ (unpublished work, circa 1942). Thomas Attig, How We Grieve: Relearning the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 18. 3 Alexander Bryant, ‘Performance Ethnography: The Re-Enacting and Inciting of Culture’, In Strategies of Qualitative Inquiry, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. (California: Sage, 2008), 90. 4 William Worden, Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for the Mental Health Practitioner (New York: Springer, 2009), 44. 5 Robert, A. Neimeyer, Lessons of Loss: A Guide to Coping (New York: McGrawHill, 1998). 6 Catherine Barrette, in this volume. 7 Soyini D. Madison, ‘Performance, Personal Narratives, and the Politics of Possibility’, The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions, ed. S. J. Dailey (Annandale: National Communication Association, 1998), 276. 8 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006), 206-11. 9 George A. Bonanno, ‘Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Adverse Events?’ American Psychologist 59 (2004): 20-2. 10 Roland Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text, ed. Stephen Heath, (London: Fontana, 1977), 146. 11 Christina Lovey, in this volume. 12 Peter Bray, ‘Bereavement, Post-Traumatic Growth and Psycho-Spiritual Transformation’ Journal of Religion and Health 50 (2011), Viewed 28 September 2011, http://www.springerlink.com/content/37n011w7463167h4/. 13 Richard, G. Tedeschi and Lawrence G. Calhoun, ‘Beyond the Concept of Recovery: Growth and the Experience of Loss’ Death Studies 32 (2008): 27-39. 14 Bryant, ‘Performance Ethnography’, 90-93. 15 Attig, How We Grieve, viii. 16 Worden, Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy, 135-137. 17 Terry L. Martin and Kenneth J. Doka, Men Don’t Cry: Women Do: Transcending Gender Stereotypes of Grief (Philadelphia: Brunner, 2000), 31. 18 Kenneth Doka, ed., Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1989), 25. 19 Judith Viorst, Necessary Losses: The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 16. 20 Lorraine Hedtke and John Winslade. Re-Membering Lives: Conversations with the Dying and the Bereaved (Amityville: Baywood, 2004), 1-5. 21 Bryant, ‘Performance Ethnography’, 92. 2

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Madison, ‘Performance, Personal Narratives’, 276. ‘Baby Dies after Hamilton Road Crash’, Viewed July 25 2011, http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-17354263.html. 24 Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person (London: Constable, 1961), 123. 25 David Mann and Valerie Cunningham, eds., The Past in the Present: Therapy Enactments and the Return of Trauma (London: Routledge, 2009), 2. 26 Robert Kastenbaum, ‘Death and Bereavement in Later Life’, in Death and Bereavement, ed. Austin H. Kutscher (Springfield: Thomas, 1969), 28-54. 27 Erich Lindemann, ‘Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief’, American Journal of Psychiatry 101 (1944): 141. 28 Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, ‘The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement: Rationale and Description’ Death Studies 23 (1999): 192. 29 Judith L. Herman Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 52. 30 Fran Gale, Natalie Bolzan, and Dorothy McRae-McMahon, Introduction to Spirited Practices:Spirituality and the Helping Professions, by Fran Gale (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2007), xx. 31 Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman and Steven L. Nickman, eds., Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (Washington: Taylor & Francis, 1996), 29. 32 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, trans. and ed. J. Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 243. 33 Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma (New York: Free Press, 1992), 5. 34 Robert A. Neimeyer and Maria Buchanan-Arvay, ‘Performing the Self: Therapeutic Enactment and the Narrative Integration of Traumatic Loss’, in The Dialogical Self in Psychotherapy, ed. Hubert J. M. Hermans and Giancarlo Dimaggio (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2004), 174. 35 Worden, Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy, 39-51. 36 John H. Harvey and Eric D. Miller, eds., Loss and Trauma: General and Close Relationship Perspectives (Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge, 2000), 30. 37 Stanislav Grof, Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death and Transcendence in Psychotherapy (Albany: State University New York Press, 1985) 346-347. This work outlines Stan Grof’s foundational cartography of the psyche – see also Holotropic Breathwork. 38 Howard Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 146. 39 George A. Bonanno, The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life after Loss (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 155. 40 Attig, How We Grieve, 7. 41 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (originally The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere) was written in 1797-98 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The poem appropriately tells 23

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__________________________________________________________________ of a wandering marine survivor who is compelled to communicate his story of trauma to whoever is willing to listen in order that he might find momentary rest. 42 ‘Funeral Helper Garden Burial’, Viewed 13 September 1011, http://www.funeralhelper.org/garden-burial.html. 43 Elaine Aston and George Savona, Theatre as a Sign-System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance (London: Routledge, 2005), 99-102. 44 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002), vii. 45 Deirdre Heddon, Autobiography and Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillian, 2008), 27. 46 Augusto Boal, ‘The Theatre as Discourse’, in The Twentieth Century Performance Reader, eds. Michael Huxley and Noel Witts (London: Routledge, 1996), 87-9. 47 William Shakespeare, Hamlet (London: Penguin, 2001), 33. 48 Michael Frayn, ‘Michael Frayn’, BOMB Magazine, Autumn 2000, 58. 49 Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (London: John Calder, 1983), 7. 50 Colin Counsell, Signs of Performance: An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theatre (London: Routledge, 1996), 86. 51 Samuel Bray, ‘The Gun’ (unpublished work, circa 1942). 52 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin, 2008), 22. 53 ‘chav’. Dictionary.com. Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition. Harper Collins Publishers, Viewed 30 September 2011, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/chav. 54 ‘corpsing’. Urbandictionary.com ‘Corpsing is a theatrical slang term used to describe when an actor breaks character during a scene’, Viewed 30 September 2011, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=corpsing. 55 William Shakespeare, The Tempest (London: Penguin, 2005), 91.

Bibliography Aston, Elaine, and George Savona. Theatre as a Sign-System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance. London: Routledge, 2005. Attig, Thomas. How We Grieve: Relearning the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Barthes, Roland. ‘Death of the Author’. In Image, Music, Text, ed. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. Beckett, Samuel. Worstward Ho. London: John Calder, 1983.

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__________________________________________________________________ Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by J.A. Underwood. London: Penguin, 2008. Bloom, Howard. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. Boal, Augusto. ‘The Theatre as Discourse’. In The Twentieth Century Performance Reader, edited by Michael Huxley and Noel Witts, 87-89. London: Routledge, 1996. Bonanno, George A. ‘Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Adverse Events?’ American Psychologist 59 (2004): 20-2. Bonanno, George A. The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life after Loss. New York: Basic Books, 2009. Bray, Peter. ‘Bereavement, Post-Traumatic Growth and Psycho-Spiritual Transformation’. Journal of Religion and Health 50 (2011). Viewed 28 September 2011. http://www.springerlink.com/content/37n011w7463167h4/. Bryant, Alexander. ‘Performance Ethnography: The Re-Enacting and Inciting of Culture’. In Strategies of Qualitative Inquiry, edited by Norman K. Denzin, and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 75-117. California: Sage, 2008. Counsell, Colin. Signs of Performance: An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theatre. London: Routledge, 1996 Doka, Kenneth, ed. Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow. Lexington: Lexington Books, 1989. Frayn, Michael. ‘Michael Frayn’, BOMB Magazine, Autumn 2000. Freud, Sigmund. Mourning and Melancholia. Translated and edited by J. Strachey in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 243-258. London: Hogarth Press. Original edition, 1917, 1961. Gale, Fran. Introduction to Spirited Practices:Spirituality and the Helping Professions, edited by Fran Gale, Natalie Bolzan, and Dorothy McRae-McMahon, xix-xxviii. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2007.

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__________________________________________________________________ Grof, Stanislav. Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. Albany: State University New York Press, 1985. Harvey, John H., and Eric D. Miller, eds. Loss and Trauma: General and Close Relationship Perspectives. Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge, 2000. Heddon, Deirdre. Autobiography and Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillian, 2008. Hedtke, Lorraine, and John Winslade. Re-Membering Lives: Conversations with the Dying and the Bereaved. Amityville: Baywood, 2004. Herman, Judith L. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Janoff-Bulman, Ronnie. Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma. New York: Free Press, 1992. Kastenbaum, Robert. ‘Death and Bereavement in Later Life.’ In Death and Bereavement, edited by Austin H. Kutscher, 28-54. Springfield: Thomas, 1969. Klass, Dennis, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven L. Nickman, eds. Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Washington: Taylor Francis, 1996. Lindemann, Erich. ‘Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief.’ American Journal of Psychiatry 101 (1944): 141-48. Madison, Soyini D. ‘Performance, Personal Narratives, and the Politics of Possibility’. In The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions, edited by S. J. Dailey, 276-286. Annandale: National Communication Association, 1998. Mann, David, and Valerie Cunningham, eds. The Past in the Present: Therapy Enactments and the Return of Trauma. London: Routledge, 2009. Martin, Terry L., and Kenneth J. Doka. Men Don’t Cry - Women Do: Transcending Gender Stereotypes of Grief. Philadelphia: Brunner/Mazel, 2000. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge, 2002. Neimeyer, Robert, A. Lessons of Loss: A Guide to Coping. New York: McGrawHill, 1998.

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__________________________________________________________________ Neimeyer, Robert, A., and Maria Buchanan-Arvay. ‘Performing the Self: Therapeutic Enactment and the Narrative Integration of Traumatic Loss’. In The Dialogical Self in Psychotherapy, edited by Hubert J. M. Hermans and Giancarlo Dimaggio, 173-89. New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2004. Rogers, Carl. R. On Becoming a Person. London: Constable, 1961. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. London: Penguin, 2005. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. London: Penguin, 2001. Stroebe, Margaret, and Henk Schut. ‘The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement: Rationale and Description’. Death Studies 23 (1999): 192-224. Tedeschi, Richard, G., and Lawrence G. Calhoun. ‘Beyond the Concept of Recovery: Growth and the Experience of Loss’. Death Studies 32 (2008): 27-39. The Press. ‘Baby Dies After Hamilton Road Crash’. Accessed July 25, 2011. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-17354263.html. Urbandictionary.com. ‘Corpsing’. Viewed 30 September 2011, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=corpsing. Viorst, Judith. Necessary Losses: The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. Worden, William. Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for the Mental Health Practitioner. New York: Springer, 2009. Peter Bray is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Trades at the Eastern Institute of Technology in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand. His current research and writing reflect interests in counselling theory and practice, loss and bereavement and the impact of spiritual consciousness experiences upon post-traumatic growth. Oliver Bray is a Senior Lecturer in Performance Practice at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. He is the Artistic Director of Until Thursday Theatre Company and his research interests include performance pedagogy, contemporary theatre making and experimental writing.

Trauma and Art Making: Reclaiming a Mother/Daughter Relationship Catherine Barrette Abstract After sudden and tragic events, survivors of trauma are often left with inadequate means to reiterate their impressions. This was my experience after a serious motor vehicle accident where I sustained many injuries including and above-knee amputation. This traumatic event not only disrupted my life but also had serious repercussions on my family, as my daughter Ella was only three months old when this accident occurred. As with other authors in this volume such as Peter and Oliver Bray, my personal circumstances provide a unique perspective from which to engage in trauma as other than representation. Through an interdisciplinary approach and examining photographs I took of my daughter in the years following the accident, I propose that art making can contribute to recovery after trauma. In this context, the operative element of artwork is affective rather than its signifying capacity or objective meaning. Affect is a different way of engaging with artworks where information is conveyed at the level of emotions. Particularly for art making after trauma, affect is not just a source of inspiration, it evokes the possibility to witness one’s own feelings, touching us through our senses and inciting meaningful change. Key Words: Trauma, affect, trauma art, resilience, posttraumatic growth, PostTraumatic Stress Disorder, motherhood, maternal bond. ***** My daughter Ella was three months old when my trauma occurred. I survived a terrible motor vehicle accident on January 21st 1997. I was waiting to cross the street when a left turning car collided into a sports utility vehicle. This second vehicle lost control, careened in my direction and hit me against a tree. In an instant, my life changed. Ella was not with me at the time of the accident. For this, I am eternally grateful. Trauma after injury, with its psychic violence and sudden physical disruption, tore at my maternal bond with my daughter. How can you recover a broken relationship after such a tragic event? Attending to this reality and letting it find form can be an important part of the healing process. It is my belief that the arts can give form to this reclaiming process; a shared means in which trauma can begin to take shape and create new bonds. My work in photography with my daughter Ella is an example of this important endeavour. Through this intimate art making process, I was able to reclaim in my mother/daughter relationship.

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Image 1: Ella Looking up at the Sky, silver print, © 2004 1. January 21st 1997 Ella’s birth was an experience that marked my life. She came into the world in a birthing centre under the care of extraordinary midwives. My subsequent maternity leave from my work with the Canadian government was joyful and fulfilling. I was planning to take a four-month leave before returning to work fulltime. On January 21st 1997, I left home to attend meetings and prepare for my subsequent return to work. This was the first time I left my daughter with my husband, as my breast-feeding routine did not permit lengthy absences. The accident occurred at approximately 2 p.m. on a cold, clear winter day. My polytrauma included a double pneumothorax, many broken bones, basal skull fracture, bleeding and swelling of the brain, loss of blood and an above-knee amputation. I do not remember this day or the sequence of events leading up to the accident due to my traumatic brain injury. I can only piece together the events through written witness accounts and police reports. My husband was advised of the accident upon my arrival at the emergency room. He has related to me that because of his shock, time slowed down. He carefully prepared Ella and her things before they both made their way to the hospital. Once there, he contacted my parents and family, asking them to come as soon as possible.

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__________________________________________________________________ In the blink of an eye, my reality changed and the events of this accident caused major upheavals in my life. This is the most devastating effect of trauma – how from one moment to the next all the usual points of reference are lost. I have only patchy memories of the first moments at the hospital. The injuries were so serious that my doctors doubted that I would survive. My first flashes of reality were of agonizing pain, panic and fear. I vaguely remember the sensation of having my underwear cut off in the emergency room in an attempt to free my body of constraints. I did not even realize I was in the hospital until much later when my sister said, ‘It’s just like ER’, a popular American TV series in the 1990s about a hospital emergency room that I religiously watched. 1 While the medical professionals were working on my damaged body, I could only register the confusion and shock of the deeply distressing experience. I spent several days in the ICU where I was intubated and sedated. Once I was stabilized, I was transferred to the orthopaedic floor to wait for my subsequent surgeries. 2. Rehabilitation Journal entry Sunday, February 2nd 1997: Lots of visitors today! But very sad morning. I missed Ella lots. I really love her so much. But good day otherwise – they took the IV away! No more tubes linking my body to the outside. The ensuing surgeries and medical interventions were effective and I slowly recuperated to begin my physical recovery. I was bedridden for several weeks and needed assistance to even move in my bed. My husband left a blank book on my side table for various note taking. During the pain ridden sleepless nights and long days, I used this book to write my thoughts. Almost fourteen years after the accident, I discovered the book among my papers. To my surprise, the brief passages are centred on the feelings of being separated from my daughter, not the events of the accident. I remember shedding many tears during this long lonely time. Journal entry 6:45 a.m., Monday, February 3rd: I still miss Ella lots. I looked at her pictures this morning and cried. It’s sad but not bad. I need to let my emotions go. The release feels natural.

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__________________________________________________________________ Journal entry 5:28 p.m., Monday, February 3rd: Ella was here – she wasn’t great. She had colic that hurt really bad. Annette managed to comfort her but at some point I asked if I could hold her. I was crying – I felt like I couldn’t make her feel better and I was responsible for her colic. What a great feeling though – to have her in my arms and to have her stop crying. Oh! I felt like her mother again. That I could do something to make her feel better. I love her so much. Everyday, I hold her for longer. Maybe some days I’ll spend the night with her. In the same bed like we used to do. Why was it a few days before the accident I held her in my arms and enjoyed all the sensations – her smell, her breathing, her being content, her comfort in my arms? Did I know this accident would happen? Oh, I want to get better to take care of her. While in my hospital bed, I struggled to understand my changed maternal role – a different role that I had originally imagined when my husband and I decided to have a child. Journal entry 6:57 a.m., Tuesday, February 4th: Today, I decided that Ella was staying home – it’s her day off as she needs to rest. I’m OK with not seeing her today – but she will come tomorrow. I am still sad about the time away from her. Andrew said last night he didn’t know whether he cared more for Ella or for me. I know what he means because I felt the same way but didn’t know how to express it. I’m glad I never took her for granted. Andrew remembers that night I held her in my arms and said I would never take her for granted, holding her/ her smell and her sighs when she breathes. God, I love her! This accident will make me a better mother. Everything about her is important. Thank God she wasn’t with me when the accident happened. She has grown so much in the last two weeks. She is a part of me always. Luckily during this time, my parents, godparents, aunts, uncles and close friends stayed at my home to provide Ella with the necessary care. Simply put, my daughter was surrounded with the love of an extended family. I have lost count of the number of ‘grandmothers’ and ‘grandfathers’ that Ella still has enriching her life.

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__________________________________________________________________ Journal entry 10:01 a.m., Wednesday, February 5th: This afternoon, Yvon and Annette, my godparents, surprised me with Ella. I am so happy they decided to stay this week and take care of Ella! I was strong – I could hold her for a long time and she fell asleep on me. She was happy and content. I think she knows who I am. I was dozing and at 10 p.m., I opened my eyes and Andrew was there. We talked and cried for a long time. He told me how afraid he was. He also said how much it hurt to see my Mom and Dad worry and to imagine how he’d feel if something happened to Ella. I had never thought of that. We cried – I know how Mom and Dad feel. I still count my blessing my daughter is OK. Last Journal entry Friday, February 7th: I had lots of downs yesterday. After Ella left, I was very sad as I’m not able to take care of her. For the first year, I continued physical therapy for my broken bones and amputated leg. The rehabilitation for my traumatic brain injury lasted much longer, extending for several years after my accident. This lengthy rehabilitation process interrupted my maternal bond with my daughter Ella. I could not care for her, as my rehabilitation was too demanding. Eight months after the accident, I returned to work part-time at my government job and faced difficult physical and emotional challenges that eroded my strength. I left my daughter in day care, choosing to spend my energy on returning my life to ‘normal’. I was denying the new limits of my changed condition. It took five years and five different positions to admit my failings and abandon my ambitions. Ella played a major role in this decision. At six years old, she clearly asked me to stop working and to spend more time with her. I took a year to recuperate and began to explore the role and responsibilities of motherhood. Acknowledging my limitations enabled me to recognize my need to express ideas and feelings through visual means. I was already taking part-time courses in visual arts at the University of Ottawa and after my resignation, I continued with other studio classes. Now, looking back, I realize that my artworks provided a way to engage with the accident and the difficult separation from my daughter during my rehabilitation period. Through my art making, I was able to express the painful feelings about the trauma of being separated from my infant child. The photograph ‘Ella Looking up at the Sky’ shows how I addressed my ambivalent feelings of motherhood in my artwork. In this black and white photograph, Ella is dressed in a large ill-fitting winter suit. She is the central focus

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__________________________________________________________________ appearing in the middle of the frame starkly contrasting the dark grasses in the background. Ella is looking up to the sky, eyes staring intensely at a point beyond the photograph’s frame. Her lips are pursed. The photograph shows a great range of tones from the dark, velvety shadows in the grass to many shades of grey on the snowsuit and even a spot of light on Ella’s face. She is not looking at me, her mother behind the camera. She seems hopeful and happy, contemplating the sky. Despite the tragedy from my trauma, Ella continued to thrive. My art making cannot help but reveal this reality. 3. Trauma and Art Making Art making can take into account and illustrate the many disruptions to one’s vitality after trauma due to bodily injury. Art making is distinguished from other modes of therapeutic practice by its emphasis on working materials to embody form. I define art making as the components necessary in the production of an artwork including the treatment and use of materials, the concepts driving the ideas and the feelings and intentions of the individual producing the artwork. Often, this indirect route of communicating one’s experience enables the gathering and assembling of fragments into new signification. Steering away from the Romantic belief in the power of art to transform reality, the operative element of art making is affective rather than its signifying capacity. 2 Indeed, affective responses to artworks produced can be emotional and thought provoking, both for the viewer and the art maker. Particularly for art making after trauma, affect is not just a source of inspiration; it evokes the possibility to witness one’s own feelings. 3 Understanding trauma is about comprehending how shattering events can mark a life and break bonds between individuals. It is also about accepting the different ways individuals react to such events, in particular how they adequately come to terms with what has happened and how they live with their memory and long-term effects. Prevailing discourse in psychology and the humanities attempts to categorize the theoretical framework for thinking about trauma. Works by authors such as Roger Luckhurst and Ruth Leys discussed later in this chapter offer comprehensive examinations of trauma across psychiatric, legal and culturalpolitical sources. Approaching this discourse is a daunting task and even a brief survey reveals its vastness and complexity. While my interest here lies not in a critique of trauma studies, defining certain theoretical underpinning will lay the groundwork to further my investigation. In The Trauma Question, Roger Luckhurst, professor of modern and contemporary literature at the University of London, aptly describes the ‘conceptual knot’ of trauma – a concept that ties together many different elements and fields of study where any specific definition would be inevitably reductive. 4 Throughout its multidisciplinary history, trauma is most often characterized not by the nature of the event per se, but rather in its damaging and delayed after effects. This is one of the central paradoxes of trauma, the wound of the traumatic event is

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__________________________________________________________________ not fully experienced at the time of its occurrence and instead manifests with time, often years after the originating event. Although it is now part of contemporary vocabulary, the term trauma derives much of its weight from psychoanalytic discourse. Sigmund Freud defined trauma as a psychic deformation and symbolic wound where the normal way of dealing with or processing an experience fails. In his early writings, he associated hysteria, a cluster of psychoneurotic symptoms, with sexual and other traumas that had been split from consciousness. The hysteria’s physical and emotional manifestations are viewed as an attempt to express and symbolize a psychosexual conflict and, at the same time, to avoid acknowledging that conflict. 5 Freud contended that many neuroses had their origins in profound traumatic experiences which transpired in the patient’s past but which were now forgotten. He conceived that during the traumatic event, the mind splits as a primary defence into an altered state of consciousness called a dissociated state. This is how trauma was alternately relived and suppressed by individuals. His treatment involved remembering hidden memories and confronting them both intellectually and emotionally. This cathartic method was believed to the discharging of ills and thus, eliminates the psychological origins of the neurotic symptoms. Freud was the first to conceive the two distinctive characteristics of the traumatic events or experiences – the original first event and the later trigger of that experience. As such, trauma is neither located in the original event that was not assimilated into consciousness, nor by the memory that later triggers that experience – it is located in a dialectic between the two events. 6 One of the problems deriving from the psychoanalytic model is whether traumatic memory was preserved intact or whether it was subject to distortions in time. Pierre Janet, a psychologist from the 1880s who studied trauma and psychological automatisms, conceived that traumatic memory was contained in a different part of the psyche, preserved in its original narrative memory form. 7 This contrasts with Freud’s theories in which traumatic symptoms are viewed as signs of latent ideas in the unconscious and prevented from reaching consciousness through repression. Janet believed that the intensity of the emotional reaction determined the meaning attributed to the traumatic event, rather than the circumstances of the event itself. This resulting emotional reaction or ‘phobia of memory’ prevents the integration of the event into a personal narrative. 8 This splits off the traumatic memory from ordinary consciousness where it continues to intrude as terrifying re-experiences. Today, Janet’s ideas can be considered as the origin of many modern treatments for post-traumatic stress disorders. 9 Recently, physician Judith Herman specialising in trauma treatment, has written about the important contribution by made by Janet in understanding two kinds of memory: a traumatic memory where the unconscious repeats the past and narrative memory that narrates the past as past. She continues

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__________________________________________________________________ by emphasizing that the ultimate goal for trauma patients is to put the traumatic story into words. 10 While I have only included a short analysis of Freud and Janet’s contributions, my interest in describing their theories is to call to attention to the way their ideas are still prominent in contemporary discourse and treatment. Turning now to the contemporary discourse in cultural and literary studies, I would like to discuss how works of post-structuralist theorists such as Cathy Caruth, professor of English and comparative literature at Cornell University, have become recognised as a canon in trauma theory. 11 Using psychoanalytical theory, Caruth analysed the origins of the word ‘trauma’ as referring frequently to the notion of a wound that the body is subjected to when injured and proposed that trauma is inflicted on the mind as well as on the body. 12 Specifically, she is concerned with questions of representation: how trauma becomes text, and the difficulty, even impossibility of its representation. Trauma is inaccessible and incompressible; it is imagined as other than representation. The assertions made by Caruth address the complicated problem of articulating traumatic experiences and offer an approach that yields interesting insights. While affirming the necessity of acting out trauma in its continual repetition, her theories do not address the possibility of working through trauma. This refers to the ability to distinguish between the past and the present and to ascribe agency to the trauma survivor. I believe that it is simply not true that survivors cannot gradually recover and lay to rest intrusive images and memories, an idea that I will address in looking at how art making can be a key component in recovery. It was only in 1980 that trauma received its first official recognition in psychiatry when the American Psychiatric Association introduced it into the Diagnostic Manual as a new illness: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). 13 This diagnosis defines trauma as an event that is outside the range of human experience and lists the necessary conditions in order for a patient to be diagnosed with this disorder: psychological distress, including flashbacks or nightmares, avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, and increased arousal such as difficulty falling or staying asleep, anger, and hypervigilance. 14 This addition to the Diagnostic Manual signalled a major shift in the trauma discourse as it departed from the psychodynamic model of unconscious conflict to an empirical, description model of symptoms, identifiable through diagnostic criteria. 15 Although I was never diagnosed with PTSD after my accident, I struggled with dissociation, hypervigilance and flashbacks. For example, I refused to celebrate Mother’s Day for several years following the accident, as this day seemed to exasperate my feelings of helplessness struggling to be a mom. The introduction of PTSD had major implications for medical treatment. Trauma could be alleviated through the patient’s treatment and recovery with therapy and/or medication. Trauma as a psychiatric disorder placed the patient under the care of experts where they continue treatment until they were cured. This

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__________________________________________________________________ simple model of causality is connected with the requirements of legal and economic circles to deal with cases as quickly as possible. Significantly, continued development in the scientific study of traumatic stress drew on Janet’s model of memory. The imprint of the traumatic event fixes itself in the mind assimilated through a neurobiological process instead of an alternative realm of consciousness. Using Janet’s initial model, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, proposed that trauma is engraved in the brain disrupting the nervous system, immune system, and hormonal functioning. 16 During trauma, the amygdala, the part of the brain that stores visual and emotional memories, administers a fear response ‘message’ to the memory of an event, causing a complex chain reaction and brain activity interpreted as danger. Normally, physical responses quickly lessen with each subsequent reminder of the stressful event. This is not the case for individuals who have experienced trauma, as overwhelming memories of the events remain as strong as when they were first stored by the amygdala. The traumatic experience causes a strengthening of the event’s memory and a positive feedback loop. Subsequently, during the recollections of the traumatic event, the brain’s chain reaction strengthens the original encoded memory and physical symptoms become progressively stronger than experienced during the original event. This is how trauma becomes replayed in the mind for a long period of time and victims are stuck with intrusive problems such as concentration, hyperarousal and altered perceptions of self. 17 In his more recent writings, van der Kolk states that merely uncovering trauma memories are not enough. The memories need to be modified and transformed through the body. Thus in therapeutic practices, remembering and dealing with difficult memories need to become an act of creative action rather the static retelling of the event. 18 As I could attest in the years following the accident, talking through the trauma experience was not enough, as words could not integrate the disorganised trauma sensations. I learnt to better regulate emotional and physical states through art making: an active way of regaining control over my feelings. 4. The Mimetic Strain of Trauma Offering a survey of these different approaches in the humanities and psychology including the writings of Freud, Janet, Caruth and van der Kolk, Ruth Leys, professor of humanities at Johns Hopkins University, examines in her book Trauma: A Genealogy the strong ‘mimetic’ strain or the role of imitation in predominant trauma theories. 19 Because of this mimetic model, individuals are not able to assimilate the trauma cognitively causing a sort of hypnotic repetition. Alternatively, the antimimetic model maintains that trauma is an external event that individuals, with care, can remember and control. This is where the genealogy of trauma is in tension: between the mimetic and antimimetic models. Leys argues that it is the oscillating between the two paradigms that creates trauma’s historical

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__________________________________________________________________ construction marked by ambiguity and dissonance. 20 This is where I believe the question of trauma’s unrepresentability has itself become a trope. As such, Leys affirms that trauma stands outside representation, criticizing Caruth and van der Kolk and the application of traumatic memory models. Leys points out that traumatic memory – in particular, the idea that victims are revisited by traumatic memories and unable to process them – should not be treated as axiomatic but part of a larger discourse. Leys argues that this generalization produces a traumatized subject, one who is absolved of responsibility. In other words, prevailing trauma theories negate an understanding of a resilient survivor and one’s capacity to respond to the event in a resourceful and creative manner. The wish not to blame the victim can lead to repression taking away all responsibility from the survivor, potentially eliminating their capacity to respond. During rehabilitation, I too struggled with this paradigm having difficulty defining my limits. I often resorted to a victim state, constantly preoccupied with mere survival. I was unable to assume household responsibility and those of motherhood. I understand being a victim as a constant preoccupation with mere survival. My daughter still describes this period as my ‘checked out state’ where I spent much time either working or sleeping, unable to engage in family activities. 5. Resiliency and Post-Traumatic Growth Published in 2000, Leys’ genealogy does not include recent studies in traumatic stress, where the focus has shifted to understanding the highly adaptive and even constructive processing of trauma by the individual. Lawrence Calhoun and Richard Tedeschi, professors of psychology at the University of North Carolina, analysed cases where trauma survivors respond to trauma with a combination of both resilience and vulnerability. 21 Resilience is the product of the dynamic interaction between a range of risks and protective factors internal and external to an individual at various stages of their life. 22 Resilience can be viewed as a process, a give and take between an individual and their environment, rather than a static characteristic or personality trait. 23 It is within this dynamic process that trauma survivors find adaptive outcomes in the face of difficulties. It gives the survivor the capacity to respond and move out of the victim stance. Eventually with the supportive help of therapists, focusing on my health and art making, I found the courage to leave my victim stance behind and began engaging with life and motherhood. I discovered that it was not the quantity of time and love that I gave my daughter that was important; it was rather the quality of exchanges that made a difference in our relationship. This change in self from victim to survivor implies a greater sense of resiliency, wisdom, strength, and acceptation of limitations. Termed ‘posttraumatic growth’ by Calhoun and Tedeschi, this is where the subjective experience of positive psychological change is a result of the struggle with trauma. 24 Posttraumatic growth gives an individual the opportunity to further their development in their

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__________________________________________________________________ sense of self, interpersonal relationship and existential issues. 25 Importantly, posttraumatic growth is conceptualised as a positive outcome of meaning making or schema reconstruction process after having experienced significant challenges to one’s identity after trauma. 26 Through experiences with my own trauma and researching the different theoretical positions in the discourse, I agree with Leys’ position about trauma’s mimetic characteristics in treatment. Indeed, it is precisely the logic of victimisation that prevents overcoming traumatic wounds after trauma. As Calhoun and Tedeschi’s contributions demonstrate, I built on self-efficacy and my empowered position, where suffering was not eliminated, but given meaning and value. 6. Trauma and Affect Theory In ‘Ella at Home’, my daughter is photographed in front of our residence. In the top left corner, the window of her room is barely visible behind the trees. Ella looks away from me behind the camera. She appears frightened as her arms cross her body and grip her forearms. Her shoulders are raised, as the tension in her body is clearly visible. Has something terrible happened? In this photograph, I imagine that Ella’s stance is similar to those of the bystanders on the day of my accident. Although she was not present on that day, she continues to be a silent witness to my traumatic reactions. As a trauma survivor, I was left with inadequate means to share my experiences. I did not know how to find the words to describe my torn maternal bond with Ella. Affect theory suggests that trauma survivors fail to articulate their memories as coherent thoughts or narratives and are more likely to remember associated feelings and sensations. A new way to express these embodied experiences through the visual means can assist in understanding how the body remembers in a way the mind cannot. Through embodiment, the human body can speak louder than the wounds of trauma. Jill Bennett, professor of visual culture at the University of New South Wales, engaged in furthering the study of cultural trauma, proposes that through visual means, the affective quality of artwork contributes to a new understanding of trauma and loss experiences. 27 She understands affect as the effect a given object or practice has on the viewer and their embodied reaction. Bennett’s theory broadens Caruthian psychoanalytical analysis, particularly as it considers the trauma discourse beyond the literary framework to the visual arts. Bennett proposes a formal innovation: a communicable language of sensation and affect with which to register the traumatic memory experience. According to her, defining this new language for trauma through art opens up the discourse on the lived experience and memories of trauma. 28

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Figure 2: Ella at Home, silver print, © 2005 Bennett submits that, since trauma is usually defined as being beyond the scope of language and representation, the visual images of trauma might not be easily adaptable to the logic of representation. She also argues that trauma art is ill served by a theoretical framework that privileges the meaning of the represented object over the inherent qualities of art. 29 She aptly proposes that affect is necessary to the very operation of trauma art, that it enables art, in its creative process and the viewer’s experience of it, to explore the possibility (or impossibility) of representation. Affect and immediate experience has a long tradition of engagement in the arts. Although often located in an historical past, trauma art has the capacity to touch and affect: to trigger emotions in the present. This ‘sense memory’ as termed by Bennett, operated through the body to produce a ‘seeing truth’ instead of a ‘thinking truth’. 30 This subjective process can only be understood in reference to bodily sensation. To see trauma art is to be moved by it – not in the same sense as to be moved by a fictional narrative, but in the more literal sense, being affected and stricken with affect. For Bennett, to establish artwork as about trauma is reductive, a defining theme often rejected by artists. In asking ‘how does it work and how is ‘seeing feeling’ being achieved?’ Bennett finds that this is where art unveils itself, as ‘art cannot

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__________________________________________________________________ simply give us answers’. 31 Bennett insists that it is not the artwork’s objective to answer questions as ‘this would, of course, merely short-circuit critical thought’. 32 This is where we can begin to explore the possibility of representation in trauma art. Through representational forms, trauma art reveals the presence of suffering, moving it out of the private traumatic memory domain into a public space. Bennett cites Gilles Deleuze noting that this sense memory puts an ‘outside and inside into contact’ central to the dynamic encounter with the structure of representation. 33 This interface or how the viewer encounters sensation is central to the experience of affect in trauma art. Art objects can register the imprint of trauma through the medium itself and touch the viewer’s own bodily memory; the viewer feels rather than simply seeing the object. In other words, the viewer is drawn into the image through a process of affect transmission. Bennett suggests that bodily response precedes the inscription of the narrative and empathy noting that this Deleuzian framework does not allow ‘to theorisation of art as a transcription of a psychological state’. 34 Rather, the transmission of affect through sense memory is a ‘tapping into a certain kind of process; a process experienced not as remembering of the past but as a continuous negotiation of a present with indeterminable links to the past’. 35 In the photograph ‘Ella at home’, the sense memory of my accident breaks through into representation. The viewer feels the anxiety rather than simply seeing the expression on Ella’s face. Though affect, the viewer is drawn to her fearful pose, almost wanting to protect her from the impending event. Based on the theoretical underpinnings presented by Freud, Janet and Caruth and Bennett’s proposal for understanding trauma in the visual arts, I contend that an artistic approach can effectively convey the nature and intensity of the traumatic experience while triggering an affective response for the viewer. Therefore, on a practical level, I believe that an artistic approach has the potential to work through and assist in alleviating suffering regarding the losses of the traumatized individual. Considering the different modalities of how this applies to my art making is the topic of the final section of this chapter. 7. Traumatic Imagination In the diptych ‘Beaver Dam and Ella’ the two photographs speak of my sense of inner space. On the left, an enlarged print of a Polaroid shows a beaver dam. The large structure made of a culmination of branches sits in the centre of the frame. The sky and round structure is mirrored in the water below the dam. The image is slightly out of focus with bluish colour saturation. On the right, a photograph of Ella shows her standing on a branch in the same lake where I took the image of the beaver dam. Ella looks away from me; her body is curved and she is staring at the horizon point. While Ella’s body is in the centre, the horizon frames the photograph’s top third, creating a cross like composition. The two photographs juxtapose each other. One is a fine print that took me a day of work to develop in

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__________________________________________________________________ the darkroom. This contrasts the nature of the Polaroid photograph where the image is instantly developed.

Figure 3: Beaver Dam and Ella, Polaroid and silver print, ©2005 In these photographs, I do not claim that I was able to capture the reality in the struggle to reclaim the bond with my daughter – I merely hint at it, through evoking themes. The dam is like a womb; the dark, hidden space in my body from which my daughter emerged. Yet she emerges from the dam as a young girl. Ella is looking far behind her at the end of the lake. Is she staring at the past or is she already contemplating the future? Indeed, this diptych shows how at the moment I decided to reclaim motherhood many years after the accident; Ella had already developed her own persona. My true challenge was to discover what kind of mom she now needed as a young girl. Here, I will turn to Stephen Levine’s proposal for understanding and treating trauma through creative action to explore how creating artworks such as ‘Beaver Dam and Ella’ can potentially transform suffering. 36 Levine, professor of social sciences at York University and an expressive arts psychologist specialising in treating trauma, contends that only an artistic approach based on what he calls ‘traumatic imagination’ is adequate for comprehending the essence of trauma. 37 He remarks that the arts are ways of shaping experience and finding a format that makes sense of life through imaginative transformation. Levine proposes two central concepts: poiesis – making, especially art making and mimesis – imitation or representation. He defines mimesis as a form of copying or reproducing what already exists. Based on philosophical inquiry, Levine defines the scope of poiesis: it does not only produce a work, it shapes a world and uncovers new possibilities. 38

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__________________________________________________________________ Poiesis offers a meaningful understanding of trauma and an explanation of how the expressive arts can be used in therapeutic framework. In other words, poiesis is where clients take themselves out of a passive state and become involved in making and reshaping the world. According to Levine, it is through this process that clients gain a renewed sense of self as capable of action and able to use their resources in the world. 39 Resisting closure, this allows individuals to approach trauma binaries of past and present, victim and victimiser, spectacle and spectator through a transformative process. In engaging with issues of trauma, an artistic approach explores memory through a self-reflective engagement. 40 Levine’s expressive arts therapy uses various arts forms in a supportive environment to experience and express feelings. 41 The artwork provides a process for self-discovery and a means to express inner feelings by creating outer forms. Through a creative connection where the art form stimulates discussion or the production of other works, this interweaving assists an individual to experience insight and reclaim personal strength. Through this act of poiesis, an individual moves from a passive state and becomes actively involved in reshaping the wounds of trauma. Individuals gain a renewed sense of self, capable of acting upon their world. Levine emphasizes the importance of the therapist being a ‘witness’ to the process and their capacity to respond to what is being made. The therapist/witness is more than a mere observer as they are responsible to shape the session to experience affect. The therapist/witness not only ‘processes’ verbally what individuals are doing, but makes sure that they have a ‘poietic’ experience, one where they can sense affect in the process of shaping. 42 As such, Levine proposes an alternative to traditional narrative therapies for treating trauma. His innovative approach represents an embodied and creative approach to transform trauma into creative action. Bennett’s theories on the affective qualities of trauma art intersect with Levine’s expressive art therapy approach. Within their framework, traumatic memory is resolutely a matter of the present where works move from the domain of representation to a dynamic interaction between images and senses. Affect allows ‘speaking’ about traumatic memory through the body sustaining sensation. As I believe that trauma is lived primarily in our bodies, an embodied approach based on tacit, not cognitive ways of knowing can transform difficult memories and imagine new possibilities for the future. 8. Reclaiming Motherhood I believe that this artistic approach assisted in reclaimed my maternal bond with Ella. This art making activity had the unique characteristic of transcending linguistic barriers, communicating thoughts, experiences and self-perceptions in a different way that is beneficial me and I believe cognitively necessary. More specifically, this art making addressed trauma obliquely, refraining from depicting narrative description to look instead at the present lieu of the traumatic inscription.

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__________________________________________________________________ Due to my intense grief, shame and pain, I was not always able or willing to articulate my experiences despite the fact that those feelings remain strong and intrusive. Significant for me, art making was used as a form of expression that transcended linguistic barriers. This photographic work is highly personal and extends beyond the autobiographical. This experience transcends my personal story. My quest is at once a deeply personal and universal act about yearning to find answers to an unexplainable past. These photographs are honest. There is love in each of these photographs: I am a mother with a vested interest in my daughter, rather than a removed, dispassionate artist. I struggled with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my maintaining my health and the needs of my child, and finally between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. I truly believe that photographing Ella facilitated the expressions of difficult emotions to create a space for dialogue. Now at fifteen years old, Ella has come to understand and accept my struggles by seeking to understand these images. I photographed my daughter in order to work through senselessness, capturing the pain of my losses within a frame that gave me solace and reprieve. It allowed me to visit the past and face the truth about the natural development of my beautiful Ella. My art making provided me a way not only to be a survivor but also to reclaim my motherhood.

Notes 1

ER, NBC (1994, Chicago, IL: Warner Brothers), Television. Nicolas Pioch, ‘Romanticism,’ WebMuseum, last modified October 14, 2002, http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/ glo/romanticism/. 3 Paolo J. Knill, Ellen G. Levine, and Stephen K. Levine, Principles and Practice of Expressive Arts Therapy: Toward a Therapeutic Aesthetics (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2005), 67. 4 Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008), 14. 5 Sigmund Freud and John Rickman, A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), 6-7. 6 Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 20. 7 Bessel A. van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane, and Lars Weisæth, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), 52. 8 van der Kolk et al., Traumatic Stress, 309. 9 Ibid., 53. 10 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992), 37. 2

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__________________________________________________________________ 11

Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 12 Ibid., 3. 13 van der Kolk, et al., Traumatic Stress, iv. 14 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV-TR (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2000), 463. 15 Luckhurst, Trauma Question, 61. 16 van der Kolk et al., Traumatic Stress, 220. 17 Ibid., 293. 18 Mary S. Wylie, ‘The Limits of Talk: The Limits of Talk: Bessel van der Kolk wants to Transform the Treatment of Trauma’, Psychotherapy Networker 28 (2004): 30-36. 19 Leys, Trauma, 8. 20 Ibid., 10. 21 Lawrence G. Calhoun and Richard G. Tedeschi, Handbook of Posttraumatic Growth: Research and Practice (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006), 11. 22 Stephen J. Lepore and Tracey Revenson, ’Relationships Between Posttraumatic Growth and Resilience: Recovery, Resistance, and Reconfiguration’, in Handbook of Posttraumatic Growth: Research and practice, eds. Lawrence G. Calhoun and Richard G. Tedeschi (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006), 25. 23 Calhoun and Tedeschi, Handbook, 29. 24 Ibid., 5. 25 Lawrence G. Calhoun and Richard G. Tedeschi, Facilitating Posttraumatic Growth: A Clinician’s Guide, (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999), 1214. 26 Ibid., 50. 27 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 28 Ibid., 2. 29 Ibid., 3. 30 Ibid., 26. 31 Ibid., 41. 32 Ibid., 90. 33 Ibid., 44. 34 Ibid., 38. 35 Ibid. 36 Stephen K. Levine, Trauma, Tragedy, Therapy: The Arts and Human Suffering (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2009). 37 Ibid., 18-19.

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Ibid., 166. Ibid., 166-167. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 25-7. 42 Ibid., 167. 39

Bibliography American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV-TR. Washington: American Psychiatric Association, 2000. Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Calhoun, Lawrence G., and Richard G. Tedeschi. Facilitating Posttraumatic Growth: A Clinician’s Guide. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999. Calhoun, Lawrence G., and Richard G. Tedeschi. Handbook of Posttraumatic Growth: Research and Practice. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. ER. NBC. Chicago, IL: Warner Brothers, 1994. Television. Freud, Sigmund, and John Rickman. A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. 1992. Knill, Paolo J., Ellen G. Levine, and Stephen K. Levine. Principles and Practice of Expressive Arts Therapy: Toward a Therapeutic Aesthetics. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2005. Lepore, Stephen. J., and Tracy Revenson. ’Relationships Between Posttraumatic Growth and Resilience: Recovery, Resistance, and Reconfiguration’. In Handbook of Posttraumatic Growth: Research and Practice, edited by Lawrence G. Calhoun and Richard G. Tedeschi, 24-46. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006.

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__________________________________________________________________ Levine, Stephen K. Trauma, Tragedy, Therapy: The Arts and Human Suffering. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2009. Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge, 2008. Knill, Paolo J., Ellen G. Levine, and Stephen K. Levine. Principles and Practice of Expressive Arts Therapy: Toward a Therapeutic Aesthetics. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2005. Pioch, Nicolas. ‘Romanticism,’ WebMuseum. Last modified October 14, 2002. http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/glo/romanticism/. van der Kolk, Bessel A., Alexander C. McFarlane, and Lars Weisæth. Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. New York: Guilford Press, 1996. Wylie, Mary S., ‘The Limits of Talk: Bessel van der Kolk wants to transform the treatment of trauma’, Psychotherapy Networker 28 (2004): 30-36. Catherine Barrette is a PhD candidate in Philosophy (Special Individualized Program – Fine Arts, Art History, Creative Art Therapies and Psychology) at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Through an artist/researcher position with a scholarly approach embedded within the creative process, Catherine’s research investigates how artistic practice can transform trauma. Holding degrees in social sciences and business administration, Catherine obtained her bachelor in Fine Arts in 2003 and graduated in the Master’s in Fine Arts program at the University of Ottawa in 2009. Currently living in Gatineau Quebec, Catherine’s works have been exhibited in the National Capital Region, Montreal and Vancouver.

‘He looks at me as if I were a dog:’ Representations of Shame and Trauma in the Fiction of Jean Rhys Jack Dawson Abstract Trauma and shame haunt the fiction of Jean Rhys, yet little scholarship exists which addresses the significance of the role of shame, and its links to trauma, within her work. 1 In exploring Jean Rhys’s fourth novel, Good Morning, Midnight, published in 1939, I will focus on one technique Rhys uses to represent shame: ocular imagery. Visual dynamics and taboos of looking are often extended to implicate the reader in the intersubjective relation of shaming, and are intricately and intimately woven into the texture of trauma. Rhys’s work demands participatory reading and, as readers, we are made complicit in the shaming reification of the protagonists, as our only entrance into their world is by watching, which may evoke uncomfortable voyeuristic feelings in the reader. We conspire as we watch the narrator watching the protagonist watching others watching them, which can potentially flood the reader with affect. Mary Ayers notes that shame is a contagious affect, stinging the observer with the sheer visceral power of exposure. Rhys thereby places weighty emotional demands on us. The experience of shame is soul destroying. Ewan Fernie argues that shame is one of the most intense and painful of our human passions. Shame is further described as the master emotion and is a powerful affect linked to identity of the self. Indeed, shame is a wound to the self. And it is this wounding aspect which opens a space to liberate and move beyond shame’s devastating and negating powers, that makes Rhys’s work so exciting. The pain of shame holds the key to transcendence. I will seek to address the following issues within the text: the multi-layered, narrative approaches to trauma and their significant relationship with affect, specifically shame; shame linked to visual dynamics and ocular imagery – to feelings of exposure and invasion, from self to other, from text to reader; literature and an exploration of emotion/affect and expression. Key Words: Jean Rhys, shame, trauma, eyes, ocular imagery, desire, sexuality, transcendence, transgressive writing, affect. ***** The world of shame is a world of staring eyes. 2 1. Introduction To enter the world of Sasha Jansen, the narrator-protaganist of Good Morning, Midnight, is to enter into a world of ‘utter darkness. 3 It is a world crowded with ‘leering and sneering,’ 4 a world seemingly of little hope: ‘Venus is dead; Apollo is

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__________________________________________________________________ dead; even Jesus is dead.’ 5 We meet Sasha at a time in her life when she is ‘[q]uite alone,’ a place of alienation where she feels there is ‘[n]o voice, no touch, no hand’ available to her. 6 We stare at her as she stares at us from the page ‘think[ing] about … being cold, being hurt, being ridiculed, as if it were in another life than this.’ 7 Sasha longs for another narrative, she has become dissociated, ‘[s]he is past shame, detached, grim,’ 8 she has reached ‘an impasse.’ 9 Shame saturates Rhys’s fiction. Its role in her work is devastatingly powerful and operates on many levels, both in the text, as can be seen from the above paragraph where it leaves her protaganist in the grip of a dehumanising and destabilising sense of shame, and further throughout the narrative as we witness Sasha lurching from hopelessness to, at times, hope, from shame to shamelessness and also in the intersubjective relationship of shaming with the reader. Yet shame remains undeveloped as a research interest in Rhys’s work, and in academia in general. One reason for this may be that the research of emotion, affect, is undervalued in the academic arena, and perhaps this is particularly true of shame, because shame holds a contagious effect – shame is slippery, tenacious, sticky, it adheres to the body, the mind, and the soul and people may become afraid it will attach to them. 10 Shame is just not funky. Joseph Adamson notes that ‘[r]eferences to the complex world of affective reality and inner experience explored by literature are viewed as hopelessly naïve and retrograde.’ 11 Shame on me! 12 An academic colleague recently described her experience of reading Rhys as being unbearable: ‘I can’t bear reading Rhys. It’s like nails scraping down a blackboard.’ Her whole body shuddered as she said this and it was clear that this was quite an emotive reaction, more than a response to a dislike of style. Her reaction intrigued me and I began to consider the tenacity of shame quite carefully. We often attack that which remains an unacknowledged part of self. It is difficult to witness feminine vulnerability and shame laid bare on the page, even more so I believe if that part of ourselves has been disowned and remains hidden in our shadow side, and which if mirrored in others will result in charged feelings of distaste and attack. 13 This can be further witnessed when we think of the piety attached to much criticism of Rhys’s work. Critics have at times fallen into two camps – those who scapegoat and lump all Rhys’s ‘petite femmes’ together, as a comglomerate of victimness, and those who attempt to rescue her protaganists. The dynamics of victim, rescuer and persecutor are played out in many critics of Rhys, with Rhys often being persecuted in dismissals of her work, for utilising her life in her writing – a shame-evoking snobbery. I recalled my first encounter with Good Morning, Midnight as a mature undergraduate student returning to study, and I considered the impact shame had on me at that time. The novel was received by most of my peers as a dirty, grubby little book and a depressing read, something to be discarded quickly. Much like the feelings we may have when we witness someone else’s shame. It becomes uncomfortable to witness, with the desire to flee overwhelming. Yet I loved Good

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__________________________________________________________________ Morning, Midnight, although I felt quite disturbed by it on my first reading – maybe this disturbed feeling is precisely why I loved it. Why read if not to be moved? My curiosity about this book was met with thinly disguised dismay by my peers and with some irritation – ‘let’s get this over with’ was mostly how they approached the study of the book. Much like the dynamics of shame itself. Yet I was astonished by Good Morning, Midnight, such is the intimacy of Rhys’s work. I felt the heat of shame radiate off the page. These feelings were directly related to aspects of my own feelings of shame which were evoked as I witnessed, in excruciating detail, the shaming of Sasha. How could someone know what shame felt like in such particularity? How could someone know shame this intimately, so that the text itself performed the dynamics of shame, implicating the reader in the process? How could someone have the audacity to expose shame, so shamelessly? I knew what it felt like to be a stranger in my own body, to feel alientated, ashamed, shamed. I was stunned by the psychological depth of her writing, the emotional intelligence and reflexivity of the novel. I recognised myself, my shame laid bare on the page. I have grappled with my own experiences of shame on a personal level and also on a professional level, as I worked with women in a trauma unit who were drenched in shame. Researching shame, reading shame and writing shame, brings us up close and personal to some very difficult material. For many years after first encountering Good Morning, Midnight, the novel stayed with me. It surfaced in my post-graduate studies in Creative Writing Therapy and further, years later, where I went back to it and utilised it as an example of writing out of silence and anger and shame, the whole shame-bind. It again surfaced in the trauma unit where I used it in bibliotherapy terms and prescibed it to a group of women who I worked with, facilitating their trauma group. 14 This book just would not go away. It was sticky, tenacious much like the affect of shame. It eventually became clear that Rhys’s work would provide a central role in my body of research into feminine shame. It is no surprise to me to discover much later on, that shame was amongst one of Rhys’s favourite words too. 15 2. The Shame of Feminine Experience The power of Rhys’s writing, the assertive voice of the work, and the at times, silence and passivity of her protaganist holds the potential to evoke strong feelings within the reader. Indeed there is no escape from the iron strength of Rhys’s realist writing. Sasha’s life is revealed slowly to us: ‘[i]t wasn’t one thing. It took years. It was a slow process’ to reach her ‘impasse.’ 16 The word impasse is defined as ‘a situation in which no progress is possible, especially because of disagreement; a deadlock,’ with its mid-nineteenth century French origins from ‘im’ expressing negation, the ‘stem of passer to pass.’ 17 This is a pivotal word in the narrative. Rhys was so precise with the words she chose, the language of her work is simple,

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__________________________________________________________________ spare, realist – pared to the bone. It is pivotal in that Rhys expresses the deadlock, the negation of feminine subjectivity and in order to challenge this negating deadlock, one must expose it, which Rhys does by writing Good Morning, Midnight. Sasha’s intimate journey is exposed to us by the fixed, focalised, first person narrative, that holds a confessional quality, which, as discussed, may create feelings of tension in the reader. We journey alongside her, positioned as voyeurs, where her innermost feelings become an exhibition as we witness her alienation from self: ‘[w]hat are you? I am an instrument, something to be made use of.’ 18 Our only entrance into the text is by watching. To witness shame is also perhaps to feel it for ourselves and shame is an acutely painful feeling – a feeling of a small, inner death, where, for a moment, a part of the self dies. Rhys destabilises the reader by exposing Sasha – and the reader – to shaming scenes. Deborah Martinsen writes about this risky strategy in relation to Dostoevsky’s portrayal of shame and the implication this has for the reader: ‘He puts shame on display, thereby scandalising readers, flooding us with affect and the desire to flee ... [r]eaders who cannot bear the affective flooding flee, some never to return.’ 19 Helen Lewis states: ‘just as shame has an intrinsic tendency to encourage hiding, so there is a tendency for the observer of another’s shame to turn away from it.’ 20 But Rhys does not allow us to turn away from it. Throughout the narrative, visual dynamics, ocular imagery, polarities of being hidden and exposed are played out with shaming alacrity. But what is shame exactly? How do we define it? How do the dynamics of shame operate in us? In the text? 21 The feminist philospher, Sandra Bartky, defines shame as the ‘distressed apprehension of the self as inadequate or diminished,’ and where ‘women’s pervasive affective attunement’ is linked ‘to the social environment.’ 22 J Brooks Bouson states that ‘the female body remains a locus of shame for women associated as it is with out-of-control passions and appetites and with something dirty and defiling.’ 23 The principal shame affect theorist, Silvan Tomkins, describes shame’s power: ‘shame is the affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression, and of alienation.’ 24 Tomkins further asserts: [S]hame is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of the soul. It does not matter if the humiliated one has been shamed by derisive laughter or whether he mocks himself. In either event he feels himself naked, defeated, alienated, and lacking in dignity or worth. 25 With Sasha, Rhys appears to be showing us all the traits that are deemed transgressive or shameful in women. Sasha is a woman who drinks too much: ‘[i]t was then that I had the bright idea of drinking myself to death.’ 26 She is a woman who becomes a virtual prostitute: ‘[t]here was a monsieur, but the monsieur has

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__________________________________________________________________ gone. There was more than one monsieur, but they have all gone. What an assortment! One of every kind.’ 27 And for Sasha perhaps the worst sin of all, a woman who is ageing, as beauty is her commodity: she feels ‘sad ... sad as a woman who is growing old. Sad, sad, sad.’ 28 Throughout the narrative, Sasha appears to embody female shame. Her sexual appetites, her looks, her behaviour are all displayed for intense scrutiny and judgement. Tomkins describes shame’s devastating power: ‘Though terror speaks to life and death and distress makes of the world a vale of tears, yet shame strikes deepest into the heart of [wo]man.’ 29 Although this quotation may veer towards the melodramatic, I find it is perhaps the most striking description of shame’s absolute power. Gershen Kaufman asserts that shame is so important because ‘no other affect is more disturbing to the self, none more central for the sense of identity.’ 30 Indeed, shame is about our core self. When we feel guilty, it is because we feel we have done something wrong; when we feel shame, it is because we feel we are wrong. Rhys offers us many examples of this throughout the narrative and although I have illustrated many of them here via a close textual reading, there are many, many more I could have chosen. Hardly a page goes by that is not drenched in shame. 3. The Visual Dynamics of Shame In her recent pionering study on shame, Mother-Infant Attachment and Psychoanalysis: The Eyes of Shame, Mary Ayers states that: [d]espite the broad range of meanings and numerous attempts at definition, experience reveals that every instance of shame is a time of painful incapacity, an endless moment when one is overcome with the existential feelings of defect and unlovability. 31 This is a world where women assume the shamed position, where women slink out of the lavabo – ‘powdered, but with hollow eyes – and, head down, slink into the street.’ 32 They hope not to be noticed. There are numerous mentions throughout the narrative of toilets, normally accessed by the spatial sensation of going down into the underground, of falling, of a fall. They are used as possible refuges for Sasha, linked to bodily waste and usually with a ‘slinking’ back into the world when no comfort is found. The ‘slinking’ word is so evocative of the shamed self moving in a world of others, wishing to hide, to disappear, to slink away, not to be seen. Ayers further writes of the importance of eyes in the dynamics of shame: ‘To the person who suffers shame, the world is full of eyes, crowded with things and people that can see. Bewitching eyes watch every movement and moment of self.’ 33 Good Morning, Midnight is a world where male characters roam the page

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__________________________________________________________________ with ‘ha-ha eyes;’ 34 where ‘[f]ish in tanks stare with eyes which are both glassy and unbelieving.’ 35 Even houses have the uncanny ability to loom, to look – ‘tall cubes of darkness, with two lighted eyes at the top’ watch and ‘sneer.’ 36 Domestic spaces shame Sasha – she belongs nowhere, not even in her own skin. Leon Wurmser identifies the eyes and perception as the locus of shame: ‘[T]he eye is the organ of shame par excellence. Therefore in the classic shame scenario the individual feels exposed and humiliated – looked at with contempt for being inferior, flawed.’ 37 It is this looked-at-ness which may make us as readers feel uncomfortable too, as we read Sasha, as we watch. Throughout this novel eyes have powers beyond that of sight too: He stares at me. Something else has come into his eyes. He knows how I am feeling – yes, he knows. “Just a hopeless, helpless little fool, aren’t you?” he says. Jovial? Bantering? On the surface, yes. Underneath? No, I don’t think so. “Well, aren’t you?” “Yes, yes, yes, yes. Oh, yes.” I burst into tears. I haven’t even got a handkerchief. 38 Here, Sasha dramatises ‘shame – vulnerability’ described by Wurmser as a ‘sensitivity to, and readiness for, shame – and “shame anxiety,” which is evoked by the imminent danger of unexpected exposure, humiliation, and rejection.’ 39 Benjamin Kilborne asserts: Since shame is at the bottom shame about the self, felt in interaction with an other, I am ashamed as I imagine I appear to you … shame deals not only with appearances (i.e., how I appear to you), but also with imagined appearances (i.e., how I imagine I appear to you), shame allows me to realise that I am that object that another is looking at and judging. 40 There are numerous examples of this throughout the narrative. Sasha Jansen desperately seeks escape from watchful, judging eyes, even perhaps from her own narrative, from her own judging other who pops up in the narrative from time time as ‘white-dressing-gown man.’ Rhys reveals Sasha’s scopophobic tendencies as she has her character thinking: Fly, fly, fly from … those abominable eyes … [d]on’t let him notice me, don’t let him look at me. Isn’t there something you can do so that nobody looks at you or sees you. 41 I suggest that phrases such as, ‘[r]un, run away from their eyes’ are symptomatic of the humiliation and shame she feels. 42 Shaming eyes humiliate. Ayers states: ‘We

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__________________________________________________________________ hide our faces, want to run away, and long to vanish from the powerful eyes of contempt and disgust, which stare and induce these intolerable feelings.’ 43 When Rhys utilises visual dynamics and ocular imagery in the text, she produces some of her most potent and evocative images of the dynamics of shame, with the most compelling line being: ‘He looks at me with distaste. Plat du Jour – boiled eyes, served cold.’ 44 It is interesting to note here that the feminine is linked to food, a dish of the day, served up on a plate to be devoured by an implied contemptuous male gaze. And it is in this refusal of control, dignity, power and self-possession to her female subject that Rhys’s novels are simply so radical. Rhys eschews the conventional forms of narrative authority, which are linked to the kinds of patriarchal authority that the oft written about ‘they’ in her novels embody. Rhys writes from the edge, from the other side of confidence, from the other side of respectability – shamelessly. 4. The Shame of Traumatic Experience We watch Sasha lurch from page to page in a highly sensitised state, traumatised, destabilised. This destabilising effect is further enhanced by Rhys’s choice of Sasha’s vices – she self-medicates with both alcohol and barbituates. Their effects are intimately woven with the dynamics of trauma and shame and serve to heighten the dramatic effects on both the narrative structure and Sasha’s disintegrating relationship with her self. The temporal shifts in narrative mimic a drunken swagger as we are taken ‘[b]ack, back, back.’ 45 Like Sasha, we as readers may feel disoriented for a moment and do not ‘know whether it’s yesterday, today or tomorrow.’ 46 This is also a state of dissociation, of a traumatised individual. Christina Lovey, in her chapter on personal mourning, describes the liminal space as the ‘psychological space of grief.’ 47 It is a space Rhys knows well and a space her protagonist inhabits. Lovey, quoting Lewis, describes this embodied feeling: ‘it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me.’ 48 Yet at some level, Sasha is aware of her own separation, her own fragmentation: It’s when I am quite sane like this, when I have had a couple of extra drinks and am quite sane … I’m a bit of an automaton, but sane surely – dry, cold and sane. Now I have forgotten about the dark streets, dark rivers, the pain, the struggle and the drowning. 49 There is a brutal, relentless truth in how she articulates the pain and suffering of being in this degraded state – ‘I believe in survival after death. I’ve had personal proof of it.’ 50 This is a state of survival, rather than a state of living:

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__________________________________________________________________ [f]rom your heaven you have to go back to hell. When you are dead to the world, the world often rescues you, if only to make a figure of fun out of you. 51 Prominent in the experience of shame is the desire to flee from the gaze, from any form of exposure, as it becomes excruciatingly painful to be seen. To exist. Yet Rhys puts Sasha on display; we watch, we conspire. The polarities of being hidden and exposed are explored as Sasha misuses barbiturates, which enable her to sleep and hide in hotel rooms – rooms which should be womb-like, but are tomb-like – ‘I crept in and hid. The lid of the coffin shut down with a bang,’ and alcohol to help her forget in her waking moments. 52 Alcohol is the watery cloak that serves to hide her feelings of shame, yet paradoxically it exposes her to shaming scenes. The waiter looks at her ‘in a sly, amused way,’ and the waitress ‘says nothing … [b]ut she says it all.’ 53 Sasha continually lives in a state of anxiety, where she will ‘blush at a look, cry at a word;’ 54 where she feels, ‘[w]ith a hundred francs they buy the unlimited right to scorn you. It’s cheap.’ 55 How Sasha looks, how she appears to both herself and others are directly related to her feelings of shame. As Sasha’s story unfolds she remembers her first time living in Paris with her now estranged husband Enno. He had abandoned her after the death of their child and ‘it was after that’ she tells us she ‘began to go to pieces.’ 56 Enno’s rejection of her, tied to the death of her child, creates feelings of immense shame in Sasha. Enno told her: ‘You don’t know how to make love … you’re too passive, you’re lazy, you bore me … goodbye.’ 57 Sasha feels the shame of not being a good mother, a good lover, nor a good wife. Throughout Rhys’s fiction we can also see how the representation of trauma and shame are intimately linked. Shame pervades the narrative, almost smothers it, us, even. Patricia Moran notes in her study on the aesthetics of trauma: Although trauma and shame seem linked in an intuitive way theorists of trauma and theorists of shame have tended to work in parallel, non-intersecting paths. Recently, however, both theorists of shame and literary critics have begun to turn their attention to the ways in which traumatic experience and shaming may be intertwined. 58 Sasha is subjected to many traumas throughout the narrative: the death of her child, the death of her marriage and the death of her relationship with her family. She is completely isolated, alone and abandoned. At points in the narrative it is clear she also abandons her self. And some of these traumas link directly to her feelings of hopelessness and shame. Yet there is something more, something unsaid, attached to shame here. Something unsourced in the text. Something feminine. Moran’s view is that ‘Rhys’s novels are not ‘about’ trauma; rather, they

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__________________________________________________________________ perform or stage trauma through the manipulation of narrative elements.’ 59 It would be dfficult to deny that Good Morning, Midnight is not also ‘about’ trauma. This chapter has been developed from a paper I delivered at the First Global Trauma, Theory and Practice Conference in Prague, March 2011. A question was asked of my work by a conference delegate: Does every traumatic event involve shame in Rhys’s work? And does every shaming scene involve trauma? It should be noted that every trauma does not include feelings of shame, and every shaming scene does not include a trauma. Yet trauma and shame are intimately linked on many levels and there is more than one type of trauma – physical, spiritual and emotional. I argue that Rhys is representing the trauma of femininine subjectivity which results in a multi-layered representation of shame. The shame of being Sasha. The shame of being female. The shame of being. 5. The Trauma of Shameful Experience However, exposure is heightened in the narrative with the utilisation of the performative. The novel opens as Rhys sets the ‘stage’ for us in what may become ‘positively the last performance’ for Sasha. 60 We watch Sasha in a bedroom, a most intimate place, which Rhys exposes. The very dynamics of shame include feelings of deep intimacy and the fear of others seeing us, seeing our private self in a degraded state. We witness Rhys perform this in her text by exposing Shasha’s thoughts, by exposing her in a most intimate and private place – her bedroom. Further, her bedroom is rented, it does not belong to her, it is a space open to investigation, negotiation. A transient place. We watch her in amongst the beds. The novel opens and closes with beds; beds wrap themselves around the narrative – sex on display, women’s sexuality and desire on display: ‘In that hotel there is a room with the biggest bed I have ever known – the biggest bed in the world, the bed of beds … Shall I go and lie on it again tonight, when everything is a caricature, a grimace?’ 61 It is interesting to note that Rhys uses the word ‘known’ and not ‘seen’ and the word ‘again’ – there is an inevitability about her place. It is known. It is familiar and repeatable. This is her narrative. Rhys further links women’s sexuality and desire to the ‘smell of cheap hotels:’ “Quite like old times,” the room says. “Yes? No?” There are two beds, a big one for madame and a smaller one on the opposite side for monsieur. The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is a large room, the smell of cheap hotels faint, almost imperceptible. The street outside is narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and ending in a flight of steps. What they call an impasse. 62 We know we have been here before, we have witnessed this on previous occassions: It is ‘[q]uite like old times.’ We also know that the ‘impasse’ is linked to sexuality, to gender politics. Rhys’s display of beds and how they link to the

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__________________________________________________________________ performance of shame are evocative of Tracey Emin’s work on shame: ‘My Bed’ and ‘Everyone I have ever slept with 1963-1995.’ 63 Emin’s work, like Rhys’s, opens a dialogue about trauma, shame, femaleness, bodies, women, sleeping, sex. Both artists offer a way to discuss openly how women’s sexuality is represented in the past and present. Shame knows no historicised time-boundary, although what we may feel ashamed of does, both culturally and historically shift. There is a difference between feeling ashamed and shame. By placing shame on display, by embracing it, re-experiencing it, sharing it, it affords women, and Sasha in the text, a dialogue with the transcending aspects of shame. This makes Rhy’s work so exciting. Joseph Adamson writes about how the dynamics of shame operate when there is a feeling of hopelessness and helplessness: [S]hame has traditionally shaped the experience of women under patriarchy. Women and others who suffer from inequality in power are particularly prone to the humiliated rage that stems from unacknowledged shame, a rage turned on the self and transformed to guilt because one does not feel entitled to it. Again, as the passive experience of being devalued and disempowered, shame is linked with low self-esteem and depression. 64 We see an attempt to fight against her feelings of powerlessness as Sasha tells us that: One day, quite suddenly, when you’re not expecting it, I’ll take a hammer from the folds of my dark cloak and crack your little skull like an egg-shell. Crack it will go, the egg-shell; out they will stream, the blood, the brains. One day, one day … One day the fierce wolf that walks by my side will spring on you and rip your abominable guts out. One day, one day … Now, now, gently, quietly, quietly. 65 The wolf represents the animal in Sasha, an emblem for her shadow side, crouched, waiting for her to take control of her feelings of shame, waiting for her to acknowledge her shame. At this point in the narrative it remains hidden, and unexplored. Until this time the rage is turned inwards as displayed in her failed attempt at suicide. Her failed attempt to escape the narrative is a poignant reminder of her feelings of despair and shame: Mind you, I’m not talking about the struggle when you are strong and a good swimmer and there are willing and eager

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__________________________________________________________________ friends on the bank willing to pull you out at the first sign of distress. I mean the real thing. You jump in with no willing and eager friends around, and when you sink you sink to the accompaniment of loud laughter. 66 This is the imagery of her very self drowning in shame. We are also reminded that Sasha tries to escape herself in other ways throughout the narrative. At the beginning of her relationship with Enno, Sasha was not happy. It was then that she decided to change her name from Sophia – with its origins linked to wisdom – to Sasha, because she thinks ‘it might change [her] luck’ – a failed attempt to escape herself, her true identity. 67 Feelings of shame are further linked to identity and the construction of self. Sasha tells us: ‘I have no pride – no pride, no name, no face, no country. I don’t belong anywhere.’ 68 To have no pride, is to be shameful and to have no face is to be obliterated – unnamable, unspeakable. She travels from hotel room to rented room, from London to Paris, and any fixed domestic space takes on the persona of sneering monsters. 69 She has become alienated from any form of stability, both internally and in a physical space too. Here she may represent feminine embodied, archaic shame. Sasha, in her waking moments, gets into the ‘habit of walking with [her] head down,’ 70 but she also walks ‘along with [her] head bent, very ashamed’ in her dream/nightmare moments too. 71 There really is no escape from her feelings of shame – there is a deep incompleteness in her at the bottom of all the other shames, which is never sourced. Even as a child Sasha’s feelings of innate shame are alluded to: ‘I’ve never been young. When I was young I was strained up, anxious.’ 72 So here an acknowledgement that she has never felt comfortable in her own skin, and attempts to externally fix herself with clothes, alcohol and men are therefore doomed to failure: ‘[i]t is a black dress with wide sleeves embroidered in vivid colours … if I had been wearing it I should never have stammered or been stupid.’ 73 Perhaps a hat, a new hair colour, ‘I had expected to think about this damned hair of mine without any let-up for days’ and immediately after it has been newly dyed, ‘I must go and buy a hat this afternoon … I must get on with the transformation act.’ 74 All are futile attempts to give her the concrete proof she needs in order to know that she exists, except she desperately tries to change, escape how she looks, because she has become ‘empty of everything.’ 75 Sasha acknowledges the futility of her position: Please, please, monsieur et madame, mister, missis and miss, I am trying so hard to be like you. I know I don't succeed, but look how hard I try … [e]very word I say has chains round its ankles. 76

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__________________________________________________________________ Her feelings of shame, her need to be kept hidden behind a succession of men, new clothes and alcohol have manifested in feelings of futility, despair and chronic shame. The use of the word ‘chains’ evokes imagery of slavery – to her femaleness, her words, her ‘no face[ness]’ her self, chained to a naming, an owning perhaps? This is Sasha speaking out and therefore an attempt to break free of the slavery of the shame-bind she is in. Sandra Lee Bartky calls shame: the distressed apprehension of the self as inadequate or diminished: it requires if not an actual audience before whom my deficiencies are paraded, then an internalized (sic) with the capacity to judge me … shame requires the recognition that I am, in some important sense, as I am seen to be. 77 Mary Ayers notes: In shame, we meet eyes and avoid eyes; the solitary, scrutinising eye of our inner selves or the collective eyes of the world that will bear witness to our state of self-worthlessness, impotence, undesirability, ugliness, incompetence, filth, or damage. 78 And no other affect is more central to identity formation than shame. Ayers expands on the dynamics of shame: Absolute shame, a term coined by Wurmser, requires no audience, but occurs through the observations made by a staring, critical internal eye that objectifies and poisons the other parts of self being scrutinised. The shaming other exists within, although it does get projected and populates the world with staring eyes that magnify and distort one’s self-image, and from which one frantically seeks escape. 79 We may be reminded of Rhys’s startling image here: All that is left in the world is an enormous machine made of white steel. It has innumerable, flexible arms, made of steel. Long, thin arms. At the end of each arm is an eye, the eyelashes stiff with mascara. 80 This macabre dance with the many-eyed – perhaps feminine as it wears mascara – and many-armed tentacle monster may be linked to the iron strength of

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__________________________________________________________________ Rhys’s writing, and the skeleton-white bones barely able to hold the veneer of identity for Sasha. 81 6. Female Desire as Transcendence of Shame The damaging effects of this searing, chronic shame can be further witnessed in the sabotaging of Sasha’s relationship with Rene the gigolo. Whilst in Paris Sasha meets Rene, a man who makes her ‘feel natural and happy, just as if [she] were young – but really young.’ 82 She has the chance to feel passion, to come alive again. When she thinks of him she is ‘prancing about and smirking.’ 83 She tells us, ‘I don’t know what it is about this man that seems to me so natural, so gay – that makes me also feel natural and happy, just as if I were young.’ 84 But she rejects him – ‘(But supposing you were disappointed in me.)’ 85 – and in so doing, ultimately rejects herself too, ‘[a] little pride, a little dignity at the end … I will not grimace and posture before these people any longer.’ 86 Pride, the other side of the shame/pride axis is challenged and what is crucial, pivotal to the dynamics of shame within the text, is this rejecting stance. Sasha tells us: I’m very much afraid of men. And I’m even more afraid of women. And I’m very much afraid of the whole bloody human race … who wouldn’t be afraid of a pack of damned hyenas? 87 Her interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships have broken down completely: What I really mean is that I hate them. I hate their voices. I hate their eyes. I hate the way they laugh … I hate the whole bloody business. It’s cruel, it’s idiotic, it’s unspeakably horrible. 88 Sasha highlights what has become for her the absurdity of human relationships. Her fear and horror reduces people to packs of animals, which is a distancing effect. Her fear is projected outwards and here Rhys represents the highly defended stance of shaming dynamics. Sasha plays out the attack-other script, where she feels alienated and a different species. You will abandon me, reject me, so I will push you away first. Yet Rene appears to have opened a dialogue within Sasha, a conflict. The souldestroying aspects of shame are witnessed when Sasha is in a distressed, fragmented state, when she is separate from self, from society: You trip. You fall into blackness. That’s the past – or perhaps the future. And you know there is no past no future, there is only this blackness, changing faintly, slowly, but always the same. 89

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__________________________________________________________________ Her shame is linked to Eve, to the past, to feminine archaic shame. She leaves Rene outside the hotel and does not invite him into her room, her self. She imagines Rene’s return to her room with the words: I have my arms around him … Now everything is in my arms on this dark landing – love, youth, spring, happiness, everything I thought I had lost … But a whisper … What do I expect to see? There is nobody on the landing – nothing. 90 There is nobody there, but Rene embodies every thing she has ever lost: ‘love, youth, spring, happiness.’ She dreams: about being young, about being made love to and making love, about pain and dancing and not being afraid of death, about all the music I’ve ever loved, and every time I’ve been happy. 91 In this moment, Rhys denies her this chance of happiness, of love: ‘Everything tender and melancholy – as life is sometimes, just for one moment.’ 92 We may feel as readers: ‘Like the incalculable raising its head, uselessly and wildly, for one moment before it sinks down, beaten, into darkness.’ 93 We as readers may have hoped for some love, for some tenderness at this point. We may ask ourselves, how much more can I /will I take. Another dynamic to the intersubjective relation to shame as readers. As Sasha has imagined his return, her alienation is complete – ‘But I know quite well that all this is hallucination, imagination.’ 94 The pain of ultimately rejecting the only source of human love open to her however fleetingly, because of her feelings of inadequacy and shame, become too much: ‘[t]his is the effort … under which the human brain cracks.’ 95 She brutalises his imagined lovemaking, in what is now her shamed, broken, corrupted mind: ‘I feel his hard knee between my knees. My mouth hurts, my breasts hurt, because it hurts, when you have been dead, to come alive.’ 96 Desire, life even, has become this painful – the key to transcending shame. Sasha returns to the foetal position for her birth out of a shaming death, into a transcendental space: I turn over on my side and huddle up, making myself as small as possible, my knees almost touching my chin. I cry in the way it hurts right down, that hurts your heart and your stomach. Who is this crying? The same one who laughed on the landing … this is me, this is myself who is crying. The other – how do I know who the other is. She is not me. 97

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__________________________________________________________________ Any traumatic psychological injury will result in a heightening of vulnerability and a highly sensitised state of being – it will directly challenge our sense of self and our core identity. This negative experience of the other as sitting in judgement, this painful double focus on the self as seen by the other, is, indeed, one of the central features of shame as an emotion. At the same time that this identity imagery is registering as one’s own experience, there is also vivid imagery of the self in the other’s eyes. This creates a doubleness of experience, which is characteristic of shame. Adamson describes shame as being central to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work where, ‘a depiction of obsessed protaganists … whose narcissistic defences against shame lead them to violate the private sanctity of other selves, the ultimate consequence of which is psychic destruction;’ 98 – ‘I am walking up and down the room. She has gone. I am alone.’ 99 The same may apply to Rhys’s representation of shame and trauma. Yet this crucial scene represents the core of Rhys’s representation of the trauma of femininity, of shame. In order to transcend, there is no escape, there is only an embrace, an acknowledgement of self as is, in order to transcend the shackles of shame and emerge into an enlightened way of being. This is a birth into liberation – she is all possibility in this moment: transcendental; herein lies shame’s power. She must reject everything to birth into selfhood. Shame is a vicarious experience of the other’s negative evaluation. In order for shame to occur, there must be a relationship between the self and the other in which the self cares about the other’s evaluation. Fascination with the other and sensitivity to the other’s treatment of the self render the self more vulnerable in shame. Adamson further notes that, ‘In traumatic … situations shame, combined with other negative affects, becomes magnified and turns into a chronic experience.’ 100 One experiences an ‘all-pervasive feeling of estrangement and meaninglessness, both of oneself and of one’s environment.’ 101 Sasha believes throughout the narrative that she is ‘[e]asy to fool, easy to torture, easy to laugh at.’ 102 Bouson notes that, ‘[e]xperiencing a heightened sense of self-consciousness, shame sufferers may feel inhibited, inferior, incompetent, dirty, defective, scorned, and ridiculed by others.’ 103 This desire to escape the unbearableness of being attached to shame, and the ugliness and degraded state of shame was something I witnessed when I worked as a therapist in a women’s trauma unit, and facilitated group therapy with young girls in crisis. I was constantly reminded of Rhys’s book, as I witnessed similar feelings being described to me, by observing the same sense of shame attached to women’s lives and sexuality, that Rhys had been writing about decades previously. When I facilitated a closed women’s trauma group, I used Rhys’s novel and prescribed it for the group to read and share their thoughts and experiences in relation to the text. Often times, when the raw material is painful, offering another way of exploring trauma via a creative medium is useful. There is a connection, yet it is once removed and therefore offers a buffer and is less threatening. It opens up

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__________________________________________________________________ a dialogue and offers a space for women to discuss another’s pain and shame, before considering how this may link to their own experiences. Many women found the novel difficult. It was a risky strategy, one that I considered carefully. At the same time as facilitating this group, I was also facilitating groups and one to one sessions in an attached day care unit. I would not have undertaken such depth work with day care clients, as the risk of the women feeling flooded with affect would be too high in an unsupported enviroment, and the risk of their feeling unsupported and abandoning therapy would be high. The women in the trauma unit had twenty-four hour residential support and had access to support staff outside of their group and sessional work. All of the women in the group had experienced alcohol or other drug dependency issues in their past and some were also sex workers. I was working with women who wished to flee their lives, much in the same way as Sasha attempts to escape her narrative. Like Sasha, in order to flee, the women and young girls were acting out the same, at times, destructive shaming behaviours, which led them to question their identity, their very selfhood. I recall one client who felt so ashamed, that her ritual every day was to use a scrubbing brush and bleach on her body to cleanse what she felt she had become. She no longer felt attached to her body. She told me she had become dirty, sullied, shamed. The imagery that Rhys uses at times throughout the narrative conjures this feeling of ingrained shame that women can feel linked to their bodies, their selves, where they embody shame. When Sasha borrows money from Mr Lawson, an old lover with ‘glassy eyes,’ 104 he steals a kiss from her and she thinks: ‘I am hating him more than I have ever hated anyone in my life.’ 105 However, this projected hate is soon acknowledged and turned back towards the self. She returns, thinking: ‘I feel so awful. I feel so dirty. I want to have a bath. I want another dress. I want clean underclothes. I feel so awful. I feel so dirty.’ 106 No one thing, however, will change how she feels; the repetition of the words ‘I feel,’ ‘dirty,’ and ‘awful’ evoke images of ingrained shame – shame that cannot be scrubbed away in a bath, or hidden underneath new dresses, or clean underclothes. At the very core of shame, at its heart, is the knowingness that one is essentially, defective, grubby, unlovable. Yet it is also important to understand shame’s transcending power. I witnessed women seeking an understanding, seeking some form of transcendence from their feelings of shame. Which is exactly what I believe Rhys does in her work. The women found identification in the text, the feelings of universality were therapeutic and in the reading, discussing, encountering of the text, they moved through a corrective emotional experience. Their identification with the protaganist opened up a dialogue about women’s lives, and they identified as a group that they were not the only women to feel this way, which they found quite liberating. We must re-experience to let go of shame’s power: ‘shame is a pungently intransigent affect, one that requires a re-experiencing in order to relinquish it.’ 107 This was the

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__________________________________________________________________ case for some of the women I worked with, and perhaps also for Rhys and her protaganist. Shame is a catalyst for transformation and is not solely a negative affect. The premise in this section of the book, My Voice: Personal narratives of trauma and truth, focuses around the idea that the acknowledging of trauma, and here I am talking about the double wound of trauma and shame, is a necessary precurser for personal healing to occur. 108 Herein lies the key, I believe, in Rhys’s representation of women’s lives and sexuality and the reason she affords shame the starring role in her work. In exposing the harsh reality of women’s lives and sexuality, by shining a shametinted lense on her protaganists, they resist their given roles and are afforded the potentiality to transcend shame. Shame, itself, is performative. Like Sally Munt, I am also: interested, not in wallowing in the shamed subject as victim, but in harnessing that space as an analytical framework for working through the experience of shame … as a mechanism for thinking about identity, desire, embodiment, relationships … 109 Interested in transcending shame, and moving beyond its power to shackle, Donald Nathanson notes that ‘[w]herever you see shame (no matter how vigorously defended against), someone is hoping for reconnection.’ 110 This has been my personal and professional experience of this affect. It is what I believe we witness at the end of Sasha’s narrative too. 7. Conclusion Throughout the narrative the figure of a man in a white dressing-gown appears; he occupies the room next door to Sasha in the Parisian hotel. It is through him that we may question our position as voyeurs to Sasha’s journey. When Sasha tells us that ‘[t]he truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it’s in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth,’ we see that by exposing Sasha’s corrupted, traumatised, chemically-induced truth, Rhys also implicitly exposes the truth of a judging, harsh and shallow society. 111 There is always a ‘they’ in Rhys’s fiction; a disembodied ‘they’ who are the judging ‘others,’ the producers of shame. If we are not vigilant as readers, we too may take on the persona/role of ‘white dressinggown man’ and perform as judging ‘others.’ His very function appears to be that disowned part in Sasha. Perhaps the disowned projections we may have? Therefore, he does not exist outside of Sasha’s/our mind. He is a fictional hovering projection. He is always ‘[h]anging around … like the ghost of the landing [and] is as thin as a skeleton … with a peculiar expression, cringing, ingratiating, knowing.’ 112 He even wears the expression of shame on his face – he is the devouring face of shame. Furthermore, as Sasha touches him, ‘[i]t’s like pushing a

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__________________________________________________________________ paper man, a ghost, something that doesn’t exist.’ 113 He is always encountered on the landing; a landing is a communal space, it belongs to everyone and no one. Furthermore, it is a transitional space, a space that takes you from one place to another. ‘White dressing-gown man’ gains access to Sasha’s embrace only after her rejection of Rene. Inner doors that have remained closed are now opened up to this judging other – ‘and the dreams that you have, alone in an empty room, waiting for the door that will open’ – Sasha lets him into her most private place, her bedroom, her self. 114 He is like a grotesque leering god-monster; ‘like a priest, the priest of some obscene, half-understood religion.’ 115 He is dressed in white – innocence, nothingness or judgement? – and finally envelops Sasha in a metaphorical death. This is a spiritual death of chronic, searing shame linked explicitly with sex. He is Sasha’s judging other, a once disowned projected part of self, which she finally embraces. Shame, which is a painful feeling of exposed vulnerability, has a particularly interesting relationship to writing. Rhys writes with shamelessness in a courageous way which allows us as readers to look at, gaze, expose the truths, to look at what internal and external sanctions conspire to keep us from seeing and exploring female desire: writing is potentially an act of the most dangerous exposure, and thus it often becomes an artful and ingenious playing with masks … writing because it allows one to hide and reveal oneself at the same time. 116 The novel itself becomes a good enough holding space, a container for shame, much in the same way that Lovey explores and considers creative expression ‘as a way to process and ultimately move on from the liminal experience/space.’ 117 Lovey further describes this liminal space where ‘the borders are open: there are no restrictions.’ 118 This is much like the place Rhys describes at the end of her narrative where Sasha is all possibility. Shame, unless realised, is corrosive and destroys, but once realised it forms a basis for rebirth. Ewan Fernie notes that, ‘[f]reedom from self is liberation into love … the idea of shame as transcendence’ also applies to Sasha’s journey, a release from the impasse at which her journey opened. 119 Shame is, however, a ‘spiritual fulcrum, poised between transcendence and oblivion, salvation and damnation.’ 120 Is Sasha’s acceptance her salvation, or her damnation? Is this final orgasmic ‘[y]es – yes – yes’ embrace of him/herself a healing death; a spiritual death of shame that will result in one of rebirth? 121 I believe it is. When ‘whitedressing-gown man’ hovers above Sasha, ‘looking down at’ her, ‘[n]ot sure of himself, his mean eyes flickering,’ 122 the flickering mean eyes are life itself. Here is precisely where we see Rhys’s rejection of the male world as being omnipotent.

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__________________________________________________________________ He is unsure now. As she challenges the maleness of the world, there is now space for her to embrace the female – to celebrate it even. This is something Rhys does throughout the novel. The Molly Bloom-esque orgasmic ‘yes yes yes’ at the end of the narrative is a nod towards not only James Joyce, but also towards a society which Rhys felt took male writers much more seriously than women writers. 123 Yet by exploring the life of Sasha, there can be found a yearning, a deep incompleteness underlying all her other shames. And this incompleteness – this search for a viable self – is not entirely socially determined, whereby her alienation is only partly the result of living in a patriarchal world. Sasha is transformed, momentarily, by a new frock, a new man, a couple of glasses of wine. Sasha cannot however escape herself completely. Rhys is writing about a lost truth, a lost innocence; Rhys is writing about the lost perfection Sasha’s life has always fallen away from, and the return she yearns for and dreams of: ‘Since I was born, hasn’t every word I’ve said, every thought I’ve thought, everything I’ve done, been tied up, weighted, chained?’ 124 Rhys is writing about existential shame. By exploring Rhys’s novel through this shame-tinted lense, it affords us a deeper psychological understanding of one aspect of her work – the dynamics of trauma and shame. And in examining the multi-layered narrative approaches to trauma and their significant relationship with affect, specifically shame, it opens up a different dialogue and another way to understand the intersubjective relationship of shame with the reader. I suggest that the novel actually plays out the dynamics of shame with the reader and ensures we are complicit in the shaming reification of Sasha. This is dramatically apparent with Rhys’s utilisation of visual dynamics and ocular imagery, creating a creepy voyeuristic tension within us and, at times, feelings of repulsion and a desire to flee. ‘He doesn’t answer or move. He stands in the door-way, smiling. (Now then, you and I understand each other, don’t we? Let’s stop pretending.).’ 125

Notes 1

Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (London: Penguin, 2000). Mary Ayers, Mother-Infant Attachment and Psychoanalysis: The Eyes of Shame (London: Routledge, 2008), 16. 3 Rhys, Good, 145. 4 Ibid., 28. 5 Ibid., 156. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 91. 8 Ibid., 19. 9 Ibid., 9. 2

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Both Sally Munt and Joseph Adamson write further about this, from an academic and psychoanalytical perspective. 11 Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark, eds., Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing (New York: SUNY Press, 1999), 2. 12 For a detailed exploration of affect and its transference qualities, its stickiness, see Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). 13 Shakespeare’s words from Julius Caeser, Act I. Scene II come to mind here: And since you know you cannot see yourself, / so well as by reflection, I, your glass, / will modestly discover to yourself, / that of yourself which you yet know not of. 14 ‘Oxford Dictionaries’, Viewed 24 October 2011, http://www.oxforddicionaries.com. The definition of bibliotherapy is, ‘the use of books as therapy in the treatment of mental or psychological disorders.’ Often times books or poems may be recommended, which may offer the person another way of entering their own experience. It can offer a way to help a person understand and work through their own process more clearly and in a less threatening way, because they are witnessing events, whilst being slightly removed from them. Bibliotherapy can at times also be utilised by health professionals. A Doctor may write a prescription for a book which a local library can then source. Many examples of books or poems on love, loss, anger, grief, alcoholism, shame can be drawn from. Jessica Kingsley Publishers is a good source of books on creative approaches to therapy, including creative writing therapy and bibliotherapy. Their website is http://www.jkp.com 15 Patricia Moran, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, And The Aesthetics Of Trauma (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 100. 16 Rhys, Good, 146. 17 ‘Oxford Dictionaries’, Viewed 6 October 2011, http://www.oxforddicionaries.com. 18 Rhys, Good, 50. 19 Deborah Martinsen, Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative Exposure (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003), 224. 20 Helen Block Lewis, Shame and Guilt in Neurosis (New York: International Universities Press, 1971), 15-16. 21 For more direction on further studies of shame see Patricia Moran, 77. ‘Interest in shame has gathered momentum in recent decades, fueled by the work of Helen Block Lewis, Leon Wurmser, and Andrew, P. Morrison, and by the revival and extension of the affect theorist Silvan Tomkins in the work of Donald L. Nathanson, Gershen Kaufman, and others, including Eve Sedgewick and Adam Frank, whose 1995 edition of Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader

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__________________________________________________________________ (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), notably brought shame into the mainstream of literary criticism.’ 22 Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), 85. 23 J. Brooks Bouson, Embodied Shame (New York: SUNY Press, 2010), 3. 24 Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, Vol. 2, The Negative Affects (New York, Springer, 1963), 133. 25 Ibid., 133. 26 Rhys, Good, 37. 27 Ibid., 68. 28 Ibid., 39. 29 Tomkins, Affect, 133. 30 Gershen Kaufman, Psychology of Shame: Theory and Treatment of ShameBased Syndromes (New York: Springer, 1989), viii. 31 Ayers, Mother-Infant, 9. 32 Rhys, Good, 89. 33 Ayers, Mother-Infant, 1. 34 Rhys, Good, 17. 35 Ibid., 13. 36 Ibid., 28. 37 Leon Wurmser, The Mask of Shame (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 67. 38 Rhys, Good, 24. 39 Wurmser, Mask, 49. 40 Benjamin Kilborne, ‘The Diappearing Who: Kierkegaard, Shame, and the Self’, in Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing, eds. Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark (New York: SUNY Press, 1999), 38. 41 Rhys, Good, 22. 42 Ibid., 17. 43 Ayers, Mother-Infant, 16. 44 Rhys, Good, 25. 45 Ibid., 50. 46 Ibid., 121. 47 Christina Lovey, in this volume. 48 Ibid., 49 Rhys, Good, 10. 50 Ibid., 141. 51 Ibid., 76. 52 Ibid., 37. 53 Ibid., 87.

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Ibid., 26. Ibid., 101. 56 Ibid., 119. 57 Ibid., 107. 58 Moran, Aesthetics, 7. 59 Ibid., 7. 60 Rhys, Good, 154. 61 Ibid., 67. 62 Ibid., 9. 63 There is a fabulous chapter on Emin’s work linked to shame in Sally Munt’s work on shame: Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008). The chapter is entitled, ‘A Queer Feeling When I look at You: Tracey Emin’s Aesthetics of the Self,’ 203-227. 64 Bouson in Scenes of Shame, 208. 65 Rhys, Good, 45. 66 Ibid., 10. 67 Ibid., 11. 68 Ibid., 38. 69 Ibid., 28. 70 Ibid., 72. 71 Ibid., 12. 72 Ibid., 130. 73 Ibid., 25. 74 Ibid., 53. 75 Ibid., 48. 76 Ibid., 88. 77 Bartky, Feminity and Domination, 86. 78 Ayers, Mother-Infant, 2. 79 Ibid., 11. 80 Rhys, Good, 156. 81 With thanks to Chris Lewis, Bath Spa University, for making this connection, private communication. 82 Rhys, Good, 130. 83 Ibid., 128. 84 Ibid., 130. 85 Ibid., 134. 86 Ibid., 128. 87 Ibid., 144. 88 Ibid., 144. 89 Ibid., 144. 55

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__________________________________________________________________ 90

Ibid., 148. Ibid., 155. 92 Ibid., 98. 93 Ibid., 109. 94 Ibid., 156. 95 Ibid., 157. 96 Ibid., 153. 97 Ibid., 154. 98 Adamson and Clark, Scenes of Shame, 27. 99 Rhys, Good, 157. 100 Adamson and Clark, Scenes of Shame, 18. 101 Ibid., 23. 102 Rhys, Good, 150. 103 Bouson, Embodied Shame, 6. 104 Rhys, Good, 99. 105 Ibid., 100. 106 Ibid., 101. 107 Munt, Queer Attachments, 87 108 I thank Sinead McDermott for drawing my attention to the words ‘double wound’ in her chapter on trauma and shame in, Sexed Sentiments: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Gender and Emotion, eds., Willemijn Ruberg and Kristine Steenbergh, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011). 109 Ibid., x. 110 Nathanson, D., Introduction to Queer Attachments, Munt, xv. 111 Rhys, Good, 63. 112 Ibid., 13. 113 Ibid., 31. 114 Ibid., 83. 115 Ibid., 30. 116 Adamson and Clark, Scenes of Shame, 28. 117 Lovey, in this volume. 118 Lovey, in this volume. 119 Ewan Fernie, Shame in Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2002), 245. 120 Ibid., 233. 121 Rhys, Good, 159. 122 Rhys, Good, 158. 123 The very last words of Ulysses echo that of the ending of Good Morning, Midnight: ‘and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his 91

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__________________________________________________________________ heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.’ James Joyce, Ulysses (London: The Bodley Head, 1960), 933. 124 Rhys, Good, 88. 125 Ibid., Good, 31.

Bibliography Adamson, Joseph, and Clark, Hilary, eds. Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing. New York: SUNY Press, 1999. Ahmed Sara, The Cultural Politics of Emotions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Ayers, Mary, Mother-Infant Attachment and Psychoanalysis: The Eyes of Shame. London: Routledge, 2008. Bartky, Sandra. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression New York: Routledge, 1990. Bouson, Brooks J. ‘Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame and Trauma in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye’. In Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing, edited by Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark, 207-236. Albany: State University of New York SUNY Press, 1999. Bouson, Brooks J. Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writing. New York: SUNY Press, 2010. Fernie, Ewan. Shame in Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 2002. Jacoby, Mario. ‘Shame: Its Archetypal Meaning and its Neurotic Distortions’. Paper presented at the C. G. Jung Center, New York, April 1990. Joyce, James. Ulysses. London: The Bodley Head, 1960. Kaufman, Gershen. The Psychology of Shame: Theory and Treatment of ShameBased Syndromes. New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2004. Lewis, Helen Block. ed., The Role of Shame in Symptom Formation. Hillsdale New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1987.

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__________________________________________________________________ Lewis, Michael. Shame: The Exposed Self. New York: Free Press – Simon and Schuster, 1995. McDermott, Sinead. ‘The Double Wound: Shame and Trauma in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan’. In Sexed Sentiments: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Gender and Emotion, edited by Willemijn Ruberg and Kristine Steenbergh, 140-163. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. Martinsen, Deborah. Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative Exposure. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003. Moran, Patricia. Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, And The Aesthetics Of Trauma. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Morrison, Andrew. The Culture of Shame. New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc, 1998. Nathanson, Donald., ed. The Many Faces of Shame. New York: Guildford Press, 1987. Rhys, Jean. Good Morning, Midnight. London: Penguin, 2000. Tomkins, Silvan. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness. Vol. 2, The Negative Affects. New York: Springer, 1963. Wurmser, Leon. The Mask of Shame. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997. Jack Dawson is a therapist, counsellor and lecturer. She specialises in working with adults, young people and children in crisis. Her current research interest lies in the representation of trauma and shame in the works of Jean Rhys.

A Pilgrimage Into the Liminal: The Work of Mourning Christina Lovey Abstract An enquiry that seeks to define and explore ways of managing and dealing with grief, by considering how rituals and processes can enable, and make possible the work of mourning. The work of mourning is a way for the self to recover from the trauma of loss. But how can the work of mourning be undertaken so that it enables a re-integration of the self? Writers, artist and film-makers have used making and the creative process as a way of enabling the work of mourning to take place. Creative expression is considered and undertaken as a way to process and ultimately move on from the liminal experience/space. Work undertaken in a hospice has provided insights into this process. The making of a film, that aims to function as a work of memorial, is made and described. Key Words: Liminal, pilgrimage, ritual, neophyte, hospice, grief, loss, mourning, art, allegory. ***** 1. Introduction This chapter is part of a wider research project that is concerned to define a process of working with those experiencing grief and loss, using imagetic representation. The project is experiential and led by practice: the production of images and the making of films allow for an in-depth exploration of the processes involved. This research is inevitably self-reflexive and on this occasion, begins from a personal position of grief and loss. By exploring my own responses and actions to the liminal experience of grief and loss, I can begin to define a process that, whilst not art therapy, or psychoanalysis, allows the subject to undertake the work of mourning, and ultimately to re-integrate and move on from their grief. As part of the self-reflexive, experiential methodology used, some of the research and thinking within this chapter is articulated through the use of a poetic, or parataxic writing style. This is used to place the reader in the present with the maker, and to convey lived-experience in a fluid and dynamic manner. This supports the making of films and describes responses to work undertaken, artworks, films and the making process. In this respect, my work has clear connections to the work of other contributors to this section. All of the contributors are reflecting on how cultural output can support those experiencing trauma, whether it be through the reading of literary works, or the production of artworks, or performing. In her chapter in this volume, on the representation of shame in the fiction of Jean Rhys, Jack Dawson describes the work she has undertaken with a group of women who had experienced trauma and how the use of the literary text enabled the women to see

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__________________________________________________________________ themselves and their own shame in a different way. This would suggest that literary, or art works can support the reader or viewer in undertaking their own work of mourning. In Peter Bray and Oliver Bray’s work, which takes a personal, autoethnographic look at bereavement, the play Hamlet, written in the 1600s by William Shakespeare, is discussed, as it relates in a very direct way to their own story, and that of all families, as it deals with the loss of a father in a family and the way in which this loss is dealt with. Catherine Barrette’s work on the recovery of the self through the making of art relates quite specifically to the proposition in my own paper, that by making work, a process of mourning, or healing can occur. A self-reflective position is taken up and utilised to enable the telling of the journey, from trauma and loss, to a place of recovery and healing: a re-integration of the fractured self. It is through the articulation of experience that trauma can be most effectively managed. 2. Pilgrimage Here – in this place, I want to begin – but what place is this? A place of inarticulation it seems – I have no voice. I am silent even as I attempt to speak – no sound is emitted – nothing is heard. I consider the implications of what I am about to do – to begin a journey with no map, and no logical conclusion: I am not travelling to a sacred location, as the definition of a pilgrimage implies. I am not undertaking a religious journey, metaphorically or literally: religion has been eliminated already from my enquiry – I am free from the burden of representing the god myths that have been created by man to explain that which appears inexplicable – yet in the freedom there is a fear, a falling away of axiomatic symbolic orders and their relational concepts, which leaves me beached and exhausted from my fight with the tide. Where have I been washed up? What place is this? 3. Pilgrim’s Progress: Bunyan and Allegory As a child, I found myself fascinated with the book Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan. 1 I have no clear memory of the story in the book, but I recall it vividly in my visual imagination. The images that I generated when reading this have stayed with me and rarely been exemplified in paintings or films – only Hieronymus Bosch, with his unreal hellish landscapes full of strange body forms and even stranger behaviours come anywhere close to the images that exist in my mind. 2 This is the place of visual imagination, a form of thinking visually that I had forgotten about – but it is the primary process of our brains is it not? Do we not see and process information visually before we are able to hear and understand language? In Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan uses allegory to articulate how a man comes to terms with the awareness of the soul and the individuals’ responsibility to their

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__________________________________________________________________ own soul, and ultimately, their own salvation. Moral philosopher Mary Midgeley describes this time: 3 When the sages of the Enlightenment deposed God and demystified Mother Nature, they did not leave us without an object of reverence. The human soul, renamed as the individual – free, autonomous and creative – succeeded to that post, and has been confirmed in it with increasing confidence ever since. 4 Bunyan describes a dream, which allows him to use allegory, character, and a narrative to frame the journey; but the journey leads from this world to the next and its end allows Pilgrim to reach salvation and eternal life. This is not my journey – not yet, although this desire to undertake a pilgrimage has been inspired by an awareness of death, of the end of life – by working with those who are dying and being myself bereaved: losing a loved one. I consider that the frame of the pilgrimage allows for a contemplative, imaginative, internal journey – a selfreflexive journey, with places and events illustrating and exemplifying the experience. I consider the pilgrimages undertaken to the site of the murder of Thomas Beckett in 1180, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, that seem to be seminal in the much recorded medieval urge to go through the process of a pilgrimage. I visit Canterbury Cathedral, and try to imagine what these literal journeys must have been like. As I contemplate I am aware that these journeys seem to have become mythical, being represented in literature and film, as well as living in our collective imaginations. I find Mary Midgeley writing about myths: Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories, they are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning. 5 So by undertaking a pilgrimage, I am attempting to interpret my world and therefore, my embodied, subjective experience of it: lived-experience. The pilgrimage is not literal, but mythical. I am attempting to make sense of my experience using myth. I am articulating my experience but without the use of narrative or language. I am relying on a visual language that resonates with our internal visual imagination. But is it possible to use a purely visual language to represent experience? In Pilgrim’s Progress, Pilgrim undertakes a series of quests or duties – reparations even. I like the idea of undertaking a series of duties; I can relate to this as hypothesis, action, process, and product. But I struggle with the concept of reparation: guilt echoes throughout my being as I try to suppress the well-worn

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__________________________________________________________________ neural patterns that remind me of the loss I experienced, and instantly take me back to the place of mourning and loss. Yet I desire to un-fold this place, to reveal its contents, to bring them out from the fold they have been placed in and show them to the world. I feel privileged to have witnessed and felt so much with regard to this forbidden subject, to have worked with neophytes to help them express their experience. 6 Yet I am anxious about re-entering the space of mourning and loss – a place I know I must enter in order to describe the process, to make work, to express lived-experience. I am inspired by Luce Irigaray to be brave, to take risks, to acknowledge the precariousness of my situation for as I attempt to articulate lived experience, I am entering unknown territory. 7 In this extract from Belief Itself, Irigaray explains what this means: Risks taken at each moment by the poet, that seek or alter the still sacred ether, which today is so covered over or buried, that he can trust no heaven or earth, learn his path from no mouth, find no sure direction. For him, no place is habitable, since his mission is to re-open a feral site. Thus he has to leave the world, while yet remaining mortal, go off to some shore that bears no signpost, to love a life assured by none. He must tear himself away from his native land to plunge his roots into a ground that is virgin, unknown, unpredictable. Free for risk. 8 I gather my tools around me – collected and found images, books, pens, paper, cameras, laptop, video playback machine, and I try to prepare myself for this journey into the unknown. I am curious, I want to find something but I am not sure what. Mary Midgeley writes: ‘Pure curiosity is a wish for understanding, not a wish for more information.’ 9 So this internal pilgrimage will take me nowhere literal, but may take me far – into myself and others’ experience and expression. It will take me into a place of understanding, of non-knowledge, a place of consciousness. I pause, I collect myself, I order myself so that I am ready to respond, to react, to interpret – for the journey ahead is unclear and many pitfalls and terrors await – or so I imagine. I begin. I enter the liminal. 4. The Liminal: The Psychological Space of Grief What is this place then? What am I doing here? I have been here before – I now seem to have been here for a long, long time – time has no beginning, middle or end here – in fact there is no time – it is time-less. I try to recall why I am here. I force myself to recall a previous time, when I did not know about the existence of such a place as this, but I keep drifting off into abstraction, losing myself. I am finding it almost impossible to maintain concentration on the present, to live in the

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__________________________________________________________________ present, to be able to observe myself in this place. How can I say it so that it is understood? Nothing is clear. I consider definitions and ways to describe the liminal experience. I search for others who have described this place – so that I can use their words – their articulation. I search for words I can use to build a vocabulary for this place – to express how it is to be here. ‘Limen’ is the Greek word for harbour and this helps as I think about how harbours contain those who enter; often they cannot leave without guidance from tugs and pilots; often they wait there indefinitely. I think of Dover harbour and the fascination that this imagery holds for me – I collect images of harbours, seawalls: frames for the daunting void of the seascape. The term liminal is used to describe transitional spaces and I consider how the space between life and death can be described as a liminal space, as it literally is a transitional space. The journey of Pilgrim in Pilgrim’s Progress is described by Bunyan as: ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress from this world, to that which is to come’. 10 It could be argued that our entire lives are in fact the stage between life and death, but for Pilgrim it is his awareness of the limitations of his earthly existence that makes him pause and take his journey into the unknown. On reflection, I realise that I too have had an awareness of the end of life forced upon me. By losing a loved one, I have found myself plunged into an experience I was unaware existed and it is this experience that constitutes the liminal. I am betwixt and between and in the margin phase. Anthropologist Victor Turner writes about this phase and attributes its definition to Arnold van Gennep, who describes the rites of transgression in three phases: separation, margin (or limen) and aggregation. Those in the margin, or liminal phase have: ‘...nothing...no status, property, insignia, secular clothing, rank, kinship position, nothing...’ 11 Turner was concerned with how tribal cultures made sense of their transitional stages: from boy to man, from life to after-life, and he studied the way in which these cultures coped with these transitions. He suggests that to go through a transitional phase is a natural and even expected event – but it seems often as if the end of life comes as a complete surprise to those of us living in the developed world. We seem to have forgotten how to use ritual as a way of placing ourselves in the symbolic order, the logos. Whereas, for those who have ritualistic processes embedded in their way of life, the transitional stages are expected, welcomed and even celebrated. But how can this knowledge help me to articulate and re-present the experience of existing in a margin? According to Turner, after the separation phase, the margin is indistinct – it has no time, no beginning, no middle, no end. I find Turner gives me some clues as to what I can do from this place in order to articulate my lived experience: During the liminal period, neophytes are alternately forced and encouraged to think about their society, their cosmos, and the powers that generate and sustain them. Liminality is the realm of

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__________________________________________________________________ primitive hypothesis, where there is a certain freedom to juggle with the factors of existence, a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise. 12 This means that the borders are open: there are no restrictions. Emboldened, I consider what I can do from here – but in order to ‘juggle with the factors of existence’, I need to more carefully define this place. It seems to me that if this phase is encountered within a symbolic order, such as in the transgressive rites of passage described by Turner, then there is a safety, a security, even in the ‘nothing’ experienced by neophytes. They know what ‘aggregation’ is for them; they know what to expect. But if this phase has been induced by separation caused by death, what are the symbolic orders that can be alluded to in order that I may be guided through this phase? What can I do to get out of this place when I have observed all of the rituals and practices associated with loss and am still no nearer the place of ‘aggregation’ – the re-integration into the land of the living, into life itself? I search for those who have been here before me that I may find illumination in their descriptions of their journeys through this place. I find that C.S. Lewis, the author of the Chronicles of Narnia series of books, wrote a book after the death of his wife: A Grief Observed. 13 It begins with the line: ‘No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.’ 14 I am shocked to see it written so clearly in black and white. I recognise this feeling – from this place everything is scary. C.S. Lewis continues: ‘At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me.’ 15 In this place, I am separated therefore, but not only from the loved one, also from the world itself. I recall reading a memoir written by Sally Freidman after the unexpected death of her young husband and I search inside it for clues and explanations. 16 I find her describe the time when she was told about her husband’s accident: The buzzer rang. I asked who it was into the intercom. ‘Police,’ they said. And in that instant, the Moment began, when time became unrecognizable to me, when I commenced the trouble to stop it from moving forward…The Moment, if time itself can have emotional components, took on an element of terror, and persisted in progressing. 17 I read The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, in which she describes the year directly after her husband’s sudden death when she did not accept his death and somehow, lived in a timeless place where he could at any moment return to her – his death undone. 18 Both of these books describe how the writers came to terms with their loss and were then able continue with their lives and their work: writing about their experience to help them move out of the liminal phase and become reintegrated into their own lives again. This means that the process of articulation

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__________________________________________________________________ can, in itself, enable a neophyte to re-integrate. But how and in what ways can I articulate my experience? In the recently published book: The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia, Darian Leader explores the psychoanalytical approach to dealing with death and loss, considering Freud’s work on this subject, as well as Karl Abraham’s and Melanie Klein’s development of Freud’s ideas. 19 Leader informs his reader that the emotional response to loss is related to both love and hate, that the loved one needs to be internalised somehow and that earlier losses return when encountering loss anew. He says that, ‘ones whole internal world has to be re-created.’ 20 Although rooted in Freudian psychoanalysis, this relates to the separation, margin and reintegration phases described by Turner. It could be argued that psychoanalysis developed in order to provide a way of dealing with the things in life that ritualistic processes had previously taken care of. This would mean therefore that in order to move on and out of the liminal phase, or margin, that something needs to happen – but whether this something needs to be psychoanalysis is debatable – is there another way to deal with the trauma of loss and re-integrate? Leader describes the way in which artists and writers have explored issues related to grief and how loss ‘is inscribed in a symbolic space’ 21 that only psychoanalysis can uncover and resolve. However, he describes works of art that come close to the process of psychoanalysis. But is it the process of making the artworks that enables the mourner to move on? Is it possible to argue for the making process, or the production of an artwork, as an alternative to the psychoanalytical process? Can I engage in this process and therefore move on – out of the liminal? But I find that even with all the tools I have surrounded myself with, and the all images that I have collected to represent my experience, I am floundering – where to begin? How to manage and sift through this, ‘exhaustion of representations’ 22 to find a way out of here? I look again to Luce Irigaray who tells me about the liminal space and the poet’s experience of this place: To advance into danger is to lay the self bare before any answering confidence has been granted. Here, there is no betrothal, no site. Terror becomes consent to everything, permission for everything that touches, without refusal or withdrawal. The way to this strange adventure is found in the renunciation of any path that has already been proposed. 23

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__________________________________________________________________ 5. The Work of Mourning Like all forms of work, the labour of mourning is tiring. 24 It seems as if one of the ways we understand death is through the representation of ghosts: the dead often penetrate our own world and attempt to communicate with us – but do they? Or is this our own projection? If the other world is a wonderful place, be it heaven or Xibalba, why would dead souls try to come back? 25 Popular narratives, that could have been influenced by myths and other beliefs, often have the dead unable to rest, if their death was sudden or unjust, and narratives are often about enabling the dead person to move on. Shakespeare uses a ghost as a plot device in his play Hamlet: the ghost forces the characters to face the facts about his murder and deal with his death. 26 Major catastrophic events in history carry with them their own death narratives, and attempts to deal with these events through cultural out-put have some success, but often these attempts are repetitious and far too generalised to actually undertake the work of mourning. Still, the Hollywood film engine churns out films about World War Two; still, the Holocaust is re-presented and re-represented, but is the work of mourning undertaken through these films? The continued production of films that deal with these issues suggest that this is unlikely. Darian Leader argues for ‘cubist’ or alternative perspectives, as: ‘On its own, the work of listing and reshuffling may indicate precisely a block to the mourning process.’ 27 Leader asks what this process can tell us about mourning: Freud’s account of the process of mourning involves … the idea of an exhaustion of representations. The representations of the lost object are brought again and again into painful focus and the memories and hopes linked to it met by the judgement that the object no longer exists. 28 I cut out an image of a painting by Edward Munch and fix it right in my line of vision. I am drawn to this image of this fragile young woman. 29 Grey and dull, her skin seems to be fading, cracking – or is that the paint? I research the making of this image and discover that this painting is of Munch’s younger sister, who died after a long illness. It seems that Munch painted this image, in varying forms, over and over again. That he continued to return to the making of this image – the rerepresentation of this time when death lingered over his sister – before finally claiming her as his own – seems to suggest that for Munch this process was not effective as mourning. Darian Leader presents a clear argument for the use of creative approaches to deal with mourning and I am conscious of the parallel here with the writings of Jacques Ranciere, arguing for the use of the aesthetic regime as a way of

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__________________________________________________________________ presenting the unrepresentable. This term has been used to describe death and trauma: for Ranciere: ‘The argument of the ‘unrepresentable’ does not fit the experience of artistic practice.’ 30 I consider the paintings of Francis Bacon, whose use of space within his work makes his paintings seem to inhabit real space. Through the use of alternative viewpoints and perspectives, Bacon can make the surface of his paintings seem deep and almost three-dimensional. Bacon painted a series of triptychs, several of which seem to record the death of his lover. These works allow for a consideration of the death experience, presenting it in what seems like real time. I stand before the painting. I am compelled to stand here. I cannot move away. I seem to see the soul of the dying man leave his body – but this is a still image – how can it seem to be moving? Fluid and flowing, moving from one canvas to the next, the three images are depicting different times, yet simultaneously I perceive them – I watch over and over again, as the troubled soul rises – is released. It is tragic, the circumstances of this death. The body slumps on a toilet, bottles are spilt, life is lost – yet this image manages to facilitate a release. Sad, but functional – Bacon cannot/could not stop this tragedy from happening – but how could he not be affected by this death? Does the painting of the image, the setting down, the fixing on canvas, do the work of mourning for Bacon? 31 Jacques Ranciere discusses the concept of unrepresentability and argues that there is a way to deal with this concept through the use of a specific aesthetic approach. In opposition to the representative regime, which relies on a system of recognition that privileges certain art forms and processes over others, the aesthetic regime allows for multiple forms and new meanings to be construed by the use of this new combination of forms, or modes of production. The aesthetic revolution establishes this identity of knowledge and ignorance, acting and suffering as the very definition of art. In it the artistic phenomenon is identified as the identity, in a physical form, of thought and non-thought, of the activity of a will that wishes to realize its idea of a non-intentionality, a radical passivity of material being there…….Everything is equal, equally representable. 32 Writing has also conveyed the mourning experience and the psychological space of grief. In the classic text about the death of his wife, C.S. Lewis manages to present the reader with an immediate response to loss and the ways in which it manifests itself in his lived-experience, in his book, A Grief Observed. Lewis presents us with both his impression of his bodily experience and reflection on the process he is going through and the place that he is inhabiting. It is an honest description of how the grieving person cannot find any energy or enthusiasm for life, even as it goes on around them: ‘What’s wrong with the world to make it so

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__________________________________________________________________ flat, shabby, worn-out looking?’ 33 His description of the liminal experience is clear and evocative: ‘…it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. 34 Lewis concludes the book with a description of the return of his loved one, his wife, who he encounters, on an intellectual level. Even a rationalist like Lewis becomes subject to the absurd consideration that the dead return to our world. It is not merely a filmic phenomenon that manifests itself in visual representation, but in fact the filmic representation that reflects our imaginations and the desires stored in our subconscious minds. Lewis describes how the process of mourning continues but with altering effects and perceptions: ‘Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape…you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench.’ 35 This idea of finding new things to be sorrowful about is part of the work of mourning and with each new thing a new sense of loss is experienced by the mourner – it is as if the work is never-ending. However, for Lewis, the process did change and he ultimately comes to some sort of peace with his memories and loss – but it is through the process of articulating his loss that this happens – it is by writing and reflecting on his notes that he is able to move on. Other writers have tried to articulate their experience of grief through the writing of a memorial that marks their actual loss and the attempts they make to deal with it. In particular, Sally Friedman’s work, Swimming the Channel: a Memoir of Love and Loss, describes her loss, the discovery of it and her way of making sense of it. 36 Ultimately, Friedman decides to undertake a quest to mark her re-integration into the land of the living by swimming the channel. Her ultimate victory over her body, which fights against the cold water she is swimming through, can be read as a triumph of the mind over the material reality of the bodies ultimate demise. The idea of a quest, or journey that allows the mourner to re-integrate finally into their own reality, is a familiar one and many mourners mark the loss of their loved ones in similar ways: undertaking journeys and re-visiting places previously inhabited by the lost loved-one. The acts of endurance that Friedman subsequently undertakes: swimming in ever colder water, enable her to reconfigure her reality and undertake the work of mourning: When the water drops below 65 degrees, I wear earplugs…helping me to lull into this energetic state of grace. And I am reminded of why I do the things I do: to feel alive in every molecule of my body, to stay awake, to shock myself into motion. It is a mystery to me, as I return to the dock, feeling undeniably wonderful, how I could have made it past the point where it hurt so cruelly, how I trusted I would benefit from the cold once past the initial pain. 37

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__________________________________________________________________ Sally Friedman is using her body to undertake the work of mourning and as the book continues to describe the ten-year period after the death of her young husband, we can see that the work of mourning can take a long, long time. I cannot stop myself from weeping. It is almost uncontrollable. How can I be a support and enable the expression of others when I am unable to manage my own grief? Yet it is because of my own experience of grief that I am here- that I have something to offer as artist in residence – that I understand something about the process and what it is like to be dragged through it. I have witnessed so much in such a short time – it seems that often the encounter with death is sudden – even as I know these neophytes are terminally ill and likely to die soon – it takes my breath away no matter how many times it happens. I miss S. already yet I hardly knew him at all. I look repeatedly at the images he created – pathways that lead around a corner – benches empty except for shadows that seem somehow to represent those that once sat there. I see him often – or think that I do – even as I know he has passed on. D. resolute and cheerful, passes on with grace and hope – she hopes to join her husband and is grateful for all the good things that she has experienced in her life. But A. cannot see anything except darkness ahead. We look at images she has collected on family holidays and combine them with video footage that she filmed one sunny day of her son and husband on Wittering Beach. The resulting video is beautiful, alternating as it does between still and moving images, which dissolve seductively into each other. But the ending is so sad. A. draws a line across her neck as her husband films her to indicate a ‘cut’ but bearing in mind her departure from her family, this cut seems acutely literal. The final image is a still image of her husband alone, walking away from the camera towards the sea. I cannot bear to think of him watching this with their son when A. has died. But I put it out of my mind as A. is so happy with the video we have made together. Working with P and his family is a different matter altogether however. I film P talking about his life as it is ending. He wants to leave a record of himself for his three young children but he is permanently on a respirator and can only move his fingers – which he moves deftly over the mouse in order to edit and construct this document of his life. He asks me to interview and film his wife for the documentary and now I struggle to be an objective maker – now I find I cannot control my weeping, my absolute despair – for in her anticipation of her loss I see my own loss reflected. In her struggle to tell the story of their love, I see how terrible the loss of a loved one is – I recall the darkness, the horror of it. And when the family ask me to film the funeral shortly after, when he has peacefully passed on, I reluctantly attend to bear witness to their grief. I am unable to bear it. I shiver uncontrollably. For in this place I recall my own experience of grief, sharply. The videos are screened – at an event to share the artwork made in the hospice. I sit with the family, silently watching, witnessing how the video seems to have a transformative effect on them. By making this work with P, the process of mourning has been partially undertaken before his actual death – as he was terminally ill – he was in

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__________________________________________________________________ a liminal space himself and therefore able to reflect on and respond to the circumstances of his own death – helping his family mourn him, before, during and after his death. It feels as if a place of safety has been reached. Yet I am still weeping. Am I still in mourning? Have I not done the work of mourning necessary? Am I unable to move on therefore? 38 A film made by Wim Wenders, that documents the last few days of film-noir director Nicholas Rays’ life, Lightning over Water, 39 strikes me as remarkable. In it, Wim Wenders shows the actual making of the film – as well as the filmic construct. He arrives at Ray’s New York loft apartment to begin the filming, but this is shown both literally – Wim Wenders arriving in actuality, cameras and lights evident in the frame – and as a filmic construct, with no filming apparatus evident. The film continues in this way and I feel as if I have some sort of privileged access to the making process, the actuality, the real circumstances surrounding this man’s death. I follow him as he receives medical treatment, visits old friends, gives a talk about his work and ultimately, lies almost lifeless in his bed. I then join the film crew in a trip on a boat as they celebrate Ray’s life and mark his death. I reflect that this was a truly generous thing for Nicholas Ray to do – to allow the showing of your own demise. I decide that this process of reflexivity is entirely necessary to the process of mourning – this raw reflection of actual lived-experience has the most power it seems – to be transformative and to allow for the necessary expression of the self. By revealing the self in the work – in the same way as hospice users almost always chose to do when making work – a reintegration of the self can occur. By seeing the self, rather than the lost loved one being the witness to existence and a sense of self, a return to life can occur. Instead of the repetitive return, it is possible to finally reach a destination. I consider how to make my own work of mourning in order to facilitate a reintegration – a return to life – a way to actually live. I recall places that were inhabited, are inhabited still in some way, by the lost loved one. I recall many journeys made, many processes undertaken and a plan to film/record a place that we both loved: Southend Pier. As a site of transition, it has much power and is a place where visitors depart and arrive. It has a train that runs along the length of it and a lifeboat station at the pier head. It is the longest pier in the world. I look at images of Southend I have collected over the years – images of my children, of the fair, the muddy beach and the grey water, the endless skies and of the lights that illuminate the pier as it starts to get dark. I revisit a story-board made some years ago for this film – for this work of memorial that I have felt the need to make for a long, long time – and I visit again and again to test shoot, to determine the actual nature of the work. I try different cameras, explore different production values, but none of the planning and filming is satisfying – I am not sure what to do now – how to proceed? Plans for clean shots of train tracks and horizons seem impossible to achieve and are dull and lifeless. I realise that I cannot convey my livedexperience in this way. I realize that I have to use my instinct, my ‘kino-eye’, and

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__________________________________________________________________ the embodied camera to truly re-represent my lived-experience – to satisfy and serve as witness I also need to see myself in the work somehow. 40 I decide to revisit on a specific day – regardless of weather, or mood, and to use a video camera with automatic focus and a low aesthetic, and to hand hold the camera at all times, using my own body movement and my gaze to convey my actual lived experience of being there – of making the work. The day is absolutely perfect – the sky is grey, the sea is grey – this is the Southend of my dreams – the route to other destinations, the way out. It won’t be long before darkness falls – I must get moving. The train is almost ready to leave. I remove the lens cap – ready. The train starts to pull away – the fair is visible from the window: the carriage I am in – at the back of the train – offers a 360 degree view and I press record, allowing my eye to be drawn to whatever attracts it. The journey is long – puzzling, confusing even as I know why I am here and where I am going. I am not sure what I will find – what I will do when I reach the pier head. I have to return, but when and how will I know when it is enough, when I have captured enough to work with, to convey my lived-experience? I am anxious. I am in a transitional phase – I have re-entered the liminal space. On arriving at the pier head, I wander aimlessly, avoiding the few other people who are wandering about, holding their coats tight against them as the wind blows ceaselessly and cruelly, invading even the most protected. I focus on the horizon – trying to fix my gaze, to find something to hold onto here, but nothing feels right, nothing seems to satisfy. I encounter my own reflection and this feels reassuring. I am reassured that I do exist, even here in this liminal place. I find sectioned off parts of the pier, dark places that my camera invades, looking for something but finding nothing at all. I look back at the shore as a train travels along the pier – this is also reassuring, there is a shore still, it has not gone away – I can return. Lights start to twinkle – bright coloured lights that move and vibrate – inviting and compelling me to return, for what is there out here, at the end of this long, long pier? I move to the very end of the pier but instead of a blank horizon, I see other places, places indistinguishable and vague. My eye is drawn to the sky, which is full of swirling colour – it is as if the sky is trying to reveal something, but beneath the clouds are more clouds: grey sky parts to reveal more grey sky – a never ending swirl. I circle beneath the swirling, accentuating the motion and raising the camera so that it records only sky. Release? Have I managed to find a release? Unsure, I return to the train and find I am the only passenger on the return journey. Fraught with anxiety, I find the camera wobbling with the train, I seem unable to hold it still now. The train unexpectedly stops and I sit in silence wondering what has happened? What has occurred here? Eventually, the train blows its whistle and continues on its journey. I breathe a sigh of relief and focus my gaze on the shore, only momentarily returning to the horizon before the train shudders into the station. The fair continues to compel me and demand my gaze – I film out of the windows as the train begins to halt and then from the shore. I pan

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__________________________________________________________________ the camera over the fairground, before finally resting on the train station. I want to recall the place, the journey, the site of transition. I want to reflect on this as transformation – have I managed to make a work of memorial? Have I done the work of mourning here finally? Has this collection of imagetic representations managed to demonstrate my lived-experience? I reflect on the footage, editing it so that it closely re-presents the journey, the experience. The train windows offered a 360 degree view of the horizon and on my journey I filmed from various viewpoints looking out and then back to the shore. I decide to alter the speed of the journey, finding that like the experience itself, the altering rhythms and temporality of the journey reflect the state of anxiety that is the liminal experience. Time is out of joint and I use post-production tricks and devices to convey this. It is satisfying to occasionally linger on the water or the horizon as the sky changes colour as dusk is falling. I find myself also lingering on reflections of the self, in windows and structures, and these are inserted in real time. I use the horizon with the footage slowed right down to invite stillness, to describe the void and I show the slow creeping shots in slow motion so they echo the predatory gaze of one who is searching. I add music to alter the dynamic, to reveal more about the subject, the lost loved one. I am struck by the use of this music, which I choose instinctively: Michael Jackson singing with his brothers when he was a child, his voice pure and beautiful. John Martyn singing of the pain of loss but without pronouncing the words properly, as if he cannot even articulate himself. Terry Callier, who wrote the lyrics to the theme from Spartacus to support the civil rights movement in the 70’s, and The Abyssinians singing about the return to Zion of the displaced Rastafarian community. All of these artists are now dead. All of these artists were revered by the lost loved one. All of these songs and their lyrics say so much about us and the time we spent together. I review this finally. The video makes me want to weep. I find myself sharing the anxiety of the camera as it tries to fix on something, to focus. I find myself feeling deep despair as the camera shows the slow constant movement of the sea and the sky and I feel relief as the music allows me to face this unbearable anxiety, this trauma of loss. I am lost in it as the footage slows at the pier head. I am totally reassured by the return to the shore. Have I managed to let go? Can I now return to the land of the living?

Notes 1

John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress was first published in 1678. Hieronymous Bosch was a Dutch painter, who was born circa 1450. His death is recorded as being in 1516. During his lifetime, he used his art to illustrate the current moral and religious concepts and narratives. His paintings consist of fantastic and imaginative imagery. 3 Mary Midgeley is a moral philosopher, whose interests include the way in which scientific thought and practice can be considered philosophically. 2

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Mary Midgeley, The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 2003), 95. Ibid., 1. 6 In 2006 I spent a year working as a digital artist in residence at St. Catherine’s Hospice, Crawley. This work was collaborative and I worked with hospice patients and their families to produce art works: photographs and videos. When working at the hospice, I was aware that when receiving a terminal diagnosis, people are plunged into a transitional space between life and death. For this reason, they can be called neophytes. However, within this chapter the neophyte is either someone facing their own death, or, a person who has lost a loved one and found themselves plunged into the liminal experience similarly. The same sense of anxiety is present in both – potentially, the same fear exists for those facing their own death or for those who have been forced to face death through the loss of a loved one. 7 Luce Irigaray, Belief Itself from The Religious in The Sublime, ed. Simon Morley, (London: Whitechapel, 2010). 8 Ibid., 80. 9 Mary Midgeley, The Myths We Live By, 15. 10 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (London: Penguin, 1986), 1. 11 Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (London: Cornell University Press, 1967), 94. 12 Ibid., 105. 13 C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961). 14 Ibid., 5. 15 Ibid. 16 Sally Freidman, Swimming the Channel: A Memoir of Love and Loss (London: Vintage, 1996). 17 Ibid., 98. 18 Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006). 19 Darian Leader, The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2008). 20 Ibid., 67. 21 Ibid., 105. 22 Ibid. 23 Irigaray, Belief Itself, 80-81. 24 Jacques Ranciere, The Future of the Image (London/New York: Verso, 2007) 21. 25 Xibalba is the Mayan underworld 26 William Shakespeare, Hamlet. First printed 1603. 27 Darian Leader, The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2008), 34. 28 Ibid., 101. 29 Parataxic response to the Sick Child, a painting by Edward Munch (1885). 5

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Jacques Ranciere, ‘The Aesthetic Regime and its Outcomes’, in The Sublime, ed. Gilda Williams (London: MIT Press, 2007) 69. 31 Parataxic response to Triptych, a painting by Francis Bacon (1973). 32 Jacques Ranciere, The Future of the Image (London/New York: Verso, 2007), 119-120. 33 C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 31. 34 Ibid., 5. 35 Ibid., 50. 36 Sally Freidman, Swimming the Channel. 37 Ibid., 246. 38 A parataxic response to working at St. Catherine’s Hospice as digital-artist-in residence. 39 Lightning Over Water, dir. Nicholas Ray, 1980. 40 Soviet film maker Dziga Vertov, (1896-1954) described his filming technique as being ‘kino-eye’. By this he meant that the camera moved with his eyes, rather than being stationary, which was the dominant mode of film making at the time.

Bibliography Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress. London: Penguin, 1986. Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006 Freidman, Sally. Swimming the Channel: A Memoir of Love and Loss. London: Vintage, 1996. Irigary, Luce. ‘Belief Itself from the Religious’. In The Sublime, edited by Simon Morley, 65-67’ London: Whitechapel, 2010. Leader, Darian. The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2008. Lewis, C. S. A Grief Observed. London: Faber & Faber, 1961. Midgeley, Mary. The Myths We Live By. London: Routledge, 2003. Ranciere, Jacques. The Future of the Image. London: Verso, 2007. Ranciere, Jacques. ‘The Aesthetic Regime and its Outcomes’. In The Sublime, edited by Gilda Williams, 65-67 London: Whitechapel Pub/MIT Press, 2007.

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__________________________________________________________________ Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. London: Cornell University Press, 1967. Christina Lovey is currently studying for a PhD in Fine Art at the University of the Creative Arts, England. The PhD is practice led and draws on Christina’s artistic practice, working within the community as a video and photographic artist.

Part II Their Voice

Enlisting Rage and Speaking Place: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) Bridget Haylock Abstract Alexis Wright’s parodic novel Carpentaria (2006), explores Australian society reeling from the genocidal trauma and subsequent rage at its foundation: consequences of colonialism. The novel exposes the progressive amplification of Indigenous traumatic experience from the personal to intra-familial to societal, and illustrates the many areas of the lives of Indigenous people that trauma affects: from modalities of the maternal, through gendered temporality to embodied subjectivity. In the narrative, Wright uses the encounter of the attempted genocide and ensuing on-going displacement of the peoples of her nation as a synecdoche for the experience of colonised people worldwide. She chronicles the fury stemming from the destructive intervention engendered into the symbiotic relationship between country and people by the occupation of Indigenous lands. The novel centres on the invaders’ development of land, the result of continued colonisation, and how rage can be a mobilising force for action. In this chapter I will explore how, through the implicit use of the Bakhtian carnivalesque, Wright subverts racist cultural assumptions. She projects and presents a world where the abject, traumatised, Indigenous subject parodies would-be oppressors; in mirroring white society, she echoes Mary Douglas’ thesis that absolute dirt exists in the eye of the beholder. I will examine in the consequent polyphony, what radical ideas she presents for cultural and political debate in the light of the trauma work of Judy Atkinson and the thesis for an ethics for decolonisation of Deborah Bird Rose. Through the deft use of Mudrooroo’s ‘maban reality,’ a genre of Indigenous Australian writing that privileges an oral storytelling position, Wright performs emergence from trauma for readers by finding the words, breaking the silence and speaking place. Her Indigenous subject enlists rage and enacts agency to regain country and dignity. Wright suggests that from furious, abjective experience, empowerment and transformation are not only possible, but also essential. Key Words: Alexis Wright, Carpentaria, trauma, rage, native title, carnivalesque, maban reality, hope. ***** 1. Introduction Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria explores Indigenous embodied subjectivity by presenting an Australian society reeling from genocidal trauma and foundational rage, consequences of the colonial project. In this chapter I interrogate the tactics of opposition used by Wright in her much lauded novel, which satirises and

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__________________________________________________________________ subverts the European invaders’ materialist and scientific worldview, and their presumption of territorial rights. A mark of the significance of the book is that it won five Australian literary awards in 2007, as well as nominations for prestigious international awards. Wright lampoons Australian settler society and chronicles and problematises consequent Indigenous subjectivity and dysfunctional interpersonal relationships. She interrogates themes universal to Australian Indigenous experience. There is evidence of profound and extensive inherited historic and cultural trauma and complex body politics, concepts which are all figured through a particular and fundamental relationship to country and reflected in its defilement. The novel centres on the controversial sequestration and development of land, and how fury can be a mobilising force for action. The singularity of her achievement can be thus accounted for by the success with which Wright chronicles the anger of the occupied and the exiled, emphasising the Indigenous view that the earth and people are one and that any separation is unconscionable. This desecration of country signifies and, considering complex Indigenous kin relationships, which include non-human lifeforms, is the grotesque traumatisation of the people. The wholesale ‘destruction of human populations and ecosystems,’ as anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose attests, has left many clans and their lands beyond revitalisation. 1 With this in mind, I examine in the multivalenced-polyphony enacted by her text how Wright presents these radical ideas for cultural and political debate, in the light of the contemporary trauma work of Judy Atkinson and Rose’s thesis of an ethics for decolonisation. 2 This analysis is going to show through a narratological reading the power of Carpentaria and how Wright effectively turns rage for the injustices suffered by Australian Indigenous peoples into robust parody. In this way I am going to complicate Frederic Jameson’s argument against the effectiveness of parody as a means of critical engagement with the past. 3 The authority of Wright’s work, which ridicules the socio-political state of affairs, might be accounted for by the fact that the novel is structured through the mobilisation of two different modes of textual production in conjunction. The first is the concept of ‘maban reality,’ the Indigenous genre of Australian writing that privileges an oral storytelling locus which was conceived by Mudrooroo. 4 The second mode is the ‘carnivalesque’ of Russian literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin. 5 Wright effectively employs the spiritual and magical-realist-like constituents of the former with the heteroglossic and abject-grotesque elements characteristic of the latter. Thus is the reader of this postmodern parodic novel privy to the legacy of trauma and the fire of resistance, as Wright writes back to power by reformulating and countering in the oppressors’ language, to assert belonging in a host(ile) culture. She projects and presents a world where the abject, traumatised, Indigenous subject satirises would-be oppressors. Although trauma-as-experience is a difficult process, which lacks any

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__________________________________________________________________ definitive emergent moment Wright performs this for readers by finding the words, breaking the silence and speaking place. From a marginalised voice one might expect writing that challenges conventions of mainstream narrative; by employing the heteroglossic Wright makes clear through using this performative mode that psychic rupture and fragmentation of identity can be the result of trauma and violence. For her the political and narrative emphasis is on the experience and perspective of the Indigenous Australian. Carpentaria champions the cause for native-title territorial rights. Wright uses the attempted genocide and ensuing ongoing displacement of the peoples of her Waanyi nation located in the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia as a synecdoche for the experience of colonised people worldwide, writing that she was ‘interested in how other people survived horror, who lived in horror and wrote about themselves.’ 6 This speaks to the theme of this section of the collection, Their Voice: Others’ Narratives of Trauma and Truth, wherein the question of the representation and demonstration of complex traumatic experience is interrogated on many levels. For example, Tamar Meskin and Tanya van der Walt interrogate the politics of depiction of post/colonial South African society within the theatrical practices of Jane Taylor and John Kani, who, like Wright, grapple with ‘the core question of speaking the past, in order to mediate the tension between the desire for retribution on the one hand and the need for reconciliation on the other.’ 7 Wright’s text offers cogent examples of history as the symptom of collective traumatic experience and the necessity for the expression of the trauma. Through learning about how colonised peoples elsewhere suffer and describe the agelessness of their cultures, Wright aims to understand her own experience and then to weave the emotional truths and awful facts into her fiction to communicate the reality of Australian Indigenous experience. She says ‘I want the truth to be told, our truths, so, first and foremost, I hold my pen for the suffering in our communities.’ 8 She is one of Marcia Langton’s ‘army of respectable, reliable, properly qualified wordsmiths who write about this corpse that is still lying in the middle of the room.’ 9 Wright joins Oodgeroo of the Tribe Noonuccal, Mudrooroo, Kim Scott and many others in the ‘long history of Indigenous Australian textual production.’ 10 Here the Indigenous subject writes themselves in and asserts their belonging to place, in what Barbara Harlow terms ‘resistance literature.’ 11 Suzette Henke argues that narratives from degraded subjects often challenge dominant points of view bell hooks agrees that writing from this cohort is never ‘solely an expression of creative power, it is an act of resistance, a political gesture that challenges the politics of domination that would render us nameless and voiceless.’ 12 As Wright expresses it in Carpentaria, ‘[t]hose of the Pricklebush mob who had taken up the offer to attend the meeting listened, were stunned again by how they had been rendered invisible.’ 13 Successive Australian governments

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__________________________________________________________________ continue to disregard the authority of Indigenous people and as Rose asserts, the fact of ongoing ancestral belonging and custodianship of land. While Germaine Greer contends that British colonialism was successful in destroying Indigenous culture, leaving a self-destructive rage in its wake, ‘the Aboriginal man has no option but to succumb,’ this is an invader’s perspective. 14 Wright’s Indigenous Australian, who faces overwhelming challenges, enacts agency and enlists rage to in an effort regain rightful stewardship of land, family and dignity. Wright suggests that from enraged, traumatised and abjective experience, empowerment and transformation is not only possible, but also essential for a subjectivity founded on unchanging and extant, Indigenous Law. 2. Place of Trauma Carpentaria shows a progression in amplification of Indigenous traumatic experience from the personal to the intra-familial and eventually to the societal and cultural. It illustrates that trauma affects every area of contemporary Indigenous people’s lives, from modalities of the maternal, through gendered temporality to embodied subjectivity, and the Indigenous relationship to country and culture. The idea figured in the Pricklebush mob’s description of the town of Desperance, ‘[y]ou is in hell,’ represents the traumatic repetition reinforced by the immense horror that for many Indigenous people, the entirety of their appropriated land is a vast traumascape. 15 For Maria Tumarkin a traumascape is a site where the remnants of violence and its consequences remain. 16 Atkinson concurs that [p]laces hold trauma just as people do. Aboriginal people talk about the energy and memory of traumatic events, such as a massacre, being retained in a place, a site or location until ceremonies of healing – a smoking or similar cleansing action – can occur. 17 Rose argues that country previously cared for in a traditional way but now overrun and destroyed by cattle and white man, is described as ‘wild country,’ this desecration of country made wild then functions as a constant trigger for recurring traumatic subjectivity and contributes to contemporary dysfunction. 18 As an example, Wright uses the fact that the grasslands of the Queensland Gulf country have been overrun by the introduced Pakistani Prickly Acacia. By locating her marginalised Indigenous population amongst its thorns, she extends her investigation into the damage wrought by colonialism, which hypocritically gave Christianity whilst it stole homelands from the unwillingly martyred ‘others.’ Wright ties this with the concept of trespass, a word bandied about in the Christian religion, Indigenous Law, and especially used against Indigenous Australians for protection of white men in relation to (white) property law. She writes that while the word itself ‘caused enough jealousies, fights, injuries, killing,

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__________________________________________________________________ the cost could never be weighed. It maintained untold wars over untold centuries – trespass.’ 19 Historically, indigenous nations were violently physically dispossessed and Carpentaria underscores one of the ways in which contemporary occupation of land is psychologically reinforced: through place naming. The Desperanians, anxious to gain the traditional owners’ approval for the mine, decide to rename the river, in honour of Norm Phantom. At a lavish name-changing ceremony and for the benefit of his countrymen, Norm gives an ‘acceptance speech’ in a local Indigenous language characterised not by appreciation, but abuse, because for them ‘the river only had one name from the beginning of time. It was called Wangala,’ which reveals the traditional owners’ resilience, courage and mockery of authority. 20 The settlers think they can manipulate the Indigenous people. However, they are blinded by racism and disrespect for what is/was already there and the traditional owners connection to, and responsibility for, their country. Wright parodies the settlers’ assumption that they can claim any place as their own in her description of Angel Day choosing ‘her spot’, if anyone could be so blatantly shameless to go around thinking they were so high and mighty, to just pluck out a spot for themselves in the bush and say, ‘This is mine.’ Well! 21 The Indigenous relationship to country is a complex myriad of associations that ensures the continuity of Indigenous society. Not only is the landscape gendered, but it is also the preserve of a certain moiety, for both of which there are differing rules of prohibition. Any place is already the preserve of someone who has a duty to uphold the Law for that place, which may include ritual observance. With country’s integral relationship within society, the devastation of land means that the colonisers smashed Indigenous social structures, and ushered in chaos. This abiding violent colonisation of Australia’s Indigenous people is the primary cause of traumatic experience for many, resulting in ongoing grief, anger and dysfunction. Three broad and interrelated descriptions of trauma are useful when analysing Indigenous experience as depicted in Carpentaria. To Atkinson, ‘trauma is an event or process that overwhelms the individual, family or community and their ability to cope in mind, body, soul, spirit,’ where feelings of grief resulting from familial and social disruption, can manifest as destructive behaviours, historical trauma becomes re-enacted in families and carries forward, passed down directly through the generations as intergenerational trauma. 22 Coralie Ober et al argue that colonialism in Australia caused universal traumatisation, the consequences of which are not specifically reductive. 23 Instead, the traumatic encounter is explained as the ‘layered, cumulative and collective traumatization (sic) of several generations,’ or transgenerational trauma. 24 A generational mapping can be done showing the impact of the initial traumatic

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__________________________________________________________________ experience, from first contact for example, as it moves through subsequent generations. This type of trauma is also called historical trauma, or postcolonial psychology, and, as defined by Eduardo and Bonnie Duran, takes account of colonisation; it offers a demonstrable definition of collective trauma. 25 Speaking of the systematic destruction of the subject’s life world during first contact, they write that, ‘the psychological trauma perpetrated by such an intrusion had collective impact at the beginning of what was to become a process of on-going loss and separation.’ 26 Whereas the first generation experiences the immediate traumatic loss of their world, their descendants’ lives are often characterised by the compounding consequences of that trauma. However, while intergenerational and historical trauma have been well theorised and are regrettably relevant when referring to Australian Indigenous populations, cultural trauma needs to also be considered in this discussion. There are disparities between cultures in how they construe and then respond to trauma and loss, and so definitions must be adapted within each particular cultural context. B. Hudnall Stamm et al suggest taking a broad cultural perspective requires viewing trauma and loss across time and place. 27 They theorise that cultural trauma adversely affects collective structure and that ‘[t]his phenomenon has a historical past, a geosociopolitical present, and an uncertain future.’ 28 Cultural trauma in Indigenous Australia can be understood as the culmination of the historical and intergenerational traumatic process. It explains the detrimental affect on the identity of Indigenous Australians through the cross-cultural exchange with the European colonisers: loss of homeland, community and cultural memory, deprivation of language, racism, discrimination, denunciation of spirituality and denial of civil rights. Contemporary fallout from cultural trauma continues as people deal with the reality of social destruction: poor physical and mental health outcomes, family break up, violent deaths in custody, and substance abuse. Traumatic loss engenders rage, which in turn is often violently expressed, and as Peter Read asserts ‘violence extinguishes memory;’ thus, like substance abuse, violence works in a twofold way: its manifestation simultaneously represses traumatic memory even as it expresses the often foreclosed traumatic experience. 29 Indigenous people, forbidden to go back ‘on traditional lands taken but never ceded,’ are estranged from themselves, they cannot honour their ancestors, cannot carry on as custodians of the Law and their obligations to the land, with families split up and languages suppressed, knowledge practices, essential for continuity of identity, are compromised. 30 While much wisdom has been wilfully destroyed by the ignorance of the invaders, remnants remain held in cultural stories. Wright expertly manipulates the colonisers’ language and means of production to testify to Indigenous experience; she enjoys ‘taking the words of the settlers and turning them back on themselves to make a political and moral point.’ 31 Dominick LaCapra argues that effective mourning must occur to enact healing which can be enabled through survivor testimony. He emphasises ‘the cultural expression of

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__________________________________________________________________ trauma as a means of understanding experience.’ 32 Wright says that traditional Indigenous literature is ‘embedded in our language code,’ and intimately connected to country. 33 She inserts the colonial nightmare into the parodic language play, ‘pardon for using white man diction,’ as she chronicles its effect on Indigenous culture. 34 Wright spells out the trauma that accompanies the Indigenous experience of displacement and attempted genocide by using variously abject and incongruous imagery, temporal discontinuity and non-linear narrative structures. Her Indigenous population live in an overcrowded ‘human dumping ground [in] trash humpies … amidst the muck of third-world poverty,’ on the edge of Desperance; poisoned by the white man’s grog. 35 Deep connection to country is fundamental to an Indigenous sense of wellbeing; it is a vital component of the physical and psychic body of the people and provides all their needs. Wright juxtaposes this by setting the camp next to the town’s rubbish tip, which is used as a resource to obtain the stuff of daily life from the discarded refuse of the conquerors’ world. Here, for example, Angel Day finds a religious icon, a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary, which she paints ‘in the colour of her own likeness.’ 36 Despite everchanging settler law being based on the Ten Commandments, many of the colonisers exhibit a blatant secular and hypocritical disregard for their own religion and morality. Having had her own spiritual world denigrated, Angel now believes that with Mary, she now owns white people’s luck. Wright shows how a profound spiritual Indigenous heritage has been exchanged for false idols, empty of signification. Angel is able to overlay her own self-image upon the icon’s likeness, which in any real reverential system would amount to heresy. In many places customary cultural lineages have been threatened, Wright demonstrates what happens when people forced from their homelands have to compete for resources, even from the town dump. Angel berates everyone: ‘Hey! What are you people doing here?’ She hollered. ‘What’s wrong with you people? You people don’t belong here. Who said you got any normal rights to be hanging around here? On other people’s land for? Just taking what you want, hey? What about the traditional owner then?’ 37 The response illuminates, ‘We can’t help that … who would want to belong there anyway?’ 38 The people explode violently, ‘Nobody listened to the other because everyone was either that mad in the head or did not care whether they were defending the peace or not.’ 39 Here, the energy from traumatic undercurrents bursts forth and threatens each subject’s identity, as being becomes inseparable from belonging, essential to robust Indigenous Australian identity and culture. Wright names one of her central characters Normal Phantom, and his kin, the Phantom family, which speaks both to traumatic inheritance, and the attempted

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__________________________________________________________________ erasure of First Australians by the colonisers. Trauma is hidden in silence, in what is not spoken; it is buried, repressed in what Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok describe as a ‘crypt’; supposedly forgotten, it signals its presence in silence. 40 In Wright’s family there is an often-employed saying ‘Don’t tell anybody,’ a phantom, passed down through generations. 41 The words giving sustenance to the phantom returned to haunt from the unconscious. These are often the very words that rule an entire family’s history and function as the tokens of its … articulations. 42 If, in the above sentences, the word/signifier ‘family’ is substituted by the word/signifier ‘culture,’ the haunting phantom concept can be broadened and applied to entire Australian Indigenous colonised cultures. As Wright says, ‘There are stories I know ... that cannot be spoken about outside of closed doors,’ because they carry a burdensome humiliation. 43 She says that in the context of her culture, she does not break taboos; it is however the transgressions of the colonists which cannot be spoken about. ‘If you listened hard enough you would have heard the silence screaming to be heard.’ 44 It is this silence that masks the fact of the ‘living hell,’ of the existences of many Indigenous people. 45 For Norm, ‘trouble’ smells like singed hair, as he recounts his father’s story of watching his parents run down and slaughtered, ‘and being lucky ... was when nobody else could smell your trouble.’ 46 As Norm tells this story he makes people wish they were alive ‘in the time of the real people, the ancestors,’ for what he does is distil stories and glues them to ‘surviving relics;’ the Pricklebush mob, so traumatised and removed from the old ways, cling to fragments of fractured identity. 47 In doing this he asserts his right to ‘pluck history at random from any era of the time immemorial of the black man’s existence on his own land’, but it also reveals a loss of cultural context for those stories. 48 Many towns across Australia cite their origins somewhere in the nineteenth century, their founders blind to the fact that the land was already storied. As Rose says: There is no place without a history; there is no place that has not been imaginatively grasped through song, dance and design, no place where traditional owners cannot see the imprint of sacred creation. 49 Wright’s Indigenous people listen to country, ‘it is a land of power where the country is continually listening and is continually speaking inside itself,’ for they are the land and the land is their story place. 50 In this context, the reader can apply the concept of dadirri, a component of which is deep listening, to the narrative of

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__________________________________________________________________ Carpentaria. 51 In its practise, dadirri transforms; the process values human stories as sacred. Wright offers the novel as a way into the painful and shameful conversation about the parlous situation of the lives of many Indigenous Australians. In the narrative she covers many of the themes concerning Indigenous daily life and shows the young people as bearing the brunt of the trauma of colonisation, their lives characterised by fractured relationships, substance abuse and death in custody. She poses the question: if traumatised youth are the elders of the future, what hope is there in the face of systemic abuse? Atkinson argues that collective trauma causes a ‘deep rage’ that is seemingly inexpressible, as the cultural means for its articulation may have been lost. 52 However, as the rage bleeds through, Wright’s men made powerless by the coloniser ‘go with culture … acting solely and simply on pure rage,’ they give it expression in violence. 53 Wright says ‘I do not like … the way our histories have been smudged, distorted and hidden, or written for us.’ 54 In Carpentaria she re-constructs the contemporary Indigenous world for readers. Her vivid description of Norm riding out a storm at sea, while illustrating a complex Indigenous worldview, also metaphorically brings to life the violent and traumatic experience of the incredulity and powerlessness experienced in the colonial environment, ‘[h]e thought perhaps he was already dead but through his spirit, in some bizarre twist of fate, was destined to remain conscious of everything that was happening to him.’ 55 This sentiment is foreshadowed at the beginning of the novel, ‘Armageddon begins here;’ the traditional Indigenous world has already survived apocalypse, a state that settler society can only fear as a possible future. 56 The difference with Indigenous Australians’ relationship to land compared to the materialist view of the invaders shows the source from where the overwhelming misunderstanding and inequality arises. For the settlers, land is merely a commodity of which to make use. In Carpentaria the local mine provides jobs for many people of the town as the miners plunder the underground wealth. Although the mining activity is marketed as providing glamorous affluence, the truth of its source and repercussions, is grim. In the Pricklebush, everyday the Indigenous people face the fact that the Gurfurritt mine has appropriated their land, the Uptown people, who Wright calls barbaric, reject the traditional owners, saying ‘The Aboriginal was really not part of the town at all.’ 57 They go so far as to neglect to mention Indigenous people past and present in ‘the official version of the region’s history. There was no tangible evidence of their existence.’ 58 However Wright’s fictional Uncle Micky has a collection of bullet cartridges, maps of massacre sites, names of witnesses, verbal statements on cassette and other evidence that he collects in preparation for the ‘war trials he predicted would happen one day.’ 59 This sentiment is tied to an idea that without a sovereign treaty with Indigenous peoples, invader culture is possibly vulnerable to significant litigation through challenges to property law. In a parodic wordplay, using Uncle Micky, Wright ‘takes the Mickey,’ and reveals a canny ‘waiting out’ which is also

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__________________________________________________________________ evident as a greater theme in Carpentaria: in time, the land will reclaim itself for its rightful custodians. 3. Enlisting Rage: The Violence of the Carnivalesque Wright shows settler and Indigenous societies as entangled, each element of the story nominally represented by a different narratological device: settler by the multifaceted heteroglossic, dialogistic and abject-grotesque realism of the carnivalesque – it is here that Wright parodies the worst excesses – and Indigenous society by maban reality, with the spiritual world vividly animate. These are not discrete elements, the two meet, merge, and clash; this narrative approach allows Wright to explore the cultural contact zone and the implications for each culture, and how they each respond to the ‘other.’ Often in scenes in the town or at the mine for example, grotesque realism appears to dominate, exemplifying the unequal power in the coloniser/colonised relationship. Wright’s fiction disguises a polemic indictment of the historical and current treatment of Indigenous people with its thematic concern of grotesquely realist details emphasised for the reader: [i]nvisible things in nature made no sense to Uptown because of their savoir faire in being Australians. Once, a long time ago when they first heard Pricklebush talk like this they kept them out of town for a long, long time. Can’t come in here if you want to talk mumbo jumbo like made people, Uptown said. 60 A carnivalesque analysis is most successfully applied to literatures ‘produced in a colonial or neo-colonial context where the political difference between the dominant and subordinate culture is particularly charged,’ for it can offer a persuasive argument that is able to diffuse some of the overt emotionality of the situation and instead use that energy to comically subvert dominant ideas and hierarchical structures. 61 In this context, the carnivalesque can be defined as a utopian position of gross impertinence and defiance in the face of power. Carpentaria creates a sardonic impression of the duplicity required to live under a brutalising regime hell-bent on enforcing its cultural worldview by threat of death. In a scene where the Westside and Eastside mobs enact a violent tribal battle reminiscent of an old feud, as soon as the policeman comes to investigate, they close ranks under a cloak of silence against him, claiming accidents or falls caused wounds. ‘It was a wasted trip at the taxpayer’s expense because nobody living around the swamp had seen a thing.’ 62 The colonised put aside their differences and align in the face of a greater mutual enemy, which they all seek to oppose. A dominant culture, in its attempts to eliminate ritual in the colonised, can inadvertently politicise those proceedings that it targets, further alienating and paradoxically empowering the maligned and subordinated culture. Wright illustrates this with Mozzie Fishman, the Indigenous leader who has designated

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__________________________________________________________________ himself in charge of teaching the younger men the Rainbow Serpent’s ancient Dreaming tracks across country. The convoy exists mainly on the road travelling for years at a time, performing important ceremony for country, upholding the Law. They need to keep their men’s business secret so avoid white people’s towns. Wright shows how the opposition of one person is made stronger by working with others for a collective goal: in a tightly rehearsed operation, the group uses its strong cohesion to overthrow the mine. Over the last few centuries in Europe, the more powerful classes have gradually suppressed carnival practices. The invaders of Australian Indigenous lands similarly repressed Indigenous ritual observance and inflicted their calendric religious festivals, which are reduced to no more than a few ‘limp and sorrylooking [decorations] … it looked as though the town had been dragged through a blizzard,’ by a cyclonic wind. 63 In a few words Wright lampoons the imposition of a materialistic religion, and decries the invasion and desecration of Indigenous sacred country, using the notion of a blizzard that is unprecedented in the tropical north of the continent. One of the foremost elements of the carnivalesque that Wright employs is parody, in order to ‘embody semiotically’ the denied suffering of Indigenous people. 64 By using anomalous depictions and semantic production, she mirrors white society, and echoes Mary Douglas’ thesis that ‘absolute dirt … exists in the eye of the beholder,’ as satire shows the conqueror his likeness in an uncanny suppressed image. 65 ‘Who knew what kind of lurgies lurked in white trash?’ 66 Here the inversion of hierarchy, which is a function of the carnivalesque, is evident as this phrase has very different meanings when voiced from an Indigenous perspective. Perhaps it means actually all white men are diseased, or, what does lurk in white man’s rubbish? Or from the settler viewpoint the phrase is expressed from a bourgeois position, and ‘white trash’ is taken to describe uneducated and poverty-stricken white people. Bakhtin’s analysis shows how the carnival challenges cultural assumptions and inverts the dichotomy between high and low. Wright employs the carnivalesque and embraces narrative multiplicity in an intricate weaving that initially appears as disparate strands; she uses this method to interrogate many issues, which coalesce in the final tapestry of the novel. The strength of the polyphonic novel derives from the relationship between diverse speech types in which both narratological and character voices articulate subversive viewpoints. Atkinson describes Indigenous society as ‘egalitarian hegemony,’ and Wright’s narrator relates the tale mostly focalised through a panoply of Indigenous characters, each inhabiting different aspects of and respond differently to their invaded world. 67 ‘They never frightened the judge or any of the Australian law because they spoke their English calmly, which they knew would not frighten white folk, who never liked black aggressors.’ 68 Wright’s Indigenous characters can be perceptive, considerate and erudite in their dealings; often multilingual, speaking multiple

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__________________________________________________________________ Indigenous languages as well as English; they challenge their invaders’ comparative barbarism. Her Indigenous men range in their engagement with the dominant culture, from traditional to ‘coconut.’ Norm is a more customary man, he lives on the sea or at home in the Pricklebush where he practises taxidermy on various aquatic species; his story is from the river people, his fathers’ fathers were there ‘from before time began,’ and he is still very connected to the watery world. 69 However, his seven children overtly exhibit symptoms of transgenerational trauma in varying degrees, through their failed relationships and violent behaviour, caused by cultural breakdown, and their higher level of engagement with invader culture. Norm’s activist son, Will, shows courage is needed to oppose the coloniser to guarantee an autonomous Indigenous future. He and Hope’s relationship, enacted off the page, offers a chance, with their son, Bala, and Norm as the elder, that the continuity of Indigenous culture is ensured, and that healthy, hopeful and creative relationships are possible. Wright’s Indigenous female characters also vary in their level of engagement with invader culture, although they are universally subject to rape and abuse from settler men. Atkinson argues that in traditional culture, Indigenous women hold ‘sovereignty and authority in the social, economic and spiritual domains.’ 70 As discussed previously, Wright juxtaposes Angel against the Queen of Heaven, the Virgin Mary. She uses this image to speak to a number of issues regarding female subjectivity and religious power in the context of contemporary intertwined Australian culture. Indigenous women have been doubly defined as ‘other’ from the Western male gaze. Wright provides an incongruous image of the statue splashed with blood, the price paid for the imposition of Christianity not just across Australia, but throughout the world where Indigenous beliefs have been disparaged and targeted, often devolving women’s creative power within the group with the use of violence. Wright contrasts this with a portrait of Indigenous female subjectivity as one of woman who is in command of her place. ‘Girlie could grab someone’s tongue and shake it around just by using her bare words.’ 71 In placing the discarded and bloodied statue of the Virgin Mary in the hands of Angel Day, Wright is according Indigenous woman with as much potential and pervasive agency as her settler sisters, yet also stressing the abject status of all women in Australia, and the binary virgin/whore impossibility of male settler ideals of female subjectivity. Carpentaria is a world ‘of heteroglot exuberance ... where all is mixed, hybrid, ritually degraded and defiled.’ 72 The carnivalesque perspective assumes that the ‘most powerful socio-economic groups existing at the centre of cultural power’ maintain hierarchy – usually a white androcentric viewpoint. 73 Thus Wright’s settler characters, the most economically powerful, are overtly grotesque, and bear parodic nomenclature that further caricatures. For example megalomaniac Mayor Bruiser exemplifies the invader culture in its murderous aspect and the ineffective and duplicitous policeman Truthful, its hypocrisy, and both are used as examples

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__________________________________________________________________ of the misuse and abuse of power. Wright stresses the absence of heritage of the invaders, a lack that they in turn project onto the colonised population in a futile effort to escape its affect while the chaos of the carnival tears apart society. Wright’s ironic mapping of place shows the settler as belonging no place, and by extension, as possessed of no identity. Norm stared at Truthful while the room bristled with long unresolved tension about dead bodies, finding someone to blame, how to classify the terms of victimisation, trashed homes and ramshackle bodies recovering from sexual abusers who wallowed with joy, like they were opening presents on Christmas day. 74 What Wright is able to achieve within this one sentence is the depth of horror and trauma that is the legacy of the colonial project, with its ‘long unresolved tension,’ once more signalling repressed trauma that must enact a return; the combination of ‘sexual abusers’ with ‘joy’ and ‘Christmas presents’ makes this grotesque image of abuse a scathing indictment. Again, in this conflation of religious reference with exploitation, Wright comments on the deceitful conquerors, who with the one hand gave God to the conquered whilst with the other stole their country. The novel contains long sentences that stem more from an oral tradition than literary, hiding deep horror within, such as: If you wait under the rivergum where those up-to-no-good Mission-bred kids accidentally hanged Cry-baby Sally, the tip of the dead branch points to where you will see how the serpent’s breath fights its way through in a tunnel of wind, creating ripples that shimmer silver, similar to the scales of a small, nocturnal serpent, thrashing in anger whenever the lights hits its slippery translucent body, making it writhe and wrench to escape back to its natural environment of darkness. 75 Here, waiting under the rivergum might conjure an image of a majestic tree growing by a peaceful river, somewhere out bush. But then Wright draws attention to the context: the kids are dispossessed, they grew up on the mission, they act out their traumatic inheritance, the tree is dead, the children have lost their connection to the land, and they cannot read the presence of the Rainbow Serpent. The grotesque as a mode of being also signifies Indigenous traumatic experience, where, as Atkinson sees, the violence perpetrated by the colonisers is denied and instead also ascribed to the colonised, who must wear the many sins of their oppressors so that they retain power.

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__________________________________________________________________ This oppositional text is rich with linguistic play. Wright avoids using too many Indigenous language words to create her argument and instead focuses on a literary protocol which is at once strangely familiar to a non-Indigenous reader. She employs unconventional grammar, such as ‘your boat’s catched on fire,’ and much repetition, to create a vibrant literary language. 76 Language is central to power, the invaders not only deem their language the lingua franca, they deny Indigenous languages, which is another futile attempt to censor Indigenous thought and resistance. Wright comments on the misuse of words which is part of indigenous experience of cultural clash: If only the town could see the power of words at work, if it could have, just for one instance, imagined what it was like to throw words around nilly-pilly, like string to create a confusion, a pile of twists and turns, all jumbled up in a bowl like spaghetti. 77 Here Wright signals the profound misunderstandings in dealings with the bureaucracy of the colonialists due to language and cultural differences. Unpredictable trauma affects could also be triggered as the power(less) are forced to communicate in the language of the invader. This is particularly relevant in situations of justice, where each culture has different ideas of what constitutes infringement, thus varying laws, punishments and restitutions. The carnival allows for many speech forms to coexist, all voices are heard, especially the improper. The words themselves are freed from prohibition, and in claiming and using invader argot in any way they choose, the colonised enact collective defiant agency. In the carnivalesque, the tangibility of food, excrement and the body is employed, where the body represents the people, ‘continually growing and renewed.’ 78 Wright presents the human body as virile, broken or phantasmagoric, dead, alive, golden-skinned, dark-skinned. Corporeality becomes a site of contestation from which to interrogate and reflect back to the invaders, for it is on the somatic differences that the political basis of colonialism is founded. The carnival allows for normalised roles to be reversed, for trauma to be expressed and the rage it empowers to be transmuted into bold action. Normal rules of engagement are relaxed, fools become kings, and kings derided as fools. Wright has Fishman show his credentials as a just leader: he arranges for Truthful’s body to be placed in Bruiser’s lounge chair, for it is the mayor who maintains power by means of a vicious regime, excising opposition. Bakhtin argues that the laughter of the carnivalesque is the continuing social consciousness of the people, which unveils the truth about the power and mystery of the world. Laughter transmutes the fear of a dominant and violent authority, it engenders victory over divine and human power, ‘hell and all that is more terrifying than the earth itself.’ 79 In the carnivalesque, the defeat of fear is

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__________________________________________________________________ presented in a wry and bizarre form, symbols of power are reversed, death is represented comically, and the terrifying becomes monstrous. However, in defeat there is rebirth, as, for Wright, renewal occurs through radical change: The finale was majestical. Dearo, dearie, the explosion was holy in its glory. All of it was gone. The whole mine, pride of the banana state, ended up looking like a big panorama of burnt chop suey. On a grand scale of course because our country is a very big story. Wonderment, was the ear on the ground listening to the great murmuring ancestor, and the earth shook the bodies of those ones lying flat on the ground in the hills. Then, it was dark with smoke and dust and everything turned silent for a long time. 80 This violent ending of the mine might read as transgressive, alternatively, as offering a view of the profound depth of Indigenous rage and resistance, ‘[b]ut this was not Vaudeville. Wars were fought here. If you had your patch destroyed you’d be screaming too.’ 81 The Fishman, the mastermind of the apocalypse, is mindful of killing. He will not willingly contravene this prohibition, so the carnivalesque only appears chaotic to those whose dubious position is challenged; underpinning each ‘subversive’ action in Wright’s novel is an oppositional voice. This explosion of the mine is yet another example of the return of the repressed, the inevitable and unpredictable violent eruption of traumatic undercurrents, ‘the truth will out.’ One of the reasons that Wright employs this technique is that for many Indigenous people, daily life is an awful experience of traumatic repetition. The carnivalesque aspect of the novel offers an alternative perspective, a release from the predominant reality of an imposed regime and posits a survival strategy that works as relief; it advances a position of defiance to power, which allows the possibility of cultural and political change to be considered. 4. Maban Time Contrasting with the grotesque representation of the invaders’ chaos, in both style and content Wright employs Mudrooroo’s maban reality, an oral storytelling and dramatic genre, tropes of which appear in the intricate construction of Indigenous traditional Law and also in some contemporary Indigenous narratives. Maban reality is not unlike magic realism, but it expresses Australian Indigenous worldviews, ‘the reality of the earth, or country, together with an acceptance of the supernatural as part of everyday reality.’ 82 A Maban is a Clever Man or Woman, a Shaman, holder of knowledge and culture, a person able to interact, have agency within, and know the world with a spiritual, even magical connectivity, which is very different from a rational understanding of subjectivity. The scientific ‘natural’ worldview rose to dominance in Australia with the invasion of Indigenous lands;

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__________________________________________________________________ the colonial project is not just the theft of property, but also ‘the imposition of a singular European Reality,’ usurping local maban realities, and which ‘displaces the maban or shaman from the world and the magic implicit in the world.’ 83 The enforced privileging of one worldview over others caused Australian Indigenous peoples to effectively have their voice silenced, reality denied and thought censored. Wright calls this ‘the massacre of voices;’ this is the murder of oral culture, which she resurrects using polyphony. 84 Thus, given Australian Indigenous history since invasion, maban reality as a genre is intrinsically oppositional, and many Indigenous writers consciously employ it politically to affirm agency and assert identity into the dominant cultural milieu. Although Mudrooroo sees much of his work and that of other Indigenous writers as ‘scarred by assimilation,’ where invader culture has inscribed itself across Indigenous texts, he maintains that these very texts need to challenge the establishment and create interventions into the orthodoxy, yet rather than via polemic means, use entertaining traditional cultural story elements. 85 The maban reality genre as applied in Carpentaria combines mystical, sublime beliefs and juxtaposes them against a gross materialist interpretation of the world. Wright shows something of the complex relationship that Indigenous people have to living two-way lives: their obligation to honour traditional culture and worldviews, while compelled to interact with the settler realm and contend with the horror of the cultural fallout. Focalised through the Indigenous perspective, Carpentaria allows the right to Indigenous truths to prevail; the spiritual, and super/natural forces, called upon in maban reality, overcome the grotesque expressionism of a purely scientific worldview, and Wright offers that this is a more permanent reality: ‘[e]ven the afternoon rainstorms could beat the monitors in New York.’ 86 Wright’s novel begins with a panoramic perspective of country in the process of creation. Jameson argues that the panorama is a South American magical realist ‘‘logo’ meant to signify the immensity of the continent itself.’ 87 Wright employs a similar device: Carpentaria opens ‘if you had been watching with the eyes of a bird hovering in the sky far above the ground … picture the creative serpent … the mighty bending rivers spread out across the vast plains of the Gulf country.’ 88 Magical realist writer Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits begins ‘Barrabás came to us by sea,’ which is analogous to Wright’s sea-born Elias. 89 Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude opens with the description of a village scene by a river newly created: ‘the world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.’ 90 Rational realist texts usually commence with a tangible description of a physical place at a specific time, but magical and maban realist narratives begin with a description of a place of mythic proportions in the process of creation, outside of measureable time. In Sam Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung, which also starts with a creation tableau, the reader, through the protagonist’s initiation, is asked to experience maban reality. 91 The openings of both of Kim Scott’s Miles Franklin Literary

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__________________________________________________________________ Award winning novels, Benang From The Heart and That Deadman Dance offer an alternative to a rational reality. 92 This is what Wright achieves and might account for the difficulty some readers have in accessing the written text, they resist allowing the uncanny familiarity of ‘a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived,’ to occur. 93 These readers project their own discomfort back onto the text, blaming it for their unconscious struggle to retain rational understanding, thus they themselves make the text impenetrable. Mudrooroo writes that the reader must consider themselves to be: [N]ot only in the realm of untranslatability, but also in the presence of another reality, a maban reality which must be entered if we are to arrive at a reading ... [n]atural scientific reality dissolves into a maban reality of signs and intertextualities. 94 To construct a text in this way offers the possibility of an ‘alternative to the narrative logic of contemporary postmodernism.’ 95 It presents diverse challenges, and asks the reader to entertain additional ways of being in the world, ways that connect the reader experientially to a profoundly constructed universe which has meaning. It does not resist interpretation; rather it asks that the reader interpret the text in an alternate way and also to read the political landscape in a distinctive way; for, implicit in magic and maban realism is social critique. The fact that traditional stories of the maban reality genre were transmitted orally might also explain the fact of Carpentaria’s availability as an aural text. In Wright’s words, ‘[i]f you ever want to find out anything in your vicinity, you have to talk to the mad people.’ 96 Here she reveals profound wisdom, and as Douglas attests, it is those who display a disordered mind, the Maban for example, who can then through dream or ritual, access extraordinary powers of divination or healing, or truths not accessible via rational thought. Maban reality is characterised by the expression of a liminality between this world and others. In this liminal space, the Maban understands a revelation of sacred knowledge and may shapeshift, as in the stories in Paddy Roe/Stephen Muecke’s Gularabulu: in Mirdinan, a maban man held prisoner for murdering his wife variously disappears, turns into a cat and then transforms at the gallows into an eaglehawk and flies away. 97 In maban reality, spirits are alive in everything, the initiated may communicate and call upon them for assistance. Time is thus meaningless in this transitional space; it is not linear, and various schemas may overlap in the perpetual now. As Wright describes, ‘The spirits would never let you forget the past.’ 98 Carpentaria opens with the first chapter called, ‘[f]rom time immemorial,’ describing monumental time, wherein the serpent came down, those ‘billions of years ago.’ 99 Wright then shifts into cyclical time, writing about ‘days doing nothing.’ 100 Then seasonal flows, and back to ‘down through the ages since time began.’ 101 And ‘[o]nce upon a time, not even so long ago,’ offers a beginning at once familiar to

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__________________________________________________________________ non-Indigenous readers, which also allows for the entrance of fantastical elements. 102 Rose argues that the Indigenous worldview is oriented towards the past, people are the ‘behind mob’ following behind the Dreamings, while the Western worldview is temporally oriented towards the future, the past is behind. 103 The using of temporal discontinuity and non-linear narrative structures in the novel similarly performs the traumatic repetition and experience of displacement and attempted genocide, and also signifies the postmodern predicament of contemporary Indigenous life: with the knowledge of a greater timeframe comes hope for a different future. Carpentaria is woven with maban imagery: devils and spirits are found in dreams, daylight and at night; Normal and Angel’s house is built on the nest of a snake spirit; the sea woman is a beautiful death angel who lures ‘heartbroken sailors and fishing men’ to their doom. 104 Lloydie, the barman, worships a mermaid locked in the wooden bar at the pub, a full-grown woman ‘moving like a trapped fish.’ 105 Norm is assisted by phantoms, and communes with his friends the giant gropers; the giant in the cloak or the giant sugarbag man of the skies brings the storms and hazes of madness that Uptown calls the silly season; ‘[Will] knew instantly the town was evacuating. The Bureau of Meteorology had called and translated the message from the ancestral spirits.’ 106 What Wright does is embed the complexity and wonder of the Indigenous worldview, where trees whisper and birds talk, into the narrative. She likens her writing to looking at the ancestral tracks of traditional country, where ‘all stories, all realities from the ancient to the new,’ combine into one. 107 ‘Our stories are like the music which feeds the soul and the heart, which sometimes flies above the bitterness of pure logic and rational thought and soars like an eagle.’ 108 Norm keeps ‘a library chock-a-block full of stories of the old country stored in his head’ which he trades with others. 109 Wright trades stories with her readers in return for understanding, which might generate constructive action. She says she wanted ‘somebody to speak to me because I could not find the words I was searching for in Australian literature.’ 110 She aims in the narration of the novel to weave ‘history and myth into the present situation.’ 111 What she has achieved is a poignant representation of the psychological landscape of Australia: a combination of the rationalist mindset of the invader and the more spiritual and connected-to-country kinship awareness in the maban reality of Indigenous experience. Wright is adept in both cultures: she gives honourable voice to a maban reality as she challenges the invaders’ alleged dominion by showing their sacrilegious attitude to country. She challenges that Indigenous Law is the inside knowledge about country, ‘handed down through the ages since time began.’ 112 5. Hope of Belonging Greer suggests that Indigenous society needs a political structure through which to focus rage and organise resistance. 113 It is Wright who actually shows

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__________________________________________________________________ Indigenous people from an apparently hopeless position taking action. Her Indigenous subjects enact agency and enlist rage in concert with nature to regain land and dignity, although they might have: that same old defeated look, two centuries full of it … they had a taste of winning so they projected their own sheer willpower … believing magic can happen even to poor buggers like themselves. 114 It is the colonisers who have no agency, who fall prey to their own misdirected deeds, casual atrocities, mismanagement and ignorance of the land. It is the Indigenous connection with the land that gives the people the strength to live their cultural Law, to follow the Rainbow Serpent dreaming tracks, to go to sea with the stars and wind as guiding forces, to welcome the cyclone to blow everything away and create afresh. Rose cites Dorota Glowacka in writing that ‘one must continue as if there were hope because to do so is still to refuse violence,’ thus allowing humanity a chance to honour those gone before. 115 As Stamm et al argue: It is through the preservation of a culture’s strengths and the flexibility and adaptability of its people that a new middle ground will emerge that incorporates the strengths of the past, the lessons of the struggle, and hope for the future. 116 It is in acknowledging the trauma that results from cultural devastation, that challenges can be recognised, offering potential paths to reorganisation revitalisation, and as Rose argues, for decolonisation. Wright’s polyphonic tactics in the text allow for many voices to be considered, those usually silenced by marginalisation are equally heard beside those who are more vociferous. Her discourse makes room for the defiantly oppositional and for the cooperative, leaving the space between not for compromise, but for indefatigable Indigenous hope: Luckily, the ghosts in the memories of the old folk were listening, and said anyone can find hope in the stories: the big stories and the little ones in between. 117 It is from the land that Wright draws strength, for it can also provide healing, depending on what human activity has occurred there to make the ‘place unique, sacred or profane:’ 118 The river was flowing with so much force I felt it would never stop, and it would keep on flowing, just as it had flowed by

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__________________________________________________________________ generations of my ancestors, just as its waters would slip by here forever. It was like an animal, very much alive, not destroyed, that was stronger than all of us. 119 Wright demonstrates with Carpentaria that traumatised people, suffering universal dissatisfaction from the systematic dispossession and destruction of traditional ways of living by individual and corporate colonisers, encouraged by hope, can accomplish revolution. It is this Indigenous woman who suggests that from enraged, abject experience, empowerment and transformation are possible, even essential. And then you can go home.

Notes 1

Deborah Bird Rose, Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004), 125. 2 Judy Atkinson, Trauma Trails Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia (North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2002) 3 Amy Tang, ‘Postmodern Repetitions: Parody, Trauma, and the Case of Kara Walker’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21.2 (2010): 142. 4 Mudrooroo, ‘Maban Reality and Shape-shifting: Strategies to Sing the Past Our Way’, Critical Arts: A South-North Journal of Cultural & Media Studies 10.2 (1996): 6. Mudrooroo, formerly known as Colin Johnson, is an Indigenous poet, novelist and playwright from Western Australia, whose perceived right to represent Indigenous Australians was contested in the 1990s. 5 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, and Voloshinov, ed. Pam Morris (London and New York: E. Arnold, 1994). 6 Alexis Wright, ‘Politics of Writing’, Southerly 62 (2002): 10. 7 Tamar Meskin and Tanya van der Walt, in this volume. 8 Alexis Wright, Breaking Taboos, Australian Humanities Review, September 1998. Viewed 28 February 2011, http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September1998/wright.html. 9 Marcia Langton, ‘Marcia Langton responds to Alexis Wright’s Breaking Taboos’, Australian Humanities Review, Viewed 28 February 2011, http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/emuse/taboos/langton2.html. 10 Michèle Grossman, ‘When They Write What We Read: Unsettling Indigenous Australian Life-Writing,’ Australian Humanities Review 39-40 (2006). 11 Michèle Grossman, ed., Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003), 2.

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Grossman, Blacklines, 2. Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (Artarmon: The Giramondo Publishing Company, 2006), 36. 14 Germaine Greer, On Rage (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 32. 15 Wright, Carpentaria, 60. 16 Maria Tumarkin, Traumascapes (Carlton: Melbourne University Publishing, 2005). 17 Atkinson, Trauma Trails, 184. 18 Rose, Reports, 4. 19 Wright, Carpentaria, 267. 20 Ibid., 6. 21 Ibid., 14. 22 Atkinson, Trauma Trails, xi. 23 Coralie Ober, Lorraine Peeters, Ron Archer and Kerrie Kelly, ‘Debriefing in different cultural frameworks: responding to acute trauma in Australian Aboriginal contexts’, Psychological Debriefing: Theory, Practice and Evidence, ed. Beverley Raphael and John Preston Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 243. 24 Ibid., 249. 25 Eduardo Duran and Bonnie Duran, Native American Postcolonial Psychology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). 26 Ibid., 32. 27 B. Hudnall Stamm, Henry E. Stamm IV, Amy C. Hudnall, Craig Higson-Smith, ‘Considering a Theory of Cultural Trauma and Loss’, Journal of Loss and Trauma 9 (2003): 89-111. 28 Ibid., 89. 29 Peter Read, ‘And The Dead Remain Behind’, Cultural Studies Review 11.1 (n.d.): 110-121 30 Wright, Carpentaria, 6. 31 Rose, Reports, 3. 32 Jill Bennett and Rosanne Kennedy, eds. World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 3. 33 Alexis Wright, Biodiversity and the Arts, 2010, Viewed 18 August 2011, http://www.sydneyconsortium.com/tv/biodiversity-and-the-arts-alexiswright.shtml. 34 Wright, Carpentaria, 155. 35 Ibid., 4. 36 Ibid., 38. 37 Ibid., 24. 38 Ibid., 25. 13

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Ibid., 25. (emphasis mine). Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok The Shell and The Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). 41 Wright, Politics, 10. 42 Abraham, The Shell and The Kernel, 176. 43 Wright, Breaking Taboos. 44 Wright, Carpentaria, 55. 45 Wright, Politics, 13. 46 Wright, Carpentaria, 102. 47 Ibid., 102. 48 Ibid., 103. 49 Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness (Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996), http://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/ahc/publications/commission/books/pubs/ nourishing-terrains.pdf, Viewed 3 October 2011. 50 Wright, Biodiversity and the Arts. 51 Atkinson, Trauma Trails, 19. Dadirri at its deepest level is the search for understanding and meaning. It is listening and learning at its most profound level—more than just listening by the ear, but listening from the heart. 52 Atkinson, Trauma Trails, 53. 53 Wright, Carpentaria, 409. 54 Wright, Breaking Taboos. 55 Wright, Carpentaria, 266. 56 Ibid., 1. 57 Ibid., 6. 58 Ibid., 10. 59 Ibid., 11. 60 Ibid., 77. 61 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 11. 62 Wright, Carpentaria, 29. 63 Ibid., 47. 64 Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 384. 65 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1996), 2. 66 Wright, Carpentaria, 16. 67 Atkinson, Trauma Trails, 36. 68 Wright, Carpentaria, 155. 69 Ibid., 6. 70 Atkinson, Trauma Trails, 36. 71 Wright, Carpentaria, 353. 40

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Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 8. Ibid., 4. 74 Wright, Carpentaria, 226. 75 Ibid., 2. 76 Ibid., 162. (Emphasis mine) 77 Ibid., 88. 78 Bakhtin, Reader, 205. 79 Ibid., 204. 80 Wright, Carpentaria, 411. 81 Ibid., 11. 82 Mudrooroo, ‘Maban Reality’, 5. 83 Ibid., 1. 84 Wright, ‘Politics’, 10. 85 Peter Monaghan, ‘Notes From Academe: Australia’, The Chronicle of Higher Education 43.17 (n.d.): B2. 86 Wright, Carpentaria, 445. 87 Frederic Jameson, ‘On Magic Realism in Film’, Critical Inquiry 12.2 (n.d.): 308 88 Wright, Carpentaria, 1. 89 Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits (London: Black Swan, 1985), 11. 90 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (London: Picador, 1978), 9. 91 Sam Watson, The Kadaitcha Sung (Ringwood: Penguin Books Australia, 1990). 92 Kim Scott, Benang From The Heart (North Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1999) and That Deadman Dance (Sydney: Picador, 2010). 93 Jameson, Magic Realism, 301. 94 Mudrooroo, Maban Reality, 5. 95 Jameson, Magic Realism, 302. 96 Wright, Carpentaria, 356. 97 Paddy Roe, Gularabulu, ed. Stephen Muecke (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1983). 98 Ibid., 26. 99 Ibid., 1. 100 Ibid., 2. 101 Ibid., 3. 102 Ibid., 43. 103 Rose, Reports, 152. 104 Wright, Carpentaria, 93. 105 Ibid., 472. 106 Ibid., 466. 107 Wright, Politics,10. 73

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Ibid., 10. Wright, Carpentaria, 246. 110 Wright, Politics,10. 111 Kerry O’Brien, A full transcript of the interview was published in Hecate 33.1 (2007): 215-219. 112 Wright, Carpentaria, 3. 113 ATSIC, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission existed from 1990-2005. At the time of writing there is no federal organisation dedicated to Indigenous political representation, although debate is ongoing. 114 Wright, Carpentaria, 411. 115 Rose, Reports, 32. 116 Stamm et al, Cultural Trauma, 107. 117 Wright, Carpentaria, 12. 118 Atkinson, Trauma Trails, 30. 119 A. Wright, ‘On Writing Carpentaria,’ HEAT 13, 79. 109

Bibliography Books Abraham, Nicholas, and Maria Torok. The Shell and The Kernel – Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Allende, Isabel. The House of the Spirits. London: Black Swan, 1985. Atkinson, Judy. Trauma Trails Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2002. Bakhtin, Mikhail. ‘The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, and Voloshinov’, edited by Pam Morris. London and New York: E. Arnold, 1994. Bennett, Jill and Rosanne Kennedy, eds. World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge, 1996. Duran, Eduardo, and Bonnie Duran, Native American Postcolonial Psychology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Greer, Germaine. On Rage. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2008.

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__________________________________________________________________ Grossman, Michèle, ed. Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2003. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude. London: Picador, 1978. Roe, Paddy. Gularabulu, edited by Stephen Muecke. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1983. Rose, Deborah Bird. Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004. Scott, Kim. Benang from the Heart. North Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1999. Scott, Kim. That Deadman Dance. Sydney: Picador, 2010. Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Tumarkin, Maria. Traumascapes. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2005. Watson, Sam. The Kadaitcha Sung. Ringwood: Penguin Books Australia, 1990. Wright, Alexis. Carpentaria. Artarmon: The Giramondo Publishing Company, 2006. Articles Frederic Jameson, ‘On Magic Realism in Film’, Critical Inquiry 12.2 (1986): 301325. Mudrooroo. ‘Maban Reality and Shape-Shifting: Strategies to Sing the Past our Way’. Critical Arts: A South-North Journal of Cultural & Media Studies 10.2 (1996): 1. Monaghan, Peter. ‘Notes From Academe: Australia’, The Chronicle of Higher Education 43.17 (1996): B2.

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__________________________________________________________________ Ober, Coralie, Lorraine Peeters, Ron Archer and Kerrie Kelly, ‘Debriefing in Different Cultural Frameworks: Responding to Acute Trauma in Australian Aboriginal Contexts’. Psychological Debriefing: Theory, Practice and Evidence, ed. Beverley Raphael and John Preston Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (2000), 243. O’Brien, Kerry. ‘Alexis Wright Interview’. Hecate 33.1 (2007): 215-219. Read, Peter. ‘And the Dead Remain Behind’, Cultural Studies Review 11.1 (2005): 110-121. Rose, Deborah Bird. ‘The Rain Keeps Falling’. Cultural Studies Review 11.1 (2005): 122-127. Stamm, B. Hudnall, Henry E. Stamm IV, Amy C. Hudnall, Craig Higson-Smith, ‘Considering a Theory of Cultural Trauma and Loss’. Journal of Loss and Trauma 9 (2003): 89-111. Tang, Amy. ‘Postmodern Repetitions: Parody, Trauma, and the Case of Kara Walker’. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21.2 (2010): 142. Wright, Alexis. ‘On Writing Carpentaria’. HEAT 13 (2007): 79-95. Wright, Alexis. ‘Politics of Writing’. Southerly 62 2 (2002): 10. Internet Grossman, Michèle. ‘When They Write What We Read: Unsettling Indigenous Australian Life-Writing.’ Australian Humanities Review 39-40 (2006), Accessed 10 December 2010. http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September2006/grossman.html. Langton, Marcia. ‘Marcia Langton Responds to Alexis Wright’s Breaking Taboos,’ Australian Humanities Review. Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL). Accessed 29 June 2010. http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/emuse/taboos/langton2.html.

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__________________________________________________________________ Rose, Deborah Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996. Accessed 3 October 2011. http://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/ahc/publications/commission/books/nouri shing-terrains.html. Wright, Alexis. Biodiversity and the Arts. 2010. Accessed 18 August 2011. http://www.sydneyconsortium.com/tv/biodiversity-and-the-arts-alexiswright.shtml. Wright, Alexis. ‘Breaking Taboos.’ Australian Humanities Review, Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL). Accessed 29 June 2010. http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September1998/wright.html. Bridget Haylock is a tutor and PhD of Creative Writing candidate at the University of Melbourne. Her current research and writing interests are focused on the expression of trauma and creative emergence in contemporary Australian female-authored texts.

‘Public Hearing of Private Griefs’: Investigating the Performance of History in Jane Taylor’s Ubu and the Truth Commission (1998) and John Kani’s Nothing but the Truth (2002) Tamar Meskin and Tanya van der Walt Abstract This chapter interrogates how Jane Taylor and John Kani use factual material generated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa in their plays Ubu and the Truth Commission, 1998, and Nothing but the Truth, 2002. Both locate their narratives against the backdrop of the TRC and use its testimonies to confront post-apartheid South African identity tropes. The TRC itself was a performative event – a performance of pain – that created a space for the performance of history and the negotiation of both individual and collective memory in the passage to reconciliation. Although structured differently, the telling of history and the exploration of memory are foregrounded in both plays. Kani adopts a realist form, where the national imperative is mediated through the personal history of the family unit. Ubu offers an expressionistic approach, mixing media and modes of representation, and drawing extensively on intertextual influences. Post-apartheid South African theatre practice is often concerned with how to represent the narratives of its apartheid past. The chapter explores how these plays address the core question of speaking the past, in order to mediate the tension between the desire for retribution on the one hand and the need for reconciliation on the other. Key Words: South African theatre, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Ubu and the Truth Commission, William Kentridge, Jane Taylor, Handspring Puppet Company, Nothing but the Truth, John Kani, testimony, history. ***** 1. Introduction One of the recurring ideas emerging in discussions at the 1st InterDisciplinary.Net Conference on Trauma, was the notion of the unrepresentability of trauma. Conversely however, trauma is also evidently at the centre of many contemporary and historical creative products, in the form of films, novels and performances. The human experience of trauma – be it natural or man-made – seems in some ways to evoke a need to find a way to process the experience; this is often made possible through creative means. The notion that trauma may be negotiated through representative aesthetic devices drives this paper’s thesis. Traumas are not homogenously experienced; each individual event has its own contextual elements. This very individuality and specificity makes any generic representation of trauma fundamentally flawed. Art, however, is by its nature

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__________________________________________________________________ individual and context-specific; it is the uniqueness of artistic invention that facilitates representability, through the telling of individual narratives, which can give voice to the underlying social and psychological imperatives. Artists explore their own trauma/s, or those of others, through a wide range of creative devices and methods, and the very broadness of these potential landscapes allows for multiplicity and heterogeneity of experience to emerge. The central premise in this section of the book refers to Their Voices: Others’ narratives of Trauma and Truth – in particular, the notion that the speaking of the trauma is the necessary prerequisite for any kind of psycho-social healing to occur. We are concerned here, to explore the voicing of trauma – the representing of the unrepresentable – through the specific medium of theatre. In this instance, the trauma being spoken of and to, emerges out of the very unique South African apartheid context and the socio-political devices constructed, both formally and informally, to process the consequences of that regime’s traumatic events. Individuals caught up in that trauma spanned many different spheres of experience; the very specificity of that experience delineates a rich vein of potential stories that together may come to reflect the larger tapestry of oppression in South Africa during apartheid, from multiple perspectives encompassing agents, victims and bystanders alike. 2. South Africa: Speaking Truth, Seeking Reconciliation In 1994, South Africa emerged out of the oppression of apartheid and began its new life as a multicultural, democratic, free and, in some ways, postcolonial society. Significantly, this profound paradigm shift was accomplished with relatively little violence – a peaceful revolution that offered hope for a new South Africa in which all would be equal. The apparent lack of violence, however, concealed deep-seated divisions that have continued to emerge and confound the development of South Africa’s democracy. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up in 1996 as part of a national imperative to address these divisions and the legacy of the past. 1 As Shane Graham notes: The TRC was designed to at least lay the groundwork for reconciliation between the agents and supporters of the former white minority regime and the opponents of apartheid. As the banner hanging at every hearing proclaimed, Truth is the ‘Road to Reconciliation’. 2 The remit of the TRC was actively to solicit testimony from victims and perpetrators of human rights violations that occurred within the apartheid regime’s power structures. The intention behind these testimonies was firstly, to chronicle the stark narrative of the apartheid apparatus openly; secondly, to elicit the unspoken histories of the period; and finally, to make decisions around what

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__________________________________________________________________ constituted political crimes and to whom amnesty should be granted. The prime directive was that only full disclosure – truth – would, or could, lead to amnesty. Thus, the road show that was the TRC was launched, moving from town to town, village to village, in a voyage of discovery, seeking the unspoken history of South Africa between 1948 and 1994, while ‘the nation witnessed the heightened atmosphere of telling in all forms of media coverage.’ 3 As with other Truth Commissions, in other post-war/oppressive societies, the political intention was clear: to facilitate a public cleansing to enable the construction of a new future. Significantly, however, the South African TRC was the first to have public hearings, making its proceedings very different from those of other Truth Commissions in other parts of the world. As Deborah Posel notes: The most familiar and prominent face of the TRC – nationally and internationally – was its public hearings, a feature unique thus far to this Truth Commission. These hearings provided a lived experience . . . , giving voice to those whose stories hadn’t been told, and unrelentingly lifting the veils over the past. 4 It is this notion of witnessing that is especially important for theatre, and the concept of speaking something publically that makes the South African TRC so unique. Despite the noble intentions behind its formation and its practices, the TRC contained within itself numerous contradictions, particularly around the question of amnesty. The TRC demanded full disclosure of the truth in return for amnesty, but the exposure through narrative of the true scope of the horrors and atrocities of apartheid seemed to mitigate against the very possibility of amnesty. The conflict between the desire for justice – or vengeance – and the need for reconciliation created an inherent tension to the proceedings. This element of tension also makes the TRC a rich source for theatrical invention and representation, given theatre’s obligation to engage conflict in the development of dramatic action. To quote Shane Graham, again: Few believe that the amnesty provisions of the TRC were perfect, and many in fact argue that it represents a fundamental denial of justice. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the granting of amnesty to individuals contingent upon them telling ‘the whole truth’ has unearthed literally warehouses full of information and testimony that might otherwise never have been revealed. 5

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__________________________________________________________________ Graham’s contention highlights an important aspect of the connection of the TRC to post-apartheid South African theatre: the recovering of history. The TRC report notes that By telling their stories, both victims and perpetrators gave meaning to the multi-layered experiences of the South African story. These personal truths were communicated to the broader public by the media. In the (South) African context, where value continues to be attached to oral tradition, the process of story telling was particularly important. Indeed, this aspect is a distinctive and unique feature of the legislation governing the Commission, setting it apart from the mandates of truth commissions elsewhere. The Act explicitly recognized the healing potential of telling stories. The stories told to the Commission were not presented as arguments or claims in a court of law. Rather, they provided unique insights into the pain of South Africa’s past, often touching the hearts of all that heard them. 6 Such recovered ‘history’ has become a rich source of material for new theatrical works that grapple with the shape and space of South African postapartheid identity. Njabulo Ndebele suggests that the TRC enabled, amongst other things, ‘the restoration of narrative. In few countries in the contemporary world do we have a living example of people reinventing themselves through narrative.’ 7 Since narrative is one of the fundamental aspects of drama, it is perhaps, unsurprising that such narratives would form the core of much new work that sought to engage the politics of South Africa’s past and the pathways for its future. Graham suggests that it is that imperative that underpins ‘the outpouring of postapartheid literature written to help South African society come to terms with a past that is plagued by paradoxes and whose horrors elude all attempts at representation.’ 8 Within the narratives of trauma, there is always scope for dramatic re-enactment(s) that can then serve as way stations on the path to healing, through the (re)processing of such narratives in structured forms. What we are specifically interested in here is the way in which the narratives of the TRC have formed the subject material for post-apartheid theatrical events that grapple with the shape and space of South African post-apartheid identity. Greg Homann suggests: The primary project of the TRC was to unshackle us from this past. In this time of redefining our hopes – no longer as an institutionally segregated and oppressed people but rather as an ambitious democratic nation – our emancipatory politics

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__________________________________________________________________ appeared to be leading us to the emergence of work concerned with truth and to an increasing fascination with addressing the nuances and complexities of representing truth. These works were a direct response to the discourse advanced by the TRC. 9 It is the notion of the complexity of the truth – and its relationship to history specifically – that interests us in terms of its reflection in the two plays discussed here. 3. History and Identity History is often viewed (if contentiously) as objective, but in some ways, history may be seen as simply the weaving together of multiple subjective voices into a metanarrative that is then ‘accepted’ as ‘truth’. In re-examining history, we are asked to re-examine notions of truth. Part of the problem of accepted ‘history’ is that individual narratives are often subsumed into the grand project. In the case of South Africa, this has created an aggressive insistence on nation building as the prime necessity. 10 We may then ask the question: why is history important in theatre? Simplistically put, it is because we speak the past to confront and process it. In her chapter about Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, Bridget Haylock quotes the author as saying: ‘I want the truth to be told, our truths, so, first and foremost, I hold my pen for the suffering in our communities.’ 11 This notion resonates with what is happening in the theatrical representations of TRC testimony and experience. The ‘truth’ must be spoken not just for the individual but for the community as well, thus we speak not my truth, but our truth in reconstructing a shared narrative of our collective history. The power of theatre to do this in a unique manner is that it operates through dramatic action where the narrative is played out in the present tense, in real time, with live actors, so that the overall experience becomes, as Peter Brook might say, ‘immediate’. 12 The process of dramatization inevitably requires personalization, because each play must operate through some kind of representation of agency, keying into constructions of identity and selfhood – a process intimately connected to the exploration of memory. Significantly, in the theatre, memory, which we may deem individualized history, and which is central to construction of identity both private and public, is made visible. Thus, the act of making theatre that confronts and processes history is connected to the establishment of new identity tropes. The evolution of a new national South African identity requires a re-examination and reconceptualisation of the past, especially in terms of dealing with apartheid and how it has shaped the present in both overt and subtle ways. The TRC was one aspect of this imperative; it was clear that the exposure of hitherto secret and unspoken histories made for mass interrogation of the nation’s sense of self. If the intention of the apartheid regime had been to breed separatism and concealment, then the TRC’s ambit was

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__________________________________________________________________ to reinvent the tropes of South African identity through the honest – and, at least in theory, completely open – examination of the events of the past. The intended result was, partly, a catharsis that would enable the past to be consigned to the past, thus facilitating an embarkation into a future, cleansed, purified and remade as a whole and undivided nation. That the realpolitik result was less exemplary than the somewhat utopian intentions does not detract from the core import of its central dogma: the understanding of history is essential in the project of constructing a future that is not trapped in, and constrained by, that history. As Antjie Krog, poet, journalist and observer of the TRC, points out in her seminal account Country of my Skull, ‘ … if you cut yourself off from the process [of the TRC], you will wake up in a foreign country – a country that you don’t know and that you will never understand.’ 13 In her essay entitled Truth? The view from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Deborah Posel delineates a tension between what she perceives to be the two roles of the TRC – the TRC as Science, and the TRC as Theatre. 14 She delineates the ‘science’ of the TRC as being its role as investigator and researcher of apartheid’s often hidden history. As she points out, ‘Its powers of subpoena, search and seizure were formidable, far more so than any other truth commission to date.’ 15 However, as she also points out, the narrow definitions set up by the TRC to guide their investigations left them ‘ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of the nation’s history.’ 16 In contrast, the TRC was also positioned as a performance of history, what Posel terms the TRC as ‘theatre’: The power of these hearings to proclaim truth lay in the ways in which they staged often gruelling and heart-wrenching stories of victimization, along with dramatic confessions and, at times, the spectacle of victim and perpetrator embracing each other in a gesture of reconciliation. The drama was scripted as an opportunity to construct collective memories of past oppression and struggle, and then to affirm the prospect of reconciliation for the future. . . . From a nation-building perspective, the factual details of thousands of individual narratives of violation were irrelevant. What mattered was the production of an account of the past sufficient to portray the moral fact of gross human rights violations. . . . Good theatre (sic), but bad history. 17 For us, what is of import here is the way in which theatre practitioners recognized the power of the history as narrative for the beginnings of a new South African theatre project, one that Zakes Mda calls the ‘theatre of reconciliation.’ 18 Certainly, it could be argued that the plays under discussion here are concerned with an interrogation of what it means to be alive and in South Africa at a point in time when the future is yet to be made.

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__________________________________________________________________ 4. The TRC and Theatre The project of this reconciliatory theatre was aided in no small part by the overtly theatrical and performative nature of the TRC itself. From its stage like setting, its ‘performers’, its national audience, and the way it was mediated through sound bites and televised testimony in the public sphere – all of these are part of what made its testimonies such attractive material for theatre makers. William Kentridge called the TRC an exemplary civic theatre, a public hearing of private griefs which are absorbed into the body politic as a part of a deeper understanding of how the society arrived at its present position. This theatre rekindles each day the questions of the moment. How to deal with a guilt for the past, a memory of it. It awakes every day the conflict between the desire for retribution and a need for some sort of social reconciliation. 19 It was not a big leap from the TRC hearings to the notion of using the real-life testimonies of the TRC as source material – locating the fictional narrative/s necessary for the event of theatre in the non-fiction histories emerging every day in church halls and schoolrooms all over the country in ever more graphic and agonizing detail. 20 As Jane Taylor comments, ‘the way in which individual narratives come to stand for the larger national narrative’ is what has interested her in the work of the commission. 21 She continues: The stories of personal grief, loss, triumph and violation now stand as an account of South Africa’s recent past. History and autobiography merge. This marks a significant shift because in the past decades of popular resistance, personal suffering was eclipsed – subordinated to the project of mass liberation. 22 Problematically for the project of nation-building, however, the public experience of the TRC was by no means unfiltered, given the imperative to create sound bites that would reach the broader public through the headline news. Indeed, the challenge of negotiating our understanding of this history was made more difficult by the fact that only the most dramatic of stories made their way into the public eye, in sound-bite-sized snatches, sandwiched between a sitcom and a soap opera. The cynical among us may even have opined that the brief reports on the television nightly news of the TRC events of the day provided the perfect opportunity for boiling the kettle for tea or taking the necessary bathroom break before the next offering of entertainment. And the hearings themselves, while no doubt dramatic at times, also could become tedious – long unbroken narratives, often told by inarticulate people, translated word for word, and, it seemed,

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__________________________________________________________________ endlessly repetitive; how many times can a version of the same basic narrative of horror be told before one becomes inured to its hearing? 23 Certainly these are some of the questions generated in any public recounting or exposure of trauma, be it personal or political, and the addressing of these debates is at the crux of negotiating such events theatrically. Central to the debate around, and problematisation of, the TRC is the question of the inherent contradictory pull between what Kentridge and Taylor call the desire for retribution and the need for reconciliation. 24 This question is rendered in both the plays: largely metaphorically and ironically in Ubu and the Truth Commission (where we are forced to question the machinations of Ubu as he seeks amnesty for crimes for which we know he should not be forgiven) and more literally in Nothing But The Truth in the debates between Thando and Mandisa as to the rightness of the granting of amnesty at all. What makes drama such an apt vehicle for negotiating the meaning of the history emerging from the TRC is the fact that drama as a medium is premised on conflict; theatre-makers know that without conflict there can be no drama at all, and that the more intense the conflict, the more engaged and intrigued the audience becomes. While the political experience of the TRC sought to reduce conflict and preach submission to the greater good of reconciliation, the theatrical renditions of the TRC could embrace ambiguity and conflict, could operate through tension, and could represent, in all its stark detail, all of the turmoil and questioning that arose out of this singular event. Catherine Cole asks: Does it trivialize the TRC to call it theatre? Does it violate the TRC material to use it in a theatrical production? Or is theatre, in fact, the very best forum to represent and preserve in public memory the evidence these hearings brought to light? . . . At the center of the Commission’s endeavour are very real experiences of profound human suffering. What forum can do these experiences justice? Both the hearings themselves and plays about them are contrivances. Yet just because they are contrivances does not make them invalid. Telling stories of apartheid’s brutality live in front of an audience holds a unique power, one that books, Web sites, videos, and photo essays on the TRC cannot match. 25 It is theatre’s ability to encompass conflict and allow us to process our responses to that conflict that is its unique power. Seminal theatre theorist Bertolt Brecht, in constructing his theory of Epic Theatre, recognised this: in articulating his position he insisted that the audience be activated in order to enable them critically to engage with the stories they were told so that they could make their own decisions about what they saw. 26 Thus, instead of promoting hegemonic

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__________________________________________________________________ ideologies that supported a particular status quo, such an exemplary theatre could offer audiences the potential to think for themselves and make their own sense of what they were learning. Brecht insisted that theatre be based on argument and the presentation of contradiction, and that the audience is not offered easy answers. In the case of theatre made about the TRC, the intention is often to allow the audience the space to respond critically to the material they are hearing, rather than being told that the only righteous choice is forgiveness and acceptance if one is to be a member of the new South Africa. That the intention is still reconciliatory is not in question; it is rather the process by which the history is being articulated and engendered that is changed – one is forced into a recognition of complicity and an acceptance of the sacrifices that were, and still need to be made, without illusions. This perhaps makes it all the more powerful. The large body of literature emerging out of, and in the wake of, the TRC is testament to the power of its narratives to make meaning. Theatrically, many artists have used the material to make a theatre that speaks to the present South African moment. The works have ranged from verbatim pieces based directly on witness testimonies re-enacted on stage, to more abstract works where the narratives have been used more as stimulus for creativity rather than as ends in themselves. What unites the works is their focus on the significance of what William Kentridge would call the ‘found texts’, drawn from perceived ‘truth’, which give the works a weight and significance they might not have had as pure examples of fiction. 27 The two texts we are examining here fall into this body of literature, but offer very different engagements with the TRC’s ethos. 5. Ubu and the Truth Commission The Ubu project was the result of a collaboration between Jane Taylor (the author), William Kentridge (the director) and the Handspring Puppet Company. 28 It is an expressionistic and surrealistic exploration of the world of South Africa in the immediate aftermath of the end of apartheid. Significant about the production is firstly, the focus on the perpetrator narrative – as Taylor points out, the perpetrator is the agent, not the victim, and the stories of agents always provide more dramatic material than those of the victims alone – and secondly, the use of puppets, especially those that perform the testimonies. 29 Kentridge describes the tension in South Africa as being between ‘the paper shredders and the photostat machines’ – a fascinating image that articulates the tension between history and memory and the creation of a new, and blank, future. 30 To remember is part of the purpose of history; but the removal of the history of apartheid and its architects was certainly – if cynically – the purpose of some of the amnesty hearings. Kentridge asks the question: ‘what has a wide enough mouth to swallow whatever we want to hide?’ 31 Answer: a crocodile (a nod to the Groot Krokodil, the satirical nickname given to PW Botha, former finger-waving and much-vilified president of South Africa). 32 Thus is born the central image of the

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__________________________________________________________________ crocodile handbag puppet who consumes Ubu’s history but retains it in its secret belly so that it can emerge to damn him when necessary. Allied to this core image is, of course, the intertextual connection with Alfred Jarry’s revolutionary 19th century text. In its original production, Ubu Roi famously created a huge and public furore with its scatological language, its irreverence, and its overt and satirical critique of bourgeois society and its behaviours. 33 Ubu, the icon, is inscribed with resonances of socio-political critique and of an anti-hero whose antics we must find obscene, even if funny! However, in this context, Ubu is confronted with his crimes and forced to accept the consequences of them. When we see Ubu and his absolute lack of remorse juxtaposed against the testimonies of the witnesses, we are able to see in stark clarity the link between action and consequence. The style of the work is profoundly theatrical and this is what gives it its stature and importance as a seminal work of the new South African theatre. The interplay between the live actors (Ma and Pa Ubu), the various puppets, and the twodimensional animations forming the backdrop for the action, produces a multilayered theatrical experience. The collage effect offers us the potential to engage juxtaposition and contrast, lending itself to the experience of the very ambiguity sitting at the heart of the TRC event. The puppets are used for very distinctive purposes. Three main types emerge: 1. The vulture puppet is a mechanical bird who echoes incomprehensible squawks throughout as commentary on the action that are translated on the screen as subtitles – playing a Greek chorus-like role, pointing the audience to the significance of what is occurring on the stage. 34 The notion of the vulture as both scavenger and, consequently, cleanser of the wild is significant. The image of the vulture may appear vile, seeming, as it often does, to hover in anticipation over those about to die, but the vulture is also an essential part of the natural cycle of life, performing a wholly necessary function. However, the notion of the birds of prey circling over the antics of Ubu and his henchmen, and over the stories of his (and by extension others’) atrocities offers its own inevitable associations to the audience. 2. The ‘animal’ puppets: a. The first of these is Brutus the three headed dog, Ubu’s loyal companion. The intertextual connotations here are myriad: Brutus, best-friend and murderer of Julius Caesar; the three headed dog Cerberus who guards the gates of

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__________________________________________________________________ Hades; the dog itself – man’s best friend. All of these connotative signifiers are there for the audience to receive. Additionally, as Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler of Handspring Puppet Company point out, the three heads serve as the three aspects of Ubu’s henchmen. 35 These three aspects – the foot soldier, the politician, and the general – represent the three arms of the government that facilitated the continuation and implementation of the apartheid regime. The attempts of each to place the blame on the other are redolent of the age-old cry of those involved in atrocities of only carrying out orders. The question of relative culpability is at the heart of what Kentridge is asking his audience to confront. b. The second animal puppet is Niles the crocodile, from Kentridge’s starting image. Niles is Ma Ubu’s handbag, a capacious cavity filled with more knowledge than perhaps anyone really wants. Again the intertextual references abound: the Nile River, source of life in Africa; the Groot Krokodil as in PW Botha; the crocodile itself as one of the most dangerous of predators on the planet, almost impossible to escape from once caught in its powerful jaws. But it is, of course, the tension between the teeth (which destroy) and the belly (which preserves) that provides the most powerful signifier in terms of this puppet. 3. The third type of puppets are perhaps the most important and they are the ‘witness’ puppets. By choosing to speak the testimonies through puppets, Kentridge and Taylor were able to work in Brechtian Epic style, allowing the audience to receive the testimony without necessarily being emotionally assaulted by it. The inherent distancing effect of the puppet as performer offered a unique methodology to engage the historical narratives of the TRC, and offered a highly effective solution to a problem highlighted by Awelani Moyo’s chapter in this volume, when she asks ‘who has the right to speak of trauma? How does one re-tell narratives of violence without perpetuating the cycle of victimization which such representation implies?’ 36 By allowing the puppets to speak the testimonies, there is no attempt to pass off the actor as the victim, which was one of the key ethical

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__________________________________________________________________ dilemmas facing artists who dealt with the TRC narratives. As Catherine Cole points out: These stories were told at great personal cost. What was one’s responsibility in retelling the tale? Stories from the TRC are so compelling that they demand to be retold, and yet they are, in some ways impossible to represent. Performance, embodied expression in front of an audience, would seem to be the very best mode to represent the fullness of victim testimony, yet performing these narratives is problematic. Theatre artists who have adapted material from the TRC to the stage have all had to confront this simultaneous pull toward and resistance to representation by means of performance. 37 This sense of the ethical responsibility of the artist using the material of trauma, is also borne out by Moyo’s notion of what she calls ‘“a quiet horror” – the moment of recognition of one’s own potential for empathy and brutality.’ 38 The presence of the puppeteers – two of them for each witness (echoing the presence of two people alongside each witness at the hearings – one to translate, one to comfort) – made for a unique double-vision of each testimony. While the audience is drawn into the narrative, they are simultaneously distanced from its expresser, facilitating an awareness of action and consequence, and the development of critical empathy and engagement. That the puppets are artistic masterpieces in their own right is also crucial. Each one appears to exude a living history, the pain and anguish carved into the very structure of the wood from which they are crafted. At the same time, though, we are never allowed to forget that their story is only one half of the narrative; an idea reinforced by the use of Ma Ubu as the translator of the witnesses’ stories, speaking from within Ubu’s shower with its connotative references to the washing away of guilt and the resonances with the apartheid rhetoric of those activists who ‘slipped in the shower’ to their deaths. Ma Ubu’s role is particularly complex and interesting, and her function within the play becomes doubled. She is both complicit in the crimes of which Pa Ubu is accused, while also being the witness to the victims’ suffering, through her translation. She is both accessory to Pa Ubu’s crimes, as well as being his victim in many other ways. Deborah Posel points to the way in which this double role reflects the complex history of apartheid itself, where ‘. . . the apartheid system provoked an uneven, but pernicious, politics of complicity, in which victims of one set of abuses became perpetrators of another.’ 39 The act of translation itself, also becomes laden with meaning, in the context of the TRC. Many of the translators who worked for the TRC suffered enormous psychological and emotional distress, as they were in the unenviable position of having to translate what is, to some extent, untranslatable; the pain and trauma of the history uncovered by the TRC. 40 Catherine Cole comments on the sense, articulated by many translators, that they were ‘performing’ the testimony:

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__________________________________________________________________ The interpreters spoke in the first person, assuming witnesses’ authorial ‘I’. Even though the interpreters were not on stage, many reported feeling the impulse to perform the person they were representing, to reproduce through gesture, cadence, and intonation the full range of expression that the victims themselves used. . . . The interpreter’s job is technically only to translate the victim’s words. Yet so much of the rhetorical force of that testimony was in intonation and gesture that the translators felt compelled to perform. 41 It is the very theatricality of Ubu and the Truth Commission that, we believe, lends it its power. By engaging the tensions, ambiguities and conflicts of the drama, together with the innate and symbolist theatricality of the puppets and the animations, the work facilitates a new and invigorated understanding of the history that is at the core of the narrative. 6. Nothing but the Truth John Kani’s play is a very different work of theatre than Ubu. 42 Kani adopts a far more conventionally western, realist tradition to frame his narrative. He calls it a play ‘about sibling rivalry, family secrets, truth, lies, democracy, and newfound freedom’. 43 However, where Ubu examines the political metanarrative in an expressionistic and theatricalised manner, Kani elects to use the private narrative to resonate the public one. Here we are given the story of one family – the personal is offered as a way in to the political, offering, in miniature, the tale of the new South Africa. The TRC here provides the background for, rather than being the focal point of the story itself, similar to the way in which, as Deborah Posel points out: the apartheid system itself was not directly the object of the TRC’s inquiry, but merely the background, the political landscape against which the picture of gross human rights violations was to be painted. 44 It is against the backdrop of the history emerging at the hearings, that we learn the singular history of Sipho Makhaya. That the play is largely autobiographical is also significant. It did not begin life as a play; the root of the narrative is the story of Kani’s younger brother Xolile, a political poet shot at age 25 while reading poetry at the funeral of a nine year old girl in 1985. When the TRC came to Kani’s town, he was reluctant to go, commenting: I was afraid to confront the perpetrator or policeman or soldier who shot my brother. I didn’t know what I would do if he asked

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__________________________________________________________________ for forgiveness. I wasn’t ready to respond to that question, because every time I thought about him, I got very angry, very bitter. 45 That the public voicing of trauma can have a remarkably healing effect is borne out by Kani’s comments after the first performance. He wrote: It was like a weight off my shoulders. For the first time I could celebrate my brother. There’s no closure until you confront your own pain. . . I understand now that my brother was paying a price for the freedom I enjoy. . . I remember him now with pride and a smile. 46 The play thus becomes what Carolyn Clay calls Kani’s ‘own truth-andreconciliation commission.’ 47 It is achieved through the speaking of hitherto unspoken history- the history of all those who did not go before the TRC, the uncounted thousands (maybe millions) who endured and sacrificed and survived, on all sides, and whose stories have not been immortalized or dramatized in the TRC roadshow. As Catherine Cole points out, this was one of the key critiques of the TRC; that its narrow definitions did not allow it to ‘give voice to the more routine yet no less intensely experienced suffering by the majority of South Africans.’ 48 Deborah Posel argues that, A precise definition of what counted as a gross human rights violation was provided in ways that excluded many of the daily routines of apartheid humiliation and degradation suffered by black South Africans across the board. 49 The very narrowness of the definition of gross human rights violations ensured that many narratives were not considered fit for the TRC process. It is an exemplar of this kind of narrative that Kani is interested to explore. This also speaks to one of the fundamental questions relating to the voicing of trauma: how are the experiences of individuals measured against the experience of the community as a whole, where often the smallness of the individual narrative disappears into the larger imperative of chronicling the major event. Nothing but the Truth’s anti-hero, Sipho Makhaya, is one of those who stayed, one of those whose life has been a series of these daily humiliations and degradations; in his cri de coeur he says, ‘I paid for this freedom. . . They must never forget the little people like me.’ 50 Kani’s play eloquently dramatizes the cry of people like Sipho, demanding not to be forgotten, for their history to be as significant and memorialized as that of those who chose to speak has been. In this,

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__________________________________________________________________ as in many ways, Sipho is a contemporary South African Willy Loman, the small man, who, as Arthur Miller insisted, is as apt a subject for tragedy as any of the grand heroes of history. 51 Sipho is seeking his own place and identity in the new South Africa; perhaps the most poignant element of his story is his understandable bitterness at being turned down for the job as chief librarian first because of his colour and now because of his age. Sipho’s experience of apartheid’s oppression does not constitute a human rights violation under the definition of the TRC; thus, it goes ignored. It seems that for those like Sipho, the uncounted and unrecognized, the new South Africa is a lot like the old. Perhaps this is the greatest indictment of the TRC – that its grand goal of reconciliation does not seem to extend beyond those for whom it became a personal journey. Alongside Sipho’s story is that of his daughter Thando, who works for the TRC. Thando’s position is that of the insider; in her work for the TRC, she is exposed to far more than the average South African receives on the evening news. In addition, in contrast to her cousin Mandisa, who has not grown up in apartheid South Africa, she has a fine-grained understanding of the nuances of the experience of living inside the apartheid state, which cannot be appreciated by those who are outside it. She must confront her expatriate cousin Mandisa, returning from ‘exile’ to bury her father, and respond to Mandisa’s boiling, righteous anger at the TRC’s intentions to grant amnesty, an anger made more ironic given Mandisa’s positioning as outsider in the new South African landscape. As Thando points out: We, who stayed here. We who witnessed first-hand the police brutality. We who every Saturday buried hundreds of our young brothers and sisters shot by the police, dying in detention, dying because of orchestrated black-on-black violence, accept the TRC process. . . .If all those who suffered can forgive, then so can you. 52 This goes to the heart of the debate between reconciliation and retribution, and it drives much of contemporary South African life. The third character in the play is Mandisa, the daughter of Sipho’s much resented brother, Themba. She is the returning ‘exile’, whose perception of life under apartheid is one made up from her father’s stories, and her viewing of international news bulletins. We have written elsewhere of one of the recurring characters in South African plays, films, and literature, the returning exile whose expectations are never entirely met by the complex realities of life in South Africa, and Mandisa fits very neatly into this category. 53 The joyous welcome and instant acceptance into the bosom of her family, which she expects, is not forthcoming, as her idealized visions of homecoming are contrasted against her conflict with both Thando and Sipho, and her misunderstanding of much of the nuanced behaviour in

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__________________________________________________________________ the Makhaya household. Mandisa’s position as the outsider is reinforced many times, not least by the fact that she fails to recognize the significance of her father’s Themba’s body being brought home as ashes. The way she reacts to Sipho’s dismay at her announcement that she has had her father cremated – a profound insult in traditional black culture, which places great value on burial, and the connection through the soil to the ancestors – is evidence of her lack of identity as a black South African. Her English accent reiterates her position as stranger as do her opinions on the relationship between fathers and daughters. She operates also as force of disruption in the household, as she challenges Thando to live outside of the role that both tradition, and her loyalty to her father, have dictated for her. This is not to suggest that Mandisa is pictured as a negative persona; she does, however, operate as a catalyst to conflict and thus, facilitates the development of the dramatic action through which Kani’s response to the TRC and its exigencies is revealed. There are many more thematic threads running through the play but, at its core, it is a play about memory – about how identity is shaped by memory and how memory is created through history. Sipho’s narrative is important for its own sake, but in the context of narratives that use the TRC as source material, it is also important because it reminds us of the private human face of that most public history. It reminds us, too, that the journey to reconciliation cannot be legislated; memories do not disappear because a government tells us to forget them, indeed they linger beyond the lifetimes of their experiencers. Instead, we need to remember but also forgive, try to rebuild as Sipho intends to rebuild his library – together with his pride, and his identity in the wake of his cathartic revelation of the truth of his past – in order to remake his place in the new South Africa. His own speaking of his individual trauma affords him the opportunity to move beyond the painful memory of the past and into a new, and as yet undecided, future. 7. Conclusion The complex interweaving of truth, history, memory and identity is the frame within which the TRC’s litanies create new narratives for South African theatre, and literature in general. By offering us access to the unspoken histories, by opening up the doors and windows of long suppressed memory, we are afforded the opportunity to free ourselves from the shackles of this history – not to forget it, but to process it and direct our energies to making new histories out of the old. However, what is critical in all of this aiming for national unification and reconciliation, is that we do not forget the individual narratives. The temptation to subscribe to a new hegemonic imperative that denies space for conflicting or oppositional points of view or attitudes, is strong, especially given the powerful motivation of building a new country. We must resist that temptation by engaging and embracing the very contradictions and contestations that are inherent in our

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__________________________________________________________________ new country’s birth. Only by so doing can we make that new country in a new image that owns and recognizes its past, but is not trapped and enshrined in it. As Antjie Krog so poignantly writes, on the personal release which is contingent on the creation of awareness: For the first time in months – I breathe. The absolution one has given up on, the hope for a catharsis, the ideal of reconciliation, the dream of a powerful reparations policy . . . Maybe this is all that is important – that I and my child know [the names] Vlakplaas and [Joe] Mamasela. 54 That we know what happened there. 55 Or, perhaps even more simply and powerfully: ‘We tell stories not to die of life.’ 56

Notes 1

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was only one of many such processes that have taken place since 1974. Amnesty International’s website lists 32 Truth Commissions, in countries including Argentina, Chile, Morocco, Peru, and Sierra Leone, among others. This information is from Amnesty International’s website, viewed on the 1 October 2011. http://www.amnesty.org/en/international-justice/issues/truth-commissions. 2 Shane Graham, ‘The Truth Commission and Post-Apartheid Literature’, Research in African Literatures 34.1 (2003): 11. 3 Antjie Krog, cited in Mervyn McMurtry, ‘For Richer, for Poorer’: Reflections on Contemporary Theatrical Design in South Africa (Unpublished Paper, 2000), 360. 4 Deborah Posel, ‘Truth? The View from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, in Keywords: Truth, ed. Nadia Tazi (Johannesburg: Double Storey Books, 2004), 16. 5 Shane Graham, ‘I Was Those Thousands!’: Memory, Identity and Space in John Kani’s Nothing but the Truth’, Theatre Research International 32.1 (2006): 73. 6 Cited in Mark Sanders, ‘Truth, Telling, Questioning: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull, and Literature after Apartheid’, Transformation 42 (2000): 76. 7 Cited in Graham, ‘Truth Commission and Post-Apartheid Literature’, 12. 8 Ibid. 9 Greg Homann, Introduction to At This Stage: Plays from Post-Apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009), 9. 10 Yvette Hutchison, ‘Truth or Bust: Consensualising a Historic Narrative or Provoking through Theatre, The Place of Personal Narrative in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, Contemporary Theatre Review 15.3 (2005): 354-362,

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__________________________________________________________________ and Busuyi Mekusi, ‘Negotiating Nation-Building and Citizenship through the TRC’s Dramatic Spheres: A Reading of Two Post-Apartheid Plays’, Codesria (Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, 2008). 11 Cited in Bridget Haylock, ‘Enlisting Rage and Speaking Place: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria’, (paper presented at The First Global Conference. Trauma: Theory and Practice, Prague, 14-16 March 2011): 2, Viewed 1 October 2011, http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/evil/trauma/project- archives/1st. 12 Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). 13 Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull (Johannesburg: Random House, 2002): 131. 14 Posel, ‘Truth: The View from South Africa’s TRC’. 15 Ibid., 13. 16 Ibid., 14. 17 Ibid., 16-18. 18 Zakes Mda, Introduction to Nothing but the Truth, by John Kani (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2002): viii. 19 Cited in Jane Taylor, Ubu and the Truth Commission (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1998): ix. 20 There have been, and continue to be, a number of theatrical works which deal with the TRC in South Africa, including the important Truth in Translation project (2006), based around the experiences of the translators who worked at the TRC, and a production entitled The Story I am About to Tell (1997), performed by actual victims who had testified before the TRC. We have chosen in this paper to concentrate our analysis on two particular examples, chosen because they approach the TRC from very different positions, and make use of very different aesthetic choices. 21 Emory Report, ‘Jane Taylor’s Play Recounts Truth Commission Narratives’, (1998), Viewed 21 July 2008, http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/erarchive/1998/November/november.0. 22 Ibid. 23 This was a critique aimed at performances of The Story I am About to Tell, where it was noted that the repeated enactment of the testimony, even by the person who actually experienced the events, tended to deaden its impact on the audience. 24 Taylor, Ubu and the Truth Commission. 25 Catherine Cole, ‘Theatres of Truth, Acts of Reconciliation: the TRC in South Africa’, in African Drama and Performance, eds. John Conteh-Morgan and Tejumola Olaniyan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004): 224. 26 Brecht’s theory of Epic Theatre practice is widely documented. He formulated his theoretical positions in response to his desire to shift the structures of traditional Aristotelian drama into an Epic form. To do this he articulated such notions as historification and verfremdung, all intended to distance the audience

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__________________________________________________________________ from the performance in order to foster instead of identification, critical engagement. Brecht’s ideas have become part of the canon of theatrical practice in the 20th and 21st centuries. 27 Jane Taylor, Ubu and the Truth Commission. 28 The Ubu project involved three main collaborators: Jane Taylor who wrote the script, William Kentridge who directed the production, and the Handspring Puppet Company who constructed and operated the puppets. Jane Taylor is an academic whose work deals largely with history, autobiography and the politics of memory. Kentridge works in a number of different media including fine art, film and theatre. He works extensively with multimedia presentations and explores notions of intertextuality in many of his works. The Handspring Puppet Company is worldrenowned for its work with puppets and they had worked with Kentridge before on other projects. The synergy between these collaborators allied to the particularity of the moment of the TRC, created a very specific focus and structure for the finished piece. 29 Ibid. 30 In Jane Taylor, Ubu and the Truth Commission, viii. 31 Ibid. 32 Groot Krokodil is an Afrikaans term which translates as the big crocodile. It was a pejorative name given to South African president PW Botha, often seen as responsible for some of the worst excesses of the apartheid regime in the 1980s. 33 The public response to Jarry’s notorious play has been well documented in historical discussions of modernist and post-modern theatre practice. Jarry’s challenge to the conventions and norms of the theatre of his time provoked both critical debate and horrified outrage, largely as a consequence of his irreverent, iconoclastic positioning of himself and his work as resistant to the status quo. For a more comprehensive discussion of Jarry’s place in the discourse of avant garde theatre development, Christopher Innes’ key work, Avant Garde Theatre; 1892 – 1992 (London & New York: Routledge, 1993) is useful. 34 The Greek chorus in classical theatre performed numerous functions; among the most important of these was to provide commentary on the action, which most often reflected the philosophical and ideological underpinnings of the play. The chorus operated as a bridge between the world of the play and the world of the audience. In particular, in the tragedies, where the narrative was known and the interest in the play generated by the particular playwright’s take on the myth under discussion, the chorus offered the playwright a vehicle for communicating the moral imperative that drove their interpretations of the familiar story. 35 In Jane Taylor, Ubu and the Truth Commission, xvi. 36 Awelani Lena Moyo, in this volume. 37 Cole, ‘Theatres of Truth, Acts of Reconciliation’, 223. 38 Moyo, in this volume.

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__________________________________________________________________ 39

Posel, ‘Truth? The View from South Africa’s TRC’, 14. It was the difficulties of the translators’ role that was explored in the Truth in Translation project. 41 Cole, ‘Theatres of Truth, Acts of Reconciliation’, 223. 42 John Kani is one of the most significant artists to have emerged from South Africa. He began his career working primarily as an actor with Athol Fugard and Winston Ntshona, producing such seminal collaborative protest works at Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972) and The Island (1973). He has worked extensively both locally and internationally, and in recent years served as the Artistic Director for the Market Theatre, one of the most influential companies in South Africa. Nothing but the Truth is his first play to be written without collaborators. 43 In Catherine Foster, ‘Playwright-Actor Kani brings Truth out of South Africa’, Globe Newspaper Company (January 23, 2005), Viewed 29 January 2008, 2, http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2005/01/23/playwright_actor_kani_ brings_truth_out_of_south_africa/. 44 Posel, ‘Truth? The View from South Africa’s TRC’, 15. 45 Foster, ‘Playwright-Actor Kani’, 2. 46 Diane De Beer, ‘Walking the Talk’, Sunday Tribune (December 5, 2004), Viewed 4 March 2005, http://www.sundaytribune.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=255&fArticleId=233174. 47 Carolyn Clay, ‘Truth and Reconciliation: John Kani tells a South African Story’, The Providence Phoenix (January 28-February 3, 2005), Viewed 3 October 2011, http://www.providencephoenix.com/theater/tripping/documents/04425463.asp. 48 Cole, ‘Theatres of Truth, Acts of Reconciliation’, 220. 49 Posel, ‘Truth? The View from South Africa’s TRC’, 15. 50 Kani, Nothing but the Truth, 58. 51 Willy Loman is the protagonist of Arthur Miller’s seminal American play Death of a Salesman (1949). Loman is often deemed the first modern tragic hero, an antihero who is not heroic in any traditional sense of the word, but whose story elicits a catharsis similar to that which is often seen to be the defining characteristic of tragedy. 52 Kani, Nothing but the Truth, 29-30. 53 Tamar Meskin & Tanya van der Walt, ‘Writing Whiteness: Representing the Afrikaner in Post-Apartheid South Africa – A Comparative Study of Athol Fugard’s Sorrows and Rejoicings (2002) and Jason Xenopolous’ Promised Land (2002)’, The International Journal of the Arts in Society 4.5 (2010). 54 These were two of the more horrific and well-hidden stories to be revealed during the TRC process. 55 Krog, Country of My Skull, 131. 56 Ibid., 48. 40

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Bibliography Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Clay, Carolyn. ‘Truth and Reconciliation: John Kani tells a South African Story’. The Providence Phoenix, January 28 – February 3, 2005. Viewed 3 October 2011. http://www.providencephoenix.com/theater/tripping/documents/04425463.asp. Cole, Catherine M. ‘Theatres of Truth, Acts of Reconciliation: The TRC in South Africa’, in African Drama and Performance, eds. John Conteh-Morgan and Tejumola Olaniyan, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004, 219-226. De Beer, Diane. ‘Walking the Talk’. Sunday Tribune, December 5 2004. Viewed 4 March 2005. http://www.sundaytribune.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=255&fArticleId=233174. Emory Report. ‘Jane Taylor’s Play Recounts Truth Commission Narratives’. Emory Report 51 (11), November 9, 1998. Viewed 21 July 2008. http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/archive/1998/November/november.0/. Foster, Catherine. ‘Playwright-Actor Kani Brings Truth out of South Africa’. Globe Newspaper Company, January 23 2005. Viewed 3 October 2011. http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2005/01/23/playwright_actor_kani_ brings_truth_out_of_south_africa/. Graham, Shane. ‘The Truth Commission and Post-Apartheid Literature’. Research in African Literatures 34.1 (2003): 11-30. Graham, Shane. ‘I Was Those Thousands!: Memory, Identity and Space in John Kani’s Nothing but the Truth’. Theatre Research International 32.1 (2006): 68-84. Homann, Greg, ed. At This Stage: Plays from Post-Apartheid South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009. Hutchison, Yvette. ‘Truth or Bust: Consensualising a Historic Narrative or Provoking through Theatre, The Place of the Personal Narrative in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’. Contemporary Theatre Review 15.3 (2005): 354-362. Innes, Christopher. Avant Garde Theatre: 1892 – 1992. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

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__________________________________________________________________ Kani, John. Nothing but the Truth. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2002. Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull. Johannesburg: Random House, 1998. McMurtry, M. ‘For Richer, for Poorer’: Reflections on Contemporary Theatrical Design in South Africa. Unpublished paper, 2000. Mekusi, Busuyi. ‘Negotiating Nation-Building and Citizenship through the TRC’s Dramatic Spheres: A Reading of Two Post-Apartheid Plays’. Codesria. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, 2008. Meskin, T. and van der Walt, T. ‘Writing Whiteness: Representing the Afrikaner in Post-Apartheid South Africa – A Comparative Study of Athol Fugard’s Sorrows and Rejoicings (2002) and Jason Xenopolous’ Promised Land (2002)’. The International Journal of the Arts in Society 4.5 (2010): 203-215. Posel, Deborah. ‘Truth? The View from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’. In Keywords: Truth, edited by Nadia Tazi. Johannesburg: Double Storey Books, 2004. Sanders, Mark. ‘Truth, Telling, Questioning: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull, and Literature after Apartheid’. Transformation 42 (2000): 73-91. Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1998. Tamar Meskin is a lecturer in the Drama and Performance Studies programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where her primary research areas are directing, acting, directing, writing and multi/intercultural performance practices. She is currently pursuing doctoral research around performance making and pedagogy. Tanya van der Walt’s primary research interests are in the areas of directing, acting, drama- and theatre-in-education. She is currently pursuing doctoral research using self-study methodologies to investigate collaborative enquiry through performance pedagogy.

A Quiet Horror: Reflections on Performing Others’ Traumatic Narratives in the Context of Contemporary South Africa Awelani Lena Moyo Abstract This chapter explores the ethics of representing trauma and violence within the context of theatre and performance. Approaching the performance event as a landscape, the discussion tackles some key questions which impact on the processes of creation and reception of such work – Who has the right to give testimony, and how can we verify the authenticity of testimony? (How) can one bear witness to suffering without repeating its traumatic effects? What becomes of agency in the process of bearing witness to suffering? These questions are framed within the context of South Africa over time. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission fuelled a widespread engagement with popular memory, and South African performance practitioners have responded to the ethical and ideological questions which the TRC provoked by asking further questions about notions of truth, representation, and authority. With particular reference to Inner Piece (2009) created by Juanita Finestone-Praeg, I explore how the theatrical event displaces conventional time/space, and so complicates definitions of witnessing for both performers and audiences alike. From my own perspective as a performer in Inner Piece, I map out the challenges of representing the trauma of others, especially with regards to negotiating agency and responsibility. I argue that artists’ responses can create new spaces for reflection, debate and dialogue amidst conflicting ethical demands. Key Words: Representing trauma, witnessing, testimony, physical theatre, ethics, spectatorship, inner piece, Juanita Finestone-Praeg, First Physical Theatre Company, South African Theatre, landscape. ***** 1. Introduction Several commentators have noted that writing on trauma often takes the view that traumatic experience is ‘unknowable’, ‘unimaginable’, and as such ‘unrepresentable.’ 1 This in turn gives rise to a distrust of representation, especially in language and visual media. This distrust is justifiable, indeed necessary, where trauma is associated with violence in general, and with spectacular violence (war, torture, terrorism) in particular, because there are issues of power and agency to consider, which complicate attempts at representation. Yet the ‘un-representability’ of trauma is cited alongside the virtues of giving testimony. ‘Speaking out’ and ‘breaking the silence’ are seen to be ethically imperative as well as psycho-socially restorative. So it would seem, paradoxically,

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__________________________________________________________________ that one is forced to rely on discursive and narrative formations in order to come to terms with experiences which by their very nature seem to elude narrative discourse. 2 At issue here is the ability of discourse/representation to do justice to traumatic experience, and to offer viable (ethical?) responses to some of the key questions that arise when dealing with trauma. Specifically, these are questions such as: Who has the right to bear witness, and how can we verify the authenticity of testimony? (How) can one bear witness to suffering without repeating its traumatic effects? What becomes of agency in the process of bearing witness to suffering? I want to consider some of these questions within the context of theatre/performance, and to explore what implications the dilemma of representation (that is the risks involved in representing trauma) might have upon attempts to tackle traumatic events/experiences in theatrical performance. In doing this, it is not my aim to offer any sort of prescriptive account of how the relationship between trauma and performance might be negotiated. Rather, I wish to map out how, in reflecting upon the experience of performing in Inner Piece (a physical-theatre performance work conceived and directed by Juanita FinestonePraeg), I have been prompted to think about/around the ambivalent nature of witnessing and testimony, especially as these discourses relate to both the semiotics of performance and the socio or ethico-political determination of subjectivity. So I might rephrase the questions about trauma and testimony as follows: ‘[W]hat is the substance of the ethical demand that is being issued in the telling of these stories? What does it mean for us, in terms of our shared responsibility, as readers, audience members, performers?’ 3 According to Helena Grehan, Levinasian thinking posits responsibility before subjectivity and as the basis for ‘ethical’ subjectivity, meaning that we become ethical subjects only when we ‘hear the call’ of the other. 4 Grehan uses this idea as a starting point from which to explore how performance can provide ‘an alternative space of resistance, of calm, or even of radical unsettlement within which spectators may hear the call of the other.’ 5 This is a space in which the subject’s responsibility to the other – which precedes conscious thought or action – comes about by the exposure of the Self to/by its Other, a space in which the subject stands ‘face-to-face’ with her other. Grehan also points out that there are problems with applying a Levinasian ethics of responsibility within the context of theatrical performance, including the fact that there is no way of knowing what ‘hearing the call’ might mean for every spectator or every performance. Thus one cannot hope to develop a ‘formula’ for this kind of experience, but it may be helpful to consider how particular performances work towards achieving such ‘radical unsettlement’. It is therefore important to attend to how ‘response’ is negotiated within the context of a particular historical moment. 6

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__________________________________________________________________ To this end, I will begin my discussion as I began the process of my reflection on Inner Piece: with a specific approach to landscape which defines the way in which we may approach situating audience ‘response’ more consciously. Elinor Fuchs writes that ‘[E]very dramatic world is conditioned by a landscape imaginary, a “deep” surround suggested to the mind that extends far beyond the onstage environment reflected in the dramatic text and its scenographic representation.’ 7 It is this ‘deep surround’ with which I am concerned, and which links the ontological, epistemological and phenomenological modalities of experience in performance. So that when I am speaking of landscape I am not simply speaking of physical places or of ideological sites, but also of representational, social and discursive formations. 8 This expanded notion of a landscape is crucial here because it acts as a point of entry for my reflexive excursions. And if I am to engage meaningfully with the ‘deep surround’ of Inner Piece, I cannot over-emphasise the ‘depth’ of the landscape concept. 2. Locating Inner Piece Premiered at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival in July 2009, Inner Piece was created by Juanita Finestone-Praeg and the First Physical Theatre Company in collaboration with various independent practitioners. Leonhard Praeg and Dion van Niekerk provided the text and dramaturgy for Inner Piece. 9 Conceptually, Finestone-Praeg drew from a number of sources listed in the programme note. Of significance is the Japanese Haiku, a poem consisting of 17 syllables following a 57-5 rhythm. She writes that the form’s ‘brevity and reduction capture an economy of form that perfectly conveys the clarity of a distilled image and lends itself to the expression of silence and sound in movement: the stasis of body and light.’ Borrowing this form, Inner Piece consisted of 17 vignettes that explored ‘different viewpoints on emptiness, stillness, and silence.’ 10 The performance was therefore structured as follows: light (I) still life (II) trapeze I (III) trapeze II scarecrow (IV) trapeze III smoking marine (V) improvised viewpoints emptiness (VI) empty fuck (VII) inner piece (VIII) origami (IX) better than origami (X) corpse I

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__________________________________________________________________ (XI) (XII)

fullness of life corpse II

silence (XIII) monogram I (XIV) monogram II (XV) monogram III (XVI) improvised viewpoints (XVII) haiku Finestone-Praeg explains how each of these meditations ‘engages notions of absence variously captured as loss, trauma, and more self-consciously, the idea of an absent director,’ adding that ‘[T]he challenge in the creative process consisted in recognizing that this absence could not be directly represented but possibly only revealed.’ 11 This is key to trauma, where the ‘absence of traces testifies to a representation’s relation to (a traumatic) event/actuality.’ 12 In particular, the absence of the witness highlights what can/not be said, and the gap between words and bodies. Finally, a major impetus for the work was the choreographer’s interest in the ‘spectacle’, and in particular the question of how one might go about ‘deconstructing’ the spectacle of the trapeze. This theme was explored alongside what the artist described as the ‘contradictions’ of representation in a ‘technologically matrixed global context.’ 13 Inner Piece ran for eight nights and was performed for small audiences of no more than 50 people in the (deconsecrated) Old Nun’s Chapel. The building’s high, austere stone walls and arches gave the performance an amplified sense of ceremony and spectacle, whilst elements of design and staging were used minimally in order to accent these inherent properties in the venue. The work’s title and the performance space together connote interiority, sanctuary and sacredness on the one hand, and their opposites on the other. 2.1 Testimony and Witnessing in South African Performances South Africa’s much discussed Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was an important attempt to deal with the traumatic past and advance the nationalbuilding agenda post-1994. This had to begin with breaking down the racial and social boundaries created during Apartheid, boundaries upheld by the systematic use of violence. With its particular goal of ‘reconciliation’ in mind, and a notion of ‘truth’ as its vehicle, the TRC pushed the discourses of witnessing and testimony quite strongly into the foreground of the South African imaginary as it sought to engage the public in the process of re-writing history. 14As noted by Tamar Meskin and Tanya Van der Walt, South Africa’s TRC process was unique because it not

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__________________________________________________________________ only emphasised the importance of speaking about the past, but made that speaking public in a way that had not been done before. 15 While it has been highly regarded around the world, the TRC has also been criticized for a number of ‘failings’. At the core of some of this criticism lies the ambiguity surrounding its notion of ‘witnessing’ and ‘testimony’, and their purported efficacy. 16 To begin with, there has been concern about the fact that the testimonies of victims and perpetrators often involved the re-telling and sometimes re-enactment of traumatic events. Importantly, Meskin and Van der Walt note that the commission ‘demanded full disclosure of the truth in return for amnesty, but the exposure through narrative of the true scope of the horrors and atrocities of apartheid seemed to mitigate against the very possibility of amnesty.’ 17 There are two issues here. First, there appears to be an assumption that the giving of testimony would lead to ‘healing’. By making exposure a condition for amnesty the model implies, however unwittingly, a causal logic that seems to ‘guarantee’ favourable results for perpetrators and victims. Secondly, there is the danger that ‘full disclosure’ of some details might cause further harm to already traumatised witnesses. 18 On traumatic experience, Dominick LaCapra writes that the traumatised subject is ‘haunted’ or ‘possessed’ by the past, caught up in the repetition of traumatic scenes. 19 Trauma manifests itself as ‘acting-out’, where the event is relived and experienced as present reality rather than recollected memory, although ‘actingout’ may well be part of the process of ‘working-through’ trauma. 20 If the traumatic is by nature repetitive, then repetition, even in the form of testimony, presents a number of problems. Another criticism of the TRC process concerns the manner in which testimony was publicised. The screening of the amnesty hearings is said to have made them highly ‘theatrical’ and created an air of ‘spectacle’ around the process, although this criticism may have more to do with the actions of the media (television, newspaper, radio etc.). 21 Dissemination might have served the ritualistic aspirations of the project (in that it involved a wider public in the process of remembering and/or mourning the past), yet it might also be said to be exploitative. Linked to this is the problem of the appropriation of traumatic narratives by the nation, where individual stories of suffering come to represent the ‘collective trauma’ of the past. The outcomes of such repetitive representation are that witnesses/victims are made to feel alienated and disembodied from their voices, or to feel that their identities have been ‘reduced’ to contents of their testimonies. 22 These tensions have of course proved fertile ground for theatre artists, who have continued to stage conflict even as the social, economic and political landscapes of South Africa have changed over the last 18 years. 23 It is still the case that the nation has in some ways remained haunted by this past, and ‘the seeming integrity of the South African body national is regularly disturbed by the evidence of its own violence.’ 24 Rosemary Jolly links this ongoing violence to the

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__________________________________________________________________ continuation of certain cultural narratives which have not yet been deconstructed in the post-Apartheid context. Such narratives function to mark certain subjects (as non-human, female, or diseased, for example) and then designate those subjects as ‘targets of entrenched and allowable violence’. 25 This linking of narrative to cultural formations of violence points to further problems associated with its representation, namely the ability of representational forms to entrench and normalise violence. Whilst some artists have continued to use the TRC’s model of witnessing and testimony as tools for collective healing and reconciliation, others have long been questioning its efficacy. 26 Marcia Blumberg speaks about a shift towards ‘theatricalising the unspeakable’ in contemporary South African theatres – meaning that there has not only been an emergence of previously marginalized voices, but artists have also begun to explore those more subjective experiences of suffering and brutality which would have been ‘unspeakable’ in the past as they were sublimated by the political agenda. 27 The significance of this ‘shift’ must also be seen in the context of the long histories of Protest and Resistance theatres in South Africa, which played a major role in politically mobilising the public as well as communicating the sufferings and struggles of the black majority to the rest of the world during Apartheid. Here, as in Jolly, the ‘unspeakable’ is not only that which escapes language, but also that which has been denied a place in the broader national narrative. Inner Piece does not deal explicitly with the TRC or with the particularities of violence and trauma in South Africa (whether during Apartheid or in more contemporary contexts). Neither is the work entirely ‘about’ trauma and violence, although these issues informed the artists’ creative questioning. If Inner Piece is a political performance, it is not in the sense of agit-prop, protest or documentary theatre. Rather, I think, the performance responds to/locates itself within the immediate realities and legacies of the South African context by engaging a dialogue between local and global histories, spaces/places and discourses. 28 This is one sense in which Inner Piece also attempts to ‘theatricalise the unspeakable’. 3. Witnessing and Spectatorship in Performance Caroline Wake outlines some key intersections between the notions of ‘witnessing’ in trauma studies and ‘spectatorship’ in theatre/performance. 29 To begin, she highlights the lack of clarity in uses of the term ‘witness’ in theatre and performance studies, since it can be used to describe the act of seeing/viewing something as much as it can also refer to the act of giving/performing testimony. Wake is concerned that the term ‘witness’ is used to describe nearly everyone involved in making and watching theatre. ‘Hence currency has not necessarily created clarity... it has caused confusion more than anything else…compounded by the fact that as these witnesses multiply, the claims about them amplify.’ 30

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__________________________________________________________________ Using Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Street Scene’ (an accident on a street corner witnessed by several people) as an allegory and an anchor, she describes various categories of ‘witnessing’ in trauma studies and attempts a preliminary taxonomy of ‘spectatorial witness’ for theatre/performance. Crucially, her taxonomy destabilises the assumptions which underpin the terms ‘active spectatorship’ and ‘ethical spectatorship’ so often cited in writing about witnessing in theatre/performance. 31 This comes back to the key issue of response and responsibility, and questions posed earlier about what responsibility means for artists and audiences. Briefly paraphrased, the categories in Wake’s taxonomy are: a) The Spectator as Primary witness – one who is present at the scene of the accident. This is associated with the viewing of radical body performance/art which move towards the real (i.e. staging actual pain/suffering/trauma); b) The Spectator as Secondary witness – one who is present at the account of the accident rather than at the event itself, and may be the addressee of testimony. This is associated with documentary and verbatim theatre, where the performer is the primary (i.e. real) witness, or gives testimony on behalf of the real witness; c) The Spectator as Tertiary witness – one who views the act of witnessing or hears the account of the account. This is associated with ‘mirroring’ in performance (i.e. watching someone watching onstage), or with vicarious spectatorship (i.e. hearing about and imagining a performance one did not actually attend); Within both theatre/performance and trauma studies, these distinctions are related to a perceived ‘distance’ between a witness/spectator and the actual accident/event, yet it is possible for a witness/spectator to simultaneously embody more than one kind of ‘witnessing’ experience since, for example, it is possible to be present at the accident/trauma and the account of it. 32 Furthermore alongside each level of distance, there are also various activities or modalities of experience involved in the act of witnessing which might be summarised as, respectively: seeing/visual; hearing/auditory; and imagining/aesthetic. Every form of witnessing then carries with it a number of questions and assumptions about the efficacy of testimony because each is ‘implicated in a slightly different set of ethics’: that is, the ethics of ‘vision and visibility,’ of ‘listening and repetition’ and of ‘ identification and imagination.’ 33 In her quite detailed discussion, Wake not only shows the importance of understanding what is meant by witnessing/testimony, but she makes the case that in theatre/performance there can be no easy distinction between agency and

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__________________________________________________________________ passivity. Because theatre/performance incorporates multiple modes of activity and experience (seeing/visual, hearing/auditory, imagining/aesthetic), it is necessary to account for what exactly is at stake in these ‘different set[s] of ethics’. 3.1 Performing Witness So I want to consider Wake’s observations about the different levels/categories of ‘spectatorial witness’ in relation to Inner Piece. I suggest that in this work, the oscillation between various modes of ‘witnessing’ functions to break down some of the dubious assumptions about witnessing and its efficacy in theatre/performance, and also to comment on the relationship between representation and trauma/suffering/violence. But I am speaking as a performer of course, which means that I am also treating the performer as a kind of spectator, and I acknowledge that some of these ideas may not be translatable. It is easy enough to imagine the performer as primary witness (telling my own story) or as secondary witness (telling someone else’s story), and to discuss what that might imply or require. But what of the performer as tertiary witness? And, incidentally, what impact does the ‘genre’ of a performance have in defining this experience? Or rather, what expectations and assumptions are created by framing a performance in a particular context? I am speaking after all about one particular work that is neither ‘verbatim theatre’ nor ‘performance art’, performed for festival audiences and billed as ‘physical theatre’. The context of a performance and the expectations attached to it are important here because this is in part what allows theatre/performance to perform certain social functions, and not others. In the course of my explorations around the notion of landscape in performance, I have engaged in a process of reflective journaling about performing in Inner Piece, and attempted to recuperate the memory of my experiences. This writing oscillates between describing/narrating the action onstage, outlining some of my thoughts/feelings/responses to and during the performance, and sometime after the performance, all the while hinting at some of the concerns of my research. As there is a process of selection and composition at work here, which inevitably imposes a particular reading in/of the material, I am wary of trying to offer this as any kind of reductive and totalising performance analysis. 4. Light (Vignettes I-V) (I) Still Life: The chapel is dark except for the slow strobe light. I am in the chancel, Arvo Part is playing, and Shaun is swinging from the trapeze, gaining momentum. All of us are dressed in black, we look like members of a religious cult, or gangsters. As the audience comes in, we use ropes to guide them into the small space in the chancel, until we are all standing and gazing up into

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__________________________________________________________________ the ceiling [like worshippers in sacred space.] Shaun is swinging higher and higher, coming within inches of the stone walls. I think I can hear the strain of tension on the cord under the music, making the air around him seem thick and tense. He lets go of the trapeze and does a twist in the air, and even though I can see his harness, and I have seen him do it so many times before, I have to catch my breath in that first moment. He is still moving, but everything is still until until his hands are around the bar again. [typo? is this the still life in the title?] I relax a little and breathe out. I can hear other people breathing too. Sometimes it’s difficult to keep my eye on him. There is too much flashing light, and what if he can’t see? What if he can’t catch the bar again and falls? What would happen if he fell? What would we do? I look at Richard holding the safety harness, he is watching Shaun’s every move. I look down for a while. I don’t want to see him fall. But what if I need to know what happened? What if I need to be able to explain what happened? [Wake and conscious vs unconscious witnessing.] If it happens, there is nothing I can do to prevent it. He is swinging so high I could never reach him, and what would I do? [see Möller, on how looking at war photographs might make us feel powerless. 34] But I can explain what happened. I can know what happened, so I have to look and see what happens. I hope I don’t see anything, but I have to look. I have to look to be sure that he is ok. And if I stop looking, something might happen. So we all have to look to make sure that nothing happens. [is this similar to Schechner’s point about rituals postponing catastrophe? Perhaps the repeated action averts the danger? 35] So then nothing happens. (II) trapeze I: I playing the stage hand, Alan is the technician. We have to run through some technical preparations for the show. [audience listening in on a private moment, voyeuristic pleasure.] Alan does the lighting and sound checks. I have to sweep the floor and try to help him out by standing in for the performers. I have to stand on a box with one foot like the scarecrow, and pretend I’m dangling, then I have to smile for the camera in a pose and pretend I’m smoking like the marine woman. [pretending to pretend, spoof of the spoof? Sontag on the culture of exposure, modern life is lived in front of/for the camera? 36] We are joking around most of the time, we finish just in time because Shaun and Richard come back and they want to

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__________________________________________________________________ work on their duet with the trapeze. I leave to let them get on with it. Alan turns on the music for them. (IV) trapeze III smoking marine: We play performers. It’s rehearsal time, and Juanita isn’t here again. She left some notes in the corner, apparently we are supposed to try and make some still tableaux about torture. [this is a staged scene but it reads like an actual rehearsal. How does it seem for the audience? Schadenfruede?] Someone has to be in charge, so Acty grabs the directions and he pretends to be Juanita. We’re annoyed that he doesn’t let anyone else look at the Abu Ghraib pictures, because he says we would just take it ‘too literally’. So we all have to do different things. Shaun gets the scarecrow and Jesus, but he doesn’t get what he’s supposed to do so he says he’ll just hang there. [sacrifice, sacred bodies/subjects set apart from ordinary people by the law, see Agamben and Homo Sacer, what does Schechner say about ritual and sacrifice? 37] Acty tries to get him to imagine what it would be like to be the scarecrow, and T jokes that he’d probably like having wires attached to his genitals, and we all laugh. [how do performances oe, pain and pleasure interact? Sadomasochism, performance art etc. use real pain but with consent, how can we tell just by looking at the image?] I have to work with Richard and do something with a dog and a leash. I try beating Richard up to show ‘domination’, but Acty says it should be more brutal and it doesn’t look real, he send us of to work on it some more. [how do you make pain ‘look real’? and if we see images of pain all the time in news, movies, TV, internet etc., how can we tell what is real/fake? Pain/pleasure?] Tshego and Alan have a tiff about the smoking marine because she gets to smoke onstage and she doesn’t even smoke. We try a couple of things but basically spend the whole rehearsal making jokes, and Acty/Juanita gets annoyed because we can’t understand what s/he wants. In the end we all give up and move on to the next task. Glad it’s an improv. exercise which is something we can actually do. 4.1 Looking/not Looking ‘In order to resist violence must we give it violent expression? How can we minimize the risks of re-traumatizing victims in the process of capturing their trauma and injustice?’ 38 Whether we look/or not at violent images, whether we represent traumatic experience or not has bearing on how we construct our

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__________________________________________________________________ subjectivity (read here as ‘agency’), and how we locate ourselves in the contemporary world. I noted earlier, in the context of the TRC, how repetition in the form of testimony (read re-presentation of trauma) might cause victims to suffer again. The same might also be said of images – some writers argue that the drive to make visual what is ‘unimagable’ (i.e. pain) fetishises pain and produces its site (the body, or the subject when we speak about psychic pain/trauma) as little more than an aesthetic object. 39 Indeed, critics or war photography accuse the genre of aestheticising suffering in such a way that desensitises viewers and offers them a ‘disinterested pleasure’ in the image of suffering, and as such ‘depoliticising’ them. 40 But there is also need for a healthy scepticism towards arguments which emphasise the ‘un-representability’ of pain. Elizabeth Dauphinée notes that the claim that pain is such an interior experience that it is ‘un-representable’ upholds a Cartesian model of the sovereign subject, which ultimately hampers the ability to conceive of an ethical engagement with the pain/suffering of others. Yet she remains convinced that the violent ‘erasure’ of subjects that occurs in reproducing visual images of pain/war is unavoidable, and that we can only respond to the dilemma by acknowledging that this erasure does happen despite the integrity of our motives. 41 Although he too notes the risk of viewers perpetrating a ‘theft of subjectivity’ against the sufferer, Frank Möller, on the other hand, sees some potential for aesthetic representation to overcome these impasses. 42 Möller observes that images themselves cannot give us assurances or help us to make judgements, so the viewing and/or circulating of images cannot be said to be an inherently ethical or unethical act. 43 Where Dauphinée remains focused on the ethics of visual representation, Möller considers how the same negative effects (e.g. erasure) can occur through different media. He concludes that no representation can be entirely free of risk, and the ‘looking/not looking’ dilemma is not simply a matter of the artists’ intention, or their particular choice of media. ‘Anti-aesthetics are also aesthetics and representation cannot not aestheticise.’ 44 The ‘theatricality’ of the images of torture from Abu Ghraib prison, cited by several commentators, renders suffering as a spectacle. 45 It is hardly surprising then that Finestone-Praeg found an ‘incongruous resonance’ between the these images and deconstructing the spectacle of the trapeze. 46 In the first section of Inner Piece (light, vignettes I-V) the performance text takes the form of ‘stage(d) directions’ which foreground her own ‘questioning or reflection on the relationships between theatre, war, peace, torture and the body’. 47 The opening vignette in Inner Piece (still life) presents the spectacle of the trapeze, which is abruptly disrupted by the intrusion of ‘reality’ and an inversion that seems to burst into the sacred space of spectatorship and reveal the banality of the spectacle. Each of these interrupting ‘interludes’ (trapeze I and the later trapeze III smoking

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__________________________________________________________________ marine) ruptures the spatio-temporal continuity of the theatrical illusion set up by the swinging trapeze. Vignettes II and IV (above) are a theatrical device revealing a number of things: On one level, the failure of the performers to respond to the Abu Ghraib images with any degree of sensitivity is also the failure of representation to bear witness to suffering, the failure of testimony to do justice to the gravity of trauma. At the same time, the scenes play out the ‘habituation’ to images and narratives of violence a condition associated with the contemporary moment. The notorious images are present onstage (in the pile of notes left behind by the director), but they are never displayed to the audience. Instead of this, what is shown is the relationship between us and the images. The performers act as the ‘disinterested viewers’ who read the images only in terms of their aesthetic potential and elide the ethico-political dimension of the images by ignoring their specificity. 48 The humour is somewhat brutal, even cannibalistic here, and as such, the exposition of the mundane details of the creative process might function as a commentary on the production and consumption of representations of violence. The apparent ‘levity’ of the scene and dialogue in fact points to the ‘gravity’ of the subject matter by highlighting the absurdity of the task of re-presenting it to an audience. Viewer/audience complicity in this process of consumption is implicated by their presence in these moments which would usually be hidden from view, especially when there is laughter in response to the antics of the performers. In fact the question of complicity emerges in much more complex ways in the spectacle of the trapeze, because we (the spectators, both audience and performers) are compelled to look at a body facing risk. Granted, we are confronted with risk here rather than actual bodily injury or psychic trauma, but I would like to suggest that the possibility of trauma is enough to cause us, if only for a moment, to be catalysed into a mode of ‘primary witnesses’. Put differently, viewing the spectacle brought me into a state of anxiety which left me somewhere between primary and tertiary witness (the tertiary witness being one who, though literally missing an event, somehow ‘recovers’ that event imaginatively). 49 In the anticipation of an accident, I felt as though I was already witnessing the accident, even though this anticipation was never fulfilled. The anticipation catalysed a movement between modes of witnessing and entailed a temporal shift akin to the temporal shift which characterizes traumatic experience. Obviously it was not an actual trauma, and of course I am not suggesting that the imaginative recovery of an event necessarily has the same effect or gravity as an actual trauma. I am however pointing towards the ability of performance (representation) to effect a slippage in temporality which might approach traumatic experience without actually being traumatic for the viewer. Is it possible that there is a way of accessing such experiences without actually repeating them?

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__________________________________________________________________ 5. Emptiness (Vignettes VI-XII) (X) Corpse I: I have been waiting in the dark in the chancel. The audience is now sitting in parallel rows in the main chapel. [audience mirroring each other across the space. tertiary witnessing? what does this do?] As the light changes. Sifiso and I come forward. Slowly. Sort of slowly. It is quiet, maybe a few people coughing or shifting. We take our place in the empty space between the rows of people. They stop looking at each other now, and look at us. [or is it just that I started looking at him? Whose gaze has changed here?] I am leaning against a pillar, watching Sifiso. He is on the floor, he starts to move, dancing making shuffling sounds on the carpet, tangled and then untangled, fast and fluid, and then slow with a soft thud. Until he gets to that part where he is still, like he has just noticed me, and I can start. I never know how to start in the beginning, at the beginning. ‘Strange, how one remembers things.’ I never know how to start that sentence, and the one right after that, ‘I mean the reason why one remembers things.’ I never know how to repeat the repetitions. I have to remember to change the emphasis in the repeated line. But I mustn’t overdo it. Remember don’t act just think, don’t speak out just speak to yourself like D said. [but I am acting of course, rehearsing a testimony I have already been tertiary witness to, and directing myself while doing it. What is the point/gain of repetition here? where does ‘self direction’ or composition occur in testimony?] ‘I remember now, the first time I dedicated a page in my diary to somebody else.’ Another repeat coming. Remember to change emphasis. [does saying it differently really change the meaning? Is there room for another interpretation? Or does it have to be repeated exactly the same way? Where is the meaning exactly? Is it in the saying or the said? What about Levinas?] Comment on yourself but don’t be too cold, don’t be mechanical, don’t be too analytical. Remember how D did it. As if you are remembering something that happened to you, think back to that time. ‘I remember the first day I dedicated a page in my diary to somebody else. It was way back in ’94…when news of the Rwandan Genocide finally made it onto the 7 o’clock news…’ I was 9 in ’94. But don’t get lost its not about you, its Leonhard’s story [would it have been easier to use emotional memory to connect to a fictional story, or to narrate my own trauma? Emotion and affective display occurring in/through the body serves to verify the authenticity of

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__________________________________________________________________ testimony. What happens when we can’t read the body, do we distrust the witness? Jane Taylor on how we judge sincerity, the example of Winnie Mandela’s TRC hearing – she had to recite a scripted apology because she did not immediately break down in tears?] 50 Don’t try to show that you’re thinking just try to remember, as if you are remembering. ‘The story on the news was about Angelique Umutesi, a young boy of seven or eight…’ Sifiso looks up, raises his hands slightly, like he is at school. He is trying to get up from the ground, tangled, untangled, and another soft thud. Now, as if you are thinking back, as if this really happened. It did really happen. [how does this change my responsibility as performer?] He was 8, I was 9 in ’94, even remember seeing piles of skulls on the news and getting a fright. But don’t look sad, don’t get lost its not about you, it is Angelique’s story. [showing sadness vs. feeling sadness, showing emotion shifts attention from the story towards my performance, objectification of victim, cannibalistic pleasure of catharsis for me and the audience. So am I feeling guilty for ‘stealing’ his story, this moment, his voice?] Tell how they pulled him out. Don’t try to show that you’re thinking just try to remember the story. [but I can only ever remember the performance, not the actual story] Then, get back to the story of the diary, as if you have moved forward again to today. ‘I thought I had forgotten about him. That was…until the other day when I found the diary again and flipped through it with that kind of disinterested melancholy we reserve for old photographs and forgotten diaries.’[or war photographs and stories of trauma? See Möller here] Take your time, as if you are flipping through the diary now, stopping at that page in front of you, reading. ‘My eyes fell on the dedication “To Angelique Umutesi, pulled on this day from under the dead weight of your parents and grandparents in Byumba, Rwanda”’. You are closing the book. Come back to now, here, look out. [have I ‘become’ Leonhard, even when I was trying not to? Is this better than trying to ‘become’ Angelique? What about LaCapra and problems with identification vs. empathy?] Speak to someone, choose a person, but don’t hold the eye contact too long. ‘Reading it, I was aware of pulling him out yet again. His third gasp too, was paradoxical; indecipherable.’ Come back to yourself, speak to yourself. Don’t preach. Sifiso is standing next to me, listen to his breathing. ‘But that’s perhaps

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__________________________________________________________________ because his breath, like any other, doesn’t signify. It just is; on every subsequent page.’ Sifiso sits down, I can still hear him breathing. I am finished, but I am supposed to wait a few beats longer. I’m uncomfortable being watched like this, when I have nothing left to say. [I was acting even when I was not ‘acting’, but then how do I go back to being or becoming myself, or am I always acting?] I get up and break the moment and go offstage, thinking, ‘his breath, like any other, doesn’t signify.’ [his breath has no meaning? or doesn’t give meaning? or can’t be given meaning?] 5.1 Commuting Testimony As I hinted at earlier, the erasure of the (traumatised/victimised) subject that might potentially occur in the visualisation of pain/war/trauma can also occur when trauma is represented in narrative form. Rosemary Jolly writes that ‘the narrative forms we use to describe the past and to relate it to the here and now can be seen as forms of listening that hear or capture certain aspects of the narrative transition, but can remain deaf to, or ignore, others’. ‘Deaf listening’ privileges certain forms of subjectivity, and denies others, rendering those others ‘literally inconceivable.’ 51 So not only does narrative form carry the same risk of potentially ‘erasing’ the speaking (or made to speak) subject, it is also equally capable of desensitizing and/or depoliticising the reader in the process of articulating (re-presenting) pain. 52 Moreover, it can be said that the act of testimony itself does not guarantee ‘closure’. As a narrative mode of utterance, testimony is susceptible to the evil effects of obsessive repetition, where repetition can lead to (re)traumatizing both witness and listener. Repetition, as I mentioned earlier, is associated with the ‘acting out’ of traumatic experience where it points back to a temporal break in experience. Caroline Wake, observes that within trauma studies, there are anxieties surrounding the repetition of testimony. These have to do with, amongst other things, the appropriation of a traumatic narrative, which brings up the notion of ‘false witnessing’. ‘The false witness appropriates an inappropriate subject position,’ and ‘false witnessing’ is considered to be unethical practice. Yet this is also precisely what the actor does in the absence of the ‘primary witness.’ 53 In the theatre, the audience may not have access to the primary witness, and may only hear their testimony through the voice of the performer as secondary witness. This may indeed be the case even in documentary and verbatim theatre. But to imagine a performer as necessarily ‘false’, even in the theatre, assumes that the primary witness (or narrator-survivor) ‘has unmediated access to the original event in her relating of it, that she does not select elements of the story to tell…and that, by extension, her audience has the same unmediated access.’ 54 Jolly describes how, in the middle of performing his own testimony onstage in The Story

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__________________________________________________________________ I am about to Tell, one witness-performer literally forgot his story. So instead of being concerned with what is ‘truth’ and what is ‘false’, instead of asking how we might verify the authenticity of testimony, it may be more useful to ask instead: what does this right guarantee for speakers and listeners alike? 5.2 Of Absence and Authority (in my own words) I struggled to perform corpse I partly because I was very much aware that the story I was narrating was not my own. Since it was a story of a real trauma (Angelique’s ordeal) and a real response (Leonhard’s journaling of his horror), both previously mediated to me (in the form of Dion’s performance of the same text/monologue in 16 Kinds of Emptiness), I considered myself to be ‘distanced’ from the experiences narrated in the text and I felt I did not have the authority to narrate this text. But in performing (presenting myself to the audience and taking up the role of a witness) I also felt a sense of responsibility which was difficult to place. In rehearsal, I was once asked to try and retain some sense of journalistic detachment, a sense that the reflection was happening spontaneously and fuelled by the fluidity of my co-performer’s movements. This was apt because although it is deeply private at times, I would certainly say that this text is not overly emotive. So I chose not to rely on using any acting ‘techniques’ which might have made it easier to cope with performing the piece. Essentially, I had to resist the temptation to display affect as a performer to the extent that I attempted to consciously suppress even the possibility of it escaping from me during the performance. On the seventh billed performance of Inner Piece, after having recited the text of corpse I again and again in rehearsals and before an audience, I suddenly experienced an overwhelming rush of emotion halfway through the text, and struggled to finish the scene without choking on my words. When I came off stage, I wondered if I had ruined the performance on that night, and I also realised that I had only then grasped the full reality of what had happened in 1994. I cannot not explain why or how this happened in the middle of my performance, especially since I had tried to maintain a distance from the material and avoided personalising it. But I now wonder if having to repeatedly resist the urge to (re)present – which had meant resisting and controlling affect – was in some way also a denial of my own subjectivity that surprisingly lead me to access an unverifiable ‘truth’. I wonder if in the process of repeating testimony as though it were a kind of ‘working through’, I was opened up to another way of performing testimony which lead me involuntarily to ‘acting out’ a quiet horror – a moment in which I could recognise my own potential for empathy and brutality. I think that this was a ‘truth’ in terms of a response to the call of responsibility, wherein I was finally able to recognise the trauma/horror that I was speaking about. And I think that in those moments of grappling with the task of performance (the weight of testimony), I became a different kind of witness.

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__________________________________________________________________ 5.3 Forgetful Being(s) Of the ‘forgetful’ survivor-narrator, Jolly writes that perhaps what is interesting in his moment of forgetting is the foreigness, the lostness of the narrator-survivor-actor: a strangeness that has exceeded the best attempts to harness him within linear, ‘external’, speakable narrative. This is a moment in which the survivor-narrator resurrects his own strangeness by unwittingly performing his alienation from the set script to himself, and hence also to the audience. His ‘forgetting’ is actually a re-membering of the dislocation of his victimized body, performed both for himself and the commonality of the audience. The awkwardness of the silent body haunts the facility of the set script: the body resists deaf listening, which renders the speakable mute in the face of embodied suffering. 55 I am intrigued by the suggestion that a body can rupture narrative in this way and in so doing, ‘perform’ an alternative kind of testimony. I am especially interested in the communicative power of what seems to be a silence – yet even in the absence of words, something is being articulated. ‘Testimony’ is sometimes located in what is not seen, what is not said, and something more than the gritty detail of the survivor-narrator’s story is being revealed. This may be the accidental account, an instance of ‘double’ witnessing where the performer’s (non)testimony suddenly shifts spectators from being secondary witnesses to primary witnesses. I wonder if it is not dissimilar to what Levinas has called the ‘face-to-face’ encounter, a ‘moment of rupture where the saying interrupts the said.’ 56 But if so, what might all this mean for other attempts to perform traumatic narratives, and crucially, what might it mean for those who are not survivors or working in verbatim/documentary theatres? Perhaps ‘pain is not an interior, private state, but a shared and shareable phenomenon that is expressible and accessible in a fully social and intersubjective way.’ 57 6. Silence (vignettes XII-XVII) (XII) Monogram I: Lights are up, I am already placing the fence in position. Take a moment to make sure it is in the right position, find your place in front of it. On either side the audience is waiting for me. I look left and right, we share a few moments to see each other and meet. They are watching me. When we are ready, I begin the scene. ‘Monogram: 1. A picture drawn in lines without colour or shading. A sketch...’ I retreat behind the gate, Tshego and Alan enter. I introduce the first

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__________________________________________________________________ vignette. ‘Cowboy with girl/sheep, the return.’ After my voice there is a light change, music, and the beginning. I place my hand lightly on the bar, and watch closely. It seems they are hardly moving, until suddenly they have missed each other, trying to catch but swooping past each other, parallel, separated by darkness. I mustn’t forget my role while I am watching them. I take my fence, and move aside to a new place. [this is dreamlike, interior world. what is my role here? Jailer? Prisoner?] We begin again. I sit down behind the fence. I am sitting at someone’s feet. I try to be small and invisible not get in the way. Tshego is moving in the light. I try to trace the elusive line of her morphing shadow. She is wilting. I watch her from behind the bars. Behind me, they watch too. My job is to give the titles. I do not do anything else, I am not in the scene. (XIV) Monogram II: ‘solo with 17 hesitations, and woman waiting.’ I am watching the story of their relationship. He points at her accusingly. She looks at him, she looks away again. He tries to point. She is blank. I move around the fence so I can get a better view. [protected from the violence? compelled to look? or taking pleasure in watching?] I am not in this scene, so I must still try to be small. I am changing places again. I stand in Alan’s way and I fence him in. He turns around, moves back. I move back. I give the title and stand behind the fence. I say nothing more. I am not in this scene. My job is to get the hat when noone is watching me. [am I a secondary witness here? Or serving as the ‘mirror’ which casts the audience as tertiary witnesses? But what arises out of this mirroring? As the scene plays out, I am also seen to be watching, and doing nothing – I am a mute witness.] (XV) Monogram III: I give Alan his cowboy hat and his toothpick. I am standing behind the fence, leaning forward. Tshego is standing in a small circle of light. Her eyes are closed, and Alan is slowly moving around her in a larger circle, watching her from the shadows. His eyes never move from her. He changes the posture of his body, the angle of his gaze. He slows down, stops, moves, stops, moves… And she is listening, or straining to hear, and turning in circles and from side to side as though she knows he is there, but she cannot see him. She almost wanders completely into the dark, and comes back again, and he carries on, watching her. An epic, nightmarish world

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__________________________________________________________________ emerges out of the empty space. It encroaches and then recedes, leaving behind two people caught in a game of violence. He completes the circle, and comes to stand near me. He leans back on the fence. He is standing with me. We are watching her, together. [Bystander? Victim? Mute witness? Which one is ethically acceptable, and why ? who is claiming victimhood and is it necessarily productive?] 6.1 Encountering Witness Last in the ‘chain’ of viewing, the tertiary witness is a witness to the account of the accident/event. So they are positioned outside of the scene, either spatially or temporally. In the theatre, this is a mode of ‘meta-spectatorship’ that makes the audience privy to an encounter between a Self and an Other. The performer/character who is watching other performers/characters holds up a mirror to the audience, allowing them to reflect on the act of viewing/watching. 58 This accounts, perhaps, for the profound effect that the TRC hearings had on the viewing public. There is scope here to suggest that this is why the discourse of testimony, although riddled with inconsistencies, still has its value for communities attempting to wrestle with the past. Articulating the ‘unspeakable’ is a matter of agency not only for the primary witness, but for the larger social body as well. Writers on war photography have similarly suggested that the viewing of images constitutes the individual as part of a public or a ‘discursive-collective’ unit. This collective unit allows the individual to ‘respond powerfully’ and, potentially, to exert political power. So the argument goes that the potential to respond, the potential to find political agency, is diminished if the individual is not allowed to view images of war/suffering. 59 But this alone is not enough, since there is no guarantee that the ‘collective’ is in consensus about how to respond, or that such a response will not be morally or ethically dubious. Consider again the images of Abu Ghraib, for example, which generated some very different responses, and are particularly problematic because (like other spectacles of violence) they mobilise visibility as another method of dominance. 60 So, one is still left with the problem of how to translate the potential to ‘act politically’ into ‘adequate response.’ 61 6.2 Imaging Response Silence (vignettes XIII-XVIII) completes the shift out of the realm of spectacle. The use of an almost ‘gestural’ movement language in Monogram activates what Juanita Finestone-Praeg calls ‘the power of the small’. In comparison to some earlier scenes, the amount of action is almost minimal. The (un)choreographed bodies resist a formal dance aesthetic which might offer us ‘disinterested pleasure’. Moments of visual beauty are not crafted as the display of physical dexterity, they arise out of a play between absence/presence and are revealed through subtle

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__________________________________________________________________ variations in rhythm: the immediacy of a sudden impulse to move, or stop; the lingering impact of an unfinished gesture. There is no readable narrative, yet at times it is clear that the bodies in view are enacting some kind of violence upon one another which is implied rather than represented. What we have is an atmosphere made palpable through a play with the proximities of bodies in relation to each other. Proximity also serves as commentary in a landscape sculpted out of light/dark, where silence/sound are enunciated in the still/moving body which demands our concentration, but refuses objectification. When I began thinking through Inner Piece, I was at first concerned with silence as a counterpoint to the excess of spectacle and the excess of ‘tragic’ representations. I had tried to consider how silence might be considered an ‘ethical’ or ‘adequate’ response. But I have found that this, of course, is as flawed and dangerous as going between the extremes of ‘looking/not looking’. Still, what if speech and silence are not seen to be entirely opposites? What if, perhaps there can be ‘modalities of silence as varied as modalities of speech and discourse’ which might function to articulate suffering in ways that conventional speech fails to. 62 Then there may be ways of representing pain/suffering in the theatre that do not involve the exposure of suffering. Inner Piece is meditative rather than cathartic, and the landscapes created in performance ultimately embody an economy of form. But economy does not necessarily infer lack, just as absence does not necessarily signal loss. A quiet horror is not the same as a silent one. 7. A Quiet Horror In her article Caroline Wake argues that all spectatorship is essentially an active process. In Inner Piece, this meant that the bodies, identities and experiences of both performers and spectators became integral features adding more layers of meaning within the landscape of the performance. There are certainly moments in Inner Piece that create the ethical space which Helena Grehan is talking about. The oscillation between modes of witnessing moves the performer in and out of the role of ‘witness’. If the performer must move to somehow position themselves in relation to the narratives, then certainly the audience must travel too. And in the course of this movement, there arises a chance for both performers and audiences to grapple with questions around trauma and witnessing. But the work also does not offer any simple resolutions, and in the same way I cannot offer any resolution to the problems of representation or the pitfalls of ‘witnessing’ and ‘testimony’. Interestingly, Finestone-Praeg remarked in a private conversation that Inner Piece had had the worst reception of any work she has ever done. While some spectators were greatly moved by the performance, others commented that they had found it irreverent. I wonder then what ‘reverence’ would have meant. Would it have meant us stripping our clothes in order to truly ‘suffer’ before the audience, or dressing up in hoods to claim/display victimhood? Would it

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__________________________________________________________________ have meant displaying actual images, and replaying actual testimony? Or would it have meant keeping utterly silent, and steering clear of that dangerous territory? This might have made the ‘politics’ of the work clearer, certainly easier, but is it really the job of theatre to prescribe to us how to respond? Or might it be enough that it offers us the chance to do so? Perhaps I am speaking defensively. Or perhaps, what was most frustrating about the work for those spectators was that it does not offer any clear answers to the questions it poses. ‘We would like representations of violence to speak an inherent truth about the nature of the violation that is portrayed: its obscenity, we feel, should be self-evident.’ 63 But here, we are faced only with the artist’s own difficult, unresolved questioning process, and asked only to take up a questioning of our own. I often felt this as I recited the last words – a Haiku by Leonhard Praeg which serves as a haunting epilogue: Today, walked the dog; Tomorrow I’ll go to war. Hope it will be different. 64

Notes 1

See Rosemary Jolly, Cultured Violence: Narrative, Social Suffering and Engendering Human Rights in Contemporary South Africa (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2010); Elizabeth Dauphinée, ‘The Politics of the Body in Pain: Reading the Ethics of Imagery’, Security Dialogue 38 (2007); Susannah Radstone, ‘Trauma theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics’, Paragraph 30/1 (2007), 929. 2 Jolly, Cultured Violence, 21-22. 3 Amanda Stuart Fisher, Introduction to Theatre as Witness: Three Restimonial Plays from South Africa by Yael Farber, (London: Oberon Books, 2008), 17. [emphasis added] 4 Helena Grehan, Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in the Global Age, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 5 Grehan, Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship, 20. 6 Grehan, Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship, 19. 7 Elinor Fuchs, ‘Reading for Landscape: The Case of American Drama in Land/Scape/Theatre, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 30. 8 Jennifer Beningfield, The Frightened Land: Land, Landscape and Politics in South Africa in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2006), 3. 9 Praeg and van Niekerk were also involved in Finestone-Praeg’s earlier 16 Kinds of Emptiness (2007) excerpts of which appeared in the work under discussion. 10 Juanita Finestone-Praeg, ‘Inner Piece: Note from the Choreographer,’ First Physical Theatre Company Program, National Arts Festival, 2009.

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Ibid. Radstone, ‘Trauma Theory’, 12. 13 Finestone-Praeg, Inner Piece. 14 For a more detailed discussion of the TRC see Lyn S. Graybill Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Miracle or Model? (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002); Charmaine McEachern, Narratives of Nation Media, Memory and Representation in the Making of the New South Africa (New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2002); Fiona Ross, Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (London: Pluto Press, 2003); Deborah Posel and Graeme Simpson (eds.) Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2002). 15 See Meskin and Van der Walt, in this volume. 16 I think these perceived ‘failings’ are not unique to the South African situation or to the TRC, and I do not wish to take part in yet another round of TRC ‘bashing’. But I do think it may be helpful to consider such problems in this particular context because of how it has impacted on contemporary performance practices in South Africa. 17 Meskin and Van der Walt, ‘Public Hearing’. 18 An extreme example was the amnesty hearing of police agent Jeff Benzien who was actually asked to demonstrate the ‘wet bag’ torture method on one of his former victims. See McEachern, Narratives of Nation Media, 48-54. 19 Dominick LaCapra, ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss’, Critical Inquiry 25 (Summer 1999): 699. 20 Ibid., 716-717. 21 Certain stories were chosen by the media for their ‘dramatic’ qualities, and these were used to frame the entire process. The hearings were also reported in the language of ‘high drama.’ McEachern, Narratives of Nation Media, 51. 22 Jolly, Cultured Violence, 17-23. 23 Meskin and Van der Walt, ‘Public Hearing’. 24 Mbongeni N. Mtshali, Sounding the Body’s Meridian: Signifying Community and ‘The Body National’ in Post-Apartheid South African Theatre. M.A. Thesis, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2009, 68. 25 Jolly, Cultured Violence, 5. 26 L. Slachmuijlder, ‘Redefining Relevance: The New South African Theatre’ Southern Africa Report 14.2 (1999): 18-20. Also see Meskin and Van der Walt in this volume for a specific examples of TRC narratives in South African theatre. 27 Marcia Blumberg, ‘South African Theatre beyond 2000: Theatricalising the Unspeakable’, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 21.1-2 (2009): 238-60. 28 Consider this in light of how ‘the TRC broke down the fundamental divides 12

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__________________________________________________________________ between public and private spaces and narratives, and between the scales of the familial, the local, the national, and the international: that is, stories that were previously considered private and personal were told in a public forum, registered in collective consciousness, and mediated for a global audience.’ Shane Graham South African Literature after the Truth Commission (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 3. 29 Caroline Wake, ‘The Accident and the Account: Towards a Taxonomy of Spectatorial Witness in Theatre and Performance Studies’, Performance Paradigm 5.1 (May 2009). 30 Wake, ‘The Accident and the Account,’ 1-2. 31 Wake identifies such terminology in the work of Freddie Rokem, ‘Witnessing Woyzeck: Theatricality and the Empowerment of the Spectator’, SubStance 31.2-3 (2002): 167-183; and Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), amongst others. 32 Ibid., 10. 33 Ibid., 14. 34 Frank Möller, ‘The Looking/not Looking Dilemma,’ Review of International Studies 35 (2009): 787. 35 Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (London: Routledge, 1993) 36 Susan Sontag, ‘Regarding the Torture of Others,’ New York Times Magazine, 23 May 2004. 37 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 38 Wendy Hesford, ‘Staging Terror,’ TDR: The Drama Review 50, no. 3 (T191) (Fall 2006): 34. 39 Dauphinée, ‘Body in Pain,’ 140. 40 Möller, ‘The Looking/not Looking Dilemma,’ 781-794. 41 Dauphinée, ‘Body in Pain,’ 153. 42 Möller, ‘The Looking/not Looking Dilemma,’ 787. 43 Ibid., 783. c.f. Dauphinée, ‘Body in Pain,’ 153. 44 Möller, ‘The Looking/not Looking Dilemma,’ 785. 45 See chapters by Jon McKenzie, Tony Perucci and Peggy Phelan in Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict, eds. Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); also see Hesford, ‘Staging Terror.’ 46 Finestone-Praeg, Inner Piece. 47 Ibid. 48 Möller, ‘The Looking/not Looking Dilemma,’ 784. 49 Wake, ‘The Accident and the Account,’ 13.

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Jane Taylor. ‘Thresholds of Being: Horizons of Knowing.’ Camillo 2.0 Plenary Lecture, Performance Studies international # 17, Utrecht, Netherlands. May 26, 2011. 51 Jolly, Cultured Violence, 5. 52 Images of suffering can divert attention from the socio-political context of the suffering by foregrounding the aesthetic beauty of the image, or make viewers feel helpless/hopeless. See Möller, ‘The Looking/not Looking Dilemma,’ 784-786. 53 Wake, ‘The Accident and the Account,’ 9. 54 Jolly, Cultured Violence, 31. 55 Ibid., 32. 56 Grehan, Performance Ethics, 19. 57 Dauphinée, ‘Body in Pain,’ 153. 58 Wake, ‘The Accident and the Account,’ 12. 59 Möller, ‘The Looking/not Looking Dilemma,’ 783. 60 Compare: Hesford, ‘Staging Terror’; Sontag Regarding the Torture of Others; Dauphinée, ‘Body in Pain.’ 61 Möller, ‘The Looking/not Looking Dilemma,’ 784. 62 Wendy Brown, ‘In the “Folds of our Own Discourse”: The Pleasures and Freedoms of Silence,’ 3 U. Chi. L. Sch. Roundtable 185 (1996): 193. 63 Jolly, Cultured Violence, 10. 64 Leonhard Praeg and Dion van Niekerk, Inner Piece (Unpublished performance text, 2009).

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Anderson, Patrick and Menon, Jisha, eds. Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Beningfield, Jennifer. The Frightened Land: Land, Landscape and Politics in South Africa in the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge, 2006. Blumberg, Marcia. ‘South African Theatre beyond 2000: Theatricalising the Unspeakable’. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 21.1-2 (2009): 238-60. Brown, Wendy. ‘In the “Folds of our Own Discourse”: The Pleasures and Freedoms of Silence’. 3 U. Chi. L. Sch. Roundtable 185 (1996): 185-197.

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__________________________________________________________________ Caruth, Cathy. ‘Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History’. Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 181-192. Dauphinée, Elizabeth. ‘The Politics of the Body in Pain: Reading the Ethics of Imagery’. Security Dialogue 38.2 (2007): 139-155. Fuchs, Elinor and Una Chaudhuri, eds. Land/Scape/Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Graham, Shane. South African Literature after the Truth Commission. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Graybill, Lyn. S. Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Miracle or Model? Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002. Grehan, Helena. Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in the Global Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Hand, Sean. Emmanuel Levinas. London: Routledge, 2009. Hesford, Wendy S. ‘Staging Terror’. TDR: The Drama Review 50.3 (Fall 2006): 29-41. Jolly, Rosemary. Cultured Violence: Narrative, Social Suffering and Engendering Human Rights in contemporary South Africa. Scottsville: University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press, 2010. LaCapra, Dominick. ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss’. Critical Inquiry 25.4 (Summer 1999): 696-727. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press, 2007 Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981. McEachern, Charmaine. Narratives of Nation Media, Memory and Representation in the Making of the New South Africa. New York: Nova Science Publishers Inc., 2002.

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__________________________________________________________________ Möller, Frank. ‘The looking/not looking dilemma,’ Review of International Studies 35 (2009): 781-794. Mtshali, Mbongeni N. ‘Sounding the Body’s Meridian: Signifying Community and ‘The Body National’ in Post-Apartheid South African Theatre’. M.A. Thesis, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2009. Posel, Deborah and Simpson, Graeme, eds. Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2002. Radstone, Susannah. ‘Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics’. Paragraph 30.1 (2007): 9-29. Rokem, Freddie. ‘Witnessing Woyzeck: Theatricality and the Empowerment of the Spectator’, SubStance 31.2-3 (2002): 167-183. Ross, Fiona. Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. London: Pluto Press, 2003. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Schechner, Richard. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. Slachmuijlder, L. ‘Redifining Relevance: The New South African Theatre’. Southern Africa Report 14.2 (March 1999): 18-20. Sontag, Susan. ‘Regarding the Torture of Others,’ New York Times Magazine, 23 May 2004. Stuart Fisher, Amanda. Introduction to Theatre as Witness: Three Testimonial Plays from South Africa, by Yael Farber, 9-17. London: Oberon, 2008. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Taylor, Jane. ‘Thresholds of Being: Horizons of Knowing.’ Camillo 2.0 Plenary Lecture, Performance Studies international # 17. Utrecht. Netherlands. May 26, 2011.

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__________________________________________________________________ Wake, Caroline. ‘The Accident and the Account: Towards a Taxonomy of Spectatorial Witness in Theatre and Performance Studies’. Performance Paradigm 5.1 (May 2009): 1-21. Awelani Lena Moyo is a doctoral student in the Theatre Studies department at the University of Warwick, UK. Her dissertation is entitled ‘Migrating towards the Subject; how Landscape informs Identity Construction in contemporary South African performance.’ It is part of ‘Performing Memory: Theatricalising Identity in Contemporary South Africa,’ a Leverhulme Trust project.

Resilience and Implications from Writings of Children Traumatised by the Earthquake: A Pilot Study of Guided Narrative Technique Yinyin Zang, Nigel Hunt and Tom Cox Abstract Individual narratives are what we all have as explanations of ourselves, our immediate environment and the world, and it also plays an important role in determining the outcome of traumatic experiences. This pilot study investigated the effectiveness of an intervention to reduce trauma-related symptoms using a Guided Narrative Technique (GNT) in a sample of Chinese children traumatised by the Sichuan earthquake. Participants were 22 Chinese children aged from nine to eleven years old. All participants were administered specific verbal guidelines regarding what to write. Participants were assessed one day before and one day after the intervention using Children’s Revised Impact of Event Scale (CRIES). Analyses revealed overall intervention effects PTSD symptoms. The result supported GNT was effective in symptom reduction and feasible for post-disaster situation. The results were discussed in terms of the potential benefits of GNT. In addition, two examples of students’ narrative were presented and analysed to improve the understanding of the narratives facilitated by the GNT. Issues about using GNT were also discussed. Key Words: Children, earthquake, expressive writing, narrative, PTSD, trauma memory. ***** 1. Introduction On 12 May 2008 an earthquake of magnitude 8.0 on the Richter scale hit China, causing extensive damage in Sichuan province. The earthquake destroyed c. 6.5 million homes and affected c. 46 million people. Natural disasters are associated with increased prevalence of psychiatric morbidity such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety. 1 2 Children and adolescents may develop PTSD and other mental health problems after exposure to an earthquake; reported rates range from 21% to 70%, though the higher figures may be excessive due to over-reporting. Follow-up studies have shown long-term persistence of PTSD symptoms. 3 4 5 Notwithstanding high prevalence rates and a significant impact on public health, there are relatively few published studies evaluating the efficacy of interventions in this area for children. 6 One reason for the lack of children-targeted intervention is that disaster management has largely been administrated by top-down relief efforts targeted at adults, who are assumed to act harmoniously to reconcile the needs of their

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__________________________________________________________________ families and the wider community. Whilst a growing number of development approaches focus on reducing the risk of negative outcomes to disasters, they tend to treat children as passive victims with a limited role to play in communicating risks or responding to disasters. This reflects common practice within psychology, which fails to recognise the level of psychological sophistication displayed even by young children. The ability of the children to act to reduce their vulnerabilities to disasters has been largely ignored outside of the development field. Most literature on the role of children in disasters is devoted to the psychosocial impact. 7 8 Given the extent of mental health problems following earthquakes, brief, effective and cost-effective treatment interventions for children are urgently needed. There are many different types of intervention available for dealing with traumatic situations, such as cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) or eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR), but in recent years there has been a growing recognition that the focus should be on the importance of developing an effective narrative. 9 10 There are several problems with treatments such as CBT, even when it is trauma-focused. First, the treatment can take too long in situations where there are many people in need of rapid assistance (such as disaster situations). Second, CBT requires a great deal of training for the therapist and it can be difficult to find this training, or the resources for this training, in many nonwestern countries. Third, the dropout rate is often very high. CBT requires people to deal directly with the intense emotions experienced as a result of the traumatic experience, and many people simply cannot deal with it, so they fail to turn up to therapy sessions. Many current theories of PTSD suggest that trauma is the result of enduring maladaptive responses which have impacted on the individual’s autobiography or life story. 11 The core of trauma is the traumatic memory. Traumatic memories are unlike ordinary memories in that they are focused on specific incidents and are strongly associated with intense negative emotions. If someone is reminded of the event, not only does the person remember what happened, they also remember the emotions associated with it; the fear, the horror and the helplessness. 12 The shock of a traumatic event also interferes with normal cognitive, behavioural and affective responses to the world, effectively causing a breakdown in a person’s life story or autobiography. 13 Before the traumatic event, a person may look on themselves, others and the world generally in a positive way, but afterwards they may feel very badly towards all three. They may feel guilty or ashamed that they didn’t behave differently, they may be frightened of or mistrust other people, and they may be afraid to go out into the world. 14 So while people integrate the normal memories into autobiographies, traumatic memories are not so integrated. Furthermore, within the adult literature, it has been found that when experiencing a serious traumatic event, explicit memory, such as facts, are inhibited and only implicit memory, such as perceptual memories and emotions, are processed. 15 This is could be reflected in a greater description of highly

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__________________________________________________________________ emotional recollections of traumatic experience during narrative reporting. Similar memory processes that occur for adults during a traumatic event have also been found to occur for children, such that explicit memory processes tend to be inhibited during a traumatic event, leaving implicit memory (emotions) intact. 16 That is why traumatic memories are normally dominated by sensory, perceptual and emotional components which are harder to integrate into the conscious narrative as they may not have verbal components. Narrative is necessarily complex; a good story has a number of elements. It must have clear time sequences, with one event following another in a logical sequence; the events themselves play key roles. There is a context, with each event being set in a particular situation for a good reason. There is format of the narrative-whether it is oral or written, may also include image sequences too, as well as still images which imply event sequences while only showing a moment of them. 17 Sometimes, the term ‘narrative’ also extends to cover phenomena beyond verbal, visual or acted ‘texts.’ Sociologists and psychologists working with both personal and media narratives tend to assume that these narratives bear a strong resemblance to the structure and content of the lived, social world, as in Moyo’s chapters, which explore the reflections on performing traumatic narratives, and Meskin and van der Walt’s chapter which investigated how Southern African plays address the core question of speaking the past. 18 19 The social and cultural tradition or situation is the reason why people develop narratives in a particular way at a particular time point. Autobiographical memories are organised around narrative structures, so if traumatic events impact on autobiographical memory, they are impacting on narrative and narrative development. This is why a narrative approach to treatment can be effective, and effective as a brief treatment. Narrative approaches are drawing on normal human processes relating to story making and storytelling. Helping someone to tell their story of the trauma involves helping them with their own normal memory construction processes, which involves incorporating the trauma memory into their life stories. 20 Most people can, over time, rebuild their own narratives, incorporating the new traumatic information; but some find this difficult or impossible and so need some sort of assistance. We need to find simple, fast techniques that are useful. This is particularly important in situations where there are many people who may be affected by a traumatic incident – such as an earthquake – it is important to find such techniques that can be used with groups of people and applied by relatively less trained practitioners. One relatively simple narrative intervention that can be used with groups is expressive writing (EW), the written disclosure of traumatic experiences. This technique has been around for many years. It was originally used with university students rather than people with mental health problems, but over the years it has been used with a wide variety of people with a range of problems, including issues relating to traumatic stress. Typically, participants write about a traumatic

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__________________________________________________________________ experience over 3-4 consecutive days, for 15-20 minutes a day. Participants are invited to write continuously about an upsetting or traumatic experience and to focus on their deepest thoughts and feelings about the experience. They are told not to be unduly concerned about spelling or grammar. 21 There is good evidence that EW improves psychological and physical wellbeing. 22 23 In the last 20 years, the approach has been tested with different populations, including clinical patients and college students. 24 A few published EW trials carried out with younger people suggest that clinical samples can receive some benefits from EW and disclosure interventions. 25 One underlying mechanism of expressive writing is seeing avoidance or denial as an unhealthy form of coping with traumatic events. 26 The avoidance of talking about important psychological phenomena can be seen as a form of inhibition. Drawing on the animal and psychophysiological literatures, it was posited that active inhibition is a form of physiological work, which could cause or worsen psychosomatic processes thereby increasing the risk of illness and other stressrelated disorders. 27 Talking or writing about these experiences should theoretically reduce the stress of inhibition. Findings to support the inhibition model of psychosomatics are growing. 28 As with many areas of psychology, the opposite may also be true. People with problems relating to their traumatic experiences may cope effectively by using avoidant techniques. This may be particularly so when the traumatic memories are intense and difficult to deal with, like the natural disaster, war. In present study, the occurrence of earthquake is a large-scale environmental stressor. Because of altered environment, people have to adapt quickly to new circumstances, often facing loss of friends, family, and possessions. Furthermore, when an earthquake occurs, the victims have to live with the fear of potential recurrence, or aftershocks, as several earthquakes often occur in succession. This sequence of events may even affect individual's ability to regulate, identify, and express emotions as well as later development. 29 Inspecting the content of individuals’ writings and their relation to health outcomes may reveal the processes which lead to better health outcomes. Some studieshave explored the content of the writings and found that the use of words that reflect causality and insight regarding the trauma predict positive health outcomes. 30 Where participants are encouraged to adopt a narrative and cohesive approach there are fewer intrusive thoughts and a positive health outcome. 31 Positive experiences, negative emotions, personal growth, and having a futureorientated perspective in writing are associated with health improvement. 32 33 34 This may imply that helping people cope with a traumatic event and achieve benefits from writing may require more than simple instructions. Most EW studies provide simple verbal or written instructions for their participants, emphasising the focus on the emotional content of their writing, but not providing further guidance for each day of the task. However, unlike adults who are generally more able to regulate their emotions, children are more likely to

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__________________________________________________________________ restrict suppress their emotions in order to deal with them. This is because children have difficulty distinguishing emotions, especially if they occur simultaneously or conflicting emotions are elicited. 35 Consequently, it has been found that when children relate a trauma narrative they often omit emotional content. Therefore, the writers are currently developing a series of straightforward narrative methods to help children define and explore their emotions that can be used with traumatised children. These are based on methods already validated, and are called Guided Narrative Techniques (GNT). 36 This pilot study moves beyond the simple writing task to explore whether more sophisticated instructions help writers to express their trauma-related thoughts more effectively. For 20 minutes a day over three consecutive days the participants are provided with specific instructions to help them develop effective narratives. There is no study using simple narrative technique in children traumatised by the earthquake, and the effectiveness of simple narrative intervention with youth is unclear. We expected some beneficial effects from the writing independent of the severity of the PTSD children experienced. We hypothesized that young people would show decreases in PTSD symptoms. We also expected that the sophisticated instructions would facilitate a cognitive restructuring of the meaning of the event. In other words, writing would provide a new structure, major organisation, and cohesion in the representation of the episode, facilitating the cognitive assimilation of the memory of the episode. 2. Method A. Participants 22 students from one 4th grade classes in a single school participated in the study. The school was situated in Beichuan County, an area heavily damaged by the earthquake. Written consent was obtained from the school. Unlike much of the adult population of the area, the students were all literate. All students provided oral consent and the study was approved by the University of Nottingham ethics committee. There was no initial selection of participants for evidence of trauma. B. Measures PTSD symptoms were assessed using the Children’s Revised Impact of Event Scale CRIES, a 13-item scale measuring symptoms of intrusion, avoidance and arousal, with a Cronbach's α coefficient of 0.80. 37 38 The CRIES was translated into Chinese and back-translated to English to confirm their accuracy, a minimum Brislin’s requirement for cross-cultural adaptation of established scales. 39 Disputed translations were discussed by two native Chinese speakers, one native Chinese psychologist and the first author, who are also fluent in English, until a consensus was reached.

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__________________________________________________________________ C. Study Design A verbal confidentiality agreement was made that their questionnaire responses or writing samples would not be shown to either their teachers or their parents. Teachers were not present during survey administration or the intervention. No expectation of benefit was given to participants. The intervention was implemented with the students in one class from the primary school. Because we tried to evaluate the effectiveness of the GNT as a group intervention, class was selected as a unit to administrate the intervention. We applied a pre-post design. All participants completed questionnaires one day before and one day after the sessions. The assessments were administered by trained volunteers. The students’ writings were translated for further analysis. Two examples were provided in the results section. D. Writing Instructions GNT aims to enable participants’ to better express their trauma-related emotion. In the GNT condition, students were asked to consider their experiences and thoughts and feelings about the earthquake over three consecutive days: Day 1: describe the earthquake experience and their deepest feelings and thoughts; Day 2: write down any negative thoughts and feelings relating to the earthquake; Day 3: write down any positive thoughts and feelings about the earthquake and their perspective for future. All were told not to be concerned about spelling or grammar. E. Analytic Strategy Preliminary analyses were conducted to evaluate the effect of GNT. We employed paired t-test to compare the PTSD symptom score before and after the intervention. 3. Results A. Baseline 22 school students attended the study, 9 (40.9%) girls and 13 (59.1%) boys. They were aged 9–11 years (mean ±SD, 9.86 ±1.08 years). B. Impact of Treatment Paired t-test revealed a significant decrease in PTSD total score from pre-test (M=28.09, SD=9.30) t post-test (M=22.14, SD=9.21), t (21) =2.62, p=0.016. The mean decrease in CRIES score s was 5.95 with a 95% confidence interval ranging from 1.24 to 10.67. C. Student Narrative Examples The following is one typical example of student’s writing in the GNT group, chosen because it effectively demonstrates the kind of writing produced by 10 year

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__________________________________________________________________ old children. The student improved after three days writing with reduced score on CRIES. Day 1 I think I am a very good person, and I like reading and handwriting. But I feel something is not good for me. Because of the earthquake, our family’s life is not as good as before. I feel I am not as happy as before. The earthquake buried our house in ruins and I am very sad. But I still focus on my studies. However, of my many relatives, some died, and some were hurt seriously. I feel very sad as well. I really miss our former home, former life. I had so many relatives, but how about now? Some of my relatives had gone, and the house had gone… don't have the life as before. Although those had gone, now some Shushu and Ayi from Qingdao [city name] helped us rebuild our new school, and new home. I thank them very much. So I want to speak to Shushu and Ayi that you worked hard and thank you. Day 2 I feel I am very angry today. Because of many things, because I miss my friends and relatives very much, because some friends and relatives were buried in ruins, our house and some material were also buried in ruins. I am very sad, but I will still try to get good scores in the exams. Because only by this, I won’t be looked down by my parents, classmates and relatives, and won't lose face. But I cannot forget those dead good friends, relatives, and my family members. Because they were all good to me, I won't disappoint them. Miss X, I want to say thanks to you, because you can let me speak my innermost thoughts and feelings, thank you, Miss X. I also find that I changed since the earthquake, change to anger. Because some of my friends and relatives had gone, and the house had gone, I get angry. I also feel fear, because lots of people died in the earthquake, and had an awful death, so I am very fearful. Day 3 The missing for dead family members and friends is really heavy and hurt, because I and he [or she] were very very good. I and she were best friends, but when I missed her, I always feel very very unhappy. However, I thank to those Shushu, Ayi and teachers, because some Shushu and Ayi help me construct many buildings, which enable us grow up happily. And teachers, they

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__________________________________________________________________ teach us lot of knowledge, I thank this very much. If it wasn’t because of you, I won't grasp so good knowledge, and won’t be polite like this. So I thank you very much. I also thank my parents, because they raise me up, and teach me a lot as well. Although I miss my dead family and friends, I know they were also unhappy, and so were their parents. So when I grow up, I will help my friend take care of your mother and Dad, so you don’t need to worry about this, rest assured and go ahead! This person is only 10 years old and we think she demonstrates a sophisticated awareness of the world. This is an important point. Many researchers and clinicians fail to acknowledge this level of sophistication, thinking that they know best rather than trying to draw out what the child is thinking. Here the child immediately notes that she think of herself as a good person, indicating an inner resourcefulness and an understanding that the earthquake was not her fault. She recognises the support that she has received from her parents, from her teacher, and from the helpers of Qingdao. Again, this gratitude and recognition of the importance of other people shows a high level of sophistication. The words are all used in their appropriate context. She is able to discuss this and at the same time acknowledge the negative emotions she is experiencing, the sadness, the anger, and the fear. These emotions are all appropriate. There is no sense of how traumatic stress can lead to abnormal emotional and cognitive responses. She feels sadness and anger because she has lost family and friends; and she feels fear because another earthquake might occur that could be equally devastating. Even when she is expected to express her negative emotions on Day 2, she still looks on the positive side. After saying she feels angry she notes how she wants to do well in her education as a way of thanking the teachers and parents who have helped her. It appears that the earthquake is very much in the past (ie contextualised in memory), though the feelings relating to loss are in the present. Indeed, she says that she will work hard for them. On Day 3, when she was expected to try and say positive things, she still initially focuses on the negative, on the feelings she has for her lost friend. This may demonstrate that even when instructions to the contrary are given, it is difficult for the person to focus on the positive – there is perhaps a sense of guilt in focusing on the positive. Of course, the loss of friends and family will never be seen positively, but it appears from the writing that she has gained strength since the earthquake, and wants to succeed as a response to the bad experience. The problem is that we do not know what she was like before the earthquake, and whether what we see in the writing demonstrates change as a result of the earthquake or not. The following is another example of student’s writing in the GNT group. The student did not improve after three-days writing with similar score on CRIES.

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__________________________________________________________________ Day 1 When the earthquake happened, I was taking the PE class. In the moment, I did not know why the earth was shaking. Suddenly, I saw opposite mountain fell down, and I cried. About at 6 o’clock, my uncle came to pick me, and pick my brother in passing. My uncle brought me into the tent. In that moment, I felt anger forthwith, because it destroyed a big area of trees, and killed our dog. I missed my puppy very much. Before the earthquake, I was very nice. Others rated me, I would not scold back. Now others rated me, I do scold back. Ai! Could it be that I become bad? And, at this moment, I like dog, and hug the dog secretly in usual, because Dad and Mum would rebuke me. At grandma’s home, I felt lonely. I could do nothing except kill time by watching TV. In those kinds of days, I felt very sad, and often threw the pillow to blow off steam. That was not me. When I was six Dad and Mum went out to do works for others. When they were out, only grandma looked after me. I remembered that when Dad was out, knife slashed his head a long open. My Dad treated it, but there is still a scar in his head now. I think the money is hard-earned, and should save money. Day2 When the earthquake happened, I felt fear, because the chimney of the canteen fell down, almost press my classmate down, and the mountain opposite was falling. At the thought of Mum and other family members, I cried, and thought my family must get hurt. Luckily our house did not fall down, and family members did not get hurt. As a result, my uncle felt anxious very much when he heard their house had fallen down. The phone was out. The person lived in bungalow was my aunt. She was working in the river, and the water suddenly raised and buried her. I was afraid this kind of thing happened on my family. My grandma almost… because when the earthquake happened, my grandma walked besides the bridge over the river. The earth shook, Yangjia was our land, and fell down suddenly. My grandma hastened to ran up. I did not see my grandma when I was back home, I worried that my grandma had gone. After a few days, grandma came back; she lived on my Chen Popo’s (“popo” is a respectful call for elderly woman) home. After detailed asking, knowing at that time, it rained for a few days, heard that: Aunt’s Mum, which is my Zhang Nainai (“nainai” is a respectful name for an elderly woman, similar to “popo”), her house fell down

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__________________________________________________________________ and broke Zhang Nainai’s feet, and [she] was hospitalized. I was afraid (she) couldn't walk anymore. The flood washed others’ house away, I was afraid it washed my home away. Day3 After the earthquake, many kind-hearted people came to help us. I remember there is a saying of “when disaster strikes, help comes from all sides”. Shushu and Ayi from Qingdao came to rebuild our home. Kind-hearted people all over the world are helping us, and many volunteers came to teach us, and used their own money to buy books for us to read. After our earthquake, many people came to play with us, such as Qiujie, teacher Dameng, Xiaoyun jiejie (“jiejie” is a respectful call for woman older than the caller) came to play with us. In our school, Gege(“gege” a respectful call for man older than the caller) Jiejie from Hong Kong came to play with us, such as Xiaoqiang Gege, Xiaoyu Jiejie, Xiaoru Jiejie, Xiaohui Jiejie , and a funny handsome boy. In fact we did not know his real name; he just let us call him Handsome. In the activity of Bao qiang yu wawa, I was supposed to bring one Gege or Jiejie to visit our people and material. Who knew I was sick and couldn't go? It was a shame. But now thinking about it, should thank them because they let us get warmth. The first impression from this writing is that it is not fully coherent. On Day 1, the narrative moved from the earthquake experience to the puppy, which is coherent, and then to his father’s scar from a different incident. Perhaps it is still difficult to ask a 10 year old child to focus on a single thing within 20 minutes, or perhaps it is that the child is thinking about how accidents can cause damage to people. During Day 2, the narrative is about other people’s experience, rather than his. This might reflect it is not memories of the day of the earthquake but what he has heard afterwards. This is a difficulty with any narrative analysis of an historical event. Real narratives or memories are constructed from what actually happened and later interpretation, whether it is the person’s own or someone else’s. The child wrote about negative feelings such as “fear” and “worry”. However, compared to the first example, this child did not appear to express his negative emotions deeply – but again, this may be a lack of sophistication in his writing style. On Day 3, he writes about his positive thoughts about the volunteers. He describes the scenes, but does not appear to explore his deeper thoughts and feelings, which reflects the instructions rather than something inherent in the child. This narrative example is less incoherent than the first one; there is the absence of a uniting theme, and the presence of disorganisation. Coherence has been

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__________________________________________________________________ highlighted as a vital characteristic of a “good story”, both theoretically and empirically. 40 The use of further instructions should be to facilitate the building of a “good story” from the children. From these examples, we could speculate that the level of coherence may be able to predict improvement to some extent. Further analyses are needed to test this. The presence of these two examples shows how this intervention works and the importance of participants’ qualitative responses. Both children did not write down a detailed description of the earthquake event. This is consistent with the result from previous study that, children may also report incomplete narratives if they have not developed appropriate strategies to recall their memories 41. Due to an under-developed spatio-temporal memory system, children are likely to distort the actual time and context of events. 42 These cognitive limitations provide implications for our understanding of children’s reactions to trauma. These features are reflected in the content of children’s trauma narratives above. Therefore, we also anticipated that trauma narratives may assist in identifying children who are experiencing difficulties post-trauma and who would benefit from intervention. Again, further analysis combining the qualitative and quantitative data will be done to explore this. From a global perspective, children are not strangers to trauma. Sometimes adults get used to the safe world, and build their life on this ‘fantasy’ of safety. Their perception undoubtedly has impact on their children. When the inevitable danger manifests itself, when the earth shakes, when illness comes, when the glass breaks, it cracks not only buildings but the sanity if people have staked too much on the fantasy of security. However, it’s only the beginning. Traumatised people’s memories were broken by the earthquake. They lose coherence of their life narratives; traumatic events fundamentally alter the way people think, their views about their own strengths and weakness, how they believe others should act and the nature of the world generally. It is as though the written words of their lives are jumbled up and made meaningless. Compared with adults, children are affected even more. They are developing and open to any experience, which contributes to the building of their cognition system, self -identity and view of the world. No one knows exactly what happened in their minds when encountering the earthquake, and how they view the earthquake when the shakings stop, except by exploring their narratives. Narratives reflect memories, which consist of individual recollections of the past, which may or may not be accurate, and which may or may not be drawn together to form an individual narrative about the past that enhances, enlightens and supports an individual’s personal self-image. People deliberately choose to emphasise certain memories and try to forget others. People try to forget those things in the past which they perceive as bad and which do not fit their current concepts of the self or the world. Just as remembering is important in understanding our narratives, so is forgetting.

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__________________________________________________________________ Recovery from trauma means making sense of it all again, learning to understand the world as it is in the light of the traumatic event, incorporating the new trauma-related information into one’s own narratives. 4. Discussion This pilot study tried to gain a first impression of GNT in application of children traumatised by the earthquake. Results showed an important reduction in posttraumatic symptoms, as early as the post test. The positive effects of the intervention for psychological health are consistent with theories about how EW works: the act of converting emotions and images into words changes the way the person organises and thinks about the trauma experience. 43 However, this study presents with the limitations of pilot studies with small sample size. Symptom changes cannot be causally attributed to GNT, but might also be caused by spontaneous remission. Nevertheless, a follow-up study suggest that posttraumatic mental health problems after natural disaster in children have reached epidemic proportions and remain high for a long period, the high prevalence of PTSD in the children population of earthquake area (with 11.2% six months after the earthquake and 13.4% 12 month after the earthquake for PTSD), it seems unlikely that spontaneous remission has occurred. 44Otherwise, the follow-up high prevalence would be difficult to explain, as the PTSD should have remitted earlier. Therefore, this pilot study suggests that GNT might be used effectively as a short-term group intervention with traumatised children. A possible adjustment would be to allocate further individual treatment where needed, such as where the symptoms were particularly severe or numerous, or combined with other mental illness. Further research is required to compare the result of EW and GNT, as there were differences relating to writing instructions, we don’t know whether providing instructions for people to think positively, to think about any good that would set them up to change the way they perceive their memories of the experience. Previous research has focused on any change that occurs on psychological variables before and after the EW intervention. Indeed, in many cases the participant is told to throw away what they have written. The brief analysis of the two examples in the Results section demonstrates that if we are to find ways of improving these techniques we should be analysing what is written. EW is a GNT that focuses on how narratives can develop when people are simply told to write about some difficult experience. What we need to do now is go further than that and look at the narrative content, structure and tone that is being used as people write, and to examine how these change over successive writing episodes, or why some writers cannot perceive benefit. Once we can link that with the instructions that have been given we will be in a place to improve those instructions. After all, narrative is a two way process; the author needs a reader, and that reader should respond to what is being written so that the author can improve their writing through the feedback.

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__________________________________________________________________ There is also the issue of culture. Various writing narrative interventions are being used across different cultures, and it is important to evaluate the effectiveness of these interventions. 45 There are no published EW studies with Chinese children. This makes it difficult to know whether writing therapy is effective with non-western cultures, because it is possible that cross-cultural differences in emotional expression, or the nature of the writing itself (pictographic) might affect the benefit that Chinese children may gain from this kind of an intervention. This is the first study to apply these writing techniques on a Chinese sample. Further research is needed to determine whether such guided techniques can be developed to enhance the benefits of the writing experience for traumatised people. A longitual study exploring the long-term effect of GNT is being planned. However, one thing must be noticed is the importance of speaking of or writing about trauma experience may be underscored by the reluctance of many children, who have been through trauma. While there are numerous theories about this reluctance – for example, children may concerns about disclosure of trauma experience, and about the potential risk of reliving trauma in the context due to psychological mechanisms of denial and suppression This concern about encountering re-traumatisation upon giving expression to experiences of trauma is also significant when using GNT. It is understandable that, in speaking of their experiences of trauma, some children would become trapped in the immediacy of the experience of the trauma they have lived through; other than be reliving of the experience. This very outcome could be witnessed in circumstances in which children narrate trauma experience that reinforce the negative conclusions they hold about their identity and about their lives. This is usually associated with an escalation of a sense of vulnerability, of hopelessness, of desolation, and of futility. 46 Therefore, a psychological and emotional safety context is quite important for children when they speak of or write about trauma experience; otherwise, there is a strong chance that the child, in response to encouragement to express their experience of trauma, will find themselves redefined by the trauma. In present study, school enviroment was chosen as a relatively safe environment. Finally, it should be noticed that this study is trying to find ways to improve the effectiveness of a writing narrative programme. Narrative development can occur in a number of ways. Narratives can be constructed through discussion with others, thinking it through for oneself, writing down one’s interpretation of the traumatic event, drawing or painting narratives about their trauma. From other chapters in this section of this book, narratives of plays and performance are explored. 47 48 Here we can see that there are various ways of how people construct narrative to deal with their memories in this chapter. These narratives consist of recollections of individual experience that has been affected by social and cultural influences such as the media, family and friends, and also by self-education and development.

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__________________________________________________________________ No matter which way people choose, they all deserve an opportunity to make sense of our life, integrate the past with the present with a view to how we intent to live our lives in the future.

Notes 1

Anthony V. Rubonis and Leonard Bickman, ‘Psychological Impairment in the Wake of Disaster: The Disaster-Psychopathology Relationship’, Psychological Bulletin 109 (1991): 384-99. 2 Armen K. Goenjian, David Walling, Alan M. Steinberg, Ida Karayan, Louis M. Najarian, and Robert Pynoos, ‘A Prospective Study of Posttraumatic Stress and Depressive Reactions Among Treated and Untreated Adolescents 5 years after a Catastrophic Disaster’, The American Journal of Psychiatry 162 (2005): 2302-8. 3 Armen K. Goenjian, Robert S. Pynoos, Alan M. Steinberg, Louis M, Najarian, Joan R. Asarnow, Ida Karayan, Micheline Ghurabi, and Andlynn A. Fairbanks, ‘Psychiatric Comorbidity in Children after the 1988 Earthquake in Armenia’, Depression 34 (1995): 1174-84. 4 Chian-Jue Kuo, Hwa-Sheng Tang, Charng-Jer Tsay, Shi-Kwang Lin, Wei-Herng Hu, and Chiao-Chicy Chen, ‘Prevalence of Psychiatric Disorders among Bereaved Survivors of a Disastrous Earthquake in Taiwan’, Psychiatric Services (Washington, D.C.) 54 (2003): 249-51. 5 Goenjain, Pynoos, Steinberg, Najarian, Asarnow, Karayan, Ghurabi and Fairbanks, ‘Psychiatric Comorbidity in Children’, 2303. 6 National Institute for Clinical Excellence [NICE], National Clinical Practice Guideline Number 26: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder – The Management of PTSD in Adults and Children in Primary and Secondary Care (London: Author, 2005). 7 Fran H, Norris, Fran H. Norris, Matthew J. Friedman, and Patricia J. Watson, ‘60,000 Disaster Victims Speak: Part I. An Empirical Review of the Empirical Literature, 1981-2001’, Psychiatry 65 (2002): 207-39. 8 Anthony T. Ng, ‘Trauma and Disaster : Response and Management’, Psychiatric Services 56 (2005): 876-7. 9 NICE, the Management of PTSD. 10 Nigel C. Hunt, Memory, War and Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 115. 11 Hunt, Memory, War and Trauma, 119. 12 Hunt, Memory, War and Trauma, 119. 13 Richard O’Kearney and Kelly Perrott. ‘Trauma Narratives in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Review,’ Journal of Traumatic Stress 19 (2006): 81-93. 14 Hunt, Memory, War and Trauma, 125.

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__________________________________________________________________ 15

Douglas J. Bremner, John H. Krystal, Steven M. Southwick and Dennis S. Charney, ‘Functional Neuroanatomical Correlates of the Effects of Stress on Memory’, Journal of Traumatic Stress 8 (1995): 527-553. 16 Ibid., 528-529. 17 Hunt, Memory, War and Trauma, 115. 18 Awelani Lena Moyo, in this volume. 19 Tamar Meskin and Tanya van der Walt, in this volume. 20 Hunt, Memory, War and Trauma, 126. 21 James W. Pennebaker and Sandra K. Beall, ‘Confronting a Traumatic Event: toward an Understanding of Inhibition and Disease’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology 95 (1986): 274-81. 22 Joshua M. Smyth, ‘Written Emotional Expression: Effect Sizes, Outcome Types, and Moderating Variables’, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 66 (1998): 174-84. 23 Joanne Frattaroli, ‘Experimental Disclosure and Its Moderators: A MetaAnalysis’, Psychological Bulletin 132 (2006): 823-65. 24 Ibid., 825 25 Fabrizia Giannotta, Michele Settanni, Wendy Kliewer, and Silvia Ciairano, ‘Results of An Italian School-Based Expressive Writing Intervention Trial Focused on Peer Problems’, Journal of Adolescence 32 (2009): 1377-89. 26 James W. Pennebaker, ‘Telling Stories: The Health Benefits of Narrative’, Literature and Medicine 19 (2000): 3-18. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Umit Tural, Bülent Coşkun, Emin Onder, Aytül Corapçioğlu, Mustafa Yildiz, Coşkun Kesepara, Işik Karakaya, Mustafa Aydin, Ayla Erol, Fuat Torun , and Gaye Aybar, ‘Psychological Consequences of the 1999 Earthquake in Turkey’, Journal of Traumatic Stress 17(2004):451-459. 30 James Pennebaker and Martha Francis, ‘Cognitive, Emotional, and Language Processes in Disclosure’, Cognition & Emotion 10 (1996): 601-626. 31 Joshua Smyth, Nicole True and Joy Souto, ‘Effects of Writing about Traumatic Experiences: The Necessity for Narrative Structuring’, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 20 (2001): 161-172. 32 Edna B. Foa, Chris Molnar, and Laurie Cashman, ‘Change in Rape Narratives during Exposure Therapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder’, Journal of Traumatic Stress 8 (1995): 675-690. 33 Annette L. Stanton, ‘Randomized, Controlled Trial of Written Emotional Expression and Benefit Finding in Breast Cancer Patients’, Journal of Clinical Oncology 20 (2002): 4160-4168.

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__________________________________________________________________ 34

Ahmad R. Hariri, Susan Y. Bookheimer, and John C. Mazziotta, ‘Modulating Emotional Responses: Effects of a Neocortical Network on the Limbic System’, Neuroreport 11 (2000): 43-8. 35 Robert S. Pynoos, Alan M. Steinberg, and Lisa Aronson, ‘Traumatic Experiences: The Early Organisation of Memory in School-age Children and Adolescent’, in Trauma and Memory: Clinical and Legal Controversies, ed. Paul S. Appelbaum, Lisa A. Uyehara, Mark R. Elin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 272-289. 36 Nigel C. Hunt and Sue McHale, Making Sense of Trauma: How to Tell Your Story (London: Sheldon Books: forthcoming). 37 Patrick Smith, Sean Perrina, Atle Dyregrovb, and William Yule, ‘Principal Components Analysis of the Impact of Event Scale with Children in War’, Personality and Individual Differences 34 (2003): 315-322. 38 Ibid., 315. 39 Richard W. Brislin, ‘Back-Translation for Cross-Cultural Research’, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 1 (1970): 185-216. 40 Hunt, Memory, War and Trauma, 115. 41 Marcia K. Johnson and Mary Ann Foley, ‘Differentiating Fact from Fantasy: The Reliability of Children’s Memory’, Journal of Social Issues 40 (1984):33-50. 42 Robert S. Pynoos, Alan M. Steinberg, and Lisa Aronson, ‘Early Organisation of Memory’, 45. 43 James W. Pennebaker, ‘Putting Stress into Words: Health, Linguistic, and Therapeutic Implications’, Behaviour Research and Therapy 31 (1993): 539-48. 44 Mingxin Liu, Li Wang, Zhanbiao Shi, Zhen Zhang, Kan Zhang, and Jianhua Shen. ‘Mental Health Problems among Children One-Year after Sichuan Earthquake in China: A Follow-up Study’, PloS one 6 (2011): 1-6. 45 Fabrizia Giannotta, Michele Settanni, Wendy Kliewer, and Silvia Ciairano. ‘Results of an Italian school-Based Expressive Writing Intervention Trial Focused on Peer Problems’, Journal of Adolescence 32 (2009): 1377-1389. 46 Michael White, ‘Children, Trauma and Subordinate Storyline Development’ The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work 3 (2005): 10-21. 47 Meskin and van der Walt, ‘Private Griefs’. 48 Moyo, ‘A Quiet Horror’.

Bibliography Brislin, Richard. W. ‘Back-Translation for Cross-Cultural Research’. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 1 (1970): 185-216.

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__________________________________________________________________ Douglas, Bremner J., John H. Krystal, Steven M. Southwick, and Dennis Charney.‘Functional Neuroanatomical Correlates of the Effects of Stress on Memory’. Journal of Traumatic Stress 8 (1995): 527-553. Foa, Edna B., Chris Molnar and Laurie Cashman. ‘Change in Rape Narratives during Exposure Therapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder’. Journal of Traumatic Stress 8 (1995): 675-690. Giannotta, Fabrizia, Michele Settanni, Wendy Kliewer and Silvia Ciairano. ‘Results of An Italian School-Based Expressive Writing Intervention Trial Focused on Peer Problems’. Journal of Adolescence 32 (2009): 1377-89. Goenjian Armen K., Robert S. Pynoos, Alan M. Steinberg, Louis M. Najarian, Joan R. Asarnow, Ida Karayan, Micheline Ghurabi, and Lynn A. Fairbanks. ‘Psychiatric Comorbidity in Children after the 1988 Earthquake in Armenia’. Depression 34 (1995): 1174-1184. Goenjian, Armen K., David Walling, Alan M. Steinberg, Ida Karayan, Louis M. Najarian, and Robert Pynoos, ‘A Prospective Study of Posttraumatic Stress and Depressive Reactions among Treated and Untreated Adolescents 5 Years after a Catastrophic Disaster’. The American Journal of Psychiatry 162 (2005): 2302-8. Hariri, Ahmad R., Susan Y. Bookheimer and John C. Mazziotta. ‘Modulating Emotional Responses: Effects of a Neocortical Network on the Limbic System’. Neuroreport 11 (2000): 43-8. Hunt, Nigel C. Memory, War and Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Hunt, Nigel C. and Sue McHale. Making Sense of Trauma: How to Tell Your Story London: Sheldon Books, forthcoming. Johnson Marcia K., and Mary Ann Foley. ‘Differentiating Fact from Fantasy: The Reliability of Children’s Memory’. Journal of Social Issues 40 (1984):33-50. Kuo, Chian-Jue., Hwa-Sheng Tang, Charng-Jer Tsay, Shi-Kwang Lin, Wei-Herng Hu, and Chiao-Chicy Chen. ‘Prevalence of Psychiatric Disorders among Bereaved Survivors of a Disastrous Earthquake in Taiwan’. Psychiatric Services (Washington, D.C.) 54 (2003): 249-51.

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__________________________________________________________________ Liu, Mingxin, Li Wang, Zhanbiao Shi, Zhen Zhang, Kan Zhang, and Jianhua Shen. ‘Mental Health Problems among Children One-Year after Sichuan Earthquake in China: A Follow-Up Study’. PloS one 6 (2011): 1-6. National Institute for Clinical Excellence [NICE], National Clinical Practice Guideline Number 26: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder – The Management of PTSD in Adults and Children in Primary and Secondary care. London: Author, 2005. Ng, Anthony T. ‘Trauma and Disaster: Response and Management’. Psychiatric Services 56 (2005): 876-7. Norris, Fran H., Mathew J. Friedman, Patricia J. Watson, Christopher M. Byrne, Eolia Diaz, and Krzysztof Kaniasty. ‘60,000 Disaster Victims Speak: Part I. An Empirical Review of the Empirical Literature, 1981-2001’. Psychiatry 65 (2002): 207-39. O’Kearney, Richard and Kelly Perrott. ‘Trauma Narratives in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Review’. Journal of Traumatic Stress 19 (2006): 81-93. Patrick, Smith, Sean Perrina, Atle Dyregrovb and William Yule. ‘Principal Components Analysis of the Impact of Event Scale with Children in War’. Personality and Individual Differences 34 (2003): 315-322. Pennebaker, James W. ‘Putting Stress into Words: Health, Linguistic, and Therapeutic Implications’. Behaviour Research and Therapy 31 (1993): 539-48. Pennebaker, James W. ‘Telling Stories: the Health Benefits of Narrative’. Literature and Medicine 19 (2000): 3-18. Pennebaker, James W. and Beall, Sandra K. ‘Confronting a Traumatic Event: toward an Understanding of Inhibition and Disease’. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 95 (1986): 274-81. Pennebaker, James W., and Martha Francis. ‘Cognitive, Emotional, and Language Processes in Disclosure’. Cognition & Emotion 10 (1996): 601-626.

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__________________________________________________________________ Pynoos, Robert S., Alan M. Steinberg and Lisa Aronson. ‘Traumatic Experiences: The Early Organisation of Memory in School-age Children and Adolescent’. Trauma and Memory: Clinical and Legal Controversies, edited by Paul S. Appelbaum, Lisa A. Uyehara and Mark R. Elin, 272-292. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Rubonis Anthony V., and Leonard Bickman. ‘Psychological Impairment in the Wake of Disaster: The Disaster-Psychopathology Relationship’. Psychological Bulletin 109 (1991): 384-99. Smyth, Joshua M. ‘Written Emotional Expression: Effect Sizes, Outcome Types, and Moderating Variables’. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 66, (1998): 174-84. Smyth, Joshua, Nicole True and Joy Souto. ‘Effects of Writing about Traumatic Experiences: The Necessity for Narrative Structuring’. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 20 (2001): 161-172. Stanton, Annette L., ‘Randomized, Controlled Trial of Written Emotional Expression and Benefit Finding in Breast Cancer Patients’. Journal of Clinical Oncology 20 (2002): 4160-4168. Tural, Umit, Bülent Coşkun, Emin Onder, Aytül Corapçioğlu, Mustafa Yildiz, Coşkun Kesepara, Işik Karakaya, Mustafa Aydin Ayla Erol, Fuat Torun and Gaye Aybar. ‘Psychological Consequences of the 1999 Earthquake in Turkey’. Journal of Traumatic Stress 17 (2004): 451-459. White, Michael. ‘Children, Trauma and Subordinate Storyline Development’. The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work 3 (2005): 10-21. Yinyin Zang is a PhD research student in health psychology at the Institute of Work, Health & Organisations, University of Nottingham. Her studies mainly focus on the psychosocial impact of traumatic events and cross-culture comparison of trauma narrative. Currently her research and writings are devoted to exploring the effect of narrative intervention with earthquake survivors. Nigel Hunt is an Associate Professor in health psychology at the Institute of Work, Health & Organisations, University of Nottingham. His main research interests concern the consequences of traumatic experiences, particularly in relation to

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__________________________________________________________________ memory, coping and narrative development, and the interpersonal transmission of traumatic memories. Tom Cox is Professor of Organisational Psychology at the Institute of Work, Health & Organisations, University of Nottingham. He specialises in occupational health and received a CBE for his contribution to this area. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Public Health. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Occupational Medicine, Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. He is involved with a number of projects on the impact of severely stressful and traumatic events both at work and elsewhere.

A Jungian Approach to Understanding and Treating Adopted Children Who were Traumatised Prior to Their Adoption Mark Bortz Abstract All adopted children face a myriad of psychological and existential issues. This is further impacted if the child experiences trauma prior to the adoption. In this chapter I will present a case study by revisiting the myth of Oedipus exploring his trauma prior to adoption and the impact of the unaddressed trauma in his personality and later development. The work of two Jungian theoreticians offers a profound insight for understanding these children. Erich Neumann explores how the emergence of ego and consciousness is facilitated by the relationship with the primary parent. When the environment obstructs or fails to facilitate the evolution of the ego an emergency ego arises that allows the child to survive at the expense of growth and development. Donald Kalsched has suggested that when faced with severe trauma, that the ego cannot cope with, the self develops archetypal defences that allow the child to survive but hinder further development. These survival strategies make these children particularly difficult to engage with therapeutically. Their priority is to survive, rather than heal or develop. They have a great deal of difficulty in verbalising or even imagining their trauma. Carl Jung’s respect of the psyche as a self-healing system allows us a different approach in treating these children. Nonverbal therapeutic modalities allow the psyche of these children to engage in a therapeutic process. Sand play therapy is particularly useful in working with these children. This is demonstrated by a clinical vignette focusing on three sand worlds of a child who had been traumatized prior to adoption. Key Words: Adoption, emergency ego, Jung, Kalsched, Neumann, Oedipus, sand play, self-care system, psyche as self-healing system, trauma. ***** 1. Introduction All adopted children face a myriad of psychological and existential issues. Children who are adopted are always abandoned by their biological parents on a concrete or symbolic level. 1 Often abandonment takes place when the child is still egocentric. That is to say, the child believes that what happens to him (or her) happens because of him. Thus the child blames him or herself for the abandonment. Thus these children have fantasies, which feel very real to them, that they are reprehensibly bad and unlovable. They feel vulnerable to further abandonment no matter how loving and dedicated the adopted parents are. All this is further impacted if the child experiences trauma prior to the adoption. Children, who experience trauma, particularly during infancy, have issues that impact every

202 A Jungian Approach to Understanding and Treating Adopted Children __________________________________________________________________ aspect of their development and their very being. During the last decade or so my exposure and studying of Jungian psychology paralleled a calling on a practical and deeply emotional level to work with a large number of children who were adopted. All of these children had undergone immense trauma prior to their adoption. Most of these children have loving supportive adopted parents. But prior to adoption they were in orphanages where hunger, illness, unhygienic environment, neglect and inconsistent care were part of their daily reality. To the point, that their physical and psychological survival was not a given. Jungian ideas, particularly Erich Neumann’s concept of the emergency ego, and Donald Kalsched’s concept of the archetypal self-care system, and possibly, more importantly, his profound understanding of unimaginable trauma has profoundly helped me understand these children, and develop an appreciation, of how unimaginable their early trauma is for them. 2 Along with these concepts, Carl Jung’s profound respect of the psyche as a self-healing system, informed my work with these children. 3 The free and protected space of sand play therapy and the fact that images are the psyche’s first language suggests that sand play therapy is an extraordinary therapeutic technique that profoundly facilitates the psyche healing itself. 4 This is particularly so when the survival techniques used by these children impinge on an engagement in other psychotherapeutic process. Before relating to these concepts I wish to present a case history that we are all familiar with. 2. Oedipus Revisited: A Case History of Trauma and Adoption The myth of Oedipus is the myth most used and abused in psychology. Yes, Oedipus kills his father and sleeps with his mother, but nowhere in the myth, particularly Sophocles’ dramatization of the myth, is there any suggestion of him killing his father in order to sleep with his mother. Nevertheless the Oedipus myth is a profound example of early untreated trauma, even though he was adopted by loving parents. It is a story of an emergency ego, acting out, and a slow healing process that leads to individuation and spiritual growth. 5 Oedipus’s story starts before his birth. Three times Lauis, the boy’s biological father, the king of Thebes, is warned that if he has a child the child will kill him. In a state of drunken passion the boy is conceived. We are not told for how long Oedipus remains with his biological parents. In Sophocles’ extraordinary dramatization of the myth we see that the mother, Jocasta, cooperates with her husband in the attempted cruel murder of her son, and it is unlikely that he received any nurturing from her. In the middle of winter Lauis pierces the boy’s feet and sends him to be left on a hill during harsh weather and abandoned there to die. Instead of abandoning the child to his death Oedipus is taken by a shepherd to Corinth where he is adopted by the King and Queen, Periboe and Polybus. He is named Oedipus, which means swollen foot. 6 In Sophocles’ play this is the only reference to his early trauma. How could Periboe and Polybus imagine the brutality

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__________________________________________________________________ their child has undergone? Perhaps like many adopting parents it was easier for them not to imagine or investigate. We know from the myth that they do not tell him he is adopted. In spite of his loving parents Oedipus easily bursts into fits of rage. This is not difficult to understand. Untreated trauma often leads to emotional over reaction or with drawl as will be shown in the next two sections. A drunken guest of his father accuses him of not being his mild father’s true son. Oedipus is greatly troubled by this accusation. Even when the events of children’s lives are not addressed there are always memories of these events somewhere in their psyche. Hence, children always know the truth somewhere in their psyche. He goes to Delphi, Apollo’s shrine, to find out if what he suspects is true. Before he has a chance to ask his question he is told that he will kill his father and marry his mother. His love of his adopted parents, who he believes on a conscious level are his only parents, and what we will later see as the effect of an emergency ego, does not allow him to ever return home, but to become a lonely and homeless wanderer. 7 On his journey he meets up with his biological father. The two do not recognize each other. On a conscious level Oedipus does not suspect that Periboe is not his father. There is a confrontation. The father’s chariot rolls over Oedipus’s swollen foot. Or symbolically the trauma wound is further wounded. There is an argument. The king strikes his son. In a fit of rage Oedipus retaliates killing the king, his father. His marriage and relationship with his biological mother is not a direct result of the murder, but rather the reward for him solving the riddle of the Sphinx and winning the hand of the recently widowed queen. The most profound respect of the power of the unconscious cannot allow us to believe that unconsciously killing a stranger would allow him, as a lonely homeless wanderer, to marry the widowed queen or that he wishes to sleep with her because she is his mother. Oedipus rules Thebes for twenty years, siring four children. Sophocles’ play Oedipus the King tells the story how Oedipus discovers the truth. His wife/mother immediately commits suicide. Is it guilt about sleeping with her son, or the earlier guilt of abandoning her own son? Oedipus accepts his own guilt. He gives up his kingship and blinds himself. This is not the end of his saga. We meet him again in a different play by Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus. Here he is at the end of his days. Like the blind seer Teiresias, who plays such a dramatic role in Oedipus’s life, the now blind Oedipus too looks inwards when he can no longer look outward. In this play, possibly written close to Sophocles’ own death, we meet one of western literatures most individuated and spiritually developed figures. As a psychotherapist I can only ask what would have happened if his long soul work started when he was still a child? Oedipus is traumatized as an infant and young child. His ego is only beginning to be formed. In his biological parent’s house the people who are meant to take care of him persecute him. After his adoption his trauma is never addressed. This is

204 A Jungian Approach to Understanding and Treating Adopted Children __________________________________________________________________ a common picture for children who undergo trauma before adoption. Often after adoption, loving parents genuinely believe that their love is enough. Like Periboe and Polybus they cannot imagine the brutality their child has undergone. Naively they may believe the child is resilient to the early trauma. Not recognizing the trauma is a further trauma. Children are not always resilient but they do adapt. In the next two sections we will see how well they adapt, and how necessary this adaptation is for the survival of the trauma. Nevertheless the adaptation strategy will inhibit further growth and inhibit the feeling of being fully human long after adoption and the end of the initial trauma. 3. Erich Neumann’s Concept of the Emergency Ego Erich Neumann is widely recognized as Carl Jung’s most creative and scholarly student. 8 In his Opus Magnus he draws on a wide range of mythology to show how the development of the individual’s consciousness goes through the same archetypal stages as the development of human consciousness as a whole. His last book is a companion to his earlier work focusing on how these archetypal themes are played out psychologically. 9 Neumann distinguishes between the physical and psychological birth of the human infant. He writes ‘The human child…must go through an extra-uterine as well as intra-uterine phase.’ 10 Or, more simply put the nine months in the womb is not enough for psychological birth and the human infant spends another stage in a womb like experience with his or her mother. This phase he calls the uroboric phase. The uroboros is an ancient universal symbol of the snake or dragon that swallows their own tail thus capturing the unitary experience of the infant within the primal relationship. During this phase the foundations of the child’s relationship to its body, unconsciousness, self, others and the world is established. Consciousness with the ego as its centre arises from an unconscious uroboric experience of the unconscious self and the primary relationship. In addition during this stage we see decisive steps in the formation of a positive integral ego. A positive integral ego is one that is able to assimilate and integrate the positive and negative qualities of the inner and outer world. An ego that is able to be in dialogue with the self. Neumann regards the ego-self axis as the basis of human development and psychological health. This healthy ego unfolds in an evolutionary manner under the protection and guidance of the primary parent. 11 But what happens when the mother is persecutory, or abandons the infant, as in the case of Oedipus, or orphans who have no primary care, and experience trauma prior to adoption? Trauma that is unimaginable by the adopting parents, mental health professionals and most importantly the child himself. Neumann differentiates two possible consequences. The first option is ‘apathy’, an egoless state of decline. The child gives up, or dissociates. The second option is the establishment of what has become known as an ‘emergency ego’. Without the shelter of the primal relationship the emergency ego is a distressed negative ego that has emerged prematurely. 12 Not being able to rely on the other it awakens too

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__________________________________________________________________ soon and is driven prematurely to independence by the situation of hunger, anxiety, distress and a myriad of brutal factors the unprotected infant faces. This is particularly so when the trauma is early in the child’s life, and is chronically sustained. Rather than feel helpless and unsafe the emergency ego is consumed with aggression and rage. It is often provocative in a premature and inappropriate manner. The emergency ego helps the child survive horrific hardships, but if it remains after the trauma, it impacts almost every aspect of the child’s behaviour. A rigid emergency ego is associated with almost all psychopathology. During the last two decades there has been a great interest on the influence of early trauma on neurological development. 13 The brain is our most important physiological organ of adaptation. During the first years of life the brain is developing. The child who is in a state of trauma and responds in a hyper aroused provocative manner develops a brain with traits different to the child who develops in a safe holding environment. The distressed emergency ego approaches learning and thinking in a different manner. Often, the energy it uses to survive leaves very little energy for learning or long term strategies. The post-traumatised children I see in my clinic are often extremely bright, but they have a reluctance to learn or to think long term. In a profound manner a young girl who was engaged in a genuine healing process said to me ‘Mark, I come here because I want to learn to become smart’. The emergency ego is primarily concerned with survival. In this situation there is very little energy for relatedness to others, and often more devastating, to their own self. There is very little energy for feeling, which is often perceived as a threat. These perceptions were not always incorrect. Unfortunately the emergency ego does not always perceive change in the environment. Not allowing one self to feel or connect with others leaves the child in a state of acute suffering and loneliness. In short the emergency ego that helps the child survive the trauma later inhibits a wide range of experiences that makes life worthwhile. The child survives. In fact many post-traumatized children have excellent survival skills. But their ability to develop, feel, think, learn, relate to themselves and to others is severely inhibited by the emergency ego. An additional consequence is that the same survival, adaption strategies leaves them lacking the relational and reflective abilities that are often essential in order to engage in a therapeutic process that could free them from the constraints of this no longer necessary emergency ego. 4. Donald Kalsched’s Concept of Archetypal Defences Kalsched’s work with adult patients who had undergone early trauma led him to new conceptualizations. 14 His ability to integrate Jungian concepts with psychoanalytical concepts helped him to develop an important framework to understanding the impact of early trauma. Kalsched notes that every life form is centrally preoccupied with protection and defence. He concurs with most depth psychologists, that the ego is responsible for defences. He distinguishes between bearable threats, anxiety or affects with unbearable threats, anxiety or affects. The

206 A Jungian Approach to Understanding and Treating Adopted Children __________________________________________________________________ bearable anxiety and affects are what the ego can contend with. Unbearable anxiety and affects are associated with unbearable events, in other words, trauma. Often trauma is too severe for the ego to contend with. This is particularly true when the trauma happens early on in life, and the ego is not fully formed. This is even worse in the case of Oedipus or other children who are born into abusive or neglectful environments. In these environments the ego begins its formation in a hostile or traumatic environment. Kalsched sees the psyche having another line of defence. The self, as the centre of the psyche and the unconscious can create defences too. Because the self is more connected to the collective unconscious, it had archetypal or even numinous defences at its disposal. Here Kalsched accepts a basic Jungian assumption, that besides the personal unconscious we also have a collective unconscious. Here we have archetypal structures and energy. Some of these archetypal structures can be characterised by possessing Devine or demonic energy as opposed to energy that is typically human. When the self feels its personal spirit is to be violated or destroyed and that it cannot call on the ego, which is unformed or inadequate in the face of the threat, it creates an archetypal self-care system to protect the personal spirit from total annihilation. These defences allow the personal spirit, what Kalsched sees, as the essence of animation, or vitality, to survive. Nevertheless, the person pays a horrifically high price for these defences. Because the self, often correctly, perceive its self and the personal spirit being threatened with total non-being or utter annihilation it feels justified for using harsh or dark defences. These defences often come from the dark side of the numinous. Often when the trauma is one that the infant is born into, there are no positive human figures to model these self-care figures on. Hence the self can only rely on a magical or mythological energy as opposed to human energy that is sadly lacking. Here the self finds demonic figures in the archetypal psyche. Often they are personified as demons. Often these defences are persecutory. Kalsched compares this care taking system as an inner ‘Jewish Defence League’ whose slogan after the Holocaust was ‘never again’. In a similar manner the demonic care system says ‘never again will the traumatized personal spirit suffer so badly or face a cruel reality’. Before this will happen the self-care system will do whatever is in its power to do: if necessary disperse it into fragments or dissociate, drive it crazy, numb it with intoxicating substance, and keep killing it to avoid hope. 15 In short these defensive, self-preservation mechanisms can be associated with almost all of psychopathology. Like many other none integrated splits in the archetypal realm, one finds a dyad that is selfdestructive. The self-care system can be tyrannical and abusive while the personal spirit is seen, once correctly, as fragile and vulnerable. Because this configuration is often formed when the child is very young and perceives the world in an egocentric manner, or ‘what happens to me happens because of me’, his core self or the personal spirit is seen as reprehensibly bad. Kalsched goes as far as comparing the demonic self-care system as an auto immune disease (AIDS)

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__________________________________________________________________ attacking the very psyche it is defending. 16 The self-care system is archaic and archetypal, mistakably perceiving each new life event as a dangerous event. Because danger is perceived as a threat of utter destruction, the new is ruthlessly attacked. Often the initial trauma is no longer present but the self-care system is unable or unwilling to learn and hence remains tyrannical and destructive well after the danger has passed. There are three misperceived dangers the self-care system is particularly adamant to avoid: wholeness or integration; emotions; and being in relationship. Let us look at each danger separately. A. ‘Integration and Wholeness’ Here Kalsched uses the metaphor of a circuit breaker of an electrical panel in a house. When the trauma occurs the self-disintegrates all unified psychological experience of the trauma. The experience is dispersed to the deep unconscious areas of the psyche inaccessible to both memory and consciousness. The conscious ego literally has no memory or image of the trauma. The trauma is truly a shattering experience. For example part of the experience can be placed in the body as a somatic symptom; whereas another part is placed in the mind as a hallucinating image. Affect, image, body symptoms could all exist but not be known to each other. Thus the trauma is genuinely unimaginable, unthinkable and unknowable. Not only because of the horrific nature of the trauma, but because the self has not allowed the ego to be aware of the trauma. Yet the self-care system is aware of the trauma. Integration and wholeness would make both the personal spirit and ego vulnerable for experiencing the trauma. Again survival is at any cost. The demonic self care system chooses fragmentation rather than annihilation. 17 B. ‘Affects’ Related to the danger of integration and wholeness is the perceived danger of affects. Affects are the glue that holds together the different aspects of experience. Without this glue, sensations, memory, ideas and images are separate particles. Leaving the psyche fragmented and disorganized. Again the self-care system cannot allow the personal spirit to feel because it fears that the agony of feeling as being able to annihilate it. C. ‘Relatedness’ Relatedness is also perceived as a deadly danger, particularly when the trauma involved a persecuting or none protective parent. Thus the person survives but is left, fragmented, emotionally numb and psychologically alone. These three perceived dangers are all linked to, what D. W. Winnicott calls, transitional space, and the ability of the psyche to form a narrative and look at events symbolically. All of which are central factors which allow the psyche to engage in a therapeutic process. 18

208 A Jungian Approach to Understanding and Treating Adopted Children __________________________________________________________________ 5. A Partial Conclusion Neumann and Kalsched use different concepts, but on a conceptual level, and even more so in terms of the clinical phenomena of traumatized patients, Neumann and Kalsched are describing the same phenomena. Namely, when there is an early trauma, before the ego evolves or becomes adequate, the psyche uses primitive archaic structures to enable itself to survive. These configurations are extraordinarily effective in allowing the psyche to survive in an environment where survival is not a given. But because of the fear of utter annihilation these structures never let their guard down. They are so intent on survival and protection that they do not allow for growth and healing. In fact for both the provocative emergency ego and the archaic self-care system, a therapeutic encounter is a threat that is perceived as a new trauma. How, then can these children be helped? Here, as therapists, we need to be present but very respectful that only the psyche can heal itself. The free and protective space of sand play therapy, the sand as a positive aspect of the archetypal Great Mother, and the images of the miniatures allows for the psyche to present itself with an image and allow itself to slowly heal. In sand play therapy the client is given an opportunity to build sand worlds. He is not directed to address his trauma or any other issues. The sand worlds are witnessed and honoured by the therapist. Although the therapist may make clinical inferences they are not verbalized. The basic assumption is that the client’s psyche knows best. The client builds sand worlds that addressing their issues. If given a protective space they will slowly create new worlds that reflect change and healing. 19 This I will show by a clinical case focusing on three trays of a young child. 6. Clinical Material: From Persecuting to Reclaiming the Soul Yossi was six and a half when he came to therapy. 20 He had been adopted by loving devoted parents when he was a year old. He was adopted from an orphanage in Eastern Europe where illness, hunger, neglect, and inconsistent care were part of his daily reality. There was no known history prior to him being placed in the orphanage. Much like Periboe and Polybus, Oedipus’s adopted parents, the boy’s parents felt their love and devotion would be enough. Signs of pathology were underplayed or ignored until Yossi in his first year of school had, in a fit of rage, punched a hole through a plain of glass, miraculously not cutting himself. Yossi felt safe enough in the first session to do a sand world, or rather a world that he kept changing (see Image 1). This would be a pattern with many of his scenes, often making me want to film the session rather than photograph the trays during his process.

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Image 1: Sand scene, 1. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author The left side of initial scene reflects the chaos that is associated with the uroboric stage of development. The chaos is often seen in the first sand world. What is unique to Yossi’s sand world is that within the chaos are a vast number of witches, monsters and skeletons. Yossi makes a symbolic representation of the unimaginable chaos and horror he has experienced. This is the chaos and horror that his psyche not only produces, but allows him to see and experience. Kalsched goes as far to say that when the trauma is constellated as a whole it brings the various experiences together not as re-experience but really the first experience of the trauma. 21 To the lower right side of the sand tray a lone knight stands alone on a castle seeing the horror. In a container of water, attended to by two skeletons eating bones there is a figure of a princess in white. I considered that this was possibly a representation of Yossi’s soul. Not protected by the Great Mother, or the personal abandoning mother of his early environment. It is not clear whether the two skeletons are there as guards or potential consumers of his soul. Perhaps the dual nature of these skeletons captures the protecting as well as devouring energy of the archaic self-care system.

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Image 2: Sand scene, 2. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author Yossi then removed the princess from the container and placed her on a platform inside the castle walls. (see Image 2) I felt myself breathing a sigh of relief. Moving the princess to within the castle walls was to put her in a safe protected space. I thought that it was as if he was saying ‘Yes my soul was persecuted but I have helped it survive in spite of the horrors it has undergone.’ My relief did not last long. Yossi then took a guillotine that was originally placed in the walls of the castle and places the princess, head up, and ready to be beheaded. (see Image 3) With the third location, of the princess, under the blade of the guillotine it was clear to me that there was a persecutory structure, persecuting his very soul. His actions seemed to be saying ‘I would rather destroy my soul than let myself be annihilated.’ By initially placing the guillotine and cannon within the castle wall Yossi again seemed to be showing the dual nature of the self-care system. The castle offers safety and protection, but inside of the castle are instruments of destruction. This may reflect a defensive system in which what cannot be protected will be destroyer to avoid annihilation of the self or personal spirit. Both my emotional experience and clinical inferences are not verbalized. The sand world belongs to Yossi and his psyche will decide what to do with the world he has produced.

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Image 3: Sand scene, 3. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author Yossi did a sand scene every week. Allowing himself to present his harsh inner world without acting out. Yossi felt connected to me and called. So much so that when I asked him what he could do before he was violent he said he would call me. I was more concrete than him, asking how he would phone me at school. He said he was not stupid and pointed to his head saying he would talk to me in his head. I was deeply moved. I felt he had felt me calling him and hence was able to call on an image of me in times of stress. Yossi felt safe enough to share his inner world with me. The respectful stance I took to his process facilitated a strong connection. This connection allowed Yossi to internalize my presence and use it outside of the therapy, during times of stress. A few weeks later he did a sand scene thematically similar to the first. (see Image 4) This time the area of persecutory figures is both smaller and better organized. There is a barrier of fences dividing it from the right side where military planes and vehicles are placed. One aspect of the right side is that there are no human beings in this area reflecting his difficulties connecting to others and the loneliness he was then experiencing. Another aspect of this side is that there are massive and very formidable defences: the fences, the powerful tanks and fighter plans. The lack of human beings in this area is suggestive that these powerful defences are rigid and without a guiding hand, unable to respond to changing circumstances.

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Image 4: Sand scene, 4. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author

Image 5: Sand scene, 5. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author

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__________________________________________________________________ The princess is placed in a blue egg shaped container within the chaotic left side of the sand tray. (see Image 5) The location of the left side leaves her vulnerable, but by placing her within the blue egg, he is creating a protective shell around it to insulate her from the threatening world around her. I felt he was evolving from the previous representation of beheading her in the service of his survival, to insulating or freezing her within a hostile environment. I felt that it was as if he was saying: ‘My soul does not have to be murdered for me to survive, though it still needs to be frozen or encased for me to survive’. In lieu of later development, the choice of an egg shaped container may prelude to a later rebirth of the soul. A rebirth the soul cannot do at this stage because of the horrific environment the soul symbolically finds itself in the sand creation. A harsh reality that he mistakenly projects on his outer world as a result of his trauma and the demonic defences he uses. For well into a year of therapy Yossi continued playing in the sand. The same themes emerged but each time it seemed they were more organized. The acting out, outside of the therapy was less often and much less severe or provocative. The sand creations were potential space where Yossi could symbolically introduce sensory memories to different parts of his being. After the first year or so, Yossi would do sand trays much less frequently. It was as if his developing ego could not always observe the horrors of his trauma and needed time before he could again see the trauma. Often he felt the tray itself was not adequate for his inner world and used the entire floor of my clinic to present his inner world. I felt it was as if Yossii was asking me if all of me be available to contain and protect him? (see Images 6 and 7)

Image 6: Sand scene, 6. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author

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Image 7: Sand scene, 7. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author During the sessions when he did not work in the sand, the persecutory self-care system made an appearance in a recurring play we did together, which he directed. A nurturing figure played by him would prepare me a meal but would later reveal that he was a murderer. Yossi as the murderer would then leave and suggest I call a policeman or doctor. When these figures, again played by him, would appear they too would start off as caring or benevolent but would suddenly reveal themselves as persecutory murderers, crueller than the initial murderer. The repetition of the theme that one’s initial evaluation of the other, or the situation, as benign or supportive would ultimately be disillusioned. Each act of trust to the policeman or doctor would end in the harshest betrayal and painful destructive consequences. There are three levels of meaning to this. It was as if he was organizing the sequence of betrayal and abuse that was possibly characteristic of his early environment-before adoption. An environment he experienced before he had language to represent his experiences. On as second level it was a representation of his self-care system. Helping him survive yet always killing or persecuting something within him. The third level is one in which he expands his capacity for relatedness by testing the resiliency of the therapist. He needed to see that I would survive the harshest persecution these figures were able to dish out, and still be connected to him. Could I survive his destruction of me and still emerge caring enough to be in relationship to him? About two years into the therapy this remarkable series of sand trays was presented. The first scene, done in wet sand, shows some kind of construction site.

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__________________________________________________________________ Symbolically this sand world represented how Yossi now behaved in the outer world. (see Image 8)

Image 8: Sand scene, 8. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author When an area of the sand was excavated by him there are ten skulls. (see Images 9 and 10) It was as if he was saying ‘No matter how peacefully I behave I have undergone horrific annihilating events and they will always be part of who I am’. Yet like all symbols, the skull, as a symbol, is pregnant with meaning, containing positive and negative sides to it. The skull symbolizes death. Yet the skull is also everlasting. Perhaps Yossi is saying ‘I have survived annihilation. The horrific death like experience I found myself in as an infant was deadly but did not kill me’. This was not the end. Yossi then brought a number of precious stones and buried them in the sand. With infinite care and patience he began to evacuate them one by one and slowly transport them to the diametrically opposite corner to the skulls. (see Images 11 and 12) I feel these are parts of his personal spirit or soul that have been fragmented and dispersed in deep layers of the psyche. Here they are retrieved, reclaimed, and placed together for both of us to see. The richness of his inner world can be seen by both of us. It was as if he was saying ‘My soul which is precious to me need not be murdered or frozen but can survive in this world. In spite of the harsh trauma I have survived.’ The juxtaposition of the skulls with the precious stones affirms his journey to heal his traumatic origins. The selfregulated journey to uncover his traumatic experiences, integrated both the skeletons of his past with the psychic treasures that accompany this new development.

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Image 9: Sand scene, 9. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author

Image 10: Sand scene, 10. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author

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__________________________________________________________________ The therapeutic vessel could contain, within the same world, both representations of his trauma and manifestations of new energies. Yossi was reminding me that the experience of the trauma never goes away. I felt that that I was observing an alchemic process where the original darker than dark, vile chaotic material (his horrific trauma) could be refined and transformed allowing for new numinous positive energy to manifest itself. During the conference two presentations struck a similar cord in me. Both are included in this book. Catherine Barrette’s extraordinary brave presentation of terrible trauma and healing captured a similar process I had witnessed with Yossi. Her first painting of powerful unformed blacks and reds captured the horror, terror and chaos of her terrible trauma. Yet her creativity also helped her heal, and grow. In her art the trauma and loss is present, but also her strong presence, character and creativity. She uses her pain both physical, and emotional for further growth and an uncanny creativity. 22 Terrible loss and healing was powerfully juxtaposition in Peter and Oliver Bray’s dramatic yet intimate presentation. The loss of their father/grandfather is used as an opportunity for healing and reconciliation. Sam the dead father/grandfather is given a dramatic presence. Most powerfully, for me, through a poem he wrote while a soldier in World War 2. Sam too transcends fear, and loneliness to create a powerful expression of what it means when modest, descent people are called to bear arms. Again the pain, chaos and loss of trauma do not disappear but is used for creativity and healing. 23

Image 11: Sand scene, 11. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author

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Image 12: Sand scene, 12. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author I felt a sense of awe and privilege to observe Yoss’s process. In the face of his very early horrific trauma, I felt particularly grateful to have learned that the selfregulating aspect of his psyche could and would heal him. I could not help thinking that if I did not have this attitude; the therapy would have been at best a much slower and difficult process and at worse a retrauma. By allowing him both space and time his psyche had formed images of his horrific trauma in a way that he could imagine his trauma and experience it without being shattered. Yossi was now able to heal the same soul he had persecuted and reclaim it as something precious to him. 7. Conclusion Patients who have been traumatized are a particularly difficult challenge to psychotherapists. This is not only because of the traumatic experiences that needs to be addressed, but the experience of trauma leads to defensive structures and behaviour that impact every aspect of the patient’s being. Not only are these defence strategies associated with a wide range of psychopathology, but they make the patient resistant to their emotions, self-reflection and connecting to others - the cornerstones of a therapeutic process. All this is particularly true of early trauma, trauma that happens before basic psychic structures are established. Both Neumann and Kalsched’s theoretical models help clinicians make sense of these dynamics. In addition they foster in therapists a respectful attitude to these

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__________________________________________________________________ structures. The same structures that once helped the patient survive. Nevertheless patients come to therapy to heal and develop. Jung’s profound understanding of the psyche as a self-regulatory healing mechanism is also useful in the face of these patients’ resistance to change. Nevertheless for a process of transformation, and the emergence of new energies, to take place, a safe vessel needs to be available. The free and protected space of sand play therapy is a profound vessel. The figures call for creating images and often the trauma is seen and experienced in a safe and protected environment. The process allows the psyche to begin healing. By the psyche slowly creating new worlds, each transforming the initial trauma into manageable experiences. James Hillman makes the distinction of wounds and scars. Scars never go away, but unlike wounds they reflect healing. 24 The transformation of wounds to scars is not enough. The self-care system protects the psyche which continues to develop, unknown to the ego itself. The healing vessel of the sand tray and the therapeutic milieu, provide the safety which often allows the psyche to discover and manifest new energies to its entire self. Energies that allow for development and make life worthwhile.

Notes 1

Sherie Eldridge, Twenty Things Adoptive Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew (New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks, 2004), 4-5. 2 Erich Neumann, The Child: Structure and Dynamics of the Nascent Personality (Boston: Shambhala, 1973), 76-79; Donald Kalsched, ‘Archetypal Affect, Anxiety and Defence in Patients Who Have Suffered Early Trauma’, Post-Jungians Today: Key Papers in Contemporary Analytical Psychology, ed. Anne Casement (London: Routledge, 1998), 83-102. 3 Carl Jung, ‘On the Nature of the Psyche’, Collected Works Vol. 8 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1947), 159-234. 4 Ibid. 5 Dora M. Kalff, A Psychotherapeutic Approach to the Psyche (Cloverdale: Temenos Press), 2003, and Estelle L. Weinrib, Images of the Self (Boston: Sigo Press, 1983). 6 Erel Shalit, The Complex: Path of Transformation from Archetype to Ego (Toronto: Inner City Books, 2002), 56. 7 Neumann, Child, 76-79. 8 Erich Neumann, E. The Origins and History of Consciousness (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1954). 9 Neumann, Child. 10 Ibid., 7. 11 Neumann, Origins and History of Consciousness; Neumann, Child.

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Neumann, Child, 76-79. Danya Glaser, ‘Child Abuse and Neglect and the Brain: A Review’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 41 (2000): 97-116; Bruce D. Perry, et al., ‘Childhood Trauma, the Neurobiology of Adaption, and “Use-Dependent” Development of the Brain: How “States” Become “Traits”’, Infant Mental Health Journal 16 (1995): 271-291; and Allan N. Shore, ‘The Effects of Early Relational Trauma on Right Brain Development, and Infant Mental Health’, Infant Mental Health Journal 22 (2001): 201-269. 14 Kalsched, Inner World of Trauma; Kalsched, Archetypal Affect, Anxiety and Defence. 15 Ibid., 91. 16 Ibid., 91. 17 Ibid., 94. 18 D. W. Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1971), 1-25. 19 Kalff, A Psychotherapeutic Approach to the Psyche; Weinrib, Images of the Self. 20 The client’s name and biographic information have been changed. The biographic material is a composite of a number of clients who were all traumatised prior to adoption. 21 Kalsched, Archetypal Affect, Anxiety and Defence. 22 See Barrette’s chapter in this volume. 23 See Peter Bray and Oliver Bray, in this volume. 24 James Hillman, ‘Puer Wounds and Ulysses’ Scar’, Puer Papers, ed. James Hillman (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1977), 100-128. 13

Bibliography Eldridge, Sherie. Twenty Things Adoptive Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew. New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks, 2004. Glaser, Danya. ‘Child Abuse and Neglect and the Brain: A Review’. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 41 (2000): 97-116. Hillman, James. ‘Puer Wounds and Ulysses’ Scar’. Puer Papers, edited by James Hillman, 100-128. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1977. Jung, Carl. ‘On the Nature of the Psyche’. Collected Works Vol. 8. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1947.

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__________________________________________________________________ Kalff, Dora M. A Psychotherapeutic Approach to the Psyche. Cloverdale: Temenos Press, 2003. Kalsched, Donald. The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit. London: Routledge, 1996. Kalsched, Donald. ‘Archetypal Affect, Anxiety and Defence in Patients Who Have Suffered Early Trauma’. Post-Jungians Today: Key Papers in Contemporary Analytical Psychology, edited by Ann Casement, 83-102. London: Routledge, 1998. Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954. Neumann, Erich. The Child: Structure and Dynamics of the Nascent Personality. Boston: Shambhala, 1973. Perry, Bruce D. et al. ‘Childhood Trauma, the Neurobiology of Adaption, and “Use-Dependent” Development of the Brain: How “States” Become “Traits”’. Infant Mental Health Journal 16 (1995): 271-291. Shalit, Erel. The Complex: Path of Transformation from Archetype to Ego. Toronto: Inner City Books, 2002. Shore, Allan N. ‘The Effects of Early Relational Trauma on Right Brain Development, and Infant Mental Health’. Infant Mental Health Journal 22 (2001): 201-269. Sophocles. Oedipus the King. Translated by Paul Roche. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus. Translated by Paul Roche. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Weinrib, Estelle L. Images of the Self. Boston: Sigo Press, Boston, 1983. Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge, 1971. Mark Bortz, Ph.D. is a Clinical Psychologist and Jungian Therapist in private practice in Kfar Saba, Israel.

Part III Our Voice

Trauma: Terror in Need of Management Bonnie L. Settlage Abstract This chapter attempts to provide a description of the underlying psychic mechanisms that give rise to the experience of individual trauma, collective trauma, transgenerational trauma, traumatic stress response and vicarious trauma. The analysis of these mechanisms is informed by the writings of Ernest Becker and terror management theory. As such, it is proposed that the various forms of trauma arise from the shocking confrontation with our immortality and impotence. Normally shielded from this awareness through an elaborate set of defences that arose as our species evolved the traumatized individual or group suffers from a failure of these defences. Recovery from trauma is conceptualized as occurring through reparation of the physical and symbolic self. The chapter concludes with a practitioner’s experience working with refugee trauma victims in Cairo, Egypt. Key Words: Trauma, collective trauma, transgenerational trauma, traumatic stress response, vicarious trauma, terror management theory, Ernest Becker, refugees, unthought known. ***** 1. Introduction While there is considerable discourse about the existence and effects of trauma there may be more ambiguity about what it is that causes an event or series of events to be experienced as traumatic. Not all frightening or negative experiences result in trauma. Seemingly similar events may result in trauma in one individual, but not another. The way in which an event is perceived and experienced is just as if not more important than the actual event in terms of predicting a traumatic reaction. When trauma does occur the sequelae are highly heterogeneous. 1 To further complicate the picture, we use the term not only to refer to an individual reaction to a stressful experience but we also speak of collective trauma, transgenerational trauma, and vicarious trauma. In the latter instances, the origin of the traumatic experience may not entirely or in any part reside in the individual’s personal history. Instead traumatization arises due to the connection and/or identification with the original victim or group. The unifying theme in these different types of trauma and different manifestations of it may be in the subjective experience of the traumatizing event as one that erodes a set of primitive defences that safeguard us from the awareness of our own fragility and impotence. This may operate through a direct encounter with death or powerlessness, or indirectly through a loss of faith in the eternal self and the belief in a predictable, meaningful and just world.

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__________________________________________________________________ 2. Ernest Becker and Terror Management Theory Ernest Becker was a cultural anthropologist who developed a theory of human behaviour, both individual and social, that focuses on our human need to deny our mortality. His work was interdisciplinary and drew from various social sciences and particularly the writings of Sigmund Freud, Søren Kierkegaard, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, and Otto Rank among others. 2 According to Becker, as our species evolved, humans developed the unique ability to think abstractly about their existence. 3 This resulted in the confrontation with the inevitability of our own demise and eventual oblivion. This awareness has the potential to lead to incapacitating terror. In order to subvert this maladaptive knowledge, the species constructed elaborate defence mechanisms. Through the development of civilisation, humankind constructed an existence both in the physical world of objects and the symbolic world of meaning. By attaching part of our self to a symbolic existence, through identification with a wider society or belief system, we derive meaning and purpose in our life and the hope for an eternal existence beyond the life of our body. 4 When there is a challenge to our symbolic identity, which can occur by the mere presence of an alternative belief system, we are deeply threatened because it calls into question our ability to transcend mortality. Becker’s writings, especially his 1974 Pulitzer prize winning work of nonfiction, The Denial of Death, had an impact on many academic and clinical circles, perhaps most notably on a group of social psychologists and the development of terror management theory (TMT). 5 The terror management theorists summarize their reading of Becker in this way: According to Becker, sophisticated human intellectual abilities lead to the awareness of people’s vulnerability and ultimate mortality. This awareness creates the potential for paralyzing terror concerning the vast array of aversive experiences that are the eventual inevitability of death. As these abilities were evolving, cultural conceptions of reality began to emerge. The potential for terror put a stress on evolving cultures such that any culture that was to survive needed to provide means for surviving this terror. Thus, from a terror management perspective, one very important function of culture (although surely not the only one) is to provide a means of conceptualizing reality that allows for the possibility of equanimity in the face of human vulnerability and mortality. Put simply, people’s beliefs about reality provide a buffer against the anxiety that results from living in a largely uncontrollable, perilous, universe, where the only certainty is death. 6

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__________________________________________________________________ The TMT research suggests that most people report that they do not fear or even think about death very often. Even when asked to think graphically about their own death they do not report extreme anxiety. However, when mortality salience is induced, people behave and think differently, yet they are usually unaware of the influence of the mortality salience. 7 A typical study might operate in this way: subjects are randomly assigned to two groups. One group is experimentally manipulated to remember that they will eventually die (i.e. mortality salience is induced) and the other group does not receive that reminder. When comparing the two groups, the group that was reminded of their mortality, behaves and thinks differently than the group that was not. Furthermore, the research shows that this effect is stronger, (i.e. the difference in thought and behaviour between the two groups is greater), when the mortality salience is less conscious or more distanced from awareness. 8 These findings suggest that we unconsciously adjust our interpretations of stimuli in response to the threat of mortality. We unconsciously adjust our behaviour and interpretations in the response to mortality salience in a myriad of ways, but the most well-established, is that we denigrate those different from us and align ourselves more closely with those who share our worldview. 9 Specifically, when mortality salience is induced, we are less tolerant of those who are not part of our cultural in-group and respond with more hostility to any criticism of our worldview or the cultural group to which we belong. When reminded of our mortality, we desperately need the cultural beliefs and mores that give our life significance and that foster our symbolic self, the self that has meaning and will not die. We are not infrequently reminded of our mortality and most of the time it does not profoundly affect us. This is because our defences are well developed, so we do not experience it as a traumatic response. In view of Becker’s writings and the terror management theory literature, this chapter suggests that trauma occurs when we are forced to directly experience our own mortality and powerlessness and the defences we use to shield us from that awareness are overwhelmed or eroded. While trauma is not unique to humans the way in which humans experience and need to recover from trauma is unique. For individual trauma, the reaction may be such that it provokes a set of primitive biological defences rooted in something older than human civilisation. After all, other animals besides humans show signs of psychological trauma that in many ways mirror human symptoms. 10 These types of responses were probably adaptive and selected in the nascence of our evolving species and came about well before the development of our most primitive societal structures or even language. Frequently experiences of trauma impact the individual on an organismic level in which the ‘meaning making’ defence is not applicable, at least not at first. But as humans, our sense of self is not just the body, but something larger and more symbolic. When psychological trauma occurs to our organism, we must eventually repair on two different levels. When we think of the types of trauma where the

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__________________________________________________________________ assault has been primarily on the symbolic level, as in collective, transgenerational, and vicarious trauma, it is helpful to understand the significance of Becker and the TMT research. For humans, the recovery from individual trauma usually involves working through the experience on an organismic level in parallel with the reconstruction of our symbolic, meaning-making level of existence. It might be helpful to turn to each of these types of traumas in turn with an eye towards Becker’s theory and the TMT literature. 3. Trauma to the Individual One of the hallmarks of trauma are the physical symptoms often associated with it, among them are hyper and/or hypo arousal, hypervigillance, heightened startle response, insomnia, appetite change, digestive problems, phantom pain, paralysis, panic, and more. 11 As previously mentioned, many of these symptoms are evident not just in humans, but also other animals in response to a traumatic experience. 12 The body will not allow the experience to be forgotten because it must never happen again. It is a terrible but probably adaptive response to ensure avoidance of the threat to existence. Often it takes the body longer to learn that the threat has passed than it takes the mind. The flashbacks and nightmares in which it feels as though the experience were happening all over again in the present, may be a component of this primitive defence. For humans, recovery often involves the slow process of transmuting the bodily experience to a mental experience through language. 13 Once the experience is moved to the symbolic plane, it can be manipulated, retold, and re-experienced with a greater sense of control and mastery. However, the kernel of the trauma, the terrifying brush with annihilation, cannot be symbolized. It is an experience beyond symbolization and must instead be pushed out of conscious awareness. The individual must find their way back to a state of ignorance of the fragile line between their existence and non-existence. They must rebuild their symbolic eternal self and attempt to regain the faith in their ability to take control of their existence and the possibility of, at least, symbolic immortality. Becker explains that humans have two modes of experience, the bodily and symbolic. While humans can pass on their physical existence more or less through procreation, this universal ability to perpetuate the bodily self, may not satisfy the need to pass on one’s distinctive personality or spirit. 14 As he says, ‘The distinctive human problem from time immemorial has been the need to spiritualize human life, to lift it onto a special immortal plane, beyond the cycles of life and death that characterize all other organisms.’ 15 Becker suggests that in order for one’s culture to buffer one from the anxiety of mortality and fragility, one needs to have faith in one’s cultural values, standards and belief system, and one needs to feel that they are living up to those standards. If one lives up to those standards, one is protected from evil. 16 Ergo, if evil happens to someone it must be because they were not living up to the cultural standards. This creates the myth of a just world, where good things happen to good

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__________________________________________________________________ people and bad things happen to bad people. Research has shown that there is a human tendency to believe in a just world. When something bad happens to someone, we are more likely to look for explanations in the individual rather than the situation. 17 We blame the victim. The trauma victim, in addition to struggling with their traumatic experience, often encounters blame and suspicion from those around them. The victim’s experience increases the mortality salience and anxiety in others. To defend ourselves from the awareness of our own fragility, our initial response is to find ways the traumatized individual might have been able to avoid victimization. Aware that sharing their experience is likely to invite scrutiny or accusation from others, the trauma victim is inhibited from telling their story, which in turn may slow their recovery. Often, blame does not only come from others, but also from the self. 18 It is often more reassuring to believe that mistakes were made, mistakes that could be avoided in the future, than to believe that one is blameless and powerless and nothing can be done to ensure that the horrible event will not happen again. 4. Trauma to the Collective Famine, plague, natural disasters, war, and genocide are some of the catastrophes that can traumatize not just individuals but an entire community. Elsewhere in this volume, William Bostock discusses the notion of the body politic and proposes a mind politic. 19 He suggests that trauma can impact a community in two ways. Trauma to the body politic is experienced on the physical level in which the term ‘body’ is a metaphor for the physicality of the collective group. Trauma to the mind politic can also occur, and as he explains may be thought of as impacting a collective consciousness or identity. 20 Recovery involves rebuilding the collective identity through the construction of a shared narrative. These concepts of mind and body politic parallel Becker’s notion of a physical self and a symbolic self applied to a collective. Markus Brunner argues that we should be careful in our use of the term trauma and refrain from the use of the term ‘collective trauma’ because of its inadequacy in describing the complex reactions of a group of individuals to a traumatic event. 21 He does acknowledge through a reading of Ernst Simmel the ‘stabilizing effects of group bonds,’ and the power of a shared ideology to mitigate some of the effects of trauma on individual members of a group. 22 When many people of the same cultural group share a traumatic experience in some respects it may mitigate some of the negative sequelae of the trauma. Groups tend to draw closer together following an assault or disaster, which gives the group members a heightened feeling of strength and power. Some of their feelings of vulnerability brought about by the traumatic event are assuaged. Typically, as there is an increased identification with the cultural group, there is also a derogation of those who threaten the cultural worldview. 23 For example, following the attacks on the World

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__________________________________________________________________ Trade Center in the US, there was a feverish outpouring of patriotism. Unfortunately patriotism turned to jingoism. Criticism of the US by foreigners or Americans was encountered with hostility.16 The TMT group provided an elegant analysis of the cultural environment in the US following September 11, 2001. Their theory predicts alignment with the cultural group and increased hostility toward outsiders any time mortality salience is induced. However, the attacks on 9/11 didn’t just remind Americans of their mortality, it was a blatant symbolic attack on their worldview. The World Trade Center and the Pentagon were carefully chosen targets and the weapons were American airline jets. It had an impact that a natural disaster with a higher death count would not have had or even a random bombing of the city. 24 It was a successful act of terrorism. While many individuals were traumatized by the attacks on 9/11, for the most part, the trauma was not experienced on an individual level but on a collective one. It was the group identity that suffered a brush with death. Because a group only exists as an entity on a symbolic level, of course the corporal manifestations of trauma aren’t there. After pulling itself together, and activating its defences, the group identity must somehow work through and reconstruct itself by slowly metabolizing the trauma. This is typically done through the creation of a shared narrative. In the US, the most likely storyteller is Hollywood. It is of interest that while news and images of 9/11 flooded the media immediately following the event up to the present, a major feature film did not surface for a half a decade. There was the sense that the public wasn’t ready to consolidate the experience into a story. Ten years later, Hollywood has yet to make a feature film that attempts to narrate a complete account of the major events of September 11th. 25 In some instances, as is seen in genocide, there is both widespread individual trauma and collective trauma. While many, if not most members of the cultural group are individually traumatized by the same phenomenon their individual experiences are nonetheless unique. It might be expected that in such a situation the group tendency to blame the victim and for the victim to engage in self-blame would be mitigated. However, this is not assured. The impact of any disaster on a group is not equally distributed. Some members and families suffer greater and/or different atrocities than others. We desperately cling to the notion that if we behave in the right way we can avoid victimization. To consider the alternative, that in some instances we are powerless to protect ourselves is terrifying and unacceptable. Nonetheless, for some, the evidence is so overwhelming that the questions, ‘Why me?’ or ‘Why not me?’ have no answer. Individuals will return again and again to these questions, hoping to find an answer. This repetitive, ruminative questioning can be thought of as a type of traumatic response where one desperately tries to find meaning where there is none. The popularity of Rabbi, Harold Kushner’s, bestselling book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, in which he attempts to explore and reconcile religious faith with senseless tragedy,

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__________________________________________________________________ maybe a demonstration of the frequent need to find meaning when tragedy strikes, especially when the tragedy undermines our faith in a just world. 26 To the extent that one can draw from a spiritual faith and connection to others in one’s community, the negative impact of a trauma can be mitigated. Through these avenues, there is the potential for our symbolic self to be preserved or reconstituted. In this case, there is a self structure, larger than the physical self to which the individual belongs, in which part of their symbolic self may be preserved from the traumatizing event. However, when the primary explanation for one’s victimization is membership in the cultural group, this source of meaning –making and promise of protection and immortality is profoundly compromised. Initially, there may be a resulting crisis in faith, heightened anxiety, and despair. The group identity needs to recover from the trauma along with the individuals that comprise it. These recoveries may operate in parallel, but rarely at the same pace. It often takes generations for collective trauma to be metabolized and a cultural identity to be reconstructed. 5. Transgenerational Trauma The concept of transgenerational trauma is that a traumatic experience can have such a deep impact that its lack of resolution is passed onto the next generation. This can happen on both the individual and collective levels and can operate in both consciousness and unconsciousness. It is often the task of the generations following a collective trauma to re-unify and solidify the cultural identity, and to construct the narrative of the shared experience. Here the process of repetition, of telling and retelling the story serves many purposes. It is done to preserve the memory of what has gone before in the hope of preventing a reoccurrence and to contain the experience in some consolidated form. It also allows the succeeding generations to give something back to their forebears. Helpless to undo the past, telling the stories of suffering and survival is an effort to immortalize those who lived and died in that time. Through this, the victims take on a type of hero status. Becker suggested that as humans we attempt to transcend mortality through heroism. We each engage in an immortality project. We do this by striving to meet or exceed the standards of our culture and by involving ourselves in something larger and more eternal than our physical bodies thus achieving at least symbolic immortality. 27 By assigning hero status to the victims and survivors of a collective trauma the younger generations are able to express their gratitude to their ancestors for giving them life. They can assuage some of their guilt for having had the random luck of being born into an easier life. Most importantly, through the construction of the group narrative, the very experience that brought the cultural identity close to annihilation becomes one that strengthens the cultural identity and bolsters the worldview. As a consequence, membership in the group is no longer associated with impotence and death, but immortality.

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__________________________________________________________________ Immortalizing the survivors of a collective trauma is not always the outcome and it is certainly not the only outcome. When the traumatizing experience is covered in shame and secrecy, the trauma may continue to negatively impact the future generations in complex ways. Even when the story is told and victims are transformed into heroes, the memory of terror and powerlessness are often transferred in some form to future generations. The individual experiences of trauma have idiosyncratic effects on the descendants of survivors. Just as other attitudes and beliefs are passed from generation to generation, so are feelings of fear, anxiety, guilt, shame and inferiority. As will be discussed later, this is mostly transferred unconsciously with little awareness of the origin. While the group identity may seem to be flourishing years following a collective trauma, the individual survivors of trauma and their descendants, who comprise the group, may be suffering in separate and isolated ways. In collective transgenerational trauma, there is a greater probability that traumatic experience will be articulated and slowly digested, as many voices may join in constructing the group narrative. On the individual level, this may not happen. Trauma often impacts not just the victim but those close to them. When it involves childhood sexual abuse or incest it is even less likely to be articulated, both because it is more likely to be shrouded in shame and secrecy, and because it is difficult for an individual to give words to something they experienced before they may have had an understanding of what was happening. In this case, the impact on future generations is more likely to be complex and insidious. Christopher Bollas, a contemporary British psychoanalyst, speaks of the unthought known. 28 This is knowledge that may be transferred to us early in life and exists in our psyche in unsymbolized form influencing us in barely conscious or unconscious ways. On some deep level it is known, but can only be brought into consciousness with difficulty. Bollas defines the unthought known in this way: Any form of knowledge that as yet is not thought. Geneticallybased knowledge – what constitutes instinctive knowledge – has not been thought out. Infants also learn rules for being and relating that are conveyed through the mother’s logic of care, much of which has not been mentally processed. Children often live in family moods or practices that are beyond comprehension, even if they are partners in the living of such knowledge. 29 It is in the aforementioned ‘family moods or practice’ that the impact of trauma can play itself out and be transmitted from parent to child in a way that is just beyond the reach of comprehension and therefore largely undisturbed. When this knowledge or mood or practice exists in a state of consciousness that is not available to rational thought or analysis, it is not as directly amenable to change. In this repository it has the potential to have a ripple effect across the generations.

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__________________________________________________________________ 6. Vicarious Trauma and Secondary Traumatic Stress Vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress are phenomena that have received more attention in recent years. The terms are most often used to describe the negative impact that working with traumatized clients can have on mental health professionals, but they are not limited to that population. Vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress have the potential to affect anyone in close contact with trauma survivors. 30 Secondary traumatic stress refers to the stress that can arise when an individual is working with a traumatized person and feels a deep empathic response toward the person and a desperate desire to help them. The symptoms are many of the same that are found in post traumatic stress disorder, and may include nightmares, hypervigillance, attention difficulties, fatigue, insomnia, irritability and angry outbursts, and intrusive thoughts related to the trauma. 31 This may be a natural and understandable response upon hearing and deeply connecting to the horror someone you care about has experienced. Unable to erase the past, there is often a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness in the traumatized individual that is often mirrored in the counsellor or significant other. While the symptoms of secondary traumatic stress typically take on a more acute, physical and behavioural manifestation, vicarious trauma is more cognitive in nature. While seemingly less acute, there is a more pervasive erosion of the individual’s worldview. Deeply empathizing with one person’s traumatic experience is painful and stressful. Hearing multiple stories of horror and traumatization can challenge one’s faith in a predictable and just world, one’s own agency and significance, one’s spiritual beliefs and one’s faith and trust in others. It could be argued that vicarious trauma has a uniquely profound potential to erode the symbolic self. While spared from the original traumatizing event, the counsellor who is repeatedly affected by stories of trauma told by members of diverse cultural groups, may be especially vulnerable to the reality of death and human frailty. The following section of this chapter is presented as a type of case example looking at the experiences of a group of practitioners working with refugees in Cairo, Egypt. It is one attempt to articulate some of the emotional and intellectual experiences of these individuals and to view it through the lens of Becker’s paradigm. It is by no means a complete account and for some it may be a primarily or even entirely inaccurate reflection of their experience. It is a clinical supervisor’s subjective interpretation, and as such is prone to bias and error. The hope is that it reflects some of the unique aspects of some manifestations of vicarious trauma. A. Case Example This chapter was originally inspired by the experiences of a collection of exceptional people who provide services to refugees in Cairo, Egypt. They work

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__________________________________________________________________ with minimal resources under difficult conditions with a client population in desperate need of the most basic resources. The refugees arrive with heartbreaking and horrifying stories of persecution, torture, rape, war, starvation and death. Many of them were forced to leave family members behind in their homeland; they have lost their homes, their communities, their jobs, and their way of life. Almost without exception, they are all traumatized and they are stripped of some of the most basic requirements for mental health. The team of people who work with the refugees are psychosocial workers, legal workers and interpreters. They bear witness to their clients’ stories and scramble to provide what services and emotional support that they can. It is a special sort of person who commits to this type of work, often young, idealistic, naturally empathic, curious and intelligent. The work takes its toll on everyone, but for some, it gives rise to an existential crisis. While the job is extremely difficult, requires long hours and is poorly paid, the hope of providing something desperately needed and meaningful is the reward. Yet, more often than not, there are obstacles to providing what is needed or the resources simply don’t exist. For example, medication, surgery, expert consultation, transportation, education, employment, housing, therapy, child care, protections, a consistent supply of food are often unavailable. The question arises, ‘Am I doing anything meaningful?’ and then ‘Is it possible to make a difference?’ This feeling of powerlessness and insignificance coupled with the empathic knowledge of the gruesome horrors we are capable of inflicting on each other can be shattering. Rage would seem to be an understandable and adaptive response, and it is felt, but perhaps unfortunately many of these counsellors are too sophisticated in knowledge and experience to sustain it. There is no clear object to rage against. Some clients have been tortured and tortured others. One client grieves and is traumatized by witnessing the murder of her children and husband, another client was a child soldier who killed and raped. The refugees were forced to leave their communities and fled to a safer place, Egypt, a country with limited resources currently undergoing a crisis. Where does the rage go? On what or whom should it focus? This first line of defence, to derogate the enemy, is no longer available to the counsellor, because the enemy is not clear. Even worse, there may not be an enemy. For the primary trauma victim, anger is a healthy part of the process as the trauma moves from the internal to the external. It is important to experience anger towards the persecutor and for the victim to feel that they have been wronged, that their experience was unfair and undeserved, and for them to feel the agency of anger. 32 However for the practitioner who has not been victimized and has a wider view, anger often feels rationally unjustified and emotionally disconcerting. They are aware of too much to employ some of our most effective defences against the knowledge of human frailty and the problem of death. One might say that they have lost their innocence. We are not born innocent. In our genetic unthought known is the knowledge of an unpredictable and perilous world where the

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__________________________________________________________________ inevitable ending is death. Through culture and civilisation we create our innocence. It is perhaps fortunate that when it is lost we are able to recreate it. In answer to the questions, ‘Am I doing anything meaningful?’ and ‘Is it possible to make a difference?’ The answers must certainly be ‘Yes.’ And ‘Yes.’ However in answer to the deeper question that may underlie these two questions, ‘Is it possible to eradicate human suffering and death?’ The answer must sadly be, ‘No.’ For the counsellors there may be an increasing sense of futility in their immortality projects. A profound questioning of the meaning and purpose in their life, of their significance, and of the possibility to effect change often ensues. Remarkably, the result of this soul searching many times seems to inspire a renewed commitment to the work and even a desire to take it further, to move to the frontlines of human suffering. Perhaps there is the belief that if one feels ineffectual in the current position, that moving even closer to the problem will push the immortality project forward and repair the symbolic self. However, the emotion behind this impetus to move closer seems more of excitement than anxiety. It is as though there is a sort of paradoxical vitality experienced in the breakdown and reconstitution of the symbolic self. There can be a thrill or expansiveness from standing on the precipice of the awareness of death as though both Eros and Thanatos are equally heightened. 7. Conclusion This chapter argues that trauma is the brutal confrontation of our mortality and impotence. In humans this occurs when our natural defences against this awareness have been shattered, eroded or overwhelmed. Recovery involves reparation to both our physical and/or symbolic self. Informed by the research and literature of the terror management theory group and the writings of Ernest Becker an exploration of the unique experiences of individual, collective, transgenerational and vicarious trauma were given. In the Denial of Death, Becker begins his chapter on the present outcome of psychoanalysis with a quote from one of his favourite writers and thinkers, Otto Rank. Here it is used in conclusion: If man is the more normal, healthy and happy, the more he can...successfully... repress, displace, deny, rationalize, dramatize himself and deceive others, then it follows that the suffering of the neurotic comes... from painful truth... Spiritually the neurotic has been long since where psychoanalysis wants to bring him without being able to, namely at the point of seeing through the deception of the world of sense, the falsity of reality. He suffers, not from all the pathological mechanisms which are psychically necessary for living and wholesome but in the refusal of these mechanisms which is just what robs him of the illusions

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__________________________________________________________________ important for living...(He) is much nearer to the actual truth psychologically than the others and it is just that from which he suffers. 33

Notes 1

Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), Kindle edition. 2 Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), Kindle edition. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Daniel Liechty, ed., Death and Denial: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Legacy of Ernest Becker (New York: Praeger, 2002), 1-2. 6 Jeff Greenberg, et al., ‘Evidence for Terror Management Theory II: The Effects of Mortality Salience on Reactions to Those Who Threaten or Bolster the Cultural Worldview,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58 (1990): 308-318. 7 Ibid. 8 Jeff Greenberg et al., ‘Role of Consciousness and Accessibility of Death-Related Thoughts in Mortality Salience Effects,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67 (1994): 627-637. 9 Greenberg, et al, ‘Evidence for Terror Management Theory II’, 308-318. 10 Ann Weaver, ‘Trauma Among the Animals’, Journal of Trauma Counselling International 3 (2010): 1-10. 11 American Psychiatric Association, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Fourth Edition: Text Revision (Washington DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2000), 468. 12 Weaver, ‘Trauma in Animals’ 2. 13 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, Kindle edition. 14 Becker, The Denial of Death, Kindle edition. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 M. J. Lerner, and D. T. Miller. ‘Just World Research and the Attribution Process: Looking Back and Ahead,’ Psychological Bulletin 85 (1978): 1030-1051. 18 Kimberly Hanson Breitenbecher, ‘The Relationships Among Self-Blame, Psychological Distress, and Sexual Victimization’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence 21 (2006): 597-611. 19 William W. Bostock, in this volume. 20 Ibid.

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__________________________________________________________________ 21

Markus Brunner, ‘Criticizing “Collective Trauma”: A Plea for a Fundamental Social Psychological Reflection of Traumatisation Process’, paper presented at the 1st Global Conference on Trauma, Prague, March 2011. 22 Ibid., 3. 23 Greenberg, et al., ‘Evidence for Terror Management Theory II,’ 308-318. 24 Thomas Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon and Jeff Greenberg, In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror (Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2003), 189-198. 25 Brian Marder, ‘Ten Years Later: Categorizing the 9/11 Films.’ Hollywood.com, 9 September 2011, accessed 2 October 2011, http://www.hollywood.com/news/Ten_Years_Later_Categorizing_the_9_11_Films /7837169. 26 Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Avon Books, 1981.) 27 Becker, The Denial of Death, Kindle edition. 28 Christopher Bollas, Forces of Destiny: Psychoanalysis and Human Idiom (London: Free Association Books, 1991). 29 Ibid., 213-214. 30 Jason Newell and Gordon A. MacNiel, ‘Professional Burnout, Vicarious Trauma, Secondary Traumatic Stress, and Compassion Fatigue: A Review of Theoretical Terms, Risk Factors, and Preventive Methods for Clinicians and Researchers’, Best Practices in Mental Health 6 (2010): 57-68. 31 Ibid. 32 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, Kindle edition. 33 Otto Rank, Will Therapy and Truth and Reality (New York: Knopf, 1936.)

Bibliography American Psychiatric Association. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Fourth Edition: Text Revision. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2000. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Kindle edition. Bollas, Christopher. Forces of Destiny: Psychoanalysis and Human Idiom. London: Free Association Books, 1991.

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__________________________________________________________________ Breitenbecher, Kimberly Hanson. ‘The Relationships among Self-Blame, Psychological Distress, and Sexual Victimization.’ Journal of Interpersonal Violence 21(2006): 597-611. Burke, Brian, Andy Martens, and Erik Faucher. ‘Two Decades of Terror Management Theory: A Meta-Analysis of Mortality Salience Research’. Personality and Social Psychology Review 14 (2010): 155-195. Feldman, David, and Katrin Julia Kaal. ‘Vicarious Trauma and Assumptive Worldview: Beliefs about the World in Acquaintances of Trauma Victims’. Traumatology 13 (2007): 21-31. Greenberg, Jeff, Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, Abram Rosenblatt, Mitchell Veeder, Shari Kirkland, and Deborah Lyon. ‘Evidence for Terror Management Theory II: The Effects of Mortality Salience on Reactions to Those Who Threaten or Bolster the Cultural Worldview’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58 (1990): 308-318. Greenberg, Jeff, Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, Linda Simon, and Michael Breus. ‘Role of Consciousness and Accessibility of Death-Related Thoughts in Mortality Salience Effects’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67 (1994): 627-637. Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Kindle edition. Kushner, Herman. When Bad Things Happen to Good People. New York: Avon Books, 1981. Lerner, M. J., and D. T. Miller. ‘Just World Research and the Attribution Process: Looking Back and Ahead.’ Psychological Bulletin 85 (1978): 1030-1051. Liechty, Daniel, ed., Death and Denial: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Legacy of Ernest Becker. New York: Praeger, 2002. Marder, Brian. ‘Ten Years Later: Categorizing the 9/11 Films.’ Hollywood.com, 9 September 2011. Accessed 2 October 2011. http://www.hollywood.com/news/Ten_Years_Later_Categorizing_the_9_11_Films /7837169.

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__________________________________________________________________ Newell, Jason, and Gordon A. MacNiel. ‘Professional Burnout, Vicarious Trauma, Secondary Traumatic Stress, and Compassion Fatigue: A Review of Theoretical Terms, Risk Factors, and Preventive Methods for Clinicians and Researchers’. Best Practices in Mental Health 6 (2010): 57-68. Pyszczynski, Thomas, Sheldon Solomon and Jeff Greenberg. In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror. Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2003. Rank, Otto. Will Therapy and Truth and Reality. New York: Knopf, 1936. Weaver, Ann. ‘Trauma among the Animals’. Journal of Trauma Counseling International 3 (2010): 1-10. Bonnie L. Settlage is an assistant professor in psychology at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and a clinical psychologist licensed in the state of California. She is also a clinical supervisor at the African and Middle East Refugee Association in Cairo.

Psychoanalysis and Trauma: Changes in the Theory and the Practice, from Freud to the Shoah Clara Mucci Abstract After a brief presentation of Freud’s and Ferenczi’s different positions within the psychoanalytic theory of trauma, the author analyses some relevant developments in this theory, made necessary after the twentieth century’s wars and genocides and especially after the Shoah, which was a watershed in history and in the notion of massive social trauma. Changes in the theory correspond to changes in the practice: working in psychotherapy with survivors and the following generations means an active work in the reconstruction of the reality of the event: reconstructing the truth as carefully as possible is the only way to avoid the compulsion to repeat in the second and third generations and to reduce the devastating effects of trauma in individuals and in society. In this chapter different notions of trauma will be considered, both the early relational trauma that is caused by the caregiver neglecting or abusing the child or simply suffering from trauma herself and not having recovered from it, which might lead to the intergenerational transmission of symptoms, and the massive psychic trauma caused for instance by war, genocide and threat of extermination (all characterized by their man-made origin). Key Words: Trauma, pychoanalysis, intergenerational trauma, Shoah, history, fantasy, reparation, ethics, testimony. ***** 1. Freud and Ferenczi: The Theory of Trauma at the Beginning As is well known, and as Danielle Mortimer writes in her contribution in this section, Freud’s theorization of trauma originates from his practice with female patients who had developed hysterical symptoms. At the beginning, he thought that the cause of the symptoms was repression of a real event, that he terms ‘seduction,’ something we would call abuse or even sexual abuse nowadays. He distinguishes between a first moment, in which the prepubertal stimulation by an adult is not at first perceived as sexual by the child, and a second moment, after puberty, that gives the first episode its meaning and fixates its traumatic core, in a deferred action that Freud calls ‘nachträglich’. It is only after this second moment that the first episode is repressed and, if something goes wrong in this defensive process, a hysterical symptom might be formed. 1 Freud continuously revises his theory: his major doubt was about the reality of the seduction; was it a real event or an imagined, fantasised one? 2 The watershed in this reflection can be found in the famous letter to Fliess on 21 September 1897,

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__________________________________________________________________ in which he abandons his theory of actual sexual abuse in favour of the fantasied version of it, for several reasons. He considers this discovery a dramatic ‘collapse of everything valuable’; however he continues throughout his life to vacillate between acknowledging actual abuse or theorizing fantasised seduction. 3 In fact in 1916-17 he states that in neuroses ‘it is psychical reality which is the decisive kind.’ 4 Traumatization as a result seems to be the outcome of both external and internal, psychic, sources. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in 1920, he develops a new view of trauma as the result of the break of an internal shield against an overwhelming stimulum; both the shield and the stimuli are relevant to the traumatization and are linked to individual features. What is bearable for somebody (similar stimulum) might not be for another being (because the threshold is lower and the impact therefore more devastating). If the excitement is greater than the system can bear, traumatization is caused, and the apparatus goes back to a previous state of development; it is at this point that the death principle or the compulsion to repeat is involved: in order to try to abreact or free the system from the overwhelming excitation, the individual is forced to repeat the event with its psychic and physical symptoms in an effort to overcome it and dispel it. As a consequence, the system is trapped in the repetition of the trauma as if it were always happening in the present, with no time frame. 5 In fact, the traumatic time is always current, through flashbacks, memories and other mechanisms which lead back to the past situation (as in dreams, for instance). To go back to Mortimer’s definition in her chapter, based on Lyotard’s observation, the subject is trapped between the ‘too soon of the initial traumatic event, and the too late of the eventual repetition that brings understanding of it.’ 6 Another way to react to trauma (as the hysterics show in their behaviour) is to delete the memory of the event and to create a physical symptom instead. In another writing, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Freud states that a traumatic situation can occur both as a result of excessive external events or excessive internal instinctual demands. 7 The ego is therefore overwhelmed with anxiety. We are still within a psycho-economic model of trauma. This was still a point in the development of psychoanalytic theory in which drive-related conflicts and fixations of the libido were the fundamental concepts, therefore trauma was not a major preoccupation for the aetiology of mental disorders. We have to wait until the 1950s and the studies on the early childhood development for trauma to be regarded with a new concern; in addition, the catastrophes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, wars, the Shoah, the various racial and ethnic persecutions, together with a different awareness of violence within families, and a new concern for the abuse and maltreatment of children and women, have brought to the fore a new consideration for trauma and its consequences in psychoanalysis. Historically, at the time of Freud, an exception to this disregard of trauma and to the neglect of its relevance for pathology came from Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi, who never doubted that his patients had been traumatized as an

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__________________________________________________________________ effect of real events and real abuse. 8 To Freud who asked how he could be sure that the patients were not presenting fantasies of seduction, he would say that several patients actually acknowledged that they had abused children, therefore they were the perpetrators. Clearly, external events were of fundamental importance in understanding the real impact of trauma. Ferenczi was to become the initiator of a new therapeutic attitude in working with traumatized patients: contrary to Freud’s distant and neutral stance, he proposed a more empathic and sincere, honest attitude, in which even the vulnerability of the analyst and his feelings could come out in the open if necessary or, better, if functional towards the aim of the therapy (what analysts nowadays call ‘self-disclosure’). Re-establishing a strong trust between patient and analyst was for him the fundamental tool and at the same time a major achievement in therapy. Ferenczi analyses with incredible intuition elements related to trauma that would be discussed only several decades later, for instance the splitting of the traumatized ego, the numbness and blocking of affects, the possible identification with the aggressor and the sense of guilt that comes with that, because the child is imbued with the guilt that stems originally from the aggressor. Finally, a turning point for psychoanalytic theory and a deeper contribution to treatment is his famous work ‘Confusion of tongues between adults and the child,’ 9 in which the difference in attitude between parent and child is carefully analysed, the latter being in need only of tenderness, the former trapped in a sort of passion which might become a sexual intrusion onto the child. His work was rejected by Freud and his community at the time. Nowadays, it has been re-evaluated and is appreciated, to the point of acknowledging Ferenczi’s role as the initiator of the intersubjective and interpersonal trend of psychoanalysis, a trend that certainly owes some debt to postmodern thought, which questions the very concept of objective knowledge and reframes science as a form of socially constructed truth. This contemporary ‘constructivist’ view changes the frame of reference for both identity and the self, gearing towards a more functional idea of self and identity, finally modifying the very role and position of psychoanalysis in culture. As Zygmunt Bauman argues authoritatively, ‘The centrality of the center has been decomposed, and links between intimately connected spheres of authority have been broken, perhaps irreparably,’ so that ‘the process of ‘identity formation’ becomes primarily an ongoing renegotiation of networks.’ 10 2. Further Developments Continuing our brief historical overview, since the 1950s, with Kris and Sandler, who speak of ‘strain trauma,’ Masud Khan’s ‘cumulative trauma,’ Bowlby’s concept of ‘deprivation trauma,’ the relationship of the child to the caregiver and vice versa and the importance of the object relation created between them has acquired more and more relevance. 11 As more recently acclaimed clinicians and researchers in this field have argued, it is nowadays acknowledged

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__________________________________________________________________ that the relationships in which the person who usually takes care of the child exposed her to maltreatment, abuse or neglect, has a clear influence on the mental development of the child and might cause vulnerability towards various psychic disorders both in childhood and in adulthood. 12 But in the discussion of ‘trauma’ and its consequences, a major problem remains: is this concept of trauma, that which results from the relation between a deficient mother, or caregiver, and the child, similar to the massive, extreme trauma human beings face in war, genocide, extermination (i.e. trauma also involving human agency and not catastrophic natural events)? In the case of early relational trauma, the damage occurs within a relationship on a daily basis, more than being caused by a single event with a repercussion on the psyche of the subject. When physical abuse of a child is concerned, for instance, more than the physical injury, what is experienced as traumatic is that the maltreatment comes from the person who should be taking care of the child (most of the time a third person, the mother usually, is a passive onlooker, instead of becoming a witness or of giving testimony, which results in additional traumatization as a breach in trust for the child). This is a point Ruth Leys makes very clear in her chapter on Ferenczi in her Trauma: A Genealogy: in his Clinical Diary Ferenczi repeatedly suggested that more fundamental than any other traumatogenic factor, including the actual sexual assaults to which he gave such weight, it was the lies and hypocrisy of adults that, by forcing the child to doubt her own judgement about the reality of her experience, fragmented and hystericized her and made her a liar and hypocrite in turn. 13 Ferenczi goes so far as to suggest that what is really damaging in not the violence or the sexual abuse in itself but the fact that the adult distorts the truth or negates it in order to save his reputation, so that the child takes on herself the adult’s sense of guilt through identification with the aggressor. 14 Ferenczi compares the traumatized child (traumatized by the violence, the hypocrisy or the neglect of the adult) with the situation of a patient in analysis with a rigid and distant analyst (similar to Freud’s attitude), so that analysis in this case results in further traumatization and the analyst plays the role of the distant and sometimes hypocritical onlooker, who pretends not to know or see the truth of the abuse. 15 In the case of incest, the situation is even more complicated, and traditional psychoanalytic approaches based on Oedipal complex and seduction fantasies even suggested some kind of participation by the child in the actual event, that is, the child’s seductive contribution. Fortunately, in the 1980s there was a change in attitude in the psychoanalytic community; it was the time in which the

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__________________________________________________________________ controversial repressed memory debate, especially in the States and in English speaking countries, exploded. As has already been noted, in psychoanalysis unconscious fantasies and repressed memories are equally difficult to trace and at the same time both contribute to pathology, and therefore the validity of childhood memories captured through an adult psychoanalytic psychotherapy is difficult to prove. The present debate has become a discussion about memory and ways of encoding the traumatic memory. 16 It would appear that traumatic memories are specifically encoded because of the hyperarousal attached to them. More than a semantic memory, the traumatic trace becomes a state of affect, or is encoded in smell, in a physical sensation, especially if it is a very early memory: since the encoding of memories takes place through a word label, this is not possible if the child is too young and unable to speak. Besides, traumatic memories have a special quality that rests or is kept in the dissociative states, as Giovanni Liotti, Bessel van der Kolk, Antonello Correale and others have amply demonstrated. 17 This is why the notion of ‘implicit’ or ‘non–narrative memory’ is so relevant nowadays in the discussion on trauma and PTSD, a notion that van der Kolk and Otto van der Hart trace back to Pierre Janet, Freud’s contemporary. 18 This is why narrational and symbolic rendering of the traumatic events, such as expressive psychoanalytic therapies but also art and creativity, are fundamental tools in the reconstruction of what happened to the self that has been shattered by trauma. Recent research in attachment theory and relational trauma (early abuse and neglect in infancy) has revealed that, when the mother suffers from unresolved trauma, her chaotic and dysregulated alterations of state become imprinted into the developing brain and self-system of the child: ‘this intersubjective psychopathogenic mechanism thus mediates the psychobiological intergenerational transmission of both relational trauma and the dissociative defence against overwhelming and dysregulating affective states’ 19 and acts as a risk factor for later psychiatric disorders. From a developmental neuroscience perspective, the immediate impact is on the altered metabolic processes that poorly sustain the growth of the developing right brain capacity to regulate life stressors that generate intense affect states. What psychoanalysis terms ‘repetition’ or repetition principle has therefore a neurobiological correlation that makes the traumatic effects and its symptoms prone to be transferred and carried through from one generation to the other, in a cycle that is difficult to interrupt if proper therapeutic work is not undertaken. 3. The Problem of Real Trauma versus Fantasied Trauma The problem of whether the recovered memory is true or reconstructed through fantasy remains at the core of psychoanalytic theoretical discussion; but I would be very suspicious of a statement like this, coming from two very authoritative voices within the psychoanalytic field: ‘There can be only psychic reality behind a

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__________________________________________________________________ recovered memory – whether there is historical truth and historical reality is not our business as psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.’ (my emphasis). This is a sentence by Peter Fonagy and Mary Target, writing in a book published in 1997 on the subject of the recovered memory. 20 It is a very problematic stance, because it seems to imply that the difference between what has happened for sure and what did not happen is irrelevant. As Werner Bohleber underlines: ‘Psychoanalysis, originally undertaken in order to discover repressed childhood memories, is now in danger of becoming a treatment technique that actually fades out history.’ 21 I could not agree more: if there is a feature characteristic of psychoanalysis throughout its developmental phases over the years and centuries, it is its contribution to the discovery of a kind of disguised or covered or repressed truth, therefore, an ethical commitment lies at the core of the psychoanalytic practice, in my mind: psychoanalysis both in theory and in practice cannot but be a contributor to the restoration of truth in the individual and in society. I therefore agree totally with Ilse Grubrich-Simitis when she states that, when working with severely traumatized patients: the analyst has to resist not only his natural need to protect himself but also the tendency, reinforced by his training, to bypass reality and to devote his attention, from the beginning, to the patient’s fantasies. It is only to the extent that the historical reality is ascertained that the patient will be able to approach his own inner and outer reality. 22 (emphasis mine). After the Holocaust and the occurrence of post-war disorders in the survivors, disorders which sometimes came to the attention of psychoanalysts very late, as much as 25 years later, it was not possible to accept the idea that trauma and reality are not necessarily linked together; the phantasmatic aspect might be what is at stake in the second or third generations of traumatized parents, not in the first one; not to acknowledge this difference becomes to my mind an act of hypocrisy or denial of truth. Therefore, in psychoanalytic practice, the recuperation of historical truth is fundamental, in opposition to something that has been and still is fashionable in psychoanalysis nowadays, that is, what is called ‘narrative truth’ or narrativity, as Donald Spence in the ‘80s and Antonino Ferro nowadays maintain. 23 In fact, if the use of symbolic techniques in therapy – verbal narrative reconstruction on the part of the patient whenever possible, artistic expression and rendering of the emotions linked to the event, if suitable, – is a fundamental tool towards the recuperation of the missing elements, the split-off elements that escape consciousness while at the same time haunting it with uncanny returns (of symptoms, of split images, of sensations), the reconstruction of truth should not remain vague and undetermined, as to leave the responsible others in the shadow. Symbolic means are necessary as

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__________________________________________________________________ a way for the subject to go deeper into her emotional life, but the final result needs to be a kind of historical, definite, truth, attributing meaning and responsibility. In this, I disagree with Freud when he, at the end of his long life of intellectual endeavour and clinical practice, disclaims the validity of truth stating, in Constructions in the analysis that it is a ‘construction’ when one lays before the subject of the analysis a piece of his early history that he has forgotten. …the question arises of what guarantee we have while we are working on these constructions that we are not making mistakes and risking the success of the treatment by putting forward some construction that is incorrect. …we may lend our ear to some comforting information that is afforded by analytic experience. For we learn from it that no damage is done if, for once in a way, we make a mistake and offer the patient a wrong construction as the probable historical truth. A waste of time. ...but if nothing further develops we may conclude that we have made a mistake and we shall admit as much to the patient at some suitable opportunity without sacrificing any of our authority ... In this way the false construction drops out, as if it had never been made; and indeed, we often get an impression, as though, to borrow the words of Polonius, our bait of falsehood had taken a carp of truth. 24 If, on the level of the technique, in order to reconstruct a symbolic truth for the patient some levels of uncertainty are inescapable in certain moments of the therapy, nonetheless this should not enable analysts to state that symbolic truth and real events are one and the same thing; it is contrary to the ethics of the profession. In acknowledging and retrieving the truth of the event, the therapist becomes a sort of witness to what the patient has experienced. At the same time, we should not disclaim the experience of the patient that, when the truth of an historical event is ascertained, remembers something different from what reality attests; while retaining the emotional validity of it, the therapist should gently work towards the re-establishment of the truth, granting that that piece of memory was a sort of emotional bridge towards her own experience and the reclaiming of her own truth (which is one of the final goals of therapy). When dealing with people traumatized by massive psychic events, in fact, the theoretical question of the fantasied truth of trauma (meaning that trauma has a fantasied and not real origin) has to recede, for ethical reasons, and the real events have to be carefully and tactfully reconstructed, with all the physical correlates (what was bodily felt, experienced) within the appropriate time-frame. The proper

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__________________________________________________________________ timing for the re-experiencing of the trauma and putting together the fragmented pieces of the self is in fact fundamental: to approach the traumatic event too soon or to search for details when the patient is not ready for them is not appropriate and might retraumatize the patient. At the same time, to deny the reality of trauma as a way to avoid being in turn traumatized in some ways ourselves as therapists in the healing process of the cure is not recommendable if the cure is to succeed; only within the field of a deeply empathic listening can trauma be re-expressed and worked through. The pioneer work of survivor analysts such as Judith S. Kestenberg, Milton Jucovy, Martin Bergmann, Henry Krystal, and John Lifton, to mention a few, have established a connection between their persecutions and their symptoms, and several therapists have indicated how traumatisation is sometimes carried through generations, a point we will analyse in more detail in the next paragraph. 25 After the Shoah, a new understanding of trauma within society had to be achieved; as Werner Bohleber states: ‘the trauma theory that had been common up to then proved to be unsuitable to grasp the specific symptoms and the experience of the survivors.’ 26 It was not possible to use Freud’s stimulus barrier concept or other known theories: the experiences of the survivors called for a change in the theorization itself, or a special effort in understanding, since, ‘to cease to be a traumatic event, there needs to be an understanding of the event’. 27 4. ‘Knowing and not Knowing Trauma’: The Case of the Generations of the Holocaust and the Ethics of Memory When the traumatic event cannot be totally processed, the traumatisation is carried through the lives of the children and the next generations, in a play between reality and fantasy, meaning, in this case, that even though the second generation did not face the reality of trauma it has lived through it in fantasy or better in psychological effects transferred through the generations, what Judith Kestenberg has called ‘transposition of symptoms’, 28 and Ilany Kogan has termed ‘concretization’. 29 Emotional numbing, inability to mourn, which ends in depression or melancholia, passivity and a masochistic life-style seem to be the major symptoms that are likely to be passed on. Dori Laub and Nanette C. Auerhahn speak of ‘unconscious organizing principle for future generations.’ 30 In the work with survivors a reconstruction of the reality of the event has therefore become fundamental not only for the recovery of truth in the first generation, but for the future generations. I agree with Jacqueline Rose that in trauma ‘things do not go forward but repeat,’ or as Lyotard argues, ‘The event makes the self incapable of taking possession and control of what it is,’ meaning that trauma escapes awareness and therefore is relived rather than remembered. 31

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__________________________________________________________________ It is what Nanette Auerhahn and Dori Laub call the ‘knowing and not knowing of the trauma’: it is the nature of trauma, the authors maintain, to escape knowledge. 32 Massive psychic trauma ‘breaks through the stimulus barrier and defies the individual’s ability to formulate experience.’ 33 The centre of experience, or even the subject who experiences it, is no longer coinciding with the ‘experiencing I’; events happen somewhere, outside time and space reference, and bear no connection with the self anymore, fragmenting and displacing identity. This is what artist Catherine Barrette in this collection has shown so expressively in her work, and painstakingly requires a putting together of the pieces and a reconstruction of the post-traumatized self through dismemberment, what Barrette terms the ‘in-between quality’ of her work. As Dori Laub has written suggestively, While the trauma uncannily returns in actual life, its reality continues to exclude the subject who lives in its grip and unwittingly undergoes its ceaseless repetitions and reenactments. The traumatic event, although real, took place outside the parameters of ‘normal’ reality, such as causality, sequence, place and time. The trauma is thus an event that has no beginning, no ending, no before, no during and no after. This absence of categories that define it lends it a quality of ‘otherness,’ a salience, a timelessness and a ubiquity that puts it outside the range of associatively linked experiences, outside the range of comprehension, of recounting and of mastery…. The survivor, indeed, is not truly in touch either with the core of his traumatic reality or with the fatedness of its reenactments, and thereby remains entrapped in both. 34 The specific ‘belatedness’ of trauma, linked to Freud’s nachträglich, or the two moments of traumatizaton, as Mortimer reminds us through Lyotard, has to do precisely with this inaccessibility of the experience of trauma within consciousness. 35 The paradoxical epistemological status of trauma is in a way the paradox of the postmodern existential condition, if I may say so; quoting Laub e Auerhahn: ‘If our ability to know is dependent on the language of the dead, which is absent, and the language of the survivors, which is inadequate and incomplete, how can we know?’ 36 To quote Mortimer in this collection: ‘The latent period (as Freud terms it in his seduction theory) that Lyotard sees as existing between the understanding of the event and the time it takes place means that an event-…-can only be understood when it has ceased to be an event.’ 37 It is also in this ‘liminal space,’ not here nor there, not now nor then, that the creative working through of creativity might take

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__________________________________________________________________ place, contributing to a reframing and a reconstructing of the broken pieces of the self. 38 In this decenterment, so to speak, the self has to abide for a long time before it can reconnect and heal. But what is not truly understood and remains unconscious or split from consciousness is bound to return, and it could return as symptoms in the subject or in his/her children, who might carry the task, unconsciously, to relieve the parents from the burden of their experience and reprocess it for them. Israeli psychoanalyst Ilany Kogan identifies four fundamental ways for secondary traumatisation to be carried through: - The child might repeat unconsciously issues connected to the trauma in the parent, through what technically is called projective identification; - If the parent is emotionally unavailable, emotionally frozen or alexitimic, the child might respond to the emotional needs of the parent, even when the child is very young; - unconscious fantasies linked to past scenarios might be projected onto the child, who, for instance, may be referred to as a ‘little Hitler’; - the child might identify himself/herself with a lost relative of the parent and in this way carry though the mourning in place of the parent, renouncing his own/her own life through the identification with the dead relative. He or she lives a life that is not his own/her own. 39 In other words, the children might be burdened with the unconscious ego identifications with parents who carry with them the perception of a lifethreatening inner and outer reality and are chained to their parents’s experiences (conscious and unconscious) without being aware of that. These mechanisms explain why, in members of the second generation seeking help, false selves, narcissistic disturbances, borderline syndromes, hysterical and schizoid identities are very common; another common outcome in the second generation is the choice of a profession where they can be of help, like doctors, therapists, psychoanalysts. Not only the reconstruction of the details of the traumatic events are fundamental for the victim herself, but the careful reconstruction of truth, possible only at a certain stage of the therapy, has an impact on society at large, reconstructs a piece of history that was lost. Reconstructing the truth as carefully as possible is

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__________________________________________________________________ the only way to avoid the compulsion to repeat through generations and therefore the devastating effects of the death principle at work. 5. Psychoanalysis as Testimony: Ethics and the Search for Truth Dori Laub and Judith Herman have most authoritatively linked the work of psychotherapy to the testimonial process, or the process of giving and receiving testimony of a lost event. A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who has survived a labour camp in Romania at the age of 5 and has worked with survivors and the following generations, Dori Laub is also the co-founder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at the University of Yale, USA, where he interviewed many survivors. He stresses how the very process of listening to the trauma, and to the survivor giving testimony, is not an easy task, because the survival experience confronts us with the basic questions in life: the listener can no longer ignore the question of a facing death; of facing time and its passage; of the meaning and purpose of living; of the limits of one’s omnipotence; of losing the ones that are close to us, the great question of our ultimate aloneness, our otherness from any other; our responsibility to and for our destiny; the question of loving and its limits; of parents and children; and so on. 40 What was lost in the traumatic experience is the trust in the other, in the bond with the other human beings, which under certain conditions might be restored through the silent participation of a listener, a psychotherapist or a witness to the testimony, who is ‘totally present and totally committed.’ The core of trauma in fact resides in the break of the empathic dyad, the loss of the I and the ‘internal thou.’ 41 In recounting of his visit to a psychiatric hospital in Israel, where many survivors had been hospitalized with a psychiatric diagnosis but without anybody even asking about their own past life stories, Laub speaks of a man who had spent his last 35 years in the psychiatric facility, and had not spoken since then; he had been circling around Laub, communicating a feeling he wanted to meet him. His story was a story of total loneliness, because he was the only one in the family to have survived Auschwitz. When Laub asked him if anybody knew his story there, he responded simply that nobody had ever asked him. This is to say that when the listener is there totally present and totally empathic to the testimony being rendered, a piece of life story and of truth may be regained and recuperated to the world and the community, a piece of human history who would otherwise be erased.

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__________________________________________________________________ Therefore, Laub concludes, ‘what is needed for healing’ is the creation of a ‘testimonial community.’ 42 The same link between recuperation of the victim and reparation in society is underlined by Judith Herman, the author of Trauma and Recovery. This author highlights the absolute importance of the moral stance of the analyst: ‘it is not enough for the therapist to be ‘neutral’ or ‘nonjudgemental.’ 43 In fact, in the telling, the trauma story becomes a testimony. Inger Agger and Soren Jensen, in their work with refugee survivors of political persecution, note the universality of testimony as a ritual of healing. Testimony has both a private dimension, which is confessional and spiritual, and a public aspect, which is political and judicial.’ 44 Finally, the best way the therapist can fulfil her responsibility of the patient is by faithfully bearing witness to her story. With Herman I would conclude that ‘remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of the individual victims.’ 45 In fact, even the psychotherapeutic work carried out with the victim in the narrow space of the therapy room may assume a fundamental testimonial value which might end up with a form of healing and reparation of the community at large, restoring pieces of truth that belong to the entire social and historical body. In this way, psychoanalysis becomes an ethical practice among others in culture.

Notes 1

See Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, trans. James and Alix Strachey, ed. James and Alix Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1974). 2 For a short revision of all the points in Freud’s theory in which he changes his mind and then goes back to previous ideas, see Clara Mucci, Il Dolore Estremo. Il Trauma da Freud alla Shoah (Roma: Borla, 2008). 3 Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 18871904, ed. Jeffrey M. Masson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 266. 4 Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Part III), S.E., 16 (London: Hogarth Press, 1916-17), 368. 5 See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. S.E. 18, 7-64 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1920). 6 See Mortimer in this volume. 7 Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety. S.E. 20, 87-172 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1926). 8 See Sandor Ferenczi, The Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi, ed. Edith Dupont (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

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See Sandor Ferenczi, ‘Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child,’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis 30 (1949): 225-230. 10 Zygmund Bauman, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 11, 13. 11 For a brief review of all of these concepts of trauma, see Werner Bohleber, Destructiveness, Intersubjetivity, and Trauma: The Identity Crisis of Modern Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 2010). 12 Giovanni Liotti and Benedetto Farina, Sviluppi Traumatici. Eziopatogenesi, Clinica e Terapia della Dimensione Dissociativa (Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2011), 9. 13 Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 153. 14 Ferenczi, Clinical Diary, 155-156; Leys, Trauma, 154. 15 Judith Dupont, Introduction to The Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), xi-xvii. 16 See for instance Bessel A. Van der Kolk, ‘Trauma and Memory,’ in Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body and Society, eds. Bessel Van der Kolk, Alexander C. MacFarlane and Lars Weisaeth (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), 279-302. See also Mucci, Il dolore estremo. 17 Liotti e Farina, Sviluppi Traumatici; Van der Kolk, MacFarlane and Weisaeth, Traumatic Stress; Antonello Correale, Area Traumatica e Campo Istituzionale (Roma: Borla, 2006). 18 See Bessel A. van der Kolk and Otto van der Hart, ‘Pierre Janet and the Breakdown of Adaptation in Psychological Trauma,’ American Journal of Psychiatry 146 (1989): 1530-1540. 19 Allan N. Schore, ‘Relational Trauma and the Developing Right Brain: The Neurobiology of Broken Attachment Bonds,’ in Relational Trauma in Infancy: Psychoanalytic and Neuropsychological Contributions to Parent-Infant Psychotherapy, ed. Tessa Baradon (London: Routledge, 2010), 19-47, 35. 20 Peter Fonagy and Mary Target, ‘Perspectives on the Recovered Memory Debate,’ in Recovered Memories of Abuse: True or False? eds. Joseph Sandler and Peter Fonagy (London: Karnac Books, 1997), 183-216, 216. 21 Bohleber, Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity, and Trauma, 109. 22 Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, ‘Extreme Traumatization as Cumulative Trauma: Psychoanalytic Investigations of the Effects of Concentration Camp Experiences on Survivors and Their Children,’ The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 36 (1981): 415-450, 440. 23 Donald Spense, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984); Antonino Ferro, Il lavoro clinico (Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2003).

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Freud, Constructions in analysis, Standard Edition, Vol. XXIII, in Moses and Monoteism. An Outline of Psychoanalysis and Other Works (London: The Hogarth Press, 1964), 257-269, 261-262. 25 See Judith S. Kestenberg, ‘Psychoanalysis of Children of Survivors from the Holocaust,’ Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association 28 (1980): 775-804; Martin S. Bergmann and Milton E. Jucovy, Generations of the Holocaust (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Henry Krystal, ed., Massive Psychic Trauma (New York: International Universities Press, 1968); Robert J. Lifton, Broken Connections: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 26 Bohleber, Destructiveness, 87. 27 Mortimer, in this volume. 28 Judith Kestenberg, ‘Psychoanalysis of Children of Survivors.’ 29 Ilany Kogan, The Cry of Mute Children (London: Free Association Press, 1995). 30 Dori Laub and Nanette C. Auerhahn, ‘Reverberations of Genocide: Its Expression in the Conscious and Unconscious of Post-Holocaust Generations,’ in Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Holocaust, eds. Steven S. Luel and Paul Marcus (New York: Holocaust Awareness Institute, Center for Judaic Studies, University of Denver, and KTAV Publishing House Inc,. 1984), 151-167, 154. 31 See Mortimer in this volume for both quotes. 32 Dori Laub and Nanette Auerhahn, ‘Knowing and not Knowing Massive Psychic Trauma: Forms of Traumatic Memory,’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis 74 (1993): 287-302, 288. 33 Ibid., 290. 34 Dori Laub, ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,’ in Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), 57-74, 68-69. 35 I borrow the term ‘belatedness’ from Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. Trauma. Narrative and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 36 Laub and Auerhahn, Prologue to Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Special Issue of Knowing and not Knowing the Holocaust, ed. Joseph Lichtenberg, 5.1 (1985): 1-8, 4. 37 Mortimer, in this volume. 38 See Barrette and Lovey in this volume. 39 Kogan, The Cry of Mute Children. 40 Laub, ‘Bearing Witness,’ 72. 41 Laub and Auerhahn, ‘Knowing and not Knowing Massive Psychic Trauma,’ 287.

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Dori Laub, ‘From Speechlessness to Narrative: The Cases of Holocaust Historians and of Psychiatrically Hospitalized Survivors,’ Literature and Medicine 24 (2005): 253-265, 264. 43 Judith L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 178. 44 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 181. 45 Herman, Introduction, 1.

Bibliography Bauman, Zygmund. Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Bergmann, Martin S. and Milton E. Jucovy. Generations of the Holocaust. New York: Basic Books, 1982. Bohleber, Werner. Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity, and Trauma: The Identity Crisis of Modern Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books, 2010. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience. Trauma. Narrative and History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Correale, Antonello. Area Traumatica e Campo Istituzionale. Roma: Borla, 2006. Dupont, Judith. Introduction to The Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Ferenczi, Sandor. The Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi. Edited by Judith Dupont. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Ferenczi, Sandor. ‘Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child.’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis 30 (1949): 225-230. Ferro, Antonino. Il Lavoro Clinico. Milano: Cortina, 2003. Fonagy, Peter, and Mary Target. ‘Perspectives on the Recovered Memory Debate.’ In Recovered Memories of Abuse: True or False? edited by Joseph Sandler and Peter Fonagy, 183-216. London: Karnac, 1997. Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Part III). S.E., 16. London: Hogarth Press, 1916-17.

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__________________________________________________________________ Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. S.E. 18, 7-64. London: The Hogarth Press, 1920. Freud, Sigmund. Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety. S.E. 20, 87-172. London: The Hogarth Press, 1926. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Constructions in analysis,’ Standard Edition, Vol. XXIII. In Moses and Monoteism. An Outline of Psychoanalysis and Other Works, 257-269. London: The Hogarth Press, 1964. Freud, Sigmund. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 18871904, edited by Jeffrey Masson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. Grubrich-Simitis, Ilse. ‘Extreme Traumatization as Cumulative Trauma. Psychoanalytic Investigations of the Effects of Concentration Camp Experiences on Survivors and Their Children.’ The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 36 (1981): 415-450. Herman, Judith L. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Kestenberg, Judith S. ‘Psychoanalysis of Children of Survivors from the Holocaust.’ Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association 28 (1980): 775-804. Kogan, Ilany. The Cry of Mute Children. London: Free Association Press, 1995. Laub, Dori. ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening.’ In Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 57-74. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Laub, Dori. ‘From Speechlessness to Narrative: The Cases of Holocaust Historians and of Psychiatrically Hospitalized Survivors.’ Literature and Medicine 24 (2005): 253-265. Laub, Dori, and Nanette C. Auerhahn. ‘Reverberations of Genocide: Its Expression in the Conscious and Unconscious of Post-Holocaust Generations.’ Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Holocaust, edited by Steven S. Luel and Paul Marcus, 151-167. New York: Holocaust Awareness Institute, Center for Judaic Studies, University of Denver, and KTAV Publishing House, 1984. Laub, Dori and Nanette C. Auerhahn. Prologue to Knowing and not Knowing the Holocaust, edited by Joseph Lichtenberg, Psychoanalytic Inquiry 5 (1985): 1-8.

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__________________________________________________________________ Laub, Dori and Nanette C. Auerhahn. ‘Knowing and not Knowing Massive Psychic Trauma: Forms of Traumatic Memory.’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis 74 (1993): 287-302. Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. Liotti, Giovanni e Benedetto Farina. Sviluppi Traumatici. Eziopatogenesi, Clinica e Terapia della Dimensione Dissociativa. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2011. Mucci, Clara. Il Dolore Estremo. Il Trauma da Freud alla Shoah. Roma: Borla, 2008. Schore, Allan N. ‘Relational Trauma and the Developing Right Brain. The Neurobiology of Broken Attachment Bonds.’ Relational Trauma in Infancy. Psychoanalytic and Neuropsychological Contributions to Parent-Infant Psychotherapy, edited by Tessa Baradon, 19-47. London: Routledge, 2010. Spense, Donald. Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis. New York: W.W. Norton, 1984. Van der Kolk, Bessel A. ‘Trauma and Memory.’ In Traumatic Stress. The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body and Society, edited by Bessel Van der Kolk, Alan MacFarlane, and Lars Weisaeth, 279-302. New York, Guilford Press, 1996. Clara Mucci, PhD., Emory University, Atlanta, USA, and Dottore di Ricerca, University of Genoa, Italy, is Full Professor of English Literature and English Renaissance Drama at the University of Chieti, Italy, where she also teaches Clinical Psychology. A clinical psychologist trained psychoanalytically, in private practice in Pescara and Milan, she specialized in Borderline Disorders at the Personality Disorder Institute of New York, directed by Otto Kernberg. She is the author of six monographies on Shakespearean Drama, Women’s Literature, Psychoanalysis and Trauma.

Researching the Jean Pool, or Postmodernist Literature Seen as a Jeanetically Modified Material Danielle Mortimer Abstract This chapter examines Bret Easton Ellis’s 2005 novel Lunar Park in relation to a series of revisions of Sigmund Freud’s seduction theory. The chapter links together the work of Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard through their interactions with Freud’s seduction theory. Overall it argues that Lunar Park is a postmodernist trauma narrative that works in accordance with Jean Baudrillard’s ideas from his 1979 text, Seduction. The chapter suggests that as a seduction-driven text, Lunar Park resists interpretation. It looks at how various re-evaluations of Freud’s seduction theory provide alternative methods through which to read postmodernist trauma narratives. It argues that the structure of literary trauma theory has two main concepts: the idea of interpreting the symptoms of trauma through a return to the originary traumatic event, and the notion of the traumatic event as a rupture from the life that existed before it. In literary interpretations of trauma narratives, the past is not simply background to the present and presented narrative, but the very means through which an understanding of it can be reached. In postmodernist trauma narratives the trauma has instead become ruptured from its own origins. This rupture blocks the route, a return to the original trauma, through which trauma narratives have generally been interpreted. The chapter concludes that seduction-driven writing can be posited as an alternative method of reading that opens and emphasises the full implications of the role of the reader in postmodernist traumatic texts. Key Words: Seduction theory, trauma, postmodern, postmodernism, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Laplanche, Pontalis. ***** 1. Theoretical Conflicts In respect to its scientifically inspired title – although maybe inspired is the wrong word – this chapter will start with some statistics. It will look at one text, Bret Easton Ellis’s 2005 novel Lunar Park. It will explore this novel through the work of four critics, two of whom can be classified as psychoanalysts, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, and two theorists known for their writings on the postmodern, Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. Since critics who read through methods of psychoanalysis argue that everything lies beneath the surface, and postmodernists instead suggest that the surface tells all, and there is nothing under it to find, initially one might think that these critics could share nothing in common (apart from a name) and that their ideas would clash when

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__________________________________________________________________ applied to the same text. The discrepancy between the central concepts of these two schools of thought has a potentially unravelling effect on the relationship between the postmodern reader and a particular type of postmodernist text: postmodern narratives of trauma. Since the Second World War, the psychoanalytic concept of trauma theory has become prevalent in both cultural and social ideology. It has also come to dominate literary studies, initially being widely employed as a way to formulate and structure some type of response to the horrors recounted within front line and Holocaust survivors’ fictional narratives and testimonies. In her book, Trauma Fiction, Anne Whitehead suggests that after ‘the rethinking of trauma’ that occurred after the Second World War, the notion of trauma itself ‘has been absorbed into the current ideologies of history and memory’ and that this has passed on both to and in the work of contemporary writers. 1 In its literary application, the structure of trauma theory has two main concepts: the idea of interpreting the symptoms of trauma through a return to, or repetition of, the originary traumatic event, and the notion of the traumatic event as a rupture from both the life and the connection to language that existed before it. In literary interpretations of trauma narratives, the origin of the trauma is not simply background to the present and presented narrative, but the very means through which an understanding of it can be reached. In postmodernist trauma narratives, the trauma has instead become ruptured from its own origins, which as a consequence become lost. This rupture blocks the route, a return to the original trauma, through which trauma narratives have generally been interpreted. The incompatibility between psychoanalytic thought and postmodern thought, therefore, can be viewed as a potential stumbling block to the reading of postmodern narratives that deal with trauma. However, despite the schism between their central concepts, there is one psychoanalytic theory that does seem to link the two schools of thought, as can be seen in the connections it draws between all four Jeans: the seduction theory Sigmund Freud abandoned in 1897. 2 In this chapter I will use Laplanche and Pontalis, and Lyotard, and Baudrillard’s ideas to look at how Freud’s seduction theory has the potential to wed together these two conflicting schools of thought, and the implications this holds for the relationship between postmodernist narratives of trauma and their readers. This chapter will begin with a summary of the importance Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis ascribe to the timeframe of Freud’s seduction theory. It will go on to explore how Lyotard uses the same timeframe to define the postmodern, and how the conception of the postmodern in terms of a seductive timeframe can be used to draw attention to the various issues that currently exist in the relationship between the postmodern text and its reader. Lyotard’s theories can be used to explore how and why issues with the readability of – and the ability of the reader to read – a postmodern trauma narrative arise. Having framed these issues using Lyotardian logic, this chapter will examine how Baudrillard’s theorization and application of seductive structures might offer a framework within which to read postmodernist

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__________________________________________________________________ trauma narratives. This chapter will use Bret Easton Ellis’s 2005 novel Lunar Park as an example of a trauma narrative that cannot be read through conventional and established pathways of reading trauma, but can be opened up by the application of various different versions of the seduction theory. 2. The Seduction Theory of Sigmund Freud Freud’s seduction theory looked at how a child, who was abused before she or he had acquired enough knowledge to understand what had happened, was traumatised. It was developed during the1890s and abandoned in 1897. This seems, perhaps, a strange starting point to the search for an alternative reading method through which to engage with a postmodernist text. Can a return to a theory formulated at the end of the nineteenth century offer insight into texts written about and during the end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first? However, the seduction theory had a major revival – of sorts – in the late twentieth century, becoming a vital and controversial theory within many disciplines. In psychotherapy and law, the seduction theory has become important due to a focus on ‘the causal fact of seduction,’ whilst in psychoanalysis, literature and film theory, and philosophy it is the theory behind the seduction theory that has been reevaluated and re-instated, mainly as a tool for understanding and reading narratives of trauma. 3 The controversy around the seduction theory within the disciplines of psychotherapy and law began in earnest with the 1984 publication of Jeffrey Masson’s The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory. 4 Masson took a post at the Freud archives, and there claimed to have discovered scandal behind Freud’s decision to renounce the seduction theory. Freud’s seduction theory centred round a two-phase structure. The initial phase was the event of a physical seduction, which took place without being experienced as traumatic by the victim of seduction. The event, Freud argued, was not experienced as traumatic because the event was not comprehensible to its sufferer. Knowledge and experience arise in tandem, so that the trauma of the event can only be experienced when the sufferer is able to understand what has happened. During the period of latency and incomprehensibility before this repetition occurs, however, Freud’s theorised victim does not remain untouched by the event. Instead, this period is characterised by unstructured, un-knowing repetitions of the initial event, which take place as part of the seduction sufferer’s attempt to reach a point of understanding about it. The trauma of the event is only experienced when a specific type of repetition occurs. This is one that allows the victim to reassess the initial event from a separate perspective. Due to this new point of view on the original event, the sufferer can come to understand more about what happened during, and because of, it. 5 The structure Freud ascribes to the seduction theory maintains Freud and Josef Breuer’s original hypothesis, created in regard to the women whom they theorised were suffering from hysteria, that when the suffering is psychological, people

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__________________________________________________________________ ‘suffer mainly from reminiscences.’ 6 Freud theorised the seduction theory after working with eighteen female patients, all of whom, he claimed, spoke about the intrusion of sexuality into their childhood by various adult figures, among whom featured a brother and a governess. In 1896 Freud presented a paper on his seduction theory, which was badly received by the medical establishment. In 1897, despite the subsequent publication of this paper, Freud wrote a letter to his longtime mentor Wilhelm Fleiss to announce that he was abandoning it. By the time of its abandonment, Freud had made various additional and altered claims regarding the case studies contained within his written account of the seduction theory, unifying all reported events of seduction into being perpetrated by the girls’ fathers. In his book, Masson claimed that the renunciation of the seduction theory was a move made by Freud to distance himself from the sensational claim of the prevalence of incest among affluent households of Vienna. Freud replaced the seduction theory, which spoke of physical seductions, with the idea that all women fantasised a seduction by the father. Masson argued that by turning ‘true’ stories into fantasy, Freud betrayed the young women who had confided in him and turned to him for help. 7 In this claim, however, Masson made a return to the seduction theory that was curiously untouched by knowledge accumulated throughout the twentieth century about Freud’s working methods during his construction of the seduction theory. Although Masson appeared to berate Freud for his research methods and scruples, he also followed Freud’s penchant for cutting corners: while Masson’s book accuses Freud of disregarding his patients’ actual stories, it ignores Freud’s dubious methods within both the psychoanalytic setting and in his writing up of case studies. 8 Richard Webster argues that certain Freud-authored documents from the period of his construction of the seduction theory suggest that Freud systematically introduced the notion of abuse into his patient’s therapy sessions. 9 Freud also played with the original testimonies of his patients when he came to include them in his theoretical papers, and exaggerated the beneficial effects of the psychoanalytic treatment on his patients’ mental health, suggesting in his paper that all cases were near completion, when in reality none ever got that far. However, despite the limited nature of Masson’s accusations, the seduction theory – re-theorised reductively as the real seduction by a family member – was resurrected in both feminist critiques (which accused Freud of creating silence and disbelief towards a century of women’s stories of abuse by changing ‘true’ stories into fantasy) and in the courts. 10 Women who had no memory of abuse began to be awarded damages from the family members they accused (and who were also sometimes sentenced to jail terms). These accusations came after attending therapy sessions, where the therapists were eager not to repeat the mistake of their founder (denial), and in doing so, replicated some of the faults that can be identified with Freud’s initial processes of data collection and therapeutic application (suggestion). 11 The debate around the seduction theory intensified after it emerged

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__________________________________________________________________ that psychotherapists had begun to revert to Freud’s actual seduction theory technique, of suggesting the presence of childhood abuse when faced with patients who were suffering from other stresses, such as work-related issues, or from general feelings of psychological malaise. 12 This therapeutic ‘revolution’ had a huge impact, with the laws in America being altered in order to incorporate the women and men who ‘discovered’, through therapy, abuse in their past that had never been remembered prior to interaction with a therapist. Many of the women and men to whom this concept of non-remembered and repressed abuse was introduced, and who subsequently accused their family members of misconduct, sued their therapists when they revoked their claims. This phenomenon was labelled the ‘false memory syndrome’ and its after-shocks still reverberate. 13 Debates remain as to whether it is possible to not-remember childhood abuse, and how this non-remembering differs from the concept of repression. However, despite the on-going controversy, the law reverted to occlude non-remembered abuse from being a viable claim in court. In many respects, the debates about the practical application of the seduction theory fit into those surrounding both postmodernist literature and the narration of trauma. All three interrogate notions of memory, unreliability, narrative, and truth. Truth, especially, becomes a contested notion in postmodernist and trauma theories and in the debate over non-remembered abuse, as both it and history are reassessed in terms of how far they are intertwined with, and shaped by, narrative. In the seduction theory, in theories of postmodernism, and in theories of trauma, the narration of the event is as important as the event itself; in many ways narrative becomes the event itself since the event is sometimes only realised through its retelling. Since the theory of Freud’s ideas on seduction can be considered resonant to the concerns of postmodernist society, and consequently its literature and theory, it is unsurprising to find its presence in the work of three of the main postmodern theorists, Baudrillard, Lyotard and to a lesser extent, Fredric Jameson. 14 Therefore, although the seduction theory was developed at the turn of the twentieth century, its preoccupations encapsulate many postmodernist ideas and techniques, and the theory itself has had a series of postmodernist makeovers that have fine-tuned it for contemporary use. 3. Reworking the Freudian Seductive Timeframe for Contemporary Use As Clara Mucci notes in this volume, Sandor Ferenczi was one of the first psychoanalytic theorists to argue for a return to and a revaluation of Freud’s seduction theory, in his 1933 paper, ‘Confusion of tongues between adults and the child’. 15 Despite the rejection of Ferenczi’s seduction-driven work by Freud and the Freudian psychoanalytic community, Ferenczi is now viewed as one of a long line of theorists who have shown interest in the seduction theory. One of the first major reassessments of the seduction theory occurred in the 1960s, through the work of Laplanche and Pontalis. What was rescued and reinstated as vital to

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__________________________________________________________________ understanding trauma as well as sexuality by Laplanche and Pontalis (namely the two-part experience of trauma that was structured by Freud) is also what continues to resonate about the seduction theory for postmodern critics. Although this structure is present initially in Freud’s seduction theory and is subsequently present in all trauma theories, Laplanche highlights the importance of his and Pontalis’s work on this timeframe when he notes that before their involvement, ‘the theory of seduction [had] been completely neglected. When people talk about seduction, they do not talk about the theory of seduction’. 16 He continues, ‘I would argue that even Freud, when he abandoned the so-called seduction theory, forgot about his theory. He just dismissed the causal fact of seduction’. 17 Laplanche adds that he took the ‘first step…with (J.-B.) Pontalis’ towards remembering the theory behind seduction ‘a long time ago, in The Language of Psychoanalysis’ where they took action ‘to unearth this theory’. 18 The theory Laplanche speaks about can be equated with the re-energizing of the temporal structure of Freud’s ideas on seduction, since when Laplanche talks of the theory he and Pontalis unearthed, he remarks that it ‘has very complicated aspects: temporal aspects’. 19 After the publication of The Language of Psychoanalysis Laplanche and Pontalis further elaborated on and emphasised the importance of this temporal model in their 1964 paper, ‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality’. 20 Laplanche and Pontalis re-establish its importance by making it the defining characteristic of their theory of the phantasm. In The Inhuman Lyotard employs a phantasmatic timescale through which to characterise the postmodern, although he probably derives the structure for this timescale directly from Freud’s seduction theory, which he references. 21 Lyotard focuses upon the latent period of the seductive timeframe in an effort to explore the nature of the quandary regarding postmodernist arts. The latent period lies between the occurrence of the event, and the later repetition and consequent understanding and experiencing of it. This is a point at which interpretation cannot take place. The moment between the initial scene and its repetition marks a site in which the condition of knowledge is dislocated; a fallow field, in which interpretation is defeated by incomprehension. It can be argued that postmodernist literature makes traditional methods of reading trauma obsolete because it is at this point within the seduction theory that the postmodern is positioned. 4. Postmodern Trauma and the Seduction Theory This placing of the postmodern is, I would ague, made by Lyotard, who describes the postmodern using the temporal structure of the seductive event. Lyotard makes a return to Freud’s seduction theory in order to define his notion of an event. He suggests that when a happening occurs, it becomes an event only if it is not understood by those to whom it occurs. This is because, for Lyotard, the notion of an event is connected to the notion of rupture. The event dislocates a sense of identity and comprehension since it creates a rupture with what has gone before. It introduces a new ‘happening’ that exists outside the boundaries of the

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__________________________________________________________________ level of knowledge that were in place before the event occurred, and thus cannot be explained through methods and knowledge acquired prior to the event. This is precisely the seductive victim’s state of knowledge. The seduction, for Freud, comes too early, before the victim has acquired the knowledge to comprehend what has taken place. For Freud, there is a secondary occurrence, which re-adjusts this knowledge imbalance, by offering the victim either a new perspective on the event, from a changed position within the scene of seduction itself (from the desired object to the desiring subject, for example), or from a gaining of knowledge about what occurred in the original event (learning, for example, that the intention of the act was one of seduction). Postmodernist literature cannot be interpreted at present because there has been no such repetition. This means that the postmodern ‘event’ remains non-interpretable. However, it is not the case that the postmodern ‘event’, like the seductive event, merely awaits this second phase, the repetition that will allow a widening of the boundaries of knowledge in order to accommodate this rupture and initiate a process of interpretation of the postmodern. Rather, if the postmodern event is seen as a traumatic event which has lost contact with its origins, it can be suggested that this state of noninterpretability is a chronic one for the postmodern. As a whole, Freud’s seduction theory was essentially a method of reading through the original event. The present state of the subject is to be understood through the past, the repetition being understood through its connections to the original event. If the origin is lost, this interpretively-driven method of reading is unsettled, and interpretation around the subject is, in general, blocked. Lyotard’s definition of the postmodern as event disrupts the notion that a postmodernist work can be an expression of its era, can interact with and explain ‘the event’ of its time. If some people now live in a postmodern society, if the postmodern is still currently ‘an event’ in some societies, then they are according to Lyotard unable to understand it. It can be suggested from Lyotard’s arguments that the event of the postmodern is (currently) occurring at a time when people do not have the ability to explain what it is. Any postmodernist narrative that tries to express postmodernity, defined by these terms, means that the postmodern writer, as with one of Freud’s patients when he formulated the seduction theory and as with a phantasm sufferer ‘speaks too soon, before he knows what his subject is about’. 22 Any attempt to express postmodernity in a novel will be unable to capture it, to explain it or deconstruct it, because it remains something that is not understood. Either this or the postmodern has to be considered dead, past, no longer an event, but a historical occurrence which is, as Cathy Caruth notes, ‘fully evident only in connection with another place, and in another time.’ 23 If the timeframe of trauma is taken to define the structure of the postmodern as event, then the postmodernist text can be suggested to speak in a voice akin to that of a traumatised subject. However, as noted, the established methods for reading trauma – by making a return to the originary event and interpreting what comes

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__________________________________________________________________ after through that event – cannot read what the postmodernist trauma speaker or narrative says. This timeframe leads Lyotard to a new way of defining the function and form of postmodernist literature. Lyotard suggests that the main feature of a postmodernist work is that it does not represent the unpresentable, but gestures towards the fact that the unpresentable is always present. 24 The concept of the postmodern as unpresentable within postmodernist literature links strongly to the specific (seductive/phantasmatic) timeframe that Lyotard sees it as operating within. An event can only be understood later (too late), once the event itself has sufficiently altered a consciousness enough to incorporate the event. However, by the time this has occurred, the event is no longer ‘an event’ because it is no longer taking place before, or beyond, what can be understood. Therefore it makes sense that in response to the event of postmodernity, which, where it is taking place, exists outside any frame of reference, postmodernist art can only gesture towards the (unpresentable) existence of the event of postmodernity, rather than being able to explain or represent it fully. The definition of the postmodern as a traumatic event creates, at this point in Lyotard’s arguments, a problem for its readers. Namely, that the postmodern, and consequently the postmodernist novel, becomes virtually unreadable for its contemporaries. This becomes an issue when a postmodern narrative of trauma, such as Lunar Park, is approached. 5. Lunar Park as a Postmodernist Trauma Narrative Lunar Park has been spoken of as a trauma narrative by many critics. 25 It is a difficult text to summarise, since to read the text is not to pinpoint specific happenings that occur within it. This is impossible, as everything that is portrayed within Lunar Park is unwritten and undone by later descriptions in the narrative. The first-person narration of the novel is delivered by a character named Bret Easton Ellis (hereby to be termed Bret). Bret is portrayed as a successful writer, author of the novels Less than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, The Informers and Glamorama, novels which also comprise the oeuvre of the preLunar Park real-life Ellis. Bret announces in the opening pages that he will recount the story of the disappearance of his son Robby. This occurred at the end of the difficult first summer Bret had spent with Robby, after he had moved in with Robby and his mother, Bret’s ex-girlfriend Jayne. However, there are many other stories and fragments of story that intrude upon Bret’s narration, including Bret’s own battle with drug and alcohol addiction, the story of Bret’s troubled relationship with his own father and the impact his father’s death had upon him. Amongst Bret’s personal angst, other, unexplained, events begin to take place. These include the mysterious disappearance of many of the male teenagers within the area Bret lives, as well as a series of murders that mimic the chronology of the murders from American Psycho, even those that were present only in the supposed pre-publication manuscript. The narrator, Bret, is a character who thoroughly represents aspects of Lyotard’s theories on the arts’ relationship to postmodern

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__________________________________________________________________ culture in The Inhuman. Due to a lack of understanding about the event he is trying to represent, Bret always testifies to the unpresentable without actually being able to present it. The event that has unravelled his life has taken place outside his sphere of knowledge and so is never represented. It has no origin within the text itself. Trauma within a literary text is thought to be interpretable through a return to the originary event. The originary event is identified by the manner in which it becomes a theme: the way in which certain things reoccur allows the reader to trace back to the original event and work out the effect it had on the later life of the trauma sufferer. By eradicating any sort of pattern to the repetitions within Lunar Park (everything repeats, mainly to contradict what came before) Ellis creates a novel that shuts down this type of reading. An example of the way it breaks with the notion of origins can be seen in a confrontation that takes place between Bret and Robby midway through the novel. Amid the confusion of the different strands of story that are already taking place within his narration, Bret decides to pick Robby up from school. Bret has a dual purpose in this action; to bond with Robby and ease their strained relationship, and to ask Robby about the boys who have gone missing, with whom Bret has discovered Robby may be corresponding. Bret arrives at the school gates, is greeted with hesitation by his son, and initiates conversation by locking them both in the car. Bret’s narration continues, ‘I want to talk to you,’ I said, now that we were both encased….’Look, I want all the bullshit dropped, okay?’ He turned to me, incredulous. ‘What bullshit, Dad?’ The ‘Dad’ was a giveaway. ‘I want you to tell me what’s going on….About the missing boys.’ There was no way to control the urgency of my voice. ‘What do you know about them?….I saw the files Robby.’ ….’Dad, I don’t even know Cleary Miller.’ ….I started hoping that Robby was being genuine. ‘It’s just a game, Dad. It’s just a stupid game.’ It took me a long time to judge if this was the truth or the black lie returning. ….’It’s just that…I’m so scared sometimes and I think maybe…we play this game to…make a joke out of what’s happening…. maybe it’s just a way to deal with it…’ ….He removed his hands from his face once he stopped crying and looked at me with something approaching tenderness, and I believed he wasn’t keeping a secret

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__________________________________________________________________ ….Didn’t you realise that even though you felt healed you were still blind? It was true: the image of Robby’s face became multiplied through my tears, and each face held a different expression. 26 There are several markers within this passage that indicate how it undercuts typical ways of reading trauma narratives through the notion of a return to origins. One of the main markers is the instability of signifiers, such as the word ‘Dad’. The nature of this instability is extreme, the word is so completely decontextualised that its origin disappears, and hence it cannot be interpreted, cannot be given meaning, via this method of reading. The first time the word ‘Dad’ is used it is represented as ‘a giveaway’ sign that Robby is being insincere. The word briefly seems to be coming from a specific origin since it appears to be contextualised; a young boy with a guilty conscience (who has been communicating with the missing boys) uses the word – one of the only times he uses it in this way throughout the text, preferring to keep his distance from the man he generally calls Bret – to try to manipulate his father into leaving him alone. The word seems to be contextualised as performance by its out-of-place nature within Robby’s vocabulary. However, over the course of the exchange between Bret and Robby this superficially stable meaning quickly gives way as the word slips out of its secure setting. When the word is used a second time, it prompts Bret to begin ‘hoping that Robby was being genuine’ (and is therefore not communicating with the missing boys). The origin of the event – Robby’s involvement in the original event – cannot be determined since, from the representation of Robby in the rest of the novel, it is impossible to determine which of these situations is true: that he is, or that he is not, communicating with the missing boys. This uncertainty enters Bret’s dealings with Robby. When Robby uses the word a third time Bret finds himself wondering as to whether it now denotes sincerity or reveals an untruthful, manipulative intent (confusion as to whether or not Robby has been communicating with the missing boys). The instability of the word ‘Dad’ highlights the impossibility of interpreting the word through knowledge of where that word originates in either the psyche or the situation of the character using it. It is also decontextualised from acquiring a meaning that is specific to its use in this scene. No meaning or even series of meanings can be attached, because there occurs what Shoshana Felman terms an ‘incessant sliding of signification.’ 27 As a signifier it is never attached to a signified: the origin of the word’s meaning is obscured by its instability. The multiple uses of the word ‘Dad’ in Lunar Park, which all provoke different emotions and assumptions from Bret, none of which may be true – since he is such an unreliable narrator – work in the same way as the multiple images of Robby’s face at the end of the extract; it wipes the object of interpretation – the origin of the event – from the scene, as there is no way of knowing what to interpret, which

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__________________________________________________________________ signifier, symbol, or action to exchange for meaning. The reader is presented with a kaleidoscopic world, where the picture shifts with each turn of the page. 6. Reading Postmodernist Trauma Narratives A postmodern novel like Lunar Park may be content to remain open, to avoid origins, and thus origin-chartered answers, and to end on a note of incompleteness, but a reader who encounters this type of novel may not be able to interact with it in a way that respects these features without trying to impose an interpretation onto it. Interpretation, and in trauma readings, especially interpretation through the originary trauma, is a deeply ingrained method of reading trauma narratives. In Lunar Park Ellis does try to create a novel that could point the way towards the role a postmodernist reader might play within a postmodern narrative of trauma. An obstacle that might prevent the reader from assuming an open, non-originorientated approach lies in the fact, as can be suggested from Jean Baudrillard’s theorizing in Seduction, that the act of reading, as it traditionally stands, is a highly anti-postmodern undertaking. In Seduction, Baudrillard explicitly connects postmodernist discourse with the revival of the seduction theory initiated by Laplanche and Pontalis – he even quotes from their paper – but his associations between the seduction theory and the postmodern are different to Lyotard’s. Baudrillard concentrates on the differences between the pre-abandonment Freud, who wrote on seduction, and the post-abandonment Freud, who, as Baudrillard writes, ‘broke with seduction and took the side of interpretation.’ 28 Baudrillard suggests that seduction and interpretation are metrically opposed practices; seduction works to disrupt through acts of play with surface appearances, which Baudrillard calls ‘the site of play,’ 29 while interpretation tries to smash open this appearance and mine the origin that is believed to lie beneath. In Freud’s seduction theory appearances are, as Baudrillard asserts, ‘not at all frivolous’ but act as lucrative sites of reading: the appearance of seduction is read as the presence of seduction. 30 When Freud abandoned this theory, Baudrillard notes that Freud ‘abolished seduction in order to replace it with an eminently operational mechanics of interpretation’, 31 which considers appearances in need of constant interpretation. The Interpretation of Dreams, in which Freud begins to explain the working of these mechanics, was published less than three years after the seduction theory was discarded. 32 Once the concept that a surface always hides a buried origin to be interpreted is privileged, surfaces cease to contain the same level of value. Baudrillard suggests that as a result seduction ‘finds itself relegated to a condition of ‘primal fantasy’ and ‘[c]onsequently it is treated according to a logic that is no longer its own, as residue, vestige, and smokescreen’. 33 Seduction highlights the contrasts between these two ways of thinking and writing – seductively (where appearance is granted its own logic of play) and interpretively (where appearance becomes a smokescreen that conceals a hidden meaning) – and has resonating implications for the reader of postmodern texts, such as Lunar Park,

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__________________________________________________________________ that operate within the framework of seduction, rather than interpretation. I would argue that at present there is a lack of engagement on the part of the reader with a text that works seductively. Interpretation, in opposition to seduction, is the method through which readers have previously been taught and expected (in part by the texts with which they interact) to read. In the history of reading that Karin Littau gives in Theories of Reading, Books, Bodies and Bibliomania, she writes of the inventions and social changes that paved the way from public to solitary reading and shows how this constituted a huge shift in the way people read. Littau marks the advent of solitary reading as the time when the act of reading began moving away from being ‘dependent …on the interpretive mediation’ of another to becoming instead the ‘internalization of interpretive authority’. 34 It can be argued that Baudrillard’s theory of seduction has the potential to enact as drastic a change in how a person interacts with and reacts to a book as Littau chronicles during this shift. In its move away from interpretation, it might even be argued that Baudrillard’s theory provides a change that is potentially more seismic. However different physical reading habits previously became, the solitary reader, like the public one, always remained entrenched in expectations of interpretation. In Baudrillard’s terms, seduction denies and defies interpretation as ‘interpretation is…characteristically opposed to seduction.’ 35 Seduction is not accommodated by the traditional, interpretive act of ‘reading’. To accept the complexity of the surface of a text without trying to find meaning beneath it is not how the action of the reader has previously been defined. The reader is unprepared for a novel that asks them to do this. If, as suggested, interpretation has been the expected (by authors, readers, critics and the texts that are written) method through which a text is approached, a text that aims to seduce is still a novelty and essentially evades its readers at the present moment. Baudrillad writes that ‘Rather than demoting seduction to the status of a normal phase in development, we must see it as an event, which is crucial and full of consequences.’ 36 Seduction as a method of reading does not just constitute another continuing stage in the evolution of the act of reading. It is an event of reading, in the Freudian and Lyotardian sense of the word; it marks a disruption in the framework of all that readers know now, to the typical values and depth of knowledge that currently surround the concept known as ‘the act of reading’. Consequently, texts that aim to seduce can be thought to exist in a separate category to those that are written to be interpreted and their meaning – in trauma narratives, related to their origins – ‘discovered’. The construction of the writing in Lunar Park shows it is not a text that can be read through a return to its origins. All origins are effaced. Due to the lack of origins that characterises a seduction-driven text, readers who interact with a text within a seductive framework are asked to accept and become involved in the appearance of a text, in ‘the aleatory, meaningless, or ritualistic and meticulous,

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__________________________________________________________________ circulation of signs on the surface.’ 37 In an extract from Lunar Park, Bret imagines a shooting at a school. Ellis writes, And now the missing Boy Scout inevitably provoked the flicker of worry I experienced every morning before Robby and Sarah went off to school….a rampage at the school, ‘I’m so scared’ being whispered over the cellphone, what sounds like firecrackers popping off in the background, the ricocheting bullet that hurls the second-grader to the floor, the random firing in the library, the blood sprayed over an unfinished exam, the red pools of it forming on the linoleum, the desk spattered with viscera, a wounded teacher ushering dazed children out of the cafeteria, the custodian shot in the back, the girl murmuring ‘I think I’ve been hit’ before she faints, the CNN vans arriving, the stuttering sheriff at the emergency press conference, the bulletins flashing on TV screens, the ‘concerned’ anchorman offering updates, the helicopters hovering. 38 Bret is shown imagining a traumatic event without stable origins. In order to destabilise the importance of the originary event, Ellis writes in a series of contradictions, ambiguities and vague images that show themselves to be unstable and interchangeable. Language is consequently unhinged from specific meanings and can thus be re/cycled and circulated. Ellis writes that ‘what sounds like firecrackers popping off in the background’ is heard and when he describes the television coverage of the shooting he describes ‘the ‘concerned’ anchorman offering updates’. Everything in the extract is shown to be exchangeable for another, alternate version of itself since everything is left vague and no definite answers about what actually took place or what it was actually like are given. The reader is not told, for example, whether ‘the custodian shot in the back’ lives or dies, and even the characters involved in the action seem unsure about what is happening, with ‘the girl murmuring ‘I think I’ve been hit’ before she faints’. The uncertainty of the language forces the reader to acknowledge that there could be other words (which suggest other versions of events, other origins to the trauma) used in place of what is given, without any definitive answers as to what these alternatives should be. Everything is highlighted as uncertain and replaceable with another version. The reader is therefore unable to discover an exact origin to the event. The technique of making the language uncertain and interchangeable works to, as Patricia Waugh writes, ‘flaunt the materiality of writing as depthlessness,’ and makes a return to the type of surface reading that Baudrillard pinpoints as an essential feature of seduction. 39 There is one happening that the reader knows took place for certain in the imagined school shooting, and this is that the gunman is dead. However, this

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__________________________________________________________________ moment of decisiveness within the text leads only to wider levels of uncertainty; with the gunman dead, there is no definitive origin, no original meaning or startpoint, which can be placed behind these events. The death of the gunman provokes Ellis to provide the reader with the most open list of variables in the whole extract. He writes, And then in the aftermath: the .22 rifle missing from the stepfather’s cabinet, the journal recounting the boy’s rejection and despair, a boy who took the teasing hard, the boy who had nothing to lose, the Elavil that didn’t take hold or the bipolar disorder not detected, the book on witchcraft found beneath the bed, the X carved into his chest and the attempted suicide the month before, the broken hand from punching a wall, the nights lying in bed counting to a thousand, the pet rabbit found later that afternoon hanged from a hook in a small closet. 40 This list of reasons can be used to show a reader how to be seduced by writing, how to be a postmodern reader, by letting go of the notion of definitive origins through which a text can be interpreted. One of the marks of a postmodern reader, for Baudrillard and Lyotard at least, is one who can accept the ‘answer’ as ‘unpresentable’, since it is too soon for the text to understand and represent its subject or the origins of its subject. A reader who approaches trauma through means of seduction, rather than interpretation, should not try to pick an originary event from the list, but accept that its origins, and consequently its meaning, must at present remain unknowable. In Lunar Park the list is not included to be chosen from – the gunman is dead, the reader can never know. From the list provided there is the possibility that any or all of these things may have provided the originary motive or event, or alternatively that none may explain or be linked to the gunman’s actions. A reader could try to read these extracts interpretively; the reader is after all completely free to imagine and determine what originally happened exactly how she or he wishes. However, the extracts undermine the concept that this is the method most necessary to read them through. The reader may be able to choose an origin to these events, but is there a point when it is always undermined, always unstable, and never even justifiable? The reader may or may not find this circulation liberating, but it is too late, the gunman is gone, ‘Determinacy is dead, indeterminacy holds sway.’ 41 Ellis allows his readers to function as readers of postmodern trauma, or the trauma of the postmodern, by making it clear that any attempt to unearth an originary event must fail. 7. The Return to the Sovereignty of the Word As William W. Bostock notes in this volume, the absence of an originary event, or knowledge about the originary event, perpetuates and elongates the effect of the

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__________________________________________________________________ trauma itself. 42 This occurs since the trauma sufferer is caught in the latent period of non-understanding, which is dominated by the constant unconscious replay and acting out of aspects of the as-yet-not-understood original traumatic event. Much of the continuing impact Bostock speaks of in relation to political assassinations stems from the inability to understand the original motivations, or know the original perpetrators of the traumatic event. Interpreting the original event becomes untenable when the original event cannot be reconstructed. The absence of an originary traumatic event means that postmodernist trauma narratives, like Lunar Park, which speak of a trauma without origins, demand a new methodology of reading. The literary approach to trauma narratives has always contained a contradiction: on the one hand, all events are seen as ruptures that are unique in themselves and need to be understood in their own terms and in their own timeframe; on the other, all events are seen to contain the same structure. The literary structure within which trauma is understood is therefore quite rigid, but still has to acknowledge the individuality of the experience of both undergoing and speaking the event. The notion of the originary trauma as the point from which the trauma narrative is read provides the rigid structure, while the different nature of the origin in each individual case allows for the required flexibility. If Freud’s seduction theory was to be taken as a whole product, with the initial event and its repetition, this is the method through which a text would be read. However, if the period of latency is focused upon, as it is by postmodernist critics, then this structure becomes non-applicable. Interpretive strategies of reading produce interpretations of texts that read its language in a similar way to how Freud read the presence of symptoms in his patients. Language is seen as a surface sign that signifies an original driving desire that exists on a deeper level than the sign or symptom itself. The word in writing that adheres to a seductive timeframe, on the other hand, is not a mark to be read in terms of what it stands for within the rest of the text (since the uncertainties of seduction-driven writing breaks the contextualizing function of the word’s specific setting). The word is an unselfcontained entity, a signifier which has no set place with relation to the rest of the text within which it is situated. By devaluing the hunt for this ‘deeper meaning’ and instead emphasizing a method of interaction that privileges play with the surface construction of the text, as in Bret’s imagined sequence of a school shooting in Lunar Park, seductive writing returns the reader to the sovereignty of the word itself – to the word as object of enquiry, rather than what hides behind it. 8. Conclusion Gregory W. Bredbeck suggests that there is a ‘dominance of psychoanalysis within postmodernism.’ 43 Bredbeck links this dominance specifically to the way sexuality is read in contemporary culture. One of the main products from the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature is a diversification of methods for reading literary works. Seductive writing follows the train of changes that have

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__________________________________________________________________ taken place in regards to the notion of the traumatic event and the possibilities for its representation throughout the twentieth century, in both literary criticism that deals with trauma narratives, and from field work in trauma testimonies. The original traumatic event was located by Freud in one, ‘findable’ (albeit through dubious methods) event. In his first theory, this event was the seduction by the father. The event that began the second wave of trauma theories, and what made concrete the link between literature, reading, and trauma, was the Holocaust. Freud’s event in the seduction theory, although composed of a dual timeframe, has a solid origin. The trauma theories that sprang from the Freudian concept of trauma had to be adapted to encompass narratives and testimonies from the Holocaust, since the concept of the initial event was splintered by the sheer vastness of its scale and horror. Freud’s theories were still used to read the fictional narratives produced in relation to the Holocaust, as in the work of Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman, but they had to be updated. One aspect of the durability of Freud’s work in relation to literary studies appears to be its adaptability. Felman, for example, radically re-reads the Freudian psychoanalytic setting and the Freudian unconscious by suggesting that Jacques Lacan before her had already radically re-read them. 44 Laplanche and Pontalis re-read Freud’s seduction theory in their notion of the phantasm. Theorists of the postmodern, in turn, play with both the original seduction theory and Laplanche and Pontalis’s revision of it. Freud’s theories are flexible as they can be doubled up, doubled back on themselves and made to talk in a kind of double-speak, and the seduction theory, discarded in its infancy by Freud, has particularly great potential to be expanded, revised and re-read. This is shown in Baudrillard’s extensive alterations to the theory in his book Seduction. From these acts of re-reading, a new way of interacting with literary works, such as Lunar Park, can be formulated that begins to approach the annihilation of the traumatic event that occurs within seductive, postmodernist texts that deal with trauma within the postmodern.

Notes 1

Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 161. 2 Freud initially presented his ideas about the seduction theory to the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology, in Vienna on the 21st of April, 1896. A version of this paper can be found in J. M. Masson’s book, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), 251-282. The paper was not well received, and Freud wrote to his mentor, Wilhelm Fleiss on the 21st of September 1897 to announce that he had decided to abandon the theory. J. M. Masson, ed., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 18871904 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), 264-266.

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Cathy Caruth, ‘An Interview with Jean Laplanche,’ Postmodern Culture 11, (January 2001): unpaginated. 4 Masson, The Assault on Truth. 5 Freud’s theory was initially drafted out in the paper he presented in 1896, but the temporal aspects of seductive trauma that are clarified here can be found in his earlier work on hysteria, which he published in a joint text with Josef Breuer. In one of Freud’s sections the mini-case study, entitled ‘Katherina’ appears, in which the timeframe of the seduction theory is already described and is already utilized in connection to the notion of seduction, and in relation to the experience of trauma. Sigmund Freud, ‘Katherina,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume II (1893-1895): Studies on Hysteria, i-vi (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 125-134. 6 Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies in Hysteria (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 11. 7 Masson, The Assault on Truth, 133, and 144. 8 For in-depth discussions of Freud’s techniques when constructing the seduction theory, see Richard Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (London: HarperCollins, 1995), or Dominick LaCapra, Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 9 Freud, The Standard Edition: Studies on Hysteria, 773-774. 10 In Cathy Caruth’s interview with him in Postmodern Culture, Laplanche argues that this was also the case with Freud’s initial treatment of the seduction theory. He also suggests that Freud also lacked understanding of the theory behind his seduction theory. 11 For a discussion of these issues see Richard Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong. For a contrasting view, see Leanore Terr, Unclaimed Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memories Lost and Found (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 12 Mark Pendergrast, Victims of Memory: Sex Abuse Accusations and Shattered Lives, 2nd edition (Vermont: Upper Access Books, 1996). 13 See the work of Mark Pendergrast in Victims of Memory for a detailed account of the history and impact of this phenomenon in the United States. Pendergrast includes testimonies from all sides of the debate, as well as in-depth summaries and analysis of major cases of non-remembered abuse that have been dealt with in the US courts. 14 See for example, Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 97-99. 15 Clara Mucci, in this volume. 16 Cathy Caruth, ‘Interview with Jean Laplanche’, unpaginated.

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__________________________________________________________________ 17

Ibid. Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, ‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,’ in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986), 5-34. 21 Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 30. 22 Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York, Routledge, 1992), 21. 23 Cathy Caruth, Introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 8. 24 Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman, 119-128. 25 Georgina Colby and Sonia Baelo-Allué mention it in relation to Lunar Park in their respective retrospective books on Ellis (Georgina Colby, Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the contemporary (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Sonia Baelo-Allué, Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction: Writing between High and Low Culture (London: Continuum, 2011)). James Annesley speaks of it in his chapter in Naomi Mandel’s edited collection of essays of Ellis’s later works, Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho, Glamorama, Lunar Park, ‘Brand Ellis: Celebrity Authorship in Lunar Park’, whilst in his chapter in the same book, ‘An Awfully Good Impression: Trauma and Testimony in Lunar Park’, Jeff Karnicky writes specifically on Lunar Park as a text that blurs the boundaries between fiction and trauma testimony. 26 Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park (New York: Picador, 2006), 322-330. 27 Shoshana Felman, ‘Turning the Screw of Interpretation,’ in Literature and Psychology: The Question of Reading Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (New Haven: Yale French Studies, 1977), 172. 28 Jean Baudrillard, ‘On Seduction’, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 152. 29 Ibid., 149. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 152. 32 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Allan and Unwin, 1954). 33 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 151. 34 Karin Littau, Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 54. 35 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, 149. 36 Ibid., 151. 18

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Ibid., 149. Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park, 84. 39 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, 149. 40 Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park, 84. 41 Jean Baudrillard, ‘Symbolic Exchange and Death,’ in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 422. 42 William Bostock, in this volume. 43 Gregory W. Bredbeck, ‘The Postmodernist and the Homosexual,’ in Postmodernism across the Ages, eds. Bill Readings and Bennet Schaber (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 254. 44 Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). 38

Bibliography Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. London: Verso, 1998. Annesley, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culure, and the Contemporary American Novel. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. Annesley, James. ‘Brand Ellis: Celebrity Authorship in Lunar Park.’ In Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho, Glamorama, Lunar Park, edited by Naomi Mandel, 143-157. London: Continuum, 2011. Baelo-Allué, Sonia. Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction: Writing between High and Low Culture. London: Continuum, 2011. Baudrillard, Jean. Forget Foucault. New York: Semiotext(e), 1987. Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Baudrillard, Jean. ‘Simulacra and Simulations.’ In Literary Theories: A Reader and Guide, edited by Julian Wolfreys. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Bredbeck, Gregory W. ‘The Postmodernist and the Homosexual.’ In Postmodernism across the Ages, edited by Bill Readings and Bennet Schaber, 254259. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1993. Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud, Studies in Hysteria. London: Penguin Books, 2004.

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__________________________________________________________________ Caruth, Cathy. ‘An Interview with Jean Laplanche.’ Postmodern Culture 11 (2001). Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1996. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995. Clarke, David, Marcus Doel, and Francis McDonough. ‘Holocaust Topologies: Singularity, Politics, Space.’ Political Geography 15 (1996): 457-489. Derrida, Jacques. Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. London: Penguin, 2003. Freud, Sigmund. The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. London: Allan and Unwin, 1971. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. London: Allan and Unwin, 1954. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume II (1893-1895): Studies on Hysteria, i-vi. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955. Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Jameson, Fredric. ‘Nostalgia for the Present.’ In Literary Theories: A Reader and Guide, edited by Julian Wolfreys, 395-409. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Karnicky, Jeff. ‘An Awfully Good Impression: Truth and Testimony in Lunar Park.’ In Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho, Glamorama, Lunar Park, edited by Naomi Mandel, 117-128. London: Continuum, 2011. Kellner, Douglas. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989.

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__________________________________________________________________ Kirmayer, Laurence J. ‘Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative, and Dissociation.’ In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, edited by Paul Antze, and Michael Lambek, 173-198. New York: Routledge, 1996. LaCapra, Dominick. Soundings in Critical Theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Laplanche, Jean and J. B. Pontalis. ‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality.’ In Formations of Fantasy, edited by Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan, 5-34. London: Methuen, 1986. Laplanche, J. and J.B. Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1988, 1973. Laub, Dori and Shoshana Felman. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York, Routledge, 1992. Levin, Charles. Jean Baudrillard: A Study in Cultural Metaphysics. London: Prentice Hall, 1996. Leys, Ruth. ‘Traumatic Cures: Shell Shock, Janet, and the Question of Memory.’ In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, edited by Paul Antze, and Michael Lambek, 103-145. New York: Routledge, 1996. Lyotard, Jean. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Cambridge: Polity, 1991. Mandel, Naomi, ed. Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho, Glamorama, Lunar Park. London: Continuum, 2011. Masson, J. M. The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. London: Faber & Faber, c1984. Masson, J. M. ed. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985. McCumber, John. ‘The Holocaust as Master Rupture: Foucault, Fackenheim, and Postmodernity.’ In Postmodernism and the Holocaust, edited by Alan Milchman, and Alan Rosenberg, 239-264. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.

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__________________________________________________________________ Musselwhite, David. Thomas Hardy: Megamachines and Phantasms. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003. Pawlet, William. Jean Baudrillard against Banality. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007. Pendergrast, Mark. Victims of Memory: Sex Abuse Accusations and Shattered Lives, 2nd edition. Vermont: Upper Access Books, 1996. Readings, Bill. Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics. London: Routledge, 1991. Roazen, Paul. The Trauma of Freud: Controversies in Psychoanalysis. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, c2002. Stanton, Martin. ‘Interview: Jean Laplanche Talks to Martin Stanton.’ Free Associations 2 (1991): 323-341. Terr, Leanore. Unclaimed Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memories Lost and Found. New York: Basic Books, c1994. van der Kolk, Bessel A. ‘Posttraumatic Stress dDisorder and the Nature of Trauma.’ Healing Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Body, and Brain, edited by Marion F. Solomon, and Daniel J. Siegel, 168-195. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. van der Kolk, Bessel A. and van der Hart, Onno. ‘The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma.’ In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 158-182. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995. Waugh, Patricia. Practising Postmodernism, Reading Modernism. London: Edward Arnold, 1992. Webster, Richard. Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis. London: HarperCollins, 1995. Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Wolfreys, Julian. ‘Trauma, Testimony, Criticism: Witnessing, Memory and Responsibility’. Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century, edited by Julian Wolfreys, 126-148. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002.

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__________________________________________________________________ Danielle Mortimer has recently completed her PhD, entitled ‘Traumatic Seductions: Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park, the Postmodern, and the Reader’, at the University of Essex. She currently teaches theory and literature at the university. Her main research interest lies in both the intersection and point of conflict between narratives of trauma and postmodernist narratives.

National Trauma following Political Assassination: Diverse Experiences of Adjustment William W. Bostock Abstract This chapter examines adjustment to the national trauma of cataclysmic proportions that can result from the assassination of a political leader. This is so because societies operate at a mental level which can be severely disrupted by the sudden and often unthinkable loss of a political leader. Some key concepts will be introduced and shown to interact in a way similar to a computer. There is mental state (display screen), showing thought process at any time, the sense of coherence (operating system) which can be severely disrupted, the emotional reaction, where processing of the trauma takes place (central processing unit), psychic capital which will be referred to and drawn upon (computer memory), and sense of identity, at the basis of the mental state (similar to a web site). The result of this process of adjusting to trauma is that a new sense of identity may be required. The responses of some five very different societies to the assassination of a leader are examined, and some general observations made. It will be concluded that there is no standard pathology of assassination trauma, and each must be examined sui generis for impact, adjustment and survival through the creation of a redefined sense of national identity. Key Words: Assassination, collectivity, identity, memory, nation, trauma. ***** 1. The Concept of Trauma Trauma or wounding injury can occur to any individual or society at any time. There are physical traumas from many sources such as those referred to in the mediaeval tableau of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, namely conquest or pestilence, war, famine and death. This allegory could be expanded to include health disasters of pandemic of virally transmitted disease, natural disasters of flood, earthquake, volcano or tsunami, or human-produced disaster such war, genocide, environmental or economic collapse. Political assassination can be an especially severe cause of trauma because as an individual mind can suffer trauma, so can a collective mind suffer collective trauma. The effects of trauma were central in the writings of the early psychoanalysts: Charcot, Freud, Jung and Rank, the latter of whom developed the concept most fully in his book The Trauma of Birth, 1 Otto Rank saw the analyst’s role as helping the subject to belatedly accomplish the uncompleted mastery of the trauma of birth, in other words, to overcome trauma by processing it. The very same process can occur at the collective level, as shall be discussed.

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__________________________________________________________________ The period immediately following a trauma is one of great vulnerability which can set the stage for some terrible events. In this context it has been noted that some group can ‘choose’ a trauma to develop and expand feelings of victimhood as part of the psychology of identity. 2 Thus it is possible to state that the will to heal the wound is not present, but very often it is earnestly sought. Catherine Barrette, herself a victim of physical trauma following a vehicle accident, is able to testify to the power in the adjustment process of artistic expression, that is, ‘… the violent psychic redefinition of the self’s own territory.’ 3 The objective of the process, as described by Barrette in this volume, was a coming to terms with a changed sense of self and the construction of a posttraumatic identity, and thus provides a template for the processing of national trauma. The theme of trauma processing through redefinition of identity, is also a theme of this chapter. 2. The Computer Metaphor The computer is often taken as a metaphor for human mental activity. 4 The computer is a metaphor for the individual and a network of computers is for society. The computer can also represent the relationship between the components. The computer display screen can be said to represent the conscious mental state of an individual, that is, the thoughts, intentions and reactions, at a particular moment. All computers have an operating system or programme that recognises inputs, checks files, performs tasks and creates outputs. With an individual, this corresponds to a sense of coherence or global perspective based on a narrative, which integrates events and personalities and is in turn required for survival. Similarly, at group level, the collective sense of coherence will also make survival possible. The computer has a central processing unit, which converts inputs into outputs, and in the case of traumatic loss, the processing will be of the emotional reaction of grief. Computers cannot operate without data stored as memory with retrieval capability. Individuals also need memory to function and survive and societies similarly have collective memory with the same function. However, unlike computers, individuals and societies can repress memories, and can experience great difficulty in retrieval. Human memory is organised around the principle of memories of desirable mental states or positive psychic capital, or undesirable mental states or negative psychic capital. Psychic capital is vital for sustaining an individual or society through trauma by providing a reserve of psychic resource of memories of desirable states and also undesirable mental states which can be drawn upon to avoid disintegration, as will be shown later in this chapter. Many individuals and most collectivities interface with a computer through a computer home page or social networking entry, which is a statement of identity, that is, a statement of how they see themselves and wish to be seen by the outside world. On the internet, the home page is the main page of a web site and it usually

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__________________________________________________________________ states aims and objectives, some history, an index and some contact details: in other words, ‘how we wish to be known’. In order to have credibility, the home page or identity statement must have some correspondence with the external realities of how the individual or collectivity is seen by the rest of the world. Following major trauma, identity will be under pressure to undergo major revision as to aims, objectives, methodologies and the metaphorical web site must be revised to reflect these changes. These are achieved through the operation of the sense of coherence, the emotional processing of grief and the drawing upon psychic capital, indicative of successful posttraumatic adjustment, as will be presented. 3. The Mental State or Consciousness The mental state is a key concept in psychiatry and psychology, and the mental state of an individual is examined for signs of thought or mood disorder and impairment of cognition. The main component of the mental state is consciousness or awareness, which corresponds in a computer to the display screen. In the Nineteenth Century, various writers hypothesised a collective mind so that it is relevant to refer to it as a collective mental state. This concept has a long history as ‘collective consciousness’ which like individual consciousness, is under the influence of a collective unconscious. Predating Freud by more than two decades, the theorist Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) observed that unconscious phenomena preponderated in the functioning of the mind of the psychological crowd. This is also shared collectively as many common characteristics passed from generation to generation as collective memory which could be retrieved or unretrieved. 5 While suggestibility can be a characteristic of an individual, it is more acute in a crowd, which will be ‘perpetually hovering on the borderland of the unconscious.’ 6 Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) adopted Le Bon’s formulation of group mind functioning, which he accepted as operating through mental processes just as it does in the mind of an individual. 7 Freud noted that a racial unconscious emerges, describing it as an archaic heritage of the human mind, which is unconscious, to which must be added a repressed unconscious. 8 When he speculated on the group mind Freud saw it as impulsive, changeable and irritable, and led by the unconscious. The group mind demands leadership from which it seeks strength and violence. 9 The attraction of the group for the individual is a product of the fear of being alone, and here Freud notes that opposition to the herd is essentially separation from it. The fear among small children of being alone is therefore the foundation of the herd instinct. However, it needs qualification in that the child will fear separation from its mother and be very mistrustful of members of the herd who are strangers. 10 A herd instinct or group feeling develops later and this group will make, as its first demand, the demand for identification of one with another but also recognizes a single person as superior to all, that is, the leader. Each of the

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__________________________________________________________________ many groups that exist will have a group mind, so that each individual will have a share in numerous group minds, be they race, class, religion, nationality or any other. 11 When the leadership of the group is suddenly and unexpectedly withdrawn, (such as by political assassination as will be explored here), then major disruption to the collective mental state with instability and possibly breakdown could be expected and has been observed. Carl Jung (1875-1961) believed that the personal unconscious, as proposed by Freud, was underlain by a deeper level of the collective unconscious, or phylogenetic (tribal) substratum ‘(j)ust as the human body is a museum, so to speak, of its phylogenic history, so too is the psyche.’ 12 The collective unconscious provides a second psychic stream, ‘... a system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals.’ 13 The unconscious has three levels: that which can be produced voluntarily, that which can be produced involuntarily, and that which can never be produced. 14 The unconscious stores repressed material which compensates or counterbalances the conscious and can create symbols. Jung saw the mechanisms of compensation and symbol-creation at work at the collective level in the decline of the Roman Empire and the French Revolution. 15 The collective unconscious also shapes Weltanschauung, or as in recent terminology, the communal sense of coherence. Though he does not use the specific term collective neurosis, Jung does refer to a state of lunacy among a people and went on to state that ‘[t]here is no lunacy people under the domination of an archetype will not fall prey to.’ 16 Jung believed that individuation brings about a harmonisation between conscious and unconscious in a process called transcendent function. 17 However, the conscious and the unconscious can be in deep and violent conflict and when Jung states that when a social group deviates too far from its instinctual foundations so that it experiences the force of its unconscious forces, he implied that this conflict can also take place at the collective level. 18 On the basis of this, one can posit a major function of the leader: resolving the conflict between conscious and unconscious, so that the withdrawal of leadership can result in the dominance of emotion over reason, with resultant exposure to vulnerability. Another theorist, Manfred Kets de Vries, has applied psychoanalytic concepts to the study of group behaviour and has given a new statement to the contagion mechanism. Kets de Vries extends the psychiatric concept of folie à deux, which can be called collective insanity or psychosis of association, to an interpretation as a phenomenon that can spread from two to many persons particularly within an organizational context. 19 Leaders can either be the cause of collective insanity, particularly in seeking external enemies, or in giving protection against it, by building trust and confidence. 20 The value of Kets de Vries’ formulation is that it recognizes the very close relationship between the unconscious and the irrational. In later work, Kets de Vries argued for the importance of the Freudian mechanism of transference in understanding the leader/follower relationship. Kets

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__________________________________________________________________ de Vries noted that followers endow their leaders with magical powers and omniscience in the same way that children do for their parents and certain other adults. 21 However, the concept of a collective mind, as proposed by Le Bon, developed by Freud as collective consciousness, Jung as the collective unconsciousness, and with the risk of collective insanity as proposed by Kets de Vries, has been contested by those who argue for an emergent-norms theory that sees group unanimity as an illusion created by common action based on prevailing norms. The psychologist Arthur Reber also introduces an air of scepticism when he defines group mind as a ‘…hypothesized, collective, transcendent spirit or consciousness, which was assumed by some to characterize a group or society.’ 22 Kets de Vries has been criticized as making an anthropomorphic assumption, that is, treating organizations as if they were human beings with a distinct personality. 23 The methodological difficulty of assessing any concept of group mind is obvious: its existence cannot be proven, but neither can its non-existence. But one can accept that, whether genuinely collective or simply agglomerative, collective mental states do exist, and it is with these that societies confronted with the trauma of the assassination of one or more of its leaders will react in various ways. Political assassinations impact at the individual and collective levels, with emotional reactions passed by contagion, so that the sudden loss of a leader figure can lead to collective trauma as a kind of collective mental disorder. 4. The Sense of Identity The sense of identity or an individual or group has the same role as a web site does in the world of computers, that is, as the presentation of an essential, continuous self. Identity (from the Latin idem, the same) was introduced by Aristotle and employed by medieval theologians, the philosophers Locke and Hume, mathematicians, and this century, by psychologists. If one paraphrases Brewster Smith’s definition of individual selfhood, 24 one can define identity as: a process of collective self-awareness; having boundaries; having continuity in space and time; being in communication and in communion internally and externally; engaging in enterprises with the world and with forethought and afterthought; appraising performance; feeling responsible for actions carried out collectively and individually and holding others responsible for theirs; with the end product being successful adaptation and survival; in short, nothing less than the psychic condition necessary for survival, in the same way that a strong sense of identity is necessary for the well-being, adjustment and survival of the individual. Many poets, playwrights, novelists, composers and visual and other artists have given expression to sentiments taken up by many as statements of their identity, and have thus had influence in the creating of nations and states. When Marx wrote of class consciousness, he was using a form of identity theory, but the main impetus has come from psychoanalysis where it is seen as being at the basis of the

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__________________________________________________________________ socialisation process by which societies are created: ‘Identification is known to psychoanalysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person...’ wrote Freud. 25 To Freud, identification was a mechanism by which a child would recognise himself or herself through interaction with a parent. Later this theme was taken up by Erik H. Erikson who saw a strong sense of identity as a necessary condition for both a successfully functioning individual and for a society. Erikson discussed at length the dysfunctional states of confusion, crisis and panic arising from threat to identity, and here it could be added that loss of a leader by assassination can be a very great threat to identity. Erikson saw a strong sense of identity as a generator of energy and a weak or confused sense of identity as a source of decline. As a crisis of identity develops, powerful negative identity factors are produced which in man a hatred of ‘otherness’ may be manifested. 26 Many identity theorists have seen identity as the subjective state of a ‘sense of belonging’ as a group phenomenon, in which the members of a group ‘identify’ with one another, but there are two views about the nature of group identity: either that it is something found collectively in a group of individuals, or that it is metaphorically like a person and is its own separate identity that has emerged. Identity can thus be said to refer to the categories in which membership is claimed and the sense of meaning associated with each category. 27 National identity is therefore a collective psychological state that is a necessary condition for the survival of a politico-legal state as a body existing in international law. The presence of a stable state can engender a strong sense of national identity. Many political scientists and other scholars have discussed the order of precedence in the national identity/state relationship, particularly in the context of the politics of development or ‘nation-building’. The formulation that can be proposed to visualise this complex relationship is one of contingency, that is, development of a strong national identity will engender the development of a stable state and vice versa, a stable state will engender the development of national identity. Correspondingly, an unstable and failing state will engender a weak and failing sense of national identity as in the metaphor of the mind/body relationship. It is important to note that identity is not a monolithic entity, but rather a work in progress. Manuel Castells has observed that as identity is constructed, three categories can be recognized: (1) legitimizing identity, in which the dominant aspects of society are recreated (2) resistance identity, in which marginalized groups develop an identity and (3) project identity, in which new identities are created and which can in turn influence a dominant identity. 28 The sense of identity can thus be seen as that part of the collective mental state or consciousness that can be actively in focus at any point in time and so providing a necessary function for survival and also one that can become severely disordered by a deep and systemically traumatic event. The disruption of trauma may distort the sense of coherence upon which the sense of identity stands, with severe repercussions.

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__________________________________________________________________ 5. A Distorted Sense of Coherence Aaron Antonovsky proposed that a key factor in health maintenance is a sense of coherence. This is, a... global orientation that expresses the extent to which one has a pervasive, enduring though dynamic feeling of confidence that one’s internal and external environments are predictable and that there is a high probability that things will work out as well as can be reasonably expected. 29 The sense of coherence concept is also valid at the group level, with the proviso that there must first be a sense of group consciousness or subjectively identifiable collectivity. 30 An individual or group with a highly developed sense of coherence will have a high level of generalised resistance resources which are identified as rationality, flexibility and farsightedness. 31 Where the sense of coherence is disrupted or distorted, especially by the trauma of political assassination, the wellbeing of a community can be compromised. Moreover, the sense of coherence can be deliberately distorted by suggestion, manipulation and ideology. Some writers have described this distortion as collective paranoia. Paranoia in an individual has been defined as ‘a delusional state or system of delusions, usually involving the conviction of persecution, in which intelligence and reasoning capacity, within the context of the delusional system, are unimpaired’. 32 Where there is a history of real persecution, it is very easy to take a community into a distorted sense of current coherence. Writing on the subject of the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, the novelist Danilo Kis identified the causal factor as nationalism, which he defined as a state of collective and individual paranoia. Collective paranoia in Kis’s view is a combination of many individual paranoias brought to paroxysm in a group whose goal is ‘…to solve problems of monumental importance: a survival and prestige of that group’s nation.’ 33 It is thus possible to state that a collective mental state is either maintaining or losing its sense of coherence, as either well-adjusted or disordered, on the same criterion as a disorder of the individual personality. The occurrence of humanproduced cataclysmic events can lead to disturbances to collective mental states. It has been described by a variety of terms such as collective paranoia, collective madness or genocidal mania. This condition could be described as a disorder of the collective mental state. Here collective memory plays a role, as traces of past traumatic events are embedded and then remembered and interpreted as extreme suffering. However, collective memory, as the basis of psychic capital, can also help survival in conditions of extreme adversity. 6. Emotional Processing of Assassination Trauma The impact of a political assassination upon an individual or group or whole state can severely distort the sense of coherence that is vital to survival, in a similar way that the operating system is vital to the functioning of a computer. This will in turn impact upon the emotional processing of the trauma, or grief reaction, which

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__________________________________________________________________ plays a role analogous to the central processing unit of a computer. Here it is possible to see the well-known stages of the processing of grief by an individual (or collectivity), as proposed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross as a template, much as a central processing unit does. Kubler-Ross recognised grief as a process involving five stages in the journey from initial shock to successful adjustment and survival. The stages are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. 34 This schema can be adapted to cover the emotional and rational stages of processing by a society after an assassination: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

Denial or disbelief of the traumatic event Anger and violent reprisal against perpetrators, alleged perpetrators or scapegoats Bargaining, which may involve an act of atonement by the group or associates of the perpetrator(s) Depression, or a generalized state of despondency and gloom, resulting in widespread demotivation and apathy Acceptance and apathy, that after the depression has exhausted itself, it has given way to the widespread feeling that nothing can be done to restore the pre-assassination status quo Humiliation or an awareness that among the community of nations that the reputation of one’s collectivity has been severely damaged Rebirth, the sense that a new order will be born, where the problems and difficulties of pre-assassination times of a regime can be left behind. The rebirth may consist of a redefinition of identity, as proposed by Barrette, or may be described as posttraumatic growth, which is a positive psychological change that could have come about as a result of the challenge of surviving within a damaged system. 35

It must be emphasized that a collective mental state desirous of rebirth is not a sufficient condition to bring about major system replacement; the actual processing may well require conquest or defeat in war or civil war, violent revolution or other major cataclysmic event such as natural disaster, and will often involve the turning to a new leader of messianic reputation, a step that is itself fraught with danger due to the posttraumatic condition of vulnerability. 7. Memory and Psychic Capital An individual or group will process events by reference to memory, individual or collective, just as the central processing unit of a computer works through the checking of each operation with information stored in the computer’s memory.

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__________________________________________________________________ The term collective memory was developed by Maurice Halbwachs (18771945) who presented a detailed analysis of the relationship between individual memory and the social or collective aspects of memory. Although an individual may forget a particular remembrance, many remembrances can be recalled by a group and therefore form a system of interconnected and mutually supporting remembrances. 36 An individual’s memories are often collective in origin, even though an individual may be completely unaware of their origins, which may be a newspaper, book or conversation. Where an individual is a member of social groups with differing opinions on a particular issue the prevailing view within an individual will reflect the intensity of the respective group views. 37 Collective memory is actualised through individuals but because of the multiplicity of different and often competing sources, the outcome of societal memories will reflect a combination of influences. These may be very complex and be beyond the control of individuals, and are most effective when based on what could be called ‘raw materials’ of trauma, including assassination, conflict, war, crime, or institutionalised humiliation, such as with slavery. Memory is also the basis of psychic capital. Psychic capital is a term first used by Kenneth Boulding (1910-1993). 38 In Boulding’s formulation, capital is an accumulation of wealth, so that with psychic capital, the accumulation is one of memories of desirable mental states. The mental states could be memories of pleasure, success, achievement, recognition and tradition, and the desire to add to psychic capital is likely to be a powerful motivating force. Exchanges involving increases or decreases of psychic capital are likely to occur at any time, either through decision or through the turn of events. However, fear, insecurity and terror, through memories of past traumas of failure, disaster, atrocity, or perceived injustice and indignity, can lead to a depletion of psychic capital which could also be called negative psychic capital. Negative psychic capital and fear of it can also be a powerful motivating factor. Boulding linked psychic capital with a sense of identity as one of the determinants of the ‘morale, legitimacy and the ‘nerve’ of society’, which he saw as vital to the adaptation of society and the prevention of disintegration. 39 A similar and related concept is that of identity capital, as proposed by James Côté, which is to be distinguished from human capital and cultural capital. Côté concluded that identity capital gave an individual, particularly one possessing a ‘diversified portfolio’, a store of resources enabling the handling of life’s vagaries. 40 Psychic capital is thus essentially the same concept as identity capital but at the collective level. In addition, there is suggestive evidence that when psychic capital is severely depleted, pervasive and persistent despair develops and this can be extremely harmful to individuals through a complex psychic and hormonal process which exhausts the cortex of the adrenal glands and probably the ability to adapt to stress. 41 Thus it can be hypothesised that the stress following the depletion of

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__________________________________________________________________ psychic capital through trauma can produce a situation of vulnerability, though some immunity could be gained through negative psychic capital. 8. Adjustment to Trauma through Rebirth of a Redefined Identity Much attention has been given in individual psychology and psychiatry to difficulties in processing acute stress reactions to exceptional life events, known comprehensively as adjustment disorders. The precipitating causes could be serious threat to one or one’s loved ones, loss of position, or physical disaster. The result can be a whole gamut of emotional states similar to those of grief, and physical reactions manifested as illness. Where normal processing of emotions is overloaded and overwhelmed, a posttraumatic disorder can develop. The normally recommended programme of treatment is the cognitivebehavioural approach consisting of critical incident debriefing followed by rehearsal of the ‘trauma story’, backed up with pharmacological treatment of antidepressants. The key objective in counselling is to encourage victims to ‘reframe their thinking’, in other words, to develop a new sense of coherence, in Antonovski’s terminology, upon which a new sense of identity can be built. 42 As already noted, Barrette was able to testify to the power in the adjustment process of artistic expression, that is, ‘… the violent psychic redefinition of the self’s own territory.’ 43 The objective of the process, as described by Barrette, was a coming to terms with a changed sense of self and the construction of a posttraumatic identity, and this provides a template for the processing of national trauma. Among the many sources of national trauma, natural events such as fire, flood, tsunami or earthquake, are perceived as acts of God, and are therefore processed by psychological means combined with practical engineering works. The tragedy of war, genocide and other acts of human evil are much more difficult to process and in fact, the trauma can be so severe that it may never be processed. With the assassination of a political leader, processing involves firstly institutional responses by police, courts and the justice system. At a psychological level, processing requires the construction of a coherence-restoring narrative which can help in the emotional processing of collective grief. A narrative that can be understood and accepted by the vast majority of the population, particularly as to the identity of the assassin(s) and their motives will be helpful here. Where an assassin’s identity is not known, the processing is much more difficult and the emotional processing of grief can be stalled at the anger or depression stages. Ultimately, the processing of national trauma following assassination is precisely the same matter as for that of the traumatized individual. Specifically, it is a task of redefining a sense of national identity, requiring an admission of the humiliation caused by being seen as a country whose leaders are assassinated, which is clearly a task of greater magnitude for some nations more than others.

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__________________________________________________________________ It is significant that the great theorists of the unconscious gave enormous importance to the role of the leader. The leader’s role is one of articulating the deeper feelings and through working with these raw materials, shaping and giving direction to a society. Therefore, when a leader is suddenly and unexpectedly removed, there is likely to be major trauma. Where this removal has occurred by accident or illness, the trauma can be significant, but where it has been by the actions of assassin(s), the trauma is likely to be of even greater magnitude. As a result of being left leaderless, a society will likely be bereft of emotion, directionless, given to irrationality and paralysed with fear. The impacts of assassination will be manifold and far-reaching: political, social, economic, organisational, military and above all, psychological, in the form of a catastrophic and generalised loss of confidence, particularly where the trauma of assassination has been followed by great violence or genocide. As already noted, a strong sense of identity as a necessary condition for both a successfully functioning individual and for a society and the assassination of a leader is a potentially cataclysmic attack on an individual or group’s sense of identity, such as the dysfunctional states of confusion, crisis and panic of identity. To recall Erikson, as a crisis of identity develops, powerful negative identity factors are produced and decisive steps need to be taken. 44 9. Methodology of Observation Collective mental states including trauma can only be observed indirectly, therefore a system of methods rather than a single approach must be used, deriving information from a variety of sources. Outpourings of collective grief, mass manifestations of any other kind, including public displays, can be taken as potentially valid evidence. Opinion polls can be taken as a valid source, subject to the soundness of the technique and subject to interpretation. Electoral outcomes can be a valid source, depending on voter turnout and whether the elections are free from improper interference. However, in many situations, public manifestations, opinion polls and free elections, or even any elections, are not permitted. The opinions of ordinary people, as reported by journalists and the media are a valid source, and can later be interpreted by writers and interpretive artists as authentic voices. Particular attention can be paid to the assessments of historians whose observations can combine insight with understanding of the deeper workings of a society over a longer period of time, particularly at the subconscious level where trauma will have impacted. 10. Political Assassination: Diverse Experiences of Adjustment A. Reinhard Heydrich, 1904-1942 Heydrich, later to become known as the Butcher of Prague, quickly rose in the hierarchy of Nazi Germany where he gained a reputation for the ruthless suppression of dissent. Among his infamous political achievements were:

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__________________________________________________________________ organising the burning of the Reichstag, the killing of Roehm and 330 of the Sturmabteilung (SA or Storm Troops), the assassination of the Austrian Chancellor, the incident leading to the attack on Poland (Operation Canned Goods), production of the fake documents that led Stalin to liquidate his senior military class and the infamous Wannsee Conference of February 1942 where plans for the forthcoming genocide were finalised. 45 In 1941 he was appointed by Hitler to the position of Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, formerly Czechoslovakia, where he ruled with great brutality. Due to his abilities, power and personality, he was feared by all who had dealings with him, including members of the German High Command. During his reign as dictator of Bohemia and Moravia, Heydrich took the habit of driving unescorted with his chauffeur in a car with an open roof. This provocative behaviour was calculated to demonstrate his complete confidence in the supremacy of the security measures created by the Nazi occupation forces and contempt for known local opposition. Czechoslovakia at this time was producing, particularly through the Skoda works, significant military materiel for the Third Reich. The Czech government in exile in London felt it had to demonstrate its political will with a single bold stroke and so conceived Operation Anthropoid, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The British Special Operations Executive (SOE) were requested to train the personnel and help plan the operation. As Adolf Hitler’s chosen successor, Reinhard Heydrich was one of the most important figures in Nazi Germany, whose elimination would be a huge military as well as psychological loss to the Nazis. 46 The planned assassination took place on 27 May 1942 when the two Czech agents ambushed Heydrich in a Prague suburb while he was driven to work in his open car. As the car slowed to take a hairpin bend in the road, one of the two agents attempted to fire his sub-machine gun but it would not fire and he then threw a bomb at the rear of the car. The explosion wounded Heydrich, at first apparently not seriously, but after several days, causing his death from his wounds. This event was a major trauma for Hitler, the Nazi leadership and possibly the German population, and its processing had major political, military and psychological consequences. The historian Hauner observed that ‘…(b)y killing one of Hitler’s ablest lieutenants, the brutal regime and its collaborators were shaken, and the occupied peoples of Europe given hope.’ 47 Nazi reprisals on Czechoslovakia were swift and brutal. The historic town of Lidice was razed and ultimately some 13,000 persons were killed in revenge. It is also possible to interpret the processing as a rebirth of Nazi identity as one with an even greater level of paranoid insecurity with a greatly increased impetus to the policy of genocidal mania, the threads of which were already in place. As Kershaw wrote ‘(p)robably Heydrich’s assassination provided the impetus to draw the threads together.’ 48

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__________________________________________________________________ B. Olof Palme 1927-1986 Olof Palme was a Socialist-Democratic politician who served as Prime Minster of Sweden from 1969 to 1976 and 1982 to 1986. While Prime Minister, Palme carried out constitutional reforms of making the Rijsdag a unicameral parliament and reducing the power of the monarchy. Internationally he supported the Third World countries and opposed the Vietnam War and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and worked to end Apartheid in South Africa. On February 28 1986, while walking home from a cinema with his wife and without security guards, Palme was fatally shot and his wife wounded by an assassin. After a lengthy and somewhat botched investigation, including such suspects as the Kurdish Workers. Party and the South African secret police, a suspect, Christer Pettersson, an unaffiliated and unemployed worker was put on trial and convicted but with the conviction later overturned. In 2011 the allegation was made that the assassination was carried out by a killer in the pay of the then Yugoslav Secret Service. 49 The impact of Palme’s assassination was immediate and enormous but, in the political dimension over a longer period, not as great as might have been expected. 50 The impact at the psychological level was much greater, as stated by Hausen: The event was and has been seen as a symbolic turning pointing modern Swedish history, and a tragic transition in the view of Sweden as a benign quasi-utopian place to a more cynical view of Sweden as a place no longer insulated from the dangers previously associated with other parts of the world in the Swedish mindset. 51 In 2003, Sweden suffered a second trauma of political assassination. Anna Lindh (1957-2003) had risen through the Swedish Social Democratic Party to the post of Minister for Foreign Affairs and was a likely future Prime Minister when she became the victim of a stabbing attack while shopping (like Olof Palme, she was without a personal bodyguard). Her attacker, Mijailo Mijailovic, born in Sweden to Serbian parents, was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, a sentence later overturned on psychiatric grounds, then reimposed. Mijailovic confessed to the crime but denied that the killing was politically motivated. 52 It seems therefore that Swedish society has experienced difficulty in processing the trauma of political assassination to the level of acceptance. The fact that no clear responsibility has yet been definitively allocated for that of Palme may be part of this process. At the level of identity, Sweden has had to endure the humiliation not only of violence but the revelation of imperfect security, police detection and judicial process, requiring a redefinition of Swedish sense of identity by itself and the rest of the world. Some commentators have seen significance in

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__________________________________________________________________ concern with the darker aspects of society in recent Swedish literature. In reviewing the fictional work of writer Henning Mankell, Lavonius stated that ‘(f)or him (crime writing) was a way to look at an increasing sense of fear and xenophobia in Sweden, soon after Palme’s murder shook the country to the core.’ 53 C. Juvenal Habyarimana 1937-1994 Juvenal Habyarimana was President of the Republic of Rwanda from 1973 until his death in 1994 when his presidential jet was shot down by surface-to-air missile on final approach to Kigali International Airport. All on board were killed in the crash, including Cyprien Ntaryamina, President of Burundi, the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan military and others including the two pilots who were French nationals. The immediate aftermath of the assassination was genocide along ethnic lines of 800,000 to one million people in a period of 100 days. Whilst a colony of Germany and then Belgium, the colonial powers had traditionally favoured an ethnic minority group, the Tutsis, over the Hutu majority, though towards the end of their rule, the Belgians began to favour the Hutus, and a situation of intense ethnic rivalry was allowed to develop. Some short time before assassination of the President, who was a member of the Hutu group, it was stated that: The government had adopted a new policy, according to which everyone in the country’s Hutu majority group was called upon to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. The government, and an astounding number of its subjects, imagining that by exterminating the Tutsi people they would make the world a better place, and the mass killing had followed. 54 A full explanation of the tragedy is yet to be given, but certainly the actions and inactions of the world’s powers, international agencies and the media, share responsibility. Rwanda has had difficulty in emotionally processing the trauma triggered by the assassination, a process subverted by the lack of certainty of the identity of those responsible for the shooting down of the presidential jet, with a resultant distortion of a sense of coherence. Rwanda had been in civil war since 1990 between the mostly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and the mostly Hutu government whose troops were backed by France. A cease-fire had however been negotiated in 1993. Fearing reprisal after the assassination, some two million Hutus fled the country and the RPF was able to take power, later confirmed in elections. While an official French enquiry laid responsibility on the RPF, there are also claims that Habyarimana’s own troops were responsible, resenting his moves towards peace. 55

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__________________________________________________________________ The assassination of President Habyarimana had a profound effect on Rwandan society. A small but vocal minority have denied that the subsequent genocide ever took place. 56 A more generalised situation is one of what has been described as chosen amnesia, that is, the deliberate suppression of particular memories of the genocide as a coping mechanism. 57 However, while this coping mechanism allows the continued functioning of society, the antagonisms underlying the genocide remain in place. 58 It is possible, therefore, to interpret Rwanda as a society still profoundly affected by unresolved grief at the denial stage over the genocide that followed the Presidential assassination, as could be expected. D. Yitzhak Rabin 1922-1945 Prior to entering politics, Yitzhak Rabin had had a distinguished military and diplomatic carer. When in politics he rose through the Left to be Minister of Labour and then Prime Minister of Israel from 1974 to 1977 and 1992 to 1995. During this time, his work for peace led to the creation of the Palestinian National Authority and culminated in the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords and his receiving of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. While speaking at an evening peace rally on November 4, 1995, Rabin was fatally shot by Yigal Amir, a twenty-five year old right-wing Jewish law student. There were considerable weaknesses of security at the rally, despite many prior threats of violence and one week before the assassination, Rabin was reported in a French magazine interview to have said ‘I don’t believe a Jew would kill a Jew.’ 59 Despite the immediate capture and confession of the assassin, and subsequent conviction to life imprisonment, many conspiracy theories quickly developed and remain, including one that Shin Bet, the Israeli Security Agency, was responsible. A subsequent official enquiry, the Shamgar Commission, found that Shin Bet had ignored warnings that Jewish extremists were planning an attempt on Rabin’s life and were aware of Yigal Amir’s threats but had failed to act. 60 The immediate impact of the assassination on Israel was highly traumatic; as one commentator noted ‘(t)he event shocked Israeli society to its core and had a sobering effect on left and right, doves and hawks, secular and religious alike.’ 61 It also had worldwide effect, with Rabin’s funeral attended by many world leaders. Despite an overwhelming wave of sympathy, Rabin’s successor as Labour’s Acting Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, lost the May 1996 election to the Likud Party candidate, Binyamin Netanyahu, causing one analyst to comment that the assassination had: Less of a lasting impact on the public’s political values, beliefs and attitudes than might have been anticipated from the magnitude of the event and intensity of the immediate response. 62

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__________________________________________________________________ In the longer term, the assassination appears to have had the effect of delaying the peace process in the Middle East but, in Israeli society, which is equipped with a huge reserve of negative psychic capital born out of a history of grieving from before Masada, through pogroms, to the Holocaust, one more loss could be seen as fragmentary in psychological impact, fading with the passage of time. 63 E. Pim Fortuyn 1948-2002 Pim Fortuyn was a flamboyant, openly gay, high profile Dutch politician who was assassinated on May 6 2002, one day after the celebration of the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945, and only days before a general election. Fortuyn had lived a colourful life. Born into a Catholic family, he had been an academic sociologist committed to a Marxist position. In politics he had been initially a member of the Dutch Labour Party but from there had moved to the Livable Netherlands Party. His membership of that party became increasingly unacceptable on account of his by now right wing views of immigration, especially of Muslims, though in other areas of policy his views remained liberal. In 2002 he founded his own political party, the Pim Fortuyn List (LPF), taking with him many members of the Livable Netherlands Party. On May 6 he was shot to death by Volkert van der Graaf, a white, right wing radical animal rights activist, just after he had given a media interview. The planned general election took place as scheduled and the LPF won 26 seats but thereafter its popularity declined and after the 2006 elections, it held no seats. 64 It has been remarked that if a politician as controversial as Fortuyn had died of natural causes, there would have been little sense of shock, but is this case his death by murder occasioned a vast demonstration of public grief. In the words of the then Prime Minister Wim Kok: This is deeply tragic for his next of kin. Deeply tragic for our country and our democracy…In the Netherlands! In a tolerant country with respect for each other’s opinions….These are my personal feelings. I feel shattered. 65 With these words the Prime Minister gave expression to the prevailing sense of Dutch national identity: a mature civil society, deeply committed to tolerance, a sense that was now traumatically disrupted. However, as has been argued, some developments at the end of the 1990s had upset the Dutch collective mental state. 66 These were the arrival of large numbers of immigrants of Muslim background whose attitudes and beliefs were at odds with Dutch tolerance and secularism and, in addition, the Srebrenica tragedy of 1995 in which over seven thousand men and boys under the protection of a Dutch U.N. battalion were murdered. This event was described as a ‘…total failure of Dutch goodwill in international politics’: a failure which ultimately led to the resignation of the Dutch cabinet. 67

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__________________________________________________________________ However, the national trauma of Fortuyn’s assassination was not to be an isolated event. In 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was shot to death in a street by Muhammad Bouyari, a young man of dual Dutch and Moroccan nationality who had grown up in the Netherlands. This new trauma unleashed a wave of anti-Islamic expression and some attacks on mosques, but gradually the situation was brought under control and led to more dispassionate discussion of Islamic intolerance and global terrorism. It has been remarked that the trauma of these events led to the end of an era and possibly the end of a phase of national identity high in self-respect and international standing, and damaged the Netherland’s global image and tourist brand as a wealthy, tolerant and liberal society. 68 In a survey, a majority of Dutch respondents declared themselves ‘satisfied personally but unhappy with society at large and pessimistic about the future.’ 69 The situation is thus one of a society processing multiple traumas that have caused internal anguish and damage to international reputation, with a painful redefinition of sense of identity underway, resulting from a radically revised sense of coherence but drawing upon a large reserve of psychic capital as it does so. 11. Conclusion The assassination of a political leader is the cause of national trauma because societies operate at a mental level which can be severely disrupted by the sudden and uncontemplated loss of a political leader. The assassination can impact upon mental state or consciousness, disrupting the sense of coherence and producing an emotional grief reaction where there will be attempts to process the trauma that may remain unresolved. Processing will draw upon psychic capital which will be referred to and used and may help in the construction of a new sense of identity which will allow adaptation and survival. The responses of some five very different societies to the assassination of a leader (drawn from an extremely diverse group) have been examined. In the case of Nazi Germany after Heydrich’s assassination, there is evidence of collective paranoia among the regime’s leaders, manifested as heightened genocidal mania. In contrast, Sweden after Palme’s assassination underwent a thorough processing of grief and a redefinition of national identity, as reflected in literature. The country of Rwanda underwent a period of genocidal mania following but not caused by the assassination of President Habyarimana, which does not appear to have been processed, resting instead in a state of chosen amnesia. Again in contrast, Israel possessed a huge reserve of psychic capital, both positive and negative, to draw upon following the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin. Even so, some change to the prevailing sense of coherence and sense of identity can be detected, with less interest in pursuit of the path to peace. The assassination of Dutch politician Fortuyn, when placed in the context of other undesired events, has led to a redefinition of the sense of coherence and identity in the Netherlands, with some uncertainty over the

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__________________________________________________________________ new ‘brand’. Thus it can be concluded that while there is no standard pathology of assassination trauma and each must be examined sui generis for impact. The process of adjustment will be exceedingly complex, possibly not unlike the operation of a computer, with the probable necessity of acquiring a redefined sense of national identity.

Notes 1

Otto Rank, The Trauma of Birth (New York: Harper Row, 1973). Vamik Volkan, ‘Ethnicity and Nationalism: A Psychoanalytic Perspective’, Applied Psychology 47.1 (1998): 45-57. 3 Catherine Barrette, in this volume. 4 George Marakas, Richard Johnson and Jonathon Palmer, ‘A Theoretical Model of Differential Social Attributions Towards Computing Technology: When the Metaphor Becomes the Model’, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 52 (2000): 719-50. 5 Gustave Le Bon, The Mind of the Crowd (New York: Viking, 1960), 7. 6 Ibid., 22. 7 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, In Standard Edition XVIII (1920-1922). (London: Hogarth, 1955), 157. 8 Ibid., 75. 9 Ibid., 77-8. 10 Ibid., 118-19. 11 Ibid., 129. 12 Carl G. Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, 17 Vols. (London: Routledge, 1959), 12: 87. 13 Ibid., 43. 14 Ibid., 110. 15 Jung, Collected Works, 10: 3-28. 16 Jung, Collected Works, 9: 46-47. 17 Ibid., 289. 18 Ibid., 282. 19 Manfred Kets de Vries, Organizational Paradoxes, Clinical Approaches to Management (New York: Tavistock, 1980), 90. 20 Kets de Vries, Organizational Paradoxes, 109. 21 Manfred Kets de Vries, ‘Leaders on the Couch’, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 26.4 (1990): 427. 22 Arthur S. Reber, The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology, 3rd ed. (London: Penguin, 1995), 323. 23 Gary Gemmill, ‘Review of Organizations on the Couch: Clinical Perspectives on Organizational Behavior and Change, by Manfred Kets de Vries’, Administrative Science Quarterly 39.2 (1994): 351. 2

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M. Brewster Smith, ‘The Metaphorical Basis of Selfhood’, in Culture and Self, Asian and Western Perspectives, eds Anthony J. Marsella, George de Vos and Francis L. K. Hsu (New York: Tavistock, 1985), 56-88 . 25 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 105. 26 Erik H. Erikson, ‘Identity, Psychosocial’, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David R. Sills (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 61-65. 27 Kay Deaux, ‘Reconstructing Social Identity’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19(1) (1993): 4-12. 28 Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 8. 29 Aaron Antonovsky, Health, Stress and Coping (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1980), 123. 30 Aaron Antonovsky, Unravelling the Mystery of Health: How People Manage Stress and Stay Well (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987), 171-5. 31 Antonovsky, Health, Stress and Coping, 112-13. 32 Robert M. Youngson, Collins Dictionary of Medicine (Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1992), 459. 33 Danilo Kis, ‘On Nationalism’, Performing Arts Journal (1996) 53(18.2): 13-16, Viewed 14 July 1999, http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/performing_arts_journal/18.2kis.html. 34 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969). 35 Barrette, in this volume. Richard G. Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, ‘Posttraumatic Growth: A New Perspective on Psychotraumatology’, Psychiatric Times, Viewed 19 August 2006, http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/ptsd/content/article/10168/54661. 36 Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper Row, 1980), 30. 37 Ibid., 45. 38 Kenneth E. Boulding, ‘The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’, Viewed 1 December 2006, http://dieoff.org/page160.htm. 39 Ibid., 5. 40 James E. Côté, ‘Sociological Perspectives on Identity Formation: The CultureIdentity Link and Identity Capital’, Journal of Adolescence 19 (1996): 424. 41 Chaim F. Shatan, ‘Genocide and Bereavement’, in Genocide in Paraguay, ed. Richard Arens (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), 102-31. 42 Basant K. Puri, Paul J. Laking and Ian H. Treasaden, Textbook of Psychiatry (Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone, 1996). 43 Barrette, in this volume. 44 Erikson, ‘Identity, Psychosocial’, 62. 45 André Brissaud, The Nazi Secret Service (London, Sydney, Toronto: Bodley Head, 1972), 170-182.

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__________________________________________________________________ 46

Holocaust Education and Research Team, ‘The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich’. http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/heydrichkilling.html. 47 Milan Hauner, ‘Terrorism and Heroism: The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich’, World Policy Journal 24.2 (2007): 85-9. 48 Ian Kershaw, ‘Hitler’s Role in the Final Solution’, Viewed 3 July 2011, http://www.genocideeducation.ca/kershaw.pdf. 49 The Australian, ‘Yugoslav Spy Killed Palme, Says Germany’, 19 January 2011, 9. 50 Peter Esaiasson and Donald Granberg, ‘Attitudes Towards a Fallen Leader: Evaluations of Olof Palme Before and After Assassination’, British Journal of Political Science 26.3 (1996): 429-39. 51 Dan Hansen, The Crisis Management of the Murder of Olof Palme: A CognitiveInstitutional Analysis (Stockholm: Swedish National Defence College, 2003), 79. 52 Christian Christensen, ‘Political Victims and Media Focus: The Killings of Laurent Kabila, Zoran Djinjic, Anna Lindh and Pim Fortuyn’, Journal of Crime, Conflict and the Media 1.2 (2004): 23-40. 53 Leena Lavonius, ‘Cold Case to Close’, Sunday Tasmanian, 29 May 2011, 2. 54 Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, Stories from Rwanda (London: Picador, 1998). 55 Michael Wakabi, ‘Habyarimana Killed by His Own Army: UK eExperts.’ The East African, Viewed 9 March 2011, http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/news/-/2558/839190/-/pwwr1nz/-/index.html. 56 Helen M. Hintjens, ‘Explaining the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda’, Journal of Modern African Studies 37.2 (1999): 281. 57 Susanne Buckley-Zistel, ‘Remembering to Forget: Chosen Amnesia as a Strategy for Local Coexistence in Post-Genocide Rwanda’, Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute 76.2 (2006): 136. 58 Ibid., 147. 59 Linda Laucella, Assassination: The Politics of Murder (Los Angeles: Lowell House, 1998), 421. 60 Ibid., 433. 61 Yaacov Y. I. Vertzberger, ‘The Antimonies of Collective Political Trauma: A Pre-Theory’, Political Psychology 18.4 (1997): 863-76. 62 Ibid., 864. 63 Amiram Raviv, Avi Sadeh, Alona Raviv, Ora Silberstein, and Orna Diver, ‘Young Israelis’ Reactions to National Trauma: The Rabin Assassination and Terror Attacks’, Political Psychology 21.2 (2000): 299-322. 64 Joop Van Holsteyn and Galen Irwin, ‘Never a Dull Moment: Pim Fortuyn and the Dutch Parliamentary Election of 2002’. West European Politics 26.2 (2003): 41-66.

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Mervi Pantti and Jan Wieten, ‘Mourning Becomes the Nation: Television Coverage of the Murder of Pim Fortuyn’, Journalism Studies 6.3 (2005): 305. 66 Peter van der Veer, ‘Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and the Politics of Tolerance in the Netherlands’, Public Culture 18.1 (2005): 69. 67 Ibid., 116-17. 68 Ibid., 112. 69 Ibid., 121.

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__________________________________________________________________ Erikson, Erik H. ‘Identity, Psychosocial’. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by David R. Sills, 61-65. New York: Macmillan, 1968. Esaiasson, Peter and Donald Granberg. ‘Attitudes towards a Fallen Leader: Evaluations of Olof Palme Before and After Assassination’. British Journal of Political Science 26.3(1996): 429-39. Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. London: Routledge, 1950. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works. In Standard Edition, XVIII (1920-1922). London: Hogarth, 1955. Gemmill, Gary. ‘Review of Organizations on the Couch: Clinical Perspectives on Organizational Behavior and Change, by Manfred Kets de Vries’. Administrative Science Quarterly 39(2) (1994): 351. Gourevitch, Philip. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families, Stories from Rwanda. London: Picador, 1998. Halbwachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper Row, 1980. Hansen, Dan. The Crisis Management of the Murder of Olof Palme: A CognitiveInstitutional Analysis. Stockholm: Swedish National Defence College, 2003. Hauner, Milan. ‘Terrorism and Heroism: The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich’. World Policy Journal 24.2 (2007): 85-9. Holocaust Education and Research Team. ‘The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich’. Viewed 8 November 2011. http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/heydrichkilling.html. Hintjens, Helen M. ‘Explaining the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda’. The Journal of Modern African Studies 37.2 (1999): 241-86. Jung, Carl G. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. 17 Vols. London: Routledge, 1959. Kershaw, Ian. ‘Hitler’s Role in the Final Solution’. Viewed 3 July 2011. http://www.genocideeducation.ca/kershaw.pdf.

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__________________________________________________________________ Kets de Vries, Manfred. Organizational Paradoxes, Clinical Approaches to Management. New York: Tavistock, 1980. Kets de Vries, Manfred. ‘Leaders on the Couch’. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 26.4 (1990): 423-31. Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Laucella, Linda. Assassination: The Politics of Murder. Los Angeles: Lowell House, 1998. Lavonius, Leena. ‘Cold Case to Close’. Sunday Tasmanian, 29 May 2011: 2. Le Bon, Gustave. The Mind of the Crowd. New York: Viking, 1960. Marakas, George M., Richard D. Johnson and Jonathon W. Palmer. ‘A Theoretical Model of Differential Social Attributions Towards Computing Technology: When the Metaphor Becomes the Model’. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 52 (2000): 719-750. Nordstrom, Byron J. Scandinavia since 1500. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Pantti, Mervi and Jan Wieten. ‘Mourning Becomes the Nation: Television Coverage of the Murder of Pim Fortuyn’. Journalism Studies 6.3 (2005): 301-13. Puri, Basant K., Paul J. Laking and Ian H. Treasaden. Textbook of Psychiatry. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone, 1996. Rank, Otto. The Trauma of Birth. New York: Harper Row, 1973. Raviv, Amiram Avi Sadeh, Alona Raviv, Ora Silberstein and Orna Diver. ‘Young Israelis’ Reactions to National Trauma: The Rabin Assassination and Terror Attacks’. Political Psychology 21.2 (2000): 299-322. Reber, Arthur S. The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology. 3rd ed. London: Penguin, 1995. Shatan, Chaim F. ‘Genocide and Bereavement’. Genocide in Paraguay, edited by Richard Arens, 102-31. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976.

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__________________________________________________________________ van der Veer, Peter. ‘Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and the Politics of Tolerance in the Netherlands’. Public Culture 18.1 (2005): 111-24. Van Holsteyn, Joop and Galen Irwin. ‘Never a Dull Moment: Pim Fortuyn and the Dutch Parliamentary Election of 2002’. West European Politics 26.2 (2003): 4166. Vertzberger, Yaacov Y. I. ‘The Antimonies of Collective Political Trauma: A PreTheory’. Political Psychology 18.4 (1997): 863-76. Volkan, Vamik D. ‘Ethnicity and Nationalism: A Psychoanalytic Perspective’. Applied Psychology 47.1 1998: 45-57. Wakabi, Michael. ‘The East African, Habyarimana Killed by His Own Army: UK Experts’. Viewed 10 January 2011. http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/news/-/2558/839190/-/pwwr1nz/-/index.html. Youngson, Robert M. Collins Dictionary of Medicine. Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1992. William W. Bostock is Senior Lecturer in Government, University of Tasmania. He is also Secretary and Board Member, Research Committee 29, Psycho-Politics, International Political Science Association.