Tag: Memoir

Adrie, You’re very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re going to chat about The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems (Duke University Press: 2024) which, in the words of Yusef Komunyakaa, “is a gift across cultures…each poetic essay is a deep voyage”.

SG: Let’s start with what is possibly the most appropriate title for a collection of standalone yet connected narratives, The Trauma Mantras. In the process of creating this book, when did you arrive at the title and why did you structure the book, in three acts?

AK:I arrived at the title very late in the game, I was originally going to call it The Trouble with Trauma, to get at the anthropological critique of Western conceptions of Trauma, but then I had a class at the college where I teach and I received three emails from students saying they found a certain article traumatizing and it just occurred to me that for some of these students, trauma has become a mantra, something they think will actually help them by invoking it over and over again, like a mantra. I liked the sound of The Trauma Mantras, and I proposed putting it all as one word The Traumamantras, but my publisher felt that would be too confusing. I love that mama is in the middle of it and I like the way it hints at the Western Psychologization of certain Buddhist concepts like mantra.  I decided to break it up into three sections to give the reader a bit of breathing space, the first section deals a lot more with Trauma per se, but I’m not sure I could categorize the other section into any kind of theme.  You asked about three sections, but I’ve divided the book into two.

SG: The Trauma Mantras is unlike any collection I’ve read. Reading it was like a spell which evoked such a strong sense of place and senses that I felt compelled to go right to the start and read it again. How important is place in how you experience the world – as an anthropologist, writer and woman.

AK: Place is everything and isn’t separate from the self. As an anthropologist, we learn and teach that place and culture is not some kind of superficial covering of the mind/body, it permeates our every cell. It inhabits the senses consciously and unconsciously. I never understood journals that say they feature writing about place, because all writing on some level is about place even if it is never mentioned or described, because place is absorbed and informing the subjects we write about all the time. I can’t imagine not including place in my writing because I’m so intensely aware of the power of place to shape self. Early on as an anthropologist and a woman, I was struck by how the places I could go were limited and how my being a white woman caused people to perceive me in certain ways I wasn’t used to. In parts of South Sudan I couldn’t just walk around at night by myself and traveling alone in certain parts of India I’ve also felt unsafe at times. I’m also keenly aware of the places I cannot enter as an anthropologist because I am female. For example my husband used to have long meetings with Sudan People’s Liberation Army leaders, all male, while I hung out with the women in the kitchen. In cultures where gender segregation is more the norm, I was acutely aware that I would only be able to explore female dominated places.

SG:  The Trauma Mantras is disturbingly timely in its subject matter and dedication (to refugees everywhere). Many of the narratives touch on the notion of fixing things, systems, people and westerners are often portrayed as unwanted invaders. Right at the outset, we meet Smriti who declares that “you can make yourself so very small if you try…” and there’s the question that hangs in the air throughout the book “who knows if telling her story actually helped like our NGO told her it would”. There are multiple narratives about telling stories and getting everything out that your questioning of this practice in relation to trauma – creating and re-creating trauma like a mantra – is really powerful. Can you talk about this?

AK: Yes, in the West we have a very Freudian hydraulic metaphor for mental health and emotions, that things need to be expressed in order to get better, especially through talk therapy and revisiting the trauma story and telling it over and over. Many non Western cultures don’t have this same ethnopsychology, and we can’t just presume that our Western psychology is a universal truth. It is one among many ways of thinking about wellbeing. Tibetan refugees and Tibetan Buddhism has a very different conception of trauma which has helped them become one of the most resilient refugee populations. They do not believe in endless processing and foraging around the depths of negative emotions, rather they learn to let them go through lojong exercises, see them from a more spacious and wider perspective, identify them with the wider universal truth of suffering, reframe them as positive ways of paying off karmic debt. The degree to which the trauma concept has been globalized is frightening to me because it is replacing very healthy, often sociomythic and spiritual responses to suffering and disasters that have taken centuries to develop and work. The globalization of the trauma narrative is also contributing to a view of the self as fragile, delicate, easily triggered instead of resilient and hardy. Social workers for trauma therapy are often the first thing we send over to “rescue” countries recovering from war or disaster, even before issues like food, housing, family reunification, school are put back in place. The problem with seeing everything through the trauma lens, is that so much healthy, practical, pragmatic desires (I want to be with my friends, go back to school) is viewed as a kind of repression of what must come out. The assumption that grief and trauma must eventually “rise up” is not necessarily true and has been challenged.  This view of emotions and feelings also puts them squarely inside the individual, instead of in the social body.

SG: Following on from this, I found it fascinating how we read about the college students with their “triggers everywhere” alongside traumatised refugees who often wonder why they are being asked to speak of their experiences. In Getting the story just right we’re told

What withers in America are the clumsy folksy smelly stories that smack of soul, spirit, ancestors, cows, witches, tribe, too much history

Essentially, these are the real stories (or so it seems to me), but not necessarily seen or told through the lens of trauma. Your anger and frustration are palpable “I resent how the doctors gave her a story because they couldn’t tolerate no story at all”. Do you think our lives have been narrativized so much that they are now narrow to the extent that the felt experience cannot be felt?

AK: Yes I do think our lives have been narrativized, conditioned and trained to wind around the concept of psychologized individualism. There was an article in the New Yorker called The Case Against the Trauma Plot by Parul Seghal which consider how the trauma plot is dominating fiction. When this kind of narrative becomes hegemonic and the only narrative in town really used, people tend to gravitate toward it for lack of any other kinds of narratives to use which are widely accepted. People want to connect with each other, so they move into narratives that are currently in vogue to communicate as they are chatting by the water cooler. There are so many different (wider) ways to tell a story without invoking a hardy individualized heroic self that perseveres by exploring his/her psychological depths.  What about stories that center around myth, dreams, history, ancestors, politics, environment?

SG: Talk to me about academia and the difficulty in being open to the truths of our imperialist and polarised world view alongside the pressure of not offending or triggering – it strikes me that this book is a way in which to express what cannot be said in our institutions, in contrast to cultural rituals around grief and so on (e.g. wakes) which do let the horror out. In This is What Sorrow Looks like it feels that the deep It also pitches the disciplines of anthropology against that of psychology. Could you comment on these observations?

AK: Yes, I have had to be careful at my own institution and within academia – if trauma becomes the mental illness we have fallen in love with, then to suggest alternative conceptions of reality and different modes of healing is often seen as not being compassionate to the traumas people are suffering, including the students. My goal is not to deny the very real and painful student suffering, but to suggest alternative, less psychologized ways of making sense/meaning out of it. My Anthropology of Mental Health class is very much a critique of certain assumptions of Western psychology.

I’m also a big believer in the power of creative writing and artistic mediums to convey the complexities, subtleties and sensualities of cultural concepts. Art and academic belong together. I feel I’m much more able to represent and explore the deeply felt embodied emotions and  cultural nuances that are sometimes not portrayed in more stiff academic articles. Ethnographic poetry and fiction used to be quite rare, but more and more anthropologists are weaving creative writing into their ethnographies. In grad school I never would have been able to attempt writing up my field notes in poetic form because it wasn’t seen as scholarly and objective. I had to wait until I’d published a book and received tenure before I could “come out” as an ethnographic poet, but now this kind of writing is much more accepted.

 I’m very aware of how annoying I must sound constantly critiquing individualism in a culture where Individualism is a God, a King in this culture, and so deeply embedded in our view of the “natural” order of things.  Sometimes students find this critique liberating, sometimes threatening. I tell them over and over, we do not have to frame the challenges of an era as internal problems with individual solutions.  I do think that rather than triggering, sometimes they find the cross cultural truths I expose them to refreshing and freeing.  

Also, for example, so many colleges have vast resources built up around individualized counseling and psychotherapy to deal with post covid student depression and anxiety and mental health days are becoming quite common for students to declare they are taking. My question is what should constitute a mental health day? Should we be promoting curling up in bed in our dorm rooms and watching Netflix? Perhaps we need to broaden what constitutes healing to include group trips into the woods, iphone fasting, tree planting, visiting the homes of New Americans, taking the bus and chatting with someone you don’t know who seems very different from you, getting out of your comfort zone. Perhaps we need to up the narratives around student resilience and use more metaphors of strength and grit around student mental health. Let’s help students explore what constitutes nurturing the self outside of the psychologized individualism narrative? As well as encouraging places of consciousness that don’t privilege thought like yoga and meditation?

SG: You combine visceral, sensory and quite beautiful writing with hard facts and, what feel like hard truths about the impact of your field work on family, psyche and, as we’ve noted before, that question about making change for good. In Calla Lily, Condom, we read how your son, at the bus station in Uganda

could hardly see the difference between the squashed condom the man threw at her in disgust and the crushed lily flattened by the muzungu’s high heel, between the bleeding, the bleeding from everywhere there was an opening, and the languid arch of the red hibiscus sprawled against the night.

It struck me that the child has not yet learned or been taught to label the world in terms of trauma, triggers, and feeling. Do you think society trains us to articulate our lives in a very particular narrative frame?

AK: Yes, culture very much trains us to articulate our lives in a very particular narrative frame. In Calla Lilly, Condom, I remember wishing I could view the world through my son’s three year old perspective which was less socialized than my own responses. I felt so overwhelmed by the raw suffering I saw at this bus station that I wondered how much of this reality he also experienced as brutal to watch and how much he simply saw this reality without the tragic lens I could not escape.

SG: In The Trauma Mantras you show how even when giving birth, we search for meaning and ways of expressing how we feel rather than just allowing ourselves to feel “we string tired word stitched to tired word between us…a dogged, clumsy kind of loving, weaving our coarse nets between us, pulling each other ashore.” Later, you “simultaneously think and question whether every mother is nothing less than the sky the child plays under, giving them a shelter from the infinite.” I thought this was possibly the most beautiful statement about the power and pressure of motherhood in twenty-first century western society. This is, of course, a moving thread throughout the book – the author’s motherhood against Ayeri’s motherhood and the themes of trauma and death. Was this an intentional theme or one which emerged as you pulled the collection together? Could you comment on this?

AK: I think motherhood was woven into the book because it is an essential aspect of who I am as a human on this planet. To leave it out would have been like hiding my full self from the reader. Because I am a woman and a mother, I was given access to other women and mothers in other cultures. This was a real gift.  Because I was so deeply committed to being a mother, I found that I couldn’t bear to leave my children at home some of the time. This both limited the circles I could explore (there are some places I simply couldn’t take my children) as well as opened up others I wouldn’t have access to as a  woman without children.  Mothers were drawn to me as I was to them, and so they became a more prominent part of my field work, so I think it is inevitable that the theme of motherhood is woven throughout this book. In anthropology it is easier to establish rapport with people who share a basic universal similarity, like children. So I ended up talking more with mothers than with fathers or single men, for example, and then reflecting on the cross cultural similarities and differences between us.

SG: Many of the narratives are created from observations, themselves beautiful poems to life and our world. In Part 2, Tulip Fever the simple act of planting tulips during a pandemic becomes a ritual and a way to affirm life:

May 15 Burning Hearts. Queens of the Night, lipstick streaked, thighs splayed open ….May 18 Giant red Darwins, shiny clawed lobsters, underbellies bulging and blue veined

And later we are reminded that “though we think our minds are sealed with skulls, the hair on our arms is the first to sense an oncoming storm.” These gave me hope – that though we have possibly psychologised our way out of ourselves, our body still knows.

AK: I think that the Buddhist in me is often trying to get back to the places beneath thought, of pure knowing without the psychological grids, values, labels. Meditation and yoga have been crucial to this process as I tend to be a fairly obsessive thinker and analyzer. Anytime I can slip into the somatic experience without the busy neurotic nest of the mind replaying its dramas is very healing for me. Meditation has shown me how much of reality is spliced and diced into good/bad, aversion/attraction, should/shouldn’t and other dichotomies that corral us into a kind of limited grooves of experience. What happens when we let these go? When we try and experience, for example, a feeling in the body not just as fear, but as a particular fascinating sensation? What happens when we let go of all the ego based stories that we are so profoundly hooked on?  What are we missing out on by locking so much of our perception in the constant chatter of the mind? I come from a very academic family where high levels of thinking, PhD’s are celebrated, so meditation did not come easy, but it has allowed me to move from being held hostage by certain thoughts, to seeing them as one among many that just pass through and don’t need to be taken as a TRUTH to obey and follow all the time

SG: We’ll end this Writers Chat, Adrie, with some short questions:

• Mountains or beach? Mountains (I live at the base of Mt. Mansfield in Underhill, Vermont)
• Laptop or longhand? Laptop
• Coffee or tea? Decaf coffee and decaf tea (caffeine makes me really jittery)
• Boat or plane? Plane (oddly I often feel no fear of death when I’m flying) whereas boats in deep sea terrify me)
• What are you reading now? Currently I am re- reading mostly school/teaching oriented stuff for classes, like Sara Lewis’ book SPACIOUS MINDS: Trauma and Resilience in Tibetan Buddhism and Ethan Watters CRAZY LIKE Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche as well as Tracy Kidder’s biography of anthropologist/doctor/global humanitarian Paul Farmer entitled Mountains Beyond Mountains. I just picked up my friend and poet Bruce Weigl’s book again called SONG OF NAPALM as well as David Foster Wallace’s small and beautiful book based on his Kenyon college graduation address entitled THIS IS WATER.

Purchase The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems direct from Duke University Press here.

With thanks to Kristina Darling and Duke University Press for the advance copy of The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems.