Bearing Witness: The Power of Narratives in Navigating Collective Trauma
I will speak a dark language with the music of a harp.
—Anne Michaels
Fiction gives eyes to the horrified narrator. Eyes to see and to weep… —Paul Ricoeur[1]
Lately, I have been reminded of these two quotes above. They are the epigraphs to my first book (an edited collection) published long ago in another lifetime. Since then, I have learned and changed so much that if I were to embark on that project now I would surely do it very differently. Yet, these quotes have stayed with me, and, I think, are worth revisiting now because their resonance remains palpable.
Exploring Trauma in Art
For me, both these quotes speak to a question that has long plagued philosophers and artists: What is the role of art and culture in making sense of human experiences, particularly when it comes to collective trauma? Both quotes, it seems to me, insist on the importance of bearing witness to trauma.
Beginning with the second world war, the opening to Michaels’ novel, Fugitive Pieces (1997), is nothing short of devastating. Seven-year-old Jakob Beer survives the murder of his family. He manages to flee and, after hiding in the woods, is found by a working archaeologist who rescues him from immediate danger.
Though told from the perspective of Jakob Beer in the present tense, it is clearly not told through the voice of a seven-year-old. The language is far too advanced. Yet it works. It is a poetic and layered narrative that really does “speak a dark language with the music of a harp” and in so doing brings to life the suffering, pain, loss, fear, and sadness of that time and place.
It is, though, a hard read because it is hard to bear witness, even in fiction, to historical traumas. Perhaps especially in fiction.
Literature might be fiction in the strictest sense, but it is also a space that evokes emotional truth. As far back as 1860, the author Eduard Douwes Dekker, writing under the pen-name Multatuli, put it thus: “what is fiction in particular is truth in general.”[2]
This is what Edward Said is getting at when he writes, “many novelists, painters and poets, like Manzoni, Picasso and Neruda, have embodied the historical experience of their people in aesthetic works.”[3]
Said, however, lays the responsibility of parsing those works of art at the door of the intellectual. He writes, “[f]or the intellectual the task, I believe, is explicitly to universalize the crisis, to give greater scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that suffering with the sufferings of others.”[4]
For Said, the capacity to extrapolate out from a specific historical trauma to speak to the universal human experience is key in order to negate future traumas, “to guard against the possibility that a lesson learned about oppression in one place will be forgotten or violated in another place or time.”[5]
Personal Reflections on Collective Trauma
The idea that we can learn from each other is at the heart of Joe Cleary’s book, Literature, Partition and the Nation State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine. Cleary points out that in the 1990s and early 2000s, the situations in Ireland and Palestine were “increasingly associated with each other in both domestic and international perceptions.” [6]
Today, the two situations have diverged and stand in stark contrast. The idea, however, of putting these two situations in conversation was and is not to flatten or erase the differences, but to discover potential insights and connections. In seeking out connections perhaps, just maybe we can begin to imagine a way back from complete annihilation.
I can remember Ireland in the days before the Good Friday Agreement. Even to a child, the shadow of injustices and atrocities perpetrated by both sides loomed large. So too the frustrations of trying to negotiate disarmament and a peace process.
I can remember too crossing the border between northern and southern Ireland in the days when the border was marked by high barbed wire fences and patrolled by soldiers with machine guns. The Irish police don’t carry guns, so the only time we ever saw armed forces was at the border and it was jarring.
I can remember the car being stopped and surrounded by silent soldiers, fingers hovering over the triggers of black machine guns.
I can remember standing with my family on the side of the road, in the darkness, as soldiers searched every inch of our car, searching for something that wasn’t there.
On the scale of experiences of violent oppression under colonialism, these and other memories do not even register. I am not trying to suggest otherwise. At the time, the situation in Ireland was our normal, everyday. We didn’t know any different.
Now, however, I can reflect on how in places and times of conflict the extraordinary becomes part of ordinary life. The possibility, the threat, the fear of violence, no matter how small, leaves its mark.
From Divisive Narratives to Understanding
Later, as a researcher and teacher, I specialized in postcolonial and gender studies, in trying to make sense of stories of oppression not just from home, but from other times and places to see what we could learn from each other.
I learned how, through stories, we can dehumanize each other. How we can create stories that feed division and fear. How we can foster a world of us against them. How we can become so entrenched in our own perspective, our own wounds, that we can’t see the suffering of others.
And, also, how there are stories of healing and hope. How stories can help us to overcome those divides. How they can help us to see the humanity in each other, help heal wounds, and bring understanding and connection.
The Healing Power of Stories: Fostering Empathy and Connection
Reading Fugitive Pieces, I was struck by how the narrative can put us in touch with the pain and suffering, the hurt and loss of Jakob’s story. Just one possible story amongst millions. It makes it possible to understand that the collective trauma of the Holocaust was so deep, so totally annihilating that it reverberates through history.
Today, that trauma has broken through from its thinly veiled hiding place, like “the Tollund man, Grauballe Man”[7] and has taken on a devastating emboldened shape. We are witnessing this trauma reformed.
Yet, one of my take-aways from Fugitive Pieces is that precisely because past traumas haunt us, live on through us, we should not stop trying. Trying our absolute level best to protect each other, to respect each other, and to stop the cycle of violence. It is not enough to say never again will that happen to our people. We must say never again will that happen to any people.
Safe in my little corner of the world, I feel utterly helpless. I know my helplessness is a privilege, a luxury, but I still feel it. Helplessness in the face of unbearable human suffering, pain, and loss. And I struggle to write about anything because there are so many people, just like me, who are, in another corner of the same world, struggling for everything.
I believe in the power of words. I believe in the unique ability of stories to not only captivate imaginations and inspire, but also to challenge, and foster positive change. I believe that stories can be the catalysts for change. I believe that stories can delve deep into our hearts and minds, challenge our perspectives, ignite our empathy, and inspire us to question, learn, and grow. I believe that stories can give us the capacity to imagine a better, kinder world.
I believe all those things. I have read too many life-changing books not to. Yet, the words I find that echo the loudest belong not to a story, but to Edward Said: “No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.”[8] In fact, I would amend them to simply: no cause, no God, no idea can justify slaughter.
Tomorrow I will get back to hope and the task of trying to build a better world one story at a time. Today, I will just bear witness, weep, and pray for a ceasefire.
Notes:
[1] Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992. Cited in Gunne, Sorcha and Zoë Brigley Thompson (eds.). Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives: Violence and Violation. New York: Routledge, 2010.
[2] Cited in Lazarus, Neil. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011, p.126.
[3] Said, Edward W. Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage, 1996, p.44.
[4] Said, p.44.
[5] Said, p.44.
[6] Cleary, Joe. Literature, Partition and the Nation State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, p.5.
[7] Michaels, p.5. There’s a literary refence here to Seamus Heaney’s poetry on Northern Ireland, specifically the bog poems, in North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975).
[8] Said, Edward W. From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map: Essays. New York: Vintage, 2005, p.117.
