The subsequent narration or documentation of trauma by survivors of historical events such as combat, torture, the atomic bomb, and the Holocaust or interpersonal events such as rape, sexual abuse, and incest paradoxically perform the impossible task of bearing witness, forging community, and/or inciting political resistance to erasure, invisibility, or denial that often exacerbates the original traumatic event. At the same time that disciplinary categorization may reinscribe subjects in networks of domination by ‘realizing’ them, the absence of mooring identity categories as the template that coheres one’s experience is equally problematic because traumatic experience is delegitimated as the exceptional unreal. Writing of the paradox of bearing witness to the Holocaust, the psychoanalyst Dori Laub writes:

‘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. Trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, has no ending, attained no closure, and therefore as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into the present and is current in every respect.’ (‘Bearing’ 69)” (pg. 267-8)
(Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the ‘Real,’ edited by Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol, U of Illinois Press, 2001)

“[T]rauma… is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. This truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language.” (pg. 1-2)
(Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History by Cathy Caruth)

“Caruth’s point in ‘Unclaimed Experience’ is that history and trauma bear an indissoluble connection with each other. We consider history that which can be preserved as a memory and written, but the event that serves as the object of history, that which happens, is erased or blotted out. Maurice Blanchot’s argument about the ‘immemorial’ nature of the disaster suggests that once an experience occurs, it is forever lost; at this point- ‘upon losing what we have to say’ (21), the point of forgetfulness- writing begins. Forgetfulness is the source of memory. The ‘victim’ of [trauma] was never fully conscious during the [event] itself: the person gets way, Freud say ‘apparently unharmed’ (Caruth 187). The witness saw, the traumatic deed or circumstance; the deed or circumstance was never fully known- and hence could not be remembered- and what follows is a profusion of language. In survivor testimonies like Mary R.’s, we read the displacement of the traumatic event- the historical event, lost to memory- by the language of testimony, the sometimes broken, sometimes contradictory stories of the camps, or of hiding, or of the aftermath. But it is a language disrupted by that event, a language of repetition, in which the event is narrated over and over again but in wording that may not be clearly associated with the event. [pg. 1307]
(from Beyond the Question of Authenticity: Witness and Testimony in the Fragments Controversy, Michael Bernard-Donals, PMLA, 116.5, p. 1302-14)

Judith Herman’s book, Trauma and Recovery, (an easy read, as these things go, sort of basic but worthwhile) is a historical overview of the recognition and treatment of trauma, the political contexts in which it is understood, cataloged. Understood as what? The basic fact, the core of what various definitions and theories have gleaned over time puts trauma as that which cannot be understood. Or ignored. “Idée fixe” for Janet, the interruption, preoccupation, the obsession. The terrible absence, more than silence. The nightmares that can’t be forgotten or remembered.

so is the sea, as a place of “uninterrupted rupture” the site of trauma itself? all those blurs and fogs that haunt our daily. sometimes its so still. as still and strange as the raging. but we could never live there, just humans, flesh and bone.

In Herman’s work at Cambridge Hospital she directs a program that focuses on autobiography as a tool to integrate traumatic memory. It takes patients years and multiple drafts to remember, to grasp and to feel their horrors, to come around to some perspective, seeing themselves as characters in a larger unfolding, having sympathy for themselves, engaging in an inner dialog outside the one scripted by the trauma.
In so many ways i see the work i find engaging, the work i try to do, as the broader implementation of this process. These are murky waters, as the same reason that a story is mine to tell is the same reason that it’s not. I swear i can make that make more sense… so, if i’m telling the stories my mother told me throughout my childhood, of family long dead (and yet very alive) it is my story, a part of my identity to share if i choose. eh, but it’s the story and identity of my whole family as well and, of course, these are not pretty stories. what fun would that be? still, the bottom line is, that’s a lot of fucking cousins to get consent from. perhaps more than concern for offending or violating them, i fear that none of them really care, have enough pride, sense of (that kind of) self to give a damn. which is probably closer to the truth. my question of them is, what happens to the stories we aren’t telling? the ones we’re actively forgetting? the ones we never learn, never dare to ask?
so many of these stories, the ones told, the ones forgotten, chronicle (for me, at least) the process of becoming american. and as americans – i’m a little offended just calling myself that, but it’s true, no matter how you dice it – we are so removed from our effect on the world. we have no place within it, we are it. and images of trauma are almost entirely censured, especially the most pertinent. so of course that planes and buildings thing (i’m so sick of talking about it) dominates the national mindset. not only are such images, by definition, sites of compulsion, fixation, but we have no framework for dealing with them. pearl harbor? seriously?

so that film i saw friday, crónica de una fuga, is about four men who escaped a detention center during the dirty wars in argentina.
it was a little crazy-making, but really, it got me to finally write, when i’d been fucking whack, abuzz with poetry all week, making furious notes but unable to get anything out. and the themes that came out of this were sort of the impossibility, not just of trauma itself, but of survival. i was rather dumbstruck, and disappointed in myself, it had never occurred to me that anyone ever escaped. in what could be an extension of that theme, i kept coming back to the children, born in prison and sold to wealthy families while their parents were tossed into a ditch, while their grandparents marched around the plaza de mayo. some of these children were eventually found and returned to (what was left of) their families, some were found and refused to return. without romanticizing, or extending the analogy of these horribly misplaced orphans any further than is obvious, what does this say about justice, about love? what is the adhesive in that silence? what is it in the stories, told or untold?
and if the nation is the imagined extension of the family unit… well, that explains a few things, right? don’t think the economists can measure that. and, of course, these histories parallel our own…