Trauma & Art

Places III

Places and trauma

“So much of who we are, is where we have been.” William Langewiesche

A. This summer the acclaimed Irish writer, Edna O’Brien, passed away at the age of ninety three. I discovered her in my teens and read half a dozen or more of her books, but had not read anything by her since. Those books sort of belonged to my youth. I vaguely remembered the stories, but the themes and ambience of her work and her beautiful prose, had lingered on in my memory. The news of her death took me back to that time. I decided to read something more recent and this brought me to her memoir Country Girl, published in 2012, and her novel Girl, published in 2019.

Girl is inspired by the abduction of 276 schoolgirls in 2014 from the Government Girls Secondary School in the town of Chibok in Nigeria by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram. About a third of the girls are still missing.

At the age of 88 O’ Brien crossed continents and cultures in order to do research, to interview and write about the pain and loss of these girls. The book is compact with great economy, but also contains beautiful descriptions of nature. As with all her stories, the writer focuses intensely on women’s bodily distress and discomfort, emotions and inner lives in contexts of physical and mental constraint, while revealing the particular patriarchal and theocratic structures that keep them there. The book is painful to read. One feels that the word trauma has exploded. O’ Brien lays bare the trauma of these young girls. For instance, her precise description of the stoning of a girl to death makes us want to turn our eyes away or skip the page, but hopefully we keep reading and allow the narrative to unleash our empathy. For the reader relief comes both through allowing oneself to feel and through the glimpses of hope that the writer offers at the end of the book.

Maryam, the central heroine and narrator of this story, is a composition of the girls O’Brien met.

She begins her narrative:

“I WAS A GIRL ONCE, but not any more. I smell. Blood dried and crusted all over me, and my wrapper in shreds. My insides, a morass. Hurtled through this forest that I saw, that first awful night, when I and my friends were snatched from the school.”

Maryam is forced by her abductors into marriage and motherhood, but she somehow manages to escape with her baby daughter and a friend. Although the circumstances in this African setting are hellish, the theme of the two friemds fleeing is actually reminiscent of the two friends, Cait and Baba in O’Brien’s early work, The Country Girls.  Maryam’s friend dies along the way, but she and her baby manage against all odds to return, and finally, to be reunited with the only surviving member of her nuclear family, her mother. We witness how she is both a hero, and an unwanted reminder of where she has been and what has been lost,  a source of shame and a site for stigma and projections. A new ordeal begins for Maryam, as she struggles to distance herself enough not only from the extremists, but also, the authorities and her extended family, so as to be able to find her voice again and piece together her story, as well as, to remain alive and be reunited with her baby that has been taken from her as the child is unwanted and a source of both shame and fear for her extended family and community..

Edna O’ Brien’s memoir, Country Girl, includes themes to do with people, events, history, places, self-exile and homeland, how they all reside within us, and how they are renegotiated over time. In the prologue she writes; “I got out a cookery book from Ballymaloe House in County Cork, where I’d stayed a couple of times and partook of delicacies such as nettle soup, carrageen moss soufflé, lemon posset with rose-scented geranium and gooseberry frangipane with baby banoffees. It was where I had seen for the first time and been astonished by Jack Yeats’s paintings, thick palettes of curdled blues that spoke to me then as deeply of Ireland as any poem or fragment of prose could do. I looked up the recipe for soda bread and did something that I had not done in thirty-odd years. I made bread. Broken piano or not, I felt very alive, as the smell of the baking bread filled the air. It was an old smell, the begetter of many a memory, and so on that day in August, in my seventy-eighth year, I sat down to begin the memoir which I swore I would never write.”

.Snippets from O’Brien’s Country Girl:

“History is everywhere, it seeps into the soil, the subsoil, like rain or hail or snow or blood. A house remembers, an outhouse remembers, a people ruminate, the tale differs with the teller.”

“… and it was as if the two countries warred and jostled and made friends, inside me, like the two halves of my warring self.”

“It had something to do with going back, for ever the need to go back, the way animals do, the way elephants trudge thousands of miles to return to where the elephant whisperer has lived. ‘We go back for the whisper,’ she said, the dreamed-of reconciliation”.  From Edna O’Brien’s memoir Country Girl

B. Today I also have some more drawings inspired by places in Greece and accompanied by passages by writers Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, and Greek poet, Kostas Varnalis. To some extent, these narratives are time bound, and they are all very personal, coloured by the writers’ experiences and worldviews. They are as much about Greece, then and now, as they are of the writers themselves.

From The Greek Islands by Lawrence Durrell:

“Poros is a most enchanting arrangement, obviously designed by demented Japanese children with the aid of Paul Klee and Raoul Dufy. A child’s box of bricks that has been rapidly and fluently setup against a small shoulder of headland which holds the winds in thrall, it extends against the magical blue skyline its long herbaceous border of brilliant colours, hardly quite dry as yet; the moisture trembles with the cloud-light on the wet paint of the houses, and the changing light dapples it with butterflies’ wings. As the harbour curves round, everything seems to move on a turntable hardly bigger than the hurdy-gurdy of a funfair, and you have the illusion that without getting off the ship you can lean over the rail and order an ouzo. And this sense of proximity is increased so that you seem to be sailing down the main street with the inhabitants walking in leisurely fashion alongside the ship. You feel that finally they will lay friendly hands upon the ropes and bring it slowly to a halt. The best description of entering Poros is that of Henry Miller, who captured the port in masterly fashion in his Greek travel book.”

The American writer Henry Miller, whom Durrell refers to, travelled for five or six months around Greece in 1939, sometimes with friends he had made in Greece like Katsimbalis, who is the real colossus of Maroussi, and the Nobel prize winner, poet Georgios Seferis. His stay in Greece proved transformative for him and he believed he had had an awakening of sorts. In the afterword of a more recent edition of The Colossus of Maroussi, which I’m reading, Ian S. MacNiven writes: ”Miller leaves Greece for America on 28 December. With the world crashing into war, he drafts The Colossus of Maroussi, a paean to cross-national, multi-lingual friendship, to Greece, to peace. An idealized yet real portrait of Greece and the Greek character. Restlessly, still professing to believe that the war has nothing to do with him, Miller sets out on his year-long tour of the United States with the avowed intention of writing a parallel panegyric to his native land.” On his return to America he writes The Air-Conditioned Nightmare and a sequel, Remember to Remember, two years later. He gives up urban living and moves to the south of San Francisco. He lives in isolation in the wilderness in a cabin overlooking the Pacific Ocean, where he writes his long trilogy, The Rosy Crucifixion, the Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus volumes.

Miller’s beauitful description of coming into Poros:

“If there is one dream which I like above all others it is that of sailing on land. Coming into Poros gives the illusion of the deep dream. Suddenly the land converges on all sides and the boat is squeezed into a narrow strait from which there seems to be no egress. The men and women of Poros are hanging out of the windows, just above your head. You pull in right under their friendly nostrils, as though for a shave and haircut on route. ….  To sail slowly through the streets of Poros is to recapture the joy of passing through the neck of the womb. It is a joy almost too deep to be remembered. It is a kind of numb idiot’s delight which produces legends such as that of the birth of an island out of a foundering ship. The ship, the passage, the revoking walls, the gentle undulating tremor, the green snakelike curve of the shore, the beards hanging down over your scalp from the inhabitants suspended above you, all these and the palpitant breath of friendship, sympathy, guidance, envelop and entrance you until you are blown out like a star fulfilled and your heart with its molten smithereens scattered far and wide.”

Greek poet Kostas Varnalis wrote about Aegena in the 1920s:

“One afternoon I took the boat at Perasia, the famous “Chryso”, and went first to Aegina. I had intended, starting from Aegina, to search around the Saronic until I found a suitable place to perch permanently. I wanted to always be close to Athens. Because I didn’t have much trust in myself. I knew how easily I get tired and bored. So I needed to be able to easily take the boat and come to the city of the Gods, to regret it and flee from the furnace of fire and manure to the coolness and quiet of the pelagos. In Aegina where I went first, I dropped anchor forever. I really liked the evening walk I took, along the shore from the “column” all the way to Saint Basil. I rented the second floor (two rooms) of a quiet house and returned to Athens to bring back my things. On a small table I placed some favorite books. On the walls all around I pinned a bunch of photographs of works by Greco, Poturizio, Botticelli, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, etc., bought from the Louvre Museum and the Vatican Gallery. I used to get up at dawn, lean out of the window in the yard and look at the sky and below me were vines, almond trees, pistachio trees, a well, a goat with its bell, a flock of chickens…. And then the landlady would bring me milk and coffee and I would sit to write, happy and optimistic or pace the room gesticulating animatedly as I recited the verses I had written, testing their sound by ear.”

“A little before noon, Syra appeared. It stretched its warm and dry lines to the horizon, reflecting around it the heat of the sun, with no vegetation to absorb it. As the ship approached, the slopes of the dry rocks were shown in their unique nakedness, bathed in an irresistible light.” M. Karagatsis

PART THREE

Narrative Therapy

and

Art

“Therapists can undermine the idea that they have privileged access to the truth by consistently encouraging persons to assist them in the quest for understanding.” Michael White

“I believe, with Michel Foucault (1980), that a domain of knowledge is a domain of power, and that a domain of power is a domain of knowledge.” Michael White

This third part on narrative therapy is a continuation of the previous two posts, and it focuses on a few more ideas and papers in Michael White’s book, Narrative Therapy Classics.

I’m also posting some new ink drawings from a series with the title Τόποι / Places.

As I mentioned in the previous posts, the book is rich in themes, principles of narrative therapy, political analysis, questions and sample conversations, and is probably a book one needs to read more than once. In today’s piece I will attempt to briefly present some ideas and interventions related to loss and grief, trauma and subordinate storyline development, surface spiritualities, ethics and transparency in therapeutic contexts.

On loss and grief

In relation to experiences of loss and grief White discusses the value of utilizing both the “saying hullo” metaphor and the “saying goodbye” metaphor, when working with loss and grief. He writes that many people that have consulted him over problems related to grief have found the ‘saying hullo’ metaphor, and the questions derived from this metaphor, to be helpful. He claims that he has consistently found that, through the incorporation of the lost relationship, those problems that are often defined by the field, as ‘pathological mourning’ or ‘delayed grief ’are resolved and people arrive at a new relationship with their self.

White clarifies that he’s not taking a position against the utilisation of the saying goodbye metaphor because he believes there is a lot to say goodbye to. People often need to say goodbye to what was, to a material reality and to hopes, dreams and expectations.  However, he believes that the process of grief is both a ‘saying goodbye and a ‘saying hullo’ phenomenon.  He also argues that every experience of loss is unique, as are the requirements for its processing. Therefore, metaphors can be helpful to the extent that they don’t subject people to normative specifications, and to the extent that the expression of, this uniqueness is recognized and facilitated.

White also notes that at times it has been assumed that this work, which is oriented to the ‘saying hullo again’ metaphor, is informed by a notion of a spirituality that is immanent or ascendant, and that it is associated with forces that are of another dimension; however, this is not what he has intended to propose and these notions have not shaped the development of this particular work. He explains that work that is oriented by the ‘saying hullo again’ metaphor assists persons “in the development of skills in the resurrection and expression of significant experiences of their relationships. These are experiences that these persons have lived through – that are part of their stock of lived-experience”.

Additionally, White discusses how this metaphor provides possibilities for action in the form of re-membering practices, which inform a ‘special type of recollection.’ He quotes Myerhoff (1982), who claims that the term ‘Re-membering’ may involve the calling of attention to the re-aggregation of  the figures who belong to one’s life story, one’s  own prior selves, as well as significant others who are part of one’s story. In this sense, “Re-membering is a purposive, significant unification, quite different from the passive, continuous fragmentary flickerings of images and feelings that accompany other activities in the normal flow of consciousness “(Myerhoff cited in White). This notion of re-membering and the club metaphor, suggest possibilities for people to engage in a revision of the membership of their club of life. This process, White suggests, “provides persons with the opportunity to have a greater say about the status of particular memberships of their club of life. Through re-membering practices, persons can suspend or elevate, revoke or privilege, and downgrade or upgrade specific memberships of their lives.”

On children, trauma and subordinate storyline development   

In his paper on children, trauma and subordinate storyline development White emphasizes the importance of subordinate storyline development when working with children, who have been subject to trauma and neglect, because it provides an alternative territory of identity for children to stand in as they begin to give voice to their experiences. He writes that it gives children a significant degree of immunity from the potential for re-traumatisation in response to therapeutic initiatives to assist them to speak of their experiences of trauma and its consequences.

He clarifies that in his own work with people who have been subjected to trauma and to a range of abuses, including political torture, and for people struggling with the consequences of a range of social calamities, including disease epidemics, he has not sought to attenuate their expressions of trauma and its consequences, nor has he been timid “in opening space for people to speak of what they have not had the opportunity to speak of, to put words to what has been unmentionable.” However, he emphasizes safety and notes that he has taken care to do what is within his understandings and skills to establish contexts in which “people can give full voice to their experiences of trauma in ways that enable them to wrest their lives from the prospective longer term consequences of this trauma” without being re-traumatised in the context of assisting them to address what they have been through.

White explains that the generation of subordinate storyline development is found in children’s responses to the trauma they have been subject to, because no child is a passive recipient of trauma, regardless of the nature of this trauma.  Children, he writes, take action to minimise their exposure to trauma and to decrease their vulnerability to it by finding ways to modify the effects of this trauma on their lives; however, often their responses to the traumas are unacknowledged and unnoticed, or they are punished and diminished within the trauma context.

White writes: “These responses to trauma and its consequences are founded upon what children give value to, upon what they hold precious in their lives.”  And these responses reflect knowledge and skills in:

“a. the preservation of life in life-threatening contexts,  b. finding support in hostile environments,  c. establishing domains of safety in unsafe places,  d. holding onto possibilities for life in circumstances that are  discouraging of this,  e. developing nurturing responses to others in situations that are degrading of such responses,  f. finding connection and a sense of affiliation with others in settings  that are isolating,  g. refusing to visit trauma g. refusing to visit trauma on the lives of others in milieus that are  encouraging of this reproduction of trauma,  h. healing from the consequences of trauma under conditions that are unfavourable to this, i. achieving degrees of self-acceptance in atmospheres that are sponsoring of self-rejection,  j. and more.”

White discusses how direct observation of the spontaneous interaction of children who have been subject to trauma often provides clues about points of entry for subordinate storyline development.  He provides various examples of his work with young people that had been through a lot and demonstrates how he assisted them in developing a subordinate storyline, which afforded alternative and relatively secure territories of identity for them to occupy.

In one instance, he initiated his work with three boys [who had migrated from  their countries of origin as refugees and had been referred to him on  account of concerns about their being withdrawn, and about the extent to which they had continued to maintain silence in regard  to the very significant trauma that they had been subject to over an  extended period ahead of their migration] by consulting them about whether they’d like to talk about what they held precious, and what they intended for their lives, along with what capacities, knowledges and skills had helped them get through the trauma they’d experienced.

In another instance, while working with three siblings who had suffered abuse and neglect he witnessed the older brother engaging in the care-taking of his younger sisters in several ways, This observation, he writes, provided a foundation for a therapeutic inquiry in  which, amongst other things, he encouraged all three children to:

“name these care-taking skills; describe the know-how that was expressed in these skills;  define the contribution of these skills to the younger children’s life; speculate about what the possession of these skills might make possible for the older brother  in the future of his own life; reflect on what these skills might say about what is most important  to him; trace the history of the development of these skills in his life,  and finally, identify figures of his history who might have valued and  appreciated these skills, and who might be implicated in his  development of these skills.”

It turned out that his teacher from his third grade was a figure who was implicated in the development of his care-taking skills, and she was invited to some of their meetings, as an outsider witness. His teacher played a significant part in the rich development of a subordinate storyline of the young boy’s life, in the acknowledgement of the trauma that he and his sisters had been subject to, and in the restoration and further development of his sense of personal agency.  Later White began to enquire about whether these skills had had a part to play in providing a foundation for these children to get through the hard times they’d experienced. He writes: At this point, all three children became quite animated in giving accounts of how they had used these skills to survive the abuse and neglect that had been visited upon them.”

Surface spiritualities and transparency

I will continue with a brief references to another topic discussed in the last chapter –interview. When asked about spirituality, White replied that in the histories of the world’s cultures there have been many different notions of spirituality, but spirituality, in this western culture, has mostly been cast as  immanent and ascendant or both. Ascendant forms of spirituality are achieved on planes that are imagined at an altitude above everyday life. Immanent forms of spirituality are achieved not by locating oneself at some altitude above one’s life, but by ‘being truly and wholly who one really is’, ‘by being in touch with one’s true nature’ by being faithful to the god of self.  He comments that “Much of popular psychology is premised on a version of this notion of an immanent spirituality – to worship a self through being at one with one’s ‘nature.’ Both immanent and ascendant forms of spirituality are achieved by being in touch with or having an experience of a soul or the divine that is deep within oneself and that is manifest through one’s relationship with a god who is ascendant.

White comments that these and other contemporary notions of spirituality are of a non material nature and intangible, and are split apart from the material world, and manifest themselves on planes that are imagined above or below the surface of  life as it is lived.  He adds that even though he finds some of these notions beautiful and is interested in exploring the proposals for life or the ethics that are associated with these notions of spirituality, in his work he is more interested in what might be called the material versions of  spirituality, what he calls the spiritualities of the surface.

He claims that this notion of spirituality, which has to do with material existence and the tangible, makes it possible for us to see and to appreciate the visible in people’s lives. This notion of spirituality, he explains, can be read in the shape of people’s identity projects, in the steps that people take in the knowing formation of the self. It is a spirituality that has to do with relating to one’s material options in a way that one becomes more conscious of one’s own knowing, and it concerns one’s personal ethics. He believes it is a transformative spirituality in that it assists us to explore options for living one’s life in ways that are other in regard to the received modes of being. It has to do with the questioning of the taken-for-granted, and it is about prioritising the struggle with the moral and ethical questions relating to all of this.

When asked how people decide which of the available options or possibilities to privilege because to become one who one has not yet been could go in an infinite number of directions, White among other things says this is to be an exploration with people about the real effects of specific ways of being in their relationships with others and on the shape of their lives generally. It raises options for people to explore the possibilities for disengaging from modern “practices of self evaluation that have them locating their lives on the continuums of growth and development, of health and normality, of dependence and independence, and so on. These options can also constitute a refusal to engage in those modern acts of self-government that have us living out our lives under the canopy of the bell-shaped curve. “

I would’ve liked to make some reference to other topics discussed in the book like power dynamics and biases in therapeutic [and other] contexts, ethics and transparency, but this article is already quite lengthy. Therefore, I will end here with a short relevant extract from the book:

“The therapist can call into question the idea that s/he possesses an objective and unbiased account of reality, and undermine the possibility that persons will be subject to the imposition of ideas, by encouraging persons to interview her/him about the interview. In response to this, the therapist is able to deconstruct and thus embody her/his responses (including questions, comments, thoughts, and opinions) by situating these in the context of his/her personal experiences, imagination, and intentional states. This can be described as a condition of “transparency” in the therapeutic system, and it contributes to a context in which persons are more able to decide, for themselves, how they might take these therapist responses.“

Τόποι – Places

“Oh the places you’ll go.”  Dr. Seuss

 “We are surrounded by places. We walk over and through them. We live in places, relate to others in them, die in them. Nothing we do is unplaced. How could it be otherwise? How could we fail to recognize this primal fact?” From The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History by Edward S. Casey

“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.” Anthony Bourdain

“So much of who we are, is where we have been.” William Langewiesche

Human figures and portraits play a central role in most of the artwork I make, so, for a change, and while preparing to do some painting again I’ve been making images of places I’ve lived or been to. The images are inspired by photos, my own and others’, and rough sketches of places from past trips, which I found among the pages of old travel diaries and guides.