Trauma & Art

A. From Maya Angelou’s book, Letter to My Daughter, 2009

‘We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do’

‘I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and the dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe’

B. I had something, by Lucy Kaplansky

I had something, it fell from me
Something strong
Like a pounding drum, like ringing bells
When I was young
I had something and it was gone

I had something made me walk all night
Made me run from home, made me fight
I had something
Made me feel alone
Like an orphan waiting for a home

Every footstep that I take
Completes the circle my life makes
Every living thing has ties that bind                                                                                                                What I lost returns with love and time……

C. I have not read Ruta Sepetys’, book Salt to the Sea, but I came across this sentence from the book ‘Mother was comfort. Mother was home. A girl who lost her mother was suddenly a tiny boat on an angry ocean’

‘Only you know where the casket of pain is interred.
You will have to scrape through all the layers of covering
And according to your readiness, everything will open’**

Scraping through the layers of trauma at times feels like passing through a needle’s eye; squeezing oneself either till breaking point or to the point of realization that the space is all yours; that the oxygen is sufficient; that your eyes need not be owned – neither by others nor your wounds and scars. During these moments of existential constriction, documentation, through words or images, of events and of snippets of a life, infringed upon by injustices and cruelties, becomes a basic necessity, as basic and essential as breathing.

Tonya Alexandri, April 3^rd, 2016

‘Through the white curtain of yesterdays to a place
You had forgotten you knew from the inside out;
And a time when that bitter tree was planted’**

**From To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings by John O’Donohue

If I should have a daughter by Sarah Kay

https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kay_if_i_should_have_a_daughter/transcript

If I should have a daughter, instead of “Mom,” she’s going to call me “Point B,” because that way she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me.

And I’m going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, “Oh, I know that like the back of my hand.”

And she’s going to learn that this life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air. There is hurt, here, that cannot be fixed by Band-Aids or poetry.

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