Trauma & Art

‘You cannot be in a position of power and destroy the life of another person’ Pope Francis

This brief post today is written in response to my viewing several videos on the internet of children been separated from their parents at the US-Mexico borders, which after the intense initial emotional response and tears left a haunting lingering in my mind and heart. It breaks one’s heart to realise that after thousands of years of war fare and divide and conquer tactics, and all the human suffering and depletion of the planet this has brought about, and despite our technological advances and knowledge and our literally touching the stars, we humans are still creating contexts of strife, massacre and pain in so many places on the planet. There are probably more people than ever today fleeing their homes for lack of food, work and safety. A constant river of people around the world moving in uncertainty in search of work and better living conditions for their families. During wartime families have been torn apart not only through death, but as a result of strategies implemented at times to save the children and at other times as a means of aggression and enculturation or deculturation. In his book The Children of the Civil War : From Franco’s Social Welfare to Queen Frederica’s Fundraiser  (1936-1950)  Loukianos  Chasiotis, who adopts a comparative approach, writes ‘in both cases, the weaker military branch was carrying children abroad, while the strongest military group was gathering them in centers within the territory’/ (Ο Λουκιανός Χασιώτης στο βιβλίο του Τα Παιδιά Του Εμφυλίου: Από Την Κοινωνική Πρόνοια Του Φράνκο Στον Έρανο Της Φρειδερίκης (1936-1950) γράφει ‘σε αμφότερες τις περιπτώσεις η πιο αδύναμη στρατιωτική παράταξη μετέφερε παιδιά στο εξωτερικό, ενώ η πιο ισχυρή τα συγκέντρωνε σε κέντρα εντός της επικράτειας’. During WWII children were separated from their parents and siblings were torn apart in concentration camps. Indigenous people around the world have also often suffered policies of enculturation or rather deculturation, a process of divesting people of their indigenous traits. For many native peoples this meant being brought involuntarily and reluctantly into contact with western civilization or worse being robbed of their young ones with devastating long term effects and soul wounding.

In war – violence, rape, destruction, plundering and tactics of divide and conquer are glaring and obvious, but during peace all these things also occur, albeit in more subtle ways, and thus, are less visible.  In her book Between Two Worlds Zainab Salbi talks about how during peace families were cracked apart like pistachios. She writes ‘Clearer are the faces in my mind, the faces of my mom and dad and our friends whose families Amo cracked neatly apart like pistachios. All of us faced an asynchronous choice: home or future?’ I read somewhere that separating children from parents at the border mirrors a ‘textbook strategy’ of domestic abuse, but no matter how one describes or evaluates these tactics, in this particular context and elsewhere, it is certain that forced separation affects parents and children for the rest of their lives and is inherently immoral, unnatural and unacceptable. Fragmentation is a tactic employed by those in power since ancient times, fragmentation of the individual, of the nuclear family, of sociocultural groups, peoples, nations and so on. Chantal Pierrat from Emerging Women writes ‘In fact, the patriarchy has traditionally drawn much of its power from separating people and creating strong divisive lines in areas of gender, race, economics and political ideas. This kind of bullying, top-down negative reinforcement, and abuse of power has been the norm in cultures where the masculine is out of balance with the feminine’. Seen from a psychological perspective these policies come from a place of disconnect with one’s own humanity, wholeness and connectedness. It comes from a place of deep splitting and of non remembering one’s own primal attachment bond to one’s own mother, parents, caregivers, but also to Earth, our common mother. It comes out of lack of empathy and compassion and the understanding that like we love and cherish our own children likewise people in less fortunate circumstances or of different colour and religion also love their own and have the right to parenthood, dignity, unity and safety. Through historical amnesia, dissociation, callousness, fear, ignorance and disconnection we not only continue to engage in hurting others, but in plundering our own mother, our own home, our planet without considering consequences for others and those to come.