Period 31: Retraumatization versus remembering
I have just finished reading (listening to on audio via LibroFM, actually) Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (these are regular links not affiliate links). I think I’m going to buy a hard copy as well because it’s a text I know I’m going to return to again and again. It’s interesting reading this book right after finishing Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence (also on audio! I’ve been going on a lot of walks because my audiobook cup overflows!). Both offer insight into the pandemic, race and racism, capitalism, settler colonialism and empire. Both made me cry, many times.
The immersive experience of reading these works voiced by the authors forced me on when my emotion might have made me put one down with a plan to “finish it later.” Somehow I was able to sit (or again, walk – or fold laundry or load the dishwasher or clean the cat litter) differently with what I was hearing. Instead of being overwhelmed by sadness, or joy, or grief, I felt it and kept going, because the author was still talking and I wanted to hear what she had to say.
Erdrich’s fiction is luminous, conscientious, it feels like every word has been considered and placed perfectly – and as you see it all come together you realize you are reading the work of a genius artist. I felt so much hope for humans, such a sense that we might actually be all right, so much compassion and love for hard-shelled, soft-hearted Tookie and her friends and family. And that’s not because everything that happened was wonderful. It was because, at least in my reading, that Erdrich has the capacity to hold in her heart complex truths, and to put those into her writing.
Klein’s non-fiction has some of that quality too, in that it feels as though she has thought, and thought, and thought some more, and refused to let herself off the hook with simple stories. The whole book is about the problems of the binary – Klein versus Wolf certainly, but also a broader story about doppelgangers and what she calls the “mirror world,” the “diagonalists” who go from holding one set of beliefs to abruptly holding what seems to be an opposite one, the work of Steve Bannon and his ilk, how people came to be anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, stories of trucker convoys. She reveals what is under the stories we tell ourselves about nationalism, the residential schools, the open-air prisons, the mass graves. And through all of this telling she resists name-calling, creating two teams with sides. Or if she does do it, it’s by revealing the systems of power, especially capitalism, that provoke and encourage our thinking and talking this way.
Something towards the end of the book that Klein discusses, that got me thinking about Erdrich’s book again too, was about retraumatization versus remembering. I cannot speak from the lived experiences of either author – Klein is Jewish and Erdrich is Native American – so to be honest I worry I won’t accurately represent what I understood from Klein’s argument, nor will I correctly apply it to my read of Erdrich. I think you should just read these books and be as blown away as I am.
What I will say, though – what has made me think about my own writing and my work within feminist science – is that we owe it to ourselves, from whatever position we are writing from, whatever complex truths we wish to tell, to take care in how we think about our own experiences as victimized and victimizer. That for instance, were I only ever to write from my position as a woman who has experienced incredible medical betrayal at a very young age, were I only ever to contextualize my work through what it has meant to me to have been intensely harmed in a way that has had permanent repercussions on my mental health, I would never write about what it has also meant to be a white cis woman who has also been listened to. I want to be a writer who offers a remembrance of harm, who works to repair it and make it so it never happens again. But I do not want to retraumatize someone in such a way that they hold and echo and grow that grief until they forget the capacity all people also have to hurt others. Until they too hurt others.
It doesn’t hurt that I’ve recently started reading another related book, The Other Side of Empathy, by Jade E. Davis. I’m barely past the introduction, but what I understand of the argument so far is that empathy runs the risk of being used as a tool by the privileged to try and “understand” those with less privilege – and to have the work end there. The work of anti-racism, anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism becomes something akin to feel-good self-help, rather than a first step towards finding common ground and coalition to work for change. It is making me think too of this recent article by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on Ibram X. Kendi’s center at Boston University and the broader ideals it espouses.
As I talk to people who have experienced abortions, miscarriages, and stillbirths, I feel like I am holding something very precious in my hands, something I am terrified I will drop, or use unwisely. How do I share these intimate moments in the spirit of remembrance, not retraumatization? How do I point to systems of injustice in a way that calls us to shared action? That points to hard things, scary things, terrible things, but holds out love for the reader?
I will never be as good as Naomi Klein or Louise Erdrich or Jade E. Davis or Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. But I can keep trying.
And we can all keep calling our representatives for a ceasefire.
Links
A paper, out this week in Science Advances, looks at the effects of gender on retention rates in academia. Not only do women leave academia at higher rates than men, when you look at the reasons women and men leave they are very different. Women feel they are pushed out, where men feel they are pulled towards more exciting opportunities. In particular hostile workplace climate and work-life balance issues continue to affect the lives of women academics more strongly than men.
This article covers the STAT Summit on racial inequity in health – experts quoted make compelling cases for paid family leave, for increasing recruitment and retention of Black doctors, and more.
Laguna Beach billionaire funds anti-trans organization. This is one of probably a billion stories I could share on the many problems with billionaires – and feels a lot like one of the “diagonalist” swerves outlined by Klein in Doppelganger. To show you what I mean, two paragraphs from the piece:
Edelman is not a high-profile political donor closely associated with conservative causes. The only major electoral donations attached to his name are a handful of contributions of $50,000 or less to Democrats and Hillary Clinton in 2016 and 2017.
The Edelman Family Foundation, by contrast, which he founded in 2017, has showered six-figure grants on conservative organizations such as the Cato Institute; Foundation for Individual Rights and Free Expression; the anti-critical race theory Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism; Prager University, which markets right-wing videos as teaching material; and UATX, Bari Weiss’ unaccredited anti-cancel culture university.
These are folks who do not see their politics as inconsistent, and there is a growing number of them. And a lot of them have a lot of money.
Weekly period fact
You do not have to sync when you call your representatives to your menstrual cycle. You can call them every single day to ask that they support a ceasefire.