Tag Archives: Books

“Minds Enough to Lose and Histories that Can Only Hasten the Process”

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As I mentioned in my previous post, last year, I was in a craft course on memoir, which focused on narratives of trauma.  We had just read Teresa Cha’s Dictee.  After the third read, I understood it to be  a fragmented story exploring  rupture and  loss resulting from Cha’s separation from her mother, mother tongue, and her mother land, Korea. Dictee explores what it meant for an individual and a people to be torn apart by colonization, war and migration.

It was around the same time, I had been reading about post traumatic stress disorder in chimpanzees and elephants and was interested in similar questions in the animal context.   What does it mean for an animal as an individual or a species to be subject to similar ruptures?  In The Wauchula Woods Accord, Toward a New Understanding of Animals, Charles Siebert, explores this further when he examines psyche of captive chimpanzees.

Siebert visits Patti Ragan’s Center for Great Apes in Florida, which he calls “a place to house bad dreams.”  These rescued chimpanzees had previously been stripped of their mothers and denied their own chimpanzee culture. They like others born and bred for entertainment or biomedical research may have been “chimps with a name but no recollection of a tree.”  Though these animals are well protected and cared for now, traumatic memories can still intrude their present. He notes that chimpanzees “have, like us, minds enough to lose and histories that can only hasten the process.”

Siebert who has written several thoughtful and beautiful long narrative pieces about animals in the New York Times Magazine, incorporates some of that research in The Wauchula Woods Accord.   The book is framed around one evening he spends with Roger, a chimpanzee in the sanctuary,   but he provides background into a vast body of knowledge of our complicated history with primates.  The story of Lucy is one such example and you can listen to Siebert talk about her on Radio Lab.

What is also particularly fascinating in the book is  Siebert’s description of the history of trials against animals as described in The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals: The Lost History of Europe’s Animal Trials, where all animals were granted a lawyer—and “accorded the same legal rights as human beings, right down to being provided with the best available defense attorneys, and all at the taxpayer’s expense”   He goes on to suggest that if captive animals today who have been put down as a result of a violent outbreak, were accorded “the same legal privileges as their medieval counterparts, the most amateur lawyer would be able to get them all off on insanity pleas.” Continue reading →

Trauma Song

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This past summer, I was fortunate to participate in a historical writing workshop with the impressive Charles Strozier at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, MA. There,  I heard a little bit about his latest book on 9/11 survivors, his interviewing protocol and writing process. Earlier this month, he read from the recently published Until the Fires Stopped Burning at a bookstore in Brooklyn.

I was particularly interested in the chapter where he discussed traumasong:

“a deeply psychological state that evoked poetic forms of language, a kind of ‘melodious tear’ as Milton says in ‘Lycidas.'”

During my MFA program at Hunter College, I took a craft course with Meena Alexander,and we read a number of narratives of migration, dislocation and trauma. I became  interested in the impact of trauma on stories and story telling.

There is a loss and forgetting associated with the trauma. Fragmentation occurs. Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery writes:

“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.”

Pattrice Jones, author of Aftershock, Confronting Trauma in a Violent World, further notes that Broca’s area, the region of the brain devoted to language production and comprehension, is partially and even sometimes totally disabled during traumatic experience. Jones writes,

“Traumatic memories tend to stand alone, disconnected from their contexts and from other memories. Traumatic memories also tend to be experienced differently than other memories. They are more strongly sensory and much more difficult to express accurately in words.”

Jones cites Susan Brison who writes “ Saying something about a memory does something to it.” Jones adds:

“when we find words for traumatic memories that are stored as somatic sensations, we move the memories from one place to another in our brains. The traumatic sensory fragments may still persist, but they will be increasingly linked to the more coherent story of the event that emerges as the tale is told over and over again. In this way, fragmented memories literally become linked to their surrounding life stories.”

During the process of listening to his recorded interviews, Charles Strozier noticed something with some of the survivors—a certain cadence in their stories, a certain poetry.  He further  analyzes that language and notes:

“There is no question that trauma can destroy language, as well as the cohesive self, but death encounters seem equally capable of bringing out a language of witness that is highly rhythmic and sometimes metrical, often stanzaic and quite beautiful.”

Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

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I just received my contributor copy of Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice, edited   by Lisa Kemmerer.  Very honored to be included with all these women. Contributors are Carol J. Adams, Tara Sophia Bahna-James, Karen Davis, Elizabeth Jane Farians, Hope Ferdowsian, Linda Fisher, Twyla François, Christine Garcia, A. Breeze Harper, Sangamithra Iyer, Pattrice Jones, Lisa Kemmerer, Allison Lance, Ingrid Newkirk, Lauren Ornelas, and Miyun Park.

My essay “Small Small Redemption” is about my time in Cameroon volunteering for a chimpanzee sanctuary and coming into awareness of how logging, hunting and big oil are disrupting the forests and the many beings within them.  It is a personal story that explores the linkages of environmental destruction and economic disparities.  It is also a story of mothers and babies and the trauma of breaking that bond.

More about the Book:

“Sister Species: Women, Animals, and Social Justice addresses interconnections between speciesism, sexism, racism, and homophobia, clarifying why social justice activists in the twenty-first century must challenge intersecting forms of oppression.

This anthology presents bold and gripping–sometimes horrifying–personal narratives from fourteen activists who have personally explored links of oppression between humans and animals, including such exploitative enterprises as cockfighting, factory farming, vivisection, and the bushmeat trade. Sister Species asks readers to rethink how they view “others,” how they affect animals with their daily choices, and how they might bring change for all who are abused. These essays remind readers that women have always been important to social justice and animal advocacy, and they urge each of us to recognize the links that continue to bind all oppressed individuals. The astonishing honesty of these contributors demonstrates with painful clarity why every woman should be an animal activist and why every animal activist should be a feminist.”