{"id":54,"date":"2011-09-30T17:46:14","date_gmt":"2011-09-30T22:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sangamithra.wordpress.com\/?p=54"},"modified":"2011-09-30T17:46:14","modified_gmt":"2011-09-30T22:46:14","slug":"narratives-of-trauma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/?p=54","title":{"rendered":"“Minds Enough to Lose and Histories that Can Only Hasten the Process”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"As I mentioned in my previous post<\/a>, last year, I was in a craft course on memoir, which focused on narratives of trauma.\u00a0 We had just read Teresa Cha\u2019s Dictee<\/em><\/a>. \u00a0After the third read, I understood it to be\u00a0\u00a0a fragmented story exploring\u00a0 rupture and\u00a0 loss resulting from Cha\u2019s separation from her mother, mother tongue, and her mother land, Korea. Dictee<\/em> explores what it meant for an individual and a people to be torn apart by colonization, war and migration.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0 What does it mean for an animal as an individual or a species to be subject to similar ruptures?\u00a0 In The Wauchula Woods Accord<\/em>, Toward a New Understanding of Animals<\/em><\/a>, Charles Siebert, explores this further when he examines psyche of captive chimpanzees.<\/p>\n

\"\"Siebert visits Patti Ragan\u2019s Center for Great Apes in Florida<\/a>,\u00a0which he calls \u201ca place to house bad dreams.\u201d\u00a0 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 \u201cchimps with a name but no recollection of a tree.\u201d\u00a0 Though these animals are well protected and cared for now, traumatic memories can still intrude their present. He notes that chimpanzees \u201chave, like us, minds enough to lose and histories that can only hasten the process.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 The book is framed around one evening he spends with Roger, a chimpanzee in the sanctuary, \u00a0 but he provides background into a vast body of knowledge of our complicated history with primates.\u00a0 The story of Lucy is one such example and you can listen to Siebert talk about her on Radio Lab<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What is also particularly fascinating in the book is \u00a0Siebert’s description of the history of trials against animals as described in The Criminal Prosecuti<\/em>on and Capital Punishment of Animals: The Lost History of Europe’s Animal Trials, <\/em>where all animals were granted a lawyer\u2014and “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” \u00a0 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.”<\/p>\n

\"\"One of my favorite things about \u00a0reading is how one book leads me to the next.\u00a0\u00a0 Through Siebert, I learned about Gay Bradshaw and Eve Abe, two women working with elephants.\u00a0\u00a0 In Gay Bradshaw\u2019s Elephants on The Edge, What Animals Teach us about Humanity<\/a>, s<\/em>he explains that elephants have long-term social memory and up until recently have peacefully lived in co-existence with humans. Human activities, wars, competition over land, have led to a recent phenomenon of human elephant conflict. Elephants, who are known to visit the graves of their dead, also bury and visit the graves of their human victims.\u00a0\u201cThe rupture of elephants lands, lives and history is mirrored in the legacy of rupture in their brains, bodies and behavior,\u201d Bradshaw writes. She is studying the collapse of elephant societies that is resulting from the poaching of adults and leaving a population of orphans.<\/p>\n

\u201cA matriarch\u2019s death means not only the loss of a loved one but also a loss of cultural and environmental knowledge,\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In The Wauchula Woods Accord, Siebert also introduced me to Ugandan ethologist\u00a0Eve Abe <\/a>who studies the Acholi people and the elephants whose lives have been disrupted by the Lords Resistance Army. \u00a0She creates an interesting \u00a0parallel between the collapse of both societies.<\/p>\n

“Everyone within my tribe lives now within these refugee camps, and there are no more elders. \u00a0They were systematically eliminated…All these kids who have grown up with their parents killed\u2014no fathers, no mothers, only other children looking after them, and nothing\u00a0for them to do. \u00a0No schools. No adult supervision. \u00a0They form these roaming violent destructive bands. \u00a0And it’s the same thing that happens with the elephants. \u00a0They are wild and destructive and completely lost.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Siebert, Bradshaw, and Abe’s \u00a0work provides some insight into how human actions have impacted the animal mind, on a singular and global level.\u00a0 They also presents the question about the human psyches as individuals and a species living in a world with violence on so many levels.\u00a0\u00a0 We are ruptured, fragmented and traumatized, and must understand this particular narrative, to be able to write a restorative one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I mentioned in my previous post, last year, I was in a craft course on memoir, which focused on narratives of trauma.\u00a0 We had just read Teresa Cha\u2019s Dictee. \u00a0After the third read, I understood it to be\u00a0\u00a0a fragmented story exploring\u00a0 rupture and\u00a0 loss resulting from Cha\u2019s separation from her mother, mother tongue, and … <\/p>\n

Continue reading ““Minds Enough to Lose and Histories that Can Only Hasten the Process””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10,14,16],"tags":[29,104,75,88],"class_list":["post-54","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","category-elephants","category-primates","category-writing","tag-books","tag-elephants","tag-primates-2","tag-trauma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}