Death/Trauma/Change Tag

30 Nov

Posted at 14:54h in Culture Reviews by

‘Tell Me Who I Am’ is a fascinating documentary film made about an extraordinary set of circumstances. Alex and Marcus are twins, now in their 50’s. We see them beautifully illuminated in the studio as they tell their stories. “I don’t know who I am”, begins Alex. Like psychologists observing through a two-way mirror, we are invited into their worlds, their twin perspectives. Despite being identical twins, their experiences are not mirrored. We learn more about their responses through their body language – as they each return to glasses of water, sit forward or back on their chairs, and spread fingers across their faces when overcome with dismay. “The major thing about being a twin; you’re never alone,” says Marcus. The narrative is driven by compelling interviews, but flushed out with haunting images and atmospheric details through reconstruction.“ Alex lost his memory by accident, and I lost my memory voluntarily,” says Marcus. We observe as they open Pandora’s box and out pour secrets, truths, guilt, grief and shame. The whole tale spins on an axis of “blinding trust.” We become voyeurs in the deconstruction of an internalised history. As memory, relationships, family dynamics and identity disintegrate, what remains?  It asks whether our memory and history forms the bones of who we are? The connection between the brothers is under scrutiny. Through them this is a compelling examination of responses to trauma, and the expression of emotion.
www.imdb.com/title/tt10915286/

23 Nov

Posted at 17:02h in Book Reviews by

Kathryn Mannix – palliative care consultant – meets those who are referred to her ‘where they are’. With the aid of “tea-with-sympathy” she listens, she sits with them, and she puts her immense experience and wisdom at their disposal. As a reader, she guides us to “accompany dying strangers across the pages”. She lets us into the relationship between those approaching end of life and their care-givers. The stories within this book often made me shed a tear, as they poignantly describe “what a privilege, to be able to observe families as they are forged in a furnace of love and belonging, so often with its fiercest heat at the ebbing of a life.” Mannix describes working within the medical profession, yet with the shift moving from being “focused not on saving life at any cost, but on enabling goodbye.” This book is also a practical read. “Reclaiming the language of illness and dying enables us to have simple, unambiguous conversations about death.” Just as Mannix with her patients hears and has needed conversations to demystify the process of dying, and helps them to identify what is important, she encourages us to do the same. “We should all have those conversations with our dear ones, and sooner rather than later.”

06 Nov

Posted at 16:34h in Sarah's Journal by

Confronted with this brutal image, my inner detective constructs a crime scene. “Who decapitated this pigeon?” she asks, evaluating potential suspects and motives. I enjoy crime documentaries, police procedural and courtroom drama because I fear and am fascinated by death and criminal psychology in equal measure. I want to look at the darkness, to understand it. I spend my days practicing for ‘the good life’. But after 10pm I sink into the strong arms of the sofa to relish delving into the disturbing, traumatic and psychotic through long-form drama and documentaries – ‘Unbelievable’, ‘Mind Hunter’, ‘the Jinx’, ‘Chernobyl’.

05 Oct

Posted at 20:00h in Sarah's Journal by

Every day I meet rough sleepers. I try to give them the dignity of personhood – to say hello, to acknowledge them with a nod, to meet their eye. The most regular locals know me, and we exchange greetings and discuss the weather. Sometimes I will buy someone something to eat, more often I don’t. I often feel overwhelmed in response to the desperation in the voices of those who ask for help. This summer a kind and friendly man stationed himself near our front door step. Over the months his requests for our help dwindled. At first he wore white vests, ate only ‘plant-based foods’, bore his misfortunes with optimism. As the weeks passed I watched his skin become weathered, his hair dread, his appearance darken – both clothes and mood. We witnessed how a series of seemingly small events created a chain of increasingly difficult circumstances. He left our doorstep. Occasionally I glimpse his grizzled form shuffling in ill-fitting shoes, head bowed.

01 Oct

Posted at 21:35h in Culture Reviews by

Speaking with passion, Daiara Tukano – indigenous artist and activist – shares something of her ‘cosmovision’. This perspective beyond the material, comes from the Tukano people’s oral tradition. She holds us to account, to honour our own words. One word, ‘Decolonize’ blazes on an 8m banner. “If we hide what happened in the past, we’ll be blind to what’s happening in the present.” I feel betrayed by my white-washed written down school history. Now in this ‘radical anthropology’ lecture, we have a place to hear the legacy of genocides and the violence of evangelism in Brazil. Indigenous people don’t have magical solutions, she warns, but she is returning the history we have obfuscated or lost through the telling of it now in her words, loud and clear. www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/person/person/264

15 Sep

Posted at 21:29h in Book Reviews by

This is a brilliant book about life. I gallop through the seventeen brief encounters with the fragility of the human body in Maggie O’Farrell’s ‘I Am, I Am, I Am’. It’s beautiful words capture pivotal moments in her family life. Something happens, or doesn’t happen, but each recounting of an intimate incident leaves me catching my breath, counting my own lives and lucky stars.

10 Sep

Posted at 17:35h in Sarah's Journal by

‘Oh willow, titwillow, titwillow!’ I hum the Mikado instinctively. Here you lie amongst pavement detritus, an inauspicious grave. You lie in a feather deathbed of your own delicate prussian blue and lemon yellow feathers. Did a predatory cat hasten your end? I sit writing with a feline occasional assassin on my lap. This is one of Britain’s unpalatable and unverifiable conundrums. How do a nation of cat and dog lovers deal with this possibility. The RSPB quotes “the Mammal Society estimate that cats in the UK catch up to 275 prey items of which 27 million are birds”. Or was he homeless – a victim of loss of habitat? Poor titwillow.

09 Sep

Posted at 21:54h in Sarah's Journal by

I sit with my baggage of whiteness. Grief, shame, overwhelm and helplessness are here with me also. Disconnection is spoken of as a disease. One after another indigenous speaker takes to the floor. The details of each story is different, but there is a disturbing uniformity of the troubles and threats these people face in the front line of commercially driven destruction which is devastating rainforest, environments and communities. I hear of the loss of habitat, species, food resources, land and wellbeing, and feel the enormity of the task of rewiring ourselves to get humans everywhere back into right relationship with the earth. “Wake up, let’s live, let’s not deceive ourselves,” says Okosho of the Ashaninka (Brazil). www.survivalinternational.org

03 Sep

Posted at 22:40h in Culture Reviews by

From the outset the fortitude of the ensemble cast move us when a member of the Sydney Theatre Company tells of Ningali Lawford-Wolf’s death last week mid tour. Our narrator has come sudden to take her place, sometimes reading the text, to keep the narrative going despite tragedy. Is this a metaphor for the continuing struggle for Aboriginal land rights perhaps? This is the story of one small place where white settlers take land from the first nation people of Australia. One tale told well demonstrates the bloody outcome of colonisation. We see how fear breeds separation, which leads to violence. As one indigenous performer fills the huge Olivier stage, the power of two centuries of injustice is brought home.
https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/the-secret-river

20 Aug

Posted at 16:45h in Sarah's Journal by

I found a mouse left dead on the pavement. I instinctively swept it deftly into a doggy poo bag. If it has been poisoned it could cause serious harm to other animals if eaten, so I take it home. On close inspection it has been squashed – a blunt force trauma to the torso, but no obvious signs of blood. It’s tiny paws and teeth – so annoying when busy scratching under our stairs – now fill me with awe. I am sad to see its limp lifeless body, admire the way its whiskers glisten in the sunlight.