Death/Trauma/Change Tag

12 Feb

Posted at 20:52h in Book Reviews by

‘A Little Life’ is an epic tale by Hanya Yanagihara. It documents the lives of a small circle of close male friends, over four decades. I began it with trepidation, wondering if I would be bored with the lives of four American students, who at first seem unremarkable. The story slowly wriggles beneath the surface of the characters to discover their emotional struggles. As their lives interweave, what unfolds is a detailed depiction of the repercussions of both physical and emotional abuse. The novel explores shame graphically. With relentless detail it describes pain and suffering. Sometimes it goes beyond the bearable as a reader, but that’s the heart of what Yanagihara is trying to show. She takes us into the landscape of survival and of disability. It is a remarkable telling, ambitious in scope, sometimes too dramatic. I wanted the protagonists to make different choices. It’s an excruciating read, but it stayed with me, and I wanted to know how it would play out. Through reading to the end, I found an empathetic understanding of the link between abuse and shame that I had known but never really ‘got’ before. It also delivers a visceral examination of self-harm in the wake of trauma. It twins inner misery with outer lives that are against type, which makes an interesting paradox. I think Yanagihara also explores the criteria to measure success – outward achievements, overcoming physical wounds, or the capacity to endure – and how best to respond and relate to those who hurt. It is not for the faint-hearted.

03 Jan

Posted at 20:14h in Culture Reviews by

Chekhov’s plays are long. They usually involve a family who are suffering at the hands of political circumstances. Things generally don’t go well. This new play based on Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’ at the National Theatre has been re-imagined by talented poet Inua Ellams. The action has been transposed to the Biafran Civil War 1967-1970. It is a clever re-telling of a family trying to find happiness in the crucible of conflict. The colonising interests of the UK and France are implicated for their financial involvement. There are unpalatable historical consequences to acknowledge. It also has unpleasant resonances of current global issues around power, in territories rich in fossil fuels. All this plays out through a classic Chekhovian plot of drawing room family dynamics. Three sisters are displaced from their preferred home in Lagos. They grapple with relationships on the cusp between arranged marriages and modern influences. Each character has different motivations, and responds to trauma differently. At a familial level it’s about hope and its subsequent loss. At a global level it’s a valuable history lesson about the entanglements that burden populations as long term consequences of colonial powers playing ‘divide and rule’. The cast give us fine portrayals of different responses to life under siege, bearing the unbearable weight of hunger, violence and sorrow.
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/three-sisters

19 Dec

Posted at 21:30h in Sarah's Journal by

I bump into Wendz at the World’s End. I paint my mouth in her face as my mirror to match her vibrant red lips. They spread in a smile and dance as we catch up, swapping mental snap shots of costumes made, unlikely performances and the dazzle of the “Doris Day” side of our lives. This brief encounter in the slip stream of Camden fits with the mix of these streets’ fun, frivolous and dark. Endings slip into the conversation, and Wendz names “the big thud of death dropping into life when young”, (as she puts it). The thud came for me at twenty-three. The death of my father spun me around and sent me in a new direction in response to this glimpse of mortality. With hindsight I know how the fallout from that ‘thud’ set in train the changes that only make sense from the vantage point of who I have become. At the time I went into freefall as I re-assessed who I was and who I wanted to be. Wendz and I head off in separate directions. I see hippy pigeons eating veg curry from a paper plate on the pavement. The air is infused with conflicting beats, nag champa and cigarettes. I go to buy organic celery, vitamins and chocolate, my own Camden mix.

15 Dec

Posted at 22:44h in Sarah's Journal by

A few days ago a young man was stabbed and died just around the corner.  These are stark facts. Behind the facts is a human story. I don’t know the circumstances that led to this tragic ending. He is missed by the many who have laid tributes and battery powered night-lights in silent vigil forming an ark around the swathes of flowers. Behind his story is a culture. Violence is the outcome of a complex set of conditions. The factors may include poverty, class, mental health, addiction, gang loyalty, identity, fear and plain misfortune – just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The justice system incarcerates but does not rehabilitate. Governments know that criminalisation of drugs wins votes but fails addicts. In the absence of initiations by the whole tribe, young people initiate themselves through rituals unsanctioned by society. “These are the bearers of generation upon generation of unresolved grief, of unexpressed sorrow, and the rage that it becomes when it isn’t acknowledged,” describes Martin Prechtel of young people at the receiving end of ancestral grief. Unprocessed trauma and complex grief finds outlets in cycles of aggressive behaviour, self-sabotage and post-traumatic stress disorder, often coupled with shame. Wise cultures create alternative ways to deal with conflict and its aftermath.

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.