Who's the "We"? A Meditation on Ghosts

The cover story of today's New York Times Book Review is a piece by Robert Pinsky, former U.S. Poet Laureate, on Kathryn Harrison's new nonfiction book, While They Slept.  He examines the paradoxical way in which literature asserts the unspeakable-ness of traumatic experience while still speaking it:

The violations that destroy human lives, or maim them, seem to demand telling.  Possibly we seek such stories as ways to understand our smaller, more ordinary losses and griefs. . . .  Raped, her tongue torn out, Philomela becomes the nightingale, singing the perpetrator's guilt.

But who is the "we" in Pinsky's second sentence?  "Possibly we seek such stories as ways to understand our smaller, more ordinary losses and griefs."  This assumed in-group troubles me, for many of us have been raped.  Or experienced incest, or been witnesses to killings (examples he goes on to mention).  Or, pressed by our nations into service as warriors, we have been the perpetrators of legally sanctioned murder.  Or we've grown up in the homes of such people, afflicted by the leftover traumas they didn't know how to cure.  Many of us would love to have suffered only the "smaller, more ordinary losses and griefs" of Pinsky's second sentence.

Pinsky quotes the chorus, speaking to Oedipus:

What madness came upon you, what daemon
Leaped on your life with heavier
Punishment than a mortal man can bear?
No: I cannot even
Look at you, poor ruined one.
And I would speak, question, ponder,
If I were able. No.
You make me shudder.

"I cannot even / Look at you, poor ruined one."

How do survivors of trauma cope with this invisibility--with knowing that they make the un-traumatized "shudder"?  How do they survive, not only the initial trauma, not only its aftereffects (which can last decades), but also the knowledge that they offend the eye and ear of the healthy civilian, that their unspeakable pain has rendered them unsightly? 

Though he gives a positive review to Harrison's book (the true story of brutally abusive, fundamentalist parents whose actions, ignored by the surrounding society, led to their murder by their son), Pinsky's attitude reinscribes the horror with which "normal" people often greet those who've traumatized.  The surviving daughter,

[a]t the age of 6 or 7, in an act of imagination that foreshadowed her achievement of surviving . . . created families of ghosts she would speak with, in the trees near where she lived.  [Author] Harrison suggests that these ghosts--creatures who are dead, yet persist--were a way for the child to mourn for herself, or for the lost selves and family that might have existed.

Different ghosts arise in an interview with Edward Tick, who counsels returning veterans, in the current issue of The Sun, "Like Wandering Ghosts:  How the U.S. Fails Its Returning Soldiers."   His attitude toward the traumatized is a more compassionate one:

Kupfer: Though you treat ptsd, you’ve said that it is not a mental illness. Why do you believe this?

Tick: We pathologize everything in this culture. We think anything that ails us must be a medical condition that can be treated. Veterans are angry or sad because they have been through horrors, but we say it’s got to be a pathology. This is exacerbated by a profound alienation between our warrior class and our civilian class, which have almost nothing to do with one another. We don’t even think we have a warrior class, and we don’t teach our service people to think of themselves as warriors, even though societies throughout history have almost all had warrior classes and reciprocal relationships between warriors and civilians. Soldiers have a responsibility to defend their country, and it is our responsibility as citizens to heal those who have put their lives on the line for us, even if they fought a war for the wrong reasons or for lies. And we’re not doing that.

Using PTSD as an inadequate but the best currently available term, Tick sees it as "an identity disorder and soul wound that has its source in moral trauma. It is also a social disorder arising from the broken relationship between our society and its veterans." 

If for "veterans," you read also "battered women," "torture victims," "abused children," "rape victims," and so on, then you'll have a sense of how potentially transformative Tick's view could be for our world, in which so many people are now traumatized by war, natural disasters, and violence. 

They need to be listened to and healed, not ignored, not invisible-ized, not disappeared. 

Tick writes:

I am still protesting the Vietnam War, and all war. There are two things we have to do as a culture to end war: One is to take full responsibility for our wounded. It’s not enough just to “bring the boys home,” because they aren’t boys anymore, and getting them home physically does not do it. We need to help them heal and help shoulder their burden. The other thing we need to do is take responsibility for the damage we have done to other countries and their people. I bring veterans to Vietnam to heal not only them but also the Vietnamese. Americans do not realize the monstrous damage we do with technological warfare. I want to bring that reality back home and educate Americans about civilian suffering in war.

Read the whole interview with Tick here.