What is the role of writers in the face of cruelty and trauma?
The gravity and horror
of collective, vicarious, ancestral, and personal traumas
often feel impossible to make any sense of,
to heal or integrate in any sort of meaningful way
—especially when these traumas are ongoing.
These historical and continuing violences
have a way of accumulating in body and spirit,
feeding on the fire of vitality
and relentlessly clinging to the fabric of our being
like the stickiest of sludge.
How is it then that writers
might be the translators of the impossible,
as Toni Morrison suggests?
I don’t necessarily know that it is the writing itself
that is so transformative, but really
the commitment of a writer (not all writers)
to attempting to engage with the raw truth and felt experience
of another’s lived reality—as well as their own
—in a way that impresses upon the body and spirit
in a language that only the body and spirit can truly understand.
A between-the-lines knowing, validation, and attunement
that can help one metabolize bits of experience,
externalize, give voice to, and release the unallowable/unbearable.
And what of the imagination?
Specifically, the “moral imagination”,
the ability to creatively envision and explore
more just and liberatory alternatives?
What is the relationship between trauma and the imaginal?
In my experience, engagement with the moral imagination
has been a process of reclamation and repair
that asserts the validity of our own knowing and meaning-making capacities,
and our own self-directed vision for our present and future
that those who inflict violence and trauma seek to repress or extinguish.
Which is precisely why
“If I Must Die, Let It Be a Tale” by Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer
is so important and powerful.
To be a writer,
to imagine as a writer does,
is to seek to affirm the deathless and the inextinguishable
within the most horrific of human experiences
and to honor and believe in justice and liberation for those who have lived them.
What would you say is the role of writers in the face of cruelty and trauma?