Why is it?
Shame and insecurity are so ingrained in me
I don’t think
My life will be filled with joy and the sense of great achievement
My self
Is controlled by
The fear
There is no way to turn things around
It is foolish to presume
I will succeed
If only I could reverse the perception, my life would be different.
(Course Document 2008)
Chih-Ning, whose second language is English, wrote this poem in response to the “Monster and Angel” prompt, in which writers wrote a poem or a letter to their monster or trauma and then literally deconstructed the monster and re-assembled it into an angel. Chih-Ning chose to do this as a palindrome, which makes sense read from top to bottom, as well as from bottom to top. In her video, the poem appears in white font on a black background as she reads it aloud to soft, tinkling piano music. The monster version reads from top to bottom, scrolling downward, to emphasize the trauma. The poem’s final line signals the opposite meaning: that the positive quality of the angel, is about to begin. Next, the same poem appears on a pink background, illustrated with a flower, as Chih-Ning reads it from bottom to top, the upward movement serving the positive message.
The palindrome is a demanding master. Chih-Ning was able to recast her trauma into this stringent form for a few different reasons. First, because she had completed and revised several projects focused on her trauma, she felt grounded and confident enough for this new challenge. She knew her message inside and out and was prepared to compose it in a different way, for a wider audience. Second, like other international students who had been educated in school systems that rarely or never allowed students to experiment or “play,” Chih-Ning vigorously seized the chance to do so as a graduate student. She had just encountered the palindrome form on a YouTube video and had to try it out for herself.
In this context, the “tight” structure of the palindrome was perfect. It extended or further distanced Chih-Ning from her original trauma, which consisted of arriving in America from her native Taiwan without a means of financial support and experiencing severe culture shock throughout her first year in her new home. Like many forms, her palindrome demanded a lot of control—over the structure of the content, and, I believe, over the original trauma itself. In this case, her verbal and visual palindrome became a kind of artifact that she could now place on a shelf and reflect upon from a greater distance than ever before—a kind of end-point in her composing and healing processes about this episode in her life.
Much more can be said about the roles of shape and structure in composing through trauma. Here I’ve only sketched the two extremes—loose form and tight form. But lots of useful techniques reside somewhere in the middle. I’ll only note one of them now: subheadings. In the throes of “getting it out,” most writers don’t consider the simple use of subheads, and well they should not. But they are a wonderful first step toward coherence when writers think about them on their first re-reading of what they wrote. They only have to look for “chunks” and add a subhead where they see them. Adding subheads benefits the writer as much as the reader. In a few words or phrases, the writer can see and grasp the whole complicated discourse she has just poured out. This can help unify or synthesize the writer’s message to himself, thus motivating him to go one-step further and then maybe another step, until, like Chih-Ning (and Jefferson and Lincoln), they approximate the greatest distance from their original trauma.
Other Symbols
Composing through trauma also works because it can be communicated to ourselves and others through any medium, not just words, creating a broad spectrum of meanings to a wide range of readers. In addition to written language, Chih-Ning used other symbol systems in her composing through media—video, music, and actual images. I’ve long encouraged the use of visuals in tandem with writing about trauma. Like Chih-Ning, writers also sometimes choose to integrate videos, music, song lyrics, and even advertisements into their pieces. In Chapter 4, you’ll meet several people who effectively integrate visuals that they create themselves or find on the Internet, often manipulating these images in some way, to address their own purposes.
For many years, I’ve fiercely believed in any form of imagery. I continue to believe that any imagery represents the most basic building block of thinking and communicating—the DNA of language, media, and mind (Fox 1994; Fleckenstein, 2003). Traumatic memories are mainly stored as images (e.g., Sheikh, 2003), so when we write, we connect them to the events, people, and places which generated them, ushering them into the light of day, the first step in demystifying the trauma. When you think of imagery within these contexts, its influence is equal to or greater than that of the word.
Semiotics is the study of meanings in signs and symbols, especially in language and images. Although it’s poorly understood by most of us, it’s the wellspring of using words and images to write about trauma. Semiotics extends from the ancient Greeks, to John Poinsot’s A Treatise on Signs in 1632, to Umberto Eco (1978). From Leonardo Da Vinci, to William James, to the Gestalt psychologists, we have learned much about images and visual thinking. Cognitive psychologists also focus on the significant role played by mental imagery in thinking: Stephen Kosslyn, William Thompson, and Giorgio Ganis (2006); Ulric Neisser (1976); and Gavriel Salomon (1994) share Allan Paivio’s (2001) conclusion that perception and imagery are at least as fundamental as language when it comes to how we think. In short, words trigger other words, as well as images—and images elicit other images, as well as words. Suzanne Stokes’s (2001) meta-analysis concludes that, “using visuals in teaching results in a greater degree of learning.” Vera John-Steiner’s (1997) case studies of the thinking and creative processes of professional scientists, artists, musicians, writers, and others, documents the rich interplay of visual and verbal thinking in these accomplished professionals. Visual thinking also helps people who are learning English as their second language (Kim 2010, Fox and Kim 2011). Platforms such as Second Life have been vigorously adopted by education, business, libraries, museums, and other professional organizations. (See, for example, the “Virtual Worlds Group” of EDUCAUSE at www.educause.edu).
Other research has explored how imagery directly affects physical and psychological issues. Anees Sheikh and others review imagery’s effects on blood pressure, blood flow, sexual response, body chemistry, ocular changes, electro dermal activity, electromyography (EMGs), and the immune system (Sheikh, Kunzendorf, and Sheikh 2003, 342). Other topics include imagery and cancer, smoking cessation and weight management, cerebral laterality, music, and pain management. It’s long past time to recognize these basic research findings that clearly point to imagery as central to thinking. As Rudolf Arnheim summarizes, “We think by means of the things to which language refers—referents that in themselves are not verbal but perceptual” (Arnheim 1986, 207).
Even more relevant here, trauma, language, imagery, and memory may be connected: These have to do with the notion that trauma produces a mental picture that is stored but not accessible to the cerebral cortex. In 2000, Marian MacCurdy examined how traumas are sensory, and that the body reacts to them whether or not the conscious mind can apprehend this information.
Traumatic memories become locked in a part of the brain that is preverbal and are often accessed unexpectedly. These images pop up sometimes unbidden when we smell hear, see, or touch something that takes us back to the time the traumatic event occurred. It is these images that must be accessed if a story about the trauma is to be told. (Singer & Singer 2008)
Images communicate more directly and quickly, helping writers to crystallize their meanings. When writers use both images and language and then share their writing with a small group of supportive people, then fireworks are more likely to ignite.
Other People
Writing about trauma is one of the most private and singular activities imaginable. Such writers begin (and often remain) isolated. Eventually, though, most writers greatly benefit from involving other people. Because working through