TURBINE | KAPOHAU

Tender by Toi Derricotte 

Nearly all the poems I’ve written in the past three years have been about trauma, whether it be historical, intergenerational, sexual, childhood, colonial, or grief. Time and time again I return to the traumatic points of my life or my ancestors’, re-examining them from a million different angles. It’s obviously a reflection of my head space, and how I feel the need to make sense of all this pain I, and the people I love, carry. Trauma is so boring like that, so relentlessly repetitive.   

Looking at my previous work, I’ve realised I have a very strict distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’. White man bad! Brown girl good! Colonialism bad! Decolonisation good! Christianity bad! Queer joy good! Although I stand by most of these statements (I promise I don’t hate all White men), it’s still very didactic and one-dimensional. Where’s the in-between? Where’s the nuance? This is where all the juicy stuff is, right? That liminal space is such a powerful spot to inhabit — it’d be a waste not to visit. 

On another note, I don’t know how kind it is of me to write solely about trauma. Although I personally gravitate towards trauma narratives and enjoy reading them because they make me feel seen, for your average reader they can be triggering and overwhelming. This is especially true if your entire body of work is made up of trauma, without any space to breathe. 

And I think that’s where this book lost me. It’s one traumatic event after another, with very little breathing space. Perhaps it’s not my place to say, but, in Derricotte’s exploration of the Black female body, her magic drowns in the pain. While it’s imperative to show the wrongdoing inflicted upon her (and would be tone-deaf to only portray her glory), I have to ask: to what extent? Is pain the only thing worth reading? And, perhaps more for myself, does sitting and stewing in the pain actually do anything? Or is it time for me to find new pathways, new streams of light? 

If I’m to write about my people for my people, there needs to be some direction forward, or out. And sure, writing about pain helps validate it, but I can’t keep relying on my artistic ability to write about trauma. I don’t want that for future generations, either. So I better start. 

‘The Case Against the Trauma Plot,’ from The New Yorker, by Parul Sehgal

‘The trauma plot flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority. The solace of its simplicity comes at no little cost. It disregards what we know and asks that we forget it, too—forget about the pleasures of not knowing, about the unscripted dimensions of suffering, about the odd angularities of personality, and, above all, about the allure and necessity of a well-placed sea urchin.’

I was proud of the poem I wrote for the Week 6 exercise. Or, I was when I first wrote it. I thought, ‘Yes! Finally, something good!’ But once I distributed it to the class and re-read it the day before the workshop, I realised it was the same old shit I’d been writing for the past year, just worded a little better. The personae that appear in this poem are predictable, flat, and only shown in their trauma, suggesting that’s their only source of value. I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want this for my writing or my people.  

At the beginning of this article, Sehgal quotes Elie Wiesel, saying, ‘Our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony.‘ And these testimonials ‘[elevate] trauma from a sign of moral defect to a source of moral authority, even a kind of expertise’. Is that what I’ve been doing with my writing? Is that what’s propelled my writing journey? Have I been relying on personal and collective trauma for substance?

Yes and no. I do think the ethics of trauma narratives get a little messy when it comes to writing about and for marginalised people, whose stories are frequently suppressed or erased. Writing trauma can become a powerful way to excavate hidden histories and galvanise audiences. But at what point does visibility lose its power? Does reproducing the same stories of hardship create an archetype of us as perpetual sufferers in dire need of saving? 

Returning to Derricotte, so many trauma narratives will display the scene of their trauma(s) with either explicit detail and/or an objective standpoint of: this is exactly what happened, this is who did it, this is what I was like after. And yes, this is important and powerful, but I worry about this hypervisibility. I’m still not sure exactly what it is yet, but there’s something disturbing about moments charged with such tapu becoming extremely public. I really hope pulling on the trauma thread will open things up for me, loosen the knots, and maybe something will click, and I’ll be writing like I’m possessed by some ancient spirit and I’ll produce the most amazing piece of literature ever. A girl can dream.