Unravelling a certain word
My father used to have a particular expression when he felt that someone was misusing a word, an almost imperceptible twitch between his eyebrows and at the sides of his nose when someone said ‘disinterested’ when they meant ‘uninterested’ or pronounced lichen with a hard ‘c’ in the middle, rather than the soft shunt of ‘ch’ that he preferred. The greatest twitch of all was for words used that over-egged a situation. A classic was when he greeted any one of his grandchildren.
‘How are you, my darling? He would ask.
‘I’m great,’ often came the pat reply.
‘Isn’t that for others to decide?’ he would whip back.
He may not be alive anymore to wince at the constant use of trauma to describe a wide gamut of the everyday: how some people describe the way they feel after seeing a horror film, or on losing the rental car key after too much raki on hols, but they would have his nose and eyebrows jiggling.
I am working with people at the moment of extraordinary ability, and their work is around trauma: amongst those imprisoned and tortured during the on-going wars in Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan and more; with detained refugees who have lost everything and now stand to live out many years in a constant posture of anxiety and gratitude: twenty-six year now being the average length of time it is likely to take for a child refugee to gain full citizenship in the country of their final re-settlement, according to various international refugee bodies.
The trauma of violence and displacement of two recent gatherings where I have had both the chance and privilege to speak: the first the International Trauma Conference in Boston in May, and now, amongst a group of practitioners, policy-makers and activists in a former Communist setting, our conversation of the displaced and disenfranchised held in hovering heat amidst the scent of hot earth and ripening tomatoes, the barbed wire history of internment and deprivation in the set faces of those all around us. When people gather in the name of those who have not survived trauma, or who are living alongside its frozen or raging effects, we often run out of words as they barely represent the stories carried in the bodies, bones, blood, and cells of those in whose names we gather.
Trauma is not a word to bandy. Please.