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A recent couple of conversations reminded me of how people find different ways to cope with trauma. The brain can introduce a kind of amnesia to block out emotionally shattering events.
After a particularly loaded discussion, my friend said that she remembered so many painful things, that what surprised her was just how much of her life she had blocked out—buried so deeply that when our talk dragged them back into her consciousness, she was severely jolted to recall that those things even happened.
Many of these were experiences stretching all the way back into childhood, maybe from about the time she was five. She turned 54 in January, and if you were to observe her going about her daily business, you would swear that her life has been a cheerful journey.
She’s a mother of three, a grandmother of three, and a businesswoman, working alongside her husband, to whom she got married when she was 21. They have a good thing going, though there were some rocky times, the kind that seem to be par for the marital course.
But every now and then, perhaps because I ask so many questions, I hear stories that are so disturbing, they make me wonder why women have to endure so much; and how conditioned we are to suppress pain and humiliation because it is considered both unseemly and shameful to talk about it.
We know that the origin of these scars is usually the family, the cultural environment, traditions and religious practices—maybe beliefs is the more appropriate word.
I come from a Muslim family, and when I entered puberty I rejected Islam for telling me that menstruation made me unclean. My mother has never forgiven me for that.
My friend is Hindu and her experiences were no less determined by the assumption of patriarchal superiority. I have never been able to abide by the idea that because a man is male, he has the right to assume authority over the lives of the women in his orbit.
I know very well that is why I live alone, happily and peacefully for the most part. That is because I made a deliberate decision years ago to withdraw from toxic relationships. The kind that make you relive trauma.
Yet, I would say that I have a different coping mechanism from my friend and the others who choose to repress painful memories. I have said before that reading was my saviour and writing, my salvation. It is the way I try to process things.
And sometimes when I write in this public space, I reveal personal stories, not to fill space, but because from the responses I get, I have realised that experiences are not singular.
We all go through rough and hurtful times, particularly within the domain of the family. It is one of the reasons I have redefined what family means to me. It’s not necessarily the people in your bloodline; it’s the people who care about you.
Today, I came across a film on YouTube, The Great Indian Kitchen, a 2023 remake of a 2021 Malayalam film (Mrs). I had assumed it was about cooking, and it was, in a sense, but it was much more than that.
It made me remember so many things about the traditional ways, and while it did not influence my decision about what I wanted to write, it certainly altered my approach.
I was fascinated by the way the director, Arati Kadav, used the repetitiousness of household chores to convey the drudgery of a woman’s life in a patriarchal society. Anyway, when I had finished watching it, I sent the link to my friend, suggesting that when she had a chance, she might find it interesting.
Maybe it was not a good idea to ask her to revisit memories that she might have blocked out, but it was also fascinating to me to see how much of that life in India was this life too.
(via NYT.)
When I had been thinking about what to write, I thought about the way people cope by shutting out ghastly episodes that were too difficult to process. I believe that in many ways it is because the source is the homestead, people they cannot break away from, and they have to protect their peace of mind by burying things in order to wake up and say good morning.
I realised too that in this shutting down of chunks, whole swathes of our lives are deleted, including things that brought joy.
I know many people who wear their pain on their sleeves. Every day they pick away at the scabs, and drench themselves with dirty water. It’s a really sad way to experience this arbitrary one-shot life we have.
That was where I wanted to go, because I was really musing on whether we also shut out good times in order to fully wallow in misery.
It’s not easy because life is always pelting something rotten out there, and often you get hit. What I do is my own conscious processing. I hold it up and analyse it.
It’s not been easy, and I really don’t know if it is better to block and bury. I think repression leads to explosions and an erosion of the spirit.
I suppose we do what we have to do to survive. But is amnesia really helpful on this journey?
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Vaneisa Baksh is a columnist with the Trinidad Express, an editor and a cricket historian. She is the author of a biography of Sir Frank Worrell.
