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Trauma as a Potential Source of Solidarity

2013; Duke University Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-1957477

2164-0041

Jill Goldberg,

Counseling, Therapy, and Family Dynamics

When i first moved to Vancouver, I was immediately drawn to its Downtown Eastside neighborhood—a place where drug deals are conducted openly; crack is smoked on the streets and in the alleys; women sell cheap alleyway blowjobs to support their habits; needles lie strewn on the ground; and men and women do strange dances down the streets in time to the beat of the cocaine coursing through their veins. It is Canada’s poorest postal code, located in an opulent city with some of the world’s most unaffordable real estate prices (second only to Hong Kong).I think the attraction had to do with what had brought me to Vancouver in the first place: on the streets of the Downtown Eastside I felt a sense of kinship among others struggling, as I was, with the debilitating effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.My experiences in the Downtown Eastside made me wonder how experiences of trauma can open us to each other and serve as a new source of solidarity that cuts across class and social divisions. How might the ability to see analogies between others’ traumas and our own make us more able to see ourselves as part of an interconnected community—a community in which we are all responsible for one another’s welfare?I left my home in Montréal after having been attacked by a man who broke into my apartment in the middle of the night. I got away and was physically undamaged, but the psychological and emotional damage of this event was profound and long-lasting.In the aftermath of the attack, I developed post-traumatic stress disorder. Every time I tried to sleep, I experienced night terrors from which I would wake up screaming. Flashbacks and sudden moments of panic left me exhausted, utterly depleted. More than a year went by when I was sleeping sometimes less than two hours a night, and during that time I would wake up screaming from nightmares at persistent and regular intervals.As a result of these and other symptoms, I was unable to concentrate. My memory failed me. I was in such agony that I used to say that I was wearing my nervous system on the outside of my skin, and every bump, every nick rattled me like an electric shock. The more I suffered, the less I recognized myself.Eventually, I asked to take a semester off my position as a college professor in Montréal. I was granted the leave, but it brought on a whole new set of troubles. My insurance company refused me disability insurance, leaving me panicked over money and entrenched in an acrimonious bureaucratic battle. Because I had no money coming in, I felt stuck in the apartment in which I’d been assaulted, reminded constantly of the terror of that night. And at the end of my semester off, having spent most of that time in a state of extreme and protracted anxiety, I found that my employers had failed to tell me that they had opted not to renew my contract with them, as, at the time that I took my semester off, I was one semester shy of achieving the possibility of a permanent position.After all of this, I made a decision that I don’t even remember making: a decision to move to Vancouver, which was about as far from Montréal as I could get, in order to restart my life. After living in Vancouver for a year, I began a program that introduced therapeutic massage to a drop-in center for women who are survival sex workers in the Downtown Eastside. Eventually, I began to teach photography at the same drop-in center. Together, the women whom I met at the center and I organized a photo exhibit that was, simply, a document of their lives and an opportunity for them to show what they’d accomplished behind the lens of the camera. The photos ranged from landscapes and street shots to more intimate portrayals of the women’s lives, but each photo was a testament to their own power to rise above a city that is so often indifferent to them and to announce to all who would hear, “This is my voice; I am not invisible.”There are many ways in which my life has nothing in common with the lives of most women in the Downtown Eastside, but in that neighborhood I saw something that I recognized in myself: a feeling of abandonment. I began to see how a shared experience of trauma connected us and created a sense of community between us. Many Vancouver residents who are in other ways like me—middle-class, white, and university-educated—present a wall of indifference toward the suffering that occurs every day in the Downtown Eastside.The experience made me aware of how experiences of trauma can open us to a sense of kinship with others in the same city. It also drew me to question what other paths exist— aside from shared experiences of violence and abandonment— to a similar feeling of responsibility and commitment to care for and about those facing the most trauma in our communities.Aryeh Cohen’s article “Justice in the City” in this issue of Tikkun proposes a radical configuration of the communal responsibility that we, as societies and, in particular, municipalities, have toward the Other. In his vision of society, Cohen implicates each of us in an obligatory relationship not only to love and respect the Other, but to act on these things in a way that requires us to cross boundaries that are not only geographical or cartographical, but what he calls “the boundaries of responsibility.”My experience with the women in the Downtown Eastside taught me much about the correlation between crossing cartographical boundaries and crossing boundaries of responsibility. On the day of the exhibit’s opening, a friend from out of town and my parents, who also came from out of town, related to me that on their way to the gallery they had stopped someone to ask for directions. Both were told, “You don’t want to go to that neighborhood.” But in this case, the act of turning love and respect into action required the crossing of an undrawn but profoundly etched city boundary that prevents those with wealth and social capital from witnessing the suffering and violence occurring right next door. I did want to go to that neighborhood for the precise reason of expressing my obligation to transcend the usual lines of responsibility. It was not enough to theorize about the mutuality of our experiences, but I saw that through the burden of insight, I was required to cultivate justice by accompanying the women I met, not to a geographical destination, but to a place of greater power and dignity.In Vancouver, boundaries have tremendous class implications, and it still troubles me that the women in my course require assistance or accompaniment to capture the attention of those beyond the Downtown Eastside’s boundaries. It is as though an ambassador from the middle class is required to legitimize those voices that come from the more marginal Other place to which many of us have such a practiced indifference. And this makes me think that, in fact, we owe the greatest debt of responsibility to enact love and respect in precisely the places that much of society typically loves and respects the least.Every city has its neglected corners, filled with people who need much more than a spontaneous moment of generosity and the handing out of some spare quarters. Like Cohen, I believe that we must witness the experience of the Other and “assimilate Other into same”—to actually identify aspects of ourselves in those we might normally ignore or disdain. Asking an ordinary middle-class citizen of Vancouver to identify with a Downtown Eastsider would likely bring psychological defenses screaming to the forefront, but transcending these defenses and crossing the mental barrier of self and Other to see a fundamental, human sameness will surely cultivate the radical responsibility that prompts us to choose compassion over disdain, accompaniment over indifference, and justice for all rather than justice for me alone.I arrived in Vancouver at an interesting time: it was right around the time that serial killer Robert Pickton, who had been preying on the area’s sex workers and other disenfranchised women, was on trial and then convicted of first-degree murder. As a woman who was in the process of dealing with the judicial system’s handling of the man who attacked me, I was listening closely to the legal and societal response to the unspeakable violence wrought by Pickton on society’s most vulnerable. And what I heard was not always encouraging.Serial killing of women is an all-too-common feature of many societies, but this makes it no less shattering. Still, what is exponentially more anguishing is the response to the Pickton serial killings. It took police years of missed opportunities and ignored evidence to catch Pickton, and meanwhile more and more women went missing from the area for good. The investigation into the disappearances of women from the Downtown Eastside was so botched on the part of police and authorities that there was a legal inquiry into the handling of it. However, even this inquiry was deeply flawed and considered by many of the Downtown Eastside’s stakeholders to be a complete sham that further marginalized the population that was most affected by these murders.But perhaps what disturbs me even more than the official responses are certain views that I keep hearing in the court of public opinion. The phrase “high-risk lifestyle” has been used over and over to describe the women who were slaughtered by this mass murderer, often as though to suggest that the victims brought it on themselves. What I have been aching to say is this: the women who have supposedly “chosen” their high-risk lives and are therefore deemed unworthy of serious and adequate protection and compassion did not choose all of the circumstances of their lives, just as I did not choose mine following my own brush with trauma. Ending up on the wrong side of chance is so much easier than most of us in the middle classes know, yet we can all easily fall prey to what Shakespeare called “Giddy Fortune’s furious fickle wheel.”I sometimes imagine that I had been attacked while I was working a minimum-wage job. I would have had little or no savings. I could not have taken a leave, as I would have had no benefits. The cost of the medication that I took for help with sleep would not have been covered. I might not have been able to get a new job and recover from my losses. Perhaps I might not have even had the knowledge or resources to understand my own condition (PTSD) and articulate my needs.Change around the conditions of my life and I too could have been a woman living on the street. It would have been easier than I ever knew to end up in that situation. And what kept me in my middle-class groove was as much good fortune as the break-in was bad luck.I have always been aware of societal inequities, but this experience gave me firsthand knowledge of how far we are from being an equal society in terms of not only gender, but also class, and by extension race.Because I am an educated, white, middle-class woman, the police believed me when I said I was attacked. They got the guy and charged him, and still only a small measure of justice was done. Imagine if I had been homeless and, as a homeless woman, been attacked; I wonder then how much I’d have been listened to, and I intuitively know the answer—it is an answer that is apparent in the deep disdain that our society seems to have for the homeless, the poor. It is in our vocabulary when we call people “bums” and “whores” or worse. It is in our sideways glances that we say that the person asking for money is a parasite, less than human.The women who went missing from the Downtown Eastside were unprotected because of the systematic marginalization and revictimization of the most vulnerable in our society: women (in this case often Aboriginal) who live in poverty and resort to drugs and sex work to support themselves so that they can survive the cruelty that fate has blown their way.I do not for a minute believe that given a full range of choices, the women in this neighborhood, most of whom have long lived with intolerable abuse, would have chosen their “high-risk” lives. In society in general, most people do not dramatically change social class from the one they were born into: why would these women be any different from the rest of us? For the sake of argument, though, let’s imagine for a minute that the women who disappeared made poor choices that they are morally responsible for all on their own. Who amongst us has not made poor choices at times in our lives? For some the stakes are higher than for others.With the burden of this insight weighing heavily on me, I ventured into the Downtown Eastside to do volunteer work at the WISH Drop-in Center for women who are survival sex workers. This began as a project in which I used my training as a shiatsu (massage) practitioner as a tool of outreach to the women at the center. I did this for a couple of years, and I loved the connections that this work fostered, but I also wanted to help give the women at the center a chance to tell their own stories, to determine their own narrative.Since living in Vancouver, I feel like I’ve heard the story of the women in the Downtown Eastside told through everyone’s perspective except their own. So, I approached the director of WISH with the idea of teaching a photography class there. After getting the go-ahead and a generous donation of single-use cameras, I began to teach the basics of composition and camera use. After our first photography session, the group gave itself a name, “East Side Talent,” and we mounted an exhibit at a beautiful old building in the Downtown Eastside that houses a number of services crucial to that community.The composition of the group of women varied from week to week, but there are a few who remained with the course the entire time. With cameras in their hands, they captured stories that no one else tells. It’s not all about misery and despair. There are pictures of friends and loved ones, pictures of pets, pictures of flowers blossoming and of Vancouver’s beautiful parks. These are pictures that tell the story of lives that are rich, of passions, of hopes and disappointments. They counter our society’s oversimplified and overdetermined clichéd idea of “sex worker.” I hope that, in some small way, the photographers were able to gain a degree of empowerment by not being the object of someone else’s story, but having the opportunity to be the teller of the story. And, indeed, for many women this was the case.One of my most loyal students told me that in learning about photography, she has experienced the joy of developing a new skill and the pleasure of having a hobby. Perhaps most significantly, she said, she loves the opportunity to express her feelings and to describe her experiences through her camera. She told me that the photography course, the exhibit, and the camera she received through her participation in the workshop are some of “the best things that ever happened” to her. Moreover, she spoke of the “dignity and the power” of being the one to hold the camera. And indeed, there is power in being the master of your own narrative.It was partly out of a sense of kinship that I entered the Downtown Eastside to be with the women I met there. But I did not do this without overcoming certain intellectual, psychological, and emotional boundaries pertaining to the differences that I believed existed between us. Even after having experienced a traumatic event that to some degree shattered my perceptions of difference as defined by class, I still encountered my own resistance to the task of assimilating the sameness I shared with the women at WISH.Perhaps the most significant boundaries that must be crossed in order to accompany the Other and to cultivate justice are the boundaries that exist in each of our minds: the ones that allow, for example, middle-class people to believe that we could not experience the same type of abject poverty experienced by those who exist in a more marginal class, as if they are implicitly different from us—less meritorious, less human. To realize that difference is a social and mental construct rather than an implicit human condition is to be able to comprehend the core sameness of all humans and to understand that it is our shared humanity, not necessarily our shared conditions, that require our solidarity in another’s cause.I don’t think that one has to experience a trauma—to share a condition, so to speak—to develop compassion. If solidarity were built on shared experiences alone, then we would truly live in an atomistic world. It is not enough for me to say, “I’ve experienced violence, therefore, I stand in solidarity with all victims of violence.” The greater act would be to say, “I am human, therefore, I stand in solidarity with all humans—every person’s well-being is equally important no matter the material conditions in which they live.”I wish I knew how to generate solidarity in the absence of shared experience, and I also wish I knew how to encourage all people who have experienced something traumatic to reach outward to those who are in need rather than to recoil back behind the boundary of comfort. Perhaps the answer does, indeed, lie in Aryeh Cohen’s vision of “accompaniment” —which I take in part to entail the act of citizens offering compassion by standing in solidarity with those who are in need. The struggle though, is how we move toward seeing such accompaniment as an obligation, not a whim, that must be borne communally. If we ever succeed in truly delegating this obligation to all citizens of a given municipality, justice will be created and love and respect will be enacted in their highest forms.