Who Owns Your Story? Transcending the trauma narrative

Abstract

Who Owns Your Story? Transcending the trauma narrative Aminatta Forna (bio) There is a certain kind of person who, on being introduced, says, “What’s your story?” I like that way of opening a conversation with someone you have just met. It offers people a way of presenting themselves as they might like to be seen (which may not be the same as how others see them). But it would also be true to say that I like “What’s your story?” because stories are my stock in trade. So here’s a shocking one: During the civil war that racked Sierra Leone in the 1990s, my cousin Morlai, a teacher, was stopped at a checkpoint by soldiers who mistook him for a member of the rebel faction and dragged away for summary execution. Thousands of civilians were killed this way during that war: pulled aside at checkpoints by nervy, [End Page 36] suspicious soldiers and shot. Morlai, though, survived. He lived, he told me later, because one of the soldiers ordered to execute him was a former pupil. I was appalled by the story. Morlai was my favorite cousin. We were silent for a while and then I said, “You must have been a really good teacher.” And we both laughed. Our laughter may seem surprising. In Western societies, we have begun to conflate every difficult experience with trauma, such that the words suffering and trauma have become interchangeable. But here was someone I knew well, the cousin with whom I had grown up and who was and is immensely dear to me, who had gone through something terrible and yet was not traumatized by it—who, in fact, was able to reach a place where he could laugh about his experience. I am not suggesting that every horror can be turned into a joke. I’m thinking only about Morlai and the fact that since that day two decades ago he has gone on to live a good and contented life. so what is the meaning of the word trauma? In medical terms, it describes the impact of violence on the body: “Traumatic injury is a term which refers to physical injuries of sudden onset and severity which require immediate medical attention.” Trauma has also been used by mental health professionals since the 1970s. When used in this context, it is a specialized term to describe the impact of a violent or horrific event on an individual’s mental well-being. We might think of trauma in this sense as the wound that does not heal. There’s a man who lives in my ancestral village in Sierra Leone. Because of the rebel invasions that took place during the war, to this day he flees at the sight of a stranger and hides in the forest until the person leaves. Sometimes he stays there for days. His wife carries his meals to him. I have interviewed a woman who at the mention of the violent death of her husband twenty-five years earlier shut down to the point that she was unable to speak. We call this “damage.” But the way the psyche responds to violence is less predictable than the body’s. Everybody will suffer, [End Page 37] and the suffering, like a wound, is real. But not everyone who suffers will be traumatized. I began to write about war twenty years ago, as my country was emerging from a decade of civil war. My family, among thousands of others, had suffered greatly in those years and in the years that preceded the outbreak of violence. My father, who was a political activist in the 1970s, was imprisoned and then murdered. His death was followed by twenty-five years of dictatorship and oppression, ten years of civil war, and even an Ebola outbreak. Perhaps not surprisingly, in the novels that followed my first memoir two of my main characters were trauma specialists, and in the years of writing those books I spent many hundreds of hours talking to victims and those who try to help them. One of the people I spoke to early on in my research was the Sierra Leonian psychiatrist Edward Nahim, who...