03/09/2022
I have wanted to share this with you for a bit.
For a long while, I have been very wary about the ubiquity of 'trauma' discourse and the concomitant flourishing of a subculture that focuses not only on healing as a self-evident and exclusive response and/or entitlement but on the human body as a fixed and static matter conforming to our habits of perception.
As a cross-cultural ethnotherapeutic researcher (by training) and a recovering psychotherapist (by the unexpected goings and comings of unknown gods), I have felt the need to say more about the colonial dynamics at work within the discipline of psychology: how it 'manufactures' its object of analysis, how it is value-laden and culturally composed (instead of being - as is often presumed - an epistemologically superior glimpse of the 'true nature' of the psyche), and how it is entangled with a politics of sameness and control. To that last point, a dear colleague of mine - and Professor Emerita of psychology - goes so far as to suggest that "psychology is the policeman of capitalism."
With colleagues, with elders, through my studies and readings, along with my students in postgraduate classrooms, in conversations I am privileged to have around the world, and through shockingly generative social media encounters, I have nurtured an urgency to decenter western psychology; I feel the urge to unpack the fascinating histories of trauma as a concept, to denaturalize trauma as a world-building project, and to sit with trauma as a globalizing trope.
A couple of months ago, I composed a small post here about trauma - but from an animist, postactivist perspective. I ended my post with: "The thing to note then is that we are not traumatized subjects after all, we are subjects within trauma. We do not have trauma. Trauma has us." Someone posted a comment in response to my post - a comment so alive and inviting that I immediately sought to meet her, a dear sister I now consider a friend. When we eventually met, after sharing fascinating stories about a black man "building muscle to look formidable", the curious phenomenon of 'go-bags', as well as the intergenerational patterns in her family, she ended by saying something I'll never forget: "Bayo, trauma is not just the meteor hitting; it is the sculpting of bodies to take the heat." She was crafting a notion of trauma that was more-than-experiential, more-than-personal, and more-than-human.
I have shocking and potentially disturbing things to say. About triggers. About trauma. About healing. About the cultural phenomenon of cancellation. About modern subjects. And about how wounds are co-produced.
Thankfully, I won't get to say these things alone.
If you sense a certain indigestibility around the topic of trauma and healing, embodiment and justice, and the prolific binaries that preserve modern impasses, I invite you to join us at a 4-day web gathering I call "The Wandering, Winding Way of the Wound" - much to the chagrin of the guardians of brevity. My friends will be coming: Tyson Yunkaporta, Vanessa Andreotti, and Sophie Strand.
October 19-22. Register at the link:
https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/webinar/wandering-winding-way-1
A different signal is churning the landscape, zigzagging through the cracks, offering a fragile suggestion to wary ears: another path is possible.
Bayo Akomolafe
