Shakespeare 3, This is Shakespeare 6 —over
Shakespeare 6, This is Shakespeare 3 —over
Shakespeare 3, Give me a sitrep when you have the enemy in sight—OVER
THE ENEMY IS IN SIGHT—over
Wilco—OUT
This is a passage from the pedagogical memoir, Soldier’s Heart by Elizabeth Samet, about a Yale PhD teaching literature to West Point cadets. It brings up some important issues regarding everyday trauma and the classroom. First of all, there’s the challenge of teaching people exposed to trauma, accident, and death. The term PTSD was first diagnosed after soldier’s returned from Vietnam to describe a malady of the heart (hence the book title) : Happy are these who lose imagination: They have enough to carry with ammunition. Their hearts remain small drawn. Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle Wilfred Owen “Insensibility” . Here’s a link to the book: http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides_S/soldiers_heart1.asp
Now while BCC is not West Point, the community college is still a place of much accident and trauma. There is not a semester gone by that I do not hear horrible stories about someone’s father shooting their brother, soldiers back from Iraq, death, and foreclosure. Moreover, as the President said in our last Spring conference there are more vets at the school than ever. How much of this trauma is just made up by students is debatable. This doesn’t diminish the fact that trauma presents a real pedagogical challenge to the community college professor in just as profound a sense, as that experienced by a professor at West Point. And these phenomena have increased after 9/11. That is what the memoir “Soldier’s Heart” is about. But they increase or decrease during any time of war or recession. As we can see from the cars on the lawn at BCC, a lot of people are enrolled, many due to traumatic life circumstances.
PTSD is an imaginative and mental “insensibility.” This raises the question how might literature and the humanities be involved in the expansion or recovery of a sense and imagination that gets shut down due to traumatic circumstances? Battles that rage in Afghanistan and Iraq end up being battles that rage within us. Thus, I’ve been considering a renewed pedagogical perspective on PTSD in the classroom (not just war and the recession but the traumatic things that students bring into the classroom). This doesn’t have anything to do with “psychology” or “counseling” but it does mean using literature to address the deepest forms of mental and psychological blocks that our society meets out. This means listening or expanding their imagination with, for example, hard-boiled heroic models of men and women who manage to act honorably even when society seems senseless and dishonorable. While we may begin with discussions of “imprisonment” as a material condition, the traumatic fact is that there are greater threats in terms of imaginative incarceration through routine and duty.
This thinking about the classroom as a site for regaining our “sensibilities”, ultimately leads to another conversation about the tense relation between liberty and obedience that society demands. The “market” into which we are sending our students begs us to prepare them for societal conformity— the demands of business, employment, and the government— but also requires that we teach them how to innovate. How do we use the classroom to alternately serve or undermine the fact of societal conformity, obedience, and its often incongruity with innovative thinking? The humanities classroom may provide the imagination and fortitude required to face such everyday traumas depending on its own tendencies toward conformity. Now our only challenge is how to replace wounds with words.
The term "imaginative incarceration" invoked memories of last night's conversation about "cultivating one's garden" a la Candide and the nefarious ways in which the academy has been hijacked by anti-intellectualism at a time when a meaningful understanding of literature and the humanities may indeed be a lifeline for those students (and their families, etc.) who are indeed acting rather honorably within the constraints of a rather dishonourable society as you mentioned. Toward that end, I was also thinking of my experience at Gibbs College teaching Medea, and listening to my students articulate a like tragedy in respect to Mumia Abu Jamal. Now, everyone's personal politics notwithstanding here, my students were citing a case where they saw a man with whom they identified becoming what they deemed an unwitting victim of the "system;" and, at the same time, those same students continued to come to school--e.g., to Comp. I--and write essays about everything from push-up competitions in juvenile detention centers, profoundly disturbing accounts of sexual abuse, and a barrage of narratives recounting more mundane (and tragically normalized) inequities that are commonplace in the inner cities of New Jersey...anyway, Jessica you have touched on a crucial point here: PTSD is indeed pervasive in the growing community of veterans in our student body; and it is likewise pervasive in the community of students who are "veterans" from a very different war--a class/economic war that has plagued our cities for decades and rendered many of our students profoundly unprepared for college work...and perhaps life in general...or the market, or whatever...so perhaps if these same students were taught that the means through which they "cultivate their gardens" was/is legitimate, and that the humanities offer a bevy of themes and ideas that may offer some solace (and perhaps a bit of motivation) if we merely articulate a bridge between Paramus and 18th century France...okay, off to class...
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post, Jessica. It opens up all sorts of intriguing possibilities.
ReplyDeleteA couple of years ago, I was part of a team sent to Cambodia to help assess the Victims of Torture Project. The goal was to provide psychiatric care and counseling to people suffering from PTSD as a consequence of their experiences under the Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s. On reflection, it seems to me that one of the biggest challenges the project faced was that those suffering from PTSD were almost universally illiterate. They had no means of contextualizing, much less writing creatively about, their experiences. This has had enormous consequences for Cambodian society as a whole. Up until two years ago, textbooks in secondary schools nation-wide included only one brief paragraph about the Cambodian genocide, and even today, most young people do not believe that it ever took place.
With regard out classes, I sense that literature is an ideal arena in which to help work through issues related to trauma. Perhaps this is the case because fictional narratives rely on a displacement of the real that is, in and of itself, often traumatic. Characters only become characters insofar as they have been dislodged from the experience of everyday life. But unlike trauma in the "real" world, trauma in fiction provides the condition for a creative, rather than a destructive, re-imagining of the world.
I agree that many of our students are survivors of trauma and I am amazed at their resiliance. All of the courses at BCC, including and perhaps especially the humanities, offer students the opportunity to understand, share, write and discuss material that can help them process and understand what they have experienced. Perhaps more important, education offers an alternative to victimization--it empowers students to envison new lives, new careers, new images of self. Many of these students will make important contributions to society.
ReplyDeleteAre you familiar with the work of James Hillman, especially a collection of his called Blue Fire? It directly addresses the issue of how traumatizing experiences can render the imagination impotent and cause lifelong neuroses that are treatable, but never cureable.
ReplyDeleteHillman offers some penetrating insights into the restoration of a 'poetic basis of mind' -- a psychology rooted, not in science but in aesthetics, thereby freeing one's consciousness from literalism to uncover and reveal the depth of one's psyche. The psyche, or soul as he calls it, needs this kind of nourishment on a daily basis for real psychological survival, while the world in which we live continually strives to deny it to us. He's a fascinating thinker whose efforts to restore health and normalcy to our pathological culture are heroic and Herculean -- and yet something so simple: the return of curiosity, self reflectiion, and self expressiion. As he says in one of his essays, "Pathologizing: The Wound and the Eye," 'It is easy to fall into literalistic solutions whether they are of the socially activist sort or high-tech. Far more demanding is the ability to break out of one's narrow paradigms and world views to acquire insight into fantasies trapped in everyday assumptions.'