Trauma

I too thought this week’s articles would concentrate more on bibilotherapy and what Janet refers to as “secondary witnessing” (87). I like the notion of “secondary witnessing” because it reaffirms why I teach literature. In teaching literature, educators are able to expose students to injustices, to traumas (however one defines it), to the lived experiences of humanity in a safe environment, or so I thought until I read this week’s articles.

I think Janet raises powerful questions on educators’ responsibilities to students when introducing traumatic texts. The question that I find challenging is, “…how can we justify forcing students into crisis?” (76). The problem for me becomes if a text that I introduce in my classroom results in an unforeseen crisis for one or more of my students, what is my responsibility—ethically, professionally, personally?

Before reading this week’s articles and the YA text Cut by Patricia McCormick, I thought of the traumatic genre quite narrowly. For whatever reason, I thought of traumatic texts dealing with more large scale, collective traumas—wars, genocides, disasters, etc. I neglected to take into consideration trauma as it is experienced on an individual level, as in the novel Cut.

In this YA novel, McCormick introduces the reader to a young teenage girl named Callie who suffers from cutting (the act of cutting one’s skin as a way of coping or punishing oneself). Callie is a guest at Sea Pines, a psychiatric hospital along with other young women suffering from a variety of conditions, such as drug addictions and eating disorders. The story is told from Callie’s perspective. Since she has arrived at the hospital she has stopped talking. She makes no attempt to talk to her roommate, her therapy group, or her psychologist. The story is about her journey in understanding the cause of her condition and her interactions with the other girls in her therapy group. The narrative is very real and at times distributing, but it draws the reader into the world of a person who feels helpless, hopeless, and trapped and can’t seem to figure out why.

This book challenged my definition of “trauma” and I began to understand the different ways in which a person could relate and define trauma. For me as a teacher, it becomes challenging to think (in advance) how to deal with student responses to traumatic texts, especially if I’m not aware of their experience with a particular situation.