Intertexts

Intertexts, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2003 On Writing, Healing, and Wholeness: Personal and Cultural Benefits of Naming What Remains L a u r a A . M i l n e r G E O R G I A S O U T H E R N U N I V E R S I T Y Personal pain is connected to ancient insult; the wounds of history—racism, war, homophobia, cruelty of all kinds—fester unhealed. (Mary Rose O’Reilley 38) As we witness to the past and as we serve as witnesses for others, we may begin to see how the cords of one story link to the cords of another. This recognition of how our histories are woven together enables areconnection between people in the present. As we witness to our past, we open the possibility of allovwng ourselves to be healed from the past through ahealing relationship with another in the pres¬ ent. (Premo Steele 9) Acrossthedisciplines,countlessbooksandarticlestoutthetransformative power of writing and telling. Theorists in trauma studies, psychoanalysis, medicine,history,composition,narrative,andliteracydescribethedynamic, though sometimes painful benefits of naming, knowing, and re-visioning ourexperiencesinthepresenceofanempatheticreaderorwitness.Asbotha writer and acollege composition teacher, Ihave moved closer to wholeness bywritingpoetryandessaysaboutpersonalandculturallossandbetrayal and by witnessing my students’ stories. In the process of articulating frag¬ ments of traumatic memory or assisting my students in their articulations. I/wehavefoundhopeinwhatremains.Namingandre-framingoursub¬ conscious debris seems to make room for the beauty of the present moment and to move us toward what Richard Selzer calls “an acceptance as whole of whatremains”(qtd.inDeSalvo183).Andwhatremains,individuallyand collectively—after the Holocaust, Hiroshima, systemic racism, sexism, sexual abuse and other local and global horrors—is worth examining. In their introduction to the 2003 anthology. Loss: The Politics of Mourn¬ ing,, editors David L. Eng and David Kazanjian offer acounterintuitive per¬ spective of loss as creative rather than only negative and fragmentary. They view loss as “inseparable from what remains, for what is lost is known only by what remains of it, by how these remains are produced, read, and sus¬ tained ...[And] the dawn of the twenty-first century is amoment when the pervasive losses of the twentieth century need to be engaged from the per¬ spective of what remains” (2). Attending to what’s left after loss “generates a i n t e r t e x t s 2 4 politics of mourning that might be active rather than reactive, prescient rather than nostalgic, abundant rather than lacking, social rather than solipsistic ,militantratherthanreactionary”(2).ThroughtheFreudianlensof OKlancholia,theessaysinLojrfocusontheindividualandcollectivelegacies° war, genocide, slavery, decolonization, exile, reunification, gJobaUzation and AIDS. The editors conclude that “the psychic and maten^ practicesoflossanditsremainsareproductiveforhistoryandforpolitics r)’Iwouldadd,forindividualstryingtoremaketheirlivesaftersuffer¬ ing, oen silently, fi-om traumatic memories, espite the plethora of literamre on the connections between wriung ^ between silence and toxicity, Ihesitate to generalize that wnt^ 1hesitatebecauseIamsplitbetween(1)mydesireto“know awa °f evolving truth of athing, my commitment to composing a meaningoutofthechaosoflife,and(2)myawarenessthat topnlmowable,indescribable,unspeakable,that“wordsareanms Someri^^ of much experience, or the complexity of it” (O’Rei ley )● with t-h essentialcannotbeseenordescribedbutcanonlyee iectorxrti, h^eeting loss or other traumatic memory, our own or its ough our students’lives and writings, requires courage an min Courage to Connect and Witness Engaging nor easy. 5ourselves or our students in writing and healing is neither simple potential ofL depends on effort, bravery, and faith in the regenerauv praise us ^fe.Itisnotfun. Administratorsandcolleagueswillnot cates that , space for “personal” writing, even when researc m enced hv political and the individual is inextricably m pectsolet^huencingtheconununal.Theword“healing”itselfissus DeSalvoantt,^*^^hnewhatImeaninthiscontext.AccordingtoLomse with im^rovtl Way of Healing, writing has been associated detail and it H^ describes traumatic or distressing events i 125) Traum. how the writer felt about such events, then and now suggest athirH^^°”^?. Caruth, Dori Laub, and Cassie Premo Steele empathetic witn‘2'THr^ '' necessary, as weU: sharing the writing with an Steele sav« u!’^^^mgstonesoflossisimportantbecause,asPremo a^d to eon’n'? f recognizecommonthreadsintheirhistories , ^Witheachothermorefullyinthepresent:“Successfulwitnessmg , en, eads to an acknowledgment of many losses: the loss of the expenence,thelossofothersthroughdeath,thelossofalifeuntouchedby traurna, and the loss of the memories and histories of civilizations. Mourn¬ ingtheselossesconstructsusasindividualsandascultures”(9-10).When weandourstudentsfeelsafeenoughtowriteandreadaloudourstories,we chances of knowing and valuing each other and...