Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  Dr Rachel Yehuda is professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and the director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. In a study of Holocaust survivors and their children, Yehuda and her team claimed to show that the trauma experienced by survivors incarcerated in a Nazi concentration camp, or who experienced or witnessed torture, or were forced to hide during the Second World War, created epigenetic changes that also showed up in their children, proving ‘epigenetic inheritance’. In other words, the findings assert the traumatic experience of one person can affect subsequent generations and that trauma can be transmitted biologically.

  Such claims remain controversial, and bioinformatics researcher Ewan Birney criticises the paper for being ‘riddled with flaws’, saying the ‘absurdly small’ sample group of thirty-two people renders it redundant. Birney has legitimate concerns, but Yehuda is not alone in insisting this research has merit. Amy Bombay, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Dalhousie University in Halifax, has researched epigenetic transmission in relation to the ‘Indian residential school system’ in Canada, a network of religious assimilationist boarding schools for First Nations peoples akin to the Aboriginal missions in Australia. Bombay, who is Anishinaabe (Rainy River First Nation), was motivated to conduct this research by her own family’s extensive history of incarceration in the schools. In a 2015 interview with Rosanna Deerchild on Canada’s CBC Radio, Bombay maintains that ‘experiences and the environment can basically turn on or off genes so that the function of those genes is changed. In terms of how that is transmitted generationally, we know that if those changes happen to be in the germ line, so in the egg or the sperm, they have the potential to be transmitted across generations.’ Bombay adds that this research has been crucial to helping First Nations families and communities understand their legacy of trauma and begin to heal it. It also comes in handy as a riposte to those in the non-indigenous population who wonder why First Nations peoples can’t ‘just get over it’.

  Even if epigenetic transmission cannot be irrefutably established (yet), there is evidence of complex processes of transmission accounting for the way second-generation (and beyond) survivors experience the effects of their forebears’ trauma, theoretically argued in literary trauma theory and interdisciplinary research. In other words, science is not the only way this question can be approached. There are also compelling literary testimonies of transgenerational transmissions that bear witness by way of a creative empiricism.

  Trauma theorist Marianne Hirsch combines feminist theory and memory studies to argue that the traumatic experiences of one generation can be experienced by the next generation. She refers to this as ‘postmemory’, which she describes as ‘a structure of inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience’ and a ‘consequence of traumatic recall but (unlike post-traumatic stress disorder) at a generational remove’. Literary studies scholar Ernst van Alphen counter-claims that the transmission of trauma between generations is impossible, because memory is fundamentally individual and ‘indexical’, and as such the memory of an event cannot be transferred from one being to another. Postmemory, Hirsch qualifies, is not identical to memory: it is ‘post’. It is not the same memory as that of the person who experienced the trauma but it ‘approximates’ that memory in its ‘affective force’. Postmemory, then, is:

  not mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. To grow up with such overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own stories and experiences displaced, even evacuated, by those of a previous generation. It is to be shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic events that defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension. These events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present. This is, I believe, the experience of postmemory and the process of its generation.

  Art Spiegelman’s lauded graphic hybrid novel Maus is one of the most famed examples of this kind of testimony. ‘My father bleeds history’ are the first words of this comic masterpiece, penned and drawn by Spiegelman, the American-raised son of two Polish Jews who survived the Nazi concentration camps against the odds. Based on his interviews with his father (Spiegelman’s mother died by suicide when he was twenty), Maus depicts, in multimodal nuance, the ways trauma is transmitted from one generation to another. In MetaMaus, which details the making of Maus, Spiegelman describes the book as a ‘three-hundred-page yahrzeit candle’, adding that his ‘unconventional way of remembering’ was an act of commemoration, ‘more meaningful to me, actually, than a tombstone that I don’t think I’ve ever gone to visit in the last twenty years’.

  Lily Brett, a German-born, Australian-raised and US-based novelist, essayist and poet, has written profound poetic testimony of her second-generation experience of the Holocaust. Both her parents survived Auschwitz before immigrating to Melbourne. Her poetry collections, The Auschwitz Poems and After the War, detail the traumatic legacy and daily transmissions of living with survivors of heinous crimes. In one poem, titled ‘Everything Looked Normal’, Brett recounts the suffering behind the veneer of normality, noting the four locks on the front door, her mother’s obsessive cleaning and the curtains hanging ‘weighted with banished sadness’.

  Weighted with banished sadness, and with the postmemories of ancestors killed in massacres, driven from country, enslaved as domestic labour, stolen from family in keeping with the governmentally orchestrated genocidal assimilation project, the Dylan Vollers in the ‘land of the fair go’ endure fresh horrors that are designed to set them on the straight and narrow, but that instead add to the mother lode of trauma that gets passed down the line. I wonder about the abusers who work in those facilities, the ones tasked with managing the Vollers. I wonder if they signed on already thugs or whether the system, to some degree, made monsters of them. The systems (read: discourses) that ensnare us also define us, at least if you take Foucault’s word for it.

  I’m what they call a ‘sessional’, one of the growing army of casual hired hands recruited by the twenty-first-century university to do teaching grunt-work and save the institutional coffers a packet on sick leave, annual leave and research support. This rise of casualisation is evident across a number of industries, but it’s also part of a global trend in which the tertiary education sector, once hailed as a decidedly public project, has become increasingly corporatised and profit-driven; a trend fuelled, at least to some degree, by substantial withdrawals of government funding. I never know where I’m working next, and often my contract isn’t confirmed until the week before classes start. I move around, adapting to new systems, new coordinators, new teaching teams, every few months. I’m among the swelling ranks of a new ‘precariat’ class, forced to work as a short-contract labourer, lurching from semester to semester on a thin-ice foundation of job insecurity. I don’t have time to ponder the effects of these conditions, but then again, I don’t have to. My body keeps score and presents me with the tally in the form of stress- and fatigue-related behaviours, the flipside of the purposeful pleasures of teaching.

  During a Science Friction interview on ABC’s Radio National, Yehuda cited a study she led investigating epigenetic changes before and after psychotherapy, assuring host Natasha Mitchell that the findings indicated positive outcomes post-therapy. This supports, she said brightly, a conclusion that a beneficial environment and relational influence that facilitates stress reduction can go some way to reversing the effects of trauma. That’s cause for optimism, but the converse is also true, unfortunately – many negative, high-tension and insecure environments exacerbate the stress response associated with trauma. And there is no shortage of such environments: the prevalence of questionable enterprise agreements and contract work over job security; the housing affordability crisis; a social safety net full of gaping holes.

  Traumata has prepared us well for precarity. Who better
to dive and swoop and juggle and change direction at a moment’s notice than those who have learned how to master those skills at trauma’s heels? For some, though, it leads to breaking point. A newspaper story by George Morgan circulating in my social media feed told the sorry tale of ‘John – the “unknown scholar” – philosopher, contrarian, a member of the academic precariat’ who taught at a leading university before he killed himself. John, single and with no living relatives, had scraped by on casual tutoring since completing his PhD in philosophy fifteen years prior to his death. He was passed over for numerous faculty positions, as I myself have been, in a fiercely competitive environment where, as one colleague put it, ‘luck and politics’ often decide who gets the gig. When no offers of work came in during his last semester, John had no means of paying his rent. Facing the increasingly hostile welfare net less than accommodating of precariat workers, and no doubt depressed and disheartened by systematic devaluing, John took a train to the Blue Mountains and jumped off a cliff, his body found by a bushwalker. Given John was one of the more apparently privileged among us – male and white – it bears thinking about the implications for those with fewer advantages. I’m aware that even in precarity I too am relatively fortunate.

  I can thank feminism for my three degrees, for the privilege of this precarity, for my being able to pay my rent by teaching university rather than cleaning toilets, but we’ve got a long way to go, baby. In Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto, Jessa Crispin argues that feminism has been co-opted by neoliberalism, the New Age and the media in the course of becoming popularised. While some of her claims are, in my view, troubled and others highly debatable, there is some validity to the idea that for a certain kind of comfortable white woman living the individualistic capitalistic dream, feminism has become less a social justice movement and more a ‘social justice warrior lite’ posture (think Mia Freedman and all those ‘You go girl!’ memes). Pockets of lively fire-in-the-belly activism aside, has western feminism undergone a kind of pasteurisation process in which its dangerous microorganisms (healthy anger, the capacity to think deeply and critically, collectivism and sisterhood) are no longer present in many contexts in which ‘feminism’ is evoked or implied?

  We’ve settled for too little, says Crispin, sold ourselves short: we’ve accepted the promise of mere entry into existing institutional and cultural power structures where we were previously denied access. Apart from the obvious question of who constitutes this ‘we’, it’s worth considering whether the rights and freedoms won by feminist forebears have given way to a red herring, a sleight of hand, a trap for those whose declared feminism goes no further than a focus on selfhood or sisterhood within a particularly raced and classed niche. To the degree that there may be such a thing as the faux-feminism Crispin rails against, it suffers from blinkered whiteness and homologising. And it is not only entirely unequal to the task of dismantling aeons of patriarchy, it actively works against it – padding identity, promoting feel-good delusions, and giving predominantly middle- and upper-class women a sense they’re making a positive contribution on behalf of other women when they’re really reassuring men who don’t deserve reassurance and feathering their own reformist nests.

  In any event, it’s important to remember that there is a difference between appeasement and taking a stand, between being market-friendly and revolutionary, between ethics committees coming up with ways to make vivisection incrementally less torturous for imprisoned non-human animals and the non-negotiable demand for the abolition of animal experimentation. An understanding of feminism as defined by the Oxford Dictionary – ‘The advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes’ – is perhaps too simplistic and not visionary enough for the urgent challenges we face (that pesky ‘we’ again). Does mainstream ‘feminism’, packaged for safe mass consumption, with its project of equality between men and women, aim too low? Do we need a new word for clear-eyed analysis of the unholy trinity of patriarchy, rabid liberalism and end-stage capitalism, in which not only feminised beings, but many men too, are disadvantaged and suffer – for an advocacy that seeks a complete re-imagining of the social order?

  If the term ‘feminism’ still comes in handy in the meantime it’s because of things like this: students constantly call me ‘Miss’, despite my telling them from day one that my formal title is Dr Atkinson, but they can call me Meera. It’s well known that gender bias in the student–teacher relationship is commonplace and numerous studies indicate that male teachers consistently get more glowing student evaluations than female teachers, regardless of actual merit. For example, researchers at North Carolina State University conducted a study in which students in online-only classes were told the tutor they never saw was either male or female, and then were asked to rate the instructors on twelve different traits at the end of courses. ‘We found that the instructor whom students thought was male received higher ratings on all 12 traits, regardless of whether the instructor was actually male or female,’ said Lillian MacNell, lead author of the subsequent paper, crucially adding that the ‘ratings that students give instructors are really important, because they’re used to guide higher education decisions related to hiring, promotions and tenure’.

  An article by Aviva Shen – titled ‘Students See Male Professors As Brilliant Geniuses, Female Professors As Bossy and Annoying’ – noted that women ‘are far more likely to be called “feisty,” especially if they teach humanities classes’.

  I teach a subject called Ideas and Society. During a lecture on ‘Imperialism and Colonialism: “the west and the rest”’, I ask students if they think colonialism is inherently racist. Every semester the majority think it is. Most students today have benefited from a primary and high school education that addresses Australian history with more nuance and clarity than my Anglo-normative formative education ever did, but I wonder if they would have been any more likely to rally around the Aboriginal girl surrounded by jeering bullies.

  Racial bullying is not the only kind of bullying. Children are sponges who soak up the bigotries of the society into which they are born and regurgitate them. As such, homophobic, transphobic, ableist and sexualised bullying commonly manifest in schools, though it is, interestingly, girls who are thought to lead the field in sexuality-related bullying. Bullying between girls is held to be less often about strong-arming and shirt-fronting and more often related to sexual status or their perceived attractiveness or promiscuity.

  When I think back to those occasions when I found myself on the sharp end of bullying, it is girl bullies that mostly come to mind, though of course this perception is skewed to my own experience. There are bullyboys, and teacher-bullies, like the one who picked on me ceaselessly when we moved to Stuart’s Waverley sandstone house, but girls can turn on girls with a ferociousness that can be especially wounding. According to Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, the peak bullying phase for girls is between the ages of ten and fourteen. Girls, she says, use ‘backbiting, exclusion, rumors, name-calling, and manipulation to inflict psychological pain on victimized targets. Unlike boys, who tend to bully acquaintances or strangers, girls frequently attack within tightly knit networks of friends, making aggression harder to identify and intensifying the damage to the targets.’ Simmons writes that in almost every group session she held with girls ‘someone volunteered her wish to have been born a boy because boys can “fight and have it be over with”’. Clearly, this doesn’t mean bullying by or between boys is any easier for its victims to endure, but it does point to a cultural genesis in the differences between the ways boys and girls bully.

  According to the National Coalition Against Bullying (NCAB) website, 27 per cent of Australian students are bullied every few weeks or more often and 13.5 per cent report having lies spread about them at school. Reporting from a 2005 conference on bullying, Paula Beauchamp quoted NCAB spokesperson Dr Michael Carr-Gregg describing girl bullying as hi
erarchical, with a ‘queen bee’ (a wonderfully evocative metaphor popularised by Rosalind Wiseman in her book Queen Bees and Wannabes) at the top followed by ‘sidekicks, bankers, float-ins and targets’. A friend of mine, now retired, was a high school teacher for more than three decades. Having worked at a girls school for many years, she had her own term for girl bullying. ‘I called it “ice” bullying,’ she says. ‘I noticed it all through my career. They just “ice” some poor kid out of existence.’ Despite what might be written in policy, bullying was rarely addressed at her school. ‘It’s much harder to detect as a teacher. You’re busy teaching, not busy observing every nuance of every group.’ She points out that inadequate communication between teachers is part of the problem. ‘There’s a cone of silence for the classroom teacher. You could be teaching a kid six times a week and not know they have any issues. You only know there are problems by the look on their face, intuition and academic performance going down.’

  It makes broad sense then, that many forms of bullying can be viewed as a feminist issue and many educators see the endemic of sexualised bullying as internalised sexism. Embedded in societal beliefs about femininity are age-old assumptions that relations between girls are trivial and that women and girls are inherently ‘bitchy’, sly by nature, and prone to gossip and ridicule. But the subtle, backhanded and sideways nature of girl bullying might more accurately be linked to the way in which girls and women are heavily conditioned to be ‘nice’. In the film Mean Girls, Cady – who has recently started high school back in the United States, having previously lived in Africa – says of one conflict: ‘I knew how this would be settled in the animal world, but … in “girl world” all the fighting had to be sneaky.’ Simmons backs the conclusion that girls tend to act anger out via clandestine and abusive behaviours. She focuses on girls’ reluctance to talk openly about their feelings of anger towards each other and their resistance to confrontation, suggesting this is fertile ground for bullying.