A Language Older Than Words (48 page)

Read A Language Older Than Words Online

Authors: Derrick Jensen

Tags: #Ecology, #Animals, #Social Science, #Nature, #Violence, #Family Violence, #Violence in Society, #Human Geography, #General, #Literary, #Family & Relationships, #Personal Memoirs, #Abuse, #Biography & Autobiography, #Human Ecology, #Effect of Human Beings On

BOOK: A Language Older Than Words
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I can try to make right those parts inside of me which should never have been made wrong, and I can grieve losses both inside and out, and I can try for all my life to improve my relationships with those around me, human and nonhuman alike. I can even accept that the oncoming train will most likely crush us— or rather continue to crush us—and will stop only under the weight of our bodies and the gumming of its gears by our flesh.

But I will not give up. I know in my bones what it is like to sit stone-faced and frozen in the face of inevitable evil, and I know in my flesh what it is to lie down and take it. I know also what it is like to resist. I know that I am no longer a child, faced with only the options of a child. I know that I am now an adult, and I know that it is at long last time I began to act like one. It is time for me to fight back.

One of the difficulties of our predicament is that once having suffered atrocity, the walls you've constructed become a part of your body, and do not come down of their own when the immediate danger has passed.

Judith Herman said, "In the aftermath of trauma people see danger everywhere. They're jumpy, they startle easily, and they have a hard time sleeping. They're irritable, and more prone to anger. This seems to be a biological phenomenon, not just a psychological one. People also relive the experience in nightmares and flashbacks. Any little reminder can set them off. For example, a Vietnam veteran involved in helicopter combat might react years later when a news or weather helicopter flies overhead."

I remembered that all through my teens and twenties when someone asked me to go waterskiing, my response externally was, "No, thanks," but my internal response was, "Fuck you." I never could figure out why until a few years ago I asked my mother, who said there had been beatings associated with waterskiing trips when I was a small child. I never knew that. I just always knew that waterskiing pissed me off. I told this to Judith.

She said, "Sometimes people understand the trigger, but sometimes they won't have complete memory of the event. They may respond to the reminder as you did, by becoming terrified or agitated or angry. Sometimes it's very subtle. Someone who was raped in the backseat of a car may have a lot of feelings every time she gets into a car, particularly one that resembles the one in which she was raped.

"This reliving, these intrusions, are not a normal kind of remembering, where the smell of cinnamon rolls, for example, may remind you of your grandmother. Instead, it's like playing the same videotape over and over, a repetitive sequence of terrifying images and sensations."

She continued, "The third group of symptoms people have— and these are almost the opposite of the intrusive nightmares and flashbacks, the dramatic symptoms—is a shutting-down of feelings, a constriction of emotions, intellect, and behavior. It's characteristic of traumatized people to oscillate between feeling overwhelmed, enraged, terrified, desperate, or in extreme grief and pain, and feeling nothing at all. People describe themselves as numb. They don't feel anything, they aren't interested in things that used to interest them, they avoid situations that might remind them of the trauma. You, for example, probably avoided waterskiing in order to avoid the traumatic memories. Waterskiing may not be much to give up, but people sometimes avoid relationships, they avoid sexuality, they make their lives smaller, in an attempt to stay away from the overwhelming feelings."

"What happens," I asked, thinking not just of myself, "if a person is traumatized repeatedly or systematically?"

"People begin to lose their identity, their self-respect. They begin to lose their autonomy and independence.

"Because people in captivity are most often isolated from other relationships—that this is so in normal captivity is obvious and intentional, but it is overwhelmingly the case in domestic violence as well, as perpetrators often demand their victims increasingly cut all other social ties—they are forced to depend for basic survival on the very person who is abusing them. This creates a complicated bond between the two, and skews the victim's perception of the nature of human relationships. The situation is even worse for children raised in these circumstances, because their personality is formed in the context of an exploitative relationship, in which the overarching principles are those of coercion and control, of dominance and subordination.

"Whether we are talking about adults or children, it often happens that a kind of sadistic corruption enters into the captives emotional relational life. People lose their sense of faith in themselves, in other people. They come to believe or view all relationships as coercive, and come to feel that the strong rule, the strong do as they please, that the world is divided into victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and rescuers. They believe that all relations are contaminated and corrupted, that sadism is the principle that rules all relationships."

"Might makes right," I said. "Social Darwinism. The selfish-gene theory. Original Sin. You've just described the principles that undergird our political, economic, scientific, and religious systems."

"And there are other losses involved. A loss of basic trust. A loss of feeling of mutuality of relatedness. In its stead is emplaced a contempt for self and others. If you've been punished for showing autonomy, initiative, or independence, after a while you're not going to show them. In the aftermath of this kind of brutalization, victims have a great deal of difficulty taking responsibility for their lives. Often, people who try to help get frustrated because we don't understand why the victims seem so passive, seem so unable to extricate themselves or to advocate on their own behalf. They seem to behave as though they're still under the perpetrator's control, even though we think they're now free. But in some ways the perpetrator has been internalized."

All of the traditional Indians I have spoken with have mentioned the importance to each of us to decolonize our minds, removing the internalized messages of the dominant culture.

Judith said, "Captivity also creates disturbances in intimacy, because if you view the world as a place where everyone is either a victim, a perpetrator, an indifferent or helpless bystander, or a rescuer, there's no room for relationships of mutuality, for cooperation, for responsible choices. There's no room to follow agreements through to everyone's mutual satisfaction. The whole range of cooperative relational skills, and all the emotional fulfillment that goes with them, is lost. And that's a great deal to lose."

"It seems to me that part of the reason for this loss is not simply the physical trauma itself, but also the fact that the traumatizing actions can't be acknowledged."

She agreed, then added, "And much more broadly, because they take place within a relationship motivated by a need to dominate, and in which coercive control is the central feature." I thought again of our culture.

She said, "When I teach this, I describe the methods of coercive control perpetrators use. It turns out that violence is only one of the methods, and it's not even one of the most frequent. It doesn't have to be used all that often; it just has to be convincing. In the battered-women's movement, there's a saying: 'One good beating lasts a year.'"

"What constitutes a good beating?"

"If it's extreme enough, when the victim looks into the eyes of the perpetrator she realizes, 'Oh, my God, he really could kill me.' "Going along with this violence are other methods of coercive control that have as their aim the victim's isolation, and the breakdown of the victim's resistance and spirit. You have capricious enforcement of lots of petty rules, and you have concomitant rewards. Prisoners and hostages talk about this all the time: if you're good, maybe they'll let you take a shower, or give you something extra to eat. You have the monopolization of perception that follows from the closing off of any outside relationships or sources of information. Finally, and I think this is the thing that really breaks people's spirits, perpetrators often force victims to engage in activities the victims find morally reprehensible or disgusting. Once you've forced a person to violate his or her moral codes, to break faith with him- or herself—the fact that it's done under duress does not remove the shame or guilt of the experience—you may never again even need to use threats. At that point the victim's self-hatred, self-loathing, and shame will be so great that you don't have to beat her up, because she's going to do it herself."

I thought immediately of the secret collaboration into which my father initiated me by my mere acquiescence. I thought, too, of the other members of my family, and of the deal we each one of us had to daily make to get through the day—
I
will not break
the silence, if only you do not kill me. If you are going to kill me, do
not let me know about it beforehand.
I mentioned to Judith a description I'd read of Jews who collaborated with Nazis: "A man who had knowingly compromised himself did not revolt against his masters, no matter what idea had driven him to collaboration: too many mutual skeletons in the closet. . . . There were so many proofs of the absolute obedience that could be expected of men of honor who had drifted into collaboration."

She responded, "Perpetrators know this. These methods are known, they're taught. Pimps teach them to one another. Torturers in the various clandestine police forces involved in state-sponsored torture teach them to each other. They're taught at taxpayer expense at our School of the Americas. The Nazi war criminals who went to Latin America passed on this knowledge. It is apparently a point of pride among many Latin American torturers that they have come up with techniques the Nazis didn't know about."

Practice doesn't make perfect. If our hearts and minds are wrong, it doesn't matter what we do, nor what justifications we emplace to buttress our decisions, our actions will further destruction. Consider the consecutive claims to virtue for deforestation. Consider the fact that my father never beat anyone without good reason. If we learn nothing else from the insistent cooptation of the words of Jesus by those who would destroy, we should learn this: if your heart is wrong—if you are a member of the race of the indecent, as Viktor Frankl put it; if you are a cannibal, as Jack Forbes said—you can and will twist any words to serve vile ends. It doesn't much matter whether you are raping a woman because Eve sinned, because you need to determine if she is a witch, or because she provoked you by the clothes she was wearing, the fact is that you are raping her. Whether the tinder is lit because a woman "does marvellous things with regard to male organs," or "in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the Apostles," or because you've got to clear slash piles from clearcuts, the result is that the world and those in it burn. In the beginning is the urge....

Jesus knew this. And I believe he knew he never had a prayer. Like the salmon who hurl themselves against concrete, he knew there could only be one ending. He could not have been so stupid as to think otherwise.

The opposite is true as well. If your heart and mind are right, it doesn't matter what you do; it will be the right thing. A father who loves his children would not and could not rape them, nor beat them. He may make mistakes, but he will not traumatize them. A person who loves the world and those in it will not destroy it. A person who loves will not rob others of their voices.

Jesus would have known this also. We all know it. Anyone who has ever been in a bad or a good relationship knows it. If the magic isn't there, it doesn't matter how many roses you send nor chocolates you receive, the most you can hope to achieve is that the both of you agree to carry on a fiction (As Kahlil Gibran wrote: "It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity, and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created in years or even generations." This is true whether the lover is a human, a piece of art, the coyote tree, or the world). The same is true for writing: no amount of rewrites will awaken words that lie dead on the page. The same is true for music: if you have to ask, it ain't jazz.

While it is true that we all know this, it is also true that on another level those who would destroy are consistently able to convince themselves that they too love the world and that they too would act only in the best interests of those around them. Recall the Nazi doctors who convinced themselves they were acting in the best interests of the Jews. Recall the Boise Cascade advertisement likening clearcuts to smallpox vaccinations. Recall that in order to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves.

Recall finally our collective response to self-evident, if inconvenient, truths. A grenade rolls across the floor. This time, with all the world at stake, do not look away.

"What is the relationship," I asked, "between breaking the silence and healing? You've written that, 'When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery.' How does that work? What happens inside survivors when the truth
is
recognized?"

She laughed. "I wish I knew. It's miraculous. I don't understand it. I just observe it, and try to facilitate it. I think it's a natural healing process that has to do with the restoration of human connection and agency. If you think of trauma as the moment when those two things are destroyed, then there is something about telling the trauma story in a place where it can be heard and acknowledged that seems to restore both agency and connection. The possibility of mutuality returns. People feel better. "The most important principles for recovery are restoring power and choice or control to the person who has been victimized, and the facilitation of the person's reconnection with her or his natural social supports, the people who are important in that person's life. In the immediate aftermath, of course, the first step is always to reestablish some sense of safety. That means getting out of physical danger, and means also creating some sort of minimally safe social environment in which the person has people to count on, to rely on, to connect to. Nobody can recover in isolation.

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