Three books, a short film and a talk

This morning, I read somewhere that Israel has a huge mental health crisis to deal with after all the tormenting and killing of Palestinians the IDF have been doing in Gaza and across the West Bank.

It made me think about what kind of trauma must be going on amongst the Palestinians, currently starving and trying not to drown in their flooded encampments, surrounded by the gangster-guards Israel has gifted them instead of aid and respite, and about how many peoples around the world are in that kind of existential trauma, either as perpetrators or as victims of colonialist violence, and why we have to persuade so many people that such catastrophe could come to us, before they’ll join us in addressing it.

Which made me think again about the way we’ve been taught to think about the generational trauma Holocaust training describes.

Which made me think again about Seven Jewish Children

Which made me think again about Inherited Fate by Noémi Orvos-Tóth, who teaches about quite ordinary family disasters – an unwanted child, a disappearing father – and how they can affect the psychology and well-being of more than one generation.

One of the points the book explores is the way ordinary-family-disaster-generated-trauma-response can manifest as a need to believe in a morally fair world, an attitude which leads us to deny so much; or it can lead to dysfunctional notions about boundaries – individuals either not having or not knowing how to maintain personal boundaries, or else having over-zealous ideas about the boundaries they and/or their families should maintain – I started wondering whether that can scale up to irrational ferocity over territorial and even state boundaries.

There’s also the rather healthier discussion about the need for families to experience producing and consuming food together (both of which are now almost consigned to history), and the affects on children of parents keeping secrets…

Which made me think again about Missing Persons or My Grandmother’s Secrets by Clair Wills…

I didn’t so much read as devour that book! I was enthralled by the blending of family history, folk-tales, superstition and religion in the mossy, rushy landscapes and little stone-wall farms of southern Ireland, an intoxicating brew that in Wills’ family was passed down under the title of ‘memories’, which for her as a writer became an irresistible, cryptic puzzle.

It’s beautiful, lyrical and evocative, but it’s not a happy or a nostalgic book. I came out the other side astonished anew by the range and ruthlessness of the disasters faced by the people of Ireland over the last few hundred years, and a newly burning awareness that most of them were the result of British notions of empire-management.

It jangled in my mind in many keys because I’d just finished reading Bea Campbell and Rahila Gupta’s Planet Patriarchy, a book that roves around the world in search of answers to questions like Is patriarchy inevitable? Are patriarchy and capitalism one thing or two? Have they been successfully challenged anywhere? And Why does everything everywhere smell of US imperialism? And that world-scale story speaks to the local, whispered tale of Wills’ discovery of why the powerless and the traumatized treasure secrets they can keep, turn into enigmatic stories, and pass on like magical weapons.

A very serious set there, but those books burn in the mind because of the ideas that UK feminism and UK politics are currently struggling with, and because of Tony Blair’s latest job offer, which stands as damning evidence that the US and the UK still don’t acknowledge the harm that they do, and which explains why am I going to London to listen to this…

…if you went to FiLiA this year, and experienced the toxic divide in the women’s attitudes to Palestine, I’d strongly advise you to do the same.

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