syn.tax

The Shadow of Me knows the Shadow of You

Blogpost #3

by Lisa Daley, Danielle Rueb, Yvette Stone, Rebekah Vickery

The real unsayable of trauma is the trauma of language itself.¹

I need someone to be with me in my wordlessness
Like I’m known in the silence of the womb.

The vibes of shadows echo in the spaces we occupy
The violence
The silence
Painted bodies of trauma
Red face love
Brutal credence
What didn’t we use

What didn’t we see
Highlighted thoughts: the unsayable

Signifiers express what we can’t say or know
Lightning condensed beneath my skin

Its own logic spoken in disguise
The snow globe flips,
Keeps unresolved
Repeating

We repeat what we cannot bear
In what ways do we repeat the stories
we cannot bear within our own bodies?
The stories that we hold of our individual trauma,
our collective trauma?
Strange fruit² is the result of our repeated traumas
we cannot bear

What happens when we cannot bear the trauma in our bodies
How are you repeating that
Whipping me
Lying to me
Telling me to see that I lost my story
I am

My lost stories are just that
Telling the secrets outside of space and time
What line will I write?
To satisfy you.

The idea of leaving s p a c e³
Allows us to wayfind
To find our way into lost stories
To find out way to the unsayable
When you’re gone
I repeat what i can’t bear
Lynching black bodies
Brown bodies
Different bodies that aren’t white
Gendered bodies collectively suffered
For the trauma re-enacted
Sacrificed for some love of power and wealth.

It’s the strange fruit of the repeated traumas we can’t bear
I’ve been worse
The shame, the love, explosions of embers beneath my skin
It’s no justice for the long haul
Taught what to say when the story
Is outside of acceptable
So my body wreaks of combustible loss
Flames lit
Inside
Pathways that could lead to redemption
Generations of trauma
Dark sides of destruction
Repeating the secrecy of the trauma
The light exposes
The truth of re-enactment
We have to do something is because we are attracted to violence
We never satiate that violence
Become the abuser
The pathway
Navigated with integrity
Dignity

How do we redeem our attraction
To violence
To silence
Bound with it for life
Redeemed tho
Thoroughly way-finding as we pick

I want to be known in my wordlessness as I have been known in the silence of the womb

through the forest
Of
The parallel process
Everything in life is a paradox
Parallel

As therapists we re-enact towards goodness
We’re drawn to violence but as the therapist,
We also become the ‘abuser’
Can we re-enact destruction towards life
As therapists, healers, pastors, and friends

I don’t have words, words are not adequate
How do you speak when you’re looking at something so devastating?
Powerless to change it
To be cast out of the womb is shattering
It’s terror
We each experience terror so differently
We understand terror, we have felt it
Then with the other, we see the horror and the violence
Walk alongside
Catch them
The Samaritan
The being with
On witness

Kindness is the only breaking that I can bear with a full hope
People will know
It’s okay to be violent
To know my darkness
The shadow of me knows the shadow of you

Endnotes:

1. Annie Rogers, The Unsayable: Understanding the Hidden Language of Trauma (New York, NY: Random House, 2006), p. 293.
2. James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2019), p. 136–7.
3. Pádraig Ó Tuama, Sorry for your Troubles. (Norfolk: UK Canterbury Press, 2013), p. xiii. Pádraig Ó Tuama leaves space between letters as a way of “indicating the importance of silence, listening, grief, and the things beyond words.” ibid., p. xiii.

Bibliography

Cone, James H. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2019.

Ó Tuama, Pádraig. Sorry for your Troubles. Norfolk: UK Canterbury Press, 2013.

Rogers, Annie. The Unsayable: Understanding the Hidden Language of Trauma. New York, NY: Random House, 2006.