Trauma Of An Ongoing Past.

Land remembers, events, those who populated it and it is intwined with our perceptions and memories. Through its beauty and horrors, it influences our worldview and trauma carried through that window by those who were exploited and deemed. 

These traumas, especially those experienced by black people are like tattoos, and this film attempts to explore traces of unrealized and forgotten utopias of deserved respect and human dignity. 

The denial of these dreamscapes of liberation from past traumas from an ongoing past need an exorcism of sorts and often we look to psycho-analysts and therapist fro healing tool. 

Sadly, western psychological theory seems devoid of possibilities for such healing, expoing the pitfalls and shortcomings crafted from colonial and imperialism psyches.

To date black folks grapple with the memories, emotions, and associations we attribute to places of our incarceration, exploitative labour and education systems geared towards creating consensual slaves, and must end.

But how?

It appears that “self-analysis as collective” plays a crucial role in remembering and understanding the past while also managing periods of transition, an aspect deeply connected to the current works of Professor Kopano Ratele.

As a community centred psycho-therapist, he constantly explores methodologies that can be employed by black people to re-evaluate sources of their personal and collective trauma, crafting culturally oriented ways of collective healing that is not dependent on tools from western theory.

Meandering through our bonds means building bridges between pains and our desired joys, but these bridges are often built on landmines. New theoretical reflections are becoming necessary, where we abandon myths of the past, traditions we held dear but that kept us in the caves of antiquity from whence we we damaged.

Trauma is no longer a static reality that keeps fathers flocking to killer mining shafts stained with blood and sweat, where many are incapable of reeling against their collective catastrophes. It is a vantage point from which to envision a new reality of healing that does not require tools from our oppressors tools, a disavowal of curses hurled against us some supposed inferior being.

This time we have people who are approaching therapy from a multidisciplinary perspective, exposing earthbound histories and spiritual resonates with an entire continent of the wretched of this earth.

And despite all transhistorical cruelties of the imperialists, anxieties of those wanting free of mental shackles and a spiritual renewal, screams beyond schizophrenia and depression and violent tendencies that demonise black communities.

Perchance there is new lens to view the damaged souls we hold with us as a content living with perpetual ravages of wars. Maybe that grammar of the past haunting the present can be shattered as a myth that has kept the entire globe in psychological warfares with itself.

Black Trauma And Shortcomings Of Psychology 

Inter-generational trauma is a phrase that often describes the transmission of a memory of a traumatic events and the instinctual responses for personal preservation that one individual transmit throughout the rest of those to be born with their genetic code. 

That is my layman understanding of the idea, but what I can attest to is the validity of such traumas and their continued impact on black communities throughout the world.

Colonial trauma, characterised by oppression and inferiority complexes that evolved from the absorption of derogatory stigmas still plays out in contemporary social dynamics where people of colour are still deemed as inferior mental, cognitively and even creatively.

One thing I can also not deny if the fact that whatever effects of contemporary psychological trauma experienced by black pope in their communities is adding onto a heap unresolved and abnormal psychologies, many of which are associated with witchcraft.

This supposed abnormality in the psyche of Africa Mind is a rather mystical phenomenon that is both spiritually valued and yet needs to be elucidated in terms of contemporary understanding of phenomena, psychic or otherwise. 

To understand the origins of some unbeknown fear consuming a person who is assailed by auditory hallucinations means being able to dispel the idea of sorcery inducing said psychosis in the person concerned, as well as those interacting with the “abnormality” in this familiar person.

This can turn into uncomfortable feats of depressing family duels where others misunderstand situations, allowing for reactions to accumulate further traumatic occurrences through squabbles, slurs and curses hurled during moments of psychic breakdowns.

Families have been torn by such often misunderstood phenomena among black communities, and to understand the abnormal psychology that drives my people, I had draw from my own person experience of dealing with a mentally disabled kin.

There is an incident in my early adulthood when I encountered someone who suffered what we later discovered was termed “auditory hallucinations” by psychologists and psychiatrists, after a protracted struggle that saw families consulting Sangomas, Prophets and other diviners in an attempt to “heal” or at least understand the condition manifested by our kin.

Although the phenomenon began gradually, there was incredible concentration and a meditative attentiveness that suddenly grew into an obsession, and claims of “hearing insulting remarks from people” and sudden burst of laughter as though the patient were eavesdropping on people’s thoughts.

There came a point where “the patient” convinced their minds that they were exhibiting telepathic powers, but absurdly the remarks “heard” were nothing close tho the thoughts in the accused minds.

A compulsion to act out violent and injurious commands later evolved with the intensity of the auditory hallucinations, and this eventually rendered everyone mute to avoid being “mis-heard”.

Yet, this did not deter the patient from repeated attempts of self-harm, suicidal tendencies and a variety of anti-social behaviour.

And when finally the intervention of a western psychologist diagnosed her condition as An Acute Auditory Hallucinations caused by certain abnormal neural activity in the frontal lobe of the patient’s brain. 

The explanation confounded more than made sense of the situation, because even when mystics were discerning that the patient “has calling to become diviner”, the conundrum became why the wrong messages received during these telepathic seances between minds.

In short, the experience had its effects on myself as one who directly had to sift through options, and perchance in the process of attempting to understand another’s psychic dysfunction, I could have developed my own.

And considering that most of western psycho-analytical theories seem solely constructed from observations of people of western origin, I would like to posit an argument that western psycho-analysis remains baffled by the complex psychological and mental conditions that assail most people of colour. 

Psychology in general, lacks a vocabulary to analyse black trauma, and thus requires a new pair of eyes to delve in to what WEB Du Bois called the ‘Souls Of Black Folk” or what Franz Fanon termed “The Mind Of The Oppressed”.

There are a billion souls residing in each individual, that is belief that is held by many spiritualists who also subscribe to notions of memory being stored in genes.

As a filmmaker, I am immensely drawn to such ideas of multi-dimensionalities of being, therefore this inquiry into schools psychology and their analyses of black psychologies is also an expedition into my very mind, to listen to those many gorgons residing in my soul, the unexorcised demons who I must embrace.

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There surely are indecipherable codes to spheres of black psychological constructs, mental reception and transmission of everyday events in relation to what could, in Carl Jung’s terms be called, a “collective unconsciousness” of black people.

But how does an individual spontaneously arrive a divergence from ‘normal functioning of the mind “ in societal terms? 

Is this spontaneity similar to the revolutionary spontaneity that psycho-analyst Franz Fanon alluded to when he analysed psychological effects of wars for liberation on revolutionaries who themselves came to revolutionary situations through spontaneous means?

Are there specific inter-generational traumas that linger and are later triggered in individuals, taking forms of spontaneous psychosis that eventually grow to become fully fledged mental divergences?

What processes and ongoing turbulent dynamics assist to create a constant state of mind that veers between euphoria and rage, chaos and seeming 

These and other question are the driving impetus for this enquiry in the form a documentary with contemporary psychoanalysts who deal predominantly with problems within black communities, their diagnosis of populations who have otherwise been overlooked by western psycho-analysis.

It is not a methodological investigation that aims to determine what differentiates inter-continental perspectives on the effects of generational trauma, but understand what simply makes madnesses different from culture to culture, if there is such a clear difference.

I recall the vivid nightmares depicted by Ben Okri in The Famished road, where the Magic Child Azaro traverses spiritual realms and dimensions that overlap with his present incarnation among mortals. 

That other worldliness of the depictions through the authors literary genius invokes “memories” of actual beings, some similar to those experienced by people hallucinating , those living on the threshold between two conditions.

Concepts of persons being born to linger for a short while among the living, the idea of post-mortal journeys that have begun even before one in born to die… these concepts speak to the black psychological experiences that many live and interact with on a constant basis.

I have encountered children prone to scratching themselves incessantly because they are convinced warts are infesting their pores and lice are crawling all overs their skin, and others who compulsively drag some invisible web from their eyes.

These behavioural abnormalities are often attributed to witchcraft among black communities, for instance the invisible webs that string about one’s lashes being construed as obstacles by witches to obscure ones inner vision and render them incapable of “planning for their futures”.

Religion and other lingering effects of missionary activities within our societies has profound effects on our collective psyche hence it was essential to follow Professor Ratele to find and weave a counter-narratives to prevalent representations of black trauma and collective healing.

This ongoing investigation of suppressed memories, psychic remnants of traumas and the organic evolution of these components into future generations, poses questions about tendencies that seem inherited, especially around black kin.

Through an analysis of actual patients, persons deemed mad or otherwise purporting to be diviners and sorcerers, this exhaustive survey of cases that I have heard and experienced will potentially assist me to reconstruct the mosaic of broken inner worlds.

Contemplating the fate of individuals who are in close relation to those affected by mental breakdowns, and also finding ways of detecting triggers and propensities for psychological breakdown among black people of varying ages groups. 

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Images And Text By: Paul Khahliso Matela Zisiwe 

https://herri.org.za/10/