The Circulation of Trauma

Teaching a class on images of war has been an education for me. It is not my area of expertise, which perhaps made it all the more fascinating. I've had the opportunity to meet many wonderful guest speakers, think about things I don't normally think about, and make new connections when thinking about the subjects that I spend most of my time thinking about.

In our most recent class, we screened the powerful documentary Under Fire, which concerned post-traumatic stress disorder among war journalists. After the screening, we spoke with one of its producers, neuropsychiatrist Dr. Anthony Feinstein, and one of the journalists depicted in the film, Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Watson. Both were as candid and thoughtful as people who encounter trauma could be.

Watson's experiences as a war journalist are the stuff of classic tragedy. His telling of his experience being the photographer who helped change American military policy through his photos of dead American soldiers in Mogadishu in 1993 is the emotional climax of the documentary. It is also the basis of a series of poems, a play, and an opera that will be performed in 2014 in NYC. I've always felt a bit queasy about turning one person's suffering into another person's art/entertainment. Maybe it's the commodification that bugs me, the building of a career on the suffering of others. Even if the message affects others in some positive way, that other exploitative layer is there. Watson's pain also seems incredibly personal and private. In some respects, the troubles with the use of Watson's emotional and mental trauma for the purposes of art mirrors the trouble at the heart of his story: the depiction of death and suffering as a kind of desecration, no matter how noble the intentions. One idea I was left to mull over after that evening was how we can discuss trauma without it overwhelming us, or infecting us.

This relates to my musings on the circulation of ideas and stories about personal suffering online. When do our consumption of these ideas and stories and the conversations they give rise to provide us or the sufferer with solace? When do they prompt us to dwell on the suffering? When do they help us work through the suffering? These are "difficult" topics to think about, to speak about, to hear about. Watson had the feeling that there was something fundamentally wrong about recording and distributing these horrible images. Another part of him knew that they were important for the world to see.

Watson knew that some images he saw would overwhelm an audience. When he encountered piles of dead children, he didn't photograph them. He depicted the horror obliquely, showing the children's schoolbooks scattered on the ground. That ability to take in some overwhelming horror of real life and to retain it's essence through storytelling is, I'm understanding, an invaluable part of being a reporter, an artist, and maybe being a compassionate, honest human being.