Hello human!
We are almost done with the first month of 2016! Hope all of your courses are going well! During ASTU class this past month we focused on the the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and the two following articles: “Regarding the Pain of Self and Other: Trauma Transfer and Framing in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” by Ilka Saal and “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect (Frames of war: when is life grievable?)” by Judith Butler.Based on these three readings the causes and effects of trauma caught my attention. An idea I would like to share with you today is how trauma on someone’s live can be caused by a person who is close to you or one that you consider an “enemy.”
Butler mentions, “The Body is a social phenomenon: it is exposed to others, vulnerable by definition” (33).This quote made me think about how our body as a whole (physical/spiritual) is at some point bounded to other people in society. Why? Because from a sociological perspective to develop as a “human” it presupposes the interactions with other humans and how we socialize with them. This actually helps us to develop a sense of ourselves. This point helped me understand how trauma presented in Oskar and prisoners in Guantanamo differ because both had different “bounds” that influenced their trauma. To make it clearer, the lost of his father (a loved and close bound) influenced Oskar’s life because to cope with this trauma ,as we saw during the reading, he began to try to find out reasons for his father death. On the other hand, on Butler’s article we can identify how prisoners’ trauma was influenced by the harsh punishments they had to pass through during the jail. This can be seen as a distant bound because prisoners did not have any type of close relationships with the high powers that implement rules on the prisons. Also the way they cope with this type trauma is different because instead of trying to find reasons (as Oskar did) they wrote down poems where they expressed how they were feeling under the harsh treatments of the jails.
After realizing how people cope with traumatic events depending on how their relationships (close bound/separate bound) were with the ones who influence the traumas in their lives it made me think that no matter what type of bound you have with another human being it is most likely going to influence on the development of yourself.
Do you agree or disagree on the fact that interactions with other humans create a sense of self in ourselves?
Thank you for reading!
Maria Jose Zegarra
