Welcome back readers!
I think that if there is one thing I learned in this class throughout the year is the fact that we carry the burdens from the past and make them our own. We carry the wounds from the generations before us and make them our own, and this action might well be out of empathy and understanding, but more often than not I find that we do this because society expects us to. This is the best way I can define trauma transfer which is probably the most important topic in our ASTU class. But trauma transfer is so much more than this; when I think about it I go back to the first semester and I think of words such as “collective memory” and “national memory”, I think about “forgetting” and how my understanding of the word has changed completely because of this class.
I like to go back to Farhat Shahzad, the first scholar that we read, because her definition and analysis of collective memory changed everything for me. This was my first “aha” moment because I learned that everything I recollect in my memory is not really my own. It started making sense because there is no way I can remember what happened in the Holocaust or the Bosnian War because I wasn’t even born yet. But I know about them, I have a fair knowledge of what happened in both instances because I read about them, watched movies about them, and people told me about them. I know about 9/11 and I remember where I was when it happened, but I also remember being a very confused three-year-old girl who kept asking her dad why my mom couldn’t fly out to meet us the next day. But my understanding of 9/11 came later on in my life, when I was old enough to understand why airport security was air-tight among other things.
Furthermore, I think trauma transfer is so much more than what we learn from past history, I think about it and trauma transfer happens in today’s world. We hear about the bombings in Paris, Boston, Brussels, etc. because the news travel so fast that within the hour the event happens, everyone knows about it. We all share our grief through social media and we send our support to the people in the rough situations. Trauma transfer used to be about the people that lost their lives in horrible tragedies and how that pain and suffering transfers to the generations of today, and how we keep their memory alive by talking about them and acknowleging what was wrong with the issue. But now, trauma transfer is posting a picture on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter with people holding hands with the country’s flag on the background.
I don’t know if we live more afraid now, but we are definetely more aware about what goes on in the world. In this way, it is easier for old wounds to resurface, for new wounds to appear, and for hatred and fear to develop. In this way, countries are more aware about what they have to protect their citizens from, but they also have more pressure because the world is always watching.
Thank you for reading!
