Trauma and how it is perceived differently in Canada and Europe
Today in ASTU we discussed how trauma is interpreted and perceived as a result of reading Sall’s essay “Regarding the Pain of Self and Other: Trauma Transfer and Narrative Framing in Jonathan Safran Foer’s: Extremely loud and Incredibly close”, and the first chapter of Butler’s book “Frames of war: when is life grievable?”. In this blog post I will be examining how people in Canada and Europe perceive trauma differently and how it is discussed in each culture. I will not be discussing how trauma is viewed in the US because I have never lived there and do not have the required knowledge to discuss this.
Canada being the bastion of having a very open minded and accepting culture that it is looks at trauma in a very particular way. In Canada we look at trauma from across the world and say things such as, “oh that’s an awful thing that happened there” and unless an event in history has occurred that is in a way very relatable the trauma will be compared. As Canada its self has not experienced much trauma throughout its history in comparison with European nations this is natural. The fact that in Canada (from my experience) we look at trauma this way is important because we as a society here need to attempt to understand events on their own and not start looking at other events and compare numbers and who suffered more. The fact that here we can agree that everyone suffered who has experienced trauma on any scale is a testament to how young and innocent Canada is. This is not a bad thing however because it lets us view trauma across the globe with a wide perspective and see events for what they are and not for “how bad they could have been”, or “oh well others suffered more”. This is a great virtue of Canada and I hope it will not be lost as time goes on and traumatic events continue to happen.
Now we come to Europe. Europe has a long history from even before the Roman empire and their enslaving of conquered people, to the second world war, and on through the cold war up to this very day. In Europe today we see that when a traumatic event happens such as the holocaust people begin to compare it to other events that are similar, (such as the estimated 10 million lives lost during the Russian civil war, or the estimated 25 million killed during the reign of Stalin). This then brings forth the inevitable question: Who suffered more? In all cases there will be one example that supersedes all other events either in lives lost or in the inhumanity and disgust that people have for what happened. In my opinion this is devaluing the value of human life. I believe this because when looking at trauma many Europeans look at numbers and how important that ethnicity was at the time. An example of this is the estimated 25 million Russians that lost their lives at the hands of the Germans in World War II, many in Europe will look at this and respond with something similar to this: “that is shocking but the Germans also were the cause of 6-7 deaths as a result of the Holocaust”. Here we see immediately that people begin to start comparing numbers and the fact that people were imprisoned and killed simply because of their beliefs and not as a part of war (which seems to have become an expectation that numbers are very high in this respect in Europe). Trauma has also become a source of dislike towards other nations and cultures. For example, the Belgians will in the near future never fully forgive the Germans for the raping and destruction that was bestowed upon them during the First World War. Europe, because of the long list of traumatic events ever since and before the documentation of them is unable to go back to viewing trauma objectively instead of through a clouded lens of other events that are worse.
In conclusion we see that trauma is experienced and perceived differently when looking at Canada and Europe because of how long each has actually existed as an entity influenced by European values.
As always comments are appreciated