Managing Collective Trauma

 

The last year can be described as a cascading collective trauma for Pakistanis, regardless of which side of the polarization they stand. The information highway is chaotic with newsbreaks unfolding with bewildering speed.  How can a nation cope with this unrelenting stress?

It seems it is not Pakistan alone, but nations across the world, who face this uncertainty. As journalist Elizabeth Berg  puts it - our crazy world Is making us stressed and sad. A corrosive culture is eating away at the values that we built our social structures on.

Baba Fariduddin Ganjshakar wrote “I thought I was alone who suffered. I went on top of the house, and found every house on fire.”

We ask the question, why is the world so sad? Reliefweb International reports that 9 out of every 10 countries have fallen backwards in health, education, and standard of living and “a totally overwhelmed global society is staggering from crisis to crisis”.  

The world has always faced crises, some even more devastating than what we witness, but today social media brings the chaos right into our lives. In Pakistan, bedtime literature is listening to podcasts by exiled journalists.  

One hears from ordinary bloggers “It’s quite an unpleasant world. It hurts. It truly aches to be here.,” HSP or Highly Sensitive People, feel the pain of others with greater intensity.  

There is grief about what’s been lost, anxiety about what’s going to happen next, disillusionment with the people in power, overwhelmed by the enormity of problems that are too much for any one person to solve, guilt for not doing more.

As world leaders fail to find solutions, people find their own ways to manage the floundering ship. Citizens gather together to form groups, taking responsibility to enable change – for peace, for climate change, an end to economic inequality, for reforming institutions. These are as intense as the Escape Rooms of video games, a room in which people are locked and have to solve a series of puzzles within a certain amount of time to unlock the room and achieve freedom.

Finding ways to release emotions is important to feel calm and reassured. Many young people turn to video games which have seen a 63%  increase in sales in recent years. They encourage players to cope with failure, develop emotional resilience and feel in charge of the action.

Humour has always kept the balance during social upheavals, from the medieval court jester to Mishi Khan’s tweets. George Orwell said “Each joke is a tiny revolution”. Dark humour, while more disturbing than funny, is an outlet for overwhelming grief, and anxiety, by bringing in other emotions.  

From the verses of Shahr e Ashob (a grieving city), or Shahr-e Gholghola (the City of Screams) to the poets of Kashmir and Palestine whose main concern is how to defeat death, poetry, novels, and memoirs have voiced collective trauma and provided a much needed, if temporary, calmness.

In between grueling forced labour and harsh conditions, the prisoners of 30,000 Gulag camps across the Soviet Union from 1918 – 1960 developed theater, opera, music, dance, visual arts, and literature, rivalling the quality of Moscow’s culture.  “It helped people to remain people”. Inventive with materials for paint, costumes, stage props, using whatever was at hand – flour bags for canvases, clay and pig’s blood for paint, needles from fishbones, cotton waste for wigs, they created an escape from the reality of imprisonment.

As the world stands once again as Mathew Arnold described in the 19^th century, “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born”, it waits with bated breath for the expected seismic shift in the balance of power.

In the meantime, ordinary people try not to panic by building bridges over troubled waters as best they can.  

 

Durriya Kazi

April 24, 2023

Karachi

durriyakazi1918@gmail.com