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.
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 19th 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
Comments
Post a Comment