(c) 2005 Lorraine Bonner

Oakland, California

I'm a physician, and when I was in private practice I would have a little story I would tell to my patients of African descent who had high blood pressure. I would say that in any group of people there would always be a range of the degree to which their bodies held onto salt, and water with it, because all the body fluids are salty. Tears are salty, blood is salty, sweat. Some people would be very tight-fisted about their salt, their kidneys would be very efficient at holding onto salt. Other people would lose salt more freely. Most people would be in the middle.

Since these were non-traumatized people, they could pay attention to the messages their bodies sent them, and eat in a way that kept their salt in balance. The people who lost salt more freely would be the people who loved salted fish, the people who held onto salt would not care so much for salted fish.

In the hold of the slave ship, these two neighbors would be losing salt and water. They would be sobbing, they would have open, weeping sores where the chains and the wooden planks of the ship had worn away their skin. They would be bleeding from the lashes of the whips, sweating, and vomiting from seasickness. They would have diarrhea. Water would be rationed. The neighbor whose kidneys held less tightly to salt would be more likely to become dehydrated, and would die sooner. The one whose kidneys held on more tightly might make it to shore, and have a better chance of having children. Our ancestors.

Fast forward to fast food nation, where salt is everywhere, and the very trait which saved the life of our ancestors now makes us more vulnerable to high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, and kidney failure. And because of trauma, we are too cut off from our bodies to hear the messages that would tell us to stay away from those salty fries. We have to learn to listen to our bodies all over again.

The Maafa was a traumatic event of incomparable proportions. When we use the word trauma, we are already talking about an event which overwhelms the normal human capacity. Trauma is not missing the bus, or facing an algebra exam. The earthquake, the firestorm, were traumas, and caused great suffering, but trauma of human design brings us face to face with human evil and our own vulnerability.

Information about the human response to trauma has come from several sources. The term post-traumatic stress syndrome was first used to describe the symptoms of combat veterans, especially after the Viet Nam War. The women's movement brought to the surface an awareness of intimate partner violence, and child sexual and physical abuse. There has been extensive documentation of the survivors of the Holocaust of the Jews, and additional research on subsequent generations. And of course, all over the world today there is a depressing abundance of violence, brutality, torture, rape, betrayal and captivity to help us understand what the ancestors went through.

But the studies looking at the unique experience of the Maafa through the lens of trauma analysis and following it through the generations has not yet been done. This is of intense importance, especially because, although the Great Catastrophe has ended, remnants of it remain, in the inequalities in health care and life span, in education, housing, jobs, and incarceration, and in the general indifference of the larger society to these inequalities.

We can't talk about trauma without talking about denial. Denial is the primary stance of the perpetrator: "What you think is happening is not really happening. The slaves were happy. The Africans were heathens who deserved to be enslaved. And any way all that is in the past now, let's move on."

Denial is also the primary defense of the victim:" This isn't really happening. It isn't happening to me. I don't feel it, I don't feel anything. It's not that bad. I deserve it. If I improve myself enough it won't happen anymore."

Trauma results in an overwhelming breakdown of a person's identity, both the internal sense of who you are and the identity derived from one's relationships to family, community, the world and God. Trauma victims lose their sense of self, come to see themselves as animals, vegetables, stones, robots. The perpetrators took even the Africans' names. Their victims became fragmented, without the energy to spare to make meaningful contacts with others. Trauma victims lose trust in the world, lose their belief in the orderliness and dependability of reality. This results in an unimaginably deep despair.

Trying to make some sense of the senseless, victims blame themselves. They wonder what they could have done to deserve this horrible fate. They feel the shame and guilt that should belong to the perpetrator, they feel they have somehow failed. These are human response to trauma. Who can bear to look at this? Isn't denial preferable?

Generations of rage that cannot be expressed against the perpetrators turn back against the self. These are all examples of suicide:

1. The person who cares for others at the expense of her own well being

2. The person who neglects a health problem, such as hypertension, diabetes, or that lump in her breast. (I once took care of a woman who came to the emergency room because of pain from a large cancer in her breast. I asked her why she hadn't come in sooner to have it taken care of. She just looked at me and it was as if I could read her mind: "This is my ticket off the plantation. Why would I let anyone take it away from me?")

3. The person who shoots the person who looks like the person he sees in the mirror.

4. The person addicted to substance or behavior.

And perhaps the most insidious, identification with the perpetrator. We know there were black overseers far more harsh than the white perpetrators. There were slaves who betrayed their fellows. There were black people who joined the FBI to infiltrate civil rights organizations. And today, in our world, how many of you beat your children? How many of you deny beating your children: "It's not so bad, it's just a spanking. They deserve it. I was beaten and I turned out okay." Listen deeper. That's all I can say. Listen deeper to that child inside of you.

The foundation of recovery from trauma is the establishment of a safe relationship with another human being and telling the trauma story in the context of that relationship. Those of us who lived through the earthquake and the fire heard that from all the experts.

But this is the Maafa: Being awakened by screaming men bursting into your home, into your entire village, seeing your friends and family killed and beaten in front of you, being assaulted yourself, seeing your home burned to the ground, everything you had lost, and then, before you could even absorb that, being chained together and marched to the coast, those who fell being killed and left on the side of the path, being stripped naked and branded and crowded into tiny cells and if you survived all that, being loaded on a ship, tossing and turning on the ocean for weeks, people dying all around you, and if you were one of the lucky ones, landing in north America, subjected to brutal slavery, then Jim Crow, lynching, segregation, and now the racist disregard of a nation that just doesn't care.

Where is the safe relationship? Where the opportunity to tell the story?

I can imagine that there were a range of survivors in terms of resilience, just as in terms of salt retention. I can imagine that the most resilient were able, at some point, to begin to reach out, to make connections with others, to begin to establish community. I can imagine those individuals providing a nucleus of recovery and comfort.

But how could the survivors tell the trauma story? For one thing, the perpetrators made sure that people who spoke the same language were separated from one another. For another, the enormity of it, the complete breakdown of coherence and meaning, the overwhelming emotions of terror, grief, rage and shame placed the whole experience far beyond words, however deeply it remained in the wounded psyches of our ancestors. Only through art, especially music, could the story be told.

As children were born, the whole community, despite relentless attacks on its integrity, collectively raised them. Even for the mothers who felt like robots, like stones. Especially for those mothers.

And they resisted. In countless ways they resisted. From breaking tools, to escape, to rebellions and uprisings, to acts of defiance like that of Frederick Douglass who fought the man who had been hired to break him, fought him to a standstill, and remained unbroken.

Resistance, the studies tell us, also promotes survival.

We are living in the aftermath of the trauma of the Maafa, and we are also the inheritors of the resistance to it. We must not deny how injured we are. Parts of each of us have become stonelike. Parts of each of us would really rather die. We must address these terrible injuries to our ability to trust and to connect, and we have to listen to ourselves and each other very carefully so as not to hurt or be hurt any further. In no other way can we hope to achieve the unity that will lead to our freedom. We must speak the truth in word, music, dance and art, to tell the ancestors' story and our own.