many elements all the time, if you think
about the village where a lot of my extended
family live, they’ve dealt with two cholera
outbreaks, lost all their harvest in a fire
caused by a lightning strike, had a locust
invasion once, a civil war, of course, and then
Ebola, so you just are going to have a very
different outlook from someone who’s never
faced anything like that. I think of a char-
acter like Duro; he hunts for his own food,
he knows the landscape intimately because
that’s the kind of people they are, they’re
close to the land; he’s going to have a differ-
ent outlook from someone for whom meat
is something you pick up at the supermar-
ket. So I think environment hugely shapes
outlook, much more so than something as
basic as gender.
Recently I’ve grown interested in the idea
of narrative identity. That’s a phrase that I
didn’t know when I wrote The Memory of
Love or Happiness, but I’ve been working
on an academic paper about how the way
in which we view the world informs our
sense of ourselves and also our response to
trauma, and the concept of narrative iden-
tity is relatively simple. It’s that each of us
constructs a narrative for ourselves and that
narrative is built on what a wider society tells
you, the kinds of stories your parents tell you
as you grow up, and how you make sense of
those stories, in terms of your own experi-
ence. So you can construct narrative identity.We all have one, and some people will have
a much more shared narrative identity than
others. People who all grow up in the same
village in the same way, or in the same city, in
the same era, are going to have quite similar
narrative identities.
There’s a piece of work, for example, on
the different narrative identities of Israeli
settler kids and Palestinian kids. And they’ve
got very different narrative identities based
on the stories they’re told by the outside
society. So the Palestinian kids are constantly
given stories of loss and of sacrifice, and the
Israeli kids are given stories of resistance and
endeavor, success through endeavor. People
who look at conflict resolution are now look-
ing at narrative identity as something that
you have to know before you go in to try to
bring certain groups together. The way that
narrative identity affects trauma has to do
with what expectations you grow up with.
Something you hear very often in terms
of the Western experience of suffering is “my
life was ruined.” That’s something I have a
real problem with—people being told that
their lives are ruined. That is the contentious
bone at the center of the study of trauma and
resilience, and this is something that Boris
Cyrulnik identified as the biggest obstacle to
overcoming trauma. If you believe your life
is ruined, then your chances of overcoming
that trauma are going to be adversely affect-
ed. He saw that otherwise well-intentioned
mental health professionals were treating
kids that had encountered violent or terrify-
ing situations as though they were already
damaged, already lost causes.
So narrative identity shapes us in all
these ways. When someone’s narrative iden-
tity excludes the idea of suffering, they have
fewer tools with which to handle the result-
ing trauma than someone whose narra-
tive self is differently constructed. Cultural
trauma theory has always looked at this idea
of empathy, writing about trauma as produc-
ing empathy, which I think is correct. I was
reading about Susan Sontag talking about
the pain of others, where she says: Should we
look at these things, are we being prurient,
does it serve a purpose?Parssinen: Looking back at traumatizing
events?Forna: With Sontag it was about looking
at photographs of other people’s suffering.
When I think about literature, what purpose
does observing suffering through literature
serve? The cultural trauma theorists of the
1990s said it can evoke empathy, and I think
that’s right. I think the danger is empty
empathy, where we just look and listen and
nothing comes out of it. I think the most
important thing about writing about trauma
is to give agency, to reflect people’s trauma
in a way that makes sense of what has hap-
pened to them in the wider picture of the
world and doesn’t leave them feeling like an
exhibit of damage.October 2018Keija Parssinen is the
author of The Ruins of Us,
which won a Michener-
Copernicus Award,
and The Unraveling of
Mercy Louis, which earned
an Alex Award from the American Library
Association. A Yaddo and MacDowell Fellow,
she will be an assistant professor of English
at Kenyon College in the fall.Each of us constructs a
narrative for ourselves and
that narrative is built on
what a wider society tells
you, the kinds of stories
your parents tell you as
you grow up, and how you
make sense of those stories,
in terms of your own
experience.The most important
thing about writing
about trauma is to give
agency, to reflect people’s
trauma in a way that
makes sense of what
has happened to them
in the wider picture of
the world and doesn’t
leave them feeling like an
exhibit of damage.PARSSINEN PHOTO: SHANE EPPING
WORLDLIT.ORG 27