Shattered Roots and Shared Scars: Manifesto of Cultural Trauma

Have you ever been to a place where a sudden feeling of sadness and depression envelops you, as if the entire city is bathed in a mournful silence. A place that makes you sad and stressed for no apparent reason. As if the city has undergone some metamorphosis that resulted in an unexpected undercurrent of melancholy that knocks at your door every morning like an uninvited guest. As if the streets you are walking on, echoes the distant whispers of pain and trauma. You wonder if the city has a kind of dark past dominant over the current cityscape like a ghost, projecting echoes of pain in every house of the town, into the memory of every citizen, into the corners of every marketplace. 

As much as we like to believe that humanity is united with the cohesive force of love, do we ever wonder about the possibility that mankind is bound together by the cohesive force of pain and trauma? As a matter of fact, the shared experiences of pain have formed a common past that every resident of the town carries in their memory, having their own share of this enduring affliction. 

This phenomenon is referred to as cultural trauma, a shared traumatic event that shattered the entire community. “A social crisis must become cultural crises in order to be a cultural trauma of a community” Jeffery Alexander et al. argues in the book Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Cultural trauma is the collective event of trauma that a group experiences. The collective trauma leaves indelible marks on the collective identity and sense of security. The collective event of trauma could be anything such as earth quakes, floods, war or genocide. For anyone who has experienced something similar to this, they feel trauma as a part of their identity as well as their collective culture. The memory of the traumatic event eventually becomes instilled and ingrained in the culture of the community. Every day, the members of the community wake up to grapple with their traumatic past, some days they are successful while on others they succumb to the weight of their pain and sorrow. 

The common event is equally traumatizing for individuals on a personal level as it is for the community as a whole, for instance, someone may have lost a family member in the flood while others, in the same calamity, have experienced the destruction of their homes. The trauma could be different for the members of the community, based on the different dimensions of the event, but the pain is mutual, shared and shattering for the entire community. The traumatic events are spaced throughout a lifetime of individuals, leaving indelible marks on their memory and collective identity. The events are stressful and so are its consequences. 

Unlike the individual trauma, members of the community tend to remember and revisit their cultural trauma in the form of cultural productions and cultural artifacts. This is the reason why you see nations celebrate and commemorate their trauma by placing flowers on the deceased, observing national holidays or by making songs reflecting on the event. The shattering event causes pain that works as a cohesive force that binds the community together. Therefore, the events that become the cultural trauma of a community also become the occasions to celebrate their strength and courage. This also becomes a driving force since each member of the community experiences a sense of strength and develops a spirit to fight with the odds for a peaceful future for themselves and the generations to come after. 

Dealing with post-event stress is a common experience in our daily lives, but when an entire community experiences a shattering event, it indeed fractures the collective roots. The damage and destruction have such a profound impact on your sense of self, that it moves through your body and courses through your blood with every breath you take, as if leaving an imprint on your genetic composition. These traumas could also be multigenerational. For any community, it becomes so hard to get over the collective trauma, or to forget the traumatic memory, or to escape from the consequences. However, as time passes and even the smallest steps are taken towards normalcy, people hold to faith and hope with greater strength than ever before, moving themselves towards a more optimistic future.