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Migratory wounds: relayed trauma in contemporary poetry (critical); Seiche (creative)

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Migratory wounds: relayed trauma in contemporary poetry (critical); Seiche (creative)

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Content MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 0
MIGRATORY WOUNDS:
RELAYED TRAUMA
IN CONTEMPORARY POETRY
(CRITICAL)
BY
DIANA ARTERIAN
A Critical Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE & CREATIVE WRITING)
Conferral Date: August 2019

- TABLE OF CONTENTS -

| INTRODUCTION | 1

| CHAPTER ONE | RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 13

Trauma’s Beginnings: From Wandering Womb to Railway Spine
Shell Shock & The Moral Invalid Soldier
World War II, The American-Vietnam War, & The Rise of Identity Politics
The Beginnings of Trauma Theory
Why Memory & Haunting
Second-Generation Survivors & Memory
On Haunting
Poetry & Relayed Trauma

| CHAPTER TWO | THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES IN POETRY: 52
AN EXPLORATION OF BODIES IN ELYSE FENTON’S CLAMOR

The Narrative
The Trouble
The Haunting

| CHAPTER THREE | THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 89

The Tank Story
Believable as Art
Beginning the Epic
Alette as Notley’s Relayed Trauma Avatar

| CHAPTER FOUR | THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 141
IN BHANU KAPIL’S HUMANIMAL

Setting the Stage: Atavism & Freak Shows of the Fin de Siècle
The Orientalist Indian Missionary & Kapil’s Source Text
Kapil as a Surface, Haunting as Relayed Trauma
The Textual Form & Alphabet
Traumas of the Domesticated Body
Scars & Narrative Connection
Blurring as Process
Photographic Evidence

| CHAPTER FIVE | THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD: THE SPECTRAL OCEANIC 203
ARCHIVE IN M. NOURBESE PHILIP’S ZONG!

The Zong Events
Language, Lineage, & The Archive
To Process, In Form
Spectral Interventions
Readers’ Roles
Zong!’s Invitation

| CONCLUSION | 249

| BIBLIOGRAPHY | 253

Niemand No one
zeug für den bears witness for the
Zuegen witness

— PAUL CELAN

There is never a witness for the witness.
…
The poem bears witness. We don’t know
about what and for what, about whom and
for whom, in bearing witness for bearing
witness, it bears witness. But it bears
witness.

— JACQUES DERRIDA
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / INTRODUCTION 1
- INTRODUCTION -

A woman is on the phone with her husband who is serving as a medic in Iraq. He tells her there
was an explosion, and he “didn’t see the body / hung on concertina wire.” The danger to her
loved one is real, the gruesome image inescapable. The woman tries her best to picture the scene,
place herself there. Moments like this only underscore her powerlessness and heighten her fear.
There is a trauma here, but it is not hers—at least not directly. She accesses it only through her
husband’s communication and, ultimately, through her imagination. Or consider hundreds of
enslaved West Africans on a particular slave ship killed by the captain in the late 1700s. If a
member of the Black diaspora learns of this event, what recourse does she have to exorcizing her
horror? The slavers, the captain, the crew are all long dead—yet the ghosts of the murdered
enslaved persons continue to haunt and transmit their traumas to whoever will listen.
My own notion of “relayed trauma,” what these instances describe, is more inclusive than
others that may have some overlap: “collective trauma,” “historical trauma,” “transgenerational
trauma,” “inherited memory.”
1
Relayed trauma requires intimacy, but allows for that intimacy to
be beyond bloodlines—for there is a broader spectrum of affiliation between people than their
ancestry. Relayed trauma is mediated by other intimacies. Physical proximity, even proximity in
time-space, is not essential. While relayed trauma involves the transmission of trauma through
vehicles similar to empathy, to delineate boundaries for this concept, and where my interest lies,
relayed trauma must be more forceful than merely a distressing event that provokes human
empathy. This is not to discredit the power and importance of empathic feeling and behavior, but
for the receiver of relayed trauma there is more at stake in that traumatic event.
2
This indeed
includes trauma within bloodlines, the nuclear family, but also (in the case of haunting and the
traumas prior to a lifetime that are potentially outside of ancestry) those traumas that continue to
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / INTRODUCTION 2
echo out—that shaped one’s trajectory, informed their present lives, feel integral to
comprehending the current moment. My hope is that, with the concept of relayed trauma, I’m
able to consider a more nuanced answer than trauma theory currently provides to the question,
what can a human bear?
I created the term “relayed trauma” to describe this urgent yet unexplored phenomenon
involving a lack of physical proximity to events that nevertheless provoke potent reactions from
those receiving traumatic knowledge. Those traumatized through relayed information will feel a
sense of powerlessness, as they are incapable of protecting those experiencing the trauma first-
hand. There is no luxury of extended remove with relayed trauma. A person’s life is directly
affected by the trauma one receives through such relays. These poets’ attempts to “read” and
relieve—or resolve—these traumas, despite their distance from the original event, lies at the
heart of this dissertation.
For someone suffering from relayed trauma, their experiences vary depending on the
trauma about which they are learning, how they are connected to it, how it is relayed to them,
and where/when the traumatic event took place. Despite all of these swirling variables, what is
clear to me is that for a person traumatized through relayed information, they will feel a sense of
powerlessness. For the traumatic happening is far away and/or took place long ago. Because of
this distance, the person suffering from relayed trauma is, most often, incapable of action that
would shield the person(s) experiencing the trauma first-hand. Their inability to protect is
directly connected to their current subjugated position in modern society. An integral element of
relayed trauma is distress at recognizing the harm of another whose life intersects with the
recipient of relayed trauma—the latter in a state of forced impotence in response. Relayed
trauma is provoked by speech, observation, documents, and ghosts. Its reach is beyond the limits
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / INTRODUCTION 3
of time and space. As with most things in society that overwhelm, leave us prone, feeling
submissive to its existence, we push back (somehow) with creative production.

In “Migratory Wounds: Relayed Trauma in Contemporary Poetics” I investigate the poetry of
Elyse Fenton, Alice Notley, Bhanu Kapil, and M. NourbeSe Philip, whose works address the
large-scale traumas that contributed to the poets’ condition as socially marginalized persons. The
traumas are specific in that they are not experienced by the authors personally, but rather
communicated through family, loved ones, ghosts, and documents. These are contemporary texts
(the oldest from 1995), and generally have not undergone much scholarly scrutiny I believe they
will likely experience in subsequent years, particularly those of Alice Notley and M. NourbeSe
Philip. Yet there are many other contemporary collections just as worthy of attention, the authors
of which similarly grapple with relayed trauma in their verse. I think of Shane McCrae’s Blood
as well as In the Language of My Captor, Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder, Robin Coste Lewis’
Voyage of the Sable Venus, Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary, Solmaz Sharif’s Look,
and many others. This is all to say my dissertation is by no means comprehensive.
Which brings me to poetry as the medium through which to consider relayed trauma.
While I don’t believe all poetry evokes a feeling of recognition or “me, too,” the most
compelling work in the field is a summons to the reader—regarding the self, and how the self is
found or challenged in the work. Poetry also often is a location for addressing traumatic material.
It fights the common tropes that narrative prose frequently indulges, and is an ancient form that
has sustained all manner of content. Western people and those influenced by their cultures
3

generally regarded poetry as a potential means of solace, entertainment, a medium of expression
for centuries. This largely changed with the Great War. British soldiers in particular went to
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / INTRODUCTION 4
serve with their Victorian ideals and dated visions of the front—ignorant of mechanized warfare,
the trenches. That trauma was so terrible those who returned often wrote about it extensively.
4

Poetry serves an array of functions for the writer and reader/listener. In our modern era, poetry
has become a venue for writers to expose the deepest parts of themselves (particularly after the
work of the Confessional poets in the 1950s and 60s). Whether engaging with the lyric I or
writing Conceptualist avant-garde work, poets in one way or another interrogate their intimate
and internal disturbances. But of course what is disturbing the interior often comes from outside
the self.
In the subsequent chapters, I will consider four poets whose works focus intensely on this
interior/exterior dynamic. They feel apt for my inquiry for several reasons. First and foremost,
they all involve relayed trauma as experienced by the poet—the manuscripts acting as a means to
interrogate that relayed trauma. Beyond this, their relayed trauma plays a huge role in their
lives—so much so it informs their identities. Whether a married to a person serving in a war or a
descendent from enslaved persons here in North America, the trauma relayed to these poets
affects their trajectory on a fundamental level, be it later in life (for the former) or from birth (the
latter). These traumas haunt them and emphasize their subjugation, despite the fact they are not
direct witnesses. The discord between the control the events have over their lives and their
inability to respond is palpable. In this dissertation I will consider attempts at comprehension of
this reality by these contemporary poets, and interrogate where trauma and poetry meet—what
occurs there—with the concept of relayed trauma in mind.

In the sections that comprise the first chapter of this dissertation I address the medical
approaches to trauma (initially “hysteria”), and how it gained traction in the medical realm and
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / INTRODUCTION 5
greater spheres of Western society throughout the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries, precipitated
particularly by the World Wars, the American-Vietnam War, and eventually the advocates for
the Civil Rights Movements in the United States. I consider how each of these parts of history
played into the legibility of trauma (be it on the physical and/or psychic body), and how the
giving way to what is less legible leads us to society’s current relationship with trauma. In
writing about these collections and relayed trauma, I will use theoretical and scientific theories of
trauma, memory, and haunting throughout, and thus outline these concepts in the first chapter.
While each remaining chapter considers trauma and poetics, they all invite inquiry into
connected fields. In Chapter Two, “The Ethics of Relayed Trauma’s Valences in Poetry: An
Exploration of Bodies in Elyse Fenton’s Clamor,” I analyze a collection in which the poet
meditates on her experiences of trauma and fear while her husband is serving as a medic in Iraq.
Ultimately the chapter hinges on how aesthetic decisions considered through the lens of ethics
are often troubling, particularly when the topic is war. There are many worrisome aspects of
Fenton’s collection, including the glaring absence of Iraqi subjects and her depiction of the
wounded soldiers to whom her husband attends. In several instances, she sacrifices ethical
poetics for poetic license—catastrophizing already catastrophic situations. This is not to suggest
that Fenton should be taken to task for these poems; my concern lies in the fact that, in order to
interrogate her own trauma, she extrapolates the trauma of others, ignoring the larger systems
that precipitated her situation. In considering these issues, I engage with Levinas’s concept of the
“Other” and Maggie Nelson’s investigations of cruel artistic production.
Alice Notley’s poetry regarding her brother’s American-Vietnam War traumas acts as a
foil to Fenton’s approach to war poetry. In Chapter Three, “The War Machine’s Reach in Alice
Notley’s Work,” I examine how Notley’s experience of relayed trauma sharpens her perception
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / INTRODUCTION 6
of the systematic oppression carried out by the war machine, and her attentiveness to the
vulnerable bodies caught up in those systems in the public discourses surrounding this conflict.
These concerns are present in the aesthetic choices Notley makes in representing the American-
Vietnam War, her brother’s damage, and the United States’ abuse of its power. The desire to
understand the war machine’s connection to Notley’s own role as a marginalized citizen forms a
continual thread in her poetry, informing her insights into literature’s limits in the face of
systemic power and on writing as a potential means of subversion. Foucault’s texts on power are
a central theoretical underpinning of this chapter, as are the writings of Viet Thanh Nguyen and
Jenny Edkins on war.
The fourth chapter, “The Atavistic Ghost and Anxiety of Bodies in Bhanu Kapil’s
Humanimal” shifts from originary traumas that occur at a physical distance to include those that
also move backward in chronology. In Humanimal: A Project for Future Children, Kapil draws
on an Indian missionary Joseph Singh’s 1920s diary concerning his “rescue” of two feral girls
who had been adopted by wolves in a tribal region of Bengal, India. Singh meticulously
describes the girls’ physical “abnormalities”—their ability to see in the dark, their callouses from
moving on all fours—in order to render them, in part due to their tribal origins, as “other.”
Singh’s desire to domesticate the girls, to “save” them spiritually, was in liking of the time and a
general hysteria in the West over what the body contained when allowed to run wild. The animal
in the human was an instigator of deviance and threat to societal development, the thinking went.
Kapil travels to the place where the girls were kept and died, attempting to make contact with
their ghosts, considering their lives in connection with her father’s, especially. Overall, Kapil’s
collection emphasizes what she describes as the “pure anxiety attached to the presence of the
body”—and the extent to which the traumatic experiences tied to that anxiety can be relayed via
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / INTRODUCTION 7
ghostly encounters and research. The theoretical framework of this chapter employs Said’s
writings on Orientalism, Robert McRuer and Rosemarie Garland-Thompson’s meditations on
disabled bodies, and Dana Seitler on atavism.
The final chapter, “‘The story that cannot be told’: The Spectral Oceanic Archive in M.
NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!,” investigates poetry that is as much about haunting as it is about the
archive. Philip’s Zong! draws upon a document that should, for all intents and purposes, give us
access to information regarding a remarkable and disturbing event: the 1781 Zong ship captain’s
decision to throw 143 enslaved Atlantic Africans overboard in order to claim insurance for the
loss of “goods.” Drawing on the two-page court summation concerning this incident, Philip
creates a collage-like poetic text composed from bits of the original document and the words of
ghosts, be it slaver or enslaved. Philip has no interest in using Zong! to enact a historical
catharsis. Rather, her goal is to create a dialogue—specifically one that enables her to exact a
textual violence that mimics the violence enacted upon the Atlantic Africans of the Zong ship
and beyond. In her use of this document and her inclusion of ghosts’ voices as alternative
sources, Philip deftly implicates the reader in this horrific yet complicated event. This chapter
draws on Derrida’s concept of the archive, Glissant’s “poetics of relation,” and the work of
several contemporary scholars who write about the Zong event and Atlantic slavery.

These four writers’ works engage with notions of proximity to trauma in ways that cultivate
conversations between the chapters—for with each chapter comes a leap in propinquity or
chronology from the original source of the trauma. Notley speaks to her traumatized brother
directly, while Bhanu Kapil reads about feral wolfgirls in a diary written by a man long dead.
With these leaps as an organizing principle and a means to allow these works to speak to one
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / INTRODUCTION 8
another, I found each of these poets have a great deal to teach us. Their works were often a
means of interrogating adjacent concerns that were integral to their collections. They are each
conduits to urgent topics that intersect with relayed trauma in compelling ways. This work, I
hope, will continue to echo out and begin, rather than define, the dialog.
Together, these chapters illuminate how the phenomenon of relayed trauma can uniquely
give voice to the disenfranchised, and how these artists succeed (or don’t) in merging the ethical
considerations of such representations with the aesthetically depicted “worlds” they craft.
Looking at the effects of relayed or second-hand trauma on the recipient, in turn, can create a
deeper understanding of the inter-implications of personal and political crises—closing the
distance between the personal and the political as the traumas relayed by beloved, brother,
document, and ghost reverberate to the present and shape the lyrical expression.

POETRY & RELAYED TRAUMA
I have focused on the poetic archive of relayed trauma rather than the scholarly archive of
haunting, memory, or trauma for a few reasons. First, as incredible as many trauma theorists are,
none have addressed the notion of relayed trauma directly in their work. Second, poetry as a
medium feels apt with relayed trauma as source material. As Roger Luckhurst writes,
“Discourses requiring logical causation (such as legal proofs of causes and post-traumatic
effects) cannot recognize [trauma’s] strange temporality. Literature can.”
5
While the theorists
and scholars focus on testimony or photographs, poetry as a genre is a more ephemeral, and often
independent of such “hard” evidence as a source (though it can be—as well as what inspires it).
Poetry is a particularly good means for interrogating trauma, for poetics often allow points of
entry otherwise not easily sustained in strict prose (be it scholarly, fiction, memoir, or otherwise).
In poetry there is more room for amorphousness, uncertainty, and an opaque diction. One may
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / INTRODUCTION 9
channel a ghost, disfigure a document and assemble the result, or simply write a personal
experience. Prose often employs a common narrative arc that aims toward “closure,” which
fights against the particularly troubling and complicated nature of trauma. This is not to say that
fiction does not engage with difficult and/or abstract concepts in the least (or that there aren’t
texts that fight closure), but, more often than not, poetry allows more exploration and openness
than other forms. As Lyn Hejinian writes, “closure is a fiction.”
6
Poetry’s amorphousness feels
apt, too, considering the slippery elements at play here—trauma, memory, and haunting all fight
the grip of comprehension. Then of course there is the fact that I myself am a poet and, with that
in mind, perhaps have particular insights that other non-poet scholars may not. My own poetry
about trauma has given me experiences that, I hope, will provide me with some particular insight
into this material.
To consider relayed trauma in poetry I have selected four contemporary poets whose
works are representative texts of that experience. I find much merit in each, even if ultimately
they will not be canonical works.
7
As contemporary writers, these poets are at the vanguard of
the shifting notions of trauma in our society, and each attempt to articulate those shifts while
simultaneously existing at the center of that phenomenon. I came across each of these texts
through different means. Each speaking to me in different ways, provoking different responses in
my reader-mind. Of the four poets’ works, I first read Notley’s The Descent of Alette. Prior to
Alette I read her compelling description and explanation for the book in her lecture “The
‘Feminine’ Epic.” Thus I knew it was about her dead veteran brother, about patriarchy, about the
ripple effects of war for those who love a damaged veteran. Alette completely floored me with its
freakiness, its depth, and its adeptness with complicated material and politics. The next I
encountered was Zong! by Philip. It was assigned in a graduate course, and I was wholly baffled
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / INTRODUCTION 10
by it. In truth, I didn’t read much of Zong! the first time—it was largely illegible to me as a text.
Years later I would find it is, in fact, quite legible, though thoughtfully difficult and
overwhelming. But my first interaction with Zong! did leave me interested, particularly because
of Philip’s captivating afterword about the source text, her methods of interacting with that text,
and the emotions behind these methods. And I had never seen anything quite like it. It stayed
with me. Around this time I read Kapil’s Humanimal, rushing through it because of a deadline. I
enjoyed it, but I wasn’t ready for it as a poet or a reader. As with Zong!, it required more of me
than I realized when I first opened the volume. Thought undoubtedly more “readable,”
Humanimal is incredibly complex, the source material serving as a kind of base layer of a
palimpsest Kapil builds upon in order to interrogate her identity, notions of girlhood and the
body. Lastly, Fenton’s Clamor was itself a recommendation. Specifically, I asked a friend to
name a book that deals with war, but in such a way that beautifies the violence. I wanted to write
an essay on the topic, but had trouble locating a contemporary text to scrutinize (and ultimately
criticize). So my intentions were not exactly generous when I first interacted with Clamor,
though my opinion of the work has softened, and I find much merit in the collection.
I picked these four poets for several reasons. They interested me as a writer of poetry, and
I found their texts were rich enough for me to scrutinize as a scholar. Interest does not
necessarily imply pleasure, and indeed elements of some of these texts provoke mixed feelings
for me. Others are some of the most exciting poetry I have ever read, penned by some of my
favorite living writers—work that informs me before I set my pencil on the page to begin a poem
of my own. So, while these writers and their books may never be widely read or assigned in the
classroom, these works made the gears start turning in my mind, begged further investigation.
For one reason or another, they haunted me and came to mind when thinking of texts to
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / INTRODUCTION 11
interrogate in this dissertation. I also wanted to consider work by authors of different ages,
experiences, races, and backgrounds than myself, and whose work is (in one way or another)
different from my own to gain a deeper understanding of poetry on trauma. For this dissertation
is also about my poetics, as I have written about trauma both personal and relayed, the tension
there. As one who has experienced both, I can say relayed trauma feels far more troubling, your
powerlessness is that much more apparent—its unknowability, its impact on you, make it unique.
Thus that is my dog in this fight, and why I am particularly driven to explore the nature of
relayed trauma as expressed as differently as these four poets express it, and how their works
haunt the reader.

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / INTRODUCTION 12
INTRODUCTION NOTES
1
For what I am considering, I found these to either be too broad (9/11’s impact on America) or too focused (the
Shoah’s impact on a family).
2
Beyond this, recent neuroscience has illustrated there are indeed limits to empathic brain function. In 1994 the New
York Times piece “Brain Senses The Pain Of Someone Else’s ‘Ouch!’” by Anahad O’Connor states, “Seeing a loved
one endure a slight electrical shock, researchers have found, activates a brain region that processes pain, pointing to
a possible neurological basis for empathy. The same area lighted up on brain scans when the subjects themselves
were zapped.” Heartening, no doubt. Yet in 2009, Society for Neuroscience published an unattributed article entitled
“Imaging Study Shows Decrease in Empathic Responses to Outsiders,” in which it details the study, published in
The Journal of Neuroscience. “The researchers scanned brain areas in one Caucasian group and one Chinese group.
The authors monitored participants as they viewed video clips that simulated either a painful needle prick or a non-
painful cotton swab touch to a Caucasian or Chinese face. When painful simulations were applied to individuals of
the same race as the observers, the empathic neural responses increased; however, responses increased to a lesser
extent when participants viewed the faces of the other group.” This is not to say that people’s empathic limits are
within their racial group (the study is more about prejudice than empathy), but rather to point out why empathy alone
is not likely to trigger the response to another’s trauma to the degree that relayed trauma does to those who experience
it.
3
Through colonialism or otherwise.
4
I think particularly of Rupert Brooke, Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon—though there are
many others.
5
Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge, 2008. 81.
6
Hejinian, Lyn. “The Rejection of Closure.” The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2000. 40–58. 41.
7
The literary canon is not the enforcer of value to me, but that issue is outside the scope of this book.

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 13
- CHAPTER ONE -

RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS

“[A]n instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things,”
1
Freud
wrote in Beyond the Pleasure Principal, his text that specifically addresses trauma with famously
strange yet captivating physicality. At the time of Beyond the Pleasure Principle’s publication,
Freud was in his early sixties, the Great War over, and his place as the father of psychoanalysis
sure. His work in Beyond the Pleasure Principle would continue to echo out for decades and,
almost a century later, continues to be a seminal text in literary theory.
I start with Freud because, as Ruth Leys writes, Freud is “an inescapable figure in the
genealogy of trauma.”
2
While this chapter will not be a genealogy,
3
I will provide a core history
of trauma and trauma theory as addressed in normative Western culture, followed by two of its
sister concepts (memory and haunting). This book begins here because it is where I began and
am currently situated as a relatively normative member of a Western society and its academic
institutions. Freud, it seems, embodies these concepts explicitly. Yet, as this chapter and
dissertation progress, I interrogate increasingly marginalized interactions with trauma and
creative production. Ultimately, I will show how subjugated populations worked to proliferate a
gradual acceptance of the trauma of witness, the trauma without physical proximity. Thus I
consider the limits (or lack thereof) of trauma, and the complexity in the traumatizing
experience.
Rather than make a bold claim about the history of trauma as a social construct through
time, this chapter sketches out how different realms of Western society have interacted with
trauma as we recognize it today, from the medical to the theoretical. I do have opinions about
trauma’s history, and I don’t hesitate to lay them out—but this chapter acts more of a foundation
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 14
for my own concept of “relayed trauma.” Thus this will be a space for exploration without
claiming to designate limits of the field. As I read the necessary literature on trauma and trauma
theory, I consistently believed I had reached the end of a tether, only to find another important
name, article, book—lengthening the thread, endlessly it seemed. Considering the nature of
trauma itself, this feels apt. What is remarkable is that, if one were to take the generally accepted
view, trauma theory has only been in existence, at the time of writing this, for two decades or so.
And yet, as Dominick LaCapra writes, “no genre or discipline ‘owns’ trauma as a problem or can
provide definitive boundaries for it.”
4
The tethers indeed felt as if they were in every direction.
5

TRAUMA’S BEGINNINGS: FROM WANDERING WOMB TO RAILWAY SPINE

In terms of trauma’s etymology, its root is (appropriately) from the Greek, meaning “wound.”
Initially, its existence in English was solely for medical purposes, and came into usage in the
1600s, involving an agent external to that which sustained the trauma. Something from without
the body is suddenly within, for good or for ill. As Roger Luckhurst writes, “What wounded and
what cured shared the same term: physicians applied traumatic herbs or balsams to injuries.”
6

Thus whatever provoked a systemic reaction in the body, in wounding and curing, was described
as a trauma. This definition continued, and was used almost exclusively by those in the physical
sciences, for centuries. It was only at the end of the 1800s that scientists began to ascribe trauma
as also a potentially mental experience.
7

Yet, prior to this, notions of mental trauma arguably began with hysteria, which for two
millennia was attributed specifically to women and changes in her uterus. A medical document
from Egypt dating 1900 BCE demonstrates the Egyptians’ belief that the uterus might float
throughout the female body and cause an array of mental and physical consequences.
8
The
concept of “wandering womb” was a serious medical concept that could be treated. A non-
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 15
physical cause seemed so impossible, and the ignorance of the female reproductive system so
pervasive, this argument persisted for centuries.
9
The ancient Greeks mined the Egyptians’
knowledge, with Plato dubbing the uterus an “animal” with its mind set almost entirely on
procreation.
10
Hippocrates claimed that the uterus moved throughout the body if lacking in
proper fluids. Throughout each of these locations and eras, physicians often treated hysteria as an
issue of sexual appeasement. In France, “hystérique” is recorded as early as 1568; in England
“Histerick women” in 1657.
11
By the mid-1800s, “female hysteria” was considered less of an
issue with general physical sources, but specifically sexual ones. Treatment included massaging
the patient’s genitals with the hand, water, or vibrating mechanisms in order to induce orgasm.
12

By and large hysterical women were regarded with derision, often considered merely as
malingerers.
13
In the late-1800s, the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot began to study
hysteria in earnest, calling it “the Great Neurosis.” Charcot gave weekly lectures, which included
live demonstrations with his hysterical patients. These were often
14
sex workers, runaways,
orphans—women who found safety from abuse (sexual or not) in the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital
in Paris where Charcot treated them. Judith Herman writes of Charcot’s practices, stating that he
“focused on the symptoms of hysteria that resembled neurological damage: motor paralyses,
sensory losses, convulsions, and amnesias. By 1880 he had demonstrated these symptoms were
psychological, since they could be artificially induced and relieved through the use of
hypnosis.”
15
That said, Charcot’s work mostly stopped there—he was less interested in what
caused the symptoms, rather than the symptoms themselves. Yet Charcot’s investigations paired
with (and likely due to) his public lectures received a large amount of attention, including that of
fellow physicians. Pierre Janet worked under Charcot in Paris, and was clearly influenced by his
work—Janet’s medical thesis is entitled L’état mental des hystériques, published just a year prior
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 16
to Charcot’s death in 1893. It was Janet who directly linked hysteria with psychic trauma, which
he believed led to “dissociation” or an altered consciousness in his patients. In Vienna, Freud
(who also studied briefly with Charcot) and Joseph Breuer followed suit not long after, dubbing
this phenomenon “double consciousness,” which they regarded as a mental defense mechanism
in response to the trauma (rather than merely a symptom, as Janet believed).
Yet the trouble here, initially and particularly with Charcot and Janet, is the lack of
regard for their female patients. Ruth Leys writes of Janet’s notions of “traumatic memory”
(which repeats itself) and “narrative memory” (which heeds normative notions of time—keeping
the past, the past). Janet’s goal was to have his patients’ traumatic memories become narrative.
Janet is largely praised by modern theorists for this practice yet, as Leys writes, this “involves
repudiating the aspect of his psychotherapy that seeks to make the patient forget”
16
rather than
what Caruth calls “the freedom of forgetting.”
17
Janet induced patients to retell their traumas
while under hypnosis, and convinced the hypnotized person that the event was in fact different
than she remembered, redacting the trauma entirely (rather than aiding her in coming to terms
with it). Thus, as Leys writes, “the history of trauma is a history of forgetting.”
18
Specifically, the
patient being induced to forget, rather than claim her traumatic experience. Janet also argued for
“presentification”—patients to narrate to themselves and others the events of their lives. The
value of arguing for such testimony is no small thing, but the way in which Janet warped his
patients’ memories is a difficult one to forgive. Freud was hardly innocent either. Notions of
(sexual) trauma are directly linked to the psychoanalytic practice of hypnosis, yet “[w]hat is less
understood is that hypnosis was not just an instrument of research and treatment but played a
major theoretical role in the conceptualization of trauma.”
19
Because, according to Freud, the
sexual trauma of his patients were experienced at such a young age, and were outside the
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 17
patient’s capacity for comprehension, hypnosis was at first the analyst’s common method used to
access the events in order to treat the patient. More often than not, such medical “treatments”
exacerbated or at the very least underscored the women’s powerlessness, all for the sake of the
doctor’s own means of gaining and understanding of his patient’s condition.
As troubling as Charcot’s practices were—arguably forcing mentally and emotionally
damaged women into public and inducing hysterical behavior
20
—it was the entry point for many
to an otherwise opaque and marginalized condition, as well as women’s experiences that
precipitated such hysteria.
21
As Herman writes, the study of hysteria “had required [male
physicians] to listen to women far more than they had ever expected to listen, and to find out
much more about women’s lives than they had ever wanted to know.”
22
Specifically, the
pervasiveness of abuse women endure and perhaps succumb to. And because doctors leaned in,
took a closer look, eventually it became clear that hysterical or traumatic symptoms were not
limited solely to women.
23

The work of Charcot, Janet, Freud, and Breuer was not in a vacuum of analysis, and the belief
that hysteria was a woman’s problem soon collapsed, most notably in England. Several theorists
and scholars (Luckhurst, Ferrell, Leys, Hacking, Young, others) find a linkage between changing
notions of trauma with advancements in modernity—specifically in the development of the train
and railways in 1860s London. The train’s speed was, until then, something unknown to most
members of London society. The amount of deaths on the tracks was notable, and a frequent
sight to those who used the railways. Beyond witnessing death and/or violence, those who rode
trains were hit or nearly hit often enough, and the psychological effects so significant, that
doctors (and lawyers) took note.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 18
The notion that something could produce severe damage without physical contact was a
new one, and ascribed a modern name: “railway spine” (or “nervous shock”). Many doctors
believed the response was due to micro-lesions in the spinal cord,
24
and thus railway spine “was
the first instance of a theory of trauma that became contentious because rival theories placed it at
opposing ends of the spectrum from physical to psychical etiologies.”
25
The anxiety surrounding
a non-physical cause for symptoms is one of my primary points of interest—many medical
professionals would rather locate breaks in the spine (however small) than contend with the far
more insidious fact that no physical damage was endured at all, and yet psychic damage is real.
All of this might have remained in a state of arrested development save for the fact that
the trains “exposed the traveling mid and upper classes to the kinds of technological violence
previously restricted to factories.”
26
The issue of class is particularly important in regards to
railway spine, as it quickly became a “medico-legal problem.”
27
Luckhurst explains that “the law
[had] in general been reluctant to allow damages for ‘invisible’ psychological impacts (where
causation cannot be proved by physical evidence) in order to prevent…opening the floodgates of
litigation.”
28
Thus the reason railway spine was compelling to doctors, lawyers, and society boils
down to the fact that those with capital were being exposed to terrible sights or near-death
experiences. Of course those working in the factories in England witnessed such speedy
mechanical horrors frequently since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, yet any
psychological impact was of little concern to the wealthy. Those who had near-death experiences
with a train had the agency to claim that something was indeed “wrong” with them (physical or
not), get medical attention and diagnosis, and ultimately legal representation, if they desired.
The rise of litigiousness in the late 1800s had a hand in the recognition of psychic trauma
as caused by an event, but not nearly as much as class. The irony being of course that the
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 19
laborers who built the railroads and its trains likely suffered traumas, but only those with the
wealth to ride them could claim to have sustained a traumatic experience. In the quick shift from
hysterical orphaned sex worker to traumatized upper-class Londoner, society passed over a huge
swath of men and women (largely poor and/or black/other people of color) who might have
informed the notions of trauma through their experiences or those of their ancestors. Michael
Rothberg calls this “homogenization of trauma.”
29
The concept of invisibility of the
traumatized—who has been left out or ignored in this conversation—continued to have a huge
blind spot up until the Civil Rights Era: specifically, the traumas of the Atlantic slave trade. For
while hysteria was largely a woman’s problem, then a wealthy person’s problem, then a soldier’s
problem, for generations it was considered solely a white problem, with no regard for the
enslaved people of Europe and the Americas (the latter of which were still exploited up to just
decades before Charcot’s weekly presentations in Paris). This is likely due to the fact that
England, where issues of trauma were initially explored in earnest in the late 1800s, had
abolished slavery almost a century before. Beyond this, it was quickly clear that only those in a
position of privilege because of their race and wealth had the means and agency to advocate for
themselves.

All of this circles around the idea of visibility. There is of course the issue of damage without
physical contact or, in the case of physical contact and recovery, without the marker of physical
damage. At the time, scientists were still grappling with notions of bacteria and other microbes.
The comprehension of the minutiae of the physical reality, our bodies, the mind, were very much
more constricted when compared to our modern era.
30
Up until the late 1800s, trauma had an
invisible cause and was endured by an invisible population. As those with authority and/or
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 20
money (visibility) in society began to experience the symptoms of hysteria, a lot of attention
went into locating the visible source—the physical damage that precipitates such ailments.
“Micro lesions” in the spine for railway spine and, later, the physical impact of nearby exploding
artillery for shell shock.
31
This was an era where things needed to be seen (in more ways than
one) to be believed.
32
There is a clear linkage between the privileging of social and physical
visibility, and how the notion of psychic invisibility only became important when those with
social visibility were affected by it, and thus made it so. Hysteria/trauma had been an otherwise
invisible experience of the invisible: women, enslaved persons, people of color, disabled people,
and/or the poor. As trauma as a concept gained more visibility in society, so did the idea that that
which has no visible impact upon the body can be made visible through symptoms.
Thus what is compelling to me about the transition from disbelief to belief, at least in its
initial stages regarding trauma, is how much of it has to do with authority and power. The
physician Charcot’s attention to hysterical women, as abusive as it was, drew the attention of
others. His position of authority gave his weekly presentations more gravity because of his
power as the head of the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. Hysteria as an illness had previously been
recognized and treated (however poorly) for centuries—yet Charcot’s giving it the feel of a
weekly circus act with himself as the showman shifted the dialogue. By illustrating the
remarkable symptoms in woman after woman after woman, every week, it was clear this was
more than a freak show—it illustrated something more pervasive. If Charcot were a vagrant, it
would easily be dismissed. But as a man of authority, people and other doctors took note. Just as
Charcot had the privilege to draw a crowd, so too did the upper classes who used trains and
suffered near-deaths, and thus experienced the shock of the railroads’ danger. Where Charcot
compelled attention because of his knowledge and experience, these men and women (through
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 21
their husbands or male relatives) had the capital to do so. Thus authority shifts from the observer
to the victim themselves. The women of the Pitié-Salpêtrière had almost no agency—their lives
as Charcot’s patients (and weekly examples) were arguably better than their previous lives as
alone and abused. They had no advocates. But because of their wealth, those who suffered from
railway spine were their own advocates. They used their capital to amass other figures of
authority in Western culture (largely doctors and lawyers) to give further attention to an
otherwise marginalized experience. What was normally waved away was suddenly given
credence. The invisible was made visible once experienced by an empowered population.
That said, those who suffered from such traumas hardly had it easy. By 1883 the surgeon
Herbert Page describes railway spine as completely psychological, and yet was still in the realm
of hysteria: “To associate nervous shock with hysteria was to equate it with a shameful,
effeminate disorder, often dismissed as a form of disease imitation (what was called ‘neuro
mimesis’) or malingering.”
33
For hysteria was largely a white woman’s illness, yet men (as well
as women) were also suffering from railway spine. The connection was not a beneficial one. In
addition, it was widely believed that the desire for monetary compensation from the railway
companies drove the condition. Or, for some like Charcot, biological determinism played a role
in the hysterical response—if a victim had direct relatives with diseases and/or addictions, this
lead to a weak will and thus a higher susceptibility to neurosis. As Luckhurst states, “[P]hysical
injury and psychical shock were immediate causes, but had flowered with the proper hereditary
conditions.”
34
Ultimately, for Charcot, railway spine fell under the umbrella of “hysteria.” Freud,
Janet, and others saw such traumas as railway spine as a signifier of psychological origins that
instigated the response. It was not until the Great War that Freud and many others were forced to
consider more direct responses to shock and trauma.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 22
SHELL SHOCK & THE MORAL INVALID SOLDIER
The recognition of traumatic experience in the late 19
th
century, however rudimentary, was
brought to the fore once again during the Great War. Because of the use of machine guns,
chemical warfare, and other modernized methods of destruction, World War I was, to many, an
incredible surprise. The speed and scale of death was terrible and unprecedented, trench warfare
a horrible day-to-day experience that often lasted months. Even more scholars cite the war as the
zygote of psychic trauma as a concept (Fassin and Rechtman, and, most notably and thoroughly,
Edkins). War trauma was not isolated to England, but also noted in Germany and France. As
more and more soldiers returned with serious psychological problems that often manifested
themselves in physical symptoms (tremors, fixed gaze, muteness, paralysis, nightmares), doctors
were at a loss as to how to treat the men and get them back to the front. The hysterical response
was dubbed, famously, “shell shock.”
35

As with railway spine, shell shock was initially considered a physical malady—lesions in
the brain from soldiers’ proximity to explosions. Because of the array of symptoms, however,
doctors were quick to note that lesions could not be the cause, and the term was altered to “war
neurosis.” After shell shock was discovered as not only non-physical in its source in the sense
that it did not necessitate traumatic touch, it was generally met with suspicion—it may all be
contrived in order to avoid duty. Perhaps symptoms due to a hope to avoid the front and/or that
the soldier was weak-willed—a coward unable to sustain the realities of war that so many others
survive without similar effect. That he was a “moral invalid.”
36

The association to hysterical woman haunted the soldier, just as it had those who suffered
railway spine. As Jenny Edkins writes, referencing Foucault, “the mad of the seventeenth century
replaced the lepers of the previous century in asylums. Their function for society was to produce
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 23
its boundaries, to assure the rest of the world that it was sane. They defined what sanity was.”
37

In dishonoring the shell shocked soldier, doctors and analysts were upholding a similar system as
the lepers asylums the ability to continue—the greater spheres of society did not suffer, were
sane. Granted, the shell shocked men encroached on that boundary, pushed in on “what sanity
was.”
38
But in order to fortify that boundary, society worked hard to villainize the soldiers. Those
who suffered from what we would now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after returning home
were no longer simply psychotic. Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière write, “the
British gave these soldiers the diagnosis of NYD, ‘not yet diagnosed,’ or even GOK, ‘God only
knows.’”
39
As Kirby Farrell writes, “If a culture itself denies the responsibility for the foxhole or
the slum, dissociating or limiting their reality, then the culture itself—not just modernism or
warfare—contributes to traumatization.”
40
This is in order to maintain concepts of normalcy and
empowerment in a system that often gives you little. “Reason and objectivity are not the primary
determinants of society’s reactions to traumatized people,” explains Alexander C. McFarlane and
Bessel A. Van der Kolk. Instead “society’s reactions seem to be primarily conservative impulses
in the service of maintaining the beliefs that the world is fundamentally just, that people are in
charge of their own lives, and that bad things only happen to people who deserve them”
41

Prior to the war, Freud, had directly linked trauma with the interiority of the patient, believing
many traumas to be merely fantasies (the fantasy hypothesis). This is a now-famous reversal in
Freud’s work from “seduction theory,” in which Freud found an overwhelming number of his
patients to be survivors of sexual trauma that lay latent until the patients’ sexual maturity. In
either case, as Leys points out, “Freud problematized the ordinary status of the traumatic event
by arguing that it was not the experience itself which acted traumatically, delayed revival as a
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 24
memory after the individual had entered sexual maturity and could grasp its sexual meaning.”
42

Thus, these experiences, while potentially inculcated from the outer world, were ultimately
precipitated from within the patient herself. This location of damage from within the survivor
was troubled by the war, and Freud approached the notion of trauma once again in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, in which he attempts to grasp patients’ “repetition compulsion.” In it, Freud
gives an extensive and notably physical description of the psychologically traumatic event, thus
directly referencing the original use of the term “trauma.” He writes,
We describe as “traumatic” any excitations from outside which are powerful
enough to break through the protective shield. It seems to me that the concept of
trauma necessarily implies a connection of this kind of breach in an otherwise
efficacious barrier against stimuli. Such an event as an external trauma is bound to
provoke a disturbance on a large scale in the functioning of the organism’s energy
and set in motion every possible defensive measure…The periphery concerned to
the central apparatus of the mind, such as would normally arise only from within
the apparatus. We may, I think, tentatively venture to regard the common traumatic
neurosis as a consequence of an extensive breach being made in the protective
shield against stimuli.
43

I quote from this extensively for a few reasons—Freud is using a remarkable image as a
descriptor for the traumatic event with “breaches” in the “protective shield” in the brain. It is
singular in this way. As Leys writes, “Trauma was thus defined in quasi-military terms.”
44

Considering the period and shell shock as the precipitator for the text, this is apt. There is also
the important kernel in which Freud owns that the trauma is from without (as well as within, not
as he argued previously about traumatic neurosis). The source, to Freud, can be found entirely
outside of the patient, and immediately. Freud’s approach to traumatic neurosis in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle is arguably the foundation of contemporary trauma theory. It is the lodestone
theorists from the 1990s onward swing toward or from. Predominantly though, Freud’s
concession that traumatic neurosis could be precipitated entirely by an outside force was no
small thing. And Freud was not alone. As Ley’s writes, “[For many] physicians the notion of
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 25
sexual conflict seemed inapplicable to the traumas of the war, the threat of annihilation—the
feeling of utter helplessness when confronted with almost certain death—rather than sexual
repression came to be regarded as the cause of hysteria.”
45

WORLD WAR II, THE AMERICAN-VIETNAM WAR, & THE RISE OF IDENTITY POLITICS
As interest grew surrounding traumatic experiences and potential physical sources of psychic
repercussions, focus shifted from outside the body to within it. Just a few years prior to the
publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, adrenalin was isolated within the body and
recognized as a direct link to extreme stress. Luckhurst writes that this discovery “has been
central to most physiological theories of trauma, culminating in PTSD.”
46
Despite these
scientific—and Freud’s psychoanalytic—developments, those who suffered from what we now
call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder were largely marginalized for their response to such extreme
circumstances, the fault lying in the survivor’s weak will or cowardliness. It took death and
disaster on an unprecedented scale to provoke serious changes in society’s notions of trauma.
With World War II, the language surrounding a survivor—indeed what comes to mind for many
of us when we hear the term—began to dramatically alter how society approached the victims of
trauma. For how is it possible for millions who survived the death camps to all have the cause of
trauma within themselves? Unless one agreed with the Nazi idea of inferiority of Jews, Roma,
homosexuals, and/or disabled persons, one was forced to own that traumatic neurosis of this kind
and on such a large scale could not possibly come from within the survivor.
47
The issue of
suspicion that so plagued traumatized persons quickly began to dissipate. As Fassin and
Rechtman write, “The question was no longer, who were these men who presented psychological
disorders, but rather, how had they managed to survive the impossible?”
48
After World War II,
there emerged several movements of people who survived or were touched by trauma (the
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 26
bombing of Hiroshima, the Shoah,
49
those who endured rape, veterans). This was ultimately
accretive, with each being beneficial to one another for the larger goal of societal recognition. As
Luckhurst writes, “what emerged was a general category of ‘the survivor’ that strongly linked
trauma to identity politics.”
50
As with World War I, World War II, because of the extent of its
damage and to an unprecedented number of people of even more diverse populations (in terms of
income and/or race), members of society were forced to reevaluate their ideas about survivors of
trauma.
51

Yet many of those who write about histories of social notions of trauma (including Leys,
Luckhurst, and others) find the real shift, as least in the United States, to be after the American-
Vietnam War. The severity of the response to the war as manifest in its veterans and the chronic
nature of their responses “precipitated today’s consensus about the severity of the effects of
external trauma on the human psyche.”
52
Or, as Luckhurst writes, “The Vietnam Veteran was a
trauma icon.”
53
As to why this was the case, it is likely due to the fact that the sheer number of
veterans who suffered from what would later be called PTSD was incredible. While the initial
number of soldiers who had psychiatric trouble on the front was lower than that of World War II,
after the soldiers returned and time passed, many began to suffer terribly from the traumas of the
war—up to a quarter of American-Vietnam War veterans by the 1980s. The numbers only rose
as the veterans aged, to roughly one in three.
54
The cause of such widespread trauma was likely
because the American-Vietnam War as experienced by the American soldier was a largely
confusing one, and unlike any other major American conflict. Edkins writes, “It seems that the
Vietnam War stubbornly refuses to be remembered like any other war.”
55
Luckhurst lays it out
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 27
most helpfully and thoroughly, listing the many specificities of the United States’ engagement in
Vietnam:
[The] intense guerrilla engagements on the ground, where combatants and civilians
were indistinguishable, where the war aims were morally ambiguous, command
was openly contested and actions were shot through with notorious instances of
atrocity, where conscript troops were mainly teenagers vulnerable to drug
addiction, and where the one-year tour of duty…only intensified the alienation of
soldiers returning along to a home front severely divided on the prosecution of the
war
56

In early 1968, a company entered the village of My Lai and killed over 500 of its civilian
residents, and/or raped many others. The massacre was horrific, widely reported on in the
American media, severely diminishing any public sympathy for the damaged soldier (whether or
not he was associated with such clearly horrifying brutality). Then, of course, the fact America
lost the war left veterans questioning the purpose of their experiences, which gained nothing for
the United States and at such great cost. This left the potential for veterans’ being culpable in the
failure to “win” the war.
57
There is also a racist component here, for this was a war waged on
non-whites who defeated their (mostly) white attackers.
58
All other such conflicts ended in the
United States’ victory.
These realities for the millions of veterans were substantive and pervasive enough for
psychiatrists, the government, and greater American society to take notice. Members of other
oppressed groups found camaraderie there, connecting with the veterans’ cause. Feminists in the
1970s added their voices to the issue, often leaning on the image of war as akin to survivors’
experiences of assault. Some scholars (Edkins, Luckhurst, and others) argue that it is largely
because of the hard work of American-Vietnam War veterans, feminists, and their advocates that
PTSD was added to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
mental Disorders in 1980 (DSM-III). As Fassin and Rechtman write, by the time of the DSM-III
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 28
publication, trauma wasn’t linked to a “weak personality” or an “original trauma.” Rather, “The
sincerity of the victim of trauma was no longer in doubt: he or she was a priori credible.”
59
The
DSM-III outlines three sets of symptoms related to PTSD—the habitual re-experiencing of the
trauma (flashbacks, nightmares); the sufferer’s attempt to avoid that which can be associated
with their trauma (psychological or physical avoidance, inability to recall an event); an increase
in “arousal,” (hyper-vigilance, extreme anger, easily startled). The DSM-III also notes that these
symptoms can manifest months or years after the traumatic event.
60
After its inclusion in the
DSM-III, the idea of trauma moved outside of the realm of the medical and into the larger sphere
of society. It took roughly over a century for “trauma” to wend its way from the cloister of its
singularly physical medical usage to the everyday psychological use as generally thrown around
by the layperson (for I recently heard a college student claim to a friend in passing that a
particularly difficult exam “traumatized” him).
THE BEGINNINGS OF TRAUMA THEORY
Once largely accepted as a pervasive element of lives for many members of society, it didn’t take
long for the development of theory to emerge surrounding traumatic experiences. Several
scholars locate the beginnings of trauma studies at Yale in the 1990s, with the writing of Cathy
Caruth and Shoshana Felman, as well as Geoffrey Hartman. While Felman and Caruth explored
the significance of the Shoah in their work, Hartman’s past as one who escaped World War II-
Germany as a child gave him an understandably deeper personal interest in representation and
memory surrounding the Shoah. He, like Caruth and Felman, began to marry the
deconstructionist interests with his ideas of trauma in the early 1990s. Yet, overall, Hartman was
not particularly psychoanalytic in his approach to trauma, setting him apart from his
contemporaries.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 29
The issue of testimony is at the heart of the work by Hartman’s peer, Shoshana Felman.
Felman was on the faculty at Yale and turned her deconstructionist eye on issues of trauma in the
1990s, ultimately arguing for traumatic experiences’ capacity to transmit to others (in this case
the listener). Felman is largely a Lacanian, focusing on the limits of knowledge, transmissibility
of experience, and the real. In Testimony, Felman and psychoanalyst Dori Laub consider the
indescribability of traumas of the Shoah yet the value of transmission through testimony, as well
as the position of the listener. They write that the listener “by definition partakes in the struggle
of the victim with the memories and residues of his or her traumatic past,” going so far as to
claim the listener becomes “a participant and co-owner of the traumatic event” while “he
preserves his own separate place.”
61
In Testimony, Felman discusses the issue of traumatic
transmission she found in her class on the Shoah, and the intensity of her students’ responses.
While notions of testimony play into Cathy Caruth’s interest, they are nowhere near as
central as in the work of Felman and Laub. While Felman is a Lacanian, Caruth is a Freudian.
She ultimately argues that the trauma lies not in the original experience, but rather in the
patient’s remembrance of it and its repetition. In 1996 came Caruth’s book Unclaimed
Experience, which substantively paved the way for trauma theory. In it, Caruth engages deeply
with Freud’s notions of trauma, and considers them in relation to language, testimony, narrative,
neuroscience, and the Shoah (among other things). Caruth’s work largely hinges on the crisis of
representation and its connection with one’s difficult and complex relationship with his trauma.
She writes, “in its most general definition, trauma describes an overwhelming experience of
sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed,
uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena.”
62
Caruth,
as a Freudian, leans heavily on his idea of mimesis—that the traumatic event is in the resurfacing
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 30
and subsequent repetition the survivor exhibits or experiences, rather than the original event
itself. For Caruth, the paradox, or aporia, lies in the fact “that the most direct seeing of a violent
event may occur as an absolute inability to know it” and “the way it was precisely not known in
the first instance…returns to haunt the survivor.”
63
Thus while Felman requires another party for
testimony, Caruth is more compelled by the idea of how trauma resurfaces for the traumatized,
and the impact of that realization.

It did not take long for Caruth, Felman, and Laub to come under fire by fellow scholars who
began to write and investigate trauma as a theoretical pursuit. Considering the pioneering nature
of their work, it feels inevitable. One can hardly invent a theoretical concept (which would later
become a theoretical field) without scholars locating value in the idea, but having serious issues
with the specifics of the scholarly work. Kalí Tal in her book Worlds of Hurt: Reading the
Literatures of Trauma takes Felman and Laub to task for what she believes is sloppy and at times
ethically troubling scholarship. On Felman, Tal has issues with her using complicated terms such
as “crisis,” “trauma” and other psychoanalytic language with promiscuity. Tal writes, “Felman’s
analysis partakes of the worst sort of psychoanalytic pomposity,” in that Felman is willing to
ascribe trauma to everything from testimony to relatively benign experiences in her classroom.
64

The latter of which disturbs Tal above all—specifically Felman’s willingness to equate the
Shoah survivor’s experience with that of Felman’s students after attending her class on the
subject.
65
Laub is equally flawed in his arguments as, to Tal, his shifting the importance in the
scene of traumatic testimony from the survivor to the listener participates in a larger problem of
misdirecting society’s attention in regards to a trauma. She writes, “The survivor herself has
disappeared from the picture, reappearing only as a device for pushing the listener to self-
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 31
examination.”
66
This conjures the image of the women in Charcot’s weekly lectures—they were
mere tools for Charcot and the other doctors’ research and work, their own professional
development. The hysterical women’s oppression was (at best) secondary.
While provocative, Tal’s points are well taken, and illustrate the hazards of free and easy
use of psychoanalytic theory. She turns the eye back to the original focus—the survivor of
trauma, rather than the listener of the traumatized person’s testimony. I don’t necessarily believe
that testimony is a requirement of processing trauma, and the hazards Tal lays out are real ones.
That said, testimony is at times healing for survivors of trauma, and a potential means of
catharsis. I by no means argue against it, or its potential power for the person giving testimony,
or the party receiving it. Ultimately I have little interest in policing the acts of a traumatized
person and how they engage with that trauma, so long as all parties involved have consented to
whatever involvement they desire. The danger is how we, as scholars, interact with the
survivor’s methods of engagement—whom we privilege, and how.
Though trauma theory began to bear splinters early on, the events on September 11
th

ultimately troubled Tal’s (and others’) call for returning focus on the original traumatized
individual. Where the Shoah opened the possibilities of who was traumatized and what was
trauma, at least in the United States, September 11
th
opened those possibilities even further. The
shock of September 11
th
, which was so widespread due to the media coverage, allowed for the
usual distinctions of trauma/traumatized to become permeable. After that tragedy, the approach
to trauma in psychology changed, allowing that “it was no longer necessary to have been directly
affected by the event…it was now possible to be traumatized by virtue of the fact that one
identified oneself as part of the same human community, the community affected by the event.”
67

Thus, you didn’t have to be in the Pentagon, or the Twin Towers, or even in Manhattan to have
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 32
the capacity to claim traumatization. The privileging of proximity, which until that point had
created a clear boundary of what was and was not trauma, softened.
68
This is where my interest
lies, and ultimately will be pursued in this book’s following chapters. For if we are willing to
accept that we do not have to be touched to endure trauma, do not even have to be physically
present at a traumatic event to feel the psychological repercussions, what are trauma’s limits?
And what are the potential sources of trauma if a victim is not in close proximity? If the event
took place years or even centuries ago? What does trauma look like when it is relayed?
WHY MEMORY & HAUNTING
I arrive at two theoretical notions that arguably fall within trauma and trauma theory: memory
and haunting. I turn to these notions for a few reasons, but largely because they provide modes of
inquiry that strict trauma theory generally does not. In part this is because the institutions from
which medical and theoretical notions of trauma are built upon have participated and often
continue to participate in the subjugation of the victim.
69
As Edkins writes, “The modern state
cannot be assumed to be a place of safety, any more than the patriarchal family can.”
70
This is
largely due to the fact that the traumatized person is a potential threat to the state. Edkins
explains that “In order…for the fantasy of the democratic state to be believable, the visions of
survivors have to be hidden, ignored, or medicalised” for ultimately “testimony challenges
sovereign power at its very roots.”
71
For Tal, the “strategies of cultural coping” with serious
traumas are similar: “mythologization, medication, and disappearance.”
72
For it is hardly in the
interest of those in power to provide a platform for persons whose experiences of traumatization
act as evidence for the powerful entity’s/institution’s wrongdoing. This includes but is not
limited to that which often falls under the umbrella of cultural hegemony in the West: Anglos,
heterosexuals, cis-gender men, able-bodied, the wealthy, governmental bodies. Each of these
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 33
spheres of society, whether intentionally or not, participate in the creation of the traumatized
survivor. Because those who populate the sphere(s) reside in positions of power, they have the
capacity to undercut the trauma narratives of others, or showcase only particular traumas. This
includes, as Tal writes, medicalization, which “focuses our gaze upon the victims of trauma,
positing that they suffer from an ‘illness’ that can be ‘cured’ within an existing or slightly
modified structures of institutionalized medicine and psychiatry.”
73

As the sections of this chapter have illustrated, this has largely proved to be the case from
treatments of wandering womb to the damaged American-Vietnam War veteran. Even as
psychology has opened up the otherwise hemmed in definition of trauma throughout the past
hundred-some years to be more inclusive, it still institutes a boundary both in what it regards as
trauma and methods of treatment. Tal’s unspoken argument in the quotation above is that the
gaze shifts with such diagnoses from the culpable agent to the victim of their aggression—from
the event to its survivor. What’s more, particularly in the case of war veterans, this same agent
(the government) supplies the script that these same victims must follow if they wish to be heard
at all. Tal writes, “Representation of traumatic experience is ultimately a tool in the hands of
those who shape public perceptions and national myth,” the revision of which “occurs only as far
as the changes made do not interfere with non-survivors’ basic conceptions of themselves.”
74

This is a trap into which many theorists fall as well. As Michelle Balaev writes, “the
‘unspeakability’ of trauma claimed by so many literary critics today can be understood less as an
epistemological conundrum or neurobiological fact, but more as an outcome of cultural values
and ideologies.”
75
Trauma is ultimately a simultaneously ineffable and transformative
experience, often invoking a serious paradigm shift in the lives of those who survive it. The
danger, however, in arguing for the impossibility of discussing and representing trauma is it can
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 34
allow an out for those who would otherwise be forced to pay attention (or at the very least be
recognized as responsible if they ignored the victim). In essence, to claim something as
“unspeakable” as a means to give it meaning or credence will invite and expect silence over
testimony, ultimately serving culpable parties.
Because of this danger, I embrace Edkin’s call for “encircling the trauma”—she writes,
“we cannot try to address the trauma directly without risking its gentrification. We cannot
remember it as something that took place in time, because this would neutralize it.”
76
This is by
no means a directive to avoid investigation or privilege the “unspeakablility” of trauma, but
rather to remain open to “alternative” modes of inquiry, and with a generosity toward the
survivor’s experience and description that could ultimately incriminate even you, the listener,
and remain generous even after the point of incrimination. A tall order, to be sure, but the very
least of which the survivor of trauma deserves. For oftentimes “to recover the memory is also to
name the culprit.”
77
This all said, alongside Edkins’ notion of “encircling the trauma,” I am also
compelled by Balaev’s engaging with what she calls a “pluralistic model,” which does not
exclude theoretical approaches to trauma that may consider trauma “unrepresentable.” In short,
though many of these texts I will and have referenced have ethical issues, they all bear
compelling elements that often speak directly to the concept of relayed trauma. I will do my best
not to remain silent about their shortcomings, and use the important ideas I have found on
memory and haunting that fill the gaps. Notions of memory and haunting, because of their
elusive natures as concepts, allow a more radical approach to trauma at the points where they
intersect.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 35
SECOND-GENERATION SURVIVORS & MEMORY
While memory and identity are often yoked together in contemporary theory, this by no means is
a novel idea. In “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” John Locke wrote,
“consciousness always accompanies thinking” and “in this alone consists personal identity.”
Going further, he states that “as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past
action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person.”
78
This has since been dubbed
Locke’s memory theory of personal identity, linking those two notions with a bright thread. This
is at the heart of memory studies, albeit its scholars argue that what informs one’s memory is not
merely that which one experiences and remembers, but also the experiences and memories of
others that, in one way or another, can inform one’s identity. A mother who is a veteran of war, a
grandfather who survived the Shoah. And, “Increasingly, memory worth talking about—worth
remembering—is memory of trauma.”
79

Freud writes about memory, most notably, in his essay “Remembering, Repeating, and
Working Through,” in which he argues for testimony (or “repeating”) as a new analytical
development, making hypnosis and dream analysis secondary. Namely, he argues for accessing a
patient’s memories in conjunction with repetition compulsion and free association. Freud writes,
Remembering, as it was induced by hypnosis, could not but give the impression of
an experiment carried out in the laboratory. Repeating [testimony], as is induced in
analytic treatment…implies conjuring up a piece of real life; and for that reason it
cannot always be harmless and unobjectionable.
80

Indeed, and this only limited to describing personal experiences, rather than considering the
memories that have informed the self—the trauma of an ancestor, say. Like Locke, Freud is
focused entirely on the memories of the self that come from life events, and those which he
believed his patients should repeat to him during analysis. Locke and Freud’s thoughts on
memory, while compelling and relevant to me, did not seem to inform contemporary scholars on
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 36
memory. This is likely because of Locke and Freud’s focus on the memories of one’s experience,
rather than memories of others and their influence on one’s life and thus identity.
One of the first written pieces of scholarship on such influence was Paul Fussell’s The
Great War and Modern Memory,
81
in which Fussell made a case for literature written by a single
hand having the capacity to describe the experience of many. Specifically, he traces the literature
that came out of British World War I infantry and the horrors they captured in written works.
Later, Ellen S. Fine’s article entitled “The Absent Memory: The Act of Writing in Post-
Holocaust French Literature” addresses the phenomenon occurring in French texts as survivors
of the Shoah began to write about their experiences—the yawning gap between the word and the
event was incredible. Fine also discusses the fact that the children of survivors have limited
access to the experiences of the Shoah, yet it is a huge and formative presence in their lives. She
writes of a child of a survivor using the phrase “the absent memory”: “his way of saying that he
will never know and, at the same time, must not forget.”
82
For Fine, the direct incongruence of
this reality is that which defines the existence of the second-generation survivor of the Shoah.
While Russell and Fine are some of the first to write so explicitly about memory, Fine in
particular in connection with the Shoah (as many now do), the giant of memory studies has
proved to be Marianne Hirsch, whose work focuses primarily on the experiences of children of
Shoah survivors, and how the parents’ traumas and memories shape their children (which she
calls “post-memory”). Hirsch defines post-memory as “that of the child of the survivor whose
life is dominated by memories of what preceded his/her birth,” going on to argue the term is by
no means one of distance or with lack of reverence for memory.
83
She considers the “Holocaust
photograph” (the photo of persons who died, or survived, whether it be prior to or after the
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 37
war—in short, photos of those touched in some way by the Shoah) and their impact on second-
generation survivors.
Post-memory, the Shoah, and photographs/images have continued to inform Hirsch’s
work for over two decades, and invoked many other [ ]-memory concepts including
“collective memory” (Assman), “prosthetic memory” (Landsberg), “inherited memory” (Weigel)
—to name a few. Like Hirsch’s “post-memory” and Fine’s “absent memory,” these largely circle
around the Shoah. Considering the time their work began (the 1990s), it is not all that
surprising—the children of survivors were then well into adulthood, some becoming scholars
and examining their experiences in academic language. This is likely why there is such similarity
between Hirsch and Fine’s terms. Hirsch writes that the specificity and wide-spread experience
of such memory induces “the insistence on ‘post’ or ‘after’ and the many qualifying adjectives
and alternative formulations that try to define both a specifically inter- and trans-generational act
of transfer, and the resonant after-effects of trauma. If this sounds like a contradiction, it is one,
and I believe it is inherent to this phenomenon.”
84
My interest in memory studies (at least in
those such as Hirsch and others with similar arguments) is the concept that the traumatic
experiences of others can deeply impact those around them. In short, we can receive the traumas
of others, even with scant information. We can receive relayed trauma simply by seeing the
damage of a loved one who has survived traumatizing events. Hirsch, Fine, and others recognize
the many means of “transfer” that exist both in psyche and body.

I want to briefly move back to discuss a related phenomenon of such transfer as considered
through the opening quotation from Freud in mind: “an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life
to restore an earlier state of things.”
85
We organisms are driven to attempt to preserve comfort,
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 38
normalcy. Memory is a potential tool to do so. In the 1880s, biologist Herbert Spencer was
exploring notions of traumatic memory in relation to instinct. He argued that evolutionary (or
phylogenetic) memory is inherited via experiences of “preceding organisms” (or ancestors).
86

Allan Young in his essay “Bodily Memory and Traumatic Memory” argues that Spencer is key
in the development of theory surrounding traumatic memory. Young explains Spencer’s notions
as such: “Each phylogenetic memory begins as an individual experience” and, if pursued time
and again until a deep neural pathway is established, “a phylogenetic memory is equated to what
is called an instinct.”
87
Young continues, “What is special about this [phylogenetic] conscious
memory is that, at the moment of remembrance and reenactment, it collapses time, fusing the
ancestral past and the experienced present.”
88
Spencer and Young are focusing specifically on
instinct and bodily memory (the human’s inherited instinctual fear of snakes, say), yet the
question of what else can be relayed generation to generation is compelling. Young writes that
mental memory “is notoriously revisable and permits time to move in both directions; bodily
memory…is revisable only through evolutionary systems.”
89
Thus if considering only backward
movement, our immediate ancestors and direct descendants, I am curious how modern-day
stressful and even traumatic events shape us and our progeny. Spencer’s notion of instinct lays
bare some of the basics of memory studies, arguing for the scientific aspects of what we, as
humans, assume from our ancestors. This is far beyond merely instinct as we often think of it,
such as why we pull away from pain-inducing objects or scream in response to terror. Trauma,
too, can be passed on—more physically than we may realize.
The idea of inherited trauma has recently been illustrated by scientific studies including
one in which scientists considered the impact “stress” has on mice intergenerationally.
Ultimately, they found that, for the offspring, “the effects of stress are present at conception.”
90

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 39
In the article, the scientists describe that traumatic experiences in a mouse’s early life can be
traced through generations. This discovery can be a means to locate “molecular markers of
traumatic stress for potential use for the diagnostic of stress predisposition and stress-induced
disorders in humans.”
91
In other words, trauma changes you on a molecular level, and that
subsequent “behavioral and metabolic alteration”
92
can be passed to your children—at least if
you are a mouse, but possibly as a human, too.
While not nearly as focused on the body as the scientists above, by and large theorists in
memory studies are interested in more legible methods of tracing trauma. Hirsch writes that post-
memory “is a structure of inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and
experience. It is a consequence of traumatic recall but (unlike post-traumatic stress disorder) at a
generational removing” and goes on to argue that “the notion of memory as opposed to history
[is] best mediated by photographic images.”
93
For Hirsch and others in memory studies,
testimony, photographs—in short documentation—are required for “inter-generational
transfer.”
94
While trauma theorists focus on testimony, narrative, etc., many in memory studies
focus on photography and recorded testimony. It often hinges on visual evidence. As Barbie
Zelizer writes, “Images help stabilize and anchor collective memory’s transient and fluctuating
nature.”
95
This is why images are largely not as interesting to me in my inquiry. What of the
trauma that has no documentation or physical ephemera? Or that which is only documented by
the perpetrator of the trauma? Or occurs within those who traumatize others? These questions
show the troubling gaps in memory studies—mostly in the theorists’ reliance on the normative
archive or experience in order for inter-generational transfer to occur, and for those who inherit
trauma to explore that experience. As Ann Laura Stoler writes in her essay “Colonial Archives
and the Arts of Governance,” “The archive was the supreme technology of the late nineteenth-
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 40
century imperial state, a repository of codified beliefs that clustered (and bore witness to)
connections between secrecy, the law, and power.”
96
I am not interested in focusing wholly on
such archives, particularly because of this troubled history. While using the terms that rely on the
archive, I do so with the intention to give privilege those who are not present there. I want to
know more about that which is transmitted without material evidence. What is inherited without
a physical trace. This, to my mind, is where haunting takes a role in my inquiry, what the poet
can and does draw from to make tangible in her work (as Bhanu Kapil and M. NourbeSe Philip
do). Just as memory studies addresses the blind spots in trauma theory, discussions of haunting
aid the larger discussion of inherited traumatic memory.
ON HAUNTING
In Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, he tells of a dream that a patient heard at a lecture, and
found herself re-dreaming. According to the lecturer-via-patient-via-Freud, a man’s son
succumbed to fever. The father went to sleep, the son’s corpse wrapped in fabric and surrounded
by candles, an older man sitting watch with the body. Freud writes,
After a few hours’ sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside
his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: ‘Father, don’t
you see I’m burning?’ He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next
room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and
that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child’s dead body had been
burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them.
97

Freud is quick to undermine any ghostliness in the encounter, claiming the father’s closed eyes
perceived fire’s light, the speech cobbled from the living boy’s statements pointing to the fever
that killed him. To Freud, this is a simple example of wish-fulfillment—the father’s mind giving
life to his dead son.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 41
Lacan reads the dream too, disagreeing with Freud’s argument of it being a
manifestation of the father’s desire, because the man does not convince himself his child is not
dead—
But the terrible vision of the dead son taking the father by the arm designates a
beyond that makes itself heard in the dream. Desire manifests itself in the dream by
the loss expressed in an image at the most cruel point of the object. It is only in the
dream that this truly unique encounter can occur.
98

This “encounter,” for Lacan, is more an issue of parental duty than desire. Caruth, who falls in
Lacan’s camp, links the dream to notions of trauma. She writes, “Awakening…is itself the site of
trauma, the trauma of the necessity and impossibility of responding to another’s death.”
99
Caruth
goes on to argue that the father’s testimony of the son’s death which, in its transmission to
others, will allow him to break out of repetition.
100

This dream and theorists’ recurring interest in it
101
is the closest I can find to theoretical
approaches to haunting involving a ghost figure in psychoanalytic theory. Yet Freud, Lacan,
Caruth, and others all fail to consider what is, to me, the compelling agent in this story. It isn’t
the father or his desires—it is the ghost.

While not discussing ghosts like the one who appeared in the father’s dream, Nicholas Abraham
and Maria Torok were arguably the first to use explicit language of haunting in the world of
psychoanalytic theory. In their collection of essays The Shell and the Kernel, Abraham and
Torok provide terms such as “transgenerational haunting,” “phantom,” “crypt,” and “traces” for
their ideas, yet contain them within the strict boundaries of psychoanalysis. For Abraham and
Torok, “transgenerational haunting” is a means of describing repression and/or suppressing
within the nuclear family unit. Abraham writes, “[Phantoms] point to a gap, they refer to the
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 42
unspeakable.”
102
This is more about family secrets and psychoanalytic desires than the traumas
we see in memory studies. Abraham and Torok write, in a footnote,
Should a child have parents ‘with secrets,’…the child will receive from them a gap
in the conscious, an unknown, unrecognized knowledge—a nescience—subjected
to a form of ‘repression’ before the fact. The buried speech of the parent will be (a)
dead (gap) without a burial place in the child. The unknown phantom returns from
the unconscious to haunt its host and may lead to phobias, madness, and obsessions.
Its effect can persist through several generations and determine the fate of an entire
family line.
103

For someone interested in haunting as a theoretical pursuit, the language here swings from
thrillingly ghostly to disappointing in its overall argument. To cultivate a notion like the
phantom, argue for memories “without a legal burial place,”
104
but then assert they are the means
to interrogate the oedipal desires in a mother (which Abraham and Torok do use as an example
of a phantom at a different point), does not allow the phantom its full potential. But it does
provide the language.
Jacques Derrida’s The Specters of Marx inches closer to explicit theoretical investigations
of haunting. This text largely focuses on Marx and what haunted him, how Communism haunts.
Derrida often leans on Hamlet. His descriptions of haunting, justice, and time are hugely
compelling and likely influenced one of the foundational scholars on haunting. At one point
Derrida writes,
[No justice] seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some
responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living
present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead,
be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist,
colonialist, sexist or other kinds of exterminations, victims of oppressions of
capitalist imperialist or other forms of totalitarianism.
105

The notion of justice and thus responsibility as Derrida lays out here is integral to the experience
of haunting myself and other scholars are considering. For the focus is not on terror, but
communication of information otherwise forgotten or lost or never known. The specter
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 43
communicates in order to relay a trauma, but also to entrust a task. Derrida writes, “If [one] loves
justice, [he] should learn it and from the ghost. He should learn to live by learning not how to
make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or
how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself.”
106

Here Derrida calls for the haunted to meet the specter on their terms, that this is something
beyond mere conversation. The specter knows more than the haunted. He goes on, “they are
always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not
yet.”
107
My excitement in Derrida’s descriptions is largely due to their inclusiveness—the specter
can be real, or not. Exist now, or will someday. With the reality of the ghost, time shifts—“time
is out of joint” is one chapter’s refrain.
108
Derrida writes, “If there is something like spectrality,
there are reasons to doubt [the] reassuring order of presents, and, especially the border between
the present…and everything that can be opposed to it: absence, non-presence.”
109
And thus, with
a “reassuring” concept—the dependable system of time—thrown into uncertainty, I believe, so
too are other systems (predominantly those of power). The ghost is undoubtedly a victim of
abuse of power—when time becomes a system open to question for the haunted, they are more
likely to consider the failings of other systems that would otherwise seem fixed and secure.

Since writers on the burning child dream, as well as Abraham, Torok, and Derrida, many
scholars have interrogated the notion of haunting with more compelling and explicit intentions.
Specifically, they have a historical and political focus, often addressing the traumatic experiences
of populations otherwise avoided in trauma theory and memory studies. Largely this work
considers oppressed and harmed populations of color. In the texts I have read, nearly all gave
nods to the work of Avery Gordon, particularly her book Ghostly Matters. In it, Gordon focuses
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 44
primarily on the notion of haunting and its connection to power, trauma, and survivors’
responsibilities, interrogating Freud’s burning child dream and Derrida’s specters now and then.
She writes that a ghost “is not a case of dead of missing persons sui generis, but of the ghost as a
social figure. It is often a case of inarticulate experiences, of symptoms and screen memories.”
110

Yet, despite this argument of the ghost being some kind of general psychic energy, perhaps the
source of which being the haunted herself, Gordon is quick to ascribe the ghost agency. She
writes,
[The ghost] cannot simply be tracked back to an individual loss or trauma. The
ghost has its own desires…which figure the whole complicated sociality of a
determined formation that seems inoperative (like slavery) or invisible (like racially
gendered capitalism) but that is nonetheless alive and enforced…[The ghost is]
pregnant with unfulfilled possibility, with the something to be done that the
wavering present is demanding. This something to be done is not a return to the
past but a reckoning with its repression in the present, a reckoning with that which
we have lost, but never had.
111

I quote this extensively because not only does it illustrate Gordon’s complicated notions of the
ghost quite well, it also points to the other major concerns in the work, that which provokes the
ghost to haunt—namely injustice and its persistence into the present. This is what precipitates
the haunting, and marshals our relationship to it and our task in how we respond. The ghost must
have agency in order to compel the haunted person to act, to address the injustice in whatever
way they can. To speak for those who could not and cannot speak for themselves, who have not
yet been spoken for.
Since Ghostly Matters, others have pursued notions of haunting, often in relation to their
personal experiences linked to their identities as women of color. Grace M. Cho, in her powerful
book Haunting the Korean Diaspora, explores transgenerational haunting extensively, mingling
it with memoir. She writes, “the ghost is engendered in the private realm of family secrets,
secrets that are inextricable from the abuses of political powers.”
112
While the former half of her
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 45
sentence could easily fall within the concerns of Abraham and Torok, the latter half is her own
intervention. Cho’s text considers the specificity of her experiences as a mixed-race child of a
white American soldier and a Korean woman who may have been a “comfort woman,” or
kijich’on. Thus the ghost of family feels especially important here. Yet she frequently pulls back
and considers haunting in a larger context, particularly in regards to the Korean War and how it
continues to haunt the communities there. This includes but is not limited to the spectral, visions
on battlefields, as well as the less visible.
Where Cho has access to hauntological information of recent past, M. Jacqui Alexander
considers her Black diasporic racial identity as an avenue of accessing haunting and older
traumas in her book Pedagogies of Crossing. In it, Alexander examines the particular haunting as
the result of the American slave trade, in conjunction with what she calls “African-based
spiritual practices”
113
that made it across the Atlantic (Vodou, Santería) as a means of
interrogating and collapsing time and memory in a way that was empowering to some of the
most systematically disempowered people in history. Alexander explains,
[W]ho is remembered—and how—is continually being transformed through a web
of interpretive systems that ground meaning and imagination in principles as well
as what lies within are constantly being transformed in the process of work in the
present; collapsing, ultimately, the rigid demarcation of the prescriptive past,
present, and future of linear time.
114

Through such a collapse one can access the trauma that provokes the haunting. Alexander
reassessed her approach to haunting after researching the trial, torture, and execution of a slave
named Thisbe in 1800s Trinidad who was possibly enacting African spiritual practices. There
was little housed in the archive, and almost no direct information on Thisbe from Thisbe. It was
information accessible and given strictly on the terms of the colonial oppressor. Yet during her
research, Alexander realized “that cosmological systems housed memory, and that such memory
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 46
was necessary to distill psychic traumas produced under the grotesque conditions of slavery.”
115

The normative methods of research fell short of Alexander’s goals for her work—and this is
where haunting provided necessary information for her work to continue. It gave her access to
that which the normative archive barred her, and more deeply connected her to those who haunt.
While Alexander and Cho’s approaches to haunting are particular to a specific experience
(descendants of traumas specific to the Korean War and the Atlantic slave trade), many of their
arguments and ideas ring true, to my mind, for experiences outside of these populations as well.
When I use their writing and concepts for other populations, it is without the intention of
selective use of their work, but rather to consider how their ideas may apply to different
communities and persons similarly traumatized and neglected over time (and thus provoking
haunting). I couch Alexander and Cho’s work because each of their texts are directly tied to their
own identities, are often so personal—personal in ways that Derrida and Gordon are not due to
the fact their explorations of haunting are not linked to experience. While Derrida and Gordon
consider haunting in theory, Alexander and Cho do so from first-hand events. This is not to
privilege first-hand experience, especially considering the fact this dissertation works to illustrate
the power of indirect experience on one’s psychology. Thus, my theoretical foundation for this
work diagrammed, my interrogation of contemporary poets’ attempts to engage with their
relayed trauma begins, whose works and practices I will consider for the remainder of this
dissertation, beginning with Elyse Fenton.

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 47
CHAPTER ONE NOTES
1
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1989. Print. 43.
2
Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2000. Print. 11.
3
A genealogy in a chapter is an impossible task—such a genealogy could (and has) comprise(d) full volumes. I think
especially of Leys’ (arguably troubled) Trauma: A Genealogy, among others.
4
LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 96.
5
While I experienced the boundlessness of theory and medicine surrounding trauma, I also noted that there were
populations consistently left out of consideration—predominantly enslaved persons, other people of color, disabled
persons, and/or the poor. I will return to this later.
6
Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge, 2008. 2.
7
Ibid., 2-3.
8
Micale, Mark S. Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2008. 8.
9
King, Helen. Hippocrates' Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece. London: Routledge, 1998. 35.
10
Plato. Timaeus, 91-C, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 11th eds., Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. 1210.
11
"hysteric, adj. and n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. 25 February 2015.
12
Maines, Rachel P. The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction. JHU
Press, 2001.
13
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York, NY: Basic, 1992. 10.
14
Micale argues that Charcot also studied and diagnosed several male patients with hysteria, (122-3). He goes so far
as to state that Charcot “attempt[ed] to masculinize the traditionally ‘feminine’ diagnosis of hysteria” (124).
15
Herman, 11. While I find Trauma and Recovery compelling, it is often a flawed text. Ruth Leys takes Herman to
task for not acknowledging Pierre Janet’s troubling practice of hypnotizing his patients and altering their memories
in order to “cure” their hysterical symptoms. Herman also leans heavily on Jeffrey Masson’s notion that Freud gave
in to exterior pressures and reversed his idea that the women he was treating were survivors of sexual assault. Many
argue that Masson’s argument disregarded Freud’s original writings on the concept prior to his reversal.
16
Leys, 106. Later in this chapter we will see how notions of forgetting/silence do not begin and end with
psychotherapy, but moves into society, families, institutions.
17
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 32.
18
Leys, 119.
19
Ibid., 8.
20
This is disturbingly similar to what veteran’s hospitals require of those who return from combat and claim to have
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. (Really? Prove it.)
21
That said, the actual cause (more often than not, sexual assault), was not fully recognized until the Women’s Rights
Movements in the 1970s.
22
Herman, 17.
23
Mark S. Micale’s book Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness (Harvard University Press)
gives several examples of exploration of male hysteria dating back to the Renaissance in England (12). That said,
for the sake of the brevity of this chapter, I will be focusing on more broadly accepted notions of trauma as noted
by the larger spheres of society rather than a handful of medical professionals. I recommend his introductory
chapter for a far more in-depth consideration of the origin of hysteria, its connection to gender, and the medical
approaches to it throughout the centuries.
24
Fassin, Didier & Richard Rechtman. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Trans.
Rachel Gomme. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 30.
Micale argues male hysteria as a concept was largely stifled due to the fact that it required “sustained, analytical
self-reflexivity” that male physicians apparently were not capable of enacting (281).
25
Luckhurst, 22.
26
Ibid., 21.
27
Ibid., 24.
28
Ibid., 27. My emphasis.
29
Rothberg, Michael. "Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response." Studies in the Novel 40, no. 1-2 (2008): 224-34.
230.

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 48

30
Yet arguably we still don’t fully understand trauma, how to treat it, nor have we produced effective pharmaceuticals
or therapies to completely suppress the symptoms.
31
Recently a team of scientists, led by neuropathologist Daniel P. Perl, considered post-mortem studies of veterans’
brains exposed to blasts while serving in Afghanistan or Iraq. These soldiers suffered from what we would generally
consider to be P.T.S.D – difficulty sleeping, memory loss, severe depression, issues with cognition. Several
ultimately died from suicide upon returning home. Perl discovered tiny scars in these veterans’ brains, thus pointing
to the potential physical manifestation of trauma in the veteran’s brain due to proximity to a blast. Perl and his team
are calling for further studies.
Baughman Shively, Sharon, Iren Horkayne-Szakaly, Robert V. Jones, James P. Kelly, Regina C. Armstrong, and
Daniel P. Perl. "Characterisation of Interface Astroglial Scarring in the Human Brain after Blast Exposure:
A Post-mortem Case Series." The Lancet, June 9, 2016.
32
“One periodic lyric went like this: Perhaps you’re broke and paralyzed / Perhaps your memory goes / But it’s only
just called shell shock / For you’ve nothing there that shows” (Worth, Robert F. "What If PTSD Is More Physical
Than Psychological?" New York Times, June 10, 2016.).
33
Luckhurst, 23.
34
Luckhurst, 36.
35
Davoine, Françoise & Jean-Max Gaudillière. “4.2.2. From Shell Shock to Traumatic Neurosis: ‘God Only Knows’”
in History Beyond Trauma: Whereof One Cannot Speak, Thereof One Cannot Stay Silent. Trans. Susan
Fairfield. New York: Other, 2004.
In the late 1800s, soldier trauma was associated with the heart: “cardiac neuroses,” “irritable heart” “soldier’s heart”
(Van der Kolk, Lars Weisaeth, Onno Vander Hart “History of Trauma in Psychiatry” in Traumatic Stress: The
Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. Van der Kolk, Bessel A., MacFarlane, Alexander,
& Weisaeth, Lars, eds. New York: Guilford Press, 2007. 47-74. 48.).
36
Leys writes that many argued the hysteria “emerged as the sign of a prior, impossible mourning for and incorporation
of the lost mother.” Leys, Ruth. "Traumatic Cures: Shell Shock, Janet, and the Question of Memory." Ed. Michael
Lambek. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. Ed. Paul Antze. New York: Routledge, 1996. 103-
45. 110.
37
Edkins, Jenny. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 52.
38
This is particularly true as, by and large, World War I was the last war that involved primarily soldiers from the
upper classes. Indeed, it was because of the incredible violence and death tolls of the Great War that the subsequent
wars were largely avoided by the wealthy in Europe and the United States.
39
Davoine and Gaudillière, 107.
40
Farrell, Kirby. Post-traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1998. 10-1.
41
McFarlane, Alexander C. and Bessel A. Van der Kolk. “Trauma and Its Challenge to Society” in Traumatic
Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. Van der Kolk, Bessel A.,
MacFarlane, Alexander, & Weisaeth, Lars, eds. New York: Guilford Press, 2007. 24-46. 35.
42
Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 20.
43
Freud, BPP, 33-5.
44
Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 23.
45
Ibid., 92.
46
Luckhurst, 38.
47
In terms of the World War II soldier, the approach to treatment also changed. Psychiatrist William Sargant assisted
soldiers coming back from Dunkirk and recognized that they were exhibited what had been described as shell shock.
Sargant gave soldiers barbiturates, which he claimed often induced abreaction, or catharsis. Sargant argued this
method, rather than Breuer and Freud’s hypnosis, would treat hysterical patients (Leys, 191). Then ensued the debate
around this chemical abreaction (or neurcosynthesis) in terms of whether or not a patient had the ability to consent.
More often than not, he was not able to recall giving said permission once the catharsis was complete.
48
Fassin and Rechtman, 73.
49
I will avoid using “the Holocaust” largely because of the root of the work, which Giorgio Agamben lays out so
powerfully in The Remnants of Auschwitz. In it, he explains the Greek root, holocaustos, an adjective that means
“completely burned.” Agamben writes that “the Church Fathers used the term in its literal sense as a polemical
weapon against the Jews, to condemn the uselessness of bloody sacrifices…Not only does the term imply an
unacceptable equation between crematoria and altars; it also continues a semantic heredity that is from its inception
anti-Semitic” (28-31).
50
Luckhurst, 62.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 49

51
As Laura S. Brown writes, “The range of human experience becomes the range of what is normal and usual in the
lives of men of the dominant class: white, young, able-bodied, educated, middle-class, Christian men. Trauma is
thus that which disrupts these particular human lives, but no other. War and genocide, which are the work of men
and male-dominated culture, are agreed-upon trauma; so are natural disasters, vehicle crashes, boats sinking in
the freezing ocean” (Brown, Laura S. "Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma."
Imago 48, no. 1 [1991]: 119-33. 121.).
52
Leys, 227.
53
Luckhurst, 59.
54
Kulka, Richard A., William E. Schlenger, et al. Trauma and the Vietnam War Generation: Report of Findings from
the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1990. Cited by Luckhurst,
59.
55
Edkins, 98.
56
Luckhurst, 59-60.
57
Of course there is also the negative effects of close contact with Agent Orange, and the extensive physical maladies
that manifested themselves for many veterans years later.
58
It bears noting that the demographics of soldiers serving in the World Wars and theAmerican-Vietnam War shifted
dramatically. WWI soldiers were largely rich and educated. After the terrors of modern war were evident, WWII
had largely poor men peopling its troops. In Vietnam, poor and/or black men also served, racial issues being trumped
by the need for soldiers in the war effort. As Marita Sturken writes, “the treatment of the veterans was also a
direct result of who the veterans were—not the white middle-class men who had graduate school deferments
but working-class whites, blacks, Latinos, Guamanians, and Native Americans. The initial shock and
acquiescence with which Vietnam veterans initially accepted their postwar treatment was a direct result of
their lack of privilege.” This also played into those who died: “Casualty figures for both blacks and Hispanics
were unusually high, suggesting that they were more often assigned to combat patrols and other dangerous
assignments” (Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories the Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of
Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 65 and 114.).
59
Fassin and Rechtman, 77.
60
American Psychiatric Association. DSM III: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Washington:
APA, 1980. 467-8.
61
Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New
York: Routledge, 1991. 58, 57, 58 (respectively).
62
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1996. 11.
63
Ibid., 91-92; 4.
64
Tal, Kalí. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 54.
65
Ibid., 54-55. Beyond this, Tal excoriates Felman for her “complete exoneration” of Paul de Man for his political
silence while a WWII journalist in Belgium. There is a good deal of controversy on the topic, which falls outside
the scope of this dissertation.
66
Tal, 57.
67
Fassin & Rechtman, 106.
68
There were similar advances concerning claims for compensation despite lack of proximity to a traumatic event in
the 20
th
century as well, which Luckhurst provides in detail in his first chapter of The Trauma Question. Largely
this consisted of denying payment for nervous shock unless “Any psychological impact…[had] to have been
stamped on the body to reach the legal threshold” in the very early 1900s, limiting to the corporeal self (rather than
the bodies of others) (28). It wasn’t until 1983 that the court extended this “impact” to beyond those victim or
witness to an accident itself to include the “immediate aftermath” in McLoughlin v. O’Brian (28).
69
Some might argue this is also true with memory, as Freud writes extensively on it—yet those who work in memory
studies rarely cite him, much less consider his work a foundation upon which to build (or even abandon).
70
Edkins, 7.
71
Ibid., 52 and 230 (respectively).
72
Tal, 6.
73
Ibid., 6.
74
Ibid., 19 and 122 (respectively).
75
Balaev, Michelle. "Trends in Literary Trauma Theory." Mosaic 41.2 (2008): 149-65. 157.
76
Balaev, The Nature of Trauma, 15.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 50

77
Kenny, Michael G. "Trauma, Time, Illness, and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Traumatic Memory."
Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. Eds. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek. New York:
Routledge, 1996. 151-71. 153.
78
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Roger Woolhouse. New York: Penguin, 1997. 302.
Locke’s assertion is of course ageist and ableist—for what of the child with few memories? Or the person suffering
dementia? Are they so conscripted to a limited identity?
79
Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge,
1996. xii.
80
Sigmund Freud, "Remembering, Repeating and Working Through." Trans. Joan Riviere. The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 12. London: Hogarth, 1950. 145-57.
81
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
82
Fine, Ellen S. "The Absent Memory: The Act of Writing in Post-Holocaust French Literature." Ed. Berel Lang.
Writing and the Holocaust. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988. 41-57.
83
Hirsch, Marianne. "Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory." Discourse (Special Issue: The Emotions,
Gender, and the Politics of Subjectivity) Winter 15.2 (1992): 3-29. 8.
84
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2012. 3-4.
85
Freud, BPP, 43.
86
Spencer, Herbert. The Principles of Psychology. 2nd ed. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1880.
470.
87
Young, Allan. "Bodily Memory and Traumatic Memory." Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory.
Eds. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek. New York: Routledge, 1996. 89-102. 92, my emphasis.
88
Ibid., 93. Young writes compellingly about ancestral memory and Spencer, but I would be remiss if not to mention
his clearly derisive description of voodoo practices—a huge blind spot in this otherwise interesting essay.
89
Ibid., 98.
90
Gapp, Katharina, Ali Jawaid, Peter Sarkies, Johannes Bohacek, Pawel Pelczar, Julien Prados, Laurent Farinelli,
Erica Miska, and Isabelle M. Mansuy. "Implication of Sperm RNAs in Transgenerational Inheritance of the
Effects of Early Trauma in Mice." Nature Neuroscience 17.5 (May 2014): 667-71. 668.
91
Ibid., 669.
92
Ibid., 667.
93
Hirsch, Marianne. "The Generation of Postmemory." Poetics Today 29.1 (2008): 103-28. 106 and 111, respectively.
94
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2012. 104.
95
Zelizer, Barbie. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998. 5.
96
Stoler, Ann Laura, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance.” Archival Science, 2 (2002): 87-109. 87.
97
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic, 2010. 513-14.
98
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Alan
Sheridan. W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. 59.
99
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 100.
100
Ibid., 105-6.
101
Slavoj Žižek, too, discusses the dream in his essay “Freud Lives!,” London Review of Books, 28.10 (May 25, 2006):
32.
102
Abraham, Nicolas. “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology” in The Shell and the
Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994. 171-176.
174.
103
Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. “‘The Lost Object—Me’: Notes on Endocryptic Identification” in The Shell
and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994.
139-156. 140.
104
Ibid., 141.
105
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New
York: Routledge, 1994. xviii.
106
Ibid., 221. Derrida’s writing feels un-paraphrasable—often I’m just barely edging around full comprehension of
his meaning. Who else would write “in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself,” and get his point across?
107
Ibid., 221.
108
Derrida, Specters of Marx, “Injunctions of Marx.”
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / RELAYED TRAUMA’S ORIGINS 51

109
Derrida, Specters of Marx. 48.
110
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1997.
25.
111
Ibid., 183.
112
Cho, Grace M. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2008. 11.
113
Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the
Sacred. Duke University Press, 2005. 322.
114
Ibid., 292.
115
Ibid., 293.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 52
- CHAPTER TWO -

THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES IN POETRY:
AN EXPLORATION OF BODIES IN ELYSE FENTON’S CLAMOR

Contemporary American poet Elyse Fenton’s collection Clamor is simultaneously working
inside and outside a poetic lineage. In terms of style, her approach is clearly lyrical—an “I”
stationed in a single speaker that (according to the press surrounding Clamor) is Fenton herself.
The poems are more often than not tightly wrought, and contain beautiful imagery. Though the
collection contains third-person prose-poems, the ragged-right-edge pieces, often in couplets, are
the prevailing mode—generally pointing to serious control on the part of the writer for her
restraint. Other poets who operate similarly would be Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, or
Gwendolyn Brooks. In terms of the topic of Clamor (war), Fenton similarly has clear
predecessors—Yusef Komunyakaa and Walt Whitman, among many others. Yet where she falls
outside a defined lineage, where she is distinct in her approach, is through her point of view as
the partner of someone serving in a war abroad. Fenton’s experiences as a military spouse are in
many ways similar to those of women for the past several centuries.
1
For as long as soldiers have
left home to fight there has been angst and worry for loved ones left behind. While there is much
literature—and certainly a fair share of poetry
2
—about the war experience, by and large these
texts are written by men in action (rather than women in action or partners of those at war).
3

Thus, despite not being explicitly feminist or political, Fenton’s perspective in Clamor is a
significant one, and one that makes the collection unique. It is a position largely unrepresented in
poetry despite that position’s pervasiveness throughout the ages and across the globe.
Clearly it was an experience that people wanted to read and promote. Clamor received
many accolades after its publication, thus the book can act as a larger example of ethics and
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 53
aesthetics in writing as several “gatekeepers” in the literary world found it to be a valuable
addition to the world of literature. Beyond winning the Cleveland State University Poetry Center
First Book Prize that brought about its publication, Clamor also received the Bob Bush
Memorial Award for First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters, and the University
of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize. The accomplishments of the book aside, the value for me in
writing about Clamor is to consider the issues it raises as a text. On its face, it’s about a white
woman worrying about her husband of South Asian heritage serving in an American war in Iraq.
This, indeed, could (and should) involve complex politics, yet Fenton flattens the complexity by
not addressing her husband’s heritage or the politics of the U.S. war effort, the struggles of the
civilians in Iraq.
That said, when Fenton focuses on her experience closely—the difficulty of having a
spouse in a foreign land who is risking his life—and describes the extensiveness of her relayed
trauma after learning of her husband’s traumatic experiences, that is when the book is most
remarkable. She works hard to keep the humanity of her husband clear, writing,
When I say you I have to mean
not some signified presence, not
the striking of the same spent tinder

but your mouth & its live wetness, your tongue
& its intimate knowledge of flesh
4

That flesh, of course, being hers. Beyond these impulses, probably some of the most compelling
portions of the book are after her husband’s return, which chronicle the extended trouble for her
despite his being out of danger. At one point she writes, “The Dreams are back, The Dreams
won’t let me / alone,” forcing her to worry about his death while he is home and safe.
5
Probably
the most heartrending of these falls at the end of the book, entitled “Infidelity.” It reads in full:
When you were in Iraq I dreamed of you
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 54
dead, dormant, shanked stone

in a winter well, verb-less object
sunk haft-deep through the navel

of each walking sentence. I dreamed
myself shipwreck, rent timbers

on a tidal bed, woke to a morning’s cold
mast of breath canted wide as a search light

for the drowned. Dreamed my crumbling
teeth bloomed shrampnel’d bone light

bricks mortared into a broken
kingdom of sleep where I found you

dream-sift, rubbled, nowhere.
Forgive me, love, this last

infidelity: I never dreamed you whole.

She recognizes the mind’s impulse to harm the beloved’s body due to worry, how it cannot
merely picture him well, driving home the distress during his time away—how she suffered
relayed trauma due to his traumatizing experiences that taint even her dreams.

Interrogating the relayed trauma in Elyse Fenton’s Clamor requires a certain kind of reading
practice—what I call vulnerable reading,
6
which demands that the reader trace how the author
handles those who are vulnerable.
7
Not surprisingly, this often runs a huge gamut. More often
than not privileged authors abuse/misuse these populations through their absence, silence. At
times they are marshaled with a promiscuity that is disturbing because of its disregard for their
vulnerability. Or there is the propping up of bigoted stereotypes. For, by and large, a writer has
absolute power over bodies in her text.
8
What happens when one has such power, and writes
about disenfranchised bodies—bodies disenfranchised in different ways than herself—it often
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 55
bears out rather complicated politics. According to Levinas, “The third party is the free being
whom I can harm by exerting coercion on his freedom.”
9
This provides a neat definition of a
vulnerable person (one who can experience harm), and positions another party (the one who can
enact harm) squarely in power and thus with an ethical concern in relation to her power. For
Levinas, the third party is found in the face of the Other—the “face to face” experience that
allows pairs to be locked together without concern for others, he claims, is not possible because
of this issue. It does not allow for disregard those outside the face to face. Thus, as Levinas
states, “Judgment and justice are required from the moment the third party enters.”
10
Not only
does the face to face demand one consider the Other’s situation, their vulnerability (for Levinas
their “mortality”
11
), but, by extension, the vulnerability of many.
The potential problem with Clamor and other poetry like it is the lack of regard for the
Other in this way—even when staring directly at the reality of the Other’s vulnerability. As Viet
Thanh Nguyen writes, “Disremembering is not simply the failure to remember. Disremembering
is the unethical and paradoxical mode of forgetting at the same time as remembering…
Disremembering allows someone to see right through the other.”
12
These ethical complications
breed exponentially when one attempts to write about relayed trauma and a vulnerable person
other than the person relaying the trauma is in the scene. If one suffering relayed trauma attempts
to narrativize that experience and there are multiple vulnerable persons present, including those
the person has less concern for than others (i.e. those who sustain/succumb to trauma but are not
in the position to relay it to her)—how one narrativizes those parties’ experiences ethically is
complicated. For how can one consider experiences, traumatic ones in particular, of those to
whom one has no substantial connection?
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 56
Ideally a text that involves relayed trauma will consider not only this trauma through
relay (like learning of a family member’s murder prior to the writer’s birth
13
), but the other
players in the author’s experience. There is of course the primary person experiencing the
trauma—but who are the others present in the scene, and what is their role there? Perhaps just as
compellingly, what about those who are not present, but who still play a role (either as
empowered or disempowered parties)? The poet won’t focus on merely the primary survivor’s
experience and the poet’s subsequent relayed trauma, but the larger systematic maneuvers
required for the traumas to happen in the first place. For relayed trauma is due to that secondary
person being a subjugated member of society. Systematic oppression is a requirement.
14
If she
weren’t subject to such oppression, she would wield the agency necessary to protect the person
suffering from trauma. In the case of Clamor (or, more explicitly, the Iraq War), the oppressive
systems include cultural hegemony in the United States, patriarchy, colonialism, among others.
Yet Fenton does not touch on any of these structures that undoubtedly played a role in her
difficult situation, or consider them as a means of exploring the subjugation of others who circled
around her husband and thus, by extension, herself. In addition, she is likely modifying the
primary trauma(s) of her husband, thus provoking further ethical concerns. First and foremost,
artists must address the systems that created the traumatic experience(s) that trickle back, beg to
be retold, feel inevitable, and fight prevention.
In this chapter I will consider some of Fenton’s aesthetic decisions in Clamor and how
they relate to the larger issues of relayed trauma, as outlined in my first chapter.
15
I will be
addressing relayed trauma in this collection, but also focus on what drew me to Clamor. This
was, ultimately, how Fenton handled pretty dicey material through writing (or not) about
marginalized persons or populations. I want to investigate what the poems are doing in their
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 57
lyrical aesthetics, and how the concerns of ethics and aesthetics can be (and in Clamor, often are)
braided together. In the collection, Fenton does not remark on the fact that her husband (the main
focus of the book) is a man of South Asian heritage, and rarely touches on the local civilian
population that sustained incredible casualties while he served in the second Iraq War. She
passes over any specifics regarding those who are “othered” here in the United States
consistently by its government, media, and society.
I should state that this chapter is not meant to damn Fenton or take her to task—by and
large Clamor is a powerful collection and important considering the topic of war that pushes the
narrative along. Her experiences of relayed trauma as described in some of her poems are
undeniably moving. Yet several moments in this collection gave me pause in relation to Levinas’
approach to the Other, for the ways in which Fenton exploits/(mis)uses vulnerable populations as
literary devices. This isn’t solely a book about relayed trauma, but walks a fine line regarding the
ethics of beauty and eroticism in its representations of violence and death. Oftentimes when
people narrativize relayed trauma it is to reveal the deeper systemic issues that manifested the
site of the primary trauma. This seems to preclude ethical dilemmas insomuch that the impulse is
beyond mere solipsism, wallowing, or, perhaps most egregious, the spinning of a compelling
yarn. For Fenton, she can only imagine one other (her husband) rather than Levinas’ Other—
rather than the many others who surround her narrative, the latter of which is required in
describing traumas involving multiple vulnerable bodies. Mostly, Clamor reads as a story of a
wife attempting to gain some insight into the war, fused to her husband as a kind of dyad. The
trouble in Clamor, I’ll address later. First the narrative—and relayed trauma’s role there.
THE NARRATIVE

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 58
Though Fenton’s husband is a medic in Iraq in the early aughts, oftentimes Clamor reads as if
describing experiences of World War II or any number of wars abroad with United States’
involvement. The poem “The Beginning” involves the speaker receiving a letter from a beloved
serving in a foreign place. It is winter in Boston. She watches a train after reading the line “Only
now am I afraid to die,” the train acting as an image of pathetic fallacy
16
—“jerking roughshot
through its gears…like the heart’s smallest engine // just beginning to seize.”
17
His terror
becomes hers, then projected on the train. This is generally how the book moves—by and large
Fenton gives us the war how she experienced it: in snippets of information transmitted from her
husband—and through the rampant imagination of her terrified mind, worrying for his safety.
The direct and immediate contact of phone calls (Fenton’s primary method of communication
with her husband as described in the book) continually feeds her terror. Her husband seems to be
surrounded by violence, tasked with fending off not only his own death but, as a medic, the
deaths of others. If a soldier dies, Fenton describes how her husband’s “job was not to salvage /
but to bundle”
18
dead soldier’s clothes and burn them. To set corpses in body bags, zip them up.
While a healer, he also serves as a kind of undertaker, tending to the bodies of the dead and
living alike. The reality of death is frequently set before him, and thus (through relay) before her,
too.
In one of her most arresting poems in the collection, “Planting, Hayhurst Farm,” Fenton
describes just this. Her husband uses a shovel to place human “remains in a body bag” and tells
her this—the need to shovel relaying the horror of the situation, the body in so many pieces. One
week after this event, on the phone, “I don’t know / what to say. Neither of us has slept.”
19

Learning of her husband’s trauma is enough to provoke insomniac responses in both of them.
This trauma, while relayed, traumatizes Fenton thoroughly.
20
His experience is terrible and
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 59
frightening—seeing and handling a body reduced to parts unable to hold together enough to be
held by one’s hands, what necessitates a shovel for moving—yet in her receiving her husband’s
trauma of a comrade’s death is charged with another potential trauma for her. For Fenton, as with
anyone with a loved one at war, there is of course the fear of his body being reduced to such a
state. Beyond her worry about the impact of her husband’s experiences on him, how they bleed
into her and become her own (and expand), the looming concern for her is of his own death.
While there is no explicit haunting here, the shadow of the possibility of haunting through a dead
beloved is present throughout. The potential for death and subsequent haunting. And also how, if
he were to die, her lack of proximity to that death would impact her. In “Refusing Beatrice,”
Fenton lays out the aspects of his return home. She writes:
My curse or gift is blindness
…
And if the updraft’s whirlwind
doesn’t make the sniper miss, if your helicopter lifts

from Baghdad as doomed as the Chaldean sun,

I won’t be there to see the wreckage
or the papery flames, the falling arsenal of stars—
21

The terror of knowing—of witnessing the death—may be terrible, but perhaps less so than the
images created in the mind. The terror precipitated by relayed trauma for her certainly proves
this to be true. The fear of her husband’s death is no small thing even in Fenton’s day-to-day life.
In an essay she states she avoided all news of the war, didn’t answer unanticipated knocks. She
writes, “Early on I had learned that the war could show up at your door in the uniform of an
honor guard at any moment.”
22

This fear and the other effects of relayed trauma are explicated most thoroughly in
Fenton’s continual use of pathetic fallacy throughout Clamor as illustrated in “The Beginning.”
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 60
She is often gardening and/or viewing nature, witnessing that which we associate with new
life—and locating only the morbid or violent. This scrambling between life and death/deadly is
effective. For as someone residing in a peaceful place with terrible conflict imbuing the mind, it
feels inevitable. In the poem “The Riots in Bangalore,” Fenton considers unrest there at the death
of a Bollywood actor, her empathy for the uproar in response to death. She writes:
Even now, as grief threatens to strip the world to its naked

scaffolding…
blossoms swarm my window and the sun

impulsively flashes, bare flesh between a shredded veil
23

The rawness here, while not strictly the pathetic fallacy as described by John Ruskin, is brushing
against it. The effect of her environment is hardly friendly. Pedals “swarm,” the sun “impulsive,”
clouds covering the latter a “shredded veil.” What would normally quite literally be sunshine and
flowers is invasive, nearly violent. Hearing of her husband’s traumas leaves her environment
imbued with the characteristics of his own. When one is physically in a dangerous place,
everything within that environment quickly becomes a potential source of violence—that which
one must protect oneself against. While Fenton is not located in such a situation physically, she
finds her mind operating as if she were, the intensity of the trauma’s relay creating an empathic
response to a terrifying degree. Fenton pushes this idea more forcefully in “What We Hold, We
Hold at Bay.” She describes a series of dewy lilacs as a “flower-mortared / wall.” Taking a leaf,
holding it
the way

I think you must have held
a dog tag slipped from around the collar

of the dead
24

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 61
Imagery that normally evokes peacefulness and life in her current environment takes her
elsewhere—to violence and death, to her beloved. Her reaching toward the morbid terrible but
necessary in order to maintain a connection with him. The violence and death she sees
everywhere a result of the danger of his situation, his relaying his trauma to her. Problems arise
when the direction of her reach goes the opposite way—when Fenton ascribes life to that which
is dead, or when she prettifies gore.
THE TROUBLE
The abstraction of a body in writing has complicated implications, for it can lead people to forget
the body is indeed a body. Of course it is a written word—merely an interaction with a body in
the non-physical space. However, the lack of physical proximity with the body does not give the
writer absolute permission to manipulate that body in any manner she pleases, particularly if the
body has sustained violence and/or injury, is vulnerable. With the body of an injured soldier, for
instance, while a poet may write about such a body without any primary knowledge or
experience of it, the experience of the injured solider is one that does take place in reality, and
that body is a vulnerable one. In short, while a writer may describe shootings and explosions on
the page, these exist in the physical world, and, for some, those dangers are real. To interact with
a body maimed by the violence of war with little concern for it as a harmed body is, in its way, a
violence. This violence, while not physical, is still one that we should take seriously. Yet Fenton
herself isn’t harming such bodies—that is a point I should make clear. As Maggie Nelson writes
in The Art of Cruelty, it is an “essentially totalitarian mistake” to equate violence on the page
with violence in the physical world.
25
Beyond this, the non-physical violence Fenton is enacting
in her poetry isn’t a novel act of violence. Rather, more often than not, she is illustrating systems
of violence that already exist in regards to those with which she engages in her work. The trouble
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 62
lies in the fact she appears to be unaware of the greater implications of such writing as she
consistently recreates the systematic violence, thus reinforcing these violent systems rather than
providing a subversive approach that points to the larger issues of how such bodies are often
(mis)handled.
Though Fenton does not write about maimed bodies often in Clamor, how she does so is
illustrated at the outset of the collection. The first poem, entitled “Gratitude,” addresses her
husband directly through second-person. In it we are presented with a wounded soldier who is
completely incapacitated, apparently near death. Though Fenton was not present, she learns of
the traumatizing event through relay, placing herself near the injured soldier, outside the ring of
those who aid him. Fenton writes, “They delivered the soldier—beyond recognition,”
26
then
pursuing this notion of a body/human “beyond recognition” to what is a disturbing end. She
continues:
By the time you arrived

there were already hands fluttering white flags of gauze
against the ruptured scaffolding of ribs, the glistening skull, and no skin

left untended
27

There are several things Fenton is doing in these lines, knowingly or unknowingly. This is a
body “beyond recognition”—as Susan Sontag writes, “violence turns anybody subjected to it
into a thing.”
28
Yet Fenton isn’t merely describing the body’s parts but, in the listing description
of the fallen soldier, does otherwise. The “ruptured scaffolding of ribs” moves us from the body
to a building or structure. If you think of “The Dream of the Rood” (“The body grew cold, fair
house of the spirit”
29
), perhaps not so inappropriate. An alternate reading would argue this is a
poignant representation, contrasting an edifice with a vulnerable fallen soldier. But, the danger is
that it also blots out the violence the body has incurred, to thing-ify it in a way that is a step
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 63
beyond what its state of injury already performs. Granted, this is symptomatic of dissociation—
when one experiences trauma so severe the mind works to objectify the horror so it is no horror
at all. Yet as a recipient of relayed trauma—one who was not there, looking, or even seeing or
hearing the event as it unfolded through documentation, this is stretching the limits of trauma’s
reach. This is not to say it is impossible, yet the poem on the page here gives no substantive
signifiers of dissociation due to trauma (I will address this more later on). Ultimately this takes
the mind’s eye from an injured human to a collapsed framework (i.e. that which likely invokes
far less concern).
30

The next clause provides a similar objectification, but by a different means—namely, to
beautify. With “the glistening skull,” the poet collapses beauty and violence, ascribing an
adjective nominally used to describe gems rather than blood and gore. Sontag explains that “the
gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look.”
31
Or, in this case,
involved, looking—but more complicatedly so. This is to say that through the erotics of violence
via beautification, we are able to be spectators to it without concern for the greater implications
of that violence. As Ella Myers writes in Worldly Ethics,
the implied opposition between beauty and substantive, moral ends is troubled by
the identification of the beautiful with the morally good in ancient thought, as
evidenced by the term kalos, which referred to both beauty and moral worth.
32

I don’t think Myers’ consideration of morals and beauty applies to the beautified maimed body
here, so much as the poet’s use of beauty and the frequent conflation of the trope of beauty as also
one implying ethics on the author’s part. This is all to say, consciously or not, Fenton’s use of
beauty in describing a bloody skull may, for many, imply an ethics that ultimately does not stand
up when considering the importance beyond the words on the page.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 64
To use beautiful language or imagery is not enough to claim moral authorial decisions,
particularly if the material is politically and/or ethically complex. Elaine Scarry famously
provides such flawed arguments in On Beauty and Being Just which, while at times compelling, is
largely a low-stakes text that considers the beauty of birds, vases, plants (so, from a position of
privilege that would allow easy access to such objects), while also often yoking beauty with truth.
She writes, “Beauty, according to its critics, causes us to gape and suspend all thought. This
complaint is manifestly true,”
33
and, later, while once again considering opinions of beauty’s
detractors that “beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts attention from wrong social
arrangements.”
34
I am hardly against beauty or feel there should be less of it.
35
I don’t believe that
it pulls us away from the need to focus attention on that which is horrifying in order to ensure
there is substantive change in the world, as Scarry considers here as a counterargument to her
ideas. Looking at one thing when we need to looking at another is not my complaint with Scarry’s
argument or Fenton’s poem. My concern is what beauty does to make us look at an object
differently. Perhaps so much so it acts as a screen, distracting from the (terrible) reality of that
object, to make us forget the “object” is sentient. When beauty censors the horror in a horrifying
situation—in this case, making a bloody soldier’s skull something that “glistens.” Poet Paul Celan
addresses beauty and poetry and the German language when he writes,
[German] mistrusts the “beautiful,” it tries to be true. It is therefore…a “greyer”
language, a language which, among other things, also wants to see its “musicality”
established in a place where it no longer has anything to do with “euphony” that,
more or less untroubled, resounded with and alongside the most horrible things.
36

I recognize Celan is talking about German, the language of his oppressor during World War II
and also, disturbingly, his mother tongue—his relationship to the language after the war. Mostly
I am interested in his distrust of the beautiful “alongside the most horrible things.” If done
thoughtfully, having a proximity between beauty and violence can likely be a remarkable and
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 65
political act by the poet by pointing to the impulse and/or practices of eroticized violence in
society. Yet in the case of “Gratitude,” it seems to point to two things: Fenton’s lyric abilities,
and a potential disregard for the gravity of the situation.
“Gratitude” isn’t a subversive poem—pointing to the violence that can and does often
happen to a soldier’s body, and how those injuries are described by others. In order for that to be
the clear message, the poem would have to address the issue directly or be satirical.
37
Yet the
problem is not the lack of satire, but Fenton’s apparent lack of concern for the issues outside this
scene. In short: the systems that produced the traumas here. While it is clearly her experience of
relayed trauma—the point of view being her mind’s eye, placing her at the site where her
husband attempts to aid in saving a terribly injured man’s life—Fenton’s focus does not move
beyond its edges for herself or the soldier. Yet part of Fenton’s aesthetic decisions is likely tied
to the experience of one receiving relayed trauma. In order for her to claim some control where
she has none, the poet beautifies and manipulates. It becomes less of a question of at what point
of distance can something traumatic be made beautiful, so much as when something is
overwhelming, “beautifying” can be a method of processing or claiming power over it. In
Fenton’s case, this is something with which she has no primary experience, but is her husband’s
reality, his trauma making its way back to her. She wants to know it, but it is horrifying. This is
perhaps her method of dulling the horror—making the body something else, prettifying it,
making it anything other than a critically injured person. The poem might be subversive if it
recognized this impulse (via satire or otherwise), if it considered the larger circumstances that led
to the soldier to become a soldier, and to sustain a terrible injury, what will likely come of him if
he recovers. If it gave attention to how she became the recipient to this particular relayed trauma.
Clamor is not a textbook nor is it written by a person suffering from PTSD, and poetry indeed
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 66
allows for writing that does not require a didactic impulse. Yet this is why Clamor is not a
politically radical text, nor does it try to be—for it focuses solely on Fenton’s experience as a
wife of someone away at war and her relayed trauma, with no interrogation of how she ended up
in those circumstances or the circumstances of others connected to the conflict.
Fenton’s lack of regard for the soldier’s critical situation is driven home by what follows,
when she makes his state seem that much more dire. She writes he had “and no skin // left
untended.” Because of the sentence structure, along with the stanza break, we are lead to believe
(even if only for the fraction of a second it takes for the eye to leap) the soldier no longer enjoys
the luxury of that organ, when in fact he is being thoroughly treated by medics. I understand the
poet’s impulse for this move—to take us to the brink of horror about the injured body only to
yank us back. But consider the situation—a man is maimed, prone, near-death, and yet Fenton
feels the need to punch up the drama of his state. To write a place where he is not whole. This
may seem like some particularly focused hair splitting—questioning the ethics surrounding an
enjambed line break, (“no skin // left untended”). Yet Fenton’s gesture here is clearly intentional.
With enjambed lines, the poet tinkers with sense-making that can be contained within the line,
and how it extends, shifts, as the reader continues from one line to the next, altering the meaning.
The gap between the end of one line and the beginning of another can prove to be powerful.
Where the reader is taken one place and finds herself (in the next line) somewhere entirely
different, with the images/ideas conjured in the mind’s eye shifting, at times abruptly. Such is the
case with “no skin // left untended.” Granted, this break, if altered, doesn’t allow for “left
untended” to fall next, potentially pointing to a political description of the soldier’s experience.
Yet these words aren’t alone on a line, which would give them a weight that prompts the reader
to consider their full implications. The line reads in full: “left untended, so you were the one to
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 67
sink the rubber catheter tube.”
38
There is no skin on the soldier, then the soldier is being aided
everywhere skin is located on his body. For Fenton to conjure the image of the harmed soldier
and to cause us to see him as even more injured is a particular violence I find ethically troubling
because the soldier is already in a horrifying physical state. There is little to gain by making it
more horrifying.
The stakes (at least for that soldier, in reality) are quite high, and Fenton’s handling of the
body, of stripping its skin for an instant, disregards that fact. This is not a breaking up of syntax
that points to the unspeakability of trauma—rather it marshals the eye to make one think the
violence on the soldier’s body and the trauma of those who see it is that much worse. Taking us
from him having no skin to being thoroughly cared for. That said, I hardly want to be the
“totalitarian” scholar Nelson speaks against. Fenton is not physically hurting this person, and I
do not think her poem is an equivalent violence. Yet that does not negate the concern for how
she manipulates his body and thus how we as readers interact with it as an image she presents to
us. It is possible her impulse is connected to her learning of this trauma through relay, trying to
merely illustrate how terrible it seemed to her. I think of the fact that when the 12
th

Sonderkommando revolted and blew up Crematorium IV at Auschitz-Birkenau, witnesses who
survived the Shoah said they saw ten chimneys explode, while fact-checkers discovered there
were only two chimneys on Crematorium IV. While hardly the same as hearing about a wounded
soldier, it illustrates the impulse to describe with less interest in logistics rather than experience,
feeling. There is also the potential that, as Nelson writes, “trauma can notoriously suffuse its
sufferers with the desperate (if unconscious) desire to make others feel as bad as they have
felt.”
39
Yet Fenton’s control in her lines, syntax, diction, all seem to fight this possibility. Clearly
an intelligent and adept writer working within a standard poetic aesthetic, yet (at least based on
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 68
the writing in this collection) she does not pull back to question the status quo, the potential
issues here. Thus Fenton walks a dangerous line between altering or beautifying violence for the
sake of poetry’s aesthetic pull.
The last part of the soldier’s body we see in “Gratitude” complicates Fenton’s corporeal
manipulation of the soldier even further—in Fenton’s description of her husband inserting a
catheter. She writes,
I love you more for holding the last good flesh

of that soldier’s cock in your hands, for startling his warm blood
back to life.
40

This reads as sexual—the “cock” in hand, “blood” “startled.” It seems incredibly unlikely for the
injured soldier to get an erection, but there is something that points to the possibility here. This
injection of sexuality between men in the homophobic space of the battlefield could be
considered subversive, but that doesn’t seem to be Fenton’s intent here. She is notably avoiding
medical or formal terms, allowing for a sexual interpretation—yet my sense is that her use of
“cock” is more to produce a surprising or compelling poem than a political one. The word,
because of its connotation as a vulgar term, grabs one’s attention. A poem that otherwise
operates in the normative (chaste) lyrical mode surprises us with an obscenity. So where this
soldier has first been dehumanized as broken scaffolding, beautified, skin written away, now we
are given his (whole) cock.
41

Those problems are connected to the fact that the reader is a vector of the relay of trauma.
Each person interacting with that relayed trauma does so differently depending on the source, the
method by which the writer interacted with the primary trauma. For Fenton, she has a degree of
intimacy with the potential trauma her husband sustained in tending to such a damaged body (the
psychic trauma sustained by the soldier being another issue altogether). The reader’s interaction
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 69
with Fenton’s experience, the relay of her relayed trauma, is clearly a quieter one, giving us
access to her imagination’s painting of the scene, access to the initial medical response to a
terribly damaged soldier. With more distance from and privilege in relation to the originary
trauma, the more difficult the possibility for the writer to create an ethical representation of that
trauma—to receive the relay, then relay it in a way that is attempting to provide the
reader/listener/viewer access to the primary event without regard for the greater politics of the
trauma. Beyond all this, to have a writer who does not inhabit such a body write about it with
little concern for this fact in relation to their own privilege—their relationship to that body in a
political sense—stirs up larger questions in terms of ethics and aesthetics. If attempting ethical
creative production regarding relayed trauma, one must pull back the scope to address that which
induced that traumatic event. Fenton did not seem to consider the trauma of the severely injured
soldier, only the trauma of those who saw his injured body. She doesn’t give credence to the
populations and/or persons sustaining primary physical trauma, trauma of witness, and potential
relayed trauma beyond those parties. She doesn’t, at least in this book, regard the body as a man
who had mobility, connection with others, those who will suffer because of the state of that body
she describes in her writing.
My concern for the body in Fenton’s poem has a few valences. First: this is a body,
maimed. Second: more specifically, this is a soldier’s body. Thus, one that during training,
combat, and, once a soldier is a veteran (if they survive), is by and large at best policed and at
worst abused by their government. Arguably the soldier’s body is already an object—one of the
state as its weapon, ward, and protector. Thus how the government treats its soldiers and veterans
is perhaps unsurprising, for it considers them objects. How one handles one’s objects versus
other subjects is often remarkably different. Scarry, in The Body in Pain, considers language
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 70
used by the government and media during war, often in such a way to make bodies into non-
bodies, death and injury something else, so that the war efforts continue—for “the perpetuation
of war would be impossible without the disowning of injury.”
42
Fenton’s approach to this
soldier’s body operates in a similar mode, giving us the injured body, but in a way that (mostly)
softens the gritty reality of it. Despite the rhetoric swirling around injury and death in war, its
actuality is often what defines the soldier’s experience. Simone Weil writes, “for other men death
appears as a limit set in advance on the future; for the soldier death is the future, the future his
profession assigns him.”
43
This terrible reality—one even more palpable for civilians where
martial conflict is taking place, which I will address later—is one the soldier meets daily. There
is little concern for healing in wartime. As Scarry writes, “The main purpose and outcome of war
is injuring.”
44
Thus Fenton’s handling of the soldier’s body, considering the stakes, feels
cavalier. She objectifies him and blurs his injuries with beauty, confusion. While it may not be
possible to write about an injured body without transforming or objectifying it in the process of
writing itself, Fenton is not working to preserve the soldier as a subject.
I recognize I am likely judging these gestures more harshly than if Fenton were
experiencing this trauma first-hand. If that were the case, this could be an example of the mind
attempting to alter the scene from what it was processing through dissociation. Making the body
something other than a body in order to make it less traumatic. Perhaps one may need to
objectify trauma learned second-hand if that information is delivered from a loved one, the worry
for that person so intense it infuses the mind with a need for defense against the trauma. Yet,
receiving trauma through relay undeniably provides remove, not to mention in terms of written
representation the passage of time from the initial experience, the writing, editing, and eventual
publication—all of which may allow for some perspective. As a recipient of the trauma through
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 71
relay, she is drawing the image up herself, using information from her husband as a guide. She
decides not to look away so much as look at the body though an objectifying eye—and, most
important, with apparently no interest in that impulse. The thrust of the poem has to do with her
husband and his role as a medic above all else. That said, if this were a poetic response to a
primary trauma I would take issue with the aestheticization of vulnerability and injury as long as
there was no consideration for why the poet found herself making these aesthetic gestures—
considering what is outside that which is directly before her, as is the case with the poet in the
next chapter, Alice Notley. If “war is relentless in taking for its own interior content the interior
content of the wounded and open human body,”
45
this poem is performing similarly, taking the
injury and manipulating it for the purpose of the author’s aesthetic practices.
There are more soldier bodies in Clamor, complicating Fenton’s self-focused mode and
her scrambling of that which implies life and morbidity, as mentioned earlier. While such
confusion is common in poetry, Fenton ascribes life to the dead. Rebirth out of trauma is a
familiar trope, and hardly one limited to poetry. Yet, again, due to the systems that participated
in such deaths, the deaths do not exist in a vacuum for the poet to consider in isolation. In short,
this is not merely about Death (capital D), but rather death due to war, which is within a far more
complicated set of circumstances. In the poem “Planting, Heyhurst Farm,” Fenton describes
being on her knees as her husband was. “The last bombing” brought him there—in her case, she
is planting peppers. She writes,
I want to tell you just how easy
it became to plant the thin bodies

in the ground, to mound up
the dense soil and move on
46

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 72
This is where an otherwise powerful inversion of life and death elides crucial differences. Fenton
is likening her establishing a living plant in dirt, one that will likely take to the earth and produce
fruit, to the burying of the dead—a false metaphor. While we are all (even fruiting plants) in a
constant state of decay, a dead soldier in the ground is hardly a planted pepper. One can argue
that, despite making what looks like little graves (the stalks like sad markers of what lies below),
Fenton was able to “move on” eventually—to not give in to her feelings of relayed trauma. Yet
her description of the plants as “thin bodies” fights this interpretation. Fenton clearly means to
directly connect the pepper plants to other bodies being put in the ground in a row: the casualties
of the American war effort in Iraq. The problem with this life/death inversion is it likens dead
human bodies with living plants, ultimately diminishing those deaths. Such acts of mitigation are
not exclusively an outcome of this being relayed trauma—those who engage intimately with
traumatic death and violence primarily and can and do devalue the deaths.
47
This is not an ethical
representation of violence—the aspects of relay and proximity notwithstanding.
A more compassionate reading of this poem is Fenton’s planting what might look like
graves, reminding her of the Iraq War causalities, yet she still “moves on”—not letting herself
get caught up in the image. That said, there is no script for an ethical approach to this topic—
there are most certainly innumerable methods. Perhaps without merely focusing on one’s
personal connection to violence, and to portray it with a concern for avoiding gratuitousness. To
consider the question of how violence is functioning, and for whom. While the visual of Fenton’s
poem may ring somewhat true, the analogic rings false because of its lack of concern for the
violence’s role here. This is one of the larger problems in Clamor—Fenton’s desire for
documentation, yet her lack of ability to recognize the issues at stake.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 73
It’s clear that Fenton indeed aims for veracity and documentation when she writes, “O
make of me a human / camera.”
48
It’s an interesting invocation, especially considering its
visuality while she is receiving relayed trauma only through oral description. The camera has
defined some wars, particularly the Civil War here in the United States. During that time,
newspapers printed photographs of battlefields—suddenly gruesome images of the war, the dead,
were easily accessible in a way they had not been before. Yet, as Sontag writes, “Beautifying is
one classic operation of the camera.”
49
This doesn’t seem to be Fenton’s desire or hope in her
call, but rather what many of us consider to be one of the primary functions of the camera—to
document. There has been a good deal of research to show that photographers moved cannon
balls, bodies, other objects prior to opening the shutter in order to aestheticize that which lay
before the lens.
50
So while we may consider the camera as a means of accurate documentation, a
tool for recording, it rarely is—even when used at times and places that desperately need
documenting to relay realities to other populations. Sontag states, “Photographs objectify: they
turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.”
51
Where the impulse may be to
record, the outcome is often a portrait distorted by the edges of the frame. Thus the trouble
comes, often, in doubling the relay—when the reader has to rely on that frame provided by
someone not present at the originary traumatic event. The moment a person who has experienced
relayed trauma wants to provide a portrait of the traumatic moment, she must be smarter than the
work, know its potential pitfalls. She must consider the (perhaps thoughtful) modifications she is
inevitably making, where the edges of her frame fall.
So I come to the question of accuracy in Clamor. The book won several awards after its
publication in 2010, and Fenton enjoyed a good deal of press, including an interview with her
husband on National Public Radio. In it, her husband (Peenesh Shah) explains that Fenton’s
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 74
rendering his war experience was far more violent and terrifying than his reality of it. He was in
a Green Zone aid station and rarely treated those maimed in combat. More often than not, he
spent his deployment treating quotidian illnesses and injuries. Though supportive of Fenton,
Shah is pointedly clear on his opinion of his role in the book and the portrayal of his time in Iraq.
He states,
The bulk of my experience there was really sort of monotonous and routine. There
were maybe a handful of times when anything even remotely war-like happened.
But those things get more attention in the book…Whenever I hear Elyse talk about
her work, I think about the potential of my peers, people with whom I had served,
hearing it and what they would think.
52

Perhaps Shah is attempting to minimize his traumas, yet this likely brings up the feeling of being
tricked as a reader, led to believe an experience as authentic when it was in effect overly
dramatized or a result of catastrophizing. Often this is how poems function—think of the line of
Sharon Olds, “Hitler entered Paris the way my / sister entered the room that night,” and goes on
to describe Olds’ sister urinating on a prone young Olds.
53
Yet, as Jenny Edkins writes, “The
focus on authenticity, like the focus on truth, is a search for a chimera that distracts from the
need to face the horror.”
54
There is no doubt in my mind that Fenton is attempting to “face the
horror” to its fullest extent in Clamor. In the poem “Love in Wartime (II),” the hostility in Iraq is
suddenly present for Fenton, made manifest by wind whipping trees outside. She writes, “The
clamor of branches, lines of worshippers stampeding a mosque; // …the violence of those leaves,
their purple, / arterial sheen.”
55
The elision of space, of non-violent to violent, renders Fenton
speechless though attempting to speak.
I want to say
is what I keep saying, over and again.

It goes on like this.

The wind, the saying, the not—
56

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 75

Though this poem points to Fenton’s blind spot (it is one of very few that references Iraqi
civilians, and here only with the word “stampede”), it also brings us into her mind. Her terror is
so intense, it is in the wind and trees, it stops her tongue. Here wind causes branches to clatter
and become something else, something terrifying. This is trauma and its effects, writ large.
Whether it is the effects of relayed trauma is another matter, one not easily pinned down. For if
Shah indeed experienced traumatic events very rarely, the question becomes: What is the source
of Fenton’s relayed trauma here? One can argue it is primarily her imagination responding to any
small piece of information. This, however, is undoubtedly a signifier of relayed trauma—the
recipient of a relayed traumas (which, according to these poems, Shah did experience, however
minimally) is forced to recognize her inability to protect the primarily traumatized person. In this
case, the degree of the latter’s vulnerability was, apparently, misjudged by the former. That
hardly detracts from her experience with relayed trauma—if anything, it illustrates it thoroughly.
As Kathleen Brogan writes, “trauma is defined primarily by its effects, rather than by the kinds
of experience that traumatizes.”
57
If Fenton were present for the events, she would be aware of
the degree of the traumas and their frequency—how terrifying the situation was in reality (or
not). Because of her lack of proximity, her reliance on her husband for information, the anxiety
undoubtedly feeds on her powerlessness.
There is one other poem in the collection I find even more powerful that addresses this
issue in connection with whether or not Fenton suffers from relayed trauma. It falls near the end
of the book in a series of pieces describing the difficulties of Shah’s return, their attempts to
normalize as people, a couple. Fenton writes,
The war is everywhere

at once. Each eggplant I pick
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 76
is ripe and sun-dark in its own inviolable
skin. Except there is no inviolable anything
and you’ve been home now for a year.
58

The line “there is no inviolable anything” makes clear that, for Fenton, everything is vulnerable,
open to entry and injury. This is the terrible reality for those who have sustained trauma of any
kind. So while Fenton may not be accurate to Shah’s experience, she is heeding the accuracy of
her own. Her relayed trauma is the fact of his violability. This begs the question—has Fenton
ethically represented trauma, if not violence? The immediate answer, considering Shah’s
response, may be no. Yet this elides veracity with ethics. This is not attempting to represent
traumas of the Other. While Levinas states one does indeed owe responsibility to the Other,
59

there is also the danger of attempting to lay claim to traumas to which one has no claim, thus not
acting in a way that is responsible for the Other but rather abuses the other. As Roger Luckherst
writes, “Transmissibility has become a central ethical concern about the representation and
response to traumatic narratives and images. Can or should the right to speak of trauma be
limited to its primary victims? Who can claim ‘secondary’ status without risking
appropriation?”
60
Fenton is not representing Shah’s traumas or anyone else’s in Iraq. She is
representing her own experience of relayed trauma. If ethics is necessary when “the third party
enters,” then in the situation of relayed trauma there is indeed a third party—though who that is
depends on the perspective one considers. There is the person who experiences the trauma first-
hand and, one way or another, relays it to another. Whether or not this is an ethical act is an
impossible question. One who suffers from a traumatic event such as shoveling a corpse’s parts
into a body bag will say and do complicated and emotional things in the immediate aftermath.
We see this with far less gruesome traumas, such as in grieving the death of a loved one even
when it isn’t violent and/or surprising. If you consider the perspective of the person receiving the
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 77
relayed trauma, what one does with that information does indeed conjure ethical issues, but, for
both persons no matter the point of view, the ethical concern is simply: What do I do with this
information? For many, it seems, it is to share it with others. This points to what Nelson
describes as “the essentially unsolvable ethical mess that is autobiographical writing.”
61
Thus
while taking issue with Fenton’s aesthetic decisions, veracity (in the fact-checking sense) is
hardly a necessary element of ethical creative production. Though Clamor is an “ethical mess” in
ways Fenton likely didn’t anticipate (largely because of that which she avoids entirely), it does
remain true to Fenton’s contact with the war as a modern wife of a man at war, the particular
immediacy of relayed trauma because of her direct access to her husband’s trauma, and how this
changed her landscape—how it changed her. While this may be relayed trauma without source
material, as it is not a source so much as the imagination, some can argue it is an “inaccurate”
relay. Accuracy is a terrible restraint to put on any art. Relayed trauma can be more stressful than
primary trauma. For that primary person may be traumatized by a near-death experience, yet the
recipient of the relay is traumatized by that near-death—and their having to survive, to grieve. To
be haunted.
THE HAUNTING
Part of what haunts Clamor, as explained earlier in this chapter, is the fear of its potential in the
death of Fenton’s husband. This proves to be the case even after his return. In the second section
of the book, which is comprised largely of third-person prose poems (giving them a feeling of
distinct remove), Fenton writes of such a moment. In “By Omission,” when they are “with the
neighbors and everyone but her was back from the war,” her husband tells of accidentally
forgetting his gun behind when leaving the aid station. “She’d heard about the bodies, his
bagging of the dead, how to pull a dog tag from its chain. But not this detail before. How do you
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 78
forget your gun? she asked…and when he said nothing she knew every silence was a lie he
couldn’t tell.”
62
The entirety of Clamor has illustrated Fenton’s terror in the face of the
information her husband gave her—this moment shows she doesn’t know the worst of it. The
horrors of her imagination swirl around the void of unknowns—he escaped death more often
than she realized. Her being haunted by his death, by him, was that much closer to her reality.
Yet the focus on Fenton’s reality and her reality alone leaves what is the biggest blind
spot in this collection. As Sontag writes, “What pictures, whose cruelties, whose deaths are not
being shown?”
63
What haunts Clamor, what is not addressed but undoubtedly there, are the dead
and harmed Iraqis. In the whole of the collection, Fenton only mentions Iraqis three times by my
count, and often in such a way as to have them remain largely amorphous. As I mentioned in
“Love in Wartime (II),” we are given “The clamor of branches, lines / of worshippers
stampeding a mosque.”
64
One can argue perhaps she doesn’t feel it’s ethical to occupy the Iraqis’
experience, yet other poems illustrate a far more complicated reality than mere omission.
65
In
one she writes,
The article quoted the private as saying
they’d been thinking with their guns again

by way of explanation. The context doesn’t matter;
the soldiers were expected to survive
66

This provides no regard for those who likely didn’t survive due to such violent thinking. In
another entitled “Aubade, Iraq,” Fenton addresses the muezzin—the person who gives the call to
prayer in the morning (adhan) from the mosque’s minaret, alerting practicing Muslims to begin
the first prayer of the day before dawn. Fenton writes,
Sulfur-mouthed night crier, rooftop
harbinger, bringer of the gut-shot

down—what I would do to keep you
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 79
at rifle’s reach, stifle you, drown you

in the Tigris’ muck and swill, touch you
aflame on its kerosene spine
67

I nearly feel my interpretation of this poem is inaccurate, only because it is so rageful, and that
rage so misdirected. If the aubade form is one of lovers separating at dawn, it seems this violent
anger is incited by the beloved leaving with the muezzin’s call.
68
This doesn’t read as a persona
poem—a random person’s blind rage—because of the aubade form, Fenton’s positionality as a
woman with a beloved who must “leave” with each dawn. There are no persona poems in
Clamor—they all seem to be explicitly about Fenton and Shah. Thus I cannot locate an alternate
meaning nearly as compelling with what Fenton has provided us most explicitly through her title
and language. I can understand the anger sparked from terror at the beginning of a new day, fresh
potential of her husband’s death—but the fantasy of killing the muezzin, who signals the time for
prayer no less, is an unnecessary violence on a person hardly deserving of it. It reads as
Islamophobic. As Judith Butler writes, “We might think of war as dividing populations into those
who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned
because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all.”
69
This is the heart of the
problem—granted, Fenton seems largely disinterested in almost all bodies save for her husband’s
in Clamor. Yet the fact this book is about war in a foreign place that involves shocking numbers
of civilian dead of that place,
70
and there is no direct description of that population (much less an
address to the violence enacted upon them by their government and ours) is no small thing. For
most people in the United States, Iraqis are not, as Butler puts it, “grievable”—which Fenton has
thoroughly illustrated in Clamor. In “Public Mourning (Flag Installation),” Fenton describes
“one-hundred-sixty-six thousand flags / sodding the lawn”
71
and later in the same poem, as
referenced earlier, “O make of me a human / camera to translate this restless flock.” I want to
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 80
add the emphasis “this restless flock”—the American dead rather than the killed Iraqis. Yet the
fact that Shah himself is a South Asian man often lumped into the same category of heritage as
Iraq is also an element that Fenton ignores—though American and aiding the war effort, here in
the U.S. he is othered and (while in Iraq) in an othered place.
72
Some domestic racists also
consider his death as ungrievable. The complicated nature of this reality, his racial identity in
connection with any experiences he may have had with Iraqis and violence they incurred, is left
out.
Considering, too, how this collection documents Fenton’s largely feminine experience—
that of a wife with a husband at war—it’s unfortunate she didn’t examine her female
counterparts abroad. These women in particular haunt this book for a few reasons. As Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Robin L. Riley write in their introduction to the
anthology Feminism and War, “Contemporary methods of combat result in enormous casualties
among civilian populations, and estimates are that 80 percent of the casualties of all
contemporary wars are women and children.”
73
This while many post-World War II
engagements abroad use women’s powerlessness in foreign countries as a means of justification
for war (what Shanaz Khan dubs “colonial feminism”
74
). The terrible irony here is that these
same women for which U.S. soldiers deployed and fight for in order to effect serious
governmental change in the hopes to better women’s livelihoods also make up the majority of
the collateral damage incurred through such engagements. Thus, as a population, these foreign
women are undoubtedly the most abused in war—as the United States government’s excuse to
begin violence abroad and who suffer from that violence once U.S. soldiers are there. While I’m
not arguing that Fenton must feel relayed trauma in response to their situation (their traumas are
perhaps too distant for someone in her position to connect to in that way), at the very least she
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 81
can address her peers in some way, no matter the degree of remove—the women there who are
dying, who fear the death of their loved ones just as Fenton does. One poem merely states “In the
other country, women gum seeds in their mouths, let the empty shells speak for themselves.”
75

This all points, potentially, to the limits of relayed trauma. Perhaps such poems would appear as
merely false attempts at empathy. As Butler’s notion of “ungrievable lives” shows, not any
intimacy with trauma can induce trauma through relay. Mostly it depends on what connections to
others a person considers a kinship, one that is a connection directly tied to her own agency. That
is the necessary tether for the phenomenon of relayed trauma—when the person who is
traumatized primarily, the person suffering from relayed trauma has no power to protect them,
yet the desire to do so.
The trouble here is Fenton’s lack of interest in protecting anyone aside from her husband.
Derrida states, “[The absolute victim] cannot even present himself or herself as such. He or she is
totally excluded or covered over by language, annihilated by history, a victim one cannot
identify.”
76
It’s disappointing that, despite Fenton’s proximity to these absolute victims through
her husband and her own imagination of his experiences in Iraq, she participates in allowing
them to remain absolute. They are “totally excluded” from Clamor. This while Fenton also
benefitted from the book, considering it was her first major publication. In all the reviews I read,
none noted the limits I have laid out in this chapter. The well-known poet Rachel Zucker
spotlighted Clamor for the Poetry Society of America, stating that the poems are “crushingly
beautiful, almost intolerably beautiful.”
77
Fenton’s many accolades illustrate my earlier argument
that she is not performing originary violence in her work, but rather demonstrating systemic
violence that already exists and is enacted in serious (physical) ways by entities far more
powerful than a young white cis-woman poet. She is hardly “the problem” so much as a
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 82
symptom. As Ralph Ellison writes, “he was only a salesman, not the inventor.”
78
To my mind,
the fact that a book that so disregards the trauma and death sustained by Iraqi civilians and
receives as many awards as it did merely shows the general disregard the greater United States’
population has for those foreign civilians who die because U.S. forces are present and fighting in
their countries. By and large, those who populate the committees or editorial boards have
multiple degrees and are anti-war (as most liberal artists are). Yet none of them considered the
void in this text—the Iraqi ghosts that haunt its pages, their trauma so needing to be relayed,
received, and yet ignored.
79
As Viet Thanh Nguyen defines a “just memory” is one that “recall[s]
the weak, the subjugated, the different, the enemy, and the forgotten. A just memory says that
ethically recalling our own is not enough to work through the past, and neither is the less
common phenomenon of ethically recalling others. Both ethical approaches are needed.”
80

The cause for Fenton’s significant blind spot is likely due to the fact that her poems are
intensely focused on the experiences of her husband and how those seeped (and propagated,
expanded) into her own life thousands of miles away. She doesn’t address the plight of her
husband’s comrades beyond scant description, the situation that ultimately sent her husband to
Iraq, the human rights violations that took (and continue to take) place. Nor does Fenton consider
the systems that precipitated her husband’s situation as a traumatized medic, and her position as
a recipient of relayed trauma. In short, these are not her focus of investigation here. I do not fault
her for this impulse—it is one so many of us have and enact constantly in our thoughts, daily
lives, and work. Her position as a recipient of relayed trauma likely exacerbated or even
provoked this solipsism—as with any trauma, the victim usually turns inward, focusing on the
self and the source of the trauma. Because this is trauma of relay (no matter how benign or
infrequent the primary traumas were), the source is not present, and so the sufferer of relayed
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 83
trauma forced to bear the reality, there is little to nothing she can do to stifle the trauma’s
source—to shield a loved one from danger and/or terrible stress. For Fenton, this created an
environment that (despite its tranquility) appeared deadly, and set her focus entirely on herself
and her husband. Thus the issue is not strictly myopia, per se, but perhaps a symptom of the
circumstances of relayed trauma.
Yet for anyone engaging with trauma they receive through relay and relaying it to others,
there is in an ethical quandary when they decide to describe the trauma of which they are not a
primary witness. They are potentially misconstruing that originary event without regard for the
primarily traumatized person’s experience. This becomes exponentially complicated when that
primary trauma involves those beyond the party who relays the trauma. The more people
present/touched by the trauma, the more difficult for a person who is not present and yet desiring
to describe that trauma to ethically consider the full dimensions of the situation surrounding the
originary event. This is not necessarily yoked to descriptions by someone suffering trauma
through relay, but a larger ethical predicament for those who describe trauma in general. While
one’s impulse may be to focus attention on the immediate source, in order to be radical and (if
other persons are involved) ethical, one must consider the larger factors at play that precipitated
the traumatic event and its relay. Avery Gordon calls up the importance in shifting inquiry from
“How can we be accountable to people who seemingly have not counted in the historical and
public record?” to “How are we accountable for the people who do the counting?”
81
The first
question is flawed for its lack of consideration of how we got here. This is perhaps why Alice
Notley’s work concerning her brother, considered in the next chapter, is so remarkable. While
dealing with a personal loss and trauma, Notley is unrelenting in its scrutiny of social systems
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 84
and how they play into violence, how we as citizens must recognize them in order to avoid
complacency, complicity.

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 85
CHAPTER TWO NOTES
1
Fenton calls herself a “war bride” in her New York Times essay “My Deployment as a War Bride,” when this is
generally accepted as a term ascribed to women who married soldiers who were occupying their country, particularly
in the World Wars.
2
Some of the more famous here in the United States being Losses by Randal Jarrell (World War II), Dien Cai Dau by
Yusef Komunyakaa (the Vietnam War), Here, Bullet by Brian Turner (the Iraq War).
3
If a white, heterosexual, abled cis-male were a partner to a woman at war, ostensibly he could receive relayed trauma
while simultaneously not endure the status as a subjugated member of society. The lack of power he held as a partner
to someone as subjugated as a woman serving in the US armed forces will undeniably have an impact on the man,
particularly driven by the fact that, due to his lack of proximity to his wife/partner, and the overwhelming statistics
pointing to the likelihood of her being sexually assaulted (much less the traumas of war non-female soldiers endure)
he is clearly powerless in shielding her from such traumas. In short, while this man may be a (very) privileged
member of American society, that is ultimately trumped by the particular situation of his being coupled with a woman
so vulnerable and subjugated that this defines his experience as well, and thus he is capable of enduring relayed
trauma. For statistics on women serving in the United States Military and sexual assault, see the “Department of
Defense Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military” report via the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response
website: http://sapr.mil.
4
Fenton, Elyse. Clamor. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2009. 8.
5
Ibid. 70.
6
The concept “vulnerable reading” is informed by Amber Jamilla Musser’s “empathic reading” as outlined in her
book Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism. Musser writes, “empathic reading illuminates how
subjectivity and power act in concert with embodied experience” (Musser, Jamilla. Sensational Flesh: Race, Power,
and Masochism. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 22). Mine is interested in power, but more
specifically in regards to creative production and vulnerability of the subjects the author is addressing in their work.
This is not inextricably connected to relayed trauma by any means, but it is a valuable means of explicating my
concerns in Fenton’s work and beyond.
7
Vulnerable populations include, but are not limited to, people of color, children, the elderly, women, queer persons,
working class and poor persons, and/or disabled persons. I hesitate to list them this way, for of course populations
are not subject to the same kinds of vectors of vulnerability in society—yet they all have limited agency as
determined by their physical abilities and/or status as ascribed by society.
8
For the sake of hypothetical, let’s remove the editor.
9
Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre-Nous. Trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1998. 28.
10
Ibid. 202-03.
11
Ibid. 148.
12
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2016. 120.
13
Such as Maggie Nelson’s poetry collection Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull Press, 2005).
14
See footnote 3 for when a white, heterosexual, abled, cis-male can experience relayed trauma.
15
In essence, this notion considers that trauma can indeed be relayed to a second party whose connection to the primary
traumatized person(s) is substantial, and the person receiving the relay feeling powerless in their ability to shield
the primary person from that trauma.
16
Via John Ruskin, who describes pathetic fallacy as the phenomenon of when “All violent feelings have the same
effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things” (Ruskin, John. "Of The Pathetic
Fallacy," Modern Painters. Vol. 3. [1856]: 157-72. 160). To Ruskin, this is not a good practice. I find pathetic
fallacy to be an often remarkable and valuable tool when attempting to make the reader comprehend the state of
mind, and often appreciate it in the work I read.
17
Fenton, Clamor, 7.
18
Ibid. 33.
19
Ibid. 19.
20
This is a reversal of the analyst’s position here, the female receiving the male’s trauma, husband to a wife. Unlike
the usual tropes of trauma and psychoanalysis, the woman isn’t the traumatized originary figure, unloading her
trauma onto a so-called “objective” male figure. Yet it is worth noting women are expected to be the vessels of their
husbands’ pain.

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 86

21
Ibid. 28-9.
22
Fenton, Elyse. "My Deployment as a War Bride," New York Times 17 Aug. 2008: ST6.
23
Fenton, Clamor, 16.
24
Ibid. 35.
25
Nelson, Maggie. The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. 93.
26
Fenton, Clamor, 3. Italics in original, likely denoting the spoken words of the medic husband as that is Fenton’s
practice throughout the book.
27
Ibid. 3.
28
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. 12.
29
Donaldson, E.T. trans. "The Dream of the Rood" in Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Middle Ages
through The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century 8
th
ed., Vol. A. Ed. by Stephen Greenblatt. New York:
W.W. Norton, 2006. 24-26. 25.
30
There is also something to be said for how a human becomes a corpse, a thing, after death—and our curiosity there.
As Nelson writes, “we must concede that humans evidence an ongoing interest in becoming, at certain times and
certain contexts, things, as much as turning other people into things. The spectre of our eventual ‘becoming
object’—of our (live) flesh one day becoming (dead) meat—is a shadow that accompanies us throughout our lives”
(175).
31
Sontag, Regarding, 42.
32
Myers, Ella. Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World. Durham: Duke UP, 2013. 26.
33
Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. 29.
34
Ibid. 58.
35
Especially as notions of beauty and its role are undeniably gendered. As Hélène Cixous writes, “Beauty will no
longer be forbidden.” Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen & Paula Cohen, Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1.4 (1976): 875-893. 876.
36
Quoted in Englund, Axel. Still Songs: Music in and Around the Poetry of Paul Celan. Surrey, England: Ashgate
Publishers: 2012. 11.
37
The whole of Clamor reads as earnest, as illustrated by Fenton’s language surrounding each poem’s topic, form,
and tone.
38
Fenton, Clamor, 3.
39
Nelson, The Art of Cruelty, 251.
40
Fenton, Clamor, 3.
41
Considering recent events in the poetry world, it’s difficult not to think of another poet, another man’s genitals as a
piece’s landing point for the body’s description. Conceptualist poet Kenneth Goldsmith famously read the autopsy
report for Michael Brown, an unarmed eighteen-year-old Black man shot seven times by police officer Darren
Wilson in 2014. This, Goldsmith stated later, was to follow in the practice of his appropriating documents
concerning famous deaths (most notably in his book Seven American Deaths and Disasters). He took Brown’s
autopsy report, altered some language so that the layperson might understand medical jargon, and read it at the
Interrupt 3 Conference at Brown University. The last line of the piece, “The Body of Michael Brown,” stated that
Brown’s penis was “unremarkable.” The autopsy report, in actuality, ended on the weight of Brown’s brain,
revealing that Goldsmith had purposefully rearranged the appropriated material to end on the image of Brown’s
genitals. Goldsmith later explained he “always massage[s] dry texts” (Kenneth Goldsmith, "The Body of Michael
Brown." Facebook. March 15, 2015.). The response was, perhaps unsurprisingly, that of horror and anger from the
audience, other participants, and (later, thanks to social media) the larger literary community. The problem with
Goldsmith’s performance is not necessarily the use of the autopsy document (which, if used thoughtfully, can indeed
be powerful and political). Rather the issue was his lack of consideration of his privilege as a white cisgender male,
and the fact that he benefitted (monetary compensation, attention) by using it. To end on a description of Brown’s
penis was, for many, terribly disrespectful to Brown—particularly considering the stereotypes that prevail about the
genitals of Black persons. It sexualized a Black body killed by a representative of the State, making that into a stunt.
It diverted attention from the issue at hand. In Goldsmith’s “The Body of Michael Brown,” the trauma sustained by
Brown’s family and the relayed trauma of the larger African-American community in response to Brown’s death
and surrounding events were not the mode of access or interest for Goldsmith. Instead he took and altered a public
document, performed a reading of that text below a projected photograph of a living cap-and-gowned Michael
Brown in front of a live audience. The audience’s growing discomfort with Goldsmith’s handling of the material
culminated in two other participants set to perform after Goldsmith didn’t feel comfortable reading their work, and
the event ending early (Andrew Deck, "Racial Controversy over Poem Ends Conference Event Early," The Brown
Daily Herald, March 18, 2015.).
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 87

When a white writer describes the body of a person of color, the landscape shifts dramatically.
Representations of wartime violence against (white) cis-male soldier bodies abroad operate undeniably differently
than representations of state/police violence against Black male cis citizen bodies here in the U.S. First and foremost,
soldiers are by and large regarded as weapons of the government required to complete missions and actively
participate in the military system. As we haven’t had compulsory military service in the United States, and a draft
only recently during the Vietnam War, ostensibly soldiers voluntarily take up that position. (The larger issues
surrounding class and aggressive recruiting done by the military in the United States are outside the scope of this
dissertation.) This in comparison to an unarmed citizen being killed by a representative of the state on U.S. soil.
Both may be tragedies, but entirely different ones, the latter more primarily an issue of clear injustice than the
former. The erotics of extreme violence on the Black body (in particular the Black male body) have a much longer
history in the United States of course, reaching back centuries. Goldsmith’s appropriating and (anti-)aestheticizing
the dead Black male body unconsciously echoed the documentation and aestheticization of lynching in photographs
and/or “relics”—when lynching attendees dismembered the lynched corpse for souvenirs of the event of the public
death. Goldsmith took, rearranged, and read a document that had already reduced Michael Brown to his parts. As
Harvey Young writes in his article “Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching,” “[The lynching] stages the
transformation of the living body into a set of lifeless parts to be collected” (Young, Harvey. “The Black Body as
Souvenir in American Lynching.” Theatre Journal, 57.4 [2005]: 639-657. 655).
In no way am I arguing that Fenton and Goldsmith are identically guilty in their handling of prone male
bodies. The bodies and situations surrounding them are hugely different—the soldier is anonymous, possibly
fictional, not ascribed a race, while Michael Brown’s death, aspects of his life, and his race are all well-known. Yet
there are undeniable similarities. One of the most notable being that the body of a Black person and a soldier (despite
their race) are both policed and mishandled by this country (though in ways that are remarkably different).
Goldsmith, recognized Brown’s death as a “disaster,” but not for whom.
42
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York: Oxford University Press,
1985. 64.
43
Weil, Simone. “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” Chicago Review, 18. (1965): 5-30. 19.
44
Scarry, The Body in Pain, 63.
45
Ibid. 81.
46
Fenton, Clamor, 20.
47
I think particularly of Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs who was convicted of three counts of murder, of conspiring to commit
murder, among other things, in 2011 for killing Afghan civilians. In a New York Times article on the charges, it
states, “He also pulled a tooth from one man, saying in court that he had ‘disassociated’ the bodies from being
human, that taking the fingers and tooth was like removing antlers from a deer” (Yardley, William. "Soldier Is
Convicted of Killing Afghan Civilians for Sport," New York Times, November 10, 2011.). Clearly this lack of
connection to the Afghan body by a white man has a racial layer, but the point being that when surrounded by death
and violence have the potential to move into an extreme psychological space diminishing the importance of those
deaths.
48
Fenton, Clamor, 22.
49
Sontag, Regarding, 81.
50
As Barbie Zelizer writes in Remembering to Forget, “Memorable scenes during the Civil War—such as the battle
at Gettysburg—were found later to have been staged, and even the more reputable press sometimes tampered with
photographic images” (Zelizer, Barbie. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. 32.). Not to mention those who have argued that the photographer
should be taking a more active or ethical role rather than merely documenting, as in Eddie Adams’ photograph
“Saigon Execution” which shows the execution of a Vietcong prisoner Nguyễn Văn Lém by General Nguyễn Ngọc
Loan—an execution which Sontag states in Regarding would not have taken place were Adams not there with his
camera, documenting (Sontag, Regarding, 53).
51
Sontag, Regarding, 81.
52
Philips, Susan. "War Poetry, Inspired by A Husband’s Service," All Things Considered. National Public Radio,
December 22, 2010. Some verbal tics omitted for clarity.
53
Olds, Sharon. The Dead and the Living. New York: Knopf, 1975. 44.
54
Edkins, Jenny. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 172.
55
Fenton, Clamor, 21.
56
Ibid. 21.
57
Brogan, Kathleen. Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1998. 71.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ETHICS OF RELAYED TRAUMA’S VALENCES 88

58
Ibid. 64.
59
Levinas, Emmanuel. Time and the Other and Additional Essays, trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press, 1987. 105.
60
Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge, 2008. 3.
61
Nelson, The Art of Cruelty, 146.
62
Fenton, Clamor, 43.
63
Sontag, Regarding, 14.
64
Fenton, Clamor, 21.
65
As Viet Thanh Nguyen writes, there are “two potential problems with the ethics of recalling others—either
mistaking oneself as that idealized, innocent other, or idealizing the other as guilt-free while incriminating
oneself” (Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies, 74).
66
Fenton, Clamor, 26.
67
Ibid. 14.
68
Nelson writes, “one of the injustices of ‘phallocentrism’ itself [is] its suggestion that there’s nothing else imaginable
under the sun—not even a form of female aggression or rage or darkness—not shaped by or tethered to the male”
(Nelson, Art of Cruelty, 67). Thus I realize the danger here—that my reading focuses on Fenton’s inapt rage is from
a male lover departing.
69
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. 38.
70
Hard numbers are difficult to pin down on body counts for a few reasons, primarily because of the lack of
coordination by organizations at the outset of Operation Iraqi Freedom to maintain legitimate body counts of
civilians and combatants alike. By 2006 some argued there were fewer than 10,000 deaths. *Roberts, Les, Ridyah
Lafta, Richard Garfield et al., “Mortality Before and After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: Cluster Sample Survey,” The
Lancet, October 29, 2004, 364 [9448]:1857-1864.). Others in the same year said up to nearly 800k. (Burnham,
Gilbert, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy et al., “Mortality After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-Sectional Cluster
Sample Survey,” The Lancet, October 21, 2006, 368 [9545]: 1421-1429.). A report put together by the Knowledge
Services Group for Congress in 2008 breaks down the many different sources and discrepancies well: Fischer,
Hannah "CRS Report for Congress: Iraqi Civilian Deaths Estimates." August 27, 2008.
https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RS22537.pdf.).
71
Fenton, Clamor, 22.
72
Clamor is dedicated to “P.” (Peenesh), and the only point at which I can locate any mention of Shah’s heritage is
when she describes his jaw as “dark” (13). Part of me wonders if someone convinced Fenton that Shah’s racial
identity, if addressed in the book, would only “complicate” a relatively neat narrative. Or if perhaps she felt that
would be the case.
73
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Robin L. Riley. “Introduction: Feminism and US Wars –
Mapping the Ground.” In Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty,
Minnie Bruce Pratt, Robin L. Riley. London: Zed Books, 2008. 1-16. 9.
74
Khan, Shahnaz. “Afghan Women: The limits of colonial rescue.” In Feminism and War: Confronting US
Imperialism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Robin L. Riley. London: Zed Books, 2008.
161-78. 161.
75
Fenton, Clamor, 45.
76
Derrida, Jacques. Points ...: Interviews, 1974-1994, trans. E. Weber & P. Kamuf. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1995. 389.
77
Zucker, Rachel. “Elyse Fenton, selected by Rachel Zucker,” New American Poets, 2011.
78
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage International, 1995. 448.
79
This blind spot of course isn’t limited to this sphere of thinking. Trauma studies as a field continually privileges
PTSD as experienced by the neocolonial soldiers rather than resubjectified “post-colonial” populations that have,
across the board, incurred far more severe damage to themselves, their fellow citizens, and their (physical and non-
physical) infrastructures.
80
Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies, 17.
81
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1997. 187-8.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 89
- CHAPTER THREE -

THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK
204

A true war story should tell not only of the soldier but also what happened to her
or him after war’s end. A true war story also tells of the civilian, the refugee, the
enemy, and, most importantly, the war machine that encompasses them all.

– VIET THANH NGUYEN

Unlike an aerial attack, a poem does not come at one unexpectedly. One has to
read or listen, one has to be willing to accept the trauma.

– CAROLYN FORCHÉ

“I thought I’d better send you a picture of me. My brother took it,” Alice Notley writes to a
friend in 1970. “He’s going to Vietnam in April, by the way. He’s a tanker. He sent me a pin
from the PX, a tiny tank attached by a chain to a red heart with SISTER written on it in gold.”
205

Not twenty years later, Notley’s brother Albert died of a drug overdose—his addiction and death
are symptoms of trauma Notley directly attributes to his experiences in the war.
Notley first made a name for herself as a force in the New York School of poets and
artists in the 1960s. While it took some time for her to receive attention from the usual literary
gatekeepers, by the 1990s she was publishing books with Penguin and receiving accolades such
as being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winning the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. While
Notley is largely well known in the poetry community, there is little scholarship on her writing—
despite the fact there was an entire conference devoted to her work,
206
there are only a handful of
published peer-reviewed essays in current circulation. None address the specifics of Notley’s
experiences with her brother’s trauma. I am examining Notley’s work to illustrate how she
interacts with her relayed trauma through addressing systematic oppression of the war machine,
and the vulnerable bodies in those systems. These concerns are present not only in Notley’s
writing but also in her poetic forms (epic and otherwise), and decisions regarding her aesthetic
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 90
focus on the American-Vietnam War and her brother’s damage. This chapter will circle around
the vulnerability of her brother, whose traumatic experiences and subsequent death haunt Notley.
This in conjunction with how she engages with the United States’ nationalist power systems
207

through her objection to U.S. abuses in war, recognition of the populations that sustain this
abuse, and war as a larger historical exhibition of power. The desire to understand the war
machine’s connection to her own role as a marginalized citizen is a continual presence in her
writing. Through her work, Notley considers literature’s limits in the face of systemic power, and
writing as a potential means of subversion. Notley leans into the notion that literature can be a
discourse of the particular (her brother’s damage, the people he killed), while philosophy and
literary theory operate on a grand scale (the battlefield as a site of societal domination).
Few philosopher-theorists focused their intellectual interest on systemic power and how it
manifests itself more than Michel Foucault—most famously in his scrutiny of incarceration and
power dynamics in Discipline and Punish. Foucault’s points about surveillance, judgment, and
power are a touchstone in understanding a system of any kind interested in maintaining control
of its populations, often through instituting notions of “normalcy.” Yet not long after the
publication of Discipline and Punish—indeed mere months after U.S. involvement in the
American-Vietnam War ceased—Foucault shifted his focus to martial conflict. In a lecture in
1976, he interrogates the seemingly opposing notions of power as either a commodity or an
action,
208
ultimately homing in on war, specifically, as a site of information. Here Foucault asks,
“Should we not analyze [power] primarily in terms of struggle, conflict and war?”
209
For, he
argues, the “disequalibrium” of power exhibited in war ultimately permeates into an “unspoken
warfare…to reinscribe [this power dynamic] in social institutions, in economic inequalities, in
language, in the bodies themselves of each and every one of us.”
210
In short, the power systems
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 91
that are defined on the battlefield subsequently define our societies in their systems and
populaces. How powerful entities operate during conflict function similarly in communities.
Those entities’ methods of oppression and violence, possible because of their power, are
exhibited most explicitly in war—the shadows of which are recognizable in the nation during
peacetime/non-domestic conflict. The stakes during war are so high—deaths, control, land,
resources—that the way systems of power operate more obscurely in society is right on the
surface of militaristic events. We can look to war, then, in order to trace how oppressive systems
operate, and perhaps anticipate their movements in domestic society.
This is hardly a one-way circuit of power dynamics, however—merely playing out on the
battlefield and then manifesting themselves again in communities. By the mid-twentieth century
in the United States, neoliberal politics began informing the rhetoric of the war machine—even if
the age-old practices of othering, colonialism, and indiscriminant murder still applied. Mimi Thi
Nguyen writes in The Gift of Freedom that this yoking of liberalism to empire “led to triumphant
claims to an exceptional power.” The power, reformed, apparently requires those governments
take up the responsibility “to ease the suffering and unhappiness of others.”
211
Prior to this
moment, what was considered provocation of war seemed clear: a breach of formal agreements,
flagrant provocation, or extreme violence against allies. Nationalism was a cut-and-dry pride in
the glories of martial victory. With neoliberal politics coming into the fore, we see a shift to
murkier “moral” territory. This results in those refashioned colonialist powers becoming the cops
of the world, passing judgment regarding nations that may or may not meet their standards of
governance (i.e. non-democratic states). In the past few decades we have seen martial conflict in
those “unstable” countries “pay off,” through natural resources or otherwise, for the neoliberal
democratic state if it were to provide the “gift of freedom” to that populace.
212

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 92
Thus while the systems of power that oppress loved ones of soldiers may at first glance
be entirely separate from those who are affected by warfare abroad, they are both victim to the
same war machine (albeit in different ways, for they serve different purposes for that system).
Abusive power manifests itself in innumerable forms—that which is interested in controlling
people of color in a foreign land deemed “disqualified from the rights of sovereignty”
213

similarly has little regard for the psychological damage sustained by their soldiers from
punishing those foreigners, or the subsequent relayed traumas sustained by those soldiers’ loved
ones. In large part, systemic oppression involves the limits of a marginalized populations’
agency within that system. Powerful agents will proactively restrain and/or destroy any party that
will wield their sovereignty in such a way as to undercut the status quo dictated by their system.
This is not merely manifest in explicit activist action, but also in creative production. Just
as war governs this framework (that which drives the war machine drives oppressive systems in
the empowered government), it simultaneously informs the literature and form upon which
radical writers must draw. These are fibers of the same fabric. Notley describes this most
explicitly in her prose pieces “Homer’s Art” and “The ‘Feminine’ Epic,” both of which consider
the epic as poetic form created and employed by men (in the case of Homer) “generated by war”
and “male-centered—stories for men about a male world.”
214
Yet despite—or because of—its
masculine and misogynist roots, the epic was the form Notley felt compelled to use when writing
about war.
Notley’s concerns about the misogynist, or at least exclusionary, nature of the epic in
conjunction with her brother Albert’s trauma from the American-Vietnam War led her to write
her remarkable epic poem, The Descent of Alette,
215
the full considerations of which I will
explore further later in this chapter. The figure of Albert and how his traumas affect Notley are
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 93
pervasive in her work published during that decade after his death. She writes, “The brother is
always the victim, in Alette and elsewhere, being a soldier and having been turned into a killer
despite his sensitivity.”
216
More importantly, in regards the interests of this dissertation (and as
Notley’s diaries and letters reveal), her brother’s presence in her writing was also prevalent prior
to his tragic death, illustrating the relayed trauma she was experiencing as a direct result of
Albert’s trauma. In short, her engagement with her relayed trauma was not merely a result of his
death in 1988. Thus, rather than casting a spotlight on a particular poetic text, I combed through
several of Notley’s writings in which her brother or an unspecified damaged veteran is present,
and when Notley discusses war explicitly, to consider what those instances reveal about her own
experiences as a disempowered recipient of her brother’s trauma through relay. In addition,
considering the previous chapter, I will examine how Notley explores this experience through
poetry in such a way that, despite the incredibly personal nature of her relayed trauma and tragic
outcome of her brother’s primary traumas, adeptly avoids the ethical traps that defined Fenton’s
Clamor, a book about the poet’s husband who served as a medic during the Iraq War.
217
Clamor
and other books like it illustrate individualism writ large, while Notley’s work focuses on
systemic oppression. For the former, the concern remains within the realm of personal insight,
rather than insight beyond that which at first glance is subjective.
Notley recognizes how the power that harms those on the battlefield simultaneously
harms her as a woman and a feminist artist. Those power systems also work to restrain her
bodily, emotional, and creative freedoms. Trauma becomes a means of knowing and recognizing
the world around her, ultimately leading to a critique of the oppressive systems that put her
brother in such a damaging situation, as well as the other vulnerable persons often disregarded in
what could otherwise be an intensely personal trauma: the soldiers and civilians in Vietnam and
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 94
Laos, and the loved ones of other American soldiers. Throughout her work regarding her brother,
Notley of course focuses on him, their pain, but is equally (if not more) interested in the source
of his trauma and her relayed trauma. She recognizes that it’s not merely what is before her—it’s
the war machine in its entirety. She thus regards Albert while simultaneously looking outward
with a keen eye, identifying the culpable systems at work—and considers how this can inform
her method of creative production regarding these experiences.
THE TANK STORY
“Many men loved napalm, loved its silent power, the way it could make tree lines or houses
explode,” writes an American-Vietnam War veteran for Esquire in 1984. He continues, “I
preferred white phosphorus, which exploded with fulsome elegance, wreathing its target in
intense billowing white smoke, throwing out glowing red comets trailing brilliant white
plumes.”
218
White phosphorus, as described above with disturbing grandeur, defined Albert
Notley’s war experience, too—though with hardly the same pleasure. In her book Mysteries of
Small Houses, Notley describes “the tank story,” the poem illustrating it is a story her brother has
told often. She writes,
There’s something called “white
phosphorus” which he’s so scared of that
he always fires it off first to get rid of it.
Today’s gunner doesn’t. What happens is
a shell drops into the small top opening
of the compartment where the gunners are.
Albert hears their screams & knows
everyone is frying from white phosphorus;
he goes for the escape hatch on the bottom, but
it won’t open, for long long seconds.
Finally he gets out, everyone else is dead of
course. This is the subject of his most long-
standing nightmare, & first point of guilt,
this escape. “I thought I’d be safe in a tank,
but after that I didn’t want to get in one again.”
219

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 95
The little tank necklace Notley received from Albert quickly became an inaccurate token of his
role in the war—after this near-death experience, he became a sniper. Near the end of Albert’s
life, Notley began writing a poem that ultimately became his elegy. It is entitled “White
Phosphorus.”
At first it seems troubling that Albert only feels trauma because American soldiers died
(rather than Vietnamese). What Notley calls her brother’s “first point of guilt” is problematic
too—the one time white phosphorus doesn’t hit its Vietnamese targets but, rather, American
soldiers, the soldier feels guilty for his escape. Yet, in terms of the psychology of killing in
wartime, this isn’t surprising. In Dave Grossman’s book On Killing, he explains that “there is a
direct relationship between the empathic and physical proximity of the victim, and the resultant
difficulty and trauma of the kill.”
220
“Sniper weapons” and “tank fire” are both considered “long
range” (versus bombers, which are maximum range).
221
This may be why Albert’s superiors put
a sniper rifle in his hand after he refused to reenter a tank. According to Notley, despite Albert’s
distance from those he killed, he was continually haunted by their deaths and his role in the war.
Tankers might avoid seeing the victims—snipers can often make out their faces. She writes,
We ask him how he became a sniper. “They
came around asking for volunteers. They
said you’re a volunteer & you’re a volunteer,
I was a good shot, good with guns, they thought
I was good. I wanted to be outside. So they sent us
down to sniper school”
…Snipers had to kill civilians & “it started
to seem like murder. I must have killed 49
or 50 civilians. You see a mamasan with a baby,
you shoot first & ask questions later, she
might be carrying explosives.”
222

Albert’s claim that he killed that many civilians—not soldiers—is not unlikely. Grossman
explains, “U.S. Army snipers in Vietnam accounted for 1,245 confirmed kills, with an average of
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 96
1.39 bullets expended per kill…In the course of calculating confirmed sniper kills, no enemy was
counted as a kill unless an American soldier actually was able to physically ‘place his foot’ on
the body.”
223
(The 1,245 “confirmed kills” is an undeniably low number compared to actual
deaths.
224
) Despite the initial distance and his commanders’ insistence he kill (often how soldiers
absent themselves as agents of death, thinking themselves powerless), Albert is horrified and
traumatized by his killing.
225
His trauma is so thorough it is relayed to Notley.
This narrative of trauma from killing isn’t a new or surprising one, and is undoubtedly
problematic if the focus were to remain solely on Albert murdering indiscriminately and feeling
guilt later. This blots out the trauma of that death—or the baby who survives in her dead
mother’s arms with no recourse or recognition of the killed despite their being civilians rather
than soldiers.
226
Yet that narrative shifts as Albert continues: “But they wouldn’t / count the
civilians in their body count. They only wanted the NVA.”
227
This lack of recognition of these
deaths by U.S. Army superiors, the kills that “seemed like murder,” most certainly fell firmly
into that category of death for Albert (and Notley, too). Yet the fact that “They’d ask if / you got
any but wouldn’t write it down”
228
illuminates the reality that the U.S. Army—at least those
overseeing Albert’s sniper unit, but likely most others—was encouraging the mass murder of the
Vietnamese, whether armed NVA or civilian villagers. The destruction was devastating, but only
a fraction (the military dead) “counted.” Vietnam represented a threat—as non-white, as guerilla,
as Communist. In each of these ways it flouted the American government and the hegemonic
power (and its armed forces) it represented. And, ultimately, the U.S. Army was successful in its
violent venture to kill a large number of the Vietnamese population in retribution for the
supposed threat to American values. As Viet Thanh Nguyen writes in Nothing Ever Dies, “The
fatal consequences in Vietnam for all sides was closer to one-tenth of the population, while the
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 97
fatal consequences for Americans amounted to about .035 of the population.”
229
While this
horrifying casualty statistic for the Vietnamese is due in part to infighting, the American military
engagement played a critical role in decimating the Vietnamese population.
For Albert, not only was he killing in such a way that felt morally ambiguous, at best—
“shoot first & ask questions later”—he recognized that the U.S., which supposedly has the moral
high ground in attempting to “save” the Vietnamese from Communism, clearly had little interest
in preserving and aiding those lives—quite the opposite.
230
This is a place that represented a
threat to the systems of power in the United States. Rather than straightforward brutality of 19
th

century colonialism (or earlier), the identical impulses became cloaked in language of
responsibility and aid—and with the same outcome of its overtly colonial predecessor. This was
further explicated as time wore on and Albert witnessed more and more, including executions
carried out by the infamous Phoenix Program, a CIA-run operation specifically to destroy Viet
Cong leaders.
231
Notley provides Albert’s testimony to her, lineates it into a poem. She maintains
the unemotional tone of his descriptions, leaving their implications bare:
They’d come in after we took a village. They had
a list of people to kill. They’d pull up their
hair and shoot them in the head. They’d put down,
say, the mayor of a village that was sympathetic to
the Communists, but you could also bribe them
to kill someone in your business you disliked.
232

The brutishness of this image is horrifying, with American soldiers grabbing a shock of a
person’s hair and shooting them point-blank. The Phoenix Program soldiers’ willingness to kill
for a bribe compounds the horror, as a CIA operation with the authority to execute those on a kill
list, but refocus such deadly power on others for the right price.
Giving us Albert through spare near-prose allows us to focus on the devastating facts
before us. As this points to organized, systemic focus on such threats represented by village
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 98
mayors who hold comparatively little power. Such threatening persons faced extermination, or
perhaps could pay off soldiers to kill whomever—any subsequent chaos having slight impact on
the overall U.S. war machine’s work. At this point, Albert’s sense of duty that had mingled with
the usual wartime need to survive sloughs away. Eventually it seems Albert himself is a target.
Notley writes,
Al thinks that at a certain point he was supposed
to die because he knew too much, about the killing of
civilians, Operation Phoenix, & so on.
Members of his sniper unit stopped ever coming back
from missions
233

Albert (through Notley) explains, “I got left back [in Laos] with 150 men. If you were left back /
it was pretty much assumed you would die. Finally, / everyone was dead except for me & this
other guy.”
234
The two men walked for a week back to camp.
When I got back they were getting ready to send out
an MIA to Mom & Dad. They sent me instantly
into North Vietnam. Then I knew they wanted to
be rid of me.
235

Perhaps this is merely paranoid thinking, perhaps not. It seems likely that his being sent on what
superiors hoped would be suicide missions is true. He knows he has killed too many of those he,
by the common rules of war, should have spared. He knows too much about kill lists. He is
overburdened with guilt and knowledge, and his superiors apparently find him expendable (if not
a liability). This all ultimately leads to a mental break for Albert—“The last thing / he
remembers from North Vietnam is shooting in a circle / all around himself. He got picked up by
a chopper,” and is then sent home.
236
It is only when Albert is clearly damaged, mentally, that
the apparent need for his destruction ends. He no longer threatens the power systems that
participated in his trauma, for few would likely believe him considering his mental state.
237

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I quote Albert’s experiences so extensively for a few reasons. First, all his quotations I’ve
referenced so far appear in a single poem by Notley (“Sept 17/Aug 29, ‘88,”)—they clearly have
incredible value to her in understanding his trauma. Second, Albert’s recognition of the larger
systematic issues that induced his traumas—rather than, say, merely killing civilians by
accident/confusion/orders and feeling guilty about it—so thoroughly affected Notley’s
experiences of relayed trauma. The notion of governmental systems and how these play out in
the war-scape, despite the consequences (needless death of innocent people, traumatized
veterans, the rippling of trauma through their families and loved ones) is a pervasive theme
through several of Notley’s books, poems, and prose both prior to and after Albert’s death. The
killing Albert did, while in many ways were his actions that defined the remainder of his life, is
undoubtedly bigger than him. He, like so many before and after him, acted as mere weapons for
the U.S. government—and were simultaneously invaluable, particularly due to their
expendability. With mental damage, these veterans’ recollections are more easily dismissed.

It’s not necessary to believe what traumatized people say about their experiences for one to
suffer from relayed trauma, nor does the source of relayed trauma itself have to be true. Relayed
trauma is precipitated by the pain someone witnesses in another with whom they share a
substantial connection. This is coupled with the inability to protect that person from their trauma.
As with its other forms, whether or not primary trauma “actually happened” is beside the point—
the psychological damage is real, and thus is the site of concern for those traumatized through
relay. That all said, Notley does believe the major elements of her brother’s narrative, and she
works to have the reader believe, too, despite the complicated nature of Albert’s memories. She
verifies some points, even: “Dicky Roten confirms that Albert was / in the LRR & a lot of what
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 100
he did was top secret: / he had a double record, one with blanks.”
238
Whether this conversation
with Dicky Roten—whose connection to her brother Notley never fully explains—was in the
spirit of investigation on Notley’s part or merely information obtained by happenstance isn’t
clarified. Yet Notley includes it in the poem, showing her impulse to confirm (at least some) of
what her brother recounts to her. Notley clearly wants her reader to believe her brother’s
experiences—these gestures illustrate that he is not merely confused, making things up. She does
this while also recognizing the malleability of memory, for she writes about “the tank story”:
“usually / he’s a gunner but today for some unremembered reason / the driver.”
239
Amy Robbins
in her essay “Alice Notley’s Post-Confessional I” writes, “Notley tries not to discount the
veracity of her brother’s account of the war, even as she acknowledges in various ways the
incoherent unreliability of his narrative.”
240
Ultimately, how “reliable” Albert is as a witness is
unimportant—if anything it illustrates the extent of his damage, his impulse to relay the same
trauma again and again in a multitude of slight variations. “Sept 17/Aug 29, ‘88” describes
experiences while Notley and Albert’s wife visit him in rehab, just days before his release and
mortal overdose. So when she writes, “Mostly we talk about / Vietnam,”
241
we as readers are
simultaneously pulled into the story of primary traumas for Notley’s brother, as well as fully
aware of the serious psychological consequences of his traumas due to Albert’s circumstances as
a rehab patient. They’re all sitting in a meadow together, where Albert often goes while at the
clinic. He explains the spot is “just like Nam”—pointing to the direct corollary between the two
locations. One that is the site of trauma, the other attempting to reckon with the damage. His
loved ones take in his traumatic experiences, looking out onto a field similar to that original site,
him pulling them to Vietnam both through retelling and their environment.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 101
BELIEVABLE AS ART
What Notley does artistically with the traumatic information Albert conveys to his family is
more complicated than rough documentation. Notley explains in “Sept 17/Aug 29, ‘88” that,
despite Albert’s “tank story” being in quotations—in his voice—the text is the result of two
different sessions of storytelling on the same day. “In the morning he was / shaky but not in the
afternoon,” she writes.
242
Notley states there were thus multiple versions of the story: “I’ll / fuse
them.”
243
In an interview Notley explains, “I believe the story my brother told me as I presented
it in Mysteries of Small Houses, but I omitted some events to make the events more streamlined
and believable as art…I don’t think my brother lived that so-called story as story. I think he lived
it as shock and instances of—what—confrontation in chaos?”
244
Perhaps this is why I feel that
much more inclined to trust Notley’s aesthetic decisions when tackling an issue as complicated
as her brother’s American-Vietnam War traumas—not only does she own in an interview that
she altered Albert’s speech in order to make it “believable as art,” she states it explicitly in her
poem (“I’ll / fuse them”). Her intention is to provide her reader with the knowledge she has, but
with a chronology that, if she were merely taking dictation, wouldn’t otherwise be possible. She
states in the same interview,
My brother didn’t necessarily tell me his “story” in order—he told me these things
that happened. My memory of what he told me imposed a second order (I have a
set of notes from the meeting); then a third order was imposed by the writing of the
poem in Mysteries of Small Houses. When you’re asked to think of everything, it
tends not to come “in order.” People who practice storytelling (in bars or
professionally) give an order to events so they can remember them. Time becomes
a mnemonic trick.
245

Notley fully recognizes the creative processes of documenting relayed traumatic memory here—
how a trauma moves through one person, then another, then to the page. While this does not
diminish the truth, value, or the importance of her relayed trauma, with each transition comes
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 102
inevitable change. Notley hopes that the changes will give Albert’s memory more currency than
if they were told to a stranger from Albert directly.
This fact about Albert’s damage inhibiting people’s understanding of his traumas, and
Notley’s impulse to document his traumas (take notes), points to what Barbie Zelizer writes in
Remembering to Forget: “everyone participates in the production of memory, though not
equally.”
246
Consider this in comparison to the production of Albert’s story that Notley
describes. Perhaps Zelizer’s point is true for Notley and her brother—the former is a published
poet while the latter struggles to describe his traumatic experiences in a way that honors
chronology. But more important, and how Zelizer intends it, is that some entities hold power
over others in the production of narrative—namely governmental powers culpable for traumas
and atrocities. In other words, the government shapes the war story, and has a premier stake in
that story. As Jenny Edkins writes in Trauma and the Memory of Politics, “Generally, bearing
witness is normalized, categorized and appropriated.”
247
The act of bearing witness is placed
within a regulated system. Kalí Tal interrogates this phenomenon extensively, dubbing it
“mythologization.” She writes that this process “reduc[es] a traumatic event to a set of
standardized narratives…turning it from a frightening and uncontrollable event into a contrived
and predictable narrative.”
248
For American-Vietnam War veterans, this predominantly involves
pathologizing the former soldiers (“Is he a coward, or is he sick?”
249
), or warping/redacting their
narratives until they are appropriate for public consumption. As Notley puts it, “he had a double
record, one with blanks.”
250

I am not arguing that Notley is engaging in the mythologization of her brother’s trauma—
that is an act of violence largely executed by hegemonic powers that shape narratives that may
expose their nefarious acts. The state thus takes narratives and manipulates them on a broad scale
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 103
to serve this purpose, attempting to flood sources of societal knowledge (often the media) with
controlled stories of conflict. Yet Notley’s impulse as a subjugated citizen under an oppressive
power is to receive, document, and preserve. While there may be some alterations to Albert’s
stories of trauma, it is due to the fact that we are constant recipients of cultural memory hewn by
culpable powers. We struggle to identify with that which does not adhere to those powers’
aesthetic habits. Simply due to the fact she is writing poetry on the subject, Notley is operating
far outside the normative aesthetic mode of such powers. As she writes, “No one wants you to be
a poet; in being a poet one is disobeying society’s wishes.”
251
Yet she is giving us Albert’s story
in a way that is more accessible to a readership than if she had copied it word-for-word. As
Roger Luckhurst writes, “No narrative of trauma can be told in a linear way: it has a time
signature that must fracture conventional causality.”
252
Albert’s inability to string his traumatic
story together chronologically is thus not uncommon, and Notley’s role of altering it is an
important one. The stories Albert tells, as fractured as they may be, are worth reassembling and
retelling—if she doesn’t do this labor, the stories may very well be disregarded by others.
Otherwise his suffering will not help locate a culpable party (the U.S. government), or inform
others of that party’s unethical behavior. It will be a personal tragedy only, when it ultimately is
an indicator of violent realities and violations that exist far outside that small circle of family. To
be haunted by another’s trauma is an act of preservation within the self. To attempt to document
outside the self that which will otherwise be forgotten or redacted is activism. To do so in such a
way as to not merely give in to solipsism, an act of effective activism.
In “Sept 17/Aug 29, ’88,” Notley produces art of activism for its documentation and
thoroughness without avoiding herself as a subject. It is simultaneously one of the most explicit
pieces of poetry about her brother’s traumas in Vietnam and Laos, as well as her subsequent
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 104
anxieties. She writes, “I love my brother so much this visiting day, but wonder / if he doesn’t
know too much to live.”
253
Previously the biggest threat to Albert’s life due to his knowledge
regarding the military’s executions during the war was ostensibly the military itself sending him
on suicide missions. Safe from immediate physical dangers, the trauma as psychological damage
manifests itself, specifically in his PTSD and drug addiction, which will ultimately lead to his
death. Notley’s line “[I] wonder / if he doesn’t know too much to live” shifts the reader from
Albert’s horrors in the war (his traumatized mind) to Notley’s present worries (her mind
traumatized through relay). Albert’s telling and retelling his traumatic wartime experiences
continually keeps him in the space of his trauma, mentally—but also keeps those around him in
the state of relayed trauma. As Tal writes, “This is the heart of the survivor experience: Nothing I
do will make a difference, but to do nothing requires a kind of amnesia I have yet to discover a
means of inducing.”
254
This is directly akin to what Notley writes later in “Sept 17/Aug 29, ‘88,”
describing how Albert’s healthcare providers force him away from such amnesia.
255
She writes,
“He’s been / remembering & remembering—the therapists want him to remember even more,
but he doesn’t want to, he wants / to go home and see his kids.”
256
His hope to “go home and see
his kids” alongside Notley’s ultimately prophetic concern about Albert’s ability to simply not die
is depressing in its disjunction. Ultimately this points to a potential, though not uniform, aspect
of relayed trauma: when the person suffering from relayed trauma may have a better grasp on the
depth of the primarily traumatized person’s damage (and the consequences of such damage) than
the primarily traumatized person themselves. One experiencing relayed trauma, because that
trauma is generally less acute than direct trauma, has the capacity to recognize the severity of the
situation to its ends.
257

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 105
In poetry of relayed trauma there is thus the potential to not only detail the experience of
hearing Albert’s stories and documenting his primary trauma, but recognizing the damage he
harbors and how that damage has an impact on those around him. While poetry collections
regarding primary trauma focus exclusively on that experience and its repercussions, or touch
lightly on the effect it has on others, largely they are (not inappropriately) documenting the
feelings of isolation even when the author is supported by loved ones.
258
In short: Notley has a
wider scope as she is not focused entirely on her own survival—the scope’s edges are pulled
back in order to consider the person suffering primary traumatic experience. Notley has a
broader perspective as a witness to primary trauma and a recipient of relayed trauma. As “Sept
17/Aug 29, ‘88” was published after Albert’s death, this perspective is certainly true for Notley.
She finishes “Sept 17/Aug 29, ‘88” by saying,
[Albert] emanates too much knowledge, power;
his self is huge, bigger than any I’ve ever witnessed.
His boundaries are too painful and too small:
they keep him where he remembers, they keep his
knowledge concentrated, personal. He must get free of
this self now, but I don’t know he will;
yet escape’s fated, written already (we all know it and
don’t know it).
259

The only means of escape from these boundaries that “keep him where he remembers” is through
his death—a fate they all realize and, simultaneously, cannot fully address.
Notley upends the maxim that knowledge is power here, as we ultimately know that
Albert’s knowledge of his murders and the murders exacted by the U.S. military in Vietnam is
what precipitated his mental break, emotional damage, and subsequent death. He was incapable
of containing it. Notley writes of overwhelming power in connection to her brother elsewhere in
the poem she began prior to his death that became his elegy entitled “White Phosphorus.” The
form includes quotation marks denoting metric feet (in short, where Notley wants the reader to
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 106
pause).
260
The quotation marks also function as social commentary, as Susan McCabe points out
that “women’s speech could be said to be all quotation within the patriarchy.”
261
The use of
quotation marks to delineate metric feet is remarkably effective, and the specific punctuation of
speech is not arbitrary. In her short essay “Homer’s Art,” Notley writes about Homer’s music of
form in his epics: “as the story is told in this measure it becomes really true—the measure draws
from the poet depths of thought & feeling, as well as memory. This line, this dactylic hexameter
of Greek, is simple & grand, & gets deeply into the system. The story is told by a teller not a
book.”
262
In “White Phosphorus” Notley writes, “He’s dying” “of his power” “Go” “He came
home & died” “Go” “Power / of, power of” “forgiving” “forgiving himself for so much” “It took
too / much power & he died” “He died of that, power of that.”
263
Notley’s slippery use of
“power” in the quotation above is remarkable because it ascribes her brother power through his
overwhelming knowledge via witness and experience (as does “Sept 17/Aug 29, ‘88”), while
also describing the amount of power necessary to forgive himself for actions apparently
demanded of him by superiors (despite the horrible nature of those actions).
264
Albert’s powerful
knowledge overcame him, as did his limitations of power—to absolve himself of guilt. Once
obtained, not everything powerful we associate with empowerment, such as knowledge,
ultimately serves the person who holds it.
Power is a shapeshifter—it can simultaneously elevate and crush the same subject,
depending on the different forms it takes. Avery Gordon writes about this phenomenon most
compellingly in Ghostly Matters:
Power can be invisible, it can be fantastic, it can be dull and routine. It can be
obvious, it can reach you by the baton of the police, it can speak the language of
your thoughts and desires. It can feel like remote control, it can exhilarate like
liberation, it can travel through time, and drown you in the present. It is dense and
superficial, it can cause bodily injury, and it can harm you without seeming to ever
touch you.
265

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Power’s impact is not merely when facing your own oppression, but also the oppression of those
for whom you care, and worry. Notley illustrates the multitude of power’s forms in regards to her
brother’s experience—as well as her own. Her witnessing her brother be overcome by the
different valences of power, and recognizing her inability to aid him in any meaningful way is
clear in her poetry. At one point she writes that at first after Albert’s return home “He wanted” /
“to go back” “into the bush” “ ‘Where I belonged’ ” “And then later” / “that’s exactly” “where
he was, in his head.”
266
Edkins writes, “It is not just because traumatic experience is so powerful
that it is re-lived time and time again by survivors. It is because of the failure to allocate
meaning.”
267
“Allocating meaning” hardly seems possible for a damaged veteran who was
ordered to kill civilians by superiors and have those same superiors not “count” “ones he killed
not / in uniform” “& you, you don’t count the” “ones not in uniform” “the / child the mother.”
268

Those with power simultaneously request the murder and disregard the reality of it via their
methods of recognition—through documentation. Notley finishes this thought, powerfully, with:
“& you don’t count me.”
269
This can read as solipsistic, Notley turning away from the
Vietnamese victims and back to herself. Yet the fact these two concerns are in the same line of
thought, in the same poem, performs quite the opposite gesture here—accomplishing what
Fenton and others fail to do.
Notley is linking herself directly to those victims, recognizing how, in a sense, they hold
a similar role for the “you”/empowered party. That is, these victims are assigned no role by the
war machine—at least none with any charge beyond suffering and dying. Notley writes of her
experience in “The ‘Feminine’ Epic,”
Suddenly I, and more than myself, my sister-in-law and my mother, were being
used, mangled, by the forces which produce epic, and we had no say in the matter,
never had…[we] weren’t involved in governmental power structures, didn’t have
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 108
voices which participated in public political discussion. We got to suffer, with
without trajectory.
270

The accusatory moment in “White Phosphorous,” “you don’t count me,” is one of recognition of
this connection between the Vietnamese civilians and loved ones of American soldiers, rather
than minimizing the damage and death incurred by the Vietnamese. The experience of misuse is
not singular to loved ones of American veterans—though often with less deadly consequences.
In their introduction to Feminism and War, Charndra Talpade Mohanty, Robin L. Riley, and
Minnie Bruce explain the role of women both in places of conflict and places from which
(largely male) soldiers are deployed: “women are forced to endure wars in which their actions
are constrained, their agency is compromised, and their well-being constantly threatened.”
271
The
passive voice in this quotation as well as Notley’s prose (“were being used, mangled”) is
troubling for their lack of naming the powerful forces at work here. Who is mangling,
compromising, and using these women? The inability to locate a clear culpable agent is why the
powerful remain so—through amorphousness, through vast, many-tiered systems. While the
empowered are indeterminate, the results of their oppression provide connection between those
they abuse.
What is particularly heart-breaking about Notley’s articulated connection to the women
and children killed abroad is what she writes in the poem just a few pages prior: “He had / a
family” “but he’d” “fought families” “How can we” “compete” “with that?”
272
Albert’s loved
ones surround him, worry, experience relayed trauma because of his experiences, but their
presence is ultimately secondary to the traumatic memories regarding other families—those he
destroyed. Notley’s statement “How can we” “compete” “with that?” reads like rivalry, but is
more so a recognition—surrender—to Albert’s damage. The amount of impact his loved ones
can have is nothing compared to the dead. Any support from his family invariably reminds him
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 109
of those he participated in killing who, in comparison, are the most disempowered of any group
in question. Thus those who experience relayed trauma—who in this case don’t “count,” but
live—potentially suffer doubly by being systematically ignored (at best) by political powers as
well as by those from whom they receive their relayed primary traumas. “We got to suffer, but
without trajectory.” The Vietnamese victims remain nameless. They don’t “count” according to
the U.S. military or its government. The victims’ power reigns in Albert’s mind, only. Albert
punishes himself through guilt as there is no justice through an external source. Notley doesn’t
judge her brother, instead setting her sights on the source of his trauma and guilt. She attempts to
enact a kind of justice through her poetry, cultivating a form to bear her grappling with his
trauma as well as her relayed trauma and complicity.
In her writing, Notley is attempting to harness some of the power so explicitly wrested
from the many victims of the American violence in Vietnam and Laos. While a book of poems
hardly has the visibility as, say, an exposé in Time, it is empowering on Notley’s terms and
within her capacity as an artist grappling with traumas so vast and powerful that even privileged
support systems of healthcare and family Albert enjoys are no competition. By engaging with her
lack of power through her art, Notley is claiming some of that power—small as it may be. Yet in
beginning her attempts at writing on war and Albert’s traumatic experiences, Notley encountered
another element of the same oppressive powers that participated in Albert’s damage—but in
literature.
BEGINNING THE EPIC
Notley enjoyed some power through her writing about Albert, and she benefitted from the
amount of her work that focused on the American-Vietnam War, the war machine—in the
subsequent accolades she received for this work. Yet this is hardly meaningful currency in the
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 110
power systems of the state. While poetry, like any art, is hugely important as an element of most
“free” societies, it often has little visibility or impact on vast, powerful, oppression.
273
Yet
Notley, in addressing her relayed trauma, attempts to carve a place for herself in the literary
tradition that otherwise wholly ignores and/or suppresses her circumstances and to consider the
misogynist lineage with which she inevitably engages as a poet. The subsequent texts do work
that is largely creating, or harnessing, power against the state—rather than participating in its
structures by thinking that the only power available is that gained by participation in its
oppressive traditions.
In order to do so, Notley had to reckon with war through war’s premiere and most
enduring poetic form: the epic. The epic, like war, actively shuts out women’s experiences. She
may be a precipitator (the Iliad) or victim (the Ramayana) or one who waits (the Odyssey), but
little else. She certainly isn’t the protagonist hero. Notley states that, today, if a poet lost
someone close to them
years after the Vietnam War, as a consequence of it…One might invent devices,
invent a line, make a consistent & appropriate sound for the story—anyone might
be able to, any poet. But a[n American] woman who is affected or even badly
damaged by events in Vietnam will probably not know what it was like to be there,
had no role in shaping the policy with regard to that war or any war, has no real
access to the story or even a story: what she experienced contained very few events.
If she wants to write a poem about it, she is likely to write something lyrical
(/elegiac) or polemical, rather than epic or near-epic.
274

Because of the epic’s long history of misogynist trappings, it unsurprisingly presents itself as a
hostile form for experiences such as what Notley is describing. Her lyrical-versus-epic
dichotomy quite neatly describes what Fenton did in Clamor in comparison to what Notley
worked toward in her collections Désamère and accomplished in The Descent of Alette. Lyric or
elegy are modes by which women are expected to engage in response to the circumstances of
war by the state. They are what benefit that oppressive system more than any other approach.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 111
Notley is by no means discouraging certain methods of artistic engagement or attempting to ape
“masculine” forms in order to gain some power. Rather, by reshaping the epic, she is creating an
intervention in that form in order to create a foundation for a feminist text—so that “there might
be recovered some sense of what the mind was like before Homer, before the world went
haywire & women were denied participation in the design & making of it.”
275
So while like most
literature the epic form engages in the age-old project to disempower women (among others),
Notley recognizes that it is the most apt form by which to address her relayed trauma and
Albert’s trauma.
In order to avoid the trap of thinking the master’s tools will dismantle the master’s house,
Notley interrogates how, exactly, a woman writes an epic poem without betraying her identity or
compromising her intention. As she writes in her journal, “Beginning (as woman) question is,
whose voice from past can you identify with and use?”
276
The answer, it seems, is no one’s.
While she deeply considers her epic form in her journals, the line length and how it will manifest
itself, Notley also interrogates its legacy—Dante, Ovid, Chaucer, Pound, Williams.
277
And,
because of this legacy, “I’ve had to make myself stupid this last year, get the literature out of my
head, in order to write this poem [The Descent of Alette].”
278
Notley worked to shake herself of
her literary knowledge which was undeniably overpopulated by men, the epic’s clear place in the
patriarchal canon, in order to forge new ground in what she felt was her feminine experience of
relayed trauma in connection to war.
279

While “White Phosphorus”
280
was an exploration in the self-created feminine epic measure
denoted by quotation marks, Notleys’ book-length poem Désamère engaged epic content rather
than form. These predecessors eventually lead to The Descent of Alette (and, later, like a
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 112
resurfacing of an unfinished feeling, in Mysteries of Small Houses). Désamère reads as a kind of
prototype for Alette with a good deal of overlap between narratives. In Désamère, as in Alette,
there is a nameless protagonist who eventually claims a name (in both books the protagonist
often reads as a stand-in for Notley). Amère engages with a devil-like man, then eventually
moves through the desert with that devil figure—referencing the temptation of Christ.
281
Yet
there is more explicit pressure in Désamère than in Alette on the figure of the nameless veteran
brother, who clearly references Albert. Some points in which he speaks are almost identical to
“Sept 17/Aug 29, ’88.”
282
He describes the Phoenix executions, being left behind in Laos. Yet
what Désamère makes room for—what Alette doesn’t—is more of Notley’s interiority and
responses to her brother’s trauma, as well as the non-American victims of the U.S. military
system. Désamère is specific in that it addresses French colonialism in Vietnam, Nixon, U.S.
soldiers killing elephants that provided the Viet Cong transportation. Yet Désamère is
simultaneously amorphous, dreamy. The psychedelic tone allows for a weirdness mirroring a
kind of unconscious, making space for interrogation of Albert’s (and Notley’s) traumas.
Prior to the main character Amère’s
283
temptation, she is sitting around a fire with a group
of people, including French Surrealist poet Robert Desnos.
284
Desnos is attempting to aid those
around him through his dreams—acting as a kind of oracle. At one point he explains, “No one’s
here who had power,” which includes Amère, her brother, the Vietnamese killed in the war.
285

Amère says to the “Faceless people at the fire, / Further back from it, hard to see… ‘You’re all
trembling’ / ‘We were the vulnerable,’ one says.”
286
In Notley’s work the vulnerable bodies
(ghostly or not) are present—they speak, even if only to claim their vulnerability. The inability to
see them full (“faceless people”) is pointing to the governmental powers that work to maintain
vulnerable populations’ anonymity. Notley works to portray that reality. The poem shifts its
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 113
focus to the veteran: “The woman’s brother is shaking all over / ‘But you kill everyone, are you
vulnerable?’ she asks him / ‘I’m shaking so hard can’t talk,’ he says.”
287
Amère’s interactions
with her brother are painful in their showing her deep concern and simultaneous lack of
impact—they illustrate her consistent powerlessness in mitigating his damage.
This feeling of futility for Amère (and Notley) in the face of trauma is not new, as the
siblings interacted similarly during the war. Amère describes meeting her brother in Hawai’i—
“vacation from Nam”—with her family in which his drug addiction is already manifest, injecting
barbiturates and “nodd[ing] out into the salad.” She gives him money to buy more, then wonders
why “Didn’t I give you / More, more of anything, why didn’t you tell us / Stay with us,
anything?
288
The signifiers of trauma are there even prior to her brother’s return from the war,
self-medicating to the point where he’s disoriented and high in front of his family. Amère/Notley
was at a loss as to what else to do beyond enabling further self-medication. Alternate avenues of
relief—going AWOL among them—didn’t seem possible. You’re drafted, you fight, you die or
return home. There is no going off that route, no matter the consequences.
Instead of adhering to the status quo further enabling the war machine’s power, Notley
portrays her experiences for her readers with painful preciseness. While it may seem easier to
receive such traumas through a sympathetic vector—Albert trembles, is a “sensitive” killer—
Notley troubles this simplicity.
289
The poem continues, more importantly,
Brother repeats,
‘After a while, it
Seemed to me…’ Amère says, ‘I’ll help
You finish…What we were
Doing, was just murder’
290

The brother is thoroughly insulated in his trauma, so Amère’s role is clear—learn his narrative,
aid in in the retelling of his traumas and, just as significantly, claim some of that guilt as her
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 114
own. For Amère uses “we” when restating her brother’s telling, rather than “you.” Her brother’s
guilt can bleed into her, too.
Notley believes that she, too, was complicit in these “murders” despite her lack of agency
here. In “The ‘Feminine’ Epic” she states that Albert “was beginning to be in emotional trouble;
and one afternoon I stood in my apartment in New York and thought to myself, just as exactly
this clumsily, ‘What if my brother in Vietnam was like a Nazi, and I by extension am? And what
if I therefore owe an epic?’”
291
The greater implications of Notley’s idea here—that one “owes”
something as an artist if implicated in brutal nefarious dealings, even if due only to proximity—
is complicated, yet reaching toward an ethics. For one may argue drafted soldiers who served in
the American-Vietnam War, in a restorative justice sense, are largely innocent—pawns in the
larger game instituted by governmental powers. They, just like the Vietnamese and Laotian
civilians, fall within the category of “vulnerable” (albeit the latter being far more vulnerable than
the American soldiers for innumerable reasons). That all said, the families of the soldiers hardly
seem deserving of implication, particularly when they were not even advocates for the war. Yet
here Notley is likening her brother to a Nazi—undoubtedly the most easily and consistently
villainized historical figure of the West.
292
And, perhaps more radically, “by extension”
considering herself to be equivalent. Just as her trauma is bound up in Albert’s via relay, so is her
guilt.
The feeling of guilt and ownership of it plays out in Désamère when the now-titular
character is in the desert, attempting to fend off the villain’s temptations. A voice in her head
haunts her: “If brother could, you could. Why not. Kill…Who are you, to think you’re
different?”
293
While the voice is clearly planted by the villain vocalizing Désamère’s anxieties in
relation to her brother’s killing as a soldier, this is a legitimate question—and one that generally
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 115
plagues my feelings about most acts of violence, in the warscape or elsewhere.
294
For, if
anything, history has proved that the majority indeed can and do participate in acts of violence.
Even Albert, who Notley consistently describes as “sensitive” (she uses this term time and
again)—so sensitive she attributes this as a major element of his death—was capable of killing
dozens of innocent people. The voice in Désamère’s head continues, “he killed, over and over.
Pick up a knife and see. What it feels like. To cut open flesh. Smell of a knife wound. He said
there was a terrible smell.”
295
This idea is disturbing, and it reveals the depth of Albert’s
descriptions of his experiences to Notley. This also tips from feelings of guilt to anxiety—
bringing the person suffering from relayed trauma to the outer limits of her desire to understand
the experiences of her loved one’s primary trauma. Yet she has no interest in continuing
violence—Désamère vanquishes the voice, regains selfhood. There is a similar claiming of self
explicitly in a text that depersonalizes Notley and her brother’s experiences most while
simultaneously created to address them: The Descent of Alette. In the author’s note of that poem
Notley plainly states “I am not Alette.” While that is clear, it is also clear that Albert’s suffering
and death played a huge role in the creation of this book and its narrative. This is apparent in
both Alette itself and Notley’s journals from that time. As Notley puts it later, in Mysteries, “I am
Alette who, from deeper than the story, can change it.”
296

ALETTE AS NOTLEY’S RELAYED TRAUMA AVATAR
When first beginning The Descent of Alette, Notley had planned it to be in a single volume with
the “Mother Mask” and “White Phosphorus” as the three pieces were all deeply connected in
their interrogating her brother’s suffering and her subsequent relayed trauma. But the “Descent
poem” became too vast, a separate entity altogether.
297
Its mode of bearing up these experiences,
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through the epic form, set it apart from the previous pieces. In writing Alette, Notley claims to
have learned two hard things:
One, I’d begun to know how bad my brother’s actions had been in Vietnam in the
context of that country (he didn’t do anything bad by “army standards”) and of his
own sensitivity…and my own implication, as an American and his sister, in these
actions. Second, that not one thing in the world, not one object and not one practice
or habit had been invented, as far as I could tell, by a woman. Alette is about those
facts, though most obviously the second one—but I wouldn’t have chosen epic if I
hadn’t had to deal in some part of myself with the fact of that war.
298

Though Notley’s assertion that women haven’t invented any “thing,” “object,” “practice,” or
“habit” is certainly a dated one,
299
while investigating modes of expression regarding her
“feminine” experience, she found no female predecessors in the archive. This of course points to
the idea that history and the past are not one in the same, with examples of women’s
empowerment and invention stifled and therefore often lost in perpetuity. Notley’s thoughts can
also read as dated in the kind of age-old gendered dichotomy she is putting forth, Albert as
male/violent and Notley as female/non-violent. Yet this is ultimately upended in the narrative of
Alette, with the brother veteran figure as damaged and largely non-functional, and Alette as the
exactor of retribution. I will not give a full synopsis of Alette here, as Notley’s representations of
the veteran brother are most important to my argument, but the epic concerns an unnamed
narrator (later, Alette
300
) who is cursed along with most of society to ride the subway, endlessly,
due to a tyrant figure who enforces their bondage. People are able to switch trains, but never
ascend above ground. Indeed, the first poem in Alette includes the lines stating she has always
known “that there was” / “a tyrant” “a man in charge of” “the fact” “that we were” / “below the
ground” “endlessly riding” “our trains.”
301
She calls this “a” “world of souls.” The tyrant’s
power is all-encompassing, inevitable, enduring, and unchallenged. His power is the first piece
of information Alette has, and the first we learn as readers. It is the foundation of this world.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 117
The tyrant’s control and the subsequent horrors for those who live in Alette’s society are
manifest on nearly every page of the book. Each proffers a terrible vignette of the oppressed life
there. Early on the reader realizes what marks the narrator, beyond her place in the subway, is a
war and Alette’s subsequent feelings of guilt. Alette has a dream where the tyrant invites her to
rest in a room with a bed and food. She is pulled in unwillingly, sees “something” in the bed:
“Human” “without facial features,” “without eyes,” “nose or mouth”
“Nude & reddish-colored,” “wizening” “wizening before my eyes—”
“it’s unsensed face shrinking,” “its emaciated” “torso shrinking,”
“changing,” “rotting…” “ ‘He is a corpse” “from a battlefield,’
a voice said,” “ ‘He’s just” “a dead solider” “We will remove him’ ”…
“I awoke then”…”weeping” “for the man,” “the dead soldier,” “in the bed”
302

The lack of regard by the disembodied voice for Alette’s witnessing the decay of this body
(explaining it’s “just a dead soldier” and stating someone will “remove him”) is chilling. Who
would want to lie in a metaphorical bed where one has just seen a corpse rot? No amount of
comfort—the offered food and a bed when hungry and exhausted—will erase the cost for that
comfort. This is the apparent cost of freedom, as those who support American war efforts so
often state. This anonymous soldier’s death with his “unsensing face” points to his function for
the war machine rather than his subjectivity.
Yet, for Notley, the witnessing does not absolve. Witnesses receive trauma and guilt
braided together, without the capacity to wield power that enables or inhibits that which
produces these experiences. Derrida’s statement that “We are all heir, at least, to persons or
events marked…by crimes against humanity”
303
is complicated when connected to the traumas
of those who pass their crimes on to us. For Notley, as illustrated in Alette as well as her other
work, what is included in such crimes are more explicit (the My Lai Massacre) as well as that
which is less visible (the suffering of loved ones of the dead due to military violence). After
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 118
leaving the subway and entering a cave network, Alette enters a cave full of corpses covered in
“A white / substance” “dead-white stick.” She watches as
“A small drop of” “this evil” “this
white substance” “oozed” “from my palm” “ ‘I’ve never” “been allowed”

“to participate” “in the decision to go to war—’ ” … “ ‘Has someone” “such power”
“as to make his sin” “ooze from my pores?’ ”
304

Simply by being present, witnessing, is enough to entangle her in the violence surrounding these
dead and the subsequent guilt. This pulls us back to Notley’s realization that “What if my brother
in Vietnam was like a Nazi, and I by extension am?”
305
Yet it is not merely due to her closeness
to a veteran that implicates her, but also the fact she is a citizen of a violent and oppressive world
power. As she states in “White Phosphorus,” “We maimed” “another, a native land, we” “helped
maim another”
306
This is whether or not citizen have any power recognized by the state in
deciding the militaristic actions of that nation. For Notley, this reality requires an act of
reckoning. At one point, prior to Albert’s death, she writes in a journal, “How can I write for the
victims?”
307
Notley recognizes this obligation, because of her brother’s trauma and death and the
general disregard in the United States for the Vietnamese and Laotian dead—as well as the
terrible fact that, due to association despite systematic oppression, she too is implicated in the
traumas abroad. This is not an isolated experience. Considering the amount of veterans suffering
from PTSD after the American-Vietnam War, it was relatively common. As Notley writes, “My
personal problems—my brother’s death, my powerlessness…—were part of the general
problem.”
308
In Alette, Notley creates instances where seemingly private experiences of trauma
and guilt are reconsidered in public spaces in the subway.
Alette interacts with explicit Albert-like veteran figures throughout the book, and their
predominant characteristic is their instability. Within the first few pages of Alette, she comes
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 119
across a man in a subway car wearing an army jacket eating cold steak with his bare hands. He
says to no one in particular, “ ‘I need to find” “our father” “our fathers’ ” To which Alette
responds, “ ‘But what about” / “our mother?’ ” What begins as bickering between siblings
becomes more complicated as she continues: “ ‘the one mother” / “first mother” “of all?’ ”
309

While the impetus in searching for these parental figures isn’t clear (knowledge? healing?), the
gendered focus for these male and female characters points to Notley’s understanding that
female interest in female power in a world run by a male oppressor is not merely like searching
for like. While Alette is interested in a kind of mystical maternal figure, the veteran isn’t explicit
about what he means by “father.” He doesn’t have the capacity to explain, but merely circles
around, unspecific.
Even when unconscious, the man’s focus remains, opening up space for more
possibilities or implications for what the “father” is—a multiplicity. Notley cultivates this
thoughtfully. The veteran nods off,
310
begins talking in his sleep, saying, “ ‘I need a dolor” “a
few more dolors” “Then after that” “I’ll see / our father’ ”
311
The homophonic elision of “dollar”
and “dolor” (sadness) simultaneously points to the need for cash and the reason for that need: to
score, to ease the feelings of despair and damage. Perhaps the veteran can find the father when
overdosed and dead (so, a male god-like figure), or an actual father who is dead as Notley’s
father had died prior to her brother.
312
The muddling of these fathers is purposeful on Notley’s
part, keeps those potential readings intermingled and both simultaneously possible without
excluding each other. The veteran then wakes and reiterates the need to look for the father and
mother, suggests he locate the former and Alette the latter, “ ‘Then yours” “would be easier”
“much easier,’ ” / “I said with anger.” For in the patriarchy a father figure is relatively easy to
locate (look toward the top, the empowered), while the position of the maternal is more
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 120
amorphous.
313
“ ‘But I am agonized,’ he said” “ ‘I killed for him,” / “I was a soldier.’ ” The
veteran claims his wrongdoing as some reason for his search—the father being the initiator of his
guilt. Then “He abruptly” “left the car” “Disappeared” “disappeared.”
314
While this is a dream-
like space, ostensibly between two strangers, it gives us a sense of Notley’s reality. Alette is just
starting to comprehend the depth of this traumatized man’s experience, the reality of his
suffering clear but with no apparent recourse, when suddenly the conversation ends. As Notley
writes, “My brother began to enter a state of extreme crisis which I (we) came to understand too
gradually and too late.”
315
The information regarding the damage is scattered, its source
unclear—yet the impact is all-too-apparent.
Notley creates a metaphor in Alette for public knowledge of war via veterans’ guilt and
pain. Non-veterans are unable to engage with the veterans and their memories, but can witness
their significance. Alette answers the rhetorical question “Where is the battlefield?,” stating:
“At a station” “no longer” “in use” “Train goes right
past it” “But veterans” “know how” “to get in” “In that station” “is kept a
piece of” “a battlefield” “of the old war” “In that station” “grow white
flowers” “large blossoms” “that are faces,” “with eyes closed” “lashes
closed white” “White skin white hair” “soldiers go there” “Call to”
“the victim-flowers” “They don’t answer but” “seem to grow” “The soldiers
water them” “water the flowers” “which were” “their own victims”
316

This space where only veterans can reach to visit the “victims” provides little relief. It is where
to go and feed the memories. This battlefield is simultaneously public knowledge, yet closed off
in a distinct way for those who didn’t experience it first-hand. This terrible garden of sorts is a
kind of memorial—a place of grief. While veterans “know how” “to get in,” civilians can only
witness their mourning, simultaneously abstract and present.
Arthur Danto describes the “paradox” of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, stating, “[T]he
men and women killed and missing would not have been memorialized had we won the war and
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 121
erected a monument instead.”
317
Celebration (a monument) can’t be spoiled by reminders of the
cost of that celebration. The dead soldiers, in terms of war, hold a different space in the society
depending upon the war’s outcome. What is physically there and recognized by the state defines
most civilians’ understandings of war and its place in the cultural imagination. Public memory of
trauma, in this case the trauma of war, has an impact on relayed trauma, too. It can be the
difference of being one of many staring out the train window at the grieving veterans in Alette’s
world, or being the only one looking.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the National Mall is famous for several reasons,
including that its size (almost 250 feet long) if it bore the names of the dead Vietnamese and
Laotians from the war would be almost 12,700 feet.
318
The lack of inclusion of these victims and
those who succumbed to PTSD is not lost on Notley, who writes in a journal not long after
Albert’s death regarding the memorial’s publicity in the media,
Let’s write another paragraph about the Memorial
well fuck you my brother’s name isn’t on it
is there a Vietnamese name on it
they didn’t even accept civilians on the body counts.
319

Thus while the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is powerful for many and does important work as a
memorial for the American dead and missing in action, it hardly represents the full extent of the
war’s casualties.
320
Yet above all is Viet Thanh Nguyen’s point that the “reality for many
Americans, where they and their soldiers are victims, and not the three million Vietnamese, is
nothing less than Orwellian.”
321
Notley illustrates here in Alette that often no one seems to
comprehend this more than the damaged veteran. Here he returns to his victims over and over in
a space no one else may access—they can only watch from the outside as Alette describes. Call it
honoring the dead, call it masochism from guilt, but it is often the reality—it was Albert’s reality
which Notley could only observe, his trauma wending its way through her, too.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 122
A society’s dedicated observation of anything is an opportunity for the state to shape a
narrative. The battlefield in Alette is the veterans’ guilt-ridden memory, yet there are other public
records for war in the poem. Notley addresses this crafting of cultural memory through
memorial-like zones and their role in soldiers’ traumas. In the second section of the poem, Alette
moves through a cave network that is a more personal interrogation of her psyche through
visions. In one cave, she sees a woman made of rock mourning her dead son beside her. Alette
asks her,
“ ‘How shall” “we celebrate this?’ I said,” “not knowing” “exactly why”
“I said ‘celebrate’—” … “ ‘We’ll carve” “his name,’
she said,” “ ‘into a wall” “where there are so” “many names” “that

none” “remains legible” “for very long’ ”
322

Where Alette seems to be calling for a monument (“celebrating” the man’s death), the rock-
woman instead creates a memorial—a record. Alette’s call for “celebration” from a source within
herself she doesn’t understand, due to a kind of brainwashing she quickly checks. Yet, with the
mother’s documentation of her son’s death, it adds to its illegibility due to the sheer number of
similar records. This calls up the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, pointing out that while perhaps
powerful in illustrating the volume of American dead, it also flattens their narratives completely,
making those people illegible (not to mention censors the “enemy” dead altogether).
The impact of such decisions regarding methods of physical reminders via memorials is
not small. As Viet Thanh Nguyen writes, “This tank, these planes, these guns, these inhuman
things have more purchase on the collective memory of the human species than 99.9 percent of
the human beings who lived through, or died in, the war.”
323
Perhaps this is because a tank or a
wall of stone can outlast a human life, carrying the potential to relay information and shape
memory for longer than a single lifespan. Yet all the more reason that memorials and monuments
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 123
erected by the state are largely untrustworthy, for in all likelihood they are for posterity, with the
power to inform cultural memory without dispute as witnesses die out. Hegemonic powers bank
on the fact that “inhuman things have more purchase on the collective memory of the human
species.”
324
But, in addition, the war objects often simply endure. This reality is not lost on the
mourning mother in Alette. “ ‘And what of you?’ I asked,” “ ‘how will // you be?’ ” “She
smiled” “& said,” “ ‘I am” “of course rock” “I’m / afraid” “I have turned to rock.’ ”
325
Rather
than implying a kind of human memorial, a human statue (Pygmalion in reverse), this is rather a
loss of self, of agency. The mother is one suffering from relayed and now her own primary
trauma due to the experiences and death of her son. Her identity is forever changed, her smile
sad resignation. Notley tries to avoid this narrative for herself through her work. The Descent of
Alette and Notley’s other texts on her brother are thus a different memorial in that they function
as sites of grief for a civilian abused by the state—it is a form of protest.
According to Notley, a woman’s role in the deaths of soldiers—her grief and lack of
agency—ultimately solidifies her identity. In a new cave, Alette sees a woman mourning her
husband while she is surrounded by other women. One tells Alette, “watch & see” “what
happens now.”
326
The woman becomes rock-like, similar to the woman who witnesses her
soldier son’s death. “Her facial features disappeared”
327
—her identity gone, her shape then
“All curves”
“& hills”…”She was caves” “she was caves” “I was

now afraid I stood” “exactly” “inside of” “women’s bodies:” “was”
“the human psyche” “made of women” “turned to stone?”
328

Only women are present to witness the transformation of the grieving woman, which ultimately
further informs Alette’s recognition of the world through which she moves. By and large,
historically, women are those who remain behind. The men they care for, for one reason or
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 124
another (and because of their mobility as ascribed by society), leave home, creating a greater
likelihood of a violent death—think the errant knight, think the shepherd. Being left behind,
powerless to provide substantive physical protection and aid due to social convention, has
defined the woman’s experience for centuries. Thus, as Notley writes, “If my brother died
essentially because he had participated in the Vietnam War, that was not just a personal
event,”
329
and, she states specifically about Alette, “the poem isn’t personal, it’s public…In a
world of war like the one we live in, woman is an appendage.”
330
This taking up of the feminist
theoretical idea that the personal is political, and in this case the personal involves the narrative
of women bearing witness, through these deaths and/or through relay, feeling restrained by the
state from doing little else. The man moving, incurring damage, and these women connected to
him are forced to reckon with that damage. Hence Notley’s inclusion of women’s reaction to
men’s deaths in Alette. This doesn’t point to a blind spot, but rather Notley’s laser focus on the
current reality in an oppressive system. In the United States, women are often only allowed to
witness, standby, incur relayed trauma, endure.
331

Even when one does have the capacity to act, it is frequently troubled by that capacity’s terms set
by the oppressor. This trouble is played out in Alette. After a series of events, convinced she
must and will kill the tyrant, Alette finds him. He is disarmingly friendly yet simultaneously
maddening in his lack of regard for human vulnerability and pain. He tells Alette he knows she’s
there to kill him, and tells her to do it—but she balks. “I wanted merely” “to be there,” “like
myself in” “most moments,” / “fairly comfortable,” “& not taking” “drastic action.”
332
This is
what Shulamith Firestone describes when she writes, “Why should a woman give up her
precious seat in the cattle car for a bloody struggle she could not hope to win?”
333
For women
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 125
living in an oppressive system—and indeed those of any marginalized group—merely by
reaching a point where one feels “fairly comfortable” is a huge win. A gain large enough to often
placate those populations against taking “drastic action” (fighting back against the oppressive
system that put them in that position in the first place). Thus the cycle continues. As the tyrant
tells Alette, “being this way” “for thousands” “of years,” “I cannot change” // “It cannot
change.”
334
One of the most terrifying elements of normalcy within the oppressive system is thus
its allure, its power. It coaxes most into complacency. As Arlene Eisen Bergman writes in
Women of Viet Nam, “When people accepted another myth—that women are naturally weak and
passive—women become easier prey for men and are less likely to rebel against the entire
system of oppression.”
335
This method of control, in Foucault’s terms, attains the “perfection of
power” in when it “render[s] its actual exercise unnecessary.”
336
Notley’s tyrant as embodiment
of the state is thus appropriately charming. The appeal of a system (oppressive as it may be) is
due to the overwhelming exhaustion one feels in the face of combating tyranny. Merely enduring
requires less effort—though with continual sacrifice.
This impulse to fold instead of rise up can be misread as desire, or as simply as reason for
the way things are—thus absolving empowered forces of any culpability. One of the more
disturbing aspects of this phenomenon is its pervasiveness. Notley explains, “The tyrant is the
military-industrial-intellectual-artistic complex; he is how the made objects of the world have
found their shapes.”
337
Alette’s tyrant is shockingly explicit about this, while simultaneously
conciliatory. He and Alette walk through his house, the tyrant saying over and over “I am
reality.” At one point Alette responds: “ ‘No you aren’t,’ ” / “I said fiercely,” “but I wasn’t
sure.”
338
All that falls within the abusive system aids in convincing its society that there are no
limits, no escape. Notley illustrates this point through Alette’s tour of the tyrant’s house. There
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 126
are the governmental representatives there, but in miniature, moving, working. The tyrant
explains he contains art, libraries, green houses, the subway. “I keep telling you:” “all” “exists in
me.”
339
And perhaps this is obvious, for government, knowledge, and gardens all involve rules
and systems and were developed by men and tyranny. He continues, even more disturbingly, “for
that matter,” “am I not you too?” “What would be” “left of you?” // “If you killed me?”
340
The
outcome of the tyrant’s destruction may lead to perilous ends for one’s sense of self.
This perhaps is the most terrifying prospect of all for many suffering within the
oppressive system—its mechanisms have been in place across the globe for millennia. It is thus
tightly woven into the fabric of most human experience for countless generations though in a
multitude of iterations. If everyone’s identity is therefore so profoundly informed by the
oppression, what happens to that identity when it is dismantled? The answer may simply be that
one’s identity becomes founded on liberation rather than oppression—or perhaps that it matters
little as the posterity of freedom is more important than the difficulty for those who may struggle
with that shift if it were to happen suddenly (if only). But Notley’s tyrant smartly leans on that
potential fear. At one point he tells Alette, “The order” / “of things” “has” “its own wisdom”
“formed by everyone’s” “wills.”
341
Thus the classic farce that systemic abuse came about
naturally, and is therefore prudent and apt for societal structure. Edkins explains this most
concisely when she writes that the modern state “is a contradictory institution: a promise of
safety, security and meaning alongside a reality of abuse, control and coercion.”
342
Alette is a
character who knows without a doubt she is in the company of a figure who maintains
oppression of herself, as well as those around her—the subway section of Alette chronicles that
thoroughly. Yet she still waivers. Perhaps she will kill him, perhaps not.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 127
The tyrant’s systemic oppression seems to provoke only fear and numbness in Alette—yet
what ultimately drives home his enraging abuses is how the tyrant responds to suffering of the
populace he oppresses. They reenter the subway together, moving into a car in which a sick man
dies. The tyrant weeps while a woman kneels beside the man, crying tears of blood.
“ ‘All inspiration” “comes from here,’ ” “the tyrant whispered” “as we
changed cars” “ ‘All stories,” “all drama” “all poetry” “come from
here now” “My heart” “is theirs” “I feel all” “I feel as they feel’ ”

… [Tyrant:] “ ‘Was the woman” “crying blood” “not
crying my blood?’ ” [Alette:] “ ‘She should not be weeping blood” … “we must
see the world” “through our tears” “not weep” “the thick substance”
“of another’s” “reality”
343

Notley is shedding light on a particularly nuanced and disturbing aspect of the oppressive
system, in that it also enjoys claiming and aestheticizing pain and/or the creative output in
response to suffering produced by that very same system. The belief that it’s all worthwhile
because of the subsequent art is horrifying, and disregards the kind of lives and art liberation
might precipitate. Such systems are not merely interested in military control and monetary profit,
but keep a keen eye on public response to tragedy and suffering. In a letter to a friend, Notley
states Alette addresses the fact that “there is an unconscious will to maintain unhappy or
impoverished places in society as sources of artistic materials, emotions, action or tragedy…I
sometimes think women and minorities are used in this way, are pushed into emotional extremes
that others can feed off in various ways.”
344
The most obvious benefit here is the maintenance of
narratives that don’t assign culpability, as well as those which inform cultural memory. Where
the state cannot build monuments or memorials, it must act otherwise. By aestheticizing
suffering, there is yet another method of control, shifting the attention from that suffering to its
aesthetic value. In this case, the woman’s perception of her mourning is literally colored by that
which the tyrant feels is his, is him.
345

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Aestheticizing pain is a means to preserve ignorance regarding a population’s suffering,
blocking comprehension of personal suffering as well. This defines Alette and her journey, with
her remaining nameless until she remembers her traumas. When she regains her name and
traumatic memory she explains, “I must have” “let go of it” / “It was too painful” “I loosed it
from me” “& gave it back to you” … “from where its pain came.”
346
And with this reclaiming of
identity comes Alette’s knowledge of the trauma of her brother dying in battle.
“[The tyrant]” “was again” “deeply moved” “& thus I found” “my anger”
“my life-” “giving anger” “ ‘He died,’ I began again,” “ ‘when you last fought’ ”
… “ ‘Men fight,’ he said” “ ‘Men fight” “Don’t you
think they must sometimes?” “And there’s a shape to—” “an intensity”

“to battle—” “to war—” “a proximity to life & death—” “that captures
many men’s” “imaginations…’ ” “ ‘That’s exactly what women” “are enslaved to,’
I said dully”
347

What propagates the narrative of the glories of war is the same system that benefits from its
reputation. As Sontag writes, “war is not a spectacle”
348
—yet the war machine certainly
cultivates that idea. Thus the tyrant, while attempting to lay blame elsewhere (“men’s
imaginations”) he passes over what shaped or informed those imaginations—himself, what he
represents.
349
Alette goes on, focusing on the tyrant:
“ ‘your inspiration”
“drawn from the hardships” “of others…” “my grief for my brother”
“so moving” “to you…” “I must have been searching” “for him’ ” … “ ‘Beautiful,’ ”
“he murmured” “ ‘It is not beautiful” “It is what was!’ ” “I was nearly”
“screaming now” … “ ‘But it’s all” “so beautiful,” “so moving,’ ”
“he kept murmuring” “with tears” “in his eyes”
350

This is, in a way, a genius response by an oppressive system. By aestheticizing trauma, it is not
ignoring it, which could potentially precipitate outrage from the populace. But in considering it
to be “moving,” and publically noting it to be so, it shifts the tone to one of camaraderie with the
suffering populace, thus protecting oppressive powers from being recognized as the ultimate
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 129
source of that suffering. It saps any power from those who mourn by laying claim to their grief
through recognition without acknowledgment of its own misdeeds.
Notley recognizes this move for what it is, attempts to have Alette reclaim her pain, even
in oblique terms (“It is what was!”). Tal writes, “If ‘telling it like it was’ threatens the status quo,
powerful political, economic, and social forces will pressure survivors either to keep their silence
or revise their stories.”
351
Notley illustrates this thoroughly here. For Alette is initially silent
about her trauma (here, through “forgetting”), which censors her identity. When she attempts to
reclaim it, the tyrant quickly focuses his attention on the beauty of her suffering. It is a potential
means of excusing the events leading to trauma—they are merely a means to a beautiful end.
Thus these systems not only produce traumatic events with victims, but heavily inform the
methods the victims use to interrogate their traumatic experiences. This is not to say “ugly”
writing is the remedy—many (myself included) find Alette to be aesthetically compelling with
points of beauty. Yet to train the focus of the work on the source of the pain with explicit
description, rather than the general, is a potential means of avoiding this trap. Plunging into the
complicated truth of the circumstances, no matter one’s aesthetic choice, is a radical act for this
very reason.
This is why I vacillate between reveling in Notley’s producing a feminist epic climax that
liberates every living being with the tyrant’s death—and frustration in her lack of adhering to her
ethos of upending masculine epic tropes. For there is no Achilles heel, no method for
instantaneous deconstruction of the state in the real world. As Foucault writes, “Any individual,
taken almost at random, can operate the machine” of oppression, even if its “director” is
vanquished.
352
Those abused by the war machine and its subsequent systems are so conditioned
by them that those same marginalized persons can (and often do) maintain or even support the
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 130
continuation of their own oppression. Due to depth of the state’s influence, its pervasiveness, its
eradication would involve an overwhelming amount of labor and sacrifice from the majority of
those who it so successfully oppresses. Yet, like most archetypal villains, the tyrant has a spot of
weakness—a single bush that bears every kind of living thing (mammal, reptile, fowl, vegetable,
human) and allows him to regenerate despite injury. Once Alette uproots the bush with some
gruesome difficulty, she brings the tyrant’s corpse to the street before a crowd surfacing from the
subway to a cityscape. She explains it isn’t his actual body:
“ ‘those around us—” “this city—” “how we’ve lived,”
“is his body’ ” … “ ‘We can change it,” “of course,’ ” “someone said,”
“ ‘but the earth, all life here” “is structured on,” “conducted through,”
“the medium” “of corpses” “remains of corpses’ ”
353

The tyrant that walked around with Alette was a mere specter—a shadow of the actual tyrant that
contained the subway, his house—it all. His edges, with what endured his oppression, were
boundless. The people of the subway recognize they have conducted life within the tyrant’s
structures, and must now reshape them to claim alternate trajectories as liberated persons.
Notley may be following the epic’s form to a fault, with a feminine character exacting
violent retribution despite her consistent apparent lack of desire to do so.
354
To have Alette’s
trajectory driven by the archetypal hero’s journey is the germ of my ambivalence about the
poem’s end. The description of the tyrant’s death is quiet and calm, one touched most by
exhaustion and relief rather than fraught discontent by reenacting violence after enduring
traumas due to violence. While this is certainly distinct from other epic resolutions of intense
physical conflict with the hero prevailing, it is still a violence.
355
Notley engaged with the epic,
despite and due to its patriarchal form, yet enacted much of its same tropes with a female
protagonist. This issue of definition on the oppressor’s terms isn’t solved when a woman merely
takes up masculine characteristics.
356
While Alette is consistently “feminine” in many regards,
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 131
ultimately she moves like so many of her masculine predecessors in epic poetry. Perhaps this is
merely my own politics coloring my thinking—while nonviolent, I recognize extreme oppression
can and does require violent responsive action to gain liberation. Feminism and violent
retribution are not mutually exclusive, so what better focus of violence than on the tyrant? Yet
this question hounds me: why a literal bloody uprooting rather than speech, or organization—
some other activity than the violent one Alette enacts?
The complications regarding the final scenes of the poem don’t end with the tyrant’s
death. The populace, now aware of their liberated state, take up shovels, open up the earth,
bringing up those who were trapped by the tyrant even further down than the subway. With this
emancipation of the literal subaltern, though by those from the subway and not Alette herself,
the impulse may be to cringe. While Alette in some ways falls into the traps of a masculine hero,
she generally presents as the ultimate white liberal feminist, liberating all oppressed figures in
this world after (albeit compelling) soul searching and a bit of training. This is a problematic
truth of Alette, and likely for a few reasons. Predominantly it is due to the fact that Notley is
playing out the epic form almost as a map,
357
which often involves the vanquishing of unkillable
monsters, surviving impossible journeys—freeing the townsfolk from the terrible dragon nearby.
And of course it is immensely pleasing to see Alette succeed in vanquishing such a maddening
and accurate representation of oppressive forces.
Perhaps the tyrant’s death and the means of his destruction are metaphorical. Before he
dies, the tyrant calls her cruel, asks if this isn’t a kind of suicide. She responds, “‘I am killing no
one” “You are not real.’”
358
That all comes after Alette reclaims her trauma and identity, and she
works to ensure the tyrant does not warp her experience, instead maintaining the difficulty of her
suffering. The tyrant’s death may be connected to Tal’s belief that “Bearing witness is an
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 132
aggressive act”
359
—aggressive toward that which benefits most from blindness, silence, and
forgetting. The point of weakness for an apparently impenetrably powerful and oppressive
system is thus bearing witness to one’s own traumas as well as traumas through relay, retelling
those narratives to others with acute focus on the culpable agents and systems to blame—no
matter how large. The question of how to do this retroactively—how to recover trauma through
relay decades later—complicates this radical creative work further. The tethers of trauma
lengthen, their reach farther than one may first think, as illustrated in my next chapter on Bhanu
Kapil’s book, Humanimal: A Project for Future Children.

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 133
CHAPTER THREE NOTES
204
This is not meant to reference Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of the “war machine” as shapeshifting
iterations of hostility. Rather it is a sense of the grander systemic machinations involved in martial conflict.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Nomadology: The War Machine. Translated by Brian Massumi. New York,
NY, USA: Semiotext(e), 1986.
205
Alice Notley to Lewis Warsh, 8 March 1970. Notley, Alice, 1967-1983, Box 12, Folder 15. Bernadette Mayer
Papers, 1958-1996. Special Collections & Archives, UC-San Diego.
“PX” is shorthand for post exchange or military store.
206
“Alette in Oakland: A Symposium on the Work of Alice Notley” was hosted by the Bay Area Public School and
took place in October, 2014.
207
While I want to fight using this as a catchall term, please know “oppressive systems” is a term in the spirit of what
bell hooks dubs “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks, bell. Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate
Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000. 4.), but is also meant to include heteronormativity, ableism—in
short that which otherwise is subjugated in one way or another by cultural hegemony. When I use terms like
“oppressive systems,” “the state,” etc., this is my intention. “The war machine” similarly, but specifically when
these abusive impulses are focused on militaristic conflict, and all that entails.
208
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Edited and translated
by Colin Gordon. Also translated by Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1980. 89.
209
Ibid. 90.
210
Ibid. 90.
211
Nguyen, Mimi Thi. The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2012. 3.
212
Ibid. 23.
213
Ibid. 23.
214
Alice Notley. Homer’s Art. Canton, NY: The Institute of Further Studies, Glover Publishing, 1990. 6.
215
The book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and is widely regarded as Notley’s most-read title.
216
Claudia Kellan and Alice Notley. "A Conversation: September 2002-December 2003." The American Poetry
Review 33, no. 3 (May/June 2004): 15-19. 16.
217
Fenton, Elyse. Clamor. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2009.
218
Broyles, William, Jr. "Why Men Love War." Esquire. May 23, 2014. Originally published in November 1984 issue.
219
Notley, Alice. Mysteries of Small Houses. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. 100-01.
220
Grossman, Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little, Brown,
1995.
Grossman, a psychologist who treats veterans and is a veteran himself—though he did “not kill in combat”
(Grossman, Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little,
Brown, 1995. xxx.)—focuses entirely on soldiers (“men”) and likens them to heroes who “killed to save their lives
and the lives of their comrades” (xxxi-ii). He problematically focuses on the killing soldier rather than their dying
victims: “It is the existence of the victim’s pain and loss, echoing forever in the soul of the killer, that is at the heart
of his pain” (xxxiii). The shift from ethical focus (killed) back to the empowered (killer) is like a boomerang here,
barely glancing on legitimate issues of death and killing in war. This all said, Grossman does aptly describe
experiences of wartime killing in relation to distance (proximity to victim), as well as logistics of sniper training
and experiences for American-Vietnam War soldiers. Hence my reliance on this text.
221
Ibid. 108.
222
Notley, Mysteries of Small Houses, 101.
223
Grossman, 109.
224
If it were accurate, Albert alone accounts for 4% of those deaths.
225
Elaine Scarry writes, “[War] requires both the reciprocal infliction of massive injury and the eventual disowning
of the injury so that its attributes can be transferred elsewhere, as they cannot if they are permitted to cling to the
original site of the wound, the human body” (Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the
World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 64.).
226
Women, in a manifold of ways, were some of the most premier targets of the U.S. soldiers in Vietnam and Laos.
They were the population that sustained and succumbed to much of the most violent and pervasive impacts of the

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 134

war through rape, brutal sterilization, prostitution, and the impact of Agent Orange on their unborn fetuses
(Bergman, Arlene Eisen, ed. Women of Viet Nam. San Francisco: Peoples Press, 1975.).
227
Notley, Mysteries of Small Houses, 101. “NVA” being an abbreviation for the North Vietnamese Army.
228
Ibid. 101.
229
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2016. 120.
The American-Vietnam War and its innumerable causalities is a specter hovering over the U.S. involvement in
Iraq and Afghanistan. There are websites specifically devoted to body counts of Iraqi civilians
(http://iraqbodycount.org), giving the feeling that someone is “keeping track” in a way that wasn’t possible (or
public) during the American-Vietnam War. While there are undoubtedly similarities—its neoliberalist agenda, the
lack of “battles,” enemies entrenched and difficult to locate and destroy, the PTSD epidemic among its U.S. veteran
soldiers—the technological leaps have, in many ways, changed the field. I think predominantly of drone strikes,
which U.S. soldiers can operate from the safety of the United States, and have done an incredible amount of
structural damage, particularly in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Though killing as many as 2,581 enemy
combatants according to the Obama administration, drone strikes have also lead (famously) to soldiers dropping
bombs on those rushing to help victims of drones strikes, as well as funerals for those who died in drone strikes,
resulting in over 1,000 civilian deaths that we know of (Friedersdorf, Conor. “The Obama Administration's Drone-
Strike Dissembling.” The Atlantic. March 14, 2016.; Ackerman, Spencer. “41 Men Targeted but 1,147 People
Killed: US Drone Strikes – the Facts on the Ground.” The Guardian. November 24, 201.). As of July 2016, the
Obama Administration claimed responsibility for “killing between 64 and 116 civilians” due to drone strikes
(Ackerman, Spencer. “Obama Claims US Drones Strikes Have Killed up to 116 Civilians.” The Guardian. July
01, 2016.)
230
“War perpetuates deliberate violence to injure bodies and properties of a named enemy; liberal war perpetuates
violence that it claims is incidental to its exercise of power to free others from a named enemy who is in their midst
(giving rise to collateral damage). Such violence is vital to the genealogy of human freedom in which freedom, as
liberalism’s impetus for the preservation of life, conceives of war and violence as calculative functions for
biopolitics. Such are the calculations that require us to fathom liberal war not just as militaries and machines…but
also as continuous government of freedom” (Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom, 20).
231
The Phoenix Program was, by the CIA representative’s description, “a set of programs that sought to attack and
destroy the political infrastructure of the Lao Dong Party (hereafter referred to as the Viet Cong infrastructure or
VCI) in South Vietnam.” Finlayson, Col. Andy. “A Retrospective on Counterinsurgency Operations.” Central
Intelligence Agency. June 12, 2007.
232
Notley, Mysteries of Small Houses, 101.
233
Ibid. 101-02.
234
Ibid. 102.
235
Ibid. 102.
236
Ibid. 102.
237
This of course goes back to some of the earliest instances of people listening to traumatic experiences, and taking
them for fantasy, as with Freud and his compatriots.
238
Notley, Mysteries of Small Houses, 101. “LRR” (usually LRRP) is an acronym for long-range reconnaissance
patrol.
239
Ibid. 100.
240
Robbins, Amy (2006). “Alice Notley's Post-Confessional I: Toward a Poetics of Postmodern Witness.” Pacific
Coast Philology, 41, 76-90. 82.
241
Notley, Mysteries of Small Houses, 100.
242
Ibid. 100.
243
Ibid. 100.
244
Kellan, Claudia, and Alice Notley. "A Conversation: September 2002-December 2003." The American Poetry
Review 33, no. 3 (May/June 2004): 15-19. 19.
245
Ibid. 19.
246
Zelizer, Barbie. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998. 4.
Also, as Jenny Edkins writes in Trauma and the Memory of Politics, “The authorities that had the power to
conscript citizens and send them to their deaths now write their obituaries” (1). In this case, Notley is wresting
that power away, attempting to claim the narrative that is otherwise coopted (in this case) by governmental
powers.
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247
Edkins, Jenny. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 213.
248
Tal, Kalí. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 6.
249
Solomon, Zahava, Nathaniel Laor, and Alexander C. MacFarlane. “Acute Posttraumatic Reactions in Soldiers” in
Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. Van der Kolk, Bessel
A., Alexander C., MacFarlane, and Lars Weisaeth, Eds, 102-114. New York: Guilford Press, 2007. 111.
250
Notley, Mysteries of Small Houses, 101.
251
Kellan, Claudia, and Alice Notley, “A Conversation,” 18.
252
Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge, 2008. 9.
253
Notley, Mysteries of Small Houses, 102.
254
Tal, 93.
255
Albert is certainly enjoying a level of privilege to even have healthcare providers attempting (however ineptly) to
treat his psychological problems.
256
Notley, Mysteries of Small Houses, 102. Jenny Edkins writes in Trauma and the Memory of Politics of “western
trauma treatments” that they are “a form of ‘therapeutic governance’ that pathologises and depoliticizes
populations” (51).
257
There is the potential for the person sustaining primary trauma to be unaware of the significance of that event for
one reason or another and thus not fully comprehend the trauma—which one suffering from relayed trauma
comprehends fully and thus incurs more severe emotional damage.
258
Some recent examples are Elegy by Mary Jo Bang, Bough Down by Karen Green, Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds,
Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong, among others.
259
Notley, Mysteries of Small Houses, 103.
260
Notley writes on the form for Alette, “I invented a measure for [Alette], a line that has a very particular sound, and
it’s vivid, rhythmic, very musical” (“Small Houses Rebuilt with Musical Glue: A Word-by-Word with Alice Notley
through the Medium of Maureen Holm.”). While Notley adopts the spirit of this music for “White Phosphorus”
and Alette, rather than its rhythmic and syllabic rigidity, she clearly mingles it most explicitly with William Carlos
Williams’ “variable foot.” The “variable foot” or “triadic-line” form is simply a poem in tercet stanzas, with the
second and third lines of the stanza indented more than the preceding line. It looks like a set of stairs. Line length
is variable—the interest for Notley and others who are influenced by the variable foot falls in the breaks of the
lines. Eleanor Berry in her article “William Carlos Williams’ Triadic-Line” writes, “Williams’ step-divisions occur
most often at major constituent boundaries, but some also occur before words (or phrases or parts of phrases) with
high lexical content, some after the first word (or two) of a plausible intonation unit. The latter two kinds of
divisions seem to mimic hesitation phenomena in spontaneous speech” (368). While almost gratuitously technical,
Berry does break down the otherwise amorphous technique Williams is using, which he himself described simply
as “an assembly of three-line groups” (Berry, 380). Williams recognized the variable foot as his legacy, though. In
an interview, when asked what he has “left of special value to the new poets,” Williams responds, “the variable
foot—the division of the line according to a new method that would be satisfactory to an American,” (Koehler,
Stanley, and William Carlos Williams. "William Carlos Williams, The Art of Poetry No. 6." The Paris Review 32,
[Summer-Fall 1964]). In her lecture Dr. Williams’ Heiresses, Notley writes the variable foot “has to do with the
scoring for tone of voice, which is part of your music and your breath, but maybe even more. Variable foot is
maybe about the dominance of tone of voice over other considerations,” (Notley, Alice. Doctor Williams'
Heiresses: A Lecture Delivered at 80 Langton Street, San Francisco, Feb. 12, 1980. Berkeley, CA: Tuumba Press,
1980). Notley attempted her form in “White Phosphorus” as well as Beginning with a Stain—a eulogy for her
stepdaughter. The feet denoted by quotation marks in Beginning are long, shortening by the time she finishes
“White Phosphorus” and Alette. Notley describes the final version as “chorale-like” in her talk “The ‘Feminine’
Epic,” (Notley, Alice. "The ‘Feminine’ Epic." In Coming After: Essays on Poetry, 171-180. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2010. 173.). She states, “I wanted something regular, but also catchy—not some prosy long-
line spinoff of what-had-come-before” (173). The result was quatrains, “each line of which consists usually of
three to four feet or phrases” (“The ‘Feminine’ Epic,” 173).
I meditate on Notley’s form so extensively here for a few reasons. First, it is only a fraction of the amount of
thinking Notley did on creating her form, which has a lineage explicitly linked to war, epic, ancient writings, and
myth, but which she attempts to claim as a woman with no place in that history. In addition, playing into my writing
this long footnote is the fact I am unable to locate this sleuthing that traces Notley’s lineage of form from Williams
in connection to “White Phosphorus” and Alette elsewhere.
261
McCabe, Susan. "Alice Notley's Experimental Epic: ‘An Ecstasy of Finding Another Way of Being’" Interim 23,
no. 1 & 2 (2005): 32-41. 37.
262
Notley, Homer’s Art, 6.
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263
Ibid. 16. When Notley uses this form with quotation marks as she does in “White Phosphorus,” The Descent of
Alette, and elsewhere, I will avoid placing those in double quotation marks, as the full effect of their function is
lost. While this may scan as an amalgamation of quotations, it is from a single poem, in order.
264
This calls up Stanley Milgram’s infamous experiments on obedience in the 1960s, of which he writes, “Obedience
comes easily and often. It is a ubiquitous and indispensable feature of social life” (Milgram, Stanley. “Behavioral
Study of Obedience.” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67.4 [1963]: 371-378. 372.). Milgram’s
experiment involved forty paid volunteers who were told they were to assist in a study of learning, which involved
the subject administering shocks to another a person for each wrong answer he gave, the strength of the shock
rising with each incorrect response. The shocks were fake, as was the performance of the person receiving them.
When the subject began to show hesitation to continue shocking the person, a “technician” would inform him to
continue, despite the “victim’s” apparent heart condition. “Of the 40 subjects, 26 obeyed the orders of the
experimenter to the end, proceeding to punish the victim until they reached the most potent shock available on the
shock generator…Although obedient subjects continued to administer shocks, they often did so under extreme
stress. [Yet to] disobey would bring no material loss to the subject; no punishment would ensue.” (Milgram, 376).
265
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1997.
3. Emphasis in original.
266
Notley, Homer’s Art, 15.
267
Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, 39.
268
Notley, Homer’s Art, 18.
269
The “you” here being all the powers-that-be: the government, the military. Everything that actively participated in
Notley’s brother’s trauma.
270
Notley, "The ‘Feminine’ Epic,” 172.
271
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Robin L. Riley, and Minnie Bruce. Pratt, eds. Feminism and War: Confronting US
Imperialism. London: Zed, 2008. 7.
272
Notley, Homer’s Art. 15.
273
Of course this has not always been the case, and is hardly a moot point even today. Stalin famously sent poets (like
Osip Mandelstam) to work to death in at a gulag. The governments of China, Iran, Egypt—nearly a country in each
continent—has artists currently in prison for their activism and writing. At my writing this, the writer Liu Xiaobo
recently succumbed to cancer contracted in while incarcerated for his writing in China. He was barred from
attaining treatment and was under house arrest.
274
Notley, Homer’s Art. 6. The women who served in the war had similar yet distinct struggles. “The experience of
the [115k] women who served in Vietnam was equally affected by the difference of the war from previous U.S.
wars: an unusually large proportion of them, three-quarters, were exposed to hostile fire. Upon their return, they
not only were subject to post-traumatic stress but also they were excluded from the male veteran community”
(Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories the Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 67.).
275
Notley, Homer’s Art. 7.
276
Alice Notley. Journal entry dated March 10, 1988. 1988 February-June. Box 15, Folder 5. Alice Notley Papers,
1969-2001. Special Collections & Archives, UC-San Diego.
277
Alice Notley. Journal, n.d. 1987, September-1988 February. Box 15, Folder 4. Alice Notley Papers, 1969-2001.
Special Collections & Archives, UC-San Diego.
278
Alice Notley. Journal, n.d. 1990. Box 17, Folder 4. Alice Notley Papers, 1969-2001. Special Collections &
Archives, UC-San Diego.
279
Notley’s particularly “feminine” experience as the loved one of a veteran has of course shifted here in the United
States as there are more soldiers who are women and/or homosexual persons are serving in the U.S. military. The
Pentagon recently lifted the ban on transgender persons’ ability to serve. While there is certainly a paradigm shift
in the 21
st
century of who is the mobile soldier, and who is waiting at home for them, the common experience of
the male soldier leaving women behind hasn’t changed from being the majority of the experiences.
280
As mentioned earlier, Notley’s elegiac poem for her stepdaughter, Beginning with a Stain, used a similar form of
quotation marks.
281
That section of the book is titled “Temptation of Désamère.”
282
He states, “After a while it seemed to me / what we were doing was just murder” (Notley, Alice. Close to Me &
Closer—: (the Language of Heaven) ; And, Désamère : Two Books. Oakland, Calif.: O Books, 1995. 75.).
283
A name Notley describes as “short for America” (Notley, Désamère, 73).
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284
Robert Desnos was a poet of the early-to-mid 20
th
century who was a major player in the Surrealist movement, and
a member of the French Resistance. He ultimately died at Theresienstadt from typhoid some days after the
liberation of the camp.
285
Notley, Désamère. 81, 76.
286
Ibid. 69, 71.
287
Ibid. 71.
288
Ibid. 71.
289
These caveats that point to victimhood—Albert as draftee, as “forced” to kill, as fragile, dead from drugs—aren’t
necessary for relayed traumatic experience. One can certainly receive traumatic information form a person who
doesn’t process those events as trauma, who thus by all intents and purposes is not a “victim,” yet who reads as
such by those who may have more perspective or engage with that information differently (think of what triggers
some, and leaves others unaffected).
290
Notley, Désamère. 75.
291
Notley, "The ‘Feminine’ Epic." 171.
292
For a period, it seemed that whenever a film needed a villain, the cruel, steely Nazi was the go-to. One who the
hero can kill with no pangs of empathy from the audience. Now we’re in a strange world where they are valorized
by bigots and praised for their racist beliefs by a growing population in the U.S. and beyond.
293
Notley, Désamère. 112.
294
To return to the Nazi figure—scholars and scientists alike are all more than willing to claim Nazis acted in ways
that most would not—in a way the scholar never would. The Nazis’ narratives that brought them to participate in
one of the most horrifying systematic acts of genocide in our recent history is unimportant. In short: Nazis are, by
nature, cruel people. Ironically, this argument in a way supports the Nazi idea that they are different from the
majority. In this case, that their objective cruelty makes them special—but they are special, nonetheless. The sad
reality is of course that Nazi brutality is quite possible in any society. The Milgrim experiment is a clear illustration
of this truth.
295
Notley, Désamère. 114. Notley creates a scene in The Descent of Alette which Alette experiences relayed trauma
through magical means, allowing her access to others’ traumas of killing. At one point Alette meets “demon-saints”
with completely red eyes. She interacts with one who is clearly an Albert figure for her noting his profile (a
recurring gesture from Notley when describing her brother—this habit was pointed out to me by my student Jocelyn
Clancy). The Albert figure offers Alette a strange liquor that, he explains, “will make you like us” “temporarily.”
Alette begins to
“feel strange”

“sensations:” “as if” “I had killed,” “killed many people,” “the way a
soldier has,” “has fought & killed” “for others” “sadness” “& hysteria”
“made my heart expand” “into an immense” “sick flower” “grotesque”
“blossom”
295

Guilty by association for wartime deaths, Alette accesses the psychological traumas of soldiers who killed “for
others” (i.e. their government). The tonic inducing this comprehension was administered directly by her brother.
While it is only a temporary sensation, it is no less profound. This experiential understanding of the original trauma
(relayed trauma) retraumatizes, entangles, makes one feel powerless to divert the traumatic trajectory.
296
Notley, Mysteries, 107.
297
Alice Notley. 1989, July. Box 17, Folder 2. Alice Notley Papers, 1969-2001. Special Collections & Archives, UC-
San Diego.
298
Kellan and Notley, “A Conversation,” 16.
299
Scientists have recently made a case for some of the first cave paintings being produced by women, for one (Webb,
Sam. "Earliest Artists Were Women Claim Researchers as Study of Cave Paintings Reveal Majority of Prints Were
from Female Hands." Daily Mail Online. October 09, 2013.). The key statement here is that this is the case “as far
as [Notley] could tell,” (Kellan and Notley, “A Conversation,” 16).
300
Though the narrator doesn’t claim her name until the very end of the book (like Désamère, she learns it later in her
narrative), I will be using “Alette” when describing moments with that character that are earlier in the text for
clarity.
301
Notley, Alice. The Descent of Alette. New York: Penguin, 1996. 3.
302
Ibid. 67.
303
Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge, 2010. 29.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 138

304
Notley, Alette, 51.
305
Notley, "The ‘Feminine’ Epic," 171.
306
Notley, Homer’s Art, 14.
307
Notley, n.d., 88, June-Aug.
308
Notley, "The ‘Feminine’ Epic," 177.
309
Notley, Alette, 7.
310
Referencing Albert, high, nodding into his salad. Notley, Désamère, 71.
311
Notley, Alette, 7.
312
Notley’s dead father also plays a role in this poem, but never interacts with the veteran.
313
And indeed Notley has Alette fearful of upward movement and light for this reason. Notley states regarding this
trait, “Enlightenment is seen as a male luxury” (Notley, "The ‘Feminine’ Epic," 177).
314
Notley, Alette, 7.
315
Notley, “The ‘Feminine’ Epic,” 172.
316
Notley, Alette, 15. A potential issue in her description is the pressure on whiteness (purity) of the dead, as Viet
Thanh Nguyen explains as a potential trap of ethical “recalling of others” is the “idealizing the other as guilt-free
while criminating oneself” (Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies, 74). While this may certainly be the case here, it is not an
isolated example of Notley ascribing innocence to the dead, as “White Phosphorus” ends with Albert covered in
white petals. This thought isn’t without its difficulty for Notley, as she writes in her journal regarding this ending:
“How / can you go to Vietnam / and kill all those people / and wind up wearing white / flowers, purified” (n.d. 88
Sept-Oct. I am unsure if Notley intended for this to be lineated or if she was merely breaking due to space on the
page). She seems to answer this question in Mysteries when she writes, “kingdom of / death the great purifier”
(Notley, Mysteries, 104). While this is by no means meant to absolve Notley of the flaw of this moment, or the
fact the unnamed war’s victims do not speak, nor do they have depth or narrative. Yet by and large the spirit of
Alette is about this fact in our reality in the United States: that the systems in place police knowledge in such a way
as to censor and/or flatten information regarding the other. As Edkins writes, “These memories are the memories
of past struggles that have been concealed in order to submerge conflicts and give the appearance of consensus”
(Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, 53).
317
Danto, Arthur. “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” The Nation. August 31, 1985. 153.
318
This number is with some rough algebra on my part. The 249’ 9” memorial holds 58,307 names of dead and missing
U.S. veterans. To bear 3,000,000 names, it would need to be almost 50 times that length at about 12,695 feet, 9
inches. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. was designed by the artist Maya Ying Lin. Lin stated
that she felt the overwhelming list of names read “like an epic Greek poem” (qtd. in Sturken, Marita. Tangled
Memories the Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997. 61.). The fact it was created by Lin caused a good deal of uproar due to her being both a
woman and of Asian heritage. Her design had the memorial slope downward into the ground (rather the all-too-
common phallic upward sculpture), compounding the upset for many, with some considering it vaginal for its
movement into the earth and V shape (Sturken, Tangled Memories, 53). A memorial female figure for the women
who served in the American-Vietnam War was erected 300 feet away in 1993. Male bronze figures, by Frederick
Hart, closer to the wall in 1984. Hart was paid over ten times Lin’s $20,000 award for her concept (Sturken,
Tangled Memories, 56). Even its color of reflective black caused for offense in its denoting “dishonor,” until the
Black General George Price responded to such statements by saying, “Black is not the color of shame. I am tired
of hearing it called such by you. Color meant nothing on the battlefields of Korea and Vietnam. We are all equal
in combat. Color should mean nothing now” (qtd. in Tangled Memories, 52). The trouble here of course is Gen.
Price is blotting out the racialized Vietnamese and Koreans. Nonetheless, the rhetoric surrounding the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial quickly changed once the wall was completed, as veterans and civilians alike were moved by
its power, it seems (Sturken, Tangled Memories, 58).
319
Notley, n.d., 88, Sept-Oct.
320
Agent orange, “a blend of tactical herbicides the U.S. military sprayed in the jungles of Vietnam and around the
Korean demilitarized zone to remove trees and dense tropical foliage that provided enemy cover,” according to the
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, did incredible damage to those who served in the war (U.S. Department of
Veterans Affairs. "Veterans Exposed to Agent Orange." Veterans Benefits Administration. July 11, 2016.). While
tens of thousands of American-Vietnam War veterans have filed disability claims with the Department of Veterans
Affairs, 3 million Vietnamese civilians are suffering from side effects of exposure to the chemical (Stocking, Ben.
"Vietnam, US Still in Conflict over Agent Orange." Associated Press, May 23, 2010.). Agent Orange is still having
an impact on military personnel, with traces being located on C-123 airplanes that carried the chemical during the
conflict in Vietnam used in subsequent decades by the U.S. armed forces (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs).
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 139

321
Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies, 66.
322
Notley, Alette, 68.
323
Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies, 164.
324
Ibid. 164.
325
Notley, Alette, 68.
326
Ibid. 71.
327
Ibid. 71.
328
Ibid. 71.
329
Holm, Maureen, and Alice Notley. “Small Houses Rebuilt with Musical Glue: A Word-by-Word with Alice Notley
through the Medium of Maureen Holm.”
330
Notley, "The ‘Feminine’ Epic," 176.
331
See note 73.
332
Notley, Alette, 123.
333
Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2003. 1.
334
Notley, Alette, 132.
335
Bergman, Women of Viet Nam, 61.
336
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage
Books, 1995. 201.
337
Kellan, and Notley “A Conversation,” 16.
Susan McCabe states the tyrant “loosely yet distinctly represents manifold manifestations of the patriarchy” (“Alice
Notley's Experimental Epic,” 32).
338
Notley, Alette, 123-4.
339
Ibid. 125.
340
Ibid. 126.
341
Ibid. 139.
342
Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, 6.
343
Notley, Alette, 134.
344
Alice Notley to Leslie Scalapino, 1 September 1995. Notley, Alice, 1981-2010, Box 90, Folder 15. Leslie Scalapino
Papers, 1959-2011. Special Collections & Archives, UC-San Diego.
345
This is most obvious in dictatorships and Communist countries where art is strictly policed in order to maintain an
image both within and without the nation. Those who do not adhere to their government’s desires are often
imprisoned and/or killed in such places. In the U.S. this is hardly the case, but there is something to be said for the
insidiousness of quiet or surreptitious policing of aesthetics. For oftentimes in despotic governmental places its
citizens are aware the art is a farcical representation of their reality.
346
Notley, Alette, 136.
347
Ibid. 136.
348
Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 44.
349
Notley also addresses this more explicitly in “White Phosphorus”:
“some say,
war is” “the only” “reality” “The warriors mistake war for” “reality,
the reality” “Because they pierce” “the centers” “ the physical centers”
“of each other” “Addicted to this?” “Addicted” “& our government
of men” “organizes” “this addiction” “in the guise of protecting us all”
(Notley, Homer’s Art, 15).
350
Notley, Alette, 136.
351
Tal, Worlds of Hurt, 7.
352
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage
Books, 1995. 202.
353
Notley, Alette, 148.
354
Notley, Alette, 34, 80.
355
After pulling out the magical plant, Alette is “breathless” “& blood-splattered.” (Notley, Alette 143).
356
As Lauren Berlant writes, “The symbolic and political content of patriarchal fantasy is culturally and historically
particular: what is universally powerful about its mode of domination is that it creates the situation it imagines.
The fantasy that all women are, more or less, alike produces a meta-symbolic order in which the female sex is
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE WAR MACHINE’S REACH IN ALICE NOTLEY’S WORK 140

defined as that element which needs to be explicated or contextualized in one or another patriarchal narrative”
(Berlant, Lauren. “The Female Complaint.” Social Text, no. 19/20 [Autumn 1988]: 237-59. Emphasis in original.).
357
She seems to follow the moments of the hero’s epic journey as laid out by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a
Thousand Faces to a remarkable degree—despite the fact that few to no epics manifest each and every one of these
stages in the hero’s life.
358
Notley, Alette, 144.
359
Tal, Worlds of Hurt, 7.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 141
- CHAPTER FOUR -

THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES IN BHANU KAPIL’S HUMANIMAL

[B]ehind civilization's dawn lies a vast night of barbarism, of savagery, of bestiality, estimated at
half a million years, since the ape-man shambled forth from the steaming murk of tropical forests,
and, scowling and blinking, raised his eyes to the stars.

— LOTHRUP STODDARD

Ancient catastrophes continue to shape us like the vestigial gills and tails paleontologists can see
in our bodies.

— KIRBY FARRELL

One of the West’s most admired civilizations, its historically largest colonizing power, began
with feral beastliness. Twin infants are spirited away in the woods only to be saved by a she-wolf
who allows them to nurse and enjoy the shelter of her cave. The boys avoid starvation and are
soon returned to human society—how changed by the encounter with the she-wolf, the tales
don’t say. Once grown, they bicker over selecting a hill upon which to found a new city. One
brother kills his twin, builds on the hill of his choosing, and reigns as king—and what develops
eventually becomes the world’s most dominant power for centuries. Though the tale of Rome’s
founding is certainly a myth, it is one that has endured for over millennia. And while only a brief
moment in the narrative, the depiction of the boys suckling the wolf endures. Indeed, it is often
the defining image of the city. The interest in this moment—the quick injection of the feral in the
kingly boys’ lives—is one that has persisted in alternative venues for centuries. It continues
today, throughout the world. The interest within the West, in particular, in the animalistic part of
humanity is a profound and ancient one. Such wildness was rarely met with purely happy
wonder, however. The damage done to the feral child due to anxiety surrounding societal
development is profound, often provoking abuse, control, and other extreme harm. These
children, and others often dubbed “freaks,” were and are a means of definition of normalcy—
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 142
those within society who do not have a life determined by difference often use those with bodily
and psychological difference as a means to define the self, appeasing any fears regarding one’s
place in “normal” society. Colonialism and Orientalism have enacted and continue to enact this
violence all over the world, driven by the same anxiety—the anxiety that is at the heart of this
chapter: if that is human, then what am I?
The role of relayed trauma within this swirling societal anxiety is in those who provoke
such anxiety—those othered, often due to difference as manifest in their bodily experience.
Historically, these freaks, aboriginal people, and Others were generally silent or silenced, with
little record of the impact of such damage—their resulting traumatic experiences thus denied the
possibility of connection or relay to others through their own voices or records, but rather the
records of others (often those who oppressed them) regarding their lives. So how to access those
traumas, despite the lack of direct connection, is my mode of inquiry here.
This chapter explores the relayed trauma of two feral children and the poet Bhanu Kapil’s
attempt to engage with that trauma in the face of silence and inaccessibility. Kapil’s collection
Humanimal: A Project for Future Children draws upon Indian missionary Reverend Joseph
Singh’s 1920s faux-diary concerning his “rescue” of two girls who had been adopted by wolves
in the tribal region of Bengal, India. In his writing, Singh meticulously describes the girls’
physical “abnormalities”: their ability to see in the dark, callouses on limbs from moving on all
fours, sharpness of teeth. Singh also others the children for their Kora tribal Indian origins,
1

despite Singh himself being (albeit an Anglophile) Indian.
In order to fully explicate the complicated nature of Singh’s decisions—his capture of the
girls, his descriptions, his work to “reform” them, his attempt to capitalize on his writing—I must
provide context beyond merely Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism. Indeed, for what played
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 143
into the traumatic experiences that these children endured has as much to do with colonialism as
Westerners’ growing obsession with animality, disability, and further manifestations of other-
ness. It is because of these interests, in addition to colonialism and heteronormativity, that the
girls experienced dislocation, witnessed the deaths of loved ones, were forced into
domestication, and ultimately died young without any record of their interiorities during their
short lifetimes. The only sustained access to their lives is through the intermediary of Reverend
Singh—a man who, while complicated and apparently often with decent intentions, generally
harmed the children.
2
As Grace M. Cho asks, “When the subject cannot speak her own history,
when history is unintelligible or made unintelligible, who or what speaks for her?”
3
Cho’s
answer, and mine, is her ghost—when it encounters a willing subject.
4

Kapil indeed proves herself to be a willing witness to haunting, going so far as to visit the
orphanage where Singh attempted to raise the girls—and where she finds linkages between her
own family traumas and the girls’ hardships. As she states, “I had a childhood I did not
understand until much later. I didn’t understand that I lived in a community of working-class
immigrants, and that the violence inside and outside of our homes had a context.”
5
A first-
generation British poet of Indian parents, the personal echoes Kapil locates through haunting and
research illustrate the capacity relayed trauma carries to provoke recognition of one’s own
marginalized identity. This recognition is revealed through the traumatic marginalization of
another—another’s trauma is also one’s own trauma. This is beyond simply, “me too,” but rather
allows for insight into how that identity has been forged, and the continued impact of that
oppression. The systems that precipitated those events are the same system that subjugate today,
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 144
or at the very least are interconnected. This is certainly the case with the many modes of
oppression that created the girls’ traumatic experiences.
So, when the poet Sarah Vap states, “Kids are the hungriest, poorest, most physically
vulnerable group of people in the world,”
6
the power systems that create such a truth
simultaneously harm women (as Shulamith Firestone argues) as well as the disabled, the people
of color, the non-Christians, etc. Who is privileged by the system and who is harmed are
unsurprisingly associated across power systems—and the traumas the marginalized populations
endure links all subjugated persons, making them potential recipients of each other’s relayed
trauma due to their personal traumas at the hands of the same systems. The way trauma is
experienced in relational ways for Kapil and the wolfgirls is through Kapil’s means of dissecting
this system. This involves tracing her memories of her father, describing her experiences at the
orphanage where Singh took the wolfgirls—all these apparently disconnected acts bear up how,
in part, these systems of racism in the West continue to impact Kapil today. Yet the predominant
thread throughout Humanimal begins in the Western obsession with atavism, and how this drove
many of Singh’s actions with the wolfgirls in the early 1900s.

SETTING THE STAGE: ATAVISM & FREAK SHOWS OF THE FIN DE SIÈCLE
In 1860s Bulandshahr, India, Kanjar hunters spotted a boy trailing a wolf. The hunters inquired
with the local magistrate on whether or not they should intervene. With the promise of bounty if
they returned with a dead wolf and a live child, they accomplished the task of killing the she-
wolf, her two cubs, and wrangling the boy. He was placed in Sikandra Orphanage, and
pronounced to be roughly seven years of age. The orphanage superintendent attempted to
domesticate him, with little success. The boy craved raw meat, no clothes, running on all fours,
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 145
and did not speak human language. Eventually his feral tendencies tempered—he became
somewhat more “civilized,” and was baptized and given the name Dina Sanichar. Scientists
examined him. British soldiers, officials, and explorers visited Sanichar and wrote of their
encounters.
7
A geologist wrote,
He presented an appearance not uncommonly seen in ordinary idiots. His forehead
was low, his teeth somewhat prominent…The feature in his physical structure
which above all others attracted my particular notice was the shortness of his arms,
the total length being only nineteen-and-a-half inches. This arrested growth was
probably caused by the fact of his having gone on all fours in early life.
8

Another outsider writes, “Of that particular counterpart of Mowgli we learn: The wolf-child lived
to be between thirty and forty; ‘was strongly addicted to tobacco…and never spoke.’”
9
The local
Church Mission report moves between far more tenderness and more patronizing tones,
diagnosing Sanichar as a “half-wit”—but also noting the orphanage’s superintendent dismissing
any interest in exploiting Sanichar, Sanichar’s emotional connection to a man who had recently
died, and his recognition of his own approaching death in his mid-30s.
10

The reason the narrative of Sanichar’s life endures—why it was written down, why I am
able to call it up for you here—has several components. Largely, it is the changes throughout the
late 19
th
and early 20
th
century, predominantly in Western society, that made Sanichar’s story
one to provoke interest enough to disseminate it to those regions. During this time-period, there
was a rekindled interest in a wide array of information, to be consumed by lay persons, regarding
those with bodily and/or psychological realities that lay far outside the generally accepted
notions of “normal.” “Normal” as a concept in Western society (and beyond) has mostly gone
untouched over the centuries in terms of what it describes today: white, heterosexual, cis-gender,
physically and mentally able, and socialized. Despite the ample existences of those who bear
none of these characteristics dating before written history, during the turn of the 20
th
century
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 146
there was a growing interest in such persons by white Westerners—particularly Americans and
Brits—due in large part to the rampant developments taking place in those countries at the time.
The Industrial Revolution, an explosion of scientific knowledge regarding the human body, and
categorizations of people with specific identities, all destabilized the identity of the majority of
white Americans and British, and stoked fears of their capacity to lose ground in the race to
“evolve” via continual building, development, and discovery.
11
In short: what humans had the
capacity to invent and produce was advancing exponentially, while simultaneously what the
human body was and what it contained became increasingly mysterious with one surprising
scientific discovery after another. What humans, society, and the West represented and embodied
was undergoing remarkable shifts, leaving white Westerners feeling uncertain about who they
were or (most importantly) could be.
What the mind contained, much less the body, was similarly opaque and disconcerting
for populations driven to obtain universal “normalcy.” It was largely Freud who destabilized
concepts of understanding the self. Through his work regarding the unconscious (that which lies
in wait in the mind, invisibly driving our behavior) was deeply unsettling. In addition, Freud’s
becoming as well-known as he was contributed to a general quiet terror of what a mind might
bear up. “Man is wolf to man,” he famously stated.
Whether in regards to the body of psychology, as is still the case for so many today, an
understanding of the self is frequently pursued via an understanding of what one is not. As Leslie
Fiedler writes, “for all of us able to think of ourselves as ‘normal,’ there is a more ultimate
Other. That is, of course, the Freak, the Monster, the congenital malformation…Such anomalous
creatures have long been displayed at fairs and circuses, extorting shudders of repulsion and
delight.”
12
In the past, this often manifested itself in an interest in freak shows, wolf boys,
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 147
Orientalism, and other such ignorant and usually abusive activities. Indeed, freak shows were
frequently the space in which all these concerns revealed themselves most explicitly—a point
which I will return to later. The interest the wolf boy (and monkey boy, seal man, etc.) calls up is
a perhaps more insidious fear—what the body and mind contain, still, despite Western humans
being largely “civilized.” When allowed to go wild, what people do—and how that manifests
itself in those within civilized society—was frightening. Animalistic potential was thus a source
of terror in white Western society. As Dana Seitler writes in her book Atavistic Tendencies,
“one’s body could show signs of animality and decay anywhere and everywhere.”
13
This is a
literal description. Anyone engaging in deviant behavior, for example, was quickly scanned for
what Seitler describes as “atavistic” characteristics, and thus signs of regression into beastliness
as explanation for that deviance. “Criminals were said to have ears akin to those of lemurs;
prostitutes and lesbians, genitalia like that of orangutans; sexual perverts, the brows of apes.”
14

Thus while Western civilization seemed to be rushing toward modernity at an incredible clip, it
was continually haunted (and, as many then argued, harmed) by the past—the pre-evolved
human and our animal ancestors lingering within, hindering modern development.
Unsurprisingly, people made quick work of attempting to control humans illustrating any
form of deviance—both near and far. This ranged from placing them on a platform for lookers-
on to gaze upon, to placing (and inspecting) them on the page, to exclusion (via sterilization,
institutionalization, or simply denying them entry into the country).
15
All these moves
simultaneously attempted to protect the “normal” populace and illustrate, writ large, that they
were indeed normal—they need only look at themselves in comparison to these Others in the
newspapers and freak shows. While there was certainly the potential for relayed traumas between
the Other and “normal” populations, because those accepted by larger Western society used
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 148
those Others to assuage their own fears circling their shifting identities, often inflicting the
traumas suffered by those dubbed “Other,” this usually shuts down any empathic comprehension
of those traumas. These people often functioned as those enacting trauma rather than receiving
traumatic information through relay.
This treatment of those who deviated from the norm was also indicative of progress—to
lock deviants up, to sterilize them, made the future a brighter one of “better” human stock.
Indeed, Francis Galton coined the term “eugenics” in 1883. Seitler writes, “Atavism, then, is not
just an abjected form of modern, a sign indicating modernity’s Other; rather, it is an operation
that makes modernity and the subject of modernity, possible.”
16
Of course this is a similar
system to Orientalism, in which Edward Said uses “the Orient” to define Europe (or the West)
“as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience,” thus “draw[ing] attention to the debased
position of the Orient or Oriental as an object of study,” and, finally, “Orientals were…analyzed
not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or confined or…taken over.”
17
In
short, these means of control which operated throughout the world by colonizers (and not just of
the East, but certainly West Africa and beyond
18
) was set in motion within the Western
communities themselves. This simultaneously othered and controlled whites who misbehaved or
exhibited “bodily variation”
19
that seemed to be increasingly detrimental to the cause of
modernity, and invalidated those whites’ deviant existences.

Where there is an anxiety, there often comes a good or service to soothe it. Freak shows, though
existing for centuries prior, rose to their peak popularity in the mid-1800s through the early
1900s, largely disappearing by 1940.
20
Thus while those with congenital disabilities have long
felt the gaze of those who do not experience disability (think of conjoined fetuses in a jar on
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 149
display—or Stone Age drawings of congenital difference
21
), with the freak show lay persons had
easy access to the Other and an entire narrative regarding their lives as provided by a “normal”
person such as themselves. The barker describes the often silent person on a platform as the
audience looks on. As Garland-Thomson writes, “the mute freak [was] a figure of otherness upon
which the spectators could displace anxieties and uncertainties about their own identities.”
22

This is certainly not limited to “freaks.”
23
The freak show was frequently concocted, at
times in disturbing and abusive ways (the black man with severe mental disability put forward in
a cage and a loin cloth as “the missing link”) to shrewd alteration (the false third leg sewn onto a
pair of trousers). No matter the show, there was almost invariably text and narrative that
drummed up interest and illustrated the “freaks’” striking difference as above and beyond any
that might exist within those who comprise the crowd. To quote the infamous freak show curator
P.T. Barnum’s text from his advertisements of his “What Is It?” shows of the 1860s:
From the interior of Africa. It was captured by a party of adventurers…When first
received here his natural position was ON ALL FOURS, and it has required exercise
of the greatest care and patience to teach him to stand perfectly erect, as you behold
him at the present moment…the WALK OF WHAT IS IT is very awkward, like that of
a child beginning to acquire that accomplishment. When he first came his only food
was raw meat…but he will now eat bread, cake and similar things, though he is
fonder of raw meat.

Barnum then goes on to provide all kinds of descriptions and measurements of body parts,
eventually closing with, “He has been examined by some of the most scientific men we have,
and pronounced by them to be a connecting link between the wild native African and the brute
creation.”
24
The “What Is It?” show, like so many others of Barnum’s, bundles up animality, the
bestial, racism, and colonialism.
There are undeniable echoes in Barnum’s advertisement to the descriptions of Sanichar I
quoted earlier—and that’s certainly a thoughtful mimicking on Barnum’s part.
25
Masquerading
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 150
as a kind of scientific inquiry or educating encounter regarding Darwin’s writings on evolution,
the “What Is It?” show simultaneously eased the white crowd/reader’s sense of worry regarding
their identities (“I don’t look like that”
26
), as well as stirred up concerns surrounding what those
in civilized Western society contained—how traces of such a figure, presented as monstrous,
may manifest itself in them.
27
The fear of atavism’s insidiousness extended not only to your
neighbor’s lemurish ears, but yourself as well. Thus Barnum and other freak show producers like
him smartly played the role of pharmakon—the source of aid and injury, simultaneously. This
kept the crowds coming, in hopes of finding their not-selves, again and again.
The “feral” persons played a perhaps more terrifying role in freak shows for their clear
regression into the beastly. The fact this regression is due simply to an intervention separating
them from other humans prompts a “there but for the grace of God go I” response within the
spectator. As Michael Lundblad writes in The Birth of a Jungle, “The animal within you, just
like the animal in the wild, is naturally hardwired for survival in the jungle, even if the human
part of you is defined by the capacity for restraining—or repressing—those animal instincts.”
28

Thus the atavistic human on view also places the audience member on the platform, casting a
light upon a portion of themselves otherwise lost or kept hidden under social strictures.
And those with congenital body variation provoked a similar sense of fear—one based in
the likely future of illness and disability in the viewership. One of the most famous freaks most
would now label “dis-” or “differently abled” was Charles Tripp, a man born without arms but
perfectly capable of doing a great many tasks with his feet.
29
So, for a viewer, when seeing
someone with a bodily experience such as Tripp’s, the concept of losing the use of their limbs
and future bodily decline surfaces in the mind. As Garland-Thomson writes, “That anyone can
become disabled at any time makes disability more fluid, perhaps more threatening, to those who
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 151
identify themselves as normates than such seemingly more stable marginal identities as
femaleness, blackness, or nondominant ethnic identities.”
30
Take a knock to the head while
working on the assembly line and you may be changed forever, or—and this is particularly
notable after World War I—serve for your country and you may return with fewer appendages.
The tenuous reality of able-ness, like Sietler’s descriptions of fears surrounding atavism,
was and is bound up with concerns about productivity and one’s capacity to participate in
assisting Western society’s modern enterprises. Robert McReur in his book Crip Theory writes
extensively on Western society’s approach to disability and its connection to queerness. He
argues there are systems in place to discover deviant bodies and/or behavior that hinders or stops
their productivity, at which point “these signs of difference have been duly marked and, if
possible, ‘transformed and improved.’”
31
This focus on rehabilitation of the deviant/disabled
body is in hopes to accomplish the task of reintegration into productive society—and one that is
historically based in post-WWI practices.
32
This interest in recuperation is not excluded from
freak shows, either. There is awe at the apparent spectacle of the paraplegic performing relatively
mundane tasks for normates, as well as the “rescued” Circassian woman exhibiting all manner of
the Western female ideal with “refined” speech and intellect.
33
When there is a rejection of the
attempt to rehabilitate, or an incapacity to progress to the point of relative normalcy, this seems
to be the most distressing to those who move through normative Western society with ease (i.e.
the white, heterosexual, cis-gender man who works five days a week and wants to have
children). For this failure to rehabilitate points to the limits of salvation, science, and will. There
are fewer realities harder to face during a period of unmatched modernization than the fact that
humans can and do contain wildness, illness, and deviant interests that some are not capable of or
interested in shaking. As Seitler writes, “[Atavism] is a corporeal recognition that the past has
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 152
never passed, has not ceased to shape and form our sense of self…It closes in on the space
between past and present; it is the past and present in form: gorilla eyes, wolfish teeth, the mark
of the animal.”
34
This was certainly the case, apparently, for the wolfgirls Kapil considers in her
poetry, as she tries to access their traumas from sustaining the actions of Orientalist, ableist, and
rehabilitating-focused ideals of Reverend Singh.
THE ORIENTALIST INDIAN MISSIONARY & KAPIL’S SOURCE TEXT
Reverend Joseph Amrite Lal Singh was a dark-skinned man of Rajputani heritage with a family
formerly occupying a warrior caste.
35
Though there were Saint Thomas Christians in India dating
back to the 1
st
century, Singh’s grandfather’s conversion in the 1800s was due to colonial
Christianity, simultaneously extracting the man and his family from the caste system and
creating a social link with British colonizers. Singh studied in England, returned, and married for
love (a union which her family fought due to Singh’s complexion). Singh cultivated relationships
with whites with a confidence largely founded on their shared religious beliefs. He felt these
were bonds beyond racial complication, whether true or not (and evidence often points to the
latter).
36
Singh and his wife moved to Mindapure in order to have manageable access to tribal
areas and those peoples in order to convert them.
37

Tribes in South Asia, as with much of the world, are those linked by common ancestors
and traditions, living close to (or in) the forest.
38
Isolated tribes were at times vulnerable to
British intervention, as well as visits from missionaries like Singh who were willing to spend
weeks out in the jungle in order to bring some of the most physically and culturally isolated non-
Christians in the country into the fold. Singh claimed to have converted 700 “aboriginals” over a
twenty-year period.
39
Indeed, even his opening of an orphanage for the guardian-less children he
seemed to constantly find on these treks was for the overarching mission of spreading
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 153
Christianity, for he hoped the children, once grown, might return to their tribes and convert from
within those communities.
40

It was while on one of these missionary excursions that Singh first received word of
“manush-bagha” or “man beasts” at the village of Godamuri in the Morbhanj Raj region.
41
He
dismissed the information as mere superstition. He prayed that the Santal tribal villagers in
Godamuri be “raised from the slimy depths of heathenism, and brought from the darkness into
the glorious light of our Blessed Lord” for their believing in ghosts haunting their woods.
42
Singh
agreed to investigate the ghosts seen going in and out of the base of a large termite mound.
Posted in a tree at night with a few other men, he saw creatures emerge from the mound,
following a few wolves. Singh describes one:
[H]ideous-looking being—hand, foot, and body like a human being; but the head
was like a big ball of something covering the shoulders and upper portion of the
bust, leaving only a sharp contour of the face visible, and it was human…Their eyes
were bright and piercing, unlike human eyes.
43

Singh hired men to dig out the mound, at which point two wolves bolted, while a third attempted
“to chase the diggers—howling, racing about restlessly, scratching the ground furiously, and
gnashing its teeth. It would not budge out of place.”
44
Though Singh reports he was touched by
this motherly devotion and wanted to capture the wolf, she was killed with arrows by his hired
men.
45
Within the den were two girls (roughly three and six years old) and two cubs, clinging
tightly to one another. In Singh’s telling, the cubs were taken by the diggers to be sold at a
market,
46
yet in reality he captured them, too.
47
Though in reality unlikely, Singh believed the
girls to be abandoned to die of exposure, but were then taken up by the wolves.
48
Thus he saw
God’s hand in their rescue—initially by the wolves, and then by himself, which he believed to be
a reclamation of two lost souls to humanity.
49

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 154
Singh left the girls (and cubs) in a cage with some villagers for several days while he
continued into the forest to attempt to convert tribespeople. There was such terror around these
ghosts remaining in plain sight, however, the entirety of the village fled.
50
Upon his return, Singh
found the girls nearly dead from thirst and starvation. When they returned to the orphanage in
Mindapure, they both developed terrible sores on their hands and knees from moving around in
their excrement in a cage for several days, “mak[ing] them look like lepers.”
51
Thus at this point
the girls, rather than experiencing rescue and salvation as Singh initially believed, had endured
the terrible trauma of loss of family, both biological and adoptive, as well as nearly dying from
neglect. The wolf pups were kept in a cage near the girls in Singh’s office, then separated from
the girls for only rare visits in order to attempt to sever connections between the girls and their
feral lives.
52
Once the girls were physically well, they began prowling the property to find their
wolf family, calling to them with a howl that “was neither human nor animal,” distressed at the
lack of response.
53
This piece of information is not in Singh’s diary Kapil references, perhaps
due to his recognition of a cruelty there, of which he was ashamed. Completely isolated, the cubs
eventually died.
54

Singh and his wife began the project of attempting to domesticate the girls, naming them
Amala and Kamala. Singh wrote in his diary, “Nothing in this world can solve this great problem
except love, in any of its forms.”
55
The forms this love took, however, ultimately compromised
the girls’ health and well-being, with little regard for the consequences beyond potential recovery
of the human within the feral body. A year after their capture, the girls both became very ill, and
are “wormed” by the local doctor. This doctor claimed they were suffering from “nephritis,” or
inflamed kidneys. Kamala, the older of the two, recovered—but Amala did not. Singh was sure
to baptize her (and Kamala) before Amala died.
56
Kamala was devastated, so Singh bought her a
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 155
hyena cub for company, to which she bonded. The hyena died, too.
57
One day, Kamala was
“smelling all the places which Amala used to frequent when alive: the bed, the plate she used to
eat from, the clothes, etc. She went even to the garden and roamed about as if searching for
something and not finding it…We began to fear she would go crazy.”
58
Kamala withstood daily
attempts to force her to eat, move, behave, and interact differently than that which she was
accustomed—to be domesticated. After almost a decade of the Singhs’ efforts, Kamala spoke no
more than roughly thirty human words and walked upright with some difficulty. Singh frequently
regarded her “progress” in comparison to a child ranging from one (her psychology) to three
years old (her ability to run on two legs).
59
After nine years at the orphanage, during the last two
of which she suffered from an unknown illness, Kamala died of renal failure (Amala’s actual
cause of death) at the age of fifteen, and was buried beside her “sister.”
60

Singh decided to create a text, and a marketable one, after Kamala died. Despite his
attempts to keep the wolfgirls’ existence secret, they had become known in Mindapure,
61
and
eventually in British newspapers. An American anthropologist Robert M. Zingg approached the
reverend to put a book together. This text undoubtedly meant to capitalize on the fear and
interest in atavism, freaks, and “the East.” Singh was all-too-willing to comply and produce such
a text, if only because his impulse and response to the girls aligned well with Western society’s
interests—yet instead of fear of regression into animality, Singh strictly feared regression into
heathenism. Ultimately, according to Singh’s texts, Amala and Kamala were a potential
experiment for reclaiming lost humankind and normalcy despite a person’s prior feral life.
62
In
addition, Singh felt their condition gave insight into Christian ideas. He writes, “Human vices
seem to have been as little inherited as human virtues, and this fact seems to me to have a very
pertinent bearing on the consideration of what we mean by ‘original sin.’”
63
Indeed, Singh
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 156
believed Kamala’s “progress” over her time was directly linked to his baptizing her.
64
While
Singh may have had the opportunity to explore religious concerns as played out in the raw feral
natures of the girls, he was hardly successful in reforming them into “functional” members of
human society who spoke human language enough to convert them—all of which is laid out in
the book he produced with Zingg.
Singh and Zingg’s
65
text attempted to straddle two spheres of Western culture—the lay
persons compelled by freaks and atavism, and the science community’s taking up of freaks and
other Others as a site of inquiry. As Garland-Thomson writes, however, “the degenerate and
atavistic body became the object of a variety of reading practices and the subject of an enormous
variety of texts (medical, literary, photographic) through which human difference was explored,
managed, and made—made public, made deviant, made up.”
66
Yet their book, Wolf-Children
and Feral Man, was published in 1942, at the tail-end of freak shows’ height. As Garland-
Thomson describes “the rise of the experts”: “By 1940 the prodigious body had been completely
absorbed into the discourse of medicine, the freak shows all but gone.”
67
The freak show goer
was the primary audience with whom Singh and Zingg had hoped to engage, though they had
some recognition there was a shift occurring and attempted to make the book more scientific.
Singh’s descriptions of the girls’ physical states were often found to be inaccurate, as the
photographs illustrate. The children were physically “normal” and not deformed, though Singh
claims otherwise.
68

I do not want to hold Singh to the same Western scientific standards he ultimately fell
victim to—it is entirely possible that his encounters with the girls were indeed his experience and
what he witnessed. So, perhaps informed by Zingg’s suggestion, the anxiety at hoping to appeal
to the freak show crowd and the scientists simultaneously is manifest in the texts that surround
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 157
(and are injected into) Singh’s writing. Zingg recruited white Western men of letters to pen brief
introductions. Others, having been sent Singh’s work by Zingg prior to publication, were given
the opportunity to pose questions regarding Singh’s statements. These are printed as footnotes,
often with responses from Singh and/or the other white scientists, acting as a strange
commentary throughout the text. Thus, when Singh rattles off information regarding the girls’
physical difference that was all-too-common in freak show texts,
69
he is met with scientific
demands of specificity and measurement. There is an extensive discussion surrounding Singh’s
claim the girls’ eyes “shone” at night to allow them to see in the dark, with footnotes spanning
three pages.
70
The girls being dead in the ground halted any chance of such scientific inquiry,
which Singh had no interest in pursuing when they were alive. In response to the scientists’
questions and frustration at his not ordering an ophthalmologist or other experts to inspect the
girls, Singh writes, “the thought never occurred to me that such an explanation would ever be
asked.”
71
While Wolf-Children and Feral Man made some impact in academia, it was largely
dismissed for lack of scientific rigor.
72
Racism certainly played its role, too, for many believed
Singh’s writing to be too emotional and with uneducated facility of English, despite Singh’s
being educated in England and fluent in the language.
73
The depth to which the white scientists
patronize Singh and manhandle the girls in their writing is a disturbing counterpoint to the
diary—an unremitting and offensive presence sitting below Singh’s words on the page. Butler’s
statement that “As something, by definition, yields to social crafting and force, the body is
vulnerable”
74
certainly feels true in this book. Kapil’s poetry interacts with the children, gives
them space to act (if not speak) in response to the traumas of their lives. As David Lloyd writes,
“In the case of colonialism, the relation to the past is strictly not in relation to one’s own past but
to a social history and its material and institutional effects in no simple way a matter of internal
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 158
psychic dynamics.”
75
Thus Kapil’s mode is “I don’t want to ask primal questions,” and, later, “I
am not interested in animals. Return to the work as memory. Say it is a wolf becoming a girl, the
action in reverse.”
76

KAPIL AS A SURFACE, HAUNTING AS RELAYED TRAUMA
77

Years after Amala died, Mrs. Singh spent some days away from the orphanage. Upon her return,
Kamala raced up to the one person with whom she felt emotionally connected, and “went on
jabbering many broken words like a prattling baby, trying to express all that had happened
during [Mrs. Singh’s] absence; most of this prattle could not be understood at all.”
78
While Singh
provided a chart of Kamala’s vocabulary beside Bengali and English equivalents,
79
there is no
record of her words when strung together, despite a clear desire to communicate through speech.
“The ghost is primarily a symptom of what is missing,” writes Avery Gordon.
80
Kamala’s
interiority is a pulsing absence in this series of events, and her ghost manifests itself for this very
reason. After discovering Singh and Zingg’s book by chance,
81
Kapil threw herself into learning
about Kamala, a figure who is simultaneously wolf and child, feral and domesticated, speechless
and speaking. Kapil allowed herself to be haunted. “[With] research, you become the surface
too,” she explains in an interview. “Your body becomes the receptor site to influences and
relationships you can’t image before.”
82
So Grace M. Cho’s rhetorical question asking how “is
trauma transmitted across time and space through vehicles other than the speaking subject, such
as the interviewee or the historical record?”
83
points clearly to the ghost, the “symptom of what
is missing.” In this case it is Kamala’s voice, despite her being at the center of so much
attention—be it Reverend and Mrs. Singh, the locals in Mindapure, or the white Westerners
discussing her life experiences and their implications. There are traces of Kamala’s desire to be
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 159
understood and relay her interiority and experiences to others. Kapil’s willingness to “become a
surface” for the work, to be haunted, illustrates the implication of Kamala’s silence in Singh’s
archive.
Kapil’s capacity to comprehend Kamala’s traumas and make space for her voice, to
receive the relayed trauma, is due to their connection fostered through Kapil’s poetry and
research. As Cho writes, “The inability to see and speak of her own trauma distributes this seeing
across bodies that are effectively connected to her, thus creating a diasporic vision that engages
the productive possibilities of trauma.”
84
This is where relayed trauma and haunting intersect—
with the connections between the traumatized and the recipient of the relay. Kapil, as a member
of the Indian Diaspora, is linked to Kamala. Kapil and Kamala are not simply connected through
regional heritage, but through their experiences that indeed reveal the traumas of the past
resonating through time to the current moment. Kapil’s records of her encounters with Kamala’s
ghost in Humanimal. As “[H]aunting is a phenomenon that reveals how the past is in the
present” writes Cho.
85

The issues illustrated in Singh’s text and that played a role in Kamala’s traumas endure
today. Just this month a story surfaced about a small girl in India living with monkeys, which
was reported on by BBC News, and was in their top ten most-clicked headlines that day.
86
What
is and isn’t a freak, the legacy of Orientalism, continued colonial oppression, acts of violence on
vulnerable children
87
—all of these same structures that subjugated Kamala continue to subjugate
those they are built to harm, currently impacting Kapil’s life. Thus when Toni Morrison
describes the moment “when you bump into a rememory that belongs to someone else,”
88
there
are substantive elements of that other person’s memory that belong to you. That’s why you bump
into it in the first place, making it a rememory. Thus while Kapil was never a feral child, she is a
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 160
British woman of Indian heritage who experienced being othered by white Westerners as a child,
being freaked by them from childhood on.
As I stated in the first chapter of this dissertation, I’m not interested in attempting to
investigate the veracity of an author’s ghostly encounters or question the existence of ghosts
themselves. Rather, the author’s experiences take precedence. Thus while Derrida acknowledges
that the specter is “what one imagines. What one thinks one sees and which one projects—on an
imaginary screen where there is nothing to see,”
89
there is simultaneously Gordon’s recognition
that “There is no question that when a ghost haunts that haunting is real.”
90
Kapil’s sense of
responsibility due to the haunting drives so much of Humanimal, provoking not only
investigation into a forgotten narrative but the linkages over a century—between families whose
lines never touched, a woman to a girl dead for generations.

THE TEXTUAL FORM & ALPHABET
Kapil’s initial response to Kamala as a figure is with fear—“a double envelope, fluid digits,
scary.”
91
She became even more fearful of the implications of such feeling, recognizing she was
in danger of making a book akin to a freak show, “selling tickets”—so she stopped.
92
When
Kapil could no longer shut out the story for reasons beyond an interest in beastliness, she began
again. The book starts with Kamala’s death, the covering of her face with oil-soaked marigolds
set alight.
93
No longer focusing on Kamala as a child denied a future or agency, denied
substantive connection with others for much of her life, instead Kapil works to engage Kamala
directly. She writes, “A place where things previously separate moved together in a wet pivot, I
stood and walked towards it in a dream. Her eyes were grim, intensely clarified against her
charred skin, as she looked up.”
94
Rather than participating in voyeurism, Kapil is meeting
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 161
Kamala, acknowledging her ghost (the “charred skin” from the funeral process), meeting her
gaze. This, Kapil recognizes, is not necessarily welcomed or pleasant, however necessary it may
be for her work. Meeting the recipient of relayed trauma—an acknowledgment, for the first time,
of that trauma by another is a powerful experience. The section ends with: “An imprimatur, she
saw me and flinched.”
95
Kapil’s use of “imprimatur” obfuscates. Who it refers to, grammatically,
is unclear—but it also holds multiple definitions. It is both a general sanction or approval, or an
approval for publication, historically linked to Roman Catholic censors. Kapil’s intention to
publish a book regarding her own experiences and Kamala’s life has an impact here (there is not
a good track record for documentation of Kamala’s life). Or, perhaps, Kapil’s presence is an act
of approval of Kamala’s feral existence. The source of the flinch is ambiguous. If nothing else,
this shows Kapil’s concern about publishing work regarding relayed trauma with the
endorsement of an oppressive force (Singh and Zingg’s living relatives, white American
publishers, etc.).
However, despite any taint of such endorsements, more importantly, Kapil makes room
for Kamala in a way that, based on extant documents, had not existed before. She gives Kamala
space to make her traumas visible through form. The form manifests itself in prose poems that
alternate between ascending numbers and letters. The numbered pieces—which move into
decimals, as in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—generally contain Kapil’s
perspective and the information she locates through research. Kamala most often speaks within a
lettered section. The fonts are typographically different, and Kamala’s is larger. Her speaking
jumps chronologically, and skitters over explicit meaning. Early on (at the letter E) it reads, “The
cook fed us meats of many kinds I joined my belly to the belly of the next girl. It was pink and
we opened our beaks for meat. It was wet and we licked the dictionary off each other’s faces.”
96

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 162
While in Singh’s orphanage and undergoing attempts at domestication and human language
learning, the girls are still animal-like (“beaks”). All the language (“the dictionary”) Kamala and
Amala know and care for is in the meat and feeding. Via Kapil, though, Kamala is able to
convey more—to give human language to her experience and relay it to Kapil.
Yet this structure Kapil developed in order for Kamala to speak of her experiences
ultimately falls apart—fighting any neat enclosure of her traumatic narrative. Kapil’s system
(alpha-Kamala/numeric-Kapil) begins to break down at the letter L, in which Kapil lists the
words Kamala spoke and Singh transcribed in its entirety. This is followed by Singh’s praise of
Kamala’s “broken” speech.
97
Kamala remains stuck on the letter “O” as the counterpoint of
Kapil’s numbers. At one point “O” is simply followed by silence, allowing it to stand alone.
98

And, indeed, the majority of the book is ascribed the subtitle “AN ALPHABET TO O, A KIND OF
MOUTH.”
99
The “O,” for Kapil, is an image she returns to again and again, a letter that is also a
shape and a part of Kamala’s body that gave her some power. As an image, its initial instance is
early on in the text, from Kamala’s perspective. She states,
I was almost to the gate. I was almost to the gate when a hand reached out and
pulled me backwards by my hair, opening my mouth to an O. The next day, I woke
up with a raw throat. The cook gave me salt in warm water. I waited until she was
gone and then I bit it. I bit my own arm and I ate it.
100

The hand of course being the hand of Reverend Singh or one of the other people at the
orphanage—the colonial entity reaching out, restraining. Though there is no record of Kamala
doing anything as self-destructive as this self-harm, she did indeed attempt to escape into the
jungle quite often at the beginning of her life at the orphanage, “restlessly patrolling the
courtyard, incessantly trying to find an opening.”
101
She was always thwarted. In Kapil’s work,
Kamala reclaims her body, somehow. Her O mouth a site of record (through her scream), injury
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 163
(the rawness after the scream), and agency (eating herself). Through the mouth there is a means
of recovering the self through self-destruction, power through the destruction of other things.
Where many can cite the mouth or tongue as the last portion of self that has power while
in a subjugated position through spoken language, if one does not have language with which to
communicate with others, the mouth functions otherwise. It can contain a feral power, too.
Kamala’s description of the moment of capture by the she-wolf, her mouth is “the sharp pink O
that covered her”
102
—that O a learned thing. Kapil states in an interview, “I became obsessed
with the mouth—the moment at which the wolf-girl’s hair, as she flees, gets caught by a
dominating hand; and her mouth (its soft tissue, lips and teeth) opens to an ‘o’…a wolf’s
howl.”
103
Yet it is not merely animality in response to domination that brings Kapil back to the
mouth in a shape of a cry. Kapil explains that while writing Humanimal, “I was most interested
in attending to the connective tissue of the mouth; how the post-colonial body—or more
accurately, the colonized body—is altered [shaped] by the forces upon it; violence, but also:
acquiescence.”
104
This shape is that which might otherwise not form without the colonial power
provoking that formation, the trauma at such formation in response to subjugation. Thus Kapil
hopes to investigate the trauma of the reshaping that takes place on the colonized body when
such powers intervene. In Humanimal Kapil writes, “In the bedroom, he tried to feed her with a
copper spoon, a mineralized utensil to replenish her blood. He made her eat, watching the pink
food…pool in her mouth. Her mouth was an O and with his fingers he tried to press her gums
and teeth together. ‘Eat.’”
105
Singh attempts to aid Kamala, but in doing so works to redact her
body’s reshaping in response to his intervention (she rejects the food, makes her mouth an O,
Singh closes it).
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 164
In this case, Kamala’s traumatic reshaping is not merely an act of religious conversion or
straightforward brutality, but domestication. Sara Ahmed writes of the linkages between
Orientalism and domestication, stating, “the other is reachable, as it has already been ‘brought
home.’ The reachability of the other…does not mean that they become ‘like me/us.’ Rather they
are brought closer to home, but the action of ‘bringing’ is what sustains the difference.”
106

Indeed, the orphanage itself was called “the Home.” The irony of bringing girls who functioned
perfectly well as wolves into a place called “the Home” feels nearly like fiction. Garland-
Thompson writes, “disability has four aspects: first, it is a system for interpreting bodily
variations; second, it is a relation between bodies and their environments; third, it is a set of
practices that produce both the able-bodied and the disabled; fourth, it is a way of describing the
inherent instability of the embodied self.”
107
While Singh actively tried to make Amala and
Kamala like the people around them at the Home, there were constant reminders of their
difference. The wolfgirls actively disliked the other children and bared their teeth at any who
tried to interact with them. Singh writes, “With a ferocious look, [Kamala] tried to grab [raw
meat], her eyes rolling, jaws moving from side to side, and teeth chattering while she made a
fearful growling sound, neither human or animal.”
108
The orphans frequently called them
“heathens,” and were given the task to guard Amala and Kamala so they did not run away.
109

“The only thing they wanted to be was left all by themselves,” Singh writes (yet consistently
ignores).
110
Singh’s endeavors to reshape them physically and psychologically failed again and
again. Kapil brings the traumas they endured in such moments into Humanimal. In Kamala’s
voice she writes, “with hard fingers, they tore strips from my spine. All blonde-black fur. All hair
from a previous life.”
111
This attempt to eradicate the girls’ animality was thoroughly
superficial—as ineffectual as trimming wild knotted hair and expecting interior transformation.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 165

TRAUMAS OF THE DOMESTICATED BODY
Rehabilitation requires, if not an acquiescing body, an acquiescing spirit. Singh describes the
girls as having to “fight” their animal side—“They had to make an effort to adapt themselves to
the new environment.”
112
Yet this assumes their interest in such reformation to accommodate
human society, this new environment. As McRuer writes, “Rehab demands compliance or—
more properly—makes noncompliance unthinkable.”
113
Kamala’s initial noncompliance was an
incredible source of power. When first at the Home, the girls tried to eat with the dogs, much to
Singh’s dismay. He was able to pull the toddler Amala away, but Kamala “was too fierce and
threatened him when he tried to control her.”
114
She is able to use her beastliness in order to
scare Singh off, despite what Shulamith Firestone describes as “The natural physical inequality
of children to adults—their greater weakness, their smaller size.”
115
Kapil illustrates this
ferocious power with Kamala’s eating of her own arm to regain some agency, as quoted earlier.
Despite this ferocity, Kamala, being locked within the gates of the Singhs’ property, was
dependent on them for food and shelter. Because she lived and moved within their domestic
spaces, they used what tools they could to alter Kamala’s body to a more “human” shape. Singh
often worked with his wife to gently change how Kamala moved by placing things high up,
inviting her to stretch her legs, eventually getting her standing. Yet her interactions with him
were largely unpleasant, shot through with his frustration and anger at her lack of psychological
and linguistic development and physical change. Kapil attempts to shine a light on this tension
between the figure trying so hard to “heal” another, but with little interest in deciphering what
that person wants or needs—versus, say, a soul being saved, a body reshaped. Kapil’s
descriptions of Singh’s efforts to domesticate Kamala move between poetic and clinical.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 166
“Unbound, her elbows and wrists would flex then supinate like two peeled claws. Wrapped, she
is a swerve, a crooked yet regulated mark. This is corrective therapy; the fascia hardening over a
lifetime then split.”
116
While no longer claw-like, Kamala’s cloth-wrapped body is “crooked”
through Singh’s attempt to “reform” her. So, to return to Kapil’s statement regarding how the
colonized body is not only reshaped by violence but also “acquiescence,” there is no small
tragedy in this crooked reassemblage of Kamala’s body. It required some acquiescence on
Kamala’s part—one who struck fear into the heart of an apparently fearless man.
Yet the efforts to reshape Kamala’s figure from wolf life to human society manifests
themselves beyond mere wrapping, exercise, and promptings with threats for Kapil. She states
the girls’ doctor broke Kamala’s thumbs, that “they” broke and reset their legs.
117
For Singh,
their wolf lives meant “their limbs underwent deformity.”
118
Yet I have found no record of this
breaking and resetting of bones, but rather the slow progression toward uprightness for Kamala
(which was never fully realized
119
). Through this disturbing description, Kapil is showing that
Singh’s actions are just as violent, damaging, and controlling as to break a child’s bones in order
to “repair” her without regard for the traumas such attempts at “recovery” have. He exploited the
girls’ vulnerability in order to gain control over what he believed were feral heathens. More souls
saved.
The domestication of the girls, while certainly by definition superficial (they were never
“recovered” in the way Singh hoped), was nevertheless profoundly traumatic. Traumatic
moments occurred predominantly at the girls’ moments of extreme vulnerability and Singh’s
exploiting that vulnerability for control—particularly when they experienced physical weakness.
Singh often attempted intense intervention on the girls’ physical states when they were ill. When
they were nearly starved to death, the girls’ heads were shaved and nails trimmed. Later, when
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 167
they were sick, their doctor convinced Singh the girls should be “wormed”—thus they expelled
the large worms that had given them the capacity to eat raw meat. Kapil is acutely aware of the
depth of such traumas. As she describes, “Both children, the wolfgirls, were given a fine yellow
powder to clean their kidneys but their bodies, having adapted to animal ways of excreting meat,
could not cope with this technology”
120
— Amala died not long after. These were bodies
“adapted,” reformed through feral life over time. Singh avoided feeding them raw meat, thinking
it played a role in their feral behavior.
121
In “worming” them there was an immediate and deadly
attempt to make them domesticated humans.
The purging of the worms from the girls similarly showed an anxiety of both what took
place within their bodies as a source of beastliness. Indeed, Singh believed the worms “carried
with them all the foulness of Kamala and Amala’s animal natures and that if they recovered it
would surely begin life anew as human beings.”
122
So here is an attempt to dramatically reshape
the girls’ bodies both within and without, with the intention of domestication—an attempt
dramatic enough to kill. These interests of course were also driving Singh’s desire to “reform”
the girls psychologically as well as physically, in large part because of the greater implications if
he were to fail to “recover” them into human society.
Singh’s fear of the girls’ atavism and what it implied regarding God and religion—that
they were potentially beyond “rescue”—drove the majority of his work in reshaping and
changing the wolfgirls. Often he cultivated situations that stoked fear, especially for Kamala, in
order to alter her. They often resisted, Kamala frequently enacting wolfish aggression to such a
degree she was left alone—yet the tragedy lies in Singh’s eventual ability to force Kamala into
submission. After Amala’s death, Kamala’s depression and loneliness drove her to comply more
and more. Yet, aside from loneliness, this compliance was largely motivated by fear Singh
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 168
developed. Singh was a disciplinarian, constantly testing Kamala’s “progress” based on her shifts
in what made her afraid (being locked out of the Home at night, walking through a field after
dark
123
). He called her his “patient.”
124
For Singh’s primary focus was in deeply altering
Kamala’s environment and allowed behavior in order to have her completely abandon the
“animal” in her. Fear implied advancement: “She was no longer the same Kamala who moved
with the wolves in the dark. She had become timid…this was a great change.”
125
For Singh,
Kamala’s loss of fearlessness was required for her access to humanity. A woman who visited the
Home as a teenager states Kamala appeared fearful of Singh and, more important, “He told us he
believed she resented him for having captured her.”
126

Kapil’s impulse to extrapolate on Singh’s culture of fear he developed for Kamala to the
degree of broken bones is not far-fetched in the girls’ realm of experiences and traumas. There is
the chance this is relayed traumatic information from Kamala, yet Kapil doesn’t hint at that being
the case. Where she is otherwise explicit about ghostly interactions, here she is conveying
information as if from a textual source. Considering Kamala’s fear, resentment, and physical
restrictions, the extrapolation feels legitimate. It is through this violent reshaping of the girls’
bodies and psychological states that Kapil enacts one of the more explicit instances of blurring
between their traumatic narratives and those close to her—specifically her father’s.

SCARS & NARRATIVE CONNECTION
At one point Kapil mentions an aunt who, as a child, died after falling off a roof. She writes,
“though I am not sure if the image…is relevant to the story I am telling, it accompanies it. In the
quick black take of a body’s flight, a body’s eviction or sudden loss of place.”
127
Though this
aunt was unknown to Kapil, her young death—which is not unique, for more than half of her
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 169
father’s fifteen siblings died as children—is a result of instant body misplacement. Another
vulnerable girl in a space that puts her in danger and kills her reverberates for Kapil. Yet she
connects her family’s traumas to the wolfgirls’ more directly through her father’s body itself.
Scars carry narratives, told and untold, relayed through their visibility. As Marita Sturkin
writes, “The wound functions as a testament to the act of injuring.”
128
Near the beginning of her
book, Kapil includes a photograph of her father’s leg superimposed over a map of London.
Though blurry, there is a distinctly long and thick scar moving down a large portion of his leg. It
intersects with a point on the map: Childs Hill. Kapil’s words are on the margins of the image.
She writes,
Krishan, my father, was born in India in 1937, ten years after Kamala died. This
photograph of scar tissue, to represent a deep cut in his leg from a beating. What is
a street? Here, the flesh is healed over, repaired by natural processes…This scar
doesn’t fade; it doesn’t melt, over time, into a skin.
129

These pages are isolated in the book—it interrupts a line, which picks right back up again after
the two-page image. A strange interstitial that abruptly seems to change track from the larger
narrative, but thus functions like the mind when it connects two apparently disparate concepts—
or people in one’s life. Just as Kamala and Amala’s bodies are present through text and image (I
will return to the latter later), Kapil thus inserts her father, linking them. She pinpoints her
father’s birth in relation to Kamala’s death, their lives almost touching. Their bodies sustained
terrible traumas, the scar a documentation of those events. Kapil writes, “The scarring process is
regenerative in that you’re healed, but now you look different.”
130
This is not merely different
from the pre-injured self, but from others. Kapil addresses her father directly, describing a
holiday at a beach in Wales with her parents as a child. “I felt bitterly the contrast between our
own exposed skin against the blueness of the sky. Your legs were frankly an embarrassment:
visible chunks of flesh taken from your thighs and shins at another point in history.”
131
Different
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 170
from the crowd, from the whites surrounding them—their racial difference exposed most
distinctly when in swim suits, their brown skin exposed beside all the whites. Her father’s scars
underscore that difference and its being struck through with violence.
Not all life-defining traumas come from a culpable source—trauma of chance has just as
profound an impact on the child’s body. The scarred missing “chunks” may not be violence from
another person (as the source of the long scar down the back of his leg), but rather the markers of
illness—a more insidious traumatic experience, without an agent to ascribe blame. Kapil doesn’t
provide the cause of those scars, but does describe their process when she writes, “My father’s
body, in those first fifteen or sixteen years of his life, changed from a liquidy, peeled, thing—
constantly re-opened spots of tissue—into another kind of body. [His legs] pooled with a silvery
protein that hardened into long ovals and other shapes.”
132
A poor and illiterate goatherd, the
impact of the traumas from his early life was ultimately inescapable and severe as the scars he
bore. Ananya Kabir writes, “The ways in which the work of trauma embeds the body in place, as
well as the processes which have displaced it, demand attention.”
133
Kapil is giving her father’s
traumas attention here, showing the linkages between his experiences and the wolfgirls’—all of
whom ultimately died from their effects. For Kapil’s father was not able to avoid the impact of
his traumatic youth, the body merely bearing up trauma’s traces to visibility. He died in his
fifties, a doctor explaining to Kapil her father’s “body was clearly ravaged by the debilitating
effects of poverty, early malnutrition and the multiple musculoskeletal traumas that he appeared
to have sustained as a child.”
134
The doctor tells her, “it is a miracle he lived this long.”
135
These
facts of his traumatic youth relayed here, at the moment of his death. Kapil’s father endured
traumas profound enough to kill him as a child—as they succeeded in doing to Amala and
Kamala. To cut short the life that, despite that likely death, led to Kapil’s existence.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 171
While Kamala in many ways was a miracle due to her enduring two bouts of profound
illness and living for years at the Home before her death—surviving for more than a few months
is a rarity for captured feral people—Kapil’s father slipped from death’s reach for decades.
Where Kamala’s life stopped as a teenager, Kapil’s father’s continued. The book’s subtitle, “A
Project for Future Children” is driven to investigate the lives of those truncated through violence,
colonialism, and sheer physical vulnerability. Kapil’s father was the embodiment of such a life,
and his tether is to Kamala as Kamala’s was to Amala—an extension of a life, ended. Where
Amala died, Kamala continued. Where Kamala died, Kapil’s father endured. Their lives are
those that statistically never should have been.
Yet from here things become thornier—less an inspiring tale of endurance despite trauma
than a more complete picture of a complicated figure and his connections to the events beyond
the girls. Kapil’s father’s adult life shows resonances most clearly with Singh rather than some
imaginative ideal of Kamala’s socialized future or one in which she was released back into the
jungle. Kapil’s father had a different destiny, which he saw early. Though illiterate at twelve,
while herding goats he “had a vision” of becoming a teacher in England. “I will go to England to
teach English to the English,” he thought.
136
He succeeded in realizing this vision, shifting
gradually from an avatar for Kamala’s future (physically and emotionally maimed, yet healed) to
an echo of Singh (an instructor and keeper of children). Kapil describes waiting outside her
father’s office as a small girl. Another child is there—a boy of twelve who, when she asks him
what he’s done wrong to be there, he responds, “Nuffink.” Then—“Without warning, both
incredibly fast and in slow motion, my father came out of his head master’s office with a cane.
Within moments, the boy was writhing on the carpet, doubled up—‘Please, sir!’ Without
thinking, I stood and ran through the corridors of the school.”
137
This echoes abuse Kapil’s father
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sustained as a child, as Kapil starts a section with “The legs,” and describes his mother catching
him eating butter from the churn, so she “beat him to blood with a bamboo cane.”
138
Yet the
more important overlap is between Kapil’s father and Singh. Kapil’s father enacts the trauma he
endured on another—another person of color, too, as Kapil notes the student is Black, his
pronunciation of “nothing” suggesting working class or poor due to his location in London.
Singh was known to have a temper, at one point shooting a rifle in the air to silence the rowdy
orphans at the Home, causing Kamala to “run away on all fours,”
139
thus connecting Kapil with
Kamala in this scene. In Kapil’s book, more specifically, Singh uses violence to inform Kamala
of the rules of society. Kapil writes, “Accused by an orphan of biting, Kamala is called into
Joseph’s study where he bites her back. Beats her with a bamboo wand, then pricks her in the
palm with its tip.”
140
Kapil reminds us just after this description, too, that Singh is “a teacher.”
Each authority figure here uses violence to inform the child, to traumatize them into “good”
behavior in the hope that scars will serve as a reminder for compliance.
Yet neither man is a flat villain, here—a mere offender, only. As Jenny Edkins writes,
“there is not a perpetrator and a victim without ambiguity. That in many ways is what is most
difficult.”
141
While Kapil’s father has flashes of violence against children, he has the markers of
enduring such violence himself (or, it seems, worse), which Kapil illustrates in the descriptions
of his scars. Singh’s traumas are his internalized racism, being misused by Zingg and others, and
any scars of his own beneath his black robes. While we don’t know of Singh’s traumas,
according to Maclean—who had the most access to Singh’s letters and conducted interviews
among the Mindapure locals regarding the girls—Singh was genuinely worried over the girls’
wellbeing.
142
As with his line in the diary quoted earlier: “Nothing in this world can solve this
great problem except love.”
143
Yet, most important, Kapil is interested in twisting lines around
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 173
each and every figure in her life she finds connected to the events in Kamala’s to attempt to pull
the girl’s traumas forward into the light. Kamala is her father, her father is Singh, and then Kapil,
herself, is Kamala, too.
Michelle Balaev writes of trauma in fiction, “After the traumatic experience, the natural
world affords the protagonist the opportunity to test the boundaries of the self as against an
external medium in order to experience what is self and non-self, to differentiate between
contemporary reality and traumatic past.”
144
Yet Humanimal is (to some degree) non-fiction.
And, because the traumatic past is not hers but rather traumatic information received, Kapil turns
this mode of inquiry on its head. She loses interest in differentiation of self and non-self. The
traumatic past must also be present, the self and non-self collapsing. The decision to integrate
herself as much as possible with Kamala begins to play out within her body as she writes.
Written description leads to experience: “When a girl crawls out of the broken jungle, she’s
soaked in a dark pink fluid that covers her parts. Fused forever with the trees of the perimeter,
she can’t. The branches fill her mouth with leaves. I can’t breathe.”
145
The jungle is the
wolfgirl’s spirit, held in a distinct boundary from which she cannot emerge—where she returned
after her death. Yet her desire to do so is strong to relay information to Kapil. The leaves choke
the girl as she pushes at the edge of the jungle. The effects of her attempt to leave the trees
provokes a physical response within Kapil, too, halting her own breath. This empathic
connection, rare is it may be, has the capacity to inform the recipient of relayed trauma—or, at
the very least, the ghost’s attempt to connect.

BLURRING AS PROCESS
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 174
Just as the normative archive limits access to only include that which it contains, so does the
physical world as it is generally accepted (what our five senses show us). These limitations of
archive and environment can hinder one’s attempts at inquiry. Kapil writes, “The girl, I cannot
retrieve even one foot from her small leg. A tendon. A nail. One eye.” While this may be an
obvious truth—even if Kamala had lived past childhood she likely would be dead at the time
Kapil began her research—it captures the feeling of isolation Kapil feels toward the girl. There is
no accessing her physically in the reality in which we operate. Thus Kapil ventures at alternative
modes of connection. She states early on in Humanimal, “To write this, the memoir of your
body, I slip my arms into the sleeves of your shirt. I slip my arms into yours, to become four-
limbed.”
146
Kapil is not only attempting to place her body where Kamala placed hers, but within
her body’s experience, to document Kamala’s traumas—“the memoir of [her] body.”
147
Edkins
writes that “those who did not survive are the true witnesses, and this paradox forces a rethinking
of what is meant by a human being.”
148
This rethinking is doubly true for the wolfgirls, who
consistently pushed up against the notion of humanity through their feral lives and bodies shaped
for wolf existence. But also “a human being” with “being” acting as a verb—how it is one exists
as a human witness if what one witnesses leads to death, how “being” can be beyond the physical
world. So what drives Kapil’s inquiry is the question “what is meant by a human being” if that
being is not capable or interested in functioning in human society and no longer endures in the
reality in which the most humanity operates. That witnessing trauma so profound it kills, leaving
haunting as the only method of relaying those traumatic experiences.
Through registering Kamala’s spectral presence, for otherwise there is nothing for her to
record, Kapil can retrieve this bodily knowledge. While she cannot engage in direct physical
contact with Kamala, Kapil gets as close to touching her as possible. She goes to where the girls
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 175
are buried, stating, “I put my hand on her grave and waited, until I could feel the rhythm, faintly,
of breathing. Of a cardiac output.”
149
Where there is no physical remnant there is the opportunity
for haunting, to experience the specter as required in order for them to relay their traumas. As
Derrida states, “a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and come-back.”
150
The power of
Kamala, despite her being dead and underground, is tangible for Kapil—but only because she
reaches out.
Kapil’s interest lies in attempting to connect with the ghost, suspending the self in order
to privilege the ghost’s message, placing herself in Kamala’s path. For Kapil, this moment at the
grave was remarkable during the process of research and writing on the girls. It gives her a point
of connection with that which was otherwise lost to the archive—the girls themselves. In an
interview, Kapil explains this experience was “blurring my research” in regards to the “sense” of
her feeling breath and pulse under the earth. It was no longer a relatively objective experience,
but rather pulsing, accessible—and interested in her. She goes on, “The sense too, from other
disciplines, of the morphogenic field; the cross-activation and interaction of ‘inert’ particles with
each other…structure is empathy. Writing brings you closer still.”
151
The issue is not if the pulse
was actually Kapil’s or how she registers breath, but rather that this is a point of interaction
between herself and the otherwise inert graves. She places herself in a position to register the
girls’ existence, and attempt to learn what is missing—the girls’ presence beyond Singh’s
description. It is through this placement that what began as mere registration (a flicker of a
shadow, a feeling) becomes connection. How this connection is troubled by the physical world.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Freud’s “Wolfman” (Sergei Pankejeff) in this chapter—a
patient who earned his named by suffering from a vivid nightmare as a child of wolves sitting in
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 176
a tree outside his bedroom window with the intention of eating him. Freud connects this
nightmare and Pankejeff’s neuroses to his being a toddler witnessing his parents copulate “a
tergo” (from behind), thus reading his father as an “upright” wolf and his mother “bent down
like an animal.”
152
Pankejeff’s father simultaneously held the position of terrifying wolf and
disabled person, as he suffered from severe depression. Pankejeff visited his father in a
sanatorium where he saw him deeply changed and ill, and “His father was thus the prototype of
all the cripples.”
153
Freud claimed that the Wolfman was gay, a survivor of molestation by his
sister, and “in his neurosis he was at the level of cannibalism.”
154
The collapsing of disability,
queerness, animality, and savagery (Western ideas connected to cannibalism) is thus all present
in this strange but famous Freudian case study. As Seitler notes, “the wolf is a mark of
atavism…The recuperable presence of the non-human in the form of the wolves in this instance
is, therefore, a repetition of the subject’s deep past, psychology, and evolutionary both.”
155

While Kapil doesn’t address the “Wolfman” case, she does make a nod to Freud when
attempting to define her purpose in writing Humanimal—illustrating his impact reaches here,
too. She explains, “I want to make a dark mirror out of writing: one child facing the other, like
Dora and Little Hans.”
156
This is in reference to two of Freud’s famous young patients he used as
case studies for hysteria, castration anxiety, and the Oedipus complex, while simultaneously
denying their legitimate traumas or issues. Like Kapil’s father and the wolfgirls, Dora and Little
Hans are young persons misused by an adult (in this case the same adult), and deeply
misunderstood. For Kapil, writing is a means of linking those who can gain from recognition
from one another—writing is a mirror producing distorted reflection and connection between
lives linked by trauma. While the “Wolfman” may be the clear Freudian thread to Kamala and
Amala,
157
Dora and Hans were misconstrued by a man who profoundly benefitted from their
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 177
suffering in terms of his professional career when they were children (versus Pankejeff, who was
an adult patient). With Humanimal, Kapil wants to create a kind of mirror-window—a space
where these harmed children can face each other and see their mirroring similarities, experience
relief or healing.
Thus mirrors are a potential tool for Kapil in her attempts to connect to Kamala, connect
Kamala and Kapil’s father—yet not always as she intends.
158
She writes, “Writing makes a
mirror between two children who perceive each other. In a physical world, the mirror is a slice of
dark space. How do you break a space?”
159
A mirror is a potential site of contact with the
otherworldly, ghosts, the unknown. In the environment most of us accept as physical reality, a
mirror (“a slice of dark space”) can act as a location of recognition for the traumatized—for them
to relay their traumas to one another, the parallel elements of those traumas clear. While Kapil’s
goal is straightforward—create a portal through which Kamala and her father can see and reflect
one another through their traumas—her writing begins to entangle herself in this process as well.
She states,
I want to write, for example, about the violence done to my father’s body as a
child…A scar is memory. Memory is wrong. The wrong face appears in the wrong
memory. A face, for example, condenses on the surface of the mirror in the
bathroom when I stop writing to wash my face. Hands on the basin, I look up, and
see it: the distinct image of an owlgirl. Her eyes protrude, her tongue is sticking
out, and she has horns, wings and feet. Talons. I look into her eyes and see his.
160

When she looks in the mirror, she sees her atavistic identity—the wild and feral self. She sees the
“owlgirl” in connection to her father, two different figures than she intended facing each other.
This is the “wrong” face—it is not her aim to consider herself in the mirror looking at the animal
within and her father. Rather, the larger project is to develop a healing bridge between Kamala
and Kapil’s father. Yet there is something unlocking within. She is finding herself and her work
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 178
blurring in ways she did not anticipate, yet which will more deeply inform her of the wolfgirls’
traumas. The mirror is the surface that reveals this blurring to Kapil.
The mirror is something that, in addition to reflection, can also function as a window to
other worlds, other faces, muddling the physical world with the spectral. This manifests itself
through Kapil’s process of interaction with Kamala. Considering her firsthand experiences of
seeing the owlgirl in the mirror, Kapil recognizes the power of mirrors as holding the potential to
access something beyond the physical world. She uses small reflective sequins as mirrors while
in Mindapure, angling them in the jungles of the real world just so to give the wolfgirls space to
come forward. She writes, “I place a mirror in a cave, in a garden, on a leaf…In this way, I can
train or invert an obsidian frame to hold light, make a face clarify.” Through the mirrors, they
have a means to make their presence known here—and do. Kapil continues, “Today I saw a face
dormant in the darkness of the jungle. Coming near, I saw it was the open face of a child.”
161

Through these fingernail-sized reflectors otherwise sewn onto clothing as ornamentation, Kapil
gives Kamala a mirror-window through which she can reveal herself. This is a method by which
Kapil works to access the girls and their traumas askance—creating a space in which they can
enter without Kapil’s direct gaze—that which previously caused Kamala to flinch.
162
To make
room for the relay of information that inflicts as little harm on them as possible, and allows
empowerment through the process of Kapil receiving the realities of their lives.
Mirrors are only one physical intervention Kapil makes in Mindapure. Just as she places
mirrors to blur the ghostly and physical, she blurs the boundary between herself and the wolfgirls
through her placement of her body. By reenacting the life, motion, and positions of the girls,
Kapil invites physical as well as psychological connection. At one point Kapil moves into a tree
Kamala often climbed, as documented in photographs and Singh’s diary. Kapil writes, “I
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 179
climbed that tree, disturbing a true sphere with its knotty fingers, elongated thigh muscles, and
blue eyes brightly lit even in a darkened room. I wrote then stopped. What stopped my hand?”
163

The answer is, of course, Kamala. Kapil “disturbed” a shape that is akin to Kamala’s
description—“a true sphere.” At this moment Kapil enters the sphere, makes contact—
experiences something spectral. To provoke a ghost is to invite visions—but also direct contact
such as bodily sensation (here, a stopped hand). All to illustrate Kapil’s impulses as provocative,
for receiving the girls’ relayed traumas.
Yet for the most part these physical experiences don’t define Kapil’s encounters with the
wolfgirls, and her placement of self in locations of traumatic events in order to access those
traumas is often ineffective. At one point she writes, “I can’t find her sometimes, on the other
side of everything.”
164
This is the case with Kapil’s locating the place where Amala died. When
entering the room, she happens upon a man who resides there. He excitedly has her drink water
from the Ganges (which she happily receives)—yet this forces her to leave the room and spit the
water out to avoid illness and outward disrespect of the gift.
165
Blocked once, she tries again,
entering later. Kapil writes, “a girl of about eight, Joseph’s great-granddaughter, brought me tea.
I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to focus on the memory available to me in the room, but
there was no experience.”
166
Her attempts to connect with Amala such as this often produce
nothing—and, as I’ll touch on later, Amala seems to actively fight Kapil’s inquiry. Overall,
though, the Home itself is not a space through which Kapil can locate the girls—Kamala’s tree
was located on the outskirts of the property. Yet they show themselves by having Kapil feel them
or what they experience again and again—and not only traumas.
Such instances of blurring manifest themselves in events that echo the past as Kapil is on
the fringe of her research—not when climbing Kamala’s tree or touching her grave. At one point
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 180
Kapil meets a stranger named Mahalai in Mindapure. Kapil and Mahalai drink tea and chat
despite language barriers. Kapil writes,
Then, without warning, she took my cup and set it on the ground. She grabbed me,
shoved my head into her lap and started to massage my scalp…My whole body felt
rigid but then, abruptly, I submitted to her touch. When I woke up, I was covered
with a shawl and someone, Mahalai, had covered me with tiny, pink-orange
blossoms.
167

Though Kapil doesn’t mention it in Humanimal, this massage is notably similar to what Mrs.
Singh performed on Kamala and Amala daily. From early on, Mrs. Singh tried to massage both
girls in order to get them used to human contact and loosen their wolfish joints.
168
Both resisted,
but acclimated to it with time (Kamala later demanding it). The flowers covering Kapil’s body
recall Amala’s funerary burning. Kapil continues, “I was officially somewhere on the edges of
the story.”
169
Her occupation of the girls’ positionality gives insight into their experiences.
Accidental encounters such as this show it wasn’t all trauma and terror. Yet she feels what they
felt—discomfort of a stranger’s intimate touch, someone with whom she can barely
communicate verbally. These experiential events reveal more to Kapil than what is physically
available in Mindapure.

Extended interaction with the spectral, while thrilling for what they can reveal regarding
oppressive versions of history, are simultaneously terrifying for that reason—destabilizing our
faith in the “truth” of record, time, and reality. Rather than solely opening a space for two
traumatized children, Kapil is creating something unexpected—beyond remembrance. As Roger
Luckhurst writes, “the ghost is an insistence of the past: it obliterates memory.”
170
While Kapil
owns that “memory is wrong,” the result of such inquiry into historical traumas leads to loss of
control again and again. She states, “I wanted to write until they were real. When they began to
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 181
breathe, opening their mouths in the space next to writing, I stopped writing.”
171
The girls’
sudden spectral existence, and voices, their traumas, all prove to be overwhelming to Kapil. The
reality of their “opening their mouths”—what might come out of them—stalls the very person
who hoped to hear them most. Kapil writes elsewhere, “Tell me a story set in a different time, a
different place. Because I’m scared. I’m scared of the child I’m making.”
172
The impact of her
work—the reality of “creating” Kamala by being present and attempting to learn of her traumas
through Kamala directly is ultimately terrifying when the goal of ghostly encounter takes shape.
The implications of the ghost so profound, the depth of what she endured too much to bear.
At one point Kapil endeavors to avoid the terror of ghostly realities and trauma through a
simple closure in her book. Her attempt to write the terror away through an easy ending fails.
She states, “I imagined all the children in the sky…I wrote until the children left the jungle, the
country itself, their families of origin, and time. I saw how they changed time.”
173
While writing
the children into freedom is appealing, Kapil receives what she considers a sign the next day that
tells her otherwise—an international news story regarding a girl in Cambodia gone missing and
living in the jungle for almost two decades.
174
Where Kapil attempts to pinch off complication
and the difficult reality of the girls’ lives, they manifest themselves elsewhere, prodding her to
return to the task of recording what had been bent and reshaped into a kind of “happy ending”
time and again by Singh and others (they were baptized, after all). The traumas Kamala and
Amala experienced—the oppression they felt as feral children “saved” and put on display—have
not retreated. The world continues to operate in such a way as to reenact the same violence again
and again, as the article regarding the feral girl in Cambodia illustrates. Thus Kapil makes space
for Kamala’s voice—returns to the point where she was breathing and opening her mouth, and
Kapil documents rather than halts, now open to alternative methods of registering the wolfgirl.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 182
This leads to further connection with Kamala, bodily experience beyond sitting where Kamala
sat and feeling her presence.
In accepting time as an organizing factor of life and existence, we disregard its exclusion
of alternative existences, such as ghosts. Derrida explains this as “A spectral moment, a moment
that no longer belongs to time, if one understands by this word the linking of modalized presents
(past present, actual present: ‘now,’ future present.)”
175
Haunting has the capacity to disrupt what
Edkins calls “a succession of ‘nows.’”
176
Through her interactions with Kamala, Kapil is able to
collapse time and access the girl’s traumatic memories—yet this is not a conduit moving in a
single direction. While we largely see the disruption of time and the world from Kapil’s
perspective (the writing hand stopped, the grave’s breath and hand pulse, the child face in the
jungle as reflected in a mirror), in one instance we are given a vision from Kamala’s view. She
states, “I saw a white-pink face with ash in its forehead lines. It was a woman, sitting in a tree.
One big eye saw me then shut…I saw three thousand eyes switch on and off. They saw me and I
saw them.”
177
This is in the middle of a stanza that moves from Kamala’s account of her capture
by the shewolf to her being apprehended by Singh. Her description of the woman is ghoulish—
and arguably Kapil in the tree Kamala climbed at the Home (see FIGURES 1 and 2). The “big eye”
is a camera, or perhaps Kapil. The thousands of eyes more cameras, faraway lookers on, or the
white men of letters who wrote on and questioned Kamala’s existence so extensively. As quoted
earlier, Said writes, “Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analyzed
not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or confined or…taken over.”
178
In
short Kamala is “seen through” by many, and recognizes this viewership—her collapsing of time
a means of access to one who hopes to do more than simply stare.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 183
Time is an accepted principle that often serves the same systems and groups that initially
excluded the worlfgirls’ positionality and experiences. Edkins writes that “linear, homogeneous
time suits a particular form of power—sovereign power.” This is due to the fact that it privileges
“now,” gives less credence to the past, and blocks connections forged through the disintegration
of linear time. Edkins continues, “Sovereign power produces and is itself produced by trauma: it
provokes wars, genocides.”
179
And, I argue, operates in just as damaging but smaller-scale
traumatic experiences. Sovereign power inspires an Anglophile Indian reverend to capture and
attempt to “socialize” and convert two feral children, only to ultimately lead to their distress and
early deaths. As Glissant states, “The tragic action is the uncovering of what had gone
unnoticed.”
180
In disregarding homogeneous time as endorsed and exploited by power systems,
one opens up the potential to notice what was otherwise ignored, to access alternative moments
and entities (as with Kamala seeing Kapil in her tree and Kapil feeling Kamala stop her writing
hand). This nonobservance of sequential time is a radical act, a means of fighting those powers
that subjugated Kamala, Kapil’s father, and continue to subjugate Kapil herself—through the
passing along of information from the witness to the one capable of documentation. It is to reach
across the dark divide of linear time and give information, relay experience, to pass it along.

PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE
Kapil writes of the instance at the girls’ burial spot: “Each feral moment is valuable. Magically,
the legs slip out of their sockets deep in the hips. Milky photographs fell out of my skirt and I
crouched to collect them by the grave.”
181
Kapil’s body “magically” becomes wolfish where the
girls’ are buried, her legs shifting open. With this bodily change, the photographs of the girls
scatter on their graves, forcing Kapil to the earth, at which point she reaches out and feels breath
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 184
and pulse there. As Toni Morrison writes, “You know as well as I do that people who die bad
don’t stay in the ground.”
182
Just as mirrors, Kapil’s body, and the jungle invite the girls to come
forward, Singh’s photographs allow Kapil a site to look into the girls’ experiences and see what
surfaces.
Singh’s desire to operate as Orientalist rescuer of the wolfgirls is most potent in the
photographs he includes in “The Diary of the Wolf-Children of Mindapore.” As Ahmed writes,
“Whiteness is what the institution is orientated ‘around,’ so that even bodies that might not
appear white still have to inhabit ‘whiteness’ if they are to get ‘in.’”
183
This is certainly Singh’s
intention and hope, as described earlier in this chapter regarding his interactions with Anglos
both in and outside of India. Above all, he hoped to cast the stigma of his race and culture aside,
by taking up the Orientalist agenda through conversion of tribal peoples and his approach when
documenting his “rescue” of the wolfgirls.
As Said notes, according to the Orientalist, “The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen),
childlike, ‘different.’”
184
To Singh, the wolfgirls embody each of these characteristics to the hilt
due to their being feral and having aboriginal origins—which Singh narrates throughout the
diary. The photographs plainly illustrate Said’s words I have quoted multiple times in this
chapter: “Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through.”
185
In his published
diary Singh includes a little over twenty photographs, providing further insight into the depths of
his Orientalist positionality. Nearly all
186
document Kamala’s habits. Kamala climbs a tree, plays
with dogs, runs on all fours. These are meant to function as evidence of her initial feral
inclinations and her progress after she arrived at the Home. Yet the photos simultaneously
function in far more complicated modes than mere documentation, also functioning as a record
of curatorial impulse—what, exactly, Singh felt was worth including.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 185
One of the benefits of portraits is their ability to endure. Eventually those who encounter
such ephemera turn their gaze from the subject within the frame to the person who has trained
the lens upon that subject. As Garland-Thomson writes, “The exotic reproduces an ethnographic
model of viewing characterized by curiousity or uninvolved objectification and informed by the
popular ethnographic photography that accompanied the era of Western imperialism.”
187

Kamala’s beastliness, like so many people without “modern technology” colonized by
Westerners, draws an Orientalist gaze. The most galling of Singh’s images is captioned “Kamala
standing up for the first time,” in which Singh wears white robes and a white safari hat (see
FIGURE 3). He pushes Kamala’s chin up with one hand and presses her back straight with the
other, forcing her upright. This echoes the plethora of images of Anglos posing with their kill
while in colonial jungles all over the world (and, indeed, continues today in perhaps less “exotic”
terms with American hunters beside many-pointed stags).
While this exoticism and domestication-as-conquering is one shadow behind Singh’s
photographs, of course there is the history that, while not as long, is certainly as prevalent:
photographs of freaks and those with bodily variation.
188
The function of such photographs,
argues Garland-Thompson, is their sanction of staring. She writes, “Disability photography thus
offers the spectator the pleasure of unaccountable, uninhibited, insistent looking.”
189
This is due
to the fact that the person photographed isn’t enduring these stares—and isn’t staring back at the
viewer. So when Kapil writes from Kamala’s point of view stating, “I saw three thousand eyes
switch on and off. They saw me and I saw them,”
190
she is changing the narrative. By collapsing
time, Kamala is given the capacity to stare back.
Thus Kapil alters the usual mode of interaction with Singh’s Orientalist images—to
consider the subject’s interiority rather than what she is doing or exhibiting. There is one
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 186
photograph, in particular, Kapil returns to again and again in Humanimal—that which provoked
an instance of direct contact between Kamala and Kapil, and in which Kamala indeed stares
back. Kapil writes, “In the photograph, a girl climbs a tree, reaching out to grasp the tail of a
cat.”
191
She describes it again, later, adding it was taken while Kamala mourned the death of
Amala.
192
This is likely the photograph in Wolf-Children Singh captions “Kamala riding a tree”
(see FIGURE 1)—there is a blur in the tree limbs that may be a cat, and Kamala’s arm is extended.
It captures a moment of Kamala attempting contact with a non-human animal during a period in
which Singh feared she might die of heartbreak.
193
So Kapil climbs the tree, sitting where
Kamala once did, and reaches out through writing on the page—“I wrote then stopped. What
stopped my hand?”
194
This moment is the same in which Kamala sees Kapil in the tree,
collapsing time,
195
Kapil placing herself in order to access and see—Kamala halting her pen to
provoke an experiential focus on Kapil’s part, rather than documentation, in order to have the
capacity to document more fully, later. With the photograph came an access point, the
opportunity for connection and the breakdown of time. The importance of this moment is its
illustration of Kamala’s loss and pain in response to Amala’s death. The only photograph taken
by Singh in the published diary that Kapil includes in Humanimal is of the two girls together.
196

The trauma of losing Amala is certainly one of the most impactful of Kamala’s life—after this
point she begins attempting connection with socialized humans after non-human animal
relationships either foster nothing or are cut short by the animal’s death. Indeed, the section in
Singh’s book describing Kamala’s grief for Amala is the hardest to read, Kamala’s sole source of
comfort in an oppressive place taken from her. It is the last in a long sequence of surely
traumatizing events, and Kapil, through Singh’s photographs and overcoming the strictures of
linear time, is present for Kamala—there in her tree, at the Home, tracing her life there.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 187
Thus it is through her interactions with the photographs of Kamala that Kapil is
ultimately able to create intimate contact with the girl in a way that is obscure and limited to
placing herself where Kamala placed herself, visiting the girl’s grave. Just as mirrors help serve
as points of connection, photographs operate similarly. Roland Barthes writes of interactions
with the photograph, stating with the photo there is proof of an event—
The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false
on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to
speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand “it is not there,” on the other
“but it has been”); a mad image, chafed by reality.
197

Time can collapse here, too—Kapil in the tree she has seen in the picture, where Kamala was—
“it is not there” “but it has been.” These photos act as guides to seeing what the girls saw, but
also provides insight into their states while at the Home. Kapil describes one photo thusly: “her
flesh floats next to her in the black and white air; it doesn’t adhere. Her bones are delicate,
slightly too long to be a human child’s and coated finely, with wet fur. I know about the body
because I held it in my hand. In the photograph.”
198
By breaking the final thought into two, Kapil
translates the feeling of connection the photograph provides her to her reader. While she
recognizes how wolf life has apparently altered Kamala’s human body, she cradles rather than
attempts to reshape or reject her. As Barthes writes, “In each of [the photos], inescapably, I
passed beyond the unreality of the thing being represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle,
into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die.”
199
Despite Kamala’s
current state of being buried in the ground, Kapil is able to hold her form, be a gentle presence as
well as a thoughtful witness. Marianne Hirsch writes extensively about photographs, in
particular, and their function in transmission of memories. She states,
More than oral or written narratives, photographic images that outlive their
subjects and owners function as ghostly revenants from an irretrievably lost past
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 188
world. They enable us, in the present, not only to see and to touch that past, but
also the try to reanimate it by undoing the finality of the photographic “take.”
200

Indeed, through the photographs of the girls, Kapil works to tap into their experiences and
feelings the moments surrounding the shutter’s opening and closing. Yet she only includes one
of Singh’s photographs—that which documents the girls asleep on the ground, hair cropped
short, looking very much like sisters.
201
All other photographs Kapil merely details as access
points to Kamala’s narrative or experience—a description of the gateway rather than an inclusion
of the gates.
Ultimately the photos themselves matter little in comparison to what they transmit.
Indeed, for Kapil gains access to even more photographs than those Singh includes in his book—
shifting the landscape of the archive from public (Singh’s published diary) to private (Kapil’s
personal possession). Kapil describes how at one point Singh’s grandson hands over other
“blurry photographs” to Kapil, as well as undeveloped rolls of film.
202
Kapil writes,
When I developed the film in New Delhi, the x-ray of a marina skeleton was
superimposed upon her left arm. Her elbow as thick as a knot. I said it was
cartilage—the body incubating a curved space, an animal self. Instead of hands, she
had four streaks of light.
203

Rather than attempting to discern Kamala’s form in spite of the “flaws” within the photograph
(the superimposed shapes, the blurriness), Kapil instead reads it as a space in which Kamala is
displaying her “animal self.” As Barthes writes, “The choice is mine: to subject [the photo’s]
spectacle to the civilized code of perfect illusions, or to confront in it the wakening of intractable
reality.”
204
Kapil’s interest lies in the “intractable reality” of Kamala’s life otherwise redacted
time and again by Singh through his many methods of “recuperation” (her meals, her posture,
her dress). Thus Kapil is looking at these photographs, otherwise. It is this stanza, too, in which
Kapil closes with “she saw me and flinched.”
205
This gives Kamala the capacity to return the
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 189
gaze through the image—to produce engagement rather than merely the “authorized staring”
Garland-Thompson describes. Kapil allows the photographs to act as a channel, to recognize
Kamala’s response to Kapil’s looking.
Yet Kapil’s efforts to connect via photographic gateways brought forth more complicated
experiences than direct relay. For her invitation to receive trauma, which is at times accepted by
Kamala, is rejected outright by Amala. While Kapil often found Kamala obscure, Amala was
unreachable. Amala, too, reacts to Kapil’s looks, illustrated at the turning point of the
alphabetical stanzas meant to denote Kamala’s speech, which then shifts to Kapil. She writes, “I
looked into Amala’s eyes in the photograph but she looked away and began to cry. She destroyed
the paper. She killed her face.”
206
Where Kamala merely flinched under Kapil’s gaze, Amala
breaks down, destroys Kapil’s means of access, herself. Kapil attempts to be present for Amala
but receives nothing—only obliteration. She goes to the room where Amala died, sits, and feels
nothing.
207
Amala’s ghost has no interest in connecting to Kapil—instead, she denies her,
unwilling to relay her traumas. Amala’s potential as a future child cut short so quickly, while
Kamala endured for years after. Hence Kapil focuses her attention on the older girl intently,
heeding Amala’s rejection of her inquiry, letting her spirit rest, recognizes Amala’s rejection as
its own message.

As Sara Ahmed describes, “Groups are formed through their shared orientation toward an
object”
208
—and Singh’s gaze toward the girls was certainly from the same position as the Anglo
scientists, whether the latter agreed with that aligned positionality or not. But Singh had not
anticipated their scrutiny and distrust. Thus while Singh spent much of his life chasing the idea
he was an equal to whites and capable of crossing racial barriers due to his religion, intellect, and
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 190
education, the published diary illustrated how he had no real traction in the West due to his race.
He writes, “My simple aim was purely humanitarian and Christian. I wanted to see them human
beings again. It was not a study for science and progress.”
209
The rejection of Singh’s work in
academic circles and Western culture beyond the white scientists’ queries was one he never
experienced, as he died prior to the book’s publication. His hope was to have it serve as a source
of income for the underfunded orphanage was ultimately a failure, too, with his destitute wife
later tragically dying of starvation.
210

Singh was clearly flawed in his actions both during the girls’ lives and after—he was
driven by deeply ingrained Orientalism, colonialism, and ableism. His desire to secure them, no
matter the cost, for the “greater good” of humanity and Christianity was ultimately at the expense
of the lives of two small children. And the track record for “reclaimed” feral children was not
great, with few living more than a few months after their capture.
211
Perhaps most disturbing of
all is Singh’s stated reasoning for attempting to keep the girls’ existence secret, for “it would be
difficult for us to settle them in their life by marriage when they attained that age.”
212
For Singh,
“saving” the girls not only meant converting them and training them to speak human language
and walk upright again, but making them marriageable. McReur’s notion of “compulsory able-
bodiedness” directly links society’s anxiousness surrounding physical impairment with deviant
sexuality (which Adrienne Rich famously dubbed “compulsory heterosexuality”).
213
Both,
McReur argues, “masquerade as non-identity” and are focused on a kind of (re)productiveness
society deems valuable.
214
One’s body must function “normally” so it can do work and
participate in the production of goods. It must also be heterosexual to participate in the
production of offspring. Thus when Gayatri Spivak writes, “If in the context of colonial
production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 191
in shadow,”
215
Kamala is pushed further into the darkness of history for her young age, her
physical deviance, and her inability to communicate extensively in a language other humans can
understand. As Derrida states, “The absolute victim is a victim who cannot even protest. One
cannot even identify the victim as victim.”
216

Thus there were a variety of interconnected systems that converged upon these two
young girls through the figure of Joseph Singh, despite his also being a victim to some of the
same systems. Amala and Kamala represented the embodiment of deviance in their feral nature,
physical non-conformity, tribal heritage, and their lack of (documented) sexuality.
217
While they
seemed to function perfectly well as wolves, Singh was bent on forcing them into human society.
As Merleau-Ponty writes, “We remain physically upright not through the mechanism of the
skeleton or even through the nervous regulation of muscular tone, but because we are caught up
in a world. If this moment is seriously weakened, the body collapses and becomes another
object.”
218
This is not necessarily a collapse as an act of failure or destruction—it can be a
reshaping, and as active and ferocious as a jungle predator.
The complication of Singh’s attempt to impose human lives upon the wolf girls was not
lost on him. Despite everything, Singh was largely motivated in helping two vulnerable children.
He observed the girls gravitated toward the animals at his orphanage but avoided humans, and
worried he had acted wrongly in capturing them—a worry he directly followed with affirmations
of God’s will.
219
Still, Singh recognized Kamala’s suffering, in which he certainly played a part,
as well as the particular traumas Kamala endured. He writes,
The elder was subjected in turn to three crises which never have befallen any other
mortal child. She was thrice bereft. She was bereft of human care, when she was
carried to a wolf’s den; she was bereft of the securities of her wolf life when she
was rescued—and by unhappy chance almost starved in the transition; she was
pathetically bereft of the security of reminiscent kinship when her younger “sister”
Amala died.
220

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 192

And fourthly bereft, or failed, for the recording of these traumas solely through the figure whose
actions precipitated so many of their occurrences. That is, at least, prior to the work of the poet
Bhanu Kapil and her attempts to receive information regarding these traumas, to place them on
the page, to make space for Kamala’s voice, specifically, where she otherwise had none. As
Shulamith Firestone writes, “There are no children yet able to write their own books, tell their
own story. We will have to, one at a time, do it for them.”
221

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 193

FIGURE 1
222

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 194

FIGURE 2
223

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 195

FIGURE 3
224

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 196
CHAPTER FOUR NOTES
1
Singh, Joseph Amrito Lal., and Robert M. Zingg. Wolf Children and Feral Man. Hamden, CT: Archon Books,
1966. 3.
2
The issues surrounding accessing relayed trauma through an intermediary such as Singh (ie. the entity that
arguably inflicted the trauma) are complicated and generally circle around the concept of the archive. I will address
the issues of the normative archive (text, tangible documentation) extensively in the next chapter on M. NourbeSe
Philip’s Zong!.
3
Cho, Grace M. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2008. 179.
4
While ghosts and haunting play a role in this chapter’s inquiry, haunting is more thoroughly examined in the final
chapter of this dissertation on M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!.
5
Kapil, Bhanu, and Lisa Birman. "Lisa Birman with Bhanu Kapil." Trickhouse Journal 4 (Spring 2009).
6
Katz, Joy, and Sarah Vap. "The Conversant: Joy Katz with Sarah Vap." The Volta. February 2015.
7
There are several published documents from these interactions, including: “India’s Wolf Children Found in
Caves.” Literary Digest 95, no. 2 (October 8, 1927): 54-56.; Ball, Valentine. "Notes on children found living with
Wolves in the North Western Provinces and Oudh." In Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 129. Calcutta:
G.H. House, Baptist Mission Press, 1873.; Ball, Valentine. Jungle Life in India: or the Journeys and Journals of an
Indian Geologist. London: Thomas De la Rue and Company, 1880.; Burton, Brigadier General R.G. “Wolf
Children—the Records Examined.” Times (London), April 8, 1927.; Hewett, Sir John. Jungle Trails in Northern
India. London: Methuen and Company, 1938. 15-20.; Prideaux, W.F. “Wolf Boys.” Notes and Queries 12, (1885):
178.; Stockwell, George. “Wolf-Children.” Lippincott’s Magazine LXI (January 1898): 121.; Willock, H.D. The
Field 2237 (November 1895): 745. There was the apparent need for confirmation from white Westerners (be it
military persons, “adventurers,” or scientists) in order to validate Sanichar’s life experiences.
8
Qtd. in Zingg, Robert M. “Feral Man and Cases of Extreme Isolation of Individuals.” In Wolf Children and Feral
Man, 275-365. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1966. 161-2.
9
Ibid. 165.
10
Ibid. 159-160.
11
Seitler, Dana. Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008. 1.
12
Fiedler, Leslie A. Tyranny of the Normal: Essays on Bioethics, Theology & Myth. Boston: D.R. Godine, 1996. xiii.
13
Seitler, 74.
14
Ibid. 7.
15
Seitler, 83, 134. Sterilization excluded people from reproduction, and thus disallowing their genes the capacity to
endure within the population. This method of exclusion is strictly a heteronormative one, with the fear of
“contaminating” society.
16
Ibid. 50.
17
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. 1978. 1-2, 96, 207.
18
Slavers often attempted to convince themeslves West Africans were just less evolved versions of themselves. And
as Césaire writes, “[Colonialism] dehumanizes even the most civilized man…the colonizer, who in order to ease
his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an
animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal” (Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism.
Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. 40.).
19
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and
Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. 6.
20
Ibid. 70.
21
Ibid. 56. As Garland-Thomson writes, “Stone Age drawings record the births of the mysterious and marvelous
bodies the Greeks and early scientists would later call ‘monsters,’ the culture of P.T. Barnum would call ‘freaks,’
and we now call ‘the congenitally physically disabled.’ Our unremitting fascination with the extraordinary,
especially as manifest in our own bodies, is evident in explications that began as early as the seventh century B.C.
with cuneiform tablets at Nineveh describing sixty-two human congenital disabilities and their religious
meanings” (Extraordinary Bodies, 56).
22
Ibid. 61.
23
Or this time period—one can argue our current iteration of the freak show is reality television, which is as equally
cultivated, popular, and possibly troubling as its predecessor.

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 197

24
New York Herald, 19 March 1860. 1.
25
It is very unlikely Barnum read Singh’s text, in large part because it came out after the decline of freak shows. Yet
others like it were prevalent enough for Barnum to have a model.
26
Indeed, the majority of such advertisements and pamphlets—particularly those representing people of color—set
them alongside white non-deviant members of “civilized” society.
27
Yet for some time the “What Is It?” person was indeed very much like them—Barnum initially hired a white actor
to play the role, before eventually purchasing a Black man who had a severe mental disability after the white actor
was recognized during a show. (Cook, Jr., James W. "Of Men, Missing Links, and Nondescripts: The Strange
Career of P.T. Barnum's ‘What Is It?’ Exhibit." Edited by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. In Freakery: Cultural
Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, 139-57. New York: New York University Press, 1996. 143.).
28
Lundblad, Michael. Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015. 5.
29
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York
University Press, 1996. 6.
30
Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 14.
31
McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University
Press, 2006. 21.
32
Ibid. 113.
33
At one point P.T. Barnum actively attempted to attain “Circassian Beauties” from the Caucasus region in Russia
by having a man buy “Circassian slaves” in Turkey for his freak show. Linda Frost explains the appeal. She
writes, “The German anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach introduced the term Caucasian when he argued,
based on his measurements of skulls obtained from Caucasus, that Caucasus was the ‘origin not only of
Europeans, the Caucasian type, but of all humans.’ Given that such monogenist thought held that humans
supposedly ‘degenerated in appearance’ as they dispersed throughout the world, Blumenbach and his followers
believed that ‘the purest and most beautiful whites were the Circassians’…Racial superiority to some degree
concretized the Circassian Beauty’s beauty, making her the whitest, racially ‘purest’ specimen of a human woman
to be found on the earth.” (Frost, Linda. “The Circassian Beauty,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the
Extraordinary Body. 250.). Of course most of the women Barnum ultimately put on display were young Irish and
Scandinavian women from New York.
Perhaps most confusingly (to a modern person), these “pure” “white” “beauties” often sported Afro-like hair—
after much work on the white women’s part to attain the hairstyle including soaking their hair in beer before
teasing it. This gave them the name “moss-haired girls,” and was apparently entirely Barnum’s creation (for
unknown reasons). In the pamphlets and promotions regarding the women, there was a big focus on the Circassian
Beauty’s being “saved” from Turkish harems and brought to the United States to enjoy education and Victorian
sensibilities, which they exhibited during shows. Yet the language surrounding them had little to do with
liberation, often describing them as objects one would eat: “a most chaste and delicate curiosity.” Thus the women
were simultaneously Other and white, sex slaves saved from miscegenation and pure, simple peasant girls and
educated.
34
Seitler, 229.
35
Maclean, 8, 17.
36
Ibid. 22. Responses to Singh’s “diary” often considered his English as an attempt at posturing intellect, despite his
lofty language and clarity (Maclean, 238).
37
Ibid. 18.
38
Mohanty, R.H. “Elementary Education of Tribal Girls: A Structural Analysis of Selected Districts in Odisha.”
Edited by Chaundary, S.N. In Tribal Women: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 117-142. 120.
39
Singh, xxxi, xxxii.
40
Maclean, 15.
41
Singh, 3.
42
Qtd. in Maclean, 54, and 68.
43
Singh, 5.
44
Ibid. 7.
45
Ibid. 7-8.
46
Ibid. 8.
47
Maclean, 68.
48
The girls’ “aboriginal” features are what fed this idea for Singh. “The features bespeak of this assumption and we
became convinced that these were children of the wild jungle people whom the wolves must have carried away or
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 198

found them thus thrown out of their fate for some reason or other in the jungle to get rid of them” (Singh, 22). The
Santal tribe nearby did not have a practice or history of abandoning children. It’s more likely the wolves took the
children to feed their cubs, the children began to smell like the cubs, and were thus accepted (Maclean, 71).
49
Maclean, 72.
50
Singh, 9.
51
Ibid. 12.
52
Maclean, 87-88, 91.
53
Singh, 45, 15, 17.
54
Maclean, 94.
55
Singh, 41.
56
Ibid. 54. Maclean, 173-4.
57
Singh, 58-9.
58
Ibid. 60.
59
Ibid. 64, 90. Singh writes, “she could not run even like a child of two or three years” (90). This very much echoes
Barnum’s description in the “What Is It?” pamphlet: “the WALK OF WHAT IS IT is very awkward, like that of a child
beginning to acquire that accomplishment.” Maclean notes that, for Singh, the “defect in [Kamala’s] legs gave her
the opportunity to grow slowly as a human child” as it prevented her from running like an animal (Maclean, 164).
60
Maclean, 215, 219.
61
Once the town hears about Kamala they come to see her—several crowds form. Maclean writes, “By the evening
Kamala had been exhibited four times,” which Singh apparently wanted to avoid. “Singh established regular
visiting hours, which was reminiscent of feeding time at the Calcutta Zoo” to mitigate crowds (Maclean, 134).
62
Singh writes: “Nature, or rather chance, had provided me with this phenomenon and offered wonderful scope for
experiment and research in a line which would otherwise have been impossible. The lines are these…
1. How much of human characteristics are ‘acquired’ and how much transmitted?
2. How much ‘sociality’ was present in the character and habits of the individual per se?
3. What was the nature of the ‘human ancestor’ a myth which anthropologists are at pains to reconstruct into a
scientific theory?” (Singh, 116-7).
63
Ibid. xxvii.
64
Maclean, 204.
65
The similarity between these men’s surnames is not lost on me, and only adds to the strangeness of Kapil’s source
text. While there is the possibility of “Zingg” being an Anglicized version of “Singh,” Zingg is a Swiss name.
66
Seitler, 83.
67
Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 70. Prior to 1940, freak shows strangely leveled out class and education
difference in its crowds: “After 1840, freak shows may have been one of the last sites where the ordinary citizen
could exercise the authority to interpret the natural world, a right bestowed by the Reformation that was being
incrementally revoked by the class division of labor—what Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English have called
‘the rise of the experts’” (Extraordinary Bodies, 70).
68
Maclean, 81-2.
69
Most notably in a chapter dubbed “The Change of Appearance”: “The formation of jaw bones was raised and
high” (to accommodate chewing on meat and bones); eyeteeth “were longer and more pointed than is common in
humans”; “The color of the mouth inside was blood-red”; “Their knee joints and hip joints would not close up or
open out…Those joints were big, raised, and heavy, covered with hard corns outside from walking on all fours”;
“flat noses with big round nostrils like aboriginals”; “At the time of any excitement the nostrils pumped out breath
and a harsh noise” (Singh, 18-23).
70
Singh, 19-22.
71
Ibid. 19.
72
Maclean, 2.
73
Ibid. 238-9.
74
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. 33.
75
Lloyd, David. "Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?" Interventions 2, no. 2 (2000): 212-28. 216.
76
Kapil, Bhanu. Humanimal: A Project for Future Children. Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press, 2009. 12, 16.
77
Haunting as a concept will be covered more thoroughly in the following chapter on M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!.
78
Singh, 96-7.
79
Ibid. 103-4.
80
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1997. 63.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 199

81
When trying to decide what to write about for her MFA thesis, Kapil went to the section in the library focusing on
South Asia and pulled a random volume from the stacks, which happened to be Wolf-Children and Feral Man
(Kapil, Humanimal, 59-60).
82
Kapil, Bhanu, and Lisa Birman. "Lisa Birman with Bhanu Kapil."
83
Cho, 18.
84
Ibid. 24.
85
Ibid. 29.
86
“India police search for parents of girl ‘living with monkeys’” BBC News. April 07, 2017.
87
“In 2015 in the United States, 20% of all children—1 in 5—is living below the poverty line. Recognize that those
of lower income have less access to clean water, nutrition, health care, and have a higher mortality rate. Living as a
child at the beginning of the 20th century was certainly hard, and far harder for those in tribal areas in the world”
(Renwick, Trudi, and Liana Fox. “The Supplemental Poverty Measure: 2015.” US Census Bureau. September 13,
2016.).
88
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. 36.
89
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New
York: Routledge, 1994. 125.
90
Gordon, 179.
91
Kapil, Humanimal, 1.
92
Ibid. 1.
93
Ibid. 5.
94
Ibid. 6.
95
Ibid. 6.
96
Ibid. 14.
97
Ibid. 38-9.
98
Ibid. 54.
99
Ibid. 7.
100
Ibid. 13.
101
Singh, 31.
102
Kapil, Humanimal, 18.
103
Kapil, Bhanu, and Andy Fitch. "Andy Fitch with Bhanu Kapil." The Volta, May 2013.
104
Kapil, Bhanu, and Rowland Saifi. "Unfold Is the Wrong Word: An Interview with Bhanu Kapil." HTMLGIANT,
April 18, 2012. Bracket in original quotation.
105
Kapil, Humanimal, 23.
106
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 116-
7.
107
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.”
In Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, edited by Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and
Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, 56-75. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2002.
74.
108
Singh, 24.
109
Ibid. 17.
110
Ibid. 34.
111
Kapil, Humanimal, 12.
112
Singh, 44.
113
McRuer, 113. McRuer notes that “the crip protest can…be said to arise directly from” Mumbai in 2004 protests
that took place there (McRuer, 45).
114
Maclean, 79.
115
Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2003. 107.
116
Kapil, Humanimal, 14.
117
Ibid. 50, 55.
118
Singh, 43.
119
“[T]he only defect that remained in her was she could not run even like a child of two or three years” (Singh, 90).
120
Kapil, Humanimal, 55.
121
Maclean, 92.
122
Ibid. 128.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 200

123
Singh, 85-6, 84-5.
124
Ibid. 61.
125
Ibid. 84-5.
126
Qtd. in Maclean, 203.
127
Kapil, Humanimal, 30.
128
Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories the Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 73.
129
Kapil, Humanimal, 20-1.
130
Ibid. 52.
131
Ibid. 50-1.
132
Ibid. 52.
133
Kabir, Ananya Janahara. "Affect, Body, Place: Trauma Theory in the World," in The Future of Trauma Theory:
Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, ed. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone, 63-
75. New York: Routledge, 2013. 72.
134
Kapil, Humanimal, 53.
135
Ibid. 52.
136
Ibid. 38.
137
Ibid. 53-4.
138
Ibid. 34.
139
Singh, 108.
140
Kapil, Humanimal, 41.
141
Edkins, Jenny. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 11.
142
Maclean, 124.
143
Singh, 41.
144
Balaev, Michelle. "Trends in Literary Trauma Theory." Mosaic 41.2 (2008): 149-65. 161.
145
Kapil, Humanimal, 58.
146
Ibid. 15.
147
Ibid. 15.
148
Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, 18.
149
Kapil, Humanimal, 11-2.
150
Derrida, Specters of Marx, 123.
151
Kapil and Saifi, "Unfold Is the Wrong Word."
152
Gardiner, Muriel, Sergei Pankajeff, Sigmund Freud, and Ruth Mack Brunswick. The Wolf-Man and Sigmund
Freud. Edited and translated by Muriel Gardiner. London: Karnac, 1972. 183.
153
Ibid. 210.
154
Ibid. 165, 207.
155
Seitler, 43.
156
Kapil, Humanimal, 54.
157
Strangely enough mirrors do manifest notably in the life and psychological struggles of Pankejeff. Later in life he
began suffering from a delusional obsession, believing a doctor had botched a dermatological treatment of his
nose leading to holes or scars. According to Ruth Mack Brunswick, his Freudian analyst who treated him
(though Freud pronounced him “cured” years prior), his nose was undamaged. Pankejeff consistently checked his
nose in store windows and a small pocket mirror he carried. Brunswick writes, “His life was centred on the little
mirror in his pocket, and his fate depended on what it revealed or was about to reveal” (Brunswick, The Wolf-
Man and Sigmund Freud, 265).
158
Mirrors function outside Lacanian psychoanalytic reference for Kapil.
159
Kapil, Humanimal, 55.
160
Ibid. 54-5.
161
Ibid. 61.
162
Ibid. 6.
163
Ibid. 31.
164
Ibid. 15.
165
Ibid. 56.
166
Ibid. 56.
167
Ibid. 57.
168
Singh, 49, 65.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 201

169
Kapil, Humanimal, 57.
170
Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge, 2008. 95.
171
Kapil, Humanimal, 41.
172
Ibid. 55.
173
Ibid. 41-2.
174
Ibid. 42.
175
Derrida, Specters of Marx, xix.
176
Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, 34.
177
Kapil, Humanimal, 53.
178
Said, Orientalism, 207.
179
Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, xv.
180
Glissant, Édouard, Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
52.
181
Kapil, Humanimal, 26.
182
Morrison, 188.
183
Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 134.
184
Said, Orientalism, 40.
185
Ibid. 207.
186
Only one photograph shows both girls together, captioned “Amala and Kamala asleep overlapping” (Singh, 79).
This is the only photograph of the girls Kapil includes in Humanimal (Kapil, Humanimal, 44-5).
187
Garland-Thomson, “The Politics of Staring,” 65-6.
188
See footnote 21.
189
Garland-Thomson, “The Politics of Staring,” 58.
190
Kapil, Humanimal, 33.
191
Ibid. 31.
192
Ibid. 49.
193
Singh, 60.
194
Kapil, Humanimal, 31.
195
Ibid. 53.
196
Ibid. 44-5.
197
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Will
and Wang, 1981. 115.
198
Kapil, Humanimal, 46.
199
Barthes, 116-7.
200
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2012. 36.
201
While the cover bears a photograph of a girl reaching up into what looks like a tree, doubly imposed due to the
girl’s moving (very much in line with the images of Kamala, and seems to capture something of her feral nature)
is in fact a 1932 photograph by the famous Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, the subject here
surrounded by drying tobacco leaves. Kapil indeed is leaning into the fact this could be Kamala, as she seems to
describe this exact photograph in Humanimal (6). But that must be a different photo—one to which we do not
have access.
202
Kapil, Humanimal, x, 6.
203
Ibid. 6.
204
Barthes, 119.
205
Kapil, Humanimal, 6.
206
Ibid. 43.
207
Ibid. 56.
208
Ahmed, 119.
209
Qtd. Maclean, 262.
210
Maclean, 290.
211
Zingg, 154.
212
Singh, xxxii-xxxiii.
213
Rich, Adrienne. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society5, no. 4 (Summer 1980): 631-60.
214
McReur, 1, 31.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE ATAVISTIC GHOST AND ANXIETY OF BODIES 202

215
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary
Nelson. By Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988. 66-111. 82-3.
216
Derrida, Jacques, and Elizabeth Weber. Points ...: Interviews, 1974-1994. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1995. 389.
217
It is likely Kamala exhibited sexual behavior before she died as a teenager. This despite the fact Singh includes
Kamala’s bathroom habits. Thus I consider the total omission of any sexual behavior, as well as any description
of Kamala’s puberty or menses, surprising yet, considering Catholic dogma, perhaps unsurprising.
218
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 2002.
296.
219
Maclean, 124.
220
Singh, xvii-iii.
221
Firestone, 118.
222
Singh, 70.
223
Singh, 74.
224
Singh, 90.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 203
- CHAPTER FIVE -

THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD:
THE SPECTRAL OCEANIC ARCHIVE IN M. NOURBESE PHILIP’S ZONG!

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of
barbarism.

— WALTER BENJAMIN

Let the groans and cries of the murdered, the cruel slavery of the Africans tell!

— QUOBNA OTTOBAH CUGOANO

History was not dead for me, as the postmodernists urge. I wanted a chance to rewrite it.

— M. NOURBESE PHILIP

While it may seem a strange place to begin a chapter regarding the Atlantic slave trade, I want to
return to an early point in this dissertation: the U.S. conflict in the Middle East. In 2011, after the
assassination of Osama bin Laden, the U.S. government stated they had quickly buried the body
at sea. Many speculate this decision was to avoid bin Laden having a public gravesite that might
otherwise be frequented by those with anti-Western views.
1
Pitching a body into an oceanic
grave is hardly unique (many sea-faring communities—and oppressive dictatorships—have
similar practices), and the U.S. government’s desire to blot out any potential veneration of such
an effective enemy is not surprising. What strikes me about this decision, however, is in the
recognition that the sea is a site that can hold a body with no public marker—from a country that
so profited from the many West African dead in the Atlantic. The ocean can hide, redact, lose
people without a trace simply due to its vastness. It is a kind of void. The bodies that line the
ocean floor cannot be mourned in the way so many cultures on this earth mourn those who have
died—the desire for the living to acknowledge the dead, reckon with their own grief, is met only
with an enormous unknown that is the Atlantic.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 204
The Caribbean-Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip explains why she used a 500-word
court document from 1783 concerning the massacres of 142 West Africans during the Middle
Passage, stating, “the case is the tombstone, the one public marker of those Africans on board.”
2

In this chapter, I will consider Philip’s remarkable collection Zong!, in which she not only
appropriates from this forensic tombstone, but attempts to break it apart in order to gain
knowledge otherwise lost. The many places of intersection between Philip’s experience of
relayed trauma regarding the Zong massacres
3
and her subsequent creative production of Zong!
are central to this chapter. Ultimately Zong! acts as both product and vessel of relayed trauma,
and this is evinced in its form, language, and relationality as a text and performance. While most
scholars focus on the specificity of Philip’s process, politics, or consider Zong! in the lineage of
Caribbean writers, my hope is to address these points while focusing primarily on Philip’s
traumatic experience and how that informed her decisions while producing the collection.

The Atlantic—itself, its reaches, the journey over—was a largely unfathomable reality for the
captured West Africans forced to migrate across it. Death in precolonial West Africa often
entailed the soul’s being united with ancestors via migration, fostering the idea of death as a
means of connection with the dead via reincarnation.
4
The soul’s journey is a fundamental part of
this narrative. As Stephanie Smallwood explains in Saltwater Slavery of the forced migration of
the Middle Passage, “in this and many other respects, the slave experienced something akin to
death.”
5
The conjunction between concepts of death and the ship’s journey is just one of many
reasons the ocean so defined the Atlantic slave trade for those who survived it. “[O]ut of sight of
any land, enslaved Africans commenced a march through time and space that stretched their own
systems of reckoning to the limits.”
6
The “stretched systems of reckoning” is the site of originary
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 205
trauma—while stretched, it is not broken. Reckoning will come later to the Diaspora through
relay. The physical injury aside, this journey alone was a remarkable and often deadly trauma.
While the abuse and absolute objectification of the Atlantic African’s body began on the shore,
the destruction of the enslaved person as a subject, the brutality in that desubjectivity via the
treatment of that person as a mere commodity (yet one that requires chains
7
), took place at
sea
8
—more often than not resulting in a wholly traumatized person so thoroughly divorced from
their reality prior to the journey across the ocean, they were then the slavers’ “desired object: an
African body fully alienated and available for exploitation in the American marketplace.”
9
Thus
this annihilation of the West African subject as a result of the Middle Passage defines that broad
aquatic space used as a means of forced migration. The ocean operates simultaneously as a
cypher and a place that destroyed most elements of identity for the enslaved people and their
future ancestors. Dionne Brand calls it “the door of no return,” writing, “I cannot go back to
where I came from. It no longer exists…That one door transformed us into bodies emptied of
being, bodies emptied of self-interpretation, into which new interpretations could be placed.”
10

Glissant describes this as the “abyss.”
11
Others dub it “a spatial continuum.”
12
Claudia Rankine
writes, “if you let in the excess emotion you will recall the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our
heads.”
13
M. NourbeSe Philip considers it “a genealogy of Silence/s.”
14

While the Middle Passage has such a profound impact on the Atlantic African Diaspora,
it is the voices of the slavers, rather than the enslaved victims, that overwhelmingly narrate the
events of the defining journey in the historical record. Even when abolitionists felt the need to
acquire information regarding the Middle Passage to aid their cause, they consulted logbooks,
and the slavers’ and slave ship crews’ testimonies.
15
Or, perhaps just as maddeningly, the rare
survivor whose statements were documented claimed enduring such horrors “was what the Lord
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 206
intended for my good.”
16
James Walvin writes, “We know more about the slave trade than ever
before. Oddly enough, in the process the slaves have disappeared from view.”
17
Thus while the
normative approach to the archive—locating, reading, and interpreting documents—renders the
West Africans’ experiences to some extent, the archive here overwhelmingly contains the
suffering that defined the Middle Passage through the voices of those who enacted the brutality,
rather than those who sustained or succumbed to it. As Derrida writes, “the archive always
works, and a priori, against itself.”
18
Thus subscribing to the tangible archive as we know it, in
this case and so many others, allows for those who harmed, who held power, whose voices
dominated over those they oppressed, continue to define the narrative—even if as an attentive
thinker one can see the stark reality of what the slavers are accessing through the archive. In such
a situation to access testimony of that trauma from a victim—to receive it through relay—one
must receive it through haunting.
19
As M. Jacqui Alexander writes, “In the realm of the secular,
the material is conceived of as tangible while the spiritual is either nonexistent or invisible.
In the realm of the sacred, however, the invisible constitutes its presence by provocation of
sorts, by provoking our attention.”
20
The cover of Zong! states it is “As told to the author by
Setaey Adamu Boateng”
21
—a ghost.

Philip’s book Zong! attempts to see through “the door of no return,” using a court document as
the keyhole through which to peer. It is through appropriation of that brief text and (ultimately)
sustained interaction with the ghosts of the Zong slave ship massacres that Philip is able to
engage and document her relayed trauma. When working on Zong!, Philip traveled to a former
slave port in Ghana and interacted with local elders and a priest concerning the Zong and her
book.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 207
None of my ancestors could have been among those thrown overboard, one elder
offers. If that were the case, he continues, I would not be there…I have never
entertained the thought that I may have had a personal connection to the Zong, nor
have I ever sought to understand why this story has chosen me. Fundamentally, I
don’t think it matters, but his comment is still disconcerting.
22

Having direct blood ties to those on the Zong is hardly necessary for Philip’s relayed trauma and
subsequent creative production. The trauma has “chosen her” through relay, for one reason or
another, if nothing else. The “disconcerting” aspect of the elder’s comments is their pointing to
blood as the one site of connection. The rationale being that without which Philip has meager
claim to the Zong massacres and traumas. Philip’s daughter later reminds her there may have
been people killed on the Zong whose children survived—to whom Philip may be related.
23
Yet
the Zong and the events surrounding that ship are emblematic of the brutality of the “one-way
route of terror,”
24
to which Philip is directly connected as a member of the Black Diaspora—
particularly as a person from the Caribbean. As Levinas states,
An ethical significance of a past which concerns me, which “has to do with” me,
which is “my business” outside all remimiscence, all retention, all representation,
all reference to a recalled present. A signifier in ethics of a pure past irreducible to
my present, and thus, of an originating past. An originating signifier of an
immemorial past, in terms of responsibility for the other man. My unintentional
participation in the history of humanity, in the past of others which has something
to do with me.

Direct hereditary connection to those who are victims of trauma is not necessary to receive that
traumatic knowledge second-hand. The traumas of the Zong massacres intersect with Philip’s
modern life if only because she is a Black diasporic woman moving through the world whose
ancestors survived the Middle Passage. She is making no grand claims about the Zong and her
linkage to it in the physical realm of events, but rather listening, being present. Her knowledge as
a lawyer gives her insight. Her experiences as a Black Caribbean-Canadian woman is her stake.
The ghosts came to her, and, blood ties or no, Philip listened. “I [don’t] want or even care to link
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 208
myself to the Zong,” she writes.
25
Blood ties are unimportant here. The traumas chose her, and
Philip is taking heed. Related to those shackled and/or killed on the Zong or not, Philip
recognizes the murders as a trauma to which she is, for one reason or another, receiving.
Through the Zong massacres and surrounding events, she is accessing a trauma that is, somehow,
also hers.
THE ZONG EVENTS
What happened on the Zong and the legal battle that followed is largely considered to be that
which precipitated the end of England’s engagement in the Atlantic slave trade, as the world
power outlawed chattel slavery in its colonies not long after. The Liverpool-based Zong
26

departed Cape Coast Castle (modern Ghana) overloaded with 442 West Africans. The Zong was
almost twice as overburdened than the famous Brookes, the illustrated cross-section of which is
one of the most enduring images of the Atlantic slave trade.
27
Upon arriving in the Caribbean,
the Zong crew caught sight of Jamaica, took it for Saint-Dominique, a colony of French enemies,
and decided to push west despite being low on water reserves.
28
Desperation soon set in.
Specifically, in the fear that there would be a serious loss of life among the enslaved people on
board through their thirsting to death before the Zong’s arrival in Jamaica—thus leading to fewer
people to sell upon arrival and a subsequent loss of funds. In addition, those who were to survive
would be worth little at auction for their being in desperate physical states. Thus, the ill Captain,
Luke Collingwood, called for the crew to throw some of the West Africans into the Atlantic,
explaining, “if the slaves died a natural death, it would be at the loss of the owners of the ship;
but if they were thrown alive into the sea, it would be the loss of the underwriters.”
29

Every smart slave ship owner insured his “goods” in the potential case of the ship being
lost at sea, taken by enemies, and the like. Collingwood’s grotesque and contradictory request
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 209
was in keeping with the law of the time that stated enslaved people dead by “natural means”—
including suicide—lost their monetary value with no recompense to the ship’s owners (versus,
say, if they were stolen).
30
Collingwood braided this accepted legal concept with another that
states if a ship is in any number of dire straits and must lose (“jettison”) cargo in order to drop
weight and gain speed necessary to ensure the overall safety of those/that which remain on
board, the captain may do so and still secure insurance claims on that lost cargo. Thus, according
to these two laws together, as Ian Baucom writes, “in drowning the slaves the ship’s captain,
Luke Collingwood, was not so much murdering them as securing the existence of their monetary
value” for the ship’s owners.
31
Thus, on November 2, 1781, the Zong’s crew threw 54 women
and children from the ship’s windows, one at a time, into the Atlantic. Forty-two men were
drowned from the quarter deck on December 1. According to later testimony,
One of the Africans spoke some English, and told Kelsall (then no longer first mate)
that the people shackled below decks were murmuring on Account of the Fact of
those who had been drowned…they begged they might be suffered to live and they
would not ask for either Meat or Water but could live without either till they arrived
at their determined port.
32

It then rained, filling several depleted water barrels. Despite the enslaved person’s pleas and
fresh water, a third group of 38 were drowned by the crew, and 10 more jumped overboard of
their own volition. The reasoning of the captain here is uncertain, perhaps to keep the remaining
enslaved persons in good health with the provisions the ship had, earning more money on the
selling block. All-told, 143 West Africans were pushed or dove into the Atlantic. One managed
to scramble back on board through a porthole. Two-hundred-thirty-eight survived those
drownings, enduring the murders around them of over a quarter of the persons put on the ship at
Cape Coast Castle. The Zong arrived at Black River, Jamaica on December 22 with 208 living
West Africans.
33

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 210
Baucom explains the Zong “was not an aberration, not some wildly exceptional event.”
34

Many enslaved persons were murdered by drowning if enemy ships were near, or the slave ship
was operating illegally and in danger of being discovered. The Zong’s exceptional nature lies in
what happened after the massacres—in the legal pursuit of insurance money. While some
information on the initial legal exchanges regarding the Zong massacres are spotty, we know the
ship’s owners (Gregson
35
in the case) attempted to collect £30 for each murdered West African
as insured prior to the Zong’s departure from Cape Coast Castle. The insurance company denied
the Zong-owning syndicate that £3990,
36
the slavers subsequently took the company to court, and
a jury of their countrymen agreed they should be paid the full amount. There is no official
documentation of the case up to this point—it is only when the insurance company (represented
by Gilbert) attempts to appeal this decision that anything appears in the archive: a two-page court
holding stating that the insurance company had the right to have their case heard again (Gregson
v. Gilbert). This is Philip’s hard source for Zong!, and you can see why ghosts began to her
inform her, too—to bring in their traumas. The court decision is, on the whole, a maddening
document to encounter. The first sentence alone—“This is an action on a policy of insurance”—
stops me in my tracks.
37
As Baucom writes, “It’s hard to remember that, as a legal matter, the
Zong was not a murder case.”
38
The entirety of the court’s decision is a macabre work of
linguistic gymnastics to avoid identifying the dead as dead. Amazingly, murder does come up,
but only as an example of burden of proof: “Every particular circumstance of this averment need
not be proved. In an indictment for murder it is not necessary to prove each particular
circumstance.”
39

The whole of the Zong massacres as a legal act, and others like it, hinges on the terrible
reality that in the law, as in the minds of the slavers, one might as well have dropped barrels into
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 211
the sea. This is not necessarily an easy conversion from human to object, even for those who
endorsed it. Solicitor-General John Lee (representing the Zong’s owners) states at one point,
“they are goods and property: right or wrong, we have nothing to do with it. This property—the
human creatures if you will—have been thrown overboard.”
40
This bizarre dance, saying
“goods,” then “human creatures,” captures that tension present in the total objectification and
destruction of the enslaved human subject. As Walvin writes, “[The slave system] was a concept
which from the first contained an obvious contradiction: how could a human being be a thing?”
41

And, I will add, how can a thing require chains to halt its self-destruction and/or insurrection, to
avoid endangering the slavers’ profits?
Baucom compellingly takes the objectification to its ends, asking how can a human being
be money. He writes:
that the money forms of the trans-Atlantic slave trade could attach themselves not
only to the slaves who reached the markets of the Caribbean alive but also to those
drowned along the way; that a sufficiently credible imagination could see a
drowned slave a still existent, guaranteed, and exchangeable form of currency; that
a British court could hold the majesty of the law to endorse this act of the
imagination; that the attorneys for William Gregson and his partners could convince
a jury that by throwing 132 of the Zong’s less desirable slaves into the sea Captain
Collingwood had not so much murdered a company of his fellows as hurried them
into money, is also, as we shall see, unsurprising—perhaps even the inevitable
consequence of that epistemological revolution…which had permitted Britain’s
capital houses to convert “their” slaves into paper money.
42

I quote Baucom extensively here not only because his accretive list compounds information with
remarkable impact, but to illustrate the extent to the enslaved West African’s identity as a human
was obliterated, transformed, so explicitly into the entity desired by those who participated in
and benefitted from that destruction and objectification—no matter the amount of brutality,
death, and stretch of the imagination it required. That desire for profit so strong as to empty
people of their humanity, that a human corpse at the bottom of the Atlantic equated to money
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 212
gained. Gregson v. Gilbert illustrates this fully. As Philip explains, “this two-page
account…squeezed out the lives that were at the heart of this case.”
43
There were no people here,
only goods and value attached to those goods—the human agents are those who can claim lost
funds.
There are many non-legal documents regarding the Zong legal case due to the fact the
British abolitionists worked to publicize the terrible details for the British public—and did so
with great success.
44
Despite her ability to use any such texts in her book on the Zong events,
Philip only engaged with Gregson v. Gilbert due to its public function, specifically.
45
Stef Craps
makes the point that “the traumas sustained by the formerly colonized and enslaved are
collective in nature and impossible to locate in an event that took place at a singular, historically
specific moment in time.”
46
While I don’t disagree, because the Zong case’s documentation so
thoroughly represents the Atlantic slave trade and its horrors (while not enclosing them by any
means), Philip’s use of Gregson v. Gilbert is an apt point of entry to an otherwise elusive and
vast system of oppression. It is an example, rather than representative. The legal aspect, for
Philip, provided a foothold. She writes, “I turned…to the law: certain, objective, and predictable,
it would cut through the emotions like a laser to seal off vessels oozing sadness, anger, and
despair.”
47
As she writes through straightforward erasure of Gregson v. Gilbert in “Zong! #7”
and apparently excising emotion
48
: [see FIGURE 1]. It is an investigation (when, which, who),
which Philip attempts to twist toward the slavers who committed the murders rather than the
money owed or not. A former lawyer herself, Philip recognizes the function of law here,
ostensibly the most objective method of approach, dependable—even in regards to something as
emotionally chaotic as relayed trauma. It is, in part, why the Zong traumas found their way to
her, and why she began the disturbing work of researching the event.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 213
LANGUAGE, LINEAGE, & THE ARCHIVE
Philip’s use of Gregson v. Gilbert, an extant document within the normative archive, is
particularly germane when considering the lineage of the archive itself, which is indeed founded
in law. Derrida observes that arkeion was a residence of a caretaker of sorts with subsequent
societal power to “make or represent the law.”
49
Thus, with this system in place, “these
documents in effect speak the law: they recall the law and call on or impose the law.”
50
This
power is, like all systems of power, one that disregards different methods than its own for
knowing and containing knowledge. There is little regard for alternative means of passing on
wisdom, largely due to the potential of those means subverting what the archive represents (often
hegemonic entities). As Diana Taylor writes in The Archive and the Repertoire, essentially since
the Conquest there has been a long and exacting project of delegitimizing and eradicating often
indigenous embodied methods of archivization, be it by storytelling or non-verbal methods such
as dance.
51
This active pursuit of destroying intangible methods of passing knowledge is hardly
news to Philip. She writes, “the written archive, the historical archive has, more often than not,
been scripted by those who were integrally connected to the European project of terror and
dehumanization of the Other.”
52
This enterprise is two-fold: establishing and protecting
knowledge and law largely obscured from the colonized population, and simultaneously othering
those people further by undermining their own methods of preserving knowledge and law.
Taylor writes, “The dominance of language and writing has come to stand for meaning itself.”
53

And the idea of language being meaning is of course most beneficial for those who impose it
through colonial oppression, who profit from it most explicitly. The normative archive preserves
records and order of knowledge that often actively redacts knowledge of subjugated populations.
Akira Lippit calls this the “shadow” or “anarchive,” writing that it “represents an impossible task
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 214
of the archive: to protect the secret…It is an archive that, in the very archival task of preserving,
seeks to repress, efface.”
54
Laurie Jo Sears pins it down further in Situated Testimonies stating,
“an archive is a site of exclusion, haunting, and lack.”
55
This lineage of the archive as an
institution informed Philip’s approach to appropriating Gregson v. Gilbert. With her process of
“fracturing” the oppressive language of the archival text for her poetry, Philip explains it
“allow[ed] what I knew was locked in there to emerge; it led me to another archive—the liquid
archive of water.”
56
As Abrahama and Torok describe, “a memory they buried without legal
burial place.”
57
Alexander asks, “What is the threat that certain memory poses?”
58
Philip, in her
creation of Zong!, attempts to find out.
Philip’s engagement with the court document’s language was the key to accessing the
alternative archive regarding the Zong massacres. Philip notes a kinship between law and poetry,
as they “both share an inexorable concern with language—the ‘right’ use of the ‘right’ words,
phrases or even marks of punctuation; precision of expression is the goal shared by both” (yet, as
she states, the stakes for the former are much higher).
59
This precision in legal writing is an
element of why the Gregson v. Gilbert document is so horrifying. It was thought through and
articulated carefully, and yet the human victims were demonstrably redacted. Unless, it seems,
they are actively precipitating their deaths (agents then, only). As Jenny Edkins writes,
“Language does not just name things that are already there in the world. Language divides up the
world in particular ways to produce for every social grouping what it calls ‘reality.’”
60
The
reality Gregson v. Gilbert divided up involved few agents and with scant options for survival.
Overall there are very few verbs in the whole of the document,
61
“necessity” being one of the
most frequently used terms throughout.
62
As Philip writes, “The language in which those events
[on the Zong] took place promulgated the non-being of African peoples, and I distrust its order,
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 215
which hides disorder.”
63
In terms of Philip’s experience of relayed trauma, this distrust is a
particularly radical move in that it might not occur to many to distrust one of the most “official”
documents as a means of access to knowledge of events. Yet Philip recognizes that her means of
interrogating her experience are through, first, a language used by those who exacted brutality
with this very same language (like Celan) and, second, a tradition that similarly represents a
positionality (Euro, authoritative) to which Philip feels little connection and generally distrusts.
Philip’s grappling with the English language as not only the language of the colonial
oppressor, but her own native tongue, is not a unique pursuit in Zong!. As she writes, “As with
most writers, an issue chooses you—in my case it was language.”
64
Throughout her body of
work the issue of language recurs again and again, largely because of the irreconcilable fact that
the English she speaks and writes also “merely served to articulate the non-being of the African,
over and above her primary function as chattel and unit of production.”
65
The means of her
approach to relayed trauma (through Gregson v. Gilbert) is thus the same means that instituted
the originary traumatic events. Because of its precision and power in not only the legal system
but society as well, Gregson v. Gilbert illustrates systemic oppression and Philip’s relayed
trauma in ways the articles and essays regarding the Zong massacres and subsequent legal
proceedings never could. It so aptly captures the depth of the desubjectification to the point of
object, to the point of money, more precisely than any letter or essay. Its ability to set legal
precedent, and its success in doing so, has far more societal weight. And, just as important, it
allows Philip to continue her interrogation of the English language, here employed with such
legal facility as to close off the murders and make the Zong events about money. It is “hid[ing]
disorder” is in part Philip’s focus on this document above all others. It is the “public marker” of
the Zong events, but it is personal to her, too, for its intricate issues of language.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 216
The Western poetic lineage of pushing back against language is a long one, and many
often link Philip to these movements—to which she is largely dismissive. On having her work
called “postmodern” she writes, “you have to understand that the Caribbean was postmodern
before the term was coined: Multiple discourses—fragmentation—we’ve been doing this ever
since; we just haven’t applied that name to it.”
66
Philip does claim a tenuous connection to the
Language poets in that she “question[s] the assumed transparency of language and, therefore,
employ[s] similar strategies to reveal the hidden agendas of language.”
67
Yet ultimately Philip’s
decentralizing approach to her work, avoiding the lyric first-person speaker, is connected to her
identity. She writes,
Why should anyone care how the “I” that is me feels, or how it recollects my
emotions in tranquility? Without the mantle of authority—who gives me such
authority—whiteness? Maleness? Europeanness? Without the mantle of authority
what is the lyric voice? We seldom think of the lyric voice as one of authority…but
it is, with the weight of tradition behind it, even in its sometimes critical stance
against society or the state.
68

Thus, according to Philip, the colonizing history of the lyric provides no space for the
postcolonial Black experience and its relayed traumas. It is a representation of imposed identity,
as she writes, “Is the polyvocular the natural voicedness of women? Of Blacks? Is it because
our sense of self is constituted of so many representations—the gaps, the silences between
those selves—the many selves presented to us as African or woman?”
69
Polyvocality, one of
the defining motifs in Zong!, destabilizes that top-down mentality, the many voices breaking the
common structure of “I” telling “you/reader” something of value.
70
That is a colonialist structure,
a hegemonic approach—one we see employed in Gregson v. Gilbert.
With this court holding, Philip certainly has a representation of the hegemonic institution,
and she attempts to bear up the pain and deaths it obfuscates. As readers of Zong!, as with Philip
herself, are forced to reckon not only with the enslaved people being equated to objects, but that
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 217
the very language used to objectify them—and employed in instructing them to jump to their
deaths—was one inscrutable to those most thoroughly harmed or destroyed by it.
71
As someone
approaching the document with an ahistorical materialist bent,
72
and considering the brutality the
document bears up, it is unsurprising that Philip’s engagement with the text is a violent one. She
writes, “At times it feels as if I am getting revenge on ‘this fuck-mother motherfucking language’
of the colonizer…bringing chaos into the language or, perhaps more accurately, revealing the
chaos that is already there.”
73
Those in the West (and where the West/European powers have
invaded and colonized) are led to believe the law and other such institutions create order—to
Philip this is a façade hiding the turmoil that cultivates an empowered/disempowered dichotomy.
That fosters trauma. As Glissant writes, “Those who dominate benefit from chaos; those who are
oppressed are exasperated by it.”
74
Thus Philip attempts to reveal the chaos pushed within the
structures of order, the oppression it imposed, imposes. The violence on the Zong brought the
court document about, Philip’s actions of violence on that document generated Zong!, engaging
with what Philip calls “a poetics of the unsayable.”
75

Zong! is increasingly fragmented as you move deeper into the book. It often involves sounds and
syllables rather than full words—beginning with straight-forward erasure of Gregson v. Gilbert
(as in FIGURE 1) and ending with predominantly unreadable text. Through this process, Philip
explains, “For the first time in my writing life, I felt, this is my language—the grunts, moans,
utterances, pauses, sounds, and silences. I feel that now in a powerful sense.”
76
This is not a
happy recognition, though it likely provided remarkable relief in her ability to create a space for
such linguistic identity that has defined her art—what “chose her.” But it isn’t a site of closure.
The form of Zong! so clearly comes from trauma, and the product is not without emotional cost.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 218
“This language of limp and wound. Of the fragment. And, in its fragmentation and brokenness
the fragment becomes mind. Becomes me. Is me,” Philip writes.
77
Her methods of reckoning
with this relayed trauma through creative production, because of its apparent embodiment of her
identity in her interaction with language, made the book a particularly difficult one to produce.
Within it, Philip grapples not only with the events surrounding the Zong, but the oppression of
colonialist language, of archive, of law—how that all informs her current identity. And this is
manifest in the form.
TO PROCESS, IN FORM
Philip states in an interview, “[T]his is what Zong! is attempting: to find a form to bear this story
which can’t be told, which must be told, but through not telling.”
78
It is through Philip’s ideas
concerning language and her method of connection to her relayed trauma that she generates the
forms of Zong!. Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite writes, “It was in language that the slave was
perhaps most successfully imprisoned by his master, and it was in his (mis-)use of it that he most
effectively rebelled.”
79
Philip certainly takes this approach, but “misuse” is too demure a term for
her interaction with the hegemonic powers’ language. She writes about her process with the
Gregson v. Gilbert document, stating, “I mutilate the text as the fabric of African life and lives of
these men, women and children were mutilated…I murder the text, literally cutting it to
pieces…throwing articles, prepositions, conjunctions overboard, jettisoning adverbs.”
80
This is
an act of vengeance, the language representative of that aspect of systemic oppression—the form
a means to harm the body of the text in retribution for the dead. Philip does this “until my hands
bloodied, from so much killing and cutting, reach into the stinking, eviscerated innards” and, she
explains, like an augur, she “reads the untold story that tells itself by not telling.”
81
Thus the
violence is for the purpose of further knowledge—comprehension of what is incomprehensible,
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 219
and still manifests itself in a way one cannot “read,” but can know. As Lippit writes, “a visibility
born from annihilation.”
82
Yet Philip does this thoughtfully, as she notes, “To ‘write’ about
what happened in a logical, linear way is to do a second violence.”
83
The enigmatic “story
that cannot but must be told” is a mantra in Philip’s “Notada” section in the back matter of
Zong!.
84

The violent acts on the Zong and Philip’s desire for comprehension of that violence, in
addition to the content of the court document, ultimately shaped the form of the text.
Throughout, there is incessant repetition and wordplay—slight alterations to words until their
alternative meanings create a third interpretation due to their proximity. One of the most
compelling instances of this is in “Sal,” which a speaker describes a woman’s drowning followed
by: [see FIGURE 2]. “es / oh / es” is of course a homophone of S.O.S., or “save our souls,” but this
transforms into os (bone)—“save us os / salve / and save / our souls.”
85
This continues to dance
between “save” and “salve” until “salve the slav / e salve to / sin salve / slave salve,” the italics
of salve having it shimmer from an emollient to a Latin term simultaneously for parting and
greeting.
86
With a shifting of letters we move between rescuing and aiding (save / salve) then,
with italicization, a greeting/farewell—all within close proximity to “slave.” Through shuffling
or expunging of a single letter, with repetition, Philip produces a multitude of meanings. This
linguistic fracturing restored some of the power for Philip. She writes, “it was my engagement
with language…that helped me to understand how the fragment can resonate and have great
power. For those of us who often have nothing but fragments of our original cultures, this was
revelatory.”
87
Thus grasping the limitations that define her identity, the fragments of heritage that
wend their way through time defined by trauma, Philip constructed as apt a form to illustrate this
fact. To make it a work of increasing fragmentation and repetition.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 220
The repetition also functions alternatively, particularly in consideration of how we
generally engage with traumatic events and knowledge. Philip writes on her impulse for
repetition, that “those of us who have been victims—and sometimes perpetrators—made
manifest in our continued need to go over the same material time and time again, trying to find
answers, trying to come up with different understandings of what this experience has been all
about.”
88
For Philip, repetition, wordplay, “(mis-)use” of the language is a potential process to
access meaning. As Edkins writes, “Abuse by the state, the fatherland, like abuse by the
father within the family, cannot be spoken in language, since language comes from and
belongs to the family and the community.”
89
Yet, as Philip notes time and again, this is an
untellable event, a trauma which seems to have no meaning or logic to comprehend—it fights
direct relay. How Philip grapples with her experience of receiving this complicated relayed
trauma is ultimately more an exploration of humanity’s methods of locating meaning, even when
there seems to be none to locate. To trot out the mind’s desire to work through a narrative that is
so painful it cannot be contained in normative grammar.
90
Philip states, “I teeter between
accepting the irrationality of the event and the fundamental human impulse to make meaning
from phenomena around us.”
91
Thus her poetic form manifests this process more than anything
else, producing a text that generally overwhelms the space of the page and produces
comprehensible snippets that are few and far between [see FIGURE 4]. As Erin M. Fehskens
writes, “Instead of apprehending the Zong in any space, the massacres and attempts at
representing it inhabit every space.”
92
With fragmentation and reassembly of text from Gregson
v. Gilbert, Philip is literally reconnecting bodies of words, excavating silenced voices. She
writes, “in fragmenting the words, the stories locked in DNA of those words are released.”
93
This
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 221
is as if to say, I will try to find the truth in this madness, their voices. I will fucking break it open
and dig—and I will locate something.
It is the absences in Zong!, the spaces in particular, that inscribe powerful meaning in the
text. These are the silences that whirl around the repeated and fragmented words. As poet and
scholar Evie Shockley writes, “the most important things happening in that poem [Zong!] are
happening in the spaces between the words and word clusters.”
94
Philip explains, “each cluster of
words is seeking the space or the silence above. And this creates a number of alternatives for
meaning and reading…the text becomes an aesthetic translation of the physical containment, the
legal containment that marked our arrival in this part of the world.”
95
The white space, the
silences, surround the text. Absences define their meaning, or at the very least limit their
possibilities. Katie Eichorn writes in “Multiple Registers of Silence in M. NourbeSe Philip's
Zong!,” “any account of slavery…requires one to pay even greater attention to silence, both as
something discursively produced and as something that can and does function as speech or at
least as an audible interruption.”
96
Who or what silences, is silenced, is an urgent element of the
Atlantic slave trade from our modern perspective. Thus, for Philip, the silence plays as vital a
role as “(mis-)use” of language. How silence, the silenced, can tell a story, too. It forces the
reader to consider these gaps with distinct focus. Through the blanks, Philip is constructing a
counterarchive—an archive of silences. A space for those silenced voices, those otherwise
redacted or evaded in the archive of language/text, to receive attention—to have the narrative of
their communication, their relay, considered, too. This also turns inward to subjective
comprehension of the impact of such silences on the self. As Shockley writes, Philip
not only reconstruct[s] a sense of the speechlessness (in effect) of the passengers in
the hold, but also to demonstrate to the rest of us that even when we believe we
have freedom to use whatever words we wish to use, that we have the entire
lexicon…at our disposal…much of the language we work with is already
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 222
preselected and limited, by fashion, by cultural norms—by systems that shape us
such as gender and race—by what’s acceptable. By order, logic, and rationality.
97

The logic that constructed the brief legal document for Zong! directly defines us—what means
we have to communicate and be through language. Philip’s fragmentation and repetition thus
illustrates the methods of linguistic oppression without playing by those rules.
That all said, Philip’s role in Zong!’s production is a more complicated one than it
initially seems, with a muddling of identity, those linked by language. A Creolization occurs
here—different identities of slaver and enslaved are linked, yet distinct. This is also explicit in
Philip’s creative practice. She is not poet, medium, embodying creative retribution only—she
recognizes overlap between her acts and those of the colonizer in her taking a language and
enacting violence, being the arbiter of information. Glissant’s concept of relation “in which each
and every identity is extended through a relationship with the other”
98
is clearly Philip’s method
of engagement in Zong!. Glissant describes people he dubs “flash agents,” writing, “Today flash
agents are relay agents who are in tune with the implicit violence of contacts between cultures
and the lightning speed of techniques of relation.”
99
Not only is Philip “in tune” with such
violence—with the production of Zong! she becomes an active participant. And this is not
without its cost and confusion. While she engages deeply with the Zong’s Atlantic African
ghosts and predominately the spirit Setaey Adamu Boateng, Philip also likens herself to Captain
Collingwood embarking on a journey,
100
considers her task to be one balanced between action
and passivity with the traumas relayed to her. She writes,
In simultaneously censoring the activity of the reported text while conjuring the
presence of excised Africans, as well as their humanity, I become both censor and
magician…I replicate the censorial activity of the law, which determines which
facts should or should not become evidence; what is allowed into the record and
what is or is not. As magician, however, I conjure the infinite(ive) of to be of the
“negroes” on board the Zong.
101

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 223
Just as Glissant explains in his concept of root identity (imperialism, law, myth) versus relational
identity (chaotic relations between cultures), this is not simply colonizer versus colonized, but
rather accounts for something beyond mere dichotomy. For Philip and other African Diaspora,
the element of entanglement is hard to ignore. It is undoubtedly easier to have the clear-cut evil
villain in the slaver, but the connection between oppressor and oppressed here is more
complicated—and Philip bears this up in her process as well as her poetry through the voices the
work contains.
While Zong! privileges the ghosts of the West Africans on board the ship, it also includes
the crew and British slave law—heeding Glissant’s concept of relation. This manifests itself
most explicitly by the third section, “Ventus” (Latin for “wind”
102
), in which an entirely different
script appears, often addressing a beloved named “Ruth.” At one point it reads (with surrounding
text)
103
: [see FIGURE 3]. Much later we see (pieced together), “my fri / end i p / en this to y / ou since y / ou are
my f / riend,”
104
implying this is indeed written script, and that of a crewmember. This inclusion is
emotionally trying for Philip. She explains in an interview it is indeed “a white Euro male voice,
who is confronting his own actions and responsibility in this horrific event, and ordinarily I
would never have been interested in that voice, and for good reason. [At times] I would think,
‘shut the fuck up already, we’ve heard enough about and from you!’”
105
Yet Philip allowed the
voice to remain (“this is what was surfacing in the text”
106
), heeding whatever traumas were
relayed to her, no matter the source. She is engaging with the chaotic relations between cultures
Glissant describes, not censoring the complication of intersections between slaver/enslaved.
Thus while Philip understandably has little interest in the white Euro male experience, it
is one that can play a role in her understanding of her own relayed traumatic experiences. The
source, rather than the traumatic material, is cause for revulsion here. Yet the violences on the
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 224
Zong inextricably linked these figures to one another, each informing Philip (and the reader)
more about the traumas that distinguished and/or killed so many, and thus providing a relational
interaction with those traumas. The fragmented form ultimately is Philip’s means of some relief,
pointing back to Glissant’s relational poetics. She writes, “[Zong!] is all about words being in
relationship to each other. Words creating spaces to allow other words to breathe. Colonialism
was not about this kind of Relationship. It was rather about power—power over.”
107
Thus while
the slaver’s voice is present, it remains on Philip’s terms—fragmented, surrounded by silences,
and avoiding the power dynamics that so defined his role in the Zong traumas, the ghosts it
created.

SPECTRAL INTERVENTIONS
Zong! feels unearthly—and this isn’t due to the fact the book cover states Philip was told the
words by the spirit Setaey Adamu Boateng,
108
and thus being upfront about the instrumental role
haunting plays in Philip receiving such intimate traumatic knowledge. The strangeness of it, the
near-inability to comprehend it, the slipperiness of the language, is all thoroughly destabilizing.
As with reading Gertrude Stein, it forces you to relearn how to engage with the page. And, also
like Stein, this work fights recall. Philip herself has a similar experience. She writes, “When I
think of Zong! nothing is very clear in the work. The images are fleeting, it’s almost as if you
can’t pin them down, as if they’re ghosts.”
109
Considering the facts of the Zong massacres and
the Atlantic slave trade as a whole, ghostly presence and transmission of information is an
alternative means of gaining that information. Raw data of death tolls gives us little insight into
the particular traumas of the Middle Passage. Smallwood writes, “A great deal has been learned
from the data on mortality aboard the slave ship, but overall numbers—and our interpretation of
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 225
them—correspond only loosely to the ways African captives experienced and understood
shipboard mortality.”
110
This is coupled with the fact that, as mentioned earlier in this chapter,
the documentation to which we do have quick and easy access in the normative archive were
scratched into parchment by those who profited from and enacted the Atlantic African
enslavement—slavers, ship crewmembers, and auctioneers. And the racism associated with the
“validity” of the alternative means of access to traumatic knowledge is explicit, and not a new
belief. As Taylor writes, “from the sixteenth century onward, scholars have complained about the
lack of valid sources. Although these claims go unchallenged, the early friars made clear the
ideological assumptions/biases of what counts as sources.”
111
The danger here of course is that
those whose voices have been redacted, warped, and ignored as a “valid source” remain largely
unknown. Hegemonic history continues to repeat itself, without reckoning.
112
Yet Philip is
making an intervention within that cycle. While she habitually states this is the “story that cannot
be told,” she pushes against that apparent fact through creative production and ghostly encounter.
For if we decide something is “unspeakable,” and heed that impulse, as Edkins writes, “The
result of this is that we are excused from further inquiry.”
113
To adhere to the knowledge
contained within the normative archive, we abide by those who have crafted it for centuries.
Without pushing for the specificity of trauma beyond raw data, in deciding anything beyond that
is “unimaginable,” we ignore the traumatic realities that harmed and killed innumerable people.
As Brogan writes, “Historical meaning and ethnic identity are established through the
process of haunting.”
114
If we are willing to accept that history and the past are not the same, we
must simultaneously accept the ghost as a source of knowledge.
Thus while I recognize the value of Derrida’s idea that “there is no witness for the
witness”—that some traumas simply cannot be claimed and understood by another—I push back
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 226
at his assumption that “there is never a witness for the witness”
115
for it simultaneously assumes
that, one: those traumas can and will remain illegible to others and, two: ghosts cannot select
witnesses of their deaths and concealed experiences for relay. Agamben agrees with Derrida in
part, describing the “lacunae” within testimony by survivors of deadly encounters. He writes,
“The survivors speak in their stead, by proxy, as pseudo-witnesses; they bear witness to a
missing testimony. And yet to speak here of proxy makes no sense; the drowned have nothing to
say, nor do they have instructions or memories to be transmitted.”
116
These drowned have a good
deal to say, as Philip illustrates and, considering her feeling that she was being pushed to write
certain voices, in specific ways.
117
And that the book is “As told to the author by Setaey Adamu
Boateng” shows this is not a haunting dictated by Philip, but that to which she gives herself over
to, openly, to encounter the traumatic knowledge the ghosts decide to provide her.
Avery Gordon calls for a shifting of interrogation from “How can we be accountable to
people who seemingly have no counted in the historical record?” to “How are we accountable for
the people who do the counting?”
118
To dismiss the possibility of ghostly encounters is to heed
the hegemonic approach to the world as dictated by patriarchal and colonial powers. It is to
quash the notion that those harmed and killed by those same powers have absolutely no means of
recourse, of relay. This ascribes more power to hegemony than it deserves, and undermines the
ability of the spirit after it is relieved of the pressure and oppression hegemony imposed upon it
when it was in a body. As M. Jacqui Alexander notes, “The dead do not like to be forgotten.”
119

Indeed it is clear they are disruptive (or inspiring or healing) when it seems they are neglected in
cultural memory. Edkins writes, “What has been forgotten—subjugated knowledges—like the
memory of past traumas, returns to haunt the structures of power that instigated the violence in
the first place. Trauma is that which refuses to take its place in history as done or finished
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 227
with.”
120
This definition of trauma is simultaneously one of the most expansive yet precise I have
encountered. It contains the vast cultural traumas as well as the personal—and implies the
spectral response (refusal of closure) and the agency of those after trauma marks them in some
way and/or precipitates their deaths. The desire to continue the dialog with the living, to relay the
knowledge their traumas contain as potentially protective, gives insight into the current moment
if nothing else. As Grace M. Cho writes, “When an unspeakable or uncertain history…takes the
form of a ‘ghost,’ it searches for bodies through which to speak. In this way, the ghost is
distributed across the time-space of diaspora.”
121
Because of the value of information regarding
“unspeakable” traumas for the Black Diaspora whose progenitors encountered or succumbed to
them—the impact upon the present trajectory of the living members of the Diaspora, this relay of
traumatic knowledge, is urgent to comprehending their present state in the larger social system
through which the living move and attempt to endure.
Traumas of the past, otherwise unknown in their particulars, (numbers of dead, sure—but
experience or “a reality that exceeds facts,”
122
not really) can shine a light on present
subjugations and the systems in place to maintain that position in the world. Otherwise, as poet
and scholar Alice Ostriker writes, “silence is surrender”
123
—in this case, to the status quo, the
ignorance of the past, and all that is required for hegemonic powers to remain in their locations
of dominance. These revelations are not benign to the recipient of traumatic relay. As Brogan
notes, “The ghost gives body to memory, while reminding us that remembering is not a simple or
even safe act.”
124
For Philip this was the case during an encounter with a single word, a
description in a sales book otherwise filled with “negroe man” or “negroe woman” in which she
finds several “Negroe girl (meagre).” Philip writes, “This description leaves me shaken—I want
to weep. I leave the photocopied sheet of the ledges sitting in my old typewriter for days. I
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 228
cannot approach the work for several days.”
125
This is the moment of collapsed identity (no
names, only monetary value of thirty pounds sterling
126
)—yet “meagre” gives us something,
gave Philip something. It is a trace of the crossing and the trauma as scanable upon the girl’s
body. The ghost punctures, similarly. As Abraham and Torok note, “It is memory entombed in a
fast and secure place, awaiting resurrection.”
127
The resurrected memory of the ghost reveals the
interiority of an event or situation otherwise obscured in the archive. It flouts the laws of time
and space with an urgency—even if the relayed knowledge harms (“I want to weep”), it is
ultimately acting in order to provoke understanding within the haunted subject. To invite
comprehension beyond reduction of knowledge into ledgers. Alexander pins this issue down,
writing,
Spirit energy both travels in Time and travels differently through linear time, so
that there is no distance between space and time that it is unable to navigate. Thus,
linear time does not exist because energy simply does not obey the human idiom.
What in human idiom is understood as past, present, and future are calibrated into
moments in which mind and Spirit encounter the energy of a dangerous memory, a
second’s glimpse of an entire life…all penetrating the web of interactive energies
made manifest.
128

It is through death that the specter can cast off the “human idiom” of time and move freely,
encountering those with whom it hopes to initiate contact, relay knowledge. The ghosts of
subjugated persons are able to locate an agency otherwise denied them in life. As the poet
Morgan Parker recently stated, “[L]inear time isn’t real. It’s bullshit, and it’s white nonsense.”
129

Ghosts exploit this fact. The impact trauma often has upon those who sustain it—breaking the
acceptance of chronological time, fearing the present safe state is the past site of danger, the
difficulty of recalling the event(s) in sequential order—feeds into the issue of what is considered
a “valid” archival source as Taylor describes.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 229
Those who endure and die from traumatic experiences are often the people whose
identities are subjugated by hegemonic powers throughout history. Those who survive these
traumas and attempt to testify or relay them often struggle to do so in ways acknowledged by
those who maintain the normative archive. This points to why, in part, Philip’s forms throughout
Zong! push against the lyrical, against narrative. She is attempting to document an “untellable”
event through the ghosts’ voices spilling onto the page. She writes, “Zong! is hauntological; it is
a work of haunting, a wake of sorts, where the spectres of the dead make themselves present.”
130

Zong! places itself within the lacunae of knowledge regarding the Zong event—just one of
thousands of similar deadly traumas throughout the years of the Atlantic slave trade and which,
as Philip points out, “The only reason we have a record is because of insurance.”
131
Because of
her attention to this record, and her deep distrust of it, the specters begin to speak—and Philip
writes their experiences, breaks and fights traditional form to endeavor containing the
uncontainable, telling the untellable, on the page. She writes, “it is so instinctive, this need to
impose meaning.”
132
Yet despite her best efforts to fight meaning, form, and narrative, portions
Zong! indeed include traceable narrative. Two ghosts, in particular, relay their traumas, and
Philip allows room for their stories, identities, and specificity. Their chronology.
One of these is the “white Euro male voice” that provokes Philip to think “shut the fuck
up already, we’ve heard enough about and from you!”
133
—which she nevertheless includes
because it is the ghostly information coming to her, ostensibly provoking insight that she might
otherwise miss. This unnamed crewmember’s narrative is intertwined with a West African on
board named Wale, and manifests itself in “Ferrum” (iron). The events culminate with Wale
asking the crewmember to write a letter to his wife, Sade. It ends with Wale’s suicide.
134

“Ferrum” is largely from the perspective of that crewmember
135
to his beloved Ruth or his
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 230
interior voice, recording his observations of a life of an enslaved person on the Zong (Wale), and
describing Wale and Sade’s life together and eventual kidnapping in West Africa. In large part
this involves descriptions of the crewmembers meals, prayers—but also the massacres
themselves: “wa / ter / to se / cure our pro / fit we th / row them to res / cue our for / tunes … to
se / cure their re / scue the / y fall o / ver bo / ard to pre / serve our profit”; “t / his story i / s not
mi / ine to t / ell tell i / t i m / ust it was on / ly trade after a / ll.” While this is the rationale of the
captain and British law, the crewmember does see it differently: “it was a c / ase of m / urder i te / ll you”
136

His villainy not so clear, Philip creates space for the troubled slave ship crewmember to speak,
too.
Throughout “Ferrum,” the crewmember tells of Wale and Sade’s love, their child (Ade),
attempts to evade capture, and eventual seizure—Sade apparently in the hands of Ruth,
137
with
Wale on the Zong. The powerful and often disorienting section ends with Wale approaching the
crewmember: “i see yo / u to wri / te a / ll ti / me me wa / le you wr / ite for m / e,” which the
man does.
138
The letter reads, “de / ar sade you b / e my queen e / ver me i mi / ss you & a / de al / l my lif / e.”
139

Wale then eats the letter to Sade and says “sa / de fé / mi i / fá if / á if o / nly ifá” and leaps into
the Atlantic.
140
This, according to Philip’s glossary, translates from Yoruba as (roughly): “Sade
loves me divination divination divination”
141
The script can do nothing, the text can go nowhere
on a ship in the Atlantic—certainly not to an enslaved woman in England who cannot read
English. The desperation to create a message, to make feeling legible was so urgent to Wale—
yet his recognition of the impossibility for that message to be accessible to the woman to whom
it is addressed is crushing, causing his suicide.
The act of ingesting the hegemonic text, the feelings made legible by hegemonic
methods, destroys Wale. His love lost, his identity collapsed, the oppressor’s language in his
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 231
mouth, Yoruba on his tongue, he chooses death. After Wale jumps into the sea, the crewmember
states, “i ca / ll his na / me & f / all too t / o my on / ce my noo / nce queen of the ni / ger the sa /
ble o / ne nig / ra afra.”
142
The crewmember dies then, too, calling from the water or perhaps
merely in his mind, as Wale expresses himself similarly: “sa / d / e oh ye ye afr / i / ca oh.” The
section’s final words come from an omniscient: “o / ver & o / ver the o / ba s / o / b / s”
143
“Oba”
is Yoruba for king, and the statement that the oba is crying or sobbing is a recurring motif in
Zong!. Here, it points to Wale and Sade calling one another king and queen. The weeping and
death defining this series of pieces. Words on paper mean nothing to enslaved people on an
isolated ship. Words are the means of slavers’ attempt to legitimize brutality and murder, of
West Africans’ destruction. Distrust the words, exterminate them. You will have greater success
relaying your pain and trauma after death than in life. The horror of this truth coupled with the
horrors of the daily reality on the ship enough to send Wale to suicide. By Western literary
standards and concepts of narrative, this is one of the more “legible” threads of Zong!—a
narrative a reader can likely trace. Considering Philips’ ethos for the text, this fact has its
complication for me in that it reveals the appeal narrative has to me, how I grasp for it when it
comes in Zong!, even from the voice of the oppressor. While Zong! often fights specific
meaning, it is experiential—focused on producing feeling rather than fixed comprehension. This
is largely in the most important element of the text’s existence, which this “Ferrum” section
points to explicitly if one is self-reflective: the reader. As Quéma writes, “The poem makes the
Ancestors manifest, but this manifestation cannot occur without the work that is expected from
readers.”
144

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 232
READERS’ ROLES
The incessant fragmentation progresses to the utmost margins of most of Zong!’s large pages by
the end. It is visually overwhelming, fighting the common conventions of written literature we
often see today. Thus, for many, when first encountering Zong!, the impulse is to snap it shut.
145

This was certainly my experience when it was assigned in a course I took several years ago. The
class, made up of predominantly white students, didn’t know where to begin, how to enter. This
is, unsurprisingly, a telling response.
146
While not necessarily true for only Anglo readers, the
feeling of being “shut out” of a thoughtful text regarding the Atlantic slave trade is likely not the
fault of the literature, but of the reader. As Philip explains, “I have never set out to be difficult in
my work…I understand that when someone looks at a page of Zong!, they may wonder what to
do with it.”
147
Yet Philip is quick to note the double standard regarding “difficult” art—
“Difficulty is supposed to be the preserve of the white, European male. Not the Black female.”
148

Thus the dismissing or ignoring Philip and Zong! for being too difficult or illegible—while, at
the same time, being more than willing to read The Waste Land with its opacity or John Giorno’s
poems with their polyvocality—merely illustrates the need for a book such as Zong! to exist and
be read despite readerly discomfort. It is not meant to be easy. Receiving the experience of one’s
relayed trauma rarely is. While reading of another’s traumatic experiences is certainly difficult,
particularly for an empathic reader, trauma (as we well know) can happen to anyone—be it a
privileged or disenfranchised person. The particular trouble of reading about relayed trauma is
that it includes the usual emotional cost of engaging with trauma, but is compounded due to the
author’s disempowerment. Their trauma is linked to subjugation, which we as readers must, to
some extent, witness and sustain. The additional element of relayed trauma in Zong! for white
Western readers is the legacy of their own identity implicated in the traumas it describes. This is
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 233
not meant to imply that Zong! is “meant” for a white readership alone—the population that
should “learn” the from it—but that Philip’s form and content may be met with the most
resistance from that population. Her form explicitly bears up this difficulty in order to engage her
readers in a pointedly challenging way.
Ultimately Zong! is a book that requires readerly participation beyond what one often
encounters with a text. Philip explains her intention is for the reader to become a “cocreator”
along with her: “The form accomplishes that by allowing the reader certain options on how to
read, and it is in the process of making choices to read that the reader becomes cocreator.”
149
The
form at times is so diffuse, you, the reader, must choose how it is arranged in the process of the
eye scanning the page, taking in and deciding information. This position of power, as Philip’s
position of power when producing the book, inculpates the reader, too. Veronica Austin in her
essay “Zong!’s ‘Should We?’: Questioning the Ethical Representation of Trauma” discusses the
impact of readerly decision making in the text and thus subjective sense-making. She states,
“Philip’s text sets up a contradictory necessity: readers are positioned at once to have to do more
work, thereby potentially to assert more power over the text and the historical event it represents
and to have that position of power denied.”
150
The infinite approaches to Zong! can act as an
example of how language, when looked at differently, can serve any number of purposes.
Philip struggled in creating the text in the first place, owning a kind of complicated
complicity in engaging with Gregson v. Gilbert. In the “Notada” section of the book, she writes,
“In the discomfort and disturbance created by the poetic text, I am forced to make meaning from
apparently disparate elements—in so doing I implicate myself. The risk—contamination—lies in
piecing together the story that cannot be told.”
151
Thus the human impulse to comprehend, to
make meaning or sense from something entirely senseless, to create narrative in an untellable
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 234
story, Philip “implicates herself.” This bleeds into her readers, too. She continues, “[S]ince we
have to work to complete the events, we all become implicated in, if not contaminated by, this
activity.”
152
The desire for completion of narrative where it must be “untold” leaves us all guilty,
or at the very least tainted. “Notada” is the back matter of Zong!—what we encounter after
making our way through the body of the book. With this placement, Philip is avoiding any
warning of our impulse to narrativize when reading, what that might mean. This was her
intention—that her readers, along with herself, recognize this implication and/or contamination
only after it is complete.
Philip’s challenging poetic form is Glissant’s Relational poetics writ large: “This is not a
passive participation. Passivity plays no part in Relation.”
153
Zong! embodies chaotic expression,
but also the requirement of deep connectivity—even if you are connecting to a trauma outside
your heritage or ancestral experience, even if these ghosts are not yours. It is demanding the
reader participate in this trauma’s relay—to encounter it through implication and feeling rather
than passive reading and logical comprehension. It is through this painful chaos and engagement
with it (here through active reading) that connectivity through “shared knowledge” takes place.
As with Relation—and relayed trauma.
154

I am not arguing that any reader of Zong! will come out the other side a recipient of
relayed trauma just as if they were of Black Diasporic heritage and fully comprehending the
horrors of the Middle Passage. Ideally it will act as a kind of mirror at times, as when reading
“Ferrum” and receiving narrative, my own impulse to follow that narrative carefully—the
disturbing truth of my gravitating toward the voice and storytelling methods of the oppressor.
Philip is thoughtfully producing a text that either requires her reader engage with this
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 235
information, this untellable knowledge, and forces them to tell it themselves—or not engage at
all. The book will not do that work for you. You must choose. Philip writes,
The not-telling of this particular story is in the fragmentation and mutilation of the
text, forcing the eye to track across the page in an attempt to wrest meaning from
words gone astray…The resulting abbreviated, disjunctive, almost non-sensical
style of the poems demands a corresponding effort on the part of the reader to
“make sense” of an event that eludes understanding, perhaps permanently.
155

By filling the gaps, by providing meaning to meaningless brutality, what Philip calls “anti-
meaning,”
156
you are an active participant in it, too—for this is your human impulse. Zong!
ideally illuminates the implications of this impulse for its reader, leaving no one unscathed. You
are then within Glissant’s chaotic connectivity between people, its relay.
Glissant’s Relation and relayed trauma is perhaps most fully realized during some of
Philip’s public presentations of Zong!, in which she engages her audience to connect with the
text through performance alongside herself. With handouts disseminated throughout the crowd,
Philip assigns the audience different roles, turns off lights and has them shout the lines in the
dark holding candles or flashlights to their pages. They stand as a group, speaking the ghostly
words of Zong!, creating an immersive experience.
157
Who is whom, who bears what role or
identity, is not so simple here. At one recent event, Philip had a bottle of water on a table with
questions from audience members submerged within it, explaining they themselves were
drowned in the water—before inviting other members of the audience to come up and extract a
question, read it as if the question were their own.
158
The use of water as a potential means of
destruction (the paper will eventually deteriorate), but also a location for inquiry, is a powerful
one, directly linking to Philip’s idea of the water as archive—a place of storage. It is also an
equalizer, making audience ideas and questions interchangeable. At the start of this same event,
each audience member received a handout containing an excerpt from Zong! when entering the
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 236
space. At one point Philip told the audient to read their text aloud, over and over if the piece was
a brief one. She remained at the front of the audience singing and altering the phrase “falling
over,” repeatedly. This lasted roughly five minutes.
159
Performances such as these are thoroughly
moving, forcing what is frequently the speaker-versus-audience dynamic to fully destabilize (as
with Philip’s avoiding of European, lyrical, first-person verse). The polyvocality is immersive,
different audience members speak from any one (or many) of the voices from the Zong. None are
clear enough to distinguish. It makes explicit each person’s place in the chaos of Relation. Their
role in the relay of this trauma, even if not as direct recipient but, through Philip’s radical
aesthetics, witness—or participant. The specificity of your role (crew, enslaved Atlantic African,
none of the above) doesn’t matter, only your active participation matters. The engagement in the
relay, rather than the easy remove, yet it has the feeling of inclusivity rather than judgment or
implication. As Fred D’Aguiar writes at the end of his novel Feeding the Ghosts, “The Zong is
on the high seas. Men, women and children are thrown overboard by the captain and his crew.
One of them is me. One of them is you. One of them is doing the throwing, the other is being
thrown. I’m not sure who is who, you or I…There is only the fact of the Zong”
160

On its face, Zong! may appear to be an ordeal for its reader. It ranges from legible to fully
illegible through fragmentation and palimpsest.
161
It is often visually overwhelming, requiring
active readerly choices that will ultimately taint (at best) or implicate (at worst) that reader. This
is all without even touching on the terrible events Zong! addresses. Despite that all being true,
Zong! is one of the most generous poetic texts regarding relayed trauma I have encountered.
How, in the afterword, Philip documents her experience of relayed trauma, how she provides a
revealing chronicle of her process and thinking behind her creative production, how she solicits
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 237
the reader’s engagement despite their positionality in connection to the Atlantic slave trade—it
is, ultimately, an invitation. It is an encircling of all who engage, a thoughtful recognition of
human nature to narrativize what cannot hold narrative, to try to tell the untellable. These are
remarkable decisions on Philip’s part, but her clear desire to make her readers understand her
feeling in response to the Zong massacres, even if the specifics are lost on them, is particularly
astonishing. She is not interested in the usual method of creative production in which she (the
writer) has thoughts and experiences, explores those on the page in isolation, and the product is
then out in the world, inert, for a readership to encounter also in isolation. Zong!, almost ten
years since its publication, has remained dynamic, powerful, and informative—open to anyone
from the ancestors of the Zong’s underwriters to those murdered from its deck and portholes. In
Zong!’s pages and through performance, Philip provides the opportunity for anyone willing to
reckon with the relayed trauma chaotically connecting so many of us in the world—yet which we
so often ignore.

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 238

FIGURE 1

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 239

FIGURE 2

FIGURE 3

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 240
FIGURE 4

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 241
FIGURE 5

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 242
CHAPTER FIVE NOTES
1
Akbar Ahmed, the chair of Islamic Studies at American University is quoted as explaining that if bin Laden were
buried on land it would have quickly become a shrine. “Shrines of controversial figures in Muslim history become
centers to attract the angry, the disenchanted. The shrine bestows powers of religious charisma. If they allowed
Osama bin Laden to be buried in Pakistan, his followers would show up, plant flowers, and women will say the shrine
has healing powers, especially among the uneducated. His myth would continue to grow” (Leland, John, and
Elisabeth Bumiller. "Burial at Sea Aimed to Prevent a Shrine on Land." New York Times, May 2, 2011).
2
Philip, M. NourbeSe. Zong!. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. 194.
3
Ian Baucom takes issue with the violent events on the Zong ship being dubbed “a massacre” rather than multiple
massacres of each West African slave thrown overboard (Baucom, Ian. Specters of The Atlantic: Finance Capital,
Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 130.).
4
Smallwood, Stephanie E. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Harvard
University Press, 2009. 58-9.
Smallwood also writes, “In some Atlantic African communities it was believed that persons who departed in this
way did in fact return but traveled not on the metaphysical plane of the ancestors but rather, transmuted as wine and
gunpowder, on the material plane of commodities—an idea suggesting that the special violence of commodification
produced not only social death, but more ominous still a kind of total annihilation of the human subject” (Smallwood,
61).
5
Ibid. 59.
6
Ibid. 131.
7
Smallwood writes, “Traders and masters alike confronted the universal contradiction inherent in the idea of human
beings as property; conceding that a slave had a will, in order to better devise means to control it, was not an
acknowledgment of the slave’s personhood” (Smallwood, 182). James Walvin cites the contradiction of chains as
well, writing, “chains represented both the fearful apprehension of the enslaver and the ubiquitous, resistant defiance
of the slaved” (Walvin, James. The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2011. 37.).
8
Hortense J. Spillers argues this point similarly in her essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” (Spillers, Hortense J.
"Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book." Diacritics 17, no. 2 [Summer, 1987]: 64-81. 72.).
9
Smallwood, 122. One of the more remarkable revelations while researching for this chapter was learning of the sheer
number of slave revolts that took place during the Middle Passage. While these were rarely “successful” in returning
to West African shores, they often involved crew casualties, and working on a slave ship was often regarded as a
deadly post. Less than half Atlantic slave ships’ crews survived the journey, largely due to their lack of prior
exposure to West African illnesses (which, because of the squalid conditions of those chained below deck, pervaded
the entire ship) (Walvin, The Zong, 45.). This coupled with frequent uprisings made being a member of a slave
ship’s crew a particularly dangerous profession. As Walvin writes, “The wonder is that anyone volunteered to work
on board a slave ship, though the explanation was simple. Most joined because they were poor and desperate and
had no real alternative.” (The Zong, 48). The amount of uprisings, perhaps unsurprisingly, has not made it into the
school textbook realm of education (save, perhaps, the famous Amistad rebellion, or Melville’s Benito Cereno),
promoting the idea of the West Africans as thoroughly abject with no attempt at regaining agency. Certainly not to
the degree to which the Atlantic enslaved persons consistently made such attempts through violence. This is not to
say those who do not rebel are less deserving of recognition or respect—human’s ability to physically and
emotionally overpower others, with little apparent resistance, is what has defined (and continues to define) so many
people both in the intimate and grand scale. It is a key element of oppression. And as Césaire writes, “[Colonialism]
dehumanizes even the most civilized man…the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of
seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to
transform himself into an animal” (Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New
York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. 40.).
10
Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2001. 90, 93.
Édouard Glissant addresses this fact in regards to Jewish diasporic populations which, while dispersed and largely
apart from their place of origin, “they maintained their Judaism, they had not been transformed into anything else”
(Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Translated by J. Michael. Dash. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1989. 17.). Walvin in Black Ivory, writes, “No other slave system was so regulated
and determined by the question of race. No other slave system forcibly removed so many people and scattered them

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 243

across such vast distances—and for such wonderful returns to the slave-owning class” (Walvin, James. Black Ivory:
A History of British Slavery. London: HarperCollins, 1992. xii.).
11
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
6-8.
The “abyss” for Glissant is the ship’s hold as well as the ocean it sails over, the unbearable depths of that despair.
“[I]n actual fact the abyss is tautology: the entire ocean, the entire sea gently collapsing in the end into the pleasures
of sand, make one vast beginning, but a beginning whose time is marked by these balls and chains gone green” (6).
12
Diedrich, Maria, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen, eds. "The Middle Passage between History and Fiction:
Introductory Remarks." In Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. New York: Oxford University Press,
1999. 5-20. 8.
13
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2015. 73.
14
Philip, M. NourbeSe. A Genealogy of Resistance: And Other Essays. Toronto: Mercury Press, 1997. 13.
15
Charras, Françoise. “Landings: Robert Hayden's and Kamau Braithwaite's Poetic Renderings of the Middle Passage
in Comparative Perspective.” Edited by John Louis Gates, Jr. and Carl Pedersen. In Black Imagination and
the Middle Passage, edited by Maria Diedrich, 57-69. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 58.
Walvin writes, “Each slave landed in the Americas with his or her own unique memory of enslavement. A mere
handful left an account of their experiences, though we know a great deal from the accounts of their tormentors”
(Walvin, James. Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery. London: HarperCollins, 1992. 33.).
16
Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah and Vincent Carretta. Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Other
Writings. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. 17.
The thrust of Cugoano’s argument was largely how unchristian the practice of chattel slavery was—though he notes
that one needn’t be a Christian to recognize “that those men, who are procurers and holders of slaves, are the greatest
villains in the world” (25).
17
Walvin, James. Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery. London: HarperCollins, 1992. 51.
18
Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996. 12.
19
Saidiya Hartman, in an interview with Patricia Saunders, notes on the archive and her book Lose Your Mother, “The
nature of the archive, and/or the absence of captive Africans as subjects in the discourse of slavery, and the absence
that haunts the physical spaces of confinement made writing the book seem impossible. How does one write about
a history that is this encounter with nothing; or write about a past that has been obliterated so that even traces aren’t
left. That entails more than a critique of the archive. This absence or loss was a window onto the enormity of
violence that characterized the process of captivity and enslavements” (Saunders, Patricia J. "Fugitive Dreams of
Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman." Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, article 7
[June 2008]. 4.).
20
Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the
Sacred. Duke University Press, 2005. 307.
21
Philip, Zong!, frontmatter.
22
Ibid. 202.
23
Ibid. 202.
24
Smallwood, 6.
25
Philip, Zong!, 202.
26
Liverpool was a major hub of the Atlantic slave trade for a century, with roughly 5,000 voyages embarked from the
city from 1690-1807. (Walvin, The Zong, 21). The Zong was formerly the Dutch Zorg or “Care,” captured by
England and renamed (Ibid. 69).
27
Walvin, The Zong, 27-8. The common ratio of a British slave ship was 1.75 enslaved people per ship’s tonnage
capacity. The Brookes was 2.3 enslaved people per ton—the Zong was 4.0 enslaved people per ton. As Smallwood
explains, “Because human beings were treated as inhuman objects, the number of bodies stowed aboard a ship was
limited only by the physical dimensions and configuration of those bodies” (Smallwood, 68). Avery Gordon writes
of the Brookes ship engraving was meant to “create an impression of the dehumanization of the slave trade, but it
does so unwittingly, by being able to represent only the plan of the ship and the space for its cargo. The invisibility
and insignificance of the men, women, and children who inhabited the [space] allotted them is an offense that cannot
be avowed in the representation itself” (Gordon, 177).
28
Ibid. 92. While I lean heavily on Walvin’s text, it has a pat, foreboding tone, laden with rhetorical questions that
give it the feel of a “whodunit” crime novel. Ultimately Walvin’s many questions remain unanswered—the ill
Captain Luke Collingwood died in Jamaica, the First Mate James Kelsall never testified in person, and Robert
Stubbs (generally regarded as a duplicitous man who was a civilian passenger serving as first mate at some point
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 244

during the voyage) was the only person to testify in court (Walvin, 86-7). The Zong’s logbook went missing by the
time of the trial (Baucom, 127.). Baucom also provides a description of the events, though not as thoroughly
(Baucom, 129).
29
Walvin, Black Ivory, 15. Emphasis in original text.
30
“The insurer takes upon himself the risk of the loss, capture, and death of slaves, or any unavoidable accident to
them: but natural death is always understood to be excepted: —by natural death is meant, not only when the captive
destroys himself through despair, which often happens: but when slaves are killed, or thrown into the sea in order
to quell an insurrection on their part, then the insurers must answer” (Qtd. in Walvin, The Zong, 112).
31
Baucom, 8.
32
Walvin, The Zong, 157. This is the closest we have to testimony from a Zong’s West African in the normative
archive.
33
Ibid. 99. The crew was in a sorry state themselves. Former First Mate Kelsall “found himself unable to perform any
further duties aboard ship,” Captain Collingwood “became ‘delirious’ after the last slave was drowned and had to
be relieved of his command” (Baucom, 131).
34
Baucom, 109.
35
This was the Gregson slave-trading syndicate which included James Aspinall, George Case, Edward Wilson, and
William, James, and John Gregson. “[William Gregson] was either primary or secondary investor in 177 voyages
which carried 60,669 slaves, of whom 51,082 survived the middle passage…Nine thousand, nine hundred and
fourteen of the human beings taken aboard ships Gregson either owned or co-owned did not reach the Americas
alive” (Baucom, 49).
36
This is through some rough math on my end. Presumably this number is what they were after—there is no extant
documentation on the exact monetary figures in this case. It does seem that the ten West Africans who took their
own lives did not “count” as lost goods, as their deaths were “natural,” precluding them from Gregson’s claim. The
man who successfully returned to the ship, also, seems to not be included. The numbers are slippery, ranging from
130 to 150 dead, depending.
37
Qtd. Philip, Zong!, 210.
38
Baucom, Specters of The Atlantic, 96. Abolitionists Olaudah Equaino (a former enslaved person) and Granville
Sharp did indeed attempt to create a murder case from the Zong massacre, but to no avail.
39
Qtd. Philip, Zong!, 211.
40
Walvin, Black Ivory, 17.
41
Ibid. 17.
42
Baucom, 92-3.
43
Saunders, Patricia. "Defending the Dead, Confronting the Archive: A Conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip."
Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 26 (2008): 66.
I quote from this conversation extensively—Philip and Saunders’ dialog is a remarkable one and is hugely valuable
in understanding the depths of Philip’s thinking while creating Zong!.
44
Walvin, The Zong, 2, 180.
45
Philip, Zong!, 194.
46
Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 63.
47
Philip, Zong!, 191.
48
Ibid. 15.
49
Derrida, Archive Fever, 2.
50
Ibid. 2.
51
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2003. 18.
This book is largely about performance in contemporary and ancient Latinx cultures, but the idea of the archive’s
function most certainly still applies across many spaces.
52
Philip, M. NourbeSe, Antwi Phanuel, and Austen Veronica. "Cocreation in an Uncertain World." Jacket2.
September 17, 2013.
53
Taylor, 25.
54
Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Atomic Light: (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 11.
55
Sears, Laurie Jo. Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive. Honolulu:
University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2013. 2.
While this book is about the Dutch Indies and Indonesian literature, specifically, I find this description of the archive
still applies to my argument.
56
Philip et al, “Cocreation in an Uncertain World.”
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 245

57
Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Nicholas
T. Rand. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1994. 141.
58
Alexander, 294.
59
Ibid. 191. Philip isn’t the only thinker who puts forth this connection. Jahan Ramazani writes that poetry “resembles
the law in its precision, narratives, and…rhetoric,” yet can “unlock silences and disclose what has been legally
suppressed; to retell narratives that include their own counternarratives; to restore a multidimensionality to the past,
even when arguing with an almost legal purposiveness, for the dignity and worth of a humanity that the law had
rendered invisible” (Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 59.).
60
Edkins, Jenny. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 11.
61
Lundy Martin, Dawn, and Lisa Sewell. "The Language of Trauma: Faith and Atheism in M. NourbeSe Philip's
Poetry." In American Poets in the 21st Century: Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century:
Poetics Across North America, edited by Claudia Rankine, 283-307. Vol. 3. Middletown: Wesleyan
University Press, 2012. 302.
62
Baucom, 136.
63
Philip, Zong!, 197.
64
Ibid. 131.
65
Ibid. 47.
66
Mahlis, Kristen. "A Poet of Place: An Interview with M. NourbeSe Philip." Callaloo, 27, no. 3 (Summer, 2004):
682-97. 688-9. This is similarly stated in Philip’s A Genealogy of Resistance, 128-9.
67
Philip, Zong!, 197.
68
Philip, A Genealogy of Resistance, 124. Bolded emphasis in original.
69
Ibid. 115. While this is a quotation about her book She tries her tongue, her silence softly breaks (Wesleyan
University Press, 2015), the concept still applies.
70
Philip’s Zong! is clearly in conversation with Amiri Baraka’s short play Slave Ship, which also uses polyvocality,
non-lingual speech, and definitions of Yoruba terms in the back matter of the text (Baraka, Amiri. "Slave Ship: A
Historical Pageant." In The Motion of History and Other Plays, 129-50. New York: William Morrow and Company,
1978.).
71
Quéma, Anne. "M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!: Metaphors, Laws, and Fugues of Justice." Journal of Law and Society
43, no. 1 (March 2016): 85-104. 102.
72
This is in the Benjaminian sense. Benjamin writes, “Ahistorical materialist therefore disassociates himself from [the
barbaric document] as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain” (Benjamin, Walter.
Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. 256-7.).
73
Philip, Zong!, 205.
74
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
141.
75
Philip, M. NourbeSe. "Wor(l)ds Interrupted." Jacket2. September 13, 2013.
76
Mahlis, "A Poet of Place," 688-9. This is similarly stated in A Genealogy of Resistance, 71, 128-9.
77
Philip, Zong!, 205.
78
Saunders, "Defending the Dead," 72.
79
Brathwaite, Kamau. The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820. Kingston: Ian Randle, 2005. 237.
80
Philip, Zong!, 193.
81
Ibid. 193-4.
82
Lippit, 48.
83
Philip, Genealogy of Resistance, 116. This is also on She tries her tongue, but again applies to Zong!
84
Philip, Zong!, 196. This of course calls up “It was not a story to pass on” from Beloved (Morrison, Toni. Beloved.
New York: Knopf, 1987. 324.).
85
Philip, Zong!, 63.
86
Ibid. 63.
87
Philip, M. NourbeSe. "Nasrin and NourbeSe." In Bla_K: Interviews & Essays, 333-343. Toronto: BookThug, 2017.
340.
88
Saunders, "Defending the Dead," 74.
89
Edkins, 17.
90
This produced even further access to pain for Philip. She explains, “There were things that came out of the text,
phrases like ‘nig, nig, nog,’ and so on, that made me feel nauseous as they would surface. It was very distressing,
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 246

but it was part of the story—I could flinch, but I could not turn away from it” ()Saunders, "Defending the Dead,"
75).
91
Philip, Zong!, 198.
92
Fehskens, Erin M. "Accounts Unpaid, Accounts Untold: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and the Catalogue." Callaloo
35, no. 2 (2012): 407-24. 410.
93
Saunders, "Defending the Dead," 73.
94
Philip, M. NourbeSe. "Interview with an Empire." In Bla_K: Interviews & Essays, 53-68. Toronto: BookThug,
2017. 67.
95
Saunders, “Defending the Dead,” 73.
96
Eichorn, Katie. "Multiple Registers of Silence in M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!" Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics 23
(2010): 33-39. 34.
97
Shockley, Evie. "Going Overboard: African American Poetic Innovation and the Middle Passage." Contemporary
Literature 52, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 791-817. 811.
98
Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 11.
99
Ibid. 166.
100
Philip, Zong!, 191.
101
Ibid. 199.
102
The body of Zong! is divided into six sections: “Os” (bone), “Sal” (salt), “Ventus” (wind), “Ratio” (reason or
central reason for a legal decision), “Ferrum” (iron), and “Ẹbọra” (underwater spirits). Each term is Latin, save for
“Ẹbọra,” which is Yoruba. Philip writes, “I chose Latin to emphasize the connection with the law, which is steeped
in Latin expressions, and, also to reference the fact that Latin is the father tongue in Europe” (Zong!, 209). Each
section’s title represents a major element of the Zong massacres. Diana Leong explains these titles “are drawn from
a word bank comprised of the case and what poet Evie Shockley refers to as ‘imperfect anagrams’ or new words
derived from words in the case” (Leong, Diana. "The Salt Bones: Zong! and an Ecology of
Thirst." Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 23, no. 4 [Autumn 2016]: 798-820. 800.)
103
Ibid. 80.
104
Ibid. 147.
105
Saunders, “Defending the Dead,” 75.
106
Ibid. 75.
107
Philip, M. NourbeSe. "Nasrin and NourbeSe." In Bla_K: Interviews & Essays, 333-343. Toronto: BookThug, 2017.
338.
108
“Setaey is the survivor and decryptor of the untellable event that needs to be told to the future through the
present…Setaey addresses not only the lay but also the dead” (Quéma, “M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!,” 103.).
109
Saunders, "Defending the Dead," 69.
110
Smallwood, 137.
111
Taylor, 34.
112
I recognize in the case of the Zong massacres and British involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, there was
reckoning, in a sense, without the involvement of ghostly contact. And while the Zong events precipitated those
important actions by abolitionists, there is still a lack of information about the specificity of the brutality for those
who may need to access it most—members of the Black Diaspora, but also Anglos who are connected in one way
or another to the slave trade.
113
Edkins, 176.
114
Brogan, 18.
115
Derrida, Jacques. “‘A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text’: Poetics and Politics of Witnessing.” Translated by Rachel
Bowlby. Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today, edited by Michael P. Clark.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 180–207. 195. Emphasis mine.
116
Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
New York: Zone Books, 2000. 34.
117
Saunders, “Defending the Dead,” 75.
118
Gordon, 187-8.
119
Alexander, 59.
120
Edkins, 59.
121
Cho, Grace M. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2008. 40.
While Cho is describing the experience of the Korean diaspora and the American-Korean War, it still applies to
the phenomenon I am attempting to describe.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 247

122
Edkins, 177.
123
Ostriker, Alice. “Beyond Confession: The Poetics of Postmodern Witness.” In After Confession: Poetry as
Autobiography, edited by K. Sontag. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2001. 317-331. 319.
124
Brogan, 29.
125
Philip, Zong!, 194.
126
Ibid. 194.
127
Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Translated by
Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994. 141.
128
Alexander, 309-10.
129
Zucker, Rachel "Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People), Episode 23: Morgan Parker." March
15, 2017.
130
Philip, Zong!, 201.
131
Ibid. 191. Text was originally italicized, denoting it is from a journal written during the production of the
manuscript.
132
Ibid. 194.
133
Saunders, “Defending the Dead,” 75.
134
“Ferrum” is, to Philip, her most accomplished section of Zong!. She writes, “We are trying to find the words to
express what happened. But there are no words, there is no language for it. The closest I came to it was in the last
book, ‘Ferrum,’ where language disintegrates and degrades into sounds expressing that which cannot be expressed”
(Saunders, "Defending the Dead," 74).
135
At times it seems to shift to an omniscient or Wale himself: “i am h / am h / am i am a / m i a / m cur / se o / f go /
d by g / od” (Zong!, 133). While the “Ruth” figure is referenced prior to “Ferrum,” this section addresses her most
explicitly and consistently.
136
Philip, Zong!, 164. The crewmember is no saint—his writing includes temptations to rape female West Africans
and to succumb to the ocean’s sirens.
137
“i ma / ke y /ou a g / ift de / ar ru / th of th / is she ne / gro her na / me is sa / de i cal l / her di / do u / se her as y /
ou w / ill” (Zong!, 151).
138
Ibid. 172.
139
Ibid. 172.
140
Ibid. 172.
141
Ibid. 184. The glossary notes ifà (rather than ifá) means “divination.” I’m presuming the direction of the accent is
a typographical error.
142
Ibid. 173. “Nigra” is Latin for a black woman, “afra” for female African (183).
143
Ibid. 173.
144
Quéma, “M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!,” 104.
145
Sina Queyras writes, “I realize several things at once: this will not be an easy read; this will be a journey…There
is also a vague sense of unease: I may not be the right reader for this book” (Queyras, Sina. "On Encountering
Zong!" Influency Salon. 2014.).
146
Jenny Sharpe notes that, “By refusing the logic of language and narrative, Philip’s poems present a problem for the
reader” (Sharpe, Jenny. "The Archive and Affective Memory in M. Nourbese [sic] Philip's Zong!" Interventions
16, no. 4 [July 11, 2013]: 465-82. 473.). Yet this is a misplaced focus here. The insanity of the history, its lack of
logic, presents “a problem” for Philip and others defined by (among other things) the Atlantic slave trade—thus
Philip actively works to present the “problem” in a way that engages readers who may otherwise avoid the “anti-
meaning” here, as Philip states (Zong!, 201).
147
Philip et al, "Cocreation in an Uncertain World."
148
Ibid.
149
Ibid.
150
Austen, Veronica J. "Zong!'s ‘Should We?’: Questioning the Ethical Representation of Trauma." ESC: English
Studies in Canada 37, no. 3-4 (September 2011): 61-81. 66.
151
Philip, Zong!, 198.
152
Ibid. 198.
153
Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 137.
154
As Glissant notes, “Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge” (Poetics of Relation,
8). This is specifically about the “abyss” of the Middle Passage and the subsequent shared knowledge of the Black
Diaspora, but it applies here. He writes, “This experience of the abyss can now be said to be the best element of
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / THE STORY THAT CANNOT BE TOLD 248

exchange” for its producing “knowledge of the Whole, greater from having been at the abyss and freeing
knowledge of Relation within the Whole” (Poetics of Relation, 8).
155
Philip, Zong!, 198.
156
Ibid. 201.
157
Philip has also done durational readings, collaborated with choreographers, dancers, musicians, and other artists to
create specific events with the Zong! text. Philip, M. NourbeSe "Zong!Readings&Performances2013 15."
YouTube. December 8, 2015. https://youtu.be/zLlUFzrhyAg.
158
&Now Keynote: M. NourbeSe Philip. By M. NourbeSe Philip. California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, March 28,
2015.
159
Ibid.
160
D’Aguiar, Fred. Feeding the Ghosts. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1999. 229-30.
161
Philip, Zong!, 176-82. The final section of Zong!, “Ẹbọra” (underwater spirits), involves grey text that is indeed at
times illegible due to Philip stacking words directly on top of one another. See FIGURE 5. “Silence is…not a product
of an absence, not even an absence of freedom, but rather silence appears as an unspeakable presence in the final
section.” (Eichorn, Katie. "Multiple Registers of Silence in M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!" Xcp: Cross-Cultural
Poetics 23 (2010): 33-39. 37.)
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / CONCLUSION 249
- CONCLUSION -

Even when simply considering the beginnings of my research, much less the centuries since
trauma first became a traceable concern to the Western populace, trauma, at least as I can see it
in the United States, has become a seemingly ubiquitous happening. The images we see on the
news to the current President’s voice are enough to trigger wide swaths of the population’s
traumatic responses. Yet seeing disturbing and gruesome images is hardly new (public
executions, lynchings, photographs of the American Civil War in newspapers), nor is hearing the
voice and thoughts of someone many perceive as a threat (audio of Hitler on the radio). The new
element, what has made our time unique, is the level of access to distressing material. Not only
access—saturation. And though typing in a few words can give us innumerable traumatic media
in microseconds, we rarely seek it out. Instead, it comes to many of us in our pockets in a steady,
buzzy stream.
The impacts of smart phone technology and social media are phenomena currently
undergoing study, and likely will continue to be for generations. What is and isn’t personal, or a
time of privacy, or solitude, for many, is far more permeable than it had been in the past. The
television stopped its programming at bedtime, people only used phones during the daylight
hours. What was simply words in a headline—“UNARMED BLACK MAN SHOT BY POLICE
OFFICER”—now often comes with a video of the murder captured on a smart phone (or several).
Maybe it is livestreamed onto Facebook, reposted thousands of times. Many people get alerts
about news and social media activity (not to mention emails, calls, and texts) constantly
throughout the day and night. Protection from what can feel like an onslaught of horrifying and
enraging information is becoming harder and harder to claim. Is this “traumatic”? I don’t know.
Does it prime us to be more likely to experience traumatization? Possibly.
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / CONCLUSION 250
This is perhaps why I am proactively not on social media, don’t get news alerts on my
phone, check my email only once a day. My interaction with these things is thus on my terms. I
realize this is a mark of my privilege (I don’t need to keep track of ICE movements in my city).
And this level of disconnect (which, really, is still relatively “plugged in”) is not without its cost.
I’m often unaware of an important alternative take on a problematic article, or a literary event I
otherwise might attend, or miss the latest hubbub making the rounds—but the cost of
maintaining these digital connections is higher for me, I’ve found. I think I am not alone in this
experience. Yet the majority continue to operate in these realms and practices of social media as
connectivity. And this, perhaps, is why there is a loud and pervasive call for isolation, safety, and
solace in surrounding ourselves with those with whom we agree. While that is not the rhetoric,
it’s often the implication. The thinking, then, that if we are going to be bombarded with
information that often makes us feel helpless and powerless, at least it will come from sources
we trust and feel most comfortable listening to.
This call for self-protection and others’ need to cultivate awareness of the impact of
trauma for those moving through the world has produced a lot of hand-wringing in an array of
venues, not least of all the literature classroom. Do I wish I had received a trigger warning before
reading incestual rape in The Bluest Eye as a seventeen-year-old? Perhaps not (it’s a spoiler). But
if a peer endured such violence (statistically likely), perhaps they might. Yet the impulse to
shield—oneself, others—from that which might emotionally harm, while valiant, perhaps isn’t
ultimately all that helpful. People talk about the negative impact of overprotective children’s
guardians constantly. This is arguably no different a gesture. I recently spoke to a friend who
grew up in a particularly dangerous city in a particularly dangerous time to be a girl of color. The
problem with trigger warnings and similar demands, she explained, is their assumption someone
MIGRATORY WOUNDS / CONCLUSION 251
can be safe in the first place. This is a false concept, and one she was forced to recognize quite
young. “Nowhere is safe,” she said. This is certainly true, and defines the lives of many all over
the world. That doesn’t mean we don’t deserve safety, however. I understand the desire to have
the opportunity to steel oneself before engaging with material—or even thinking “not today” and
closing the book or news article.
Yet what I hope for above all as we continue to live in our new reality of constant (yet
often filtered) information, is that we try to learn a new way of engaging with that which might
otherwise cause us to recoil, freeze, sweat, shut down. Philip, in her performances of Zong!, acts
as a kind of guide through similarly complicated feelings. Where Anglo audience members may
feel horrified and implicated, she cultivates connection. For those present and of the Black
Diaspora, emotional support through engagement. Our encounters with such content is often a
solitary endeavor, however. Grace M. Cho writes, “Contemporary trauma studies has shifted its
focus from trauma as a wound that is only a loss or lack to one that is also an excess, and
therefore potentially productive.”
1
In the United States and many other places on Earth, we are
living in a time of excess and trauma. If we can shift how we engage with the excess, from
traumatized responses of closing off to productive interaction, there is a potential source of
gained agency and perhaps even creativity. Trauma need not merely represent what is taken
away (innocence, a sense of safety). It, too, can be a rich resource for cultivating understanding
of and connection with those we consider to be unlike ourselves. That we can create feelings of
safety in such instances so we no longer turn inward, constantly, but reach out.

MIGRATORY WOUNDS / CONCLUSION 252
CONCLUSION NOTES
1
Cho, Grace M. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2008. 24.

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SEICHE

BY

DIANA ARTERIAN

A Creative Dissertation Component Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE & CREATIVE WRITING)
Conferral Date: August 2019
SEICHE 1
- TABLE OF CONTENTS -

TWO DROWN AS BOAT UPSETS. 5
There is a centuries-old 6
My mother is appointed Dean 7
At twilight a man approaches 8
A MONSTER IN ONONDAGA LAKE. 9
My mother has her property 10
A NEW SENSE OF URGENCY TO CLEAN ONONDAGA LAKE 11
My mother is at the office 12
SHOOTING HIS MISTRESS AND HIMSELF. 13
Soon my mother spies 14
HOPING TO REVERSE HISTORY AND POLLUTION 15
My mother rises early 16
One morning my mother 17
I am home for Christmas 18
ACCUSES HIMSELF OF MURDER. 19
Violence is the heart of it 20
While walking The Dog 21
ICEBOATS IN COLLISION; THREE DEAD, THREE HURT. 22
My mother asks another neighbor 23
Fire The beauty is in 24
THE DOG WAS FATAL. 25
The Dog starts suffering 26
Years ago a crushed toe flowing out 27
A STEAMBOAT’S BOILER BURSTS. 28
Someone sets a letter 29
The envelope bears no source 30
OPENING INDIAN BURIAL GROUND. 31
She tells the police 32
What is a daughter then but clay eyes 33
When my mother 34
COST SNAGS LAKE CLEAN UP 35
A few weeks later 36
Fearful child I imagined her arms 37
COST SNAGS LAKE CLEAN UP 38
The police send a patrol car 39
LAKE CLEANUP TO BE ORDERED IN SYRACUSE 40
COST SNAGS LAKE CLEAN UP 41
My sister is home 42
DROWNED IN ONONDAGA LAKE. 43
I wish it were something I could touch 44
I knew 45
We are all home 46
SEICHE 2
HAIR SEAL SHOT IN ONONDAGA LAKE. 47
Like a Leviathan it 48
I spend a winter Sunday alone 49
SCIENTISTS SAY STATE MIXES ITS MESSAGE ON RISKS
OF EATING ONONDAGA LAKE FISH 50
It does not gather up plunge 51
Things go calm 53
Or my mother 53
My mother opens 54
Or my mother is out back 55
Things go calm 56
The Cleaner comes 57
To contain this fire dam it up 58
My mother is walking The Dog 59
Or things go calm 60
Or my mother goes to work 61
Or I get a letter 62
Or I am in the backyard 63
Or things go calm 64
The Man works a lock 65
Or The Man silently 66
The Man checks himself 67
Things go calm 68
TWO DIE IN ONONDAGA LAKE. 69
Or I take The Dog 70
Mourning dove calling on my mother’s roof Like Arizona 71
The girl starts – 72
I call my mother 73
Notes 74
Works Quoted 75

DISCLAIMER: While this work renders events from “real life,” the author takes liberty with her representations of
events, individuals, timelines, sources, etc., and makes no claim of factual accuracy in the work. Any similarity to
any individuals other than members of the author’s immediate family is coincidental.
SEICHE 3

SEICHE (/ˈseɪʃ/ SAYSH)

A phenomenon that occurs within a confined body of water
such as a lake, sea, or pool. Once disturbed, the enclosed
water may produce a “seiche” or standing wave that moves
across its surface or below, between the warmer upper and
colder lower layers.

SEICHE 4

Syracuse lies to the southeast of Onondaga
Lake, whose salty deposits stimulated the
city's economic growth, particularly from the
1820s to the 1860s…[the salt] was crucial to
keeping meat fresh in the era before electric
refrigeration.

– THE NEW YORK TIMES

2.014 Objects contain the possibility of all situations.

– LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

SEICHE 5
TWO DROWN AS BOAT UPSETS
—
G.S. Baxter and Miss Seager Lose
Their Lives in Lake Onondaga.
SEPT. 8, 1911

It was not until
this morning

the upturned boat
was found

the girl’s body caught
under it by a rope

SEICHE 6
Ô

There is a centuries-old
depiction of Syracuse

of what people believed
it would become

in the local historical museum
The buildings

surround a bright long lake
Onondaga—

a city center
flecked with sails

Some students close by
are snickering

I ask what is so funny
That’s Onondaga Lake

Onondaga Lake
is horribly polluted

The city could never
be built this way

Syracuse—from sirako
Siracusa

Salty marsh

SEICHE 7
Ô
My mother is appointed
dean of a college

She buys a house
with a slate path

Hires a man
to cultivate the yard

It is the most land
she has ever owned

A briar patch
berry trees

Wild peonies grow in the rough
of the yard next door

A friendly woman neighbor
appears one day—

invites my mother
to take peony cuttings

Help yourself to whatever
you would like
SEICHE 8
Ô

At twilight a man approaches
my mother’s gardener

He is yelling at The Gardener
about cutting the peonies

trespassing on private property
The Gardener realizes

The Neighbor
is drunk

But your wife
gave us permission –
My wife would never say that
She would never ever say that

The Gardener describes
the exchange to my mother

She grows worried
I’m not worried he says

I have my shovel
SEICHE 9
A MONSTER IN ONONDAGA LAKE.
OCT. 12, 1877

he and his son were fishing
when surprised

by the sudden appearance
of a monster

It swam
along the surface

for several rods
then sank out of sight
SEICHE 10
Ô

My mother has her property
surveyed to determine

where the line falls
The Neighbor posts

orange NO TRESPASSING signs
on trees facing her yard

They are bright enough to see
over an acre away

She has The Gardener
plant a screen of bushes

so she can no longer
see the signs

from anywhere
SEICHE 11
A NEW SENSE OF URGENCY TO CLEAN ONONDAGA LAKE
July 19, 1987

Today Onondaga Lake
is odorous and brown

Oxygen levels so low
fish live no deeper than 15 feet

One of the saltiest anywhere
Objects invisible within

three feet of the surface

SEICHE 12
Ô

My mother is at the office
The housecleaner pulls

into the driveway
Sees a drunken man

moving down the back stone path
shouldering a large crossbow

The Cleaner asks my mother
if she allows hunters on the property

It is not the season
for bow hunting
SEICHE 13
SHOOTING HIS MISTRESS AND HIMSELF.
FEB. 11, 1882

became jealous
over a girl

an inmate of a house
of ill-fame

went there with
the avowed purpose

SEICHE 14
Ô

Soon my mother spies
a raised stand for deer hunting

on The Neighbor’s property
It is illegal to shoot game

so close to houses
She does not call the cops

Wants to exert
a quieter agency

If she keeps
very still

she will no longer
be seen

SEICHE 15
HOPING TO REVERSE HISTORY AND POLLUTION
March 31, 2005

The Onondaga Nation
filed a lawsuit

claiming ownership
of a swath of New York State

The focus
Onondaga Lake

used as a dump
In 1994 added

to the federal list
of toxic waste sites

“You can’t use the lake
you can’t fish

you can’t swim in the water
you can’t collect medicines

This is our home
this is our history

treated as trash”
SEICHE 16
Ô

My mother rises early
to walk the dog

though The Dog can no longer
make it up the hill

It is winter
It is dark

Suddenly my mother
sees a man in camouflage

and a head lamp
in the road

It is not The Neighbor
It is a different man

She continues walking
They pass each other
Your dog is quiet today
he says

SEICHE 17
Ô

One morning my mother
wakes and looks out

her bedroom window
She sees tracks below

in the fresh snow across
most of her yard

They are
a man’s tracks

reeling
SEICHE 18
Ô

I am home for Christmas
Letting The Dog in

I spot boot prints
going around the house

to the stairs leading to the backdoor
The person paced at the base

of the flight
uncertain

My sister goes to inspect
They are dog tracks

The Dog went around back
With her bad hips

she can no longer climb stairs
She must have paced there

at the bottom
SEICHE 19
ACCUSES HIMSELF OF MURDER.

W. Kappel Denies Theft in Rochester,
But Says He Once Killed a Man.
JUNE 16, 1897

He buried the body
exhumed it

threw it into
Onondaga Lake

after tying a stone
about the neck

SEICHE 20
Violence is the heart of it
A sure hand all its capacity
Violence whistles sparks The hand
clawing windfire
SEICHE 21
Ô

While walking The Dog
sometime later

my mother again
sees The Man

in camouflage
As they pass each other

he says This will be
a bad year for the your college

then turns around
passes her

trudges into a random yard
the pitch morning

SEICHE 22
ICEBOATS IN COLLISION;
THREE DEAD, THREE HURT
—
Craft Plunge Head-On Into Each
Other on Onondaga Lake
—
DEC. 25, 1904

Plowing
into each other

such force
They laid upon the ice

a tangle of splinters
broken cordage
SEICHE 23
Ô

My mother asks another neighbor
the owner of the property

where The Man stalked
if he knows anything

about a man in camouflage
walking around in the mornings

Maybe a family member?
He does not know

what she
is talking about

My mother senses
he thinks she is

unbalanced

SEICHE 24
Fire The beauty is in
the blue of it That dangerous shadow around her
barely visible licking its fingers
SEICHE 25
THE DOG WAS FATAL.
AUG. 29, 1886

Rowing on Onondaga Lake
the dog upset the boat

tried to swim ashore
eel grass prevented him

the dog climbing upon
shoulders

became exhausted
sank in eight feet of water
SEICHE 26
Ô

The Dog starts suffering
from sporadic internal bleeds—

a fatal tumor
My mother must force-feed her

Our dog hates this
while loving my mother

The Dog is too ill
My mother has her put down

She regrets this
I should have let that dog decide

which heartbeat
would be her last

Some months later, lonely
my mother gets another dog

SEICHE 27
Years ago a crushed toe flowing out
She laid me down draped white cloth over it
Little ghost gaining color while she kissed
my wet cheeks
the blood rushing up to meet her

SEICHE 28
A STEAMBOAT’S BOILER BURSTS.

THE CAPTAIN KILLED AND THE ENGINEER
BADLY SCALDED.
MAY 24, 1885

two sharp reports were heard
the steamer instantly enveloped

in clouds of steam
The passengers saw a form

fling itself
out of the cloud

found writhing
scalded head to foot

In places the skin
rolled itself up

looked as if he had been
flayed alive
SEICHE 29
Ô

Someone sets a letter at each house
on my mother’s street

that says she caused
a woman’s suicide

Saying my mother did not renew
the woman’s teaching contract

The Woman
was sick

The letter claims that is why
my mother did not renew her contract

The Woman killed herself by hoarding pills
while in the hospital

She killed herself
in the hospital

She left small children
SEICHE 30
Ô

The envelope bears no source
a single sheet within

One recipient places it
unopened

directly into a plastic bag
for the police
SEICHE 31
OPENING INDIAN BURIAL GROUND.
JUNE 15, 1884

Laborers were leveling
a mound of earth

on the shores
of Onondaga Lake

came upon a pile of skulls
and skeletons

The mound a graveyard
for the Onondaga

The bodies crumbled to dust
being exposed to air

The archeologists drilled
without discovering anything
SEICHE 32
Ô

She tells the police
about The Woman

about The Neighbor
about The Man in camouflage
I am not aware of anyone who
would send such a letter she says

After she hangs up
she turns to me
Please don’t
tell anyone

SEICHE 33

What is a daughter then but clay eyes
ice A witness twice over
The terror/father Now faceless
fires advancing
SEICHE 34
Ô

When someone
informed The Woman

that the college would not
renew her contract

The Woman howled
slipped from

her chair rolled
on the office floor
You’re killing me
she said
I have cancer
she said

My mother worked to ensure the university
extended The Woman’s health insurance

but before my mother told The Woman this
The Woman slipped letters

under everyone’s door
in my mother’s office

The notes said my mother
wanted her dead
SEICHE 35
COST SNAGS LAKE CLEAN UP
November 21, 1993

The lake’s decline began after 1884
soda ash on the south shore

deterioration hastened by sewage flowing
By 1901 ice harvesting was prohibited

Swimming banned in 1940
fishing banned

Today lake waters are a toxic stew
mercury ammonia

phosphorous cyanide
A researcher reported

finding abandoned cars
sunken barges

discarded tires
broken dishes

SEICHE 36
Ô

A few weeks later
my mother

gets a letter
“Murderer”—

that’s how it started
she tells me

She reads
this letter through
I just want it
to stop

SEICHE 37
Fearful child I imagined her arms
phantom comforts
Arms wind around her now
fleshy ribbons coiling around
I feel them slow like snakes

SEICHE 38
COST SNAGS LAKE CLEAN UP

A century’s worth
of industrial and municipal dumping

can be healed
Salmon can flourish again

Who will pay the $1 billion bill
Politicians and businessmen fence

Pollution continues
SEICHE 39
Ô

The police send a patrol car
through the neighborhood

now and then
My mother’s friend

convinces her to hire
a private detective

The Detective is the only reason
the cops probe deeper

The Detective hounds them
He tells them this is urgent

SEICHE 40
LAKE CLEANUP TO BE ORDERED IN SYRACUSE
November 29, 2004

extensive dredging
to remove 165,000 pounds

of mercury
other toxins

a full remediation
would involve placing

a permanent cap
across the entire

lake bottom
SEICHE 41
COST SNAGS LAKE CLEAN UP

The salt springs that once flowed
along the shore gave rise

to the salt industry
spawned the city of Syracuse

The great chief Hiawatha
once canoed on the lake

It was the birthplace
of the Iroquois
SEICHE 42
Ô

My sister is home
She calls me

Something is wrong she says
I tell her everything I know

We worry aloud
Our mother tells us nothing

This is knowledge
only by chance

SEICHE 43
DROWNED IN ONONDAGA LAKE.

A BOAT OVERTURNED AND THE LIVES OF A
YOUNG MAN AND A GIRL LOST.
JUNE 21, 1879

Until a late hour
efforts were made

by means of grappling hooks
to recover the bodies

SEICHE 44
I wish it were something I could touch
like a stone Instead a burning
twisting around us

SEICHE 45
Ô

I knew
she had a history

of illness
but not

mental illness
Not that she had tried

to kill herself
several times

I don’t think
she really meant

to kill herself
She was in a hospital

She was being discharged
that day

She probably thought
she would be saved

I feel guilty
about many things in life

but I know
I didn’t kill

that woman
SEICHE 46
Ô

We are all home
for Christmas again

One morning
my mother announces

she has an appointment
and leaves

Later she tells me
in private

she had gone
to the police station

Looked at mug shots
Apparently The Woman

had a brother
who was a policeman

He was discharged
for psychotic behavior

The police think
he is their best bet
The Man in camouflage
had a goatee

So did
The Woman’s brother

But I couldn’t tell
for sure
SEICHE 47
HAIR SEAL SHOT IN ONONDAGA LAKE.
APRIL 29, 1882

an animal floundering
near the shore

He quickly fired at the monster
whose white teeth gleamed

The specimen measures
just six feet

tip to tip
SEICHE 48
Like a Leviathan it
may rise when all else is calm
Or below between cool and warm
bands of water rocking the deep
SEICHE 49
Ô

I spend a winter Sunday alone
the way I imagine

my mother does
I walk the new dog up the hill

I read for most of the day
Listen to the house tick

Before bed
I take The Dog out again

then stand and watch
as she barks at the trees

in the dark yard
SEICHE 50
SCIENTISTS SAY STATE MIXES ITS MESSAGE ON RISKS
OF EATING ONONDAGA LAKE FISH
June 13, 2010

The repeal of the three-decade ban
on consumption of fish

announced with much fanfare
There was no basis

for repealing the ban
It is clear it is unsafe

“No one knows why the levels
are increasing”
SEICHE 51
It does not gather up plunge
It may be slow like a dance
as a heartbeat slower

SEICHE 52
Ô

Things go calm
and quiet

stay that way

SEICHE 53
Ô

Or my mother
lets The Dog out

one night
Minutes later she calls

and calls through
cupped hands

SEICHE 54
Ô

My mother opens
the front door

The Dog is there
gutted entrails

splayed out
like a fan

A gift
SEICHE 55
Ô

Or my mother is out back
with The Dog

My mother hears
a sharp thew

then a thin whistle
The dog collapses

a crossbow’s feathered bolt
lodged in her breast
SEICHE 56
Ô

Things go calm
and quiet

stay that way

SEICHE 57
Ô

The Cleaner comes
sees my mother’s car

She calls out to her
goes up the stairs

to my mother’s room
My mother is in bed

She is not moving
SEICHE 58
To contain this fire dam it up
Can I open myself river it in
hold it The cleansing flame
SEICHE 59
Ô

My mother is walking The Dog
early in the morning

She hears footsteps
They break into a run

She turns
The Man reaches her

As they collapse onto salted blacktop
she draws a small hidden blade

SEICHE 60
Ô

Or things go calm
and quiet

stay that way
SEICHE 61
Ô

Or my mother goes to work
The Woman is sitting

in my mother’s office chair
She laughs as my mother blanches

You thought I was dead she says
SEICHE 62
Ô

Or I get a letter
I track down its author

I stand in a dark corner
of his home

for hours
watching the light shift

When he enters
I draw a gun

shoot him cleanly
between the eyes
SEICHE 63
Ô

Or I am in the backyard
Suddenly The Neighbor’s Wife

is beside me
clutching peonies

She knocks me down
rips the petals

shoves them
in my throat

then covers my eyes
with cool eel grass

lays me out
on the calm snow
SEICHE 64
Ô

Or things go calm
and quiet

stay that way

SEICHE 65
Ô

The Man works a lock
to the house

as a patrol car eases by
The Man runs

Police pursue him on foot
through thickets

over fences
frozen ponds

They run for hours
Give up

A hunter finds
The Man’s body

weeks later
frozen in the woods
SEICHE 66
Ô

Or The Man silently
picks the lock

He removes his shoes
ascends the stairs

toe-heel
No sound

He lies in bed
next to my mother

He takes in
a long breath

removes a razor
from a small box

slices his wrists
Two quick blooms
SEICHE 67
Ô

The Man checks himself
into a medical clinic

He sends my mother
a handwritten letter apologizing

He writes
about his grief

He returns to his town
where he becomes

the quiet clerk
at a local grocer’s

SEICHE 68
Ô

Things go calm
and quiet

stay that way
SEICHE 69
TWO DIE IN ONONDAGA LAKE.
NOV. 3, 1897

An empty boat drifted
upon the west shore

this morning
A short time before

two men were seen in it
Later seen clinging to the side

waving a cloth
SEICHE 70
Ô

Or I take The Dog
to Onondaga Lake

It is deserted
A building across

pumps out thin clouds
against the sun

A sharp wind
off the water

I walk in
past the icy fringe

I dredge up the bodies
all the bone clusters

that line the bottom
Gather them in my arms

Take them to the house
Shove them upright

into the ground
one by one

I build a knobby fence with them
This makes it all

stop
SEICHE 71
Mourning dove calling on my mother’s roof Like Arizona
our old home We sit close our eyes
feel fire-oven heat olive leaves
our then-threat of my father real but known

SEICHE 72
Ô

The girl starts—
tugs at the rope

caught around her
pulling upward

past tongues of grass
Rising to the surface

she speaks
From the depths

I have seen all

SEICHE 73
Ô

I call my mother
I don’t tell my mother

what I have tried to write about
but I can barely touch—

her
her hair

her hands
lips

How I cannot stand close
looking out with her

I tell her I am writing about
Onondaga Lake

But Diana she says
you haven’t even been there

SEICHE 74
- NOTES -

The poem with the first line “The girl starts—” includes the line “From the depths,” which is the
first line of Psalm 130: “De profundis.”

The New York Times epigraph is from an article entitled “A City with a Proudly Salty Reputation”
written by Sewell Chan and published on January 1, 2010.

Ô

There are small corrections as well as slight changes to capitalization in the early New York Times
articles where warranted.
Ô

Articles published by The New York Times prior to 1923 are in the public domain.
SEICHE 75
- WORKS QUOTED -

"ACCUSES HIMSELF OF MURDER." The New York Times 17 June 1897.

"THE DOG WAS FATAL." The New York Times 30 Aug. 1886.

"DROWNED IN ONONDAGA LAKE." The New York Times 22 June 1879.

"HAIR SEAL SHOT IN ONONDAGA LAKE." 2 Mar. 1882.

"ICEBOATS IN COLLISION; THREE DEAD, THREE HURT." The New York Times 26 Dec.
1904.

Kates, William. "Cost Snags Onondaga Lake Clean Up New York: Everyone Agrees That the 5-
mile-long Stew of Mercury, Ammonia, Phosphorous, PCBs, Benzene and Cyanide Can Be
Purified. But the $1-billion Price Tag Has Agencies and Firms Diving for Cover." The Los Angeles
Times 21 Nov. 1993: 12.

"A MONSTER IN ONONDAGA LAKE." The New York Times 12 Oct. 1877.

"A New Sense of Urgency to Clean Onondaga Lake." The New York Times 19 July 1987.

"OPENING AN INDIAN BURIAL GROUND." The New York Times 16 June 1884.

Semple, Kirk. "Hoping to Reverse History and Pollution." The New York Times 31 Mar. 2005.

"SHOOTING HIS MISTRESS AND HIMSELF." The New York Times 12 Feb. 1882.

"A STEAMBOAT'S BOILER BURSTS." The New York Times 25 May 1885.

"Two Die in Onondaga Lake." The New York Times 4 Nov. 1987.

"TWO DROWN AS BOAT UPSETS." The New York Times 9 Sept. 1911.
Urbina, Ian. "Lake Cleanup to Be Ordered in Syracuse”." The New York Times 29 Nov. 2004.
Weiner, Mark. "Scientists Say State Mixes Its Message on Risks of Eating Onondaga Lake Fish."
The Post-Standard [Syracuse] 13 June 2010.
ARTERIAN / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 76
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -

What I thought might be the easiest piece of the dissertation process has me hovering at my
keyboard. The names, places, and resources that have informed this work and continue to inform
me and my writing feels boundless, its edges pushing further and further.

I will begin with the committee with whom it was an absolute honor to work. Susan McCabe was
often a chipper and playful guide through what most might consider to be thoroughly depressing
topics, always so supportive and excited by my impulses. Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose life
became more and more complicated by a meteoric rise after joining my committee, was
nevertheless willing to devote time to read, critique, and engage with care when the majority of
committee members under similar circumstances might otherwise have dropped out of my orbit.
David St. John, who I call the hobbit-wizard for all his magic, was someone who made anything
feel possible in my writing, work, and life. And Sheila Briggs who, despite our apparent lack of
overlapping interests, was more than willing to join this group of scholars and thinkers to
consider my work, providing me much insight and support.

My time at USC has put me in the path of some incredible people, all of whom I can list for
pages. I’m going to restrict the list to those for whom without some effort on their part this
dissertation would not exist. First and foremost, Janalynn Bliss, who is so remarkably devoted to
the many students who pass through her door—I could not have completed this work without her
support. My feminist page swap group, which has been aptly described as “lightning in a bottle”:
Dr. Chris Belcher, Dr. Brittany Farr, Esq., and Dr. Dagmar Van Engen (with a later addition of
ARTERIAN / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 77
Dr. Nadia Raza). Our overlapping interests seemed to vibrate whenever we met and talked about
our work, and I was consistently in awe of the care, candor, and brilliance of our exchanges.
Chris gave, and continues to give, some of the best writing advice I have ever received. Dagmar
exposed me to material and thought otherwise obscure to me, gave me access to important
literature necessary for my work, as well as electrifying notes on my pages for years. Nadia is
family, and having the opportunity to read and work on her important writing with her was such
a gift. And Brittany, my sister from another hyster—our friendship may be the biggest gift USC
has given me in my years here. It’s an honor to call you my friend.

My siblings William, Susannah, Corey. Despite my maintaining the role of odd-ball artist and
broke academic for the past decade, they have consistently been supportive of my endeavors,
patient listeners of my worries, and guides in dark times. (In addition, Corey did the imperative
and painful work of combing through this dissertation for typographical errors.) My mother, who
has had to undergo a difficulty journey of her own in the last year, is my lodestone. She is my ur-
academic, thinker, and person by whom I try time and again to model myself. I’m grateful my
doctorate gave me the opportunity to be present for you when we all needed it most. Also, my
out-laws: Rehana, Jami, Shanaz, nuri, Maha, Nadia, and Adnan. Those who are gone but still
with us, and those with whom I continue to speak. Thank you for making me part of your family.

And finally, Ali, who has stood witness to my daily struggle. During my PhD, we have traversed
a landscape of thrilling peaks, terrible nadirs, and everything in between. It’s fitting the
completion of this dissertation seems to coincide with our arrival at a happy vista of
ARTERIAN / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 78
togetherness. Thank you for teaching me to be kinder to myself, always, while continuing to
provide me with gentle challenges.

Each of you helped me come to a state of completion and closing alongside openings and new
beginnings. Thank you all.

The following residencies and fellowship provided time, space, food, and support that played a
huge role in the writing of this dissertation: Caldera Arts Center, Vermont Studio Center, Yaddo,
and the Russell Endowment.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Arterian, Diana (author)

Core Title Migratory wounds: relayed trauma in contemporary poetry (critical); Seiche (creative)

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 06/07/2019

Defense Date 03/01/2019

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag aesthetics,Alice Notley,archive,atavism,Bhanu Kapil,Diana Arterian,Disability,documentary poetics,ecopoetics,ecopoetry,Elyse Fenton,ethics,found-text poetry,freaks,haunting,M. NourbeSe Philip,Middle Passage,OAI-PMH Harvest,Orientalism,poetics,Poetry,Power,relayed trauma,Seiche,trauma,War

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McCabe, Susan (committee chair), Briggs, Sheila (committee member), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee member), St. John, David (committee member)

Creator Email arterian@gmail.com,arterian@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-171521

Unique identifier UC11659980

Identifier etd-ArterianDi-7462.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-171521 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-ArterianDi-7462.pdf

Dmrecord 171521

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

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Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA