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Trauma, Memory, Bodies Assignment 2 FINAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Trauma, Memory, Bodies Assignment 2 FINAL

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The language and techniques in A Woman in Chains and Syrup leave the reader with an absence; transforming poetry into a vehicle of critical reflection. To conclude in a formal manner would leave you with a finality that contradicts the nature of poetic trauma testimony. What remains is not certainty, but an echo of what cannot be fully understood.

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By forcing the witness to confront uncomfortable truths, poetry further challenges the ethical standing of the witness and exposes the moral complexities of testimonial engagement. As previously discussed, witnessing trauma is not a neutral act and is accompanied by ethical risks. In this sense, the witness’ positionality is crucial. Rather than adopting the stance of a passive observer, witnesses play a role in deciding which voices are legitimate and which are ignored (Fassin and Rechtman 2009). For this reason, testimony, particularly testimonial poetry, can easily slip into placation. Trauma is then constructed in

ways that are palatable, polished, and morally redemptive for the reader. However, when a witness is too comfortable, the ethical risks become larger. Failing to confront uncomfortable truths can “annihilate” the survivor by refusing them recognition, understanding, or justice (Boler 1997, 263). Seeking safety over truth is a disservice both to the conveyor of trauma and the witness to it.

To mitigate these risks, A Woman in Chains and Syrup deliberately destabilise reader comfort. These poems do not offer any form of closure or coherence; operating within an ethical “grey zone” (Radstone 2001, 61). In this zone, poetry becomes ethically potent, not because it avoids identification altogether, but because it leaves space for ambivalence. This tension is apparent in Syrup in particular. The poem is not pleasant to read; it is confronting, violent, and examines the psyche of someone who rationalises and eroticises harm. However, it is precisely this confrontation that makes the poem ethically valuable. Poetry written from a perpetrator’s perspective reveals that violence is always inflicted by people; people who may not be so different from oneself. Identifying with the perpetrator in some way may help audiences resist self-righteousness, moral certainty, or simplistic good vs evil narratives. As Radstone (2001, 65) argues, “...an artwork's ethical value lies in its capacity to move its spectator through fantasy identifications with perpetration as well as with victimhood.” In doing so, poetry provides a space where readers must reckon with their own ability to commit evil, forcing them to recognise the human capacity for harm that lives within everyone.

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Poetry can act as a form of heteropathic identification (Hirsch 1999; Silverman 1993), offering an ethical mode of witnessing trauma that resists the collapse of speaker and self. Heteropathic identification is a form of empathetic remembrance and engagement where the witness recognises and understands the pain of another but does not appropriate it (9). Laub (2013, 58) builds on this, describing the witness as an active participant in testimony; understanding and feeling the emotional turmoil of the traumatic experience. Crucially, while the witness may experience a range of internal responses, this does not mean that they become the victim. Ethical witnessing, therefore, involves interrogating and processing emotions that arise. It requires critically engaging with the testimonial account and acknowledging the limits of one’s understanding. However, poetry risks complicating this dynamic as readers may become more attuned to the beauty of language, rather than the pain being communicated. In this way, trauma testimony becomes aestheticised and the urgency of its message becomes easier to ignore. It is crucial to mitigate these risks by utilising what

LaCapra (2014, 19) calls the “middle voice”. This method of inscribing trauma holds space for ambiguity and preserves heteropathic identification, enabling more ethical modes of witnessing.

Furthermore, as Boler (1997) and Radstone (2001, 2007) warn, empathy can easily become voyeuristic or performative when heteropathic identification is lacking. For example, the portrayal of “innocent victimhood” can be a problem in accounts of trauma because witnesses align themselves with the victim in ways that feel virtuous, evading the deeper ethical and emotional responsibilities of witnessing. A Woman in Chains subverts this idea as the poem demands critical distance. The reader is not positioned to rescue or identify with the narrator’s pain, but rather to sit with its brutality and relentlessness. Given that her suffering is taking place within her mind, the reader can empathise but is less able to collapse into this character. Syrup establishes heteropathic identification in a different way, disturbing the reader through grotesque imagery. Lines like, “lick my nectar from your face”, forge empathy for the victim through horror; the reader does not want to identify in any way. Instead, they are implicated as an uneasy witness to poetic testimony. For this reason, poetry creates a sense of heteropathic identification by guiding the reader into a position where they must bear witness in an ethical manner.

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Subjectivity is often devalued in dominant discourses, however, poetry gives new meaning and importance to subjective experience. In contemporary society, trauma has become a site where cultural and political ideologies either validate or ignore suffering (Fassin and Rechtman 2009). Within this framework a hierarchy of legitimacy is established and objective knowledge about trauma is privileged as truth (Hesford 1999, 196). Yet, the difference between knowledge and poetic knowing mirrors the divide between history and memory (Klein 2000). Knowledge and history are classified as objective descriptions of past events. In contrast, memory and poetic knowing are deemed less valuable. They do not just recall events but are deeply concerned with their meaning. Poetry, then, becomes a site of epistemic resistance, reclaiming agency for those who are frequently silenced or dismissed by dominant frames of understanding. Poetry centres subjectivity, not as a distortion of truth, but as a key mode of witnessing.

Writing from both the victim and perpetrator perspectives further enhances the social value of this subjectivity. By exploring two contrasting voices with differing levels of power and agency, the two poems reveal how subjective meanings are ascribed to sexual assault.

For example, the narrator in A Woman in Chains may not demonstrate agency in the typical sense. However, her construction of the “jailhouse” and “executioner” transforms her internal suffering into a symbolic landscape. Rather than relaying a factual account, she is emphasising her experience, effectively destabilising the idea that subjectivity is less valuable. Syrup, on the other hand, illustrates the perpetrators’ experience of the same event. The language, including his desire to, “anesthetise the filth of [her] character”, works to expose twisted perpetrator logics. By framing violence as something reasonable or justified, the narrator shapes his reality through the poetic medium (Hesford 1999, 198). In this way, subjectivity draws attention to harmful logics of domination. By juxtaposing these two perspectives, poetic language does not merely describe trauma but highlights its subjective dimensions, which cannot be communicated solely through objective accounts.

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Poetry reflects the fragmented, subversive nature of sexual assault trauma by employing techniques that mirror the way trauma testimony is conveyed. Felman (2013, 45) argues that testimony actively disrupts the reader’s existing cognitive frameworks, conveying “dissonant” information. Similarly, the Caruthian (1997) understanding of trauma demonstrates how it can fracture a survivor’s sense of memory, time, and self. In this context, poetic language becomes a medium where techniques such as metaphor and enjambment are useful because their expression closely resembles elements of trauma testimony. For example, enjambment, where a sentence runs through multiple lines, parallels what Caruth (10) characterises as “continual leaving of a site”. The structures of A Woman in Chains and Syrup are simultaneously broken and continuous, reflecting how trauma manifests as recurring disruptions in the psyche. For this reason, trauma is frequently conveyed in a more abstract way, making poetry a perfect medium for testimony.

Metaphor extends this idea, effectively bridging the divide between personal memory and collective experience (Michaels 1992, 96). In Syrup, for example, the metaphor of sweetness is subverted, describing how pleasure is derived from rape. This subversion not

only unsettles the reader, but forces them to confront their own perceptions of pleasure and intimacy. By animating this grotesque act through the common social experience of sweetness and desire, the poem becomes more intelligible to a broader audience. Much like testimony is a space for trauma to be understood and worked through for both the self and the witness (Felman 2013), poetry serves the same purpose. Yet, it is the same qualities that restrict poetry as a medium. Poetic techniques can be highly abstract, making them too obscure and difficult to interpret. Readers may misunderstand ideas or become detached, undermining the purpose of communicating trauma through art. Therefore, while poetry offers a unique and powerful means of expressing sexual assault trauma, it also carries risks.

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A Woman in Chains and Syrup are two original poems exploring the experience of sexual assault from both a victim and perpetrator perspective. Poetry was chosen as the medium because its fragmented, affective form offers a potent way of bearing witness to sexual trauma. Caruth (1997) and Felman and Laub (1992) emphasise how traumatic experience fractures time, language, and subjectivity, often leaving survivors unable to articulate their experience in coherent or rational ways. In this context, poetry becomes a fitting mode of testimony, drawing attention to the limits of what can be said. Poetry also occupies a liminal space between reality and fiction, where language can be more abstract and emotionally resonant. Both the writer and the witness are forced to rely on the symbolic and affective qualities of language, emphasising the importance of subjectivity. However, this ambiguity also places an ethical responsibility on the witness. As Radstone (2001) describes, poetic representations may cause the reader to become over-identified with the narrative or align themselves in a morally virtuous way. To combat these risks, poetry should challenge the ethical standing of the witness, forcing them to critically evaluate themselves and the world around them. For this reason, poetry has both affordances and restrictions in communicating sexual assault trauma, interrogating and reflecting the importance of language and ethics in testimonial art.

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The sweetness dribbled from your lips,

Driven by the rot of your desperate wanting.

Saccharine amidst the backdrop

Of your pitiful plasticine world.

Should I rip it? Kill it? Get it over with?

You long to feel me in your throat.

Choking, crying, drowning

In the honey you spilled on my floor.

My cowering princess on her bed of lies,

“I love you” “I need you” “Please stay with me”.

Submitting cheaply like the cockroach that you are,

You can’t even put up a fight.

How pathetic it must be to be you;

Temptation as thick as molasses.

I anaesthetise the filth of your character

As I feed you a mouthful of memory.

You splinter beneath the weight of me,

Bones cracking like matchsticks.

The sugar drills holes through your teeth

And they crumble to ash in your mouth.

My eyelids closed in exaltation,

Your begging crystallised in my ears.

One more thrust and I am finished,

Now lick my nectar from your face.

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Syrup is a poem filled with grotesque imagery, subverting sweetness into violence and utilising decay and indulgence as metaphors to capture a perverse portrait of a perpetrator’s perspective.

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All is quiet in the jailhouse cell.

The smell of rust and vomit.

It is not uncommon for monsters to appear here,

They thrive within these walls.

Ghostly hands gripped on gooseflesh,

Her body held by their weight.

Four hundred and nine days here,

Still she cannot get out.

Spider-like neurons stretched into prison bars,

Built stronger through each recollection.

This unknown inhabitant calls out to the others,

Begging for her screams to be heard.

Met with a cacophony of accusations

Spat by saliva-soaked sadists.

They claw at her skin with their talons

Writing scripture over her story.

At the door the blindfolded executioner

Lines up his lethal injection.

She hears his ragged breathing,

Knows what is to come.

The needle pierces into soft skin,

He shoves his hand deeper inside.

A bruised and bloodied marionette

Animated by a cruel master.

Death would be such a pleasure,

Wishing for the bitter sting of tears.

But pretty, hollow dolls don’t cry;

They shatter.

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A Woman in Chains provides a haunting portrayal of internal psychological imprisonment as a symptom of sexual assault trauma.