"His sickness was only part of something larger": Slow Trauma and Climate Change in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony

"His sickness was only part of something larger":Slow Trauma and Climate Change in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony Martin Premoli (bio) Introduction: Slow Violence, Slow Trauma Adding to Benedict Anderson's influential argument that nations are imagined communities,1 Rob Nixon notes how these entities also require the production of what he calls "unimagined communities" (2013, p. 150). Through a process of "spatial amnesia," nations physically and imaginatively displace communities within their borders whose existence disrupts teleological narratives of national progress (p. 151). Operating in tandem with physical removal, imaginative displacement renders targeted communities invisible, a necessary first step to their physical evacuation. Nixon highlights how the desire for environmental resources often underlies and justifies spatial amnesia, as "communities, under the banner of development, are physically unsettled and imaginatively removed, evacuated from place and time and thus uncoupled from the idea of both a national future and a national memory" (p. 151). Physical removal coupled with imaginative displacement temporally severs these communities, tearing them from the fabric of national time. Labeling this "violent conversion of inhabitant into uninhabitant" a "recurrent trauma," Nixon draws on an existing discourse of trauma theory that codified a commonly understood definition of what that "trauma" entails (p. 153). Nixon is hardly alone in using the rhetoric of trauma to conceptualize the crisis posed to humanity by environmental destruction and resource extraction. Timothy Morton calls global End Page 173 warming "the ecological trauma of our age" (2013, p. 9). And Michael Rothberg references Nixon's work to argue that the slow violence of climate change does not only require a shift in temporal perception away from the shattering event of classically conceived trauma; it also requires a recalibrated understanding of humanist history and subjectivity that displaces (without entirely eliminating) the positions of victim and perpetrator. (2014, p. xvi) Following these thinkers, this essay argues for the need to apply traditional trauma theory to anthropogenic climate change. Reconceptualizing the scales of trauma, I suggest, requires the concomitant disruption of humanist ontological and epistemological models inherited from a Euro-American philosophical discourse, models that inform the classical field of trauma studies. Thus, my relationship to this body of work is, like Paul Saint-Amour's, a "tense" one. In Tense Future, Saint-Amour reconceptualizes the paradigm of trauma by positing that "time—and anticipation in particular—has become a new medium for delivering injury" (2015, p. 7). Through his study of anticipatory trauma in Europe between the two world wars, Saint-Amour readjusts traditional understandings of trauma by challenging the "field's largely psychoanalytic chronology," which is not capacious enough for the idea of pre-traumatic stress (p. 13). Trauma theory, classically, relies on the instantaneous event that ruptures one's lived experience. Drawing from the work of Freud, theorists continue to privilege the immediacy of the traumatic event. Cathy Caruth writes that trauma is "not just any event but, significantly, the shocking and unexpected occurrence of an accident" (1996, pp. 6–7). In her genealogy of the field, Ruth Leys notes how traditional theorists—including Freud and Caruth—represent trauma as "an experience that, because it appeared to shatter the victim's cognitive-perceptual capacities, made the traumatic scene unavailable for a certain kind of recollection" (p. 8). And, even while Dominick LaCapra introduces an important distinction between experience and event, he still emphasizes that "trauma is itself a shattering End Page 174 experience that disrupts or even threatens to destroy experience in the sense of an integrated or at least viably articulated life" (2004, p. 117). Saint-Amour, however, observes that "the capacity for ethical responsibility and political agency are measured by the degree of trauma's rechronologization—the reopening of the future via the past's resubordination to the present" (2015, p. 15). At a time when scholars state that "the end of the world has already occurred" (Morton, 2013, p. 7), and that "we have to learn how to die not as individuals, but as a civilization" (Scranton, 2015, p. 21), the political and ethical need to reopen the future resonates on a profound level. Trauma theory, this essay suggests, is still a viable framework for such positive change. This paper focuses on...