Haunting

A Very Brief Word on Trauma -  from on line journal borderlands 10:2
Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity Avery F. Gordon
The University of California, Santa Barbara
"Haunting is often treated as more or less identical to trauma. But trauma and the time of trauma are, in my view, quite different. In the classic psychoanalytic conception, trauma not only misaligns our perception of time, it is, one could say, itself a misalignment of the temporality of experience since trauma is characteristically experienced belatedly. That's to say, it's the repression of the shocking or horrible experience and its displaced repetition that characterizes trauma and that jams time so that one experiences the shock later. As Freud and others have shown, a traumatized person or society is stuck in a past that repeats as a present that can never end. Trauma thus binds you to what can't be forgotten or forgiven. It binds you not to the repetition of a memory of a terrible, horrible, shocking event or experience but binds you to the repression of it. This repetition of and libidinal investment in the repression binds the future—what comes next—to the trauma, which is what never ends, what can't end. In this sense, trauma is a deeply regressive and repressive state—an awful predicament for both individuals and societies—a fatalistic and aberrant condition because seemingly interminable".
More on Avery Gordon's work  ☞  Ghostly Matters
A section of an interview with Dionne Brand by Maya Mavjee about her book: A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging.  (Find the rest here)
Q. What is the meaning of this book for you?
A. Beyond the meaning of existence in the black Diaspora, it’s how one defines one’s own existence within history, within a specific place. I wanted to challenge the idea of constantly having to fix oneself as a way of finding identity. How do you or I collect ourselves each morning? How do we disturb the deeply troublesome labels that admit no complexity, no range but which come to represent us in the world? I think that’s the argument at the centre of the book.
Q. Do you think the book accomplishes this?
A. If I am successful, probably not. It’s still a meditation to me. 
In the end, what it did — if I think of who might read it — I think there’s a citizen of a city like this one, who it will make a great deal of sense to. It essentially asks, how do you figure yourself out against the backdrop of history? What do you notice, what are the things that come together to make you up at a particular moment? I think it asks a fundamental question, which is not just a question for me or for Africans in the Diaspora, but the question of being. How existence is constructed for you. I talk about all these interpretations that you walk into unknowingly, almost from birth. If you’re lucky you spend the rest of your life fighting them, if you’re not, you spend your life unquestioningly absorbing.

Things to reflect upon:
What is your relationship to the idea of 'constantly having to fix oneself as a way of finding identity'?
How do we meet this 'fixing' in our work?  
How do you collect yourself each morning and to what extent is the reality of racialised embodiment part of that collecting?  
How do or don't you "disturb the deeply troublesome labels that admit no complexity, no range but which come to represent us in the world"?
What interpretations do you walk into each day?  How might we work with this notion in our work? 

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