Trauma and Literature: Process Log 05

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• Chirag Mehta
• Trauma and Literature
• Prof. Martin J. Gliserman
• 25 Feb. 2003

Trauma and Literature: Process Log 05

In his novel The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski recreates the experiences of a child lost in rural Europe, a continent torn apart by war, poverty, and religion. The author’s use of 20th century surrealism is most evident in his descriptions of the child’s unusual encounters with all forms of living beings, from old women to screaming ravens, and from sadistic masters to imaginary ants and cockroaches, who "would proliferate and eat out [his] thoughts, one after another, until [he] would become as empty as the shell of a pumpkin from which all the fruit has been scraped out." What is evident in this case with respect to trauma, is that children and adults have different forms of fear, and what seems like a joke to an adult could be the most traumatic experience for a child, and vice versa. To the young boy, the fear of ants and cockroaches eating his thoughts was real and by no means a trifle. And while he felt the pains of being whipped and abused physically, he does not react to it, as would an adult who goes through the same traumatic experience.

This brings to light one of the reasons why childhood sex abuse victims take so long to come out in the open and identify their perpetrators - Basically because, while they were going through the experiences, they did not realize the gravity of the acts and it did not shame or frighten them. With age, the guilt and shame accumulates and only when they look back at how these abusive experiences dictated their early life as an adult, do they realize that indeed, being abused in childhood was perhaps the worst and most traumatic experience of their lives.

Children’s fascination with magic, superstitions, and unearthly phenomenon affects most of their thought processes. As adults, we seldom worry whether phantoms and spirits drift around us. But part of what shapes up children’s psyches are how they interpret and interact with these mysterious phenomena, which can be considered as metaphors for the adult world, for how children deal with their imaginary problems can very well determine how they will be able to take care of themselves and their families as adults. In our context, how a child fights off the evil ghouls might show how he comes to terms with the trauma of realizing that he was abused as a child, decades after the incidents.