Editor’s Note
(Revised November 29, 2024)
This issue grew out of the following readings:
• Tracy Robert’s memoir, Angora Panties: The Afterthoughts of Loss. Robert’s book is primarily about the family she grew up in and secondarily about her marriages. Near the end is “Losing Casablanca,” a compassionate essay about her current husband that captures beautifully the kind of trauma that can be shared between husband and wife. I wrote to her asking if I could reprint it and suggested she write a follow-up essay. The result forms the beginning of “Toward a Theory of Shared Trauma.”
I then thought of Thomas Farber, whose books I had worked on and who had written essays about his marriage. Perhaps a few of these could appear alongside Robert’s as they provide an alternate viewpoint: that of a loving husband in conversation with the future. For those who want to know about the photograph that appears with his “Molokaʻi” essay: that was taken during the channel crossing by Czech swimmer Abhejali Bernardová and shows a whale breaching.
• Sirin Kale’s article “The Tragic Life and Death of John Balson” for the Guardian. Kale’s account of the illness and suicide of John Balson bothered me for a long time after I finished reading it. I felt that his suicide was apiece with his awful illness and the two made a violent whole. That he chose to die without engaging his wife or his mother is especially tragic, and it’s this aspect that joined his story with what I read next: Matthew Shaer’s article “Why Is the Loneliness Epidemic So Hard to Cure?” for the New York Times. Shaer’s description of loneliness as an existential state—not merely a passing condition—gave it an importance that made sense to me as someone who had been lonely as a young person. Here’s an extract from Shaer’s article.
More than my friends, I am not reluctant to feel deeply, whether it be sympathy, empathy, guilt, or a sense of ethical responsibility, and it’s this capability that caused me to expand the idea of shared trauma to include the subjects of war and environmental desecration.
The desolation of the Palestinian and Lebanese people is shown to us every day in reports. What is this doing to us? When adults and children get bombed, burnt, and shot again and again, what happens to our capacity to feel their pain? Around this time, my friend Alok Bhalla sent me his book The Grammar of Ruins: Intifada Pieces from My Israeli Journal, introduced by Sudeep Sen, who praises the “understated intensity” and “deeply transformative” qualities of Bhalla’s writing. The gazelle that gets shot at the end of his poem “In Praise of Those Who Search for Peace”—is that a soulless animal whose death we can disregard without feeling? For me it is a symbol of the immeasurable pain of each individual who dies as a result of the war.
Bridging a wartime past in the Middle East with a present in peacetime Hawaiʻi, the prose poem by Midori Fujioka helps us see how difficult it is for soldiers to loosen the hold of traumatic experiences and memories on their consciousness. They may exist in two places, two periods—or more—while the people around them come and go so easily that they doubt the messages of their traumatized minds and bodies.
Norma Farber’s book Year of Reversible Loss was published in 2012. Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies, wrote of the marriage that forms the central subject: “We know Norma Farber as a strikingly original poet and musician, and Sidney Farber as a larger-than-life scientific and medical visionary. But they were also husband-and-wife for more than four decades. More than a marriage of art and science, theirs was a marriage of two unorthodox and complex minds. Written after Sidney Farber’s death, this enthralling book is thus a journal of a partially amputated soul, with the rawness and urgency that only such amputations can bring.” “November,” her poem in this issue, is taken from the volume.
One of the fiction collections I have is Haas Mroue’s 8 Short Stories, which was published by his family after his death in 2007. After reading Bhalla’s poetry, I got out the collection and tried to contact his family for permission to reprint one of the stories. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear from anyone. However, I’d asked Adele Ne Jame in the meantime to write about him, and she sent me a lovely eulogy. To that, I added a section from his story about the Lebanese civil war, written from the point of view of a young man who is too sensitive to kill but who cannot help but be part of the war. I only met Haas a few times, always in Adele’s company, but I remember his shyness and his quick smile.
Naomi Klein has said the Earth is dying and we are helping to kill it. What is this complicity doing to us? And the legions of scientists, activists, researchers, lawyers, and others who have tried to stop it from happening—what is the trauma doing to them? These are a few of the questions addressed in an interview with George Tsakraklides and Lyle Lewis that closes the issue. When I was thinking of a device or ornament to insert after the interview, the idea of an image of the Earth came to me and I found a NASA photograph. In it, the planet truly looks like something that needs protection to be kept alive—the air, water, and soil clean so that life can flourish—and suddenly the interview broke free and leapt into the living world.
The only authority and power on this planet belong to nature, and physics.
George Tsakraklides
There is little difference between losing a loved one and witnessing the destruction of something we cherish.
Lyle Lewis
I hope everyone reads “Memories of the Future” and understands what will happen in the time soon to come.