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Recreating the social link between children and their histories: Revisiting ghosts in
the nursery and exploring the power of story as a decolonizing strategy
Michael O’Loughlin
Adelphi University
-------------------------------------------------Under editorial review in International Journal of Equity and Innovation in Early
Childhood Education, November 2006
--------------------------------------------------
Paper presented at:
International Conference: Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education, Rotorua,
New Zealand, December 2006
Michael O'Loughlin, 130 Harvey Hall, Adelphi University, Garden City, NY 11530.
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(516) 877 4108 [email protected]
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In this paper I would like to lay out an argument about the possibilities of a form
of pedagogy that advances a process of decolonization in early childhood education. I
have sympathy with Ashis Nandy’s (1983) formulation of colonialism as The intimate
enemy in the book of that name. Nandy notes that in addition to being a structure of
economic and political exploitation, colonialism succeeded in India by a “psychological
invasion from the West [that] had begun with the widespread internalization of Western
values by many Indians.” (p.24). Nandy, however, also offers a cautionary note about not
oversimplifying the colonial narrative, something colonizer nations did in order to deny
or obscure the colonizing dis-ease within themselves:
As folk wisdom would have it, the only sufferers of colonialism are the subject
communities. Colonialism, according to this view, is the name of a political
economy which ensures a one-way flow of benefits, the subjects being the
perpetual losers in a zero-sum game, and the rulers being the beneficiaries. This is
a view of human mind and history promoted by colonialism itself. This view has a
vested interest in denying that the colonizers are at least as much affected by the
ideology of colonialism, that their degradation, too, can be terrifying. (p. 30)
In discussing George Orwell’s attempt to lay bare the underpinnings of totalitarianism in
his novels Animal farm and 1984, Nandy notes that Orwell “worked with creative myths
that were direct attempts to reassert some of the values which colonialism forced one to
disown” (p. 39). The importance of myths, memories, and stories in the process of
reclamation of collective experience – and hence, I believe, in the decolonization project
in schools and communities - gets very close to the heart of my intent in this paper.
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Before proceeding, however, I would like to make a brief clarification. While
some groups of people in our world continue to endure direct colonial rule, the
widespread use of the term postcolonial could be read as suggesting that the colonial
condition has been transcended, at least in what are putatively represented to be
democratic societies. I share Stuart Hall’s (1996) view that despite the “’ubiquitous
academic marketability’” of the term “‘post-colonial’” (Hall, p. 243, quoting McClintock,
1992) the term offers a disquieting elision of the ways in which contemporary global
capitalism represents a new form of structural colonization that oppresses many of the
world’s peoples economically:
Like other ‘posts’ with which it is aligned, [postcolonialism] collapses different
histories, temporalities and racial formations into the same universalizing
category. This is a critique shared by Anne McClintock…who criticizes the
concept for its ‘entranced suspension of history’ (McClintock, 1992). For both
critics the concept is used to mark the final closure of a historical epoch, as if
colonialism and its effects are definitively over. (p.243)
Continuing with this argument, Hall cites the writings of Arif Dirlik, (1997), who, among
other things, critiques, a lack of emphasis on structure in postcolonial studies:
[Dirlik’s] second and related argument is that the ‘post-colonial’ grossly
underplays ‘capitalism’s structuring of the modern word’ Its notion of identity is
discursive not structural. It repudiates structure and totality. (p. 243)
Hall speaks, too, of “the persistence of many of the effects of colonisation, but at the
same time their displacement from the colonizer/colonised axis to their internalisation
within the decolonized society itself” (p. 248), suggesting that no society is exempt from
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the kind of self-examination decolonization requires. Decolonization, therefore, is a very
complex task, especially in schools, which are, after all, the chief ideological instruments
of all governments, totalitarian or otherwise, and thus likely to be held on a tight
ideological leash. Addressing decolonization is rendered even more challenging by the
difficulty for westernized academics in casting off what appears to be an inherently
colonizing gaze. Hall notes that “Eurocentric, post-Enlightenment grand narratives” (p.
248) necessarily underlie conventional Western academic approaches to knowledge,
curriculum development, and policy-making. In similar vein historian Dipesh
Chakrabarty (1995) noted that it is impossible for anybody working within a conventional
academic framework to write an Indian history of India. Hall sums up the epistemic
problem of the business of education this way:
It is possible, now, to answer the question posed earlier about the ‘post-colonial’s’
preoccupation with Eurocentric time. The Enlightenment returns, in the discourse
of the ‘post-colonial’, in its decentered position, because it represents a critical
epistemic shift within the colonizing process, understood in the wider sense,
whose discursive, power-knowledge, effects are still in play (how, in western
discourses dominated by Science and the Social Sciences, could it fail to be?).
Until the Enlightenment, difference had often been conceptualized in terms of
different orders of being… Whereas, under the universalising panoptic eye of the
Enlightenment, all forms of human life were brought within the universal scope of
a single order of being, so that difference had to be re-cast into the constant
marking and re-marking of positions within a single discursive system
(différance). This process was organized by those shifting mechanisms of
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‘otherness’, alterity and exclusion and the tropes of fetishism and pathologisation,
which were required if ‘difference’ was ever to be fixed and consolidated within a
‘unified’ discourse of civilisation (p. 252).
Hall notes, however, that despite this totalizing attempt at producing a unified discourse
which essentialized difference as other than, counterdiscourses always have had the
potential to make their presence felt. He continues:
They were constitutive in the symbolic production of a constitutive outside, which
however has always refused to be fixed in place and which was, and even more
today is, always slipping back across the porous or invisible borders to disturb or
subvert from the inside. (p. 252)
It is these potentially porous, albeit invisible, borders that represent a prime
opportunity for decolonizing interventions in schooling. My purpose in this paper is to
discuss ways in which teachers, having become sensible to their own deeply embodied
histories, can use myth, ritual, and narrative, to engage children’s minds, hearts, bodies,
and souls in the reclamation of embedded memories. I will argue that these memories,
currently unthought and unspoken, represent a psychic burden for children and
communities. However, having become spoken, these memories have the potential to set
individuals and communities free to live lives that are deeper and more faithful to their
histories, rather than the scripted consumer lives contemporary global material culture
assigns to all people. The capacity of Pai, the protagonist of the movie Whale rider (Caro,
2003), to commune with ancestral memory through her communication with whales is
suggestive of what I have in mind.
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My paper will be in two parts. First, drawing on the work of two French
psychoanalysts François Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière I will explore ways in which
suppressed memories are encased in our bodies and transmitted silently across
generations, often with catastrophic consequences. These authors argue that such
repressed memories need to be voiced, and they offer provocative thoughts about the
characteristics which a therapist – and, I will argue, teacher – must possess in order to
release such memories in people. Then, drawing on some of the writing of Trinh Minh-ha
I will explore the power of story-telling as a rubric for conceptualizing this process in
pedagogical terms. Finally, I will revisit Fraiberg, Adelson and Shapiro’s (1975) “Ghosts
in the nursery” in order to contextualize my argument specifically to early education.
As for the limitations of my point of view, let me state the obvious. To the degree
that structures of oppression are built into the global capitalist economic system – the
latest manifestation of colonialism – clothed in the garb of consumer choice and liberal
democracy, they might be challenged by revolutionary political education of the kind
Paulo Freire (1970), for example, championed. However, I know of no national education
system that would permit such a challenge to its hegemony. The approach I argue for
here, therefore, is more indirect, and more focused on decolonizing discursive aspects of
the internalization of colonial ways of being rather than on directly critiquing the
structure, as, for example, traditional Marxism would advocate. In defense of my
thinking, I suggest that this kind of education has the potential to stimulate people’s
curiosity about their origins, their histories, and the lacks they experience living the
amnestic lives consumer societies offer them. It is worth noting, too, that structural
inequalities perpetuate deprivation and trauma, and that – much as Freire (1969) did with
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his use of generative themes – surfacing people’s stories can provide a compelling entrée
into analysis of the effects of political and social inequalities. If educational authorities
become sufficiently nervous about the potential of this approach that they feel moved to
suppress it, we can then surmise we are on to something potentially revolutionary!
History, madness and the social link
In History beyond trauma Davoine and Gaudillière (2004) address the process by
which trauma is transmitted intergenerationally. In my reading of their work I will make
two extrapolations beyond the work’s original context. First, I will extend the theory
beyond the context of specific historically located trauma, to include a wide range of
historical events (e.g., forced dislocations, massacres, cultural or linguistic genocide) that
happened and that have since dropped out of the active memories of individuals or groups
of people. Second, while Davoine and Gaudillière present their theory in the context of
psychodynamic psychotherapy, I will argue that it is highly relevant to teachers who seek
to develop a decolonizing pedagogy with the intent of assisting students with the
reclamation of historically erased aspects of their individual and communal subjectivities.
Davoine and Gaudillière begin with the unremarkable psychoanalytic argument
that when we observe evidence of trauma in individuals or populations, we must probe
for the cause. If no cause can be found in immediate lived experience, then we can
suspect that the trauma is located in history. Davoine and Gaudillière do not say such
events are located in the past, however, because they assume that events that were never
encoded in memory are literally timeless, and are waiting to be named so that they can
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claim their rightful place in history. The authors suggest that ancestral memory is never
far from the surface, and that much of the diasporic movement of peoples across the
world appears to be a desperate flight from memory:
To mention the United States, which is entirely oriented toward the future to be
constructed, these symptoms keep on asking, “Your families that immigrated,
where did they come from, when did they leave their country of origin, under
what catastrophic circumstances? And what about the frontier, and the Indian
wars, the Hispanic Wars, the Civil War? And the African, American, Canadian,
Australian, English and other national cemeteries on French soil? And the wars in
Asia and Africa, and social, economic, and natural disasters, on whatever scale?”
It would take too much time to list all the countries from which refugees have fled
in order to start a new life and forget. (xxiii)
Davoine and Gaudillière argue that psychological symptoms of madness in our
patients in the present can be rooted in social issues from the past. “Sometimes,” they
note, “a fit of madness tells us more than all the news dispatches about the leftover facts
that have no right to existence” (xxvii). The therapist’s – and I will argue teacher’s –
responsibility, therefore, is to “bring into existence zones of non-existence” (xxvii). This
occurs, Davoine and Gaudillière suggest, through a process in which therapists – teachers
– become acutely attuned listeners who struggle “to make a story out of what has not
been received by any form of speech” (p. xxviii) previously. Another way to think of this,
the authors note, is to imagine the unstated and unthought (cf. Bollas, 1987; O’Loughlin,
2006) events that people carry around inside them because of, for example, literal and
cultural genocides, as pieces of frozen time:
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These critical moments…lead us, each time, to understand that the connection
between madness and trauma is not a causal one. For there can be no transition
from the past to the present when the impact of disaster has immobilized time.
Thus the stories we shall tell are those of descendants whose task it was to
transmit, from generation to generation, pieces of frozen time. The problem is to
recognize that these moments excised from history are actualized in the present of
the analytic work. (xxix)
And so it might go, too, for teachers, in the pedagogical moment - teachers who could
become sufficiently attuned to “moments excised from history” that they might bring
those moments to the conscious awareness of children in a dialogue of the present with
the unthought or unspeakable past.
What is necessary, therefore, is to listen in a carefully attuned way to the silences
that betray “a history that has escaped History” (p. 11). Whether we are speaking of
individual madness or seeking to understand the kind of self-destructive anger evident
among the Maori family depicted in Once were warriors (Tamahori, 2003), and evident
in reports of high levels of sexual abuse within aboriginal families in Australia and of
alcoholism among Native Americans in the United States, for example, Davoine and
Gaudillière would argue that all of these are potentially symptoms of frozen trauma
desperately seeking to be voiced. In Lacanian terms, what is at issue here is the Real –
that area of experience that lies unformulated in the unconscious. For therapists other
than psychoanalysts, and probably for most educators, this is unexplored terrain. The
majority of therapists and educators seem to live in the world of the symbolic, keeping as
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far distant as possible from the realm of the Real. Artists, filmmakers1, writers2,
musicians3, and indigenous healers4, however are much more likely to embrace the kinds
of knowledge that do not readily lend themselves to rational analysis, and that do not fit
easily into Eurocentric, Enlightenment taxonomies of knowledge and curriculum. As
Davoine and Gaudillière note, if catastrophic symptoms like this can be acknowledged
and named, the potential for great creativity exists (p. 27), but naming requires an
acknowledgement of the unnamable within, a silent – perhaps spectral - realm of anguish,
that, as they note, has been well recognized within the analytic community in Lacan’s
“return of the Real,” Sullivan’s “the dreadful not-me,” Bion’s “nameless dread,” and of
course in Freud’s acknowledgement that there is material in the unconscious other than
that which had been repressed (p. 27).
From an analytic perspective, then, the question which the anguish of an
individual or community raises is an archeological one pertaining to “where our patients
have been before, and toward which they are, paradoxically, seeking to guide us.” (p. 29).
If, in the school context, students are angry, alienated, or merely silent, how might we
enable them to enter history and speak the unspoken that has so profoundly shaped their
individual and collective experiences? Davoine and Gaudillière, explain that in 1826
1
In addition to movies mentioned in the text, see, for example, Meleanna Aluli Meyer’s documentary
Ho’oku’ikahi: To unify as one (1995).
2
See, for example, Imre Kertész’s Kaddish for an unborn child and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) as
examples of this process. Toni Morrison has acknowledged that she channeled the spirit of Beloved in
writing that work ( ), In her discussion of narrative and story in Woman, native, other Trinh Minh-ha
(1989) takes up this inquiry too. Trinh notes the anteriority of language – the ways in which the words we
use carry ancestral meanings. She cites, as an example, Diana Chang: “[I]t wrote itself through me. I was
driven and I drove the story onward…. Things I was not aware I knew…. It was her voice which started
speaking through me… I feel she wrote the novel” (quoted in Trinh, p. 36).
3
Israel Kamakwiwo’ole was a Native Hawi’ian singer whose songs (e.g., 1993, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2001)
are brimming with ancestral memory of pain and loss and his work resonates powerfully for native
Hawai’ian people today.
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See, for example Paula Gunn Allen’s Off the reservation (1998) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s (1995)
Storyteller for further discussion and illustration.
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August Comte, the father of Positivism, experienced an attack of madness which led him
to formulate the notion that the brain was the “device in which the dead act on the living”
(quoted in Davoine and Gaudillière, p. 36), and led Comte to conclude that “The subject
of madness, in [Comte’s] experience as a patient, is trying to tie together the traumas of
his individual history and those of history writ large” (p. 36). In what way might the dead
of our ancestral and spectral pasts (cf. Blackman, 2001, 2002; Gordon, 1997; Venn,
2002) live on within all of us? Who in our societies is equipped and willing to take on the
responsibility of serving as what Davoine and Gaudillière call a guarantor that from now
on those ancestral experiences will be given voice?
Davoine and Gaudillière argue that dehistoricization of experience is particularly
traumatic in that it causes people to lose the social link with their pasts and that we must
assist such people in “regaining a foothold in history” (p. 47). Drawing on Wittgenstein,
they employ the concept of petrification, arguing that people’s bodies can be so numbed
by trauma that, as Wittgenstein said, “I turn into stone and my pain goes on” (quoted in
Davoine and Gaudillière, p. 49). The authors note that children are particularly
susceptible to noticing the blank affect of petrified adults, and are likely to absorb that
pain into themselves, “becoming,” as they note, “the subject of the other’s suffering”(p.
49). This is how trauma is transmitted intergenerationally both within families and in
whole communities. As to the psychosocial effects of such a calamity on people, Davoine
and Gaudillière are very clear:
Our patients are perpetuating such a hell, one that continues on in the anesthesia
of several generations. This major distortion characterizes the transmission of
traumas: an insensitivity marks everything reminiscent of the catastrophe, while a
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pseudo-normality reigns in the family… If they manage to get to an analyst, these
descendants may manifest only an omnipresent shame, unalloyed misfortune, a
sense of radical injustice, and a global sadness, all these being signs of an
imminent catastrophe that they can neither name or dispel. (p. 50)
The question, then is how to address traumatic events that cannot be recounted because
they were never recorded as past – events that are still “suspended like a present without
time.” (p. 52). How does one re-vitalize an individual or community weighed down by
events that they simply do not know that they know? The psychoanalytic answer, of
course, is to assist the anguished person or community to turn these unthought knowns
(Bollas, 1987) of their foreclosed history (p. 54) into narrative. This is not an easy task
since the disturbing events have never been encoded in narrative memory. In
psychoanalysis, in such cases – and Davoine and Gaudillière’s book is replete with
examples – analysts rely on their own unconscious to serve as a receptor for the patient’s
anguish, and, through free association to give voice to the trauma the patient cannot
speak. The question for teachers and caregivers, then is whether they can feel “instead of
staying objective, in this very context of the patient’s [child’s] inability to feel.” (p. 58).
Davoine and Gaudillière clarify the difference between silence and receptivity on the
analyst’s [teacher’s] part:
One should not, of course, unload one’s problems onto one’s patients. Quite the
contrary, what is being done is unloading strange, uncanny impressions from
them, impressions received through their acute sense of alertness and survival. If
the analyst had remained silent, the psychoanalytic work would have simply
stopped there. Or worse. (p. 64)
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It is my impression, reading accounts of empowering and re-vivifying pedagogy
(e.g., Ashton-Warner, 1986; Horton, 1990; Paley, 2004; Rose, 1990) that it is precisely
this critical sensibility that critically alive teachers possess.
Of course the inverse is also true, and Davoine and Gaudillière point out the
dangers when adults offer silence when in fact a sensible response is needed to a child’s
unspoken question. In such cases, they note, “the thread of speech may be radically cut”
(p. 71) and the trauma will continue to maintain its icy grip:
From the outset, the [silent] question will be validated by the response that
confirms or disconfirms the experience. The cognitive stakes are considerable, a
prelude to the opening or the closing of the field of logos. A disingenuous reply or
an embarrassed silence, when adamantly repeated, sends the subject into
nonexistence on this point. He exiles himself, falls silent, goes crazy. Instead of
speaking to him, people speak of him as an aberration… The budding child
scientist remains bewildered, on the edge of the exploration that is refused to him;
he is made into a fool, a madman, an innocent – until he finds someone else who
accepts the challenge of reopening the question. (p. 70)
Enough has been written about the alienating, objectifying, and culturally
annihilating effects of schooling (e.g., for U.S. schools see Anyon, 1997; Churchill, 2004;
Hale, 1995; Kozol, 1992; MacLeod, 1995; Nasaw, 1979, Paley, 2004; Polakow, 2000) to
suggest that the norm, in U.S. society at any rate, is a form of schooling in which history,
feeling, and even the capacity to question are foreclosed.
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In a recent talk at my university analyst James Grotstein (2006) spoke of an
analytic session as equivalent to a dream. Davoine and Gaudillière suggest, in very
similar language, that to engage the alienated subject we must enter into a dream-like
state in order to enter the other’s experience and engage them in a revivifying
experience:5
At this crossroads, at the risk of appearing like a clown the therapist must describe
his impressions and, so to speak, animate a character who entered the session
disaffected and reified. What we say on these occasions is that we are feeling,
imagining, and dreaming in the patient’s place, and that we have to tell him about
it; otherwise we would be experimentally continuing the excision of otherness
that was perpetuated on him. (p. 76)
As to how this might come about, Davoine and Gaudillière draw lessons from the
Salmon principles, a series of treatment principles articulated by Thomas Salmon (1917)
to treat shell-shocked World War I soldiers. These four principles offer a means for
engaging in sympathetic conversation with the unspoken parts of individual or collective
unconscious that are likely to harbor trauma. As the authors remind us, the goal of these
conversations is “to enable the patient to pass from the asphyxia of a lethal impasse to the
respiration of words exchanged to name the unnamable” (p. 118).
The first principle is proximity. This refers to the need to allow oneself to
approach the hidden – possibly even dreadful – experience of the other person, whether
student or patient, or group of people. This does not take the form of an interrogation,
5
See Howard Buten’s (2004) Through the glass wall for a compelling example of the use of mime to
enter the enclosed worlds of autistic people. In The work of the negative Andre Green (1999) discusses the
need for analysis of depressed patients to be vivifying. See further discussion in O’Loughlin (2007).
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designed to extract memories from the person. What is needed is the sensibility to absorb
from the person or group the affect that will communicate “the forbidden link to their
ancestors” (p. 135). It is by accepting the person’s experience, through what analysts
refer to as a transferential relationship, that validation is given to a non-existent part of
the subject to become present. Grotstein, in his Adelphi talk, spoke of this as the dead
part of the subject emerging from the crypt. As Davoine and Gaudillière note, the alive
subjective presence of the therapist – teacher – is vital, since those “who have been
threatened with vitrification by the impact of the Real do not need to be turned into
objects yet again.” (p. 129). The authors describes the healing adult in this process as
providing “a mirror to history” (p. 136) and says that the existence of the subject
“becomes possible again, after having been annulled, because an other attests to them,
from an independent source, on the basis of his own experience” (p. 136).
As Davoine and Gaudillière note, proximity creates what Winnicott (1989) refers
to as a potential space, a safe space in which a person can allow unspoken or dead parts
of themselves to come to be. The antithesis of this, of course, as the authors note – and
this would appear to be endemic in institutional schooling - is “the violence of
meaninglessness” (p. 141). Quoting from the work of noted French child psychiatrist,
Lionel Bailly, Davoine and Gaudillière sum up this process in children thus:
When “children hear the voices of the dead” these are most often the voices of
those who died without burial, without a rite. This brief hallucination will cease as
soon as it is heard by a therapist in whom the voices of the dead can resonate
instead of remaining a dead letter. If the voice finds no echo, he says, “we have
the seed of psychosis…” (p. 145)
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Davoine and Gaudillière emphasize that the therapist – teacher – must be neither a
passive observer, nor an intrusive interlocutor. Rather, what is at issue with proximity is
the receptivity of the professional listener, one who can, as Bailly suggests, “exchange
one’s own knowledge of catastrophes for the child’s terrible knowledge, so that the child
is not longer the only one holding it” (Bailly, 1996, p. 102, quoted in Davoine and
Gaudillière, p. 146). Contrary to western notions of childhood innocence, or even tabula
erasa, the idea here is that too often the baby is burdened with excessive knowledge unknowingly, of course – and our task, therefore, is to assist in naming this terrible
knowledge (pp. 148-49). In providing words to our patients – students – we are not
offering something new. We are merely returning to them what is already theirs, but now
in a manner that increases their capacity to own their own histories (p. 152). The situation
with children is all the more poignant, as early childhood teachers and child therapists
know, because of the probability of sensitive children assuming the psychic burdens of
their families. In psychological jargon such children are often referred to as parentified.
Davoine and Gaudillière describe the process this way: “As we have seen, a baby may be
assigned the role of therapôn, keeper of the mind for its parents, the boundary of their
irrationality, remaining welded to them by a bond that may prevent any attachment” (p.
157). We thus need to be especially carefully attuned to the unthought knowns in the
lives of infants and young children.
The second of the Salmon principles is immediacy. While Davoine and
Gaudillière’s discussion of this contains psychoanalytic details that are not germane here,
an important point to note is that while Salmon originally argues for immediate
intervention – within 24-36 hours – for victims of shell shock, Davoine and Gaudillière,
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noting the timelessness of unconscious material that has not been turned into narrative,
point out that any time an attempt is made to communicate this unconscious material we
must strive to be immediately present to it. Irrespective of how often it is the apparent
subject of discussion, until trauma is truly named, each encounter should be considered a
first encounter and treated with immediacy, as “an unknown that is imminent” (p. 171).
Some people, burdened by such trauma, experience time as stopped, and are profoundly
stuck in their lives. As Davoine and Gaudillière say, sometimes “‘Once upon a time’
becomes ‘Once upon no time’” (p. 179). Such persons experience being haunted by
invisible ghosts. Their past is continually, albeit invisibly, present and such people need
our active assistance in re-entering present time:
A heavy burden weighs on the shoulders of descendants. What unfinished battles
have these warriors bequeathed to them, and, at the same time, to all of us? Their
war is snatched away by forgers who know how to take advantage of it; their
story is cut away from the fabric of history, at the price of the stopping of time for
their descendants. (p. 206)
Expectancy is the third of the Salmon principles. It expresses faith and hope:
“Expectancy is the expectation that an other will take over from you when you are
exhausted, someone you count on the way you count on yourself, and more so, to
feed you to soothe you. Food, drink, sleep: the vital needs are the only ones that
seem to count, but they would be only mechanical feeding without the face, the
voice, the gesture, and the gaze. (p. 210)
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If a person or group comes to us expecting nothing, Davoine and Gaudillière suggest, our
responsibility is to have expectations for them, and most important of all, to have a
willingness to name the truth: “The abolition of pretense, unvarnished access to the truth
of situations, and tearing the veil from the weakness of adults free up an energy block
usually held back by repression” (p. 218). The authors also warn against the dangers of
intellectual detachment, and how an intellectual – as opposed to a receptive or expectant
– stance can “perpetuate “a lesion in otherness” (p. 328) which leaves the person stuck
with the anguish of an unnamed traumatic experience.
The final Salmon principle is simplicity, and Davoine and Gaudillière sum up the
importance of simplicity rather elegantly:
With a bit of kitchen Latin, seasoned with a few obscurities borrowed from more
firmly grounded discourses, it will always be easy to make an appointment with
the chorus of the learned so as to conclude, after some gibberish that has no
bearing on the case, that “this is exactly why your daughter is mute”… “It isn’t so
simple,” said Gilda, “simply to meet someone.” (249).
Thus, for this not-so-simple “meeting of someone” existentially, we must use
simple, direct language. The goal is “to be sensitive to fossil messages, apparently
without origin or form, coming from worlds that have disappeared, uprooted from the
conventional and contrived universes of reason” (p. 251). By helping create “social links
around these fossils, we can assist people in going through madness and trauma to secure
their freedom (p. 256).
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On stories and history
In a recent article on the nature of subjectivity Couze Venn (2002) speaks of the
need for a “radical historicsation of the process of becoming, so that the subject is
conceptualised as coupled to the lifeworld, understood in terms of social and material
constituents that are historically constituted” (p. 52). In addition to well established
postmodern notions of the subject as constructed, performative, and discursive, Venn
echoes Davoine and Gaudillière when he argues that subjectivity must be considered a
“matter of mutual constitution between the psychic and the social” (p. 53). Venn
emphasizes the centrality of language to our being as subjects, and suggests - as do noted
theorists such as Lacan (1968) and Bakhtin ( 1981, 1986) – that our identities are
inscribed in language, and are therefore inherently social: “Thus, every self is a storied
self. And every story is mingled with the stories of other selves” (p. 57). Venn articulate a
notion of freeing psychic growth – a pedagogy, if you will - that is consistent with the
narrative intent evident in Davoine and Gaudillière’s work. Venn says:
So, concerning change, we must assume, to begin with, that some specific event
initiates it, an event capable of triggering or disclosing the disjunctures which
incite a particular self or group to question its way of being. Such disruptive
events could cohere around a spatial and cultural disturbance, like migration, the
translation across borders of identity, or a traumatic experience arising from
political conflict and its consequences, like war, or the introduction of a counterhegemonic account of the lifeworld, or an aesthetic experience that shakes being
to its foundation, provoking the trembling of being in the face of the sublime or
the ecstatic. (p. 66)
21
What Venn envisages, then, is “a narrative of emancipation, that is to say, a narrative
about the anticipation of a time to come that holds out the hope of the recovery of loss or
the overcoming of insufficiency and lack, or the redress of some profound injustice, or
indeed any promissory narrative, such as ‘the promise of joy.’ History and emancipatory
narratives are intrinsic to the process” (p. 67)
In Woman, native, other Trinh Minh-ha (1989) offers a postcolonial critique of
the ways in which the hegemonic westernized gaze has pierced the Others of our world.
Trinh notes the hazards of postcolonial writing that seeks out “the real native,” in a new
touristic form of essentialism that she calls planned authenticity:
Today, planned authenticity is rife; as a product of hegemony and a remarkable
counterpart of universal standardization, it constitutes an efficacious means of
silencing the cry of racial oppression. We no longer wish to erase your difference.
We demand, on the contrary, that you remember and assert it. At least to a certain
extent. Every path I/i take is edged with thorns. On the one hand, i play into the
Savior’s hands by concentrating on authenticity, for my attention is numbed by it,
and diverted from other important issues; on the other hand, i do feel the necessity
to return to my so-called roots, since they are the foundation of my strength, the
guiding arrow to which i constantly refer before heading for a new direction. (p.
89)
Thus, in some perverse sense, the hegemonic appropriation of authenticity can taint it so
that paradoxically the real and authentic feels fake. As Native American Writer Vine
Deloria Jr. noted with respect to authentic Indians, “Not even Indians can relate
22
themselves to this type of creature who, to anthropologists, is the ‘real’ Indian.” (1969,
quoted in Trinh, p. 94). Trinh points out that even with changes to make our language
sound inclusive, western academics continue to define themselves as the reference point
or norm against which all others are measured, and speaking specifically of women’s
identity, she points out – and this is remarkably echoed in Davoine and Gaudillière’s later
discussion of madness and the social link – that such Othering can make a person feel
quite mad:
Those who run around yelling that X is not X, and X can be Y, usually land in a
hospital, a “rehabilitation” center, a concentration camp, or a res-er-va-tion. All
deviations from the dominant stream of thought, that is to say, the belief in a
permanent essence of wo/man and in an invariant but fragile identity, whose
“loss” is considered to be a “specifically human danger” can easily fit into the
categories of the “mentally ill” or the “mentally underdeveloped.” (p. 95)
The antidote to this madness, as Trinh sees it, is to recognize that in addition to
the factual truths enshrined in westernized ways of knowing, there are also narrative
truths that speak to the inherited wisdom and inheritances of groups of people. This
qualitative notion of understanding has much more to do with accumulated cultural
truths, than with any enlightenment [Trinh calls it “endarkenment”] form of objective
knowing:
Understanding, however, is creating and living, such an immense gift that
thousands of people benefit from each past or present life being lived. The story
depends upon every one of us coming into being. It needs us all, needs our
23
remembering, understanding, and creating what we have heard together to keep
on coming into being. The story of a people. Of us peoples. Story, history,
literature…They call it the tool of primitive man, the simplest vehicle of truth. (p.
119).
Trinh suggests that History [with a capital H] concerns itself with very different
truths, than history which is concerned with the truths of fiction, magic and myth.
Trinh is very clear that while our stories are us, they are also very much more:
In this chain and continuum I am but one link. The story is me, neither me
nor mine. It does not really belong to me, and while I feel greatly
responsible for it, I also enjoy the irresponsibility of the pleasure obtained
through the process of transferring. Pleasure in the copy, pleasure in the
reproduction. No repetition can ever be identical, but my story carries with
it their stories, their history, and our story repeats itself endlessly despite
our persistence in denying it. (p. 122)
Trinh notes that this constructive form of storytelling is, of course, anathema to
“civilised” minds who have no doubt about their ability to distinguish fact from fiction
and who insist on a rigorous “apartheid” (p. 125) between the two.6 In Trinh’s thinking
story is a powerfully regenerative force:
6
In a study of sharing time in her U. S. first-grade classroom, teacher Karen Gallas. recounts a story about
her responses, and the ensuing response of fellow classmates, to attempts at sharing by an African
American student, Jiana, that are quite illustrative of this “apartheid”:
In the second week of March, following a child’s account of a trip to the zoo with her
mother, Jiana got into the chair and launched into a narrative about how she went to the zoo with
her mother; and the zookeeper came out and took the gorilla out on a leash for her mother to pet.
That was simply too much of me. I blurted out, ‘Jiana, this is a time for true stories!’; but she was
adamant that the event has occurred and tried to continue her story.
24
Thus, as a wise Dogon elder (Ogotemmli) pointed out, “issuing from a woman’s
sexual part the Word enters another sexual part, namely the ear”… From the ear,
it will, continuing the cycle, go to the sexual part where it encircles the womb.
African traditions conceive of speech as a gift of God/dess and a force of creation.
In Fulfulde, the word for speech (haala) has the connotation of “giving strength”
and by extension of “making material.” Speech is the materialization,
externalization and internalization of the vibration of forces. That is why, A.
Hampata Ba noted, “every manifestation of a force in any form whatever is to be
regarded as its speech… everything in the universe speaks… If speech is strength
that is because it creates a bond of coming-and-going which generates movement
and rhythm and therefore life and action [my italics]… Life is a perpetual to and
fro, a dis/continuous releasing and absorbing of the self. Let her weave her stories
within their stories, her life amidst their lives. And while she weaves, let her whip,
spur, and set them on fire. Thus making them sing again. Very softly a-new again. (pp. 127-28)
Trinh cautions against any desire to impose structure on such stories. Speaking of
anthropologists, she says: “The ready-made idea they have of reality prevents their
perceiving the story as a living thing, an organic process, a way of life. What is taken for
stories, only stories, are fragments of/in life, fragments that never stop interacting while
being complete in themselves” (p. 143).
No sooner were the words out of my mouth than all of the children in the group turned
around and looked at me very hard and long. Time seemed to stop for me as I realized from the
change in their expressions what I had done. They turned slowly back, mumbling about it not
being true, how it couldn’t be true. Jiana tried to maintain her story in the face of their questions…
but within those few seconds her audience had turned away from her. (1992, p. 176)
25
Trinh sums up the emancipatory power of story this way:
She who works at un-learning the dominant language of “civilized” missionaries
also has to learn how to un-write and write anew. And she often does so by reestablishing the contact with her foremothers. So that living traditions can never
congeal into fixed forms, so that life keeps on nurturing life, so that what is
understood as the Past continues to provide the link to the present and the future.
As our elder Lao Tzu says, “Without allowance for filling, a valley will run dry;
Without allowance for growing, creation will stop functioning.”
Ghosts in the nursery revisited: A ghostbuster pedagogy
In every nursery there are ghosts. They are the visitors from the unremembered
past of the parents, the uninvited guests at the christening. Under favorable
circumstances, these unfriendly and unbidden guests are banished from the
nursery and return to their subterranean dwelling place… This is not to say
that ghosts cannot invent mischief from their burial places. Even in families
where the love bonds are stable and strong, the intruders from the parental past
may break through the magic circle in an unguarded moment, and a parent and
his child may find themselves reenacting a moment or scene from another time
with another set of characters. (Fraiberg et al, 1975, pp. 162-63).
This is how Selma Fraiberg opens her important discussion of cultural
transmission of trauma, “Ghosts in the nursery”. While Fraiberg was more concerned
with immediate familial trauma, transmitted from parent to child, she also recognized the
26
particular difficulty of families who appear to be possessed by their ghosts”, ghosts “that
take up residence and conduct the rehearsal of the family tragedy from a tattered script”
(p. 163). Fraiberg notes, too, that by far the most challenging trauma is that which
occurred three or more generations earlier and has dropped completely out of conscious
memory. The concern of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts is typically with strategies
for giving voice to individual trauma so that anguish may be alleviated. My concern here
is with broadening the discussion in two ways. First, I would like to include a much
broader range of lost memories than those that cause individual trauma. I am thinking, for
example, of the effects of displacements and migrations; wars, genocides; cultural
erasure, enslavement, and all of the ways in which colonial oppression manifested itself
on subjugated populations, including of course imposition of Christian beliefs, and
rational Enlightenment thought to replace indigenous ways of knowing, indigenous
modes of feeling, and indigenous religious beliefs and rites. Second, despite the quixotic
nature of the enterprise <of a westernized academic engaging in this enterprise> I
propose using the kinds of understandings discussed here to articulate a pedagogy for
young children that promises to be freeing - a pedagogy with the capacity to unhook
particular, culturally located children from the anomie of an amnestic, universalist,
globalized consumer society to begin the journey of reconnecting with the latent
historical subjectivities deep within their own beings. This, I believe, is a step toward
undoing the harm to individual and collective subjectivities wrought by globalist/
capitalist/ Christianizing/ consumerist expansion. Here then are my thoughts on what
kind of pedagogical imperatives this work suggests:
27
•
Teachers need to recognize the relationship between madness and the social link,
i.e., that observed supposedly oppositional, pathological or deviant behaviors
may well be unconscious responses to culturally transmitted trauma, or the lacks
produced in people whose subjectivities have been progressively displaced by
alien values and expectations
•
Children who have experienced a foreclosed history will suffer its absence, but
are likely to be unaware of the knowledge within, i.e., we need to figure out how
to teach of the unthought knowns in children’s lives. As the authors discussed
earlier note, classrooms and consulting rooms are filled with silent ghosts – the
unnamable within silent, spectral realms of anguish.
•
Freire’s notion of generative themes has some value in describing how we might
construct grounded curriculum with children that would allow them to find
themselves critically within their own ancestral histories and memories.
•
In this discussion I am referring to small-h history as opposed to History as master
narrative. Small-h history implies a readiness to accept the wisdom of elders, and
the power of myth, storytelling, art and craft representations, performance, and
other forms of knowing that bend, stretch, and even transcend logos.
•
The teacher might consider her/himself as a guarantor of the speakability of
unnamable experience.
•
Similar to Buber’s (1971) notion of I and thou, the teacher must be prepared to
enter into a sympathetic conversation – a deep existential encounter - with
children, individually and collectively.
28
A teacher who commits to this challenging work would need to possess the following
characteristics:
•
A capacity to see children not as empty or innocent, but as burdened with spectral
knowedges which need to be elicited and named.
•
A focus not on explicit knowledge, but on the implicit or unthought knowns that
children possess, and a recognition that the only means of accessing these
knowledges in children is through our own honed acute sensitivity to our own
spectral knowledges and ancestral memories. Such an awareness can only arise
from deep reflection both on our own historical legacies, and from profound
immersion in the multiple ways of knowing by which the small-h history of the
childrens’ subjectivities has come to be.
•
Through this immersion it becomes possible to identify means by which aspects
of the children’s small-h histories can be brought forward to assist in the
subjective identifications and memorial reconstructions that will lead to the
reforging of the social link.
•
A recognition that a revivifying experience is essential to return vitality and
connection to children’s experiences of themselves and their communities.
29
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