REVIEW: The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems by Adrie Kusserow

Reviewed by Diane Gottlieb

It’s hard not to judge. We all do it. We have our lens through which we see the world, and we have our stories that determine how we walk, talk, think, act. Sometimes, we’re unaware that we’re taking a narrow view prescribed by our culture or by those with whom we surround ourselves. We often don’t acknowledge—or even realize—that there are other, no less legitimate, ways of being and seeing.

Anthropologists can broaden our outlook by introducing us to the stories people in other parts of the world tell themselves about their environments and experiences. Essayists, fiction writers, poets do the same. It’s a gift to learn from others’ disciplines—and discipline—from their careful, thoughtful study and observation. Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems (Duke University Press: January 2024) by Adrie Kusserow, an anthropologist and writer, is one such precious gift, a 154-page peek through Kusserow’s wide, open-hearted, lens.

The first piece sets the tone and frames many of the themes of the collection. It also lets the reader know Kusserow is not about to let herself off the judgment hook: “This is a story of a story I wanted to be the hero of, but wasn’t,” Kusserow writes in “The Trouble with Stories,” about a conversation she had in Darjeeling, West Bengal, India, with Smriti, a kidnapped girl rescued in a raid on a brothel.

We quickly learn how Westerners impose their ideas about healing onto people who may see things differently: “You could tell that someone had gotten to her, maybe from the Swiss NGO down the street, convincing her that telling her story over and over to a stranger would lighten her mind, release her trauma …”  Kusserow listens to Smriti, trying “not to reimagine my own grand rescue narrative.” And while Kusserow is able to let that rescue narrative go, she is less sure about what Smriti has gained from the experience: “… who knows if telling her story actually helped … if she limped back to her village lighter, or heavier …”

With striking, sensory language, Kusserow holds us in her masterful, if provocative, hands. The second piece, “The Sweaty Tribe,” includes piercing descriptions of several volunteers she encounters at the Daya Dan Orphanage in Kolkata, India:

Here comes another white girl in hip-hop, dreads, tattooed in Buddha, Krishna, Shantideva, her body a road map of past religious Kwik Stops. You can smell them, all patchouli and caged nerves, ponytailed and sandaled, toting their ratty knapsacks, grungy journals, emerging from taxis, bone-tired, hauling their boulders of guilt up the crumbling stairs, their tiny portable traumas.

Kusserow’s words cut deep. Yet she is quick to add: “And I have to love them, because I am not better, though sometimes I think I am.”

Love them, too, we must, because Kusserow soon turns her lens—and her powerful words—Stateside to reveal how American guilt around privilege and naïve good intentions can be a troubling combination.

In “Trauma Inc.,” a brilliant little hermit crab, Kusserow takes us to a writing workshop in Vermont, where she, her anthropology students, a local poet—the workshop leader—and several local refugees sit together in a circle: “Some of them say, I’m Congo, I’m Sudan, to introduce themselves. The leader cuts them short. Oh, but what is your real name? She wants them to know they are worth more than a generic country, that they should take pride in their uniqueness. And so begins the gentle wood whittling of the self at the hands of the well-meaning.”

The American love affair with individualism can negate the value of those who do not see themselves as separate from a larger collective. More damaging, however, may be the position of esteem granted to trauma in our culture. Here is how it plays out in the workshop:

The air is filled with awkward, teacup delicacy, hushed phrases, knowing glances that suggest the writing coaches all know these refugees are traumatized with a capital T. … soon Trauma will blot out any other master status (Mother, survivor, cook, wife, healer, educator) they take pride in. Trauma will bully resilience out in favor of delicate, damaged views of self that depict fragility.

Customs, language, stories—erased. In their place, refugees are often given labels provided by mental health professionals, toting the latest version of the DSM, the psychiatric bible. Kusserow explains what happens when her Sudanese friend Ayen becomes paralyzed after learning her aunt died by suicide:

… the white coats have run every test possible. No medical reason for this, they say … I tell them she went into a coma after her mother died, that not all cultures process distress psychologically. I sense their pity, as if she is developmentally delayed in the trauma world … They label it conversion disorder, because what ‘should’ be manifested as psychic trauma is presenting somatically.

In its inability—or refusal—to see beyond its own story, the medical profession pathologizes a different world view.

While what Kusserow calls our “trauma-psychosphere” harms refugees, it hurts Westerners too. In the title micro-essay, “The Trauma Mantras,” Kusserow writes with great poignancy about an American student returning from studying abroad in Tibet: “She was given a mantra by a sketchy monk, but she’s already forgotten it … Back at school, when she wakes early in the morning, she hears her trauma mantra gather its wings, its song, like a lullaby, a loon off into the mist, a lost limb, a phantom, and a kind of longing fills her. Come home. Come home.”

Kusserow wishes her students did not feel so at home with their traumas or feel so fragile and triggered at every turn: “Trigger makes me think of Tigger, who boings about with Pooh. If only students had such sturdy coils.” Sturdy coils! What a wonderful way to think of resilience.

Trauma is real. Kusserow knows it. She has witnessed it overseas in India, South Sudan, Uganda, among other countries. She has seen it in Vermont and has lived it in her own life. Kusserow writes movingly about her father’s death when she was a young child, her mother’s recent decline, and her experience with cancer (a beast she refuses to go to war with—another Western story). Yet the focus is not on the pain but on the spaces between.

Trauma Mantras is a work of great grace and beauty. Each short piece in this magnificent collection contains a wealth of wisdom wrapped in the imagery and metaphor of poetry. Because of Kusswerow’s compassion for her subjects and because she both judges and challenges herself, she has earned the authority to challenge us all. And because she places herself among us, we can take ourselves off the defensive. We widen our lens to include the hard spaces from which we might otherwise turn away.