THE RING-SHAPED ISLAND:
A New Metaphor for Speaking of Trauma
2. Ring-Shaped Island for those Who Speak Out
What I am trying to express here is simple. The space in which trauma is spoken or represented is something of a hollow, empty construct. Those who are at the epicenter of trauma cannot give it voice, and those who were unable to survive cannot testify.
Arendt called it the ‘hole of oblivion’ (Arendt, 1947), and Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak? ’ refers to the real subaltern’s inability to do so (Spivak, 1988). There certainly is a hole of oblivion, and the subaltern does at least not speak in a language immediately intelligible to ‘us.’
But the fact that there is a hole --- that there is something we cannot approach or understand ---- is not necessarily negative. Accepting this reality has tremendous value. Acknowledging that there are matters we cannot see or hear allows us to remain open to seeing and hearing more of something, or of something else; we may thus be able more fully to perceive others’ traumas.
The RSI model is an elaborated version of this hollow construct[i]. It has a landlocked inner sea.
Each traumatic issue creates the potential for the formation of a new RSI, and those who can speak about the trauma position themselves somewhere on the island. Viewed from above, the island is doughnut-shaped. Figure 2 shows both a side and an overhead view of the island. There is an inner sea, an outer sea, a ridge, an inner and an outer slope.
The image originally came from a map (well-known to the Japanese) of the atomic bomb blast in Hiroshima or Nagasaki with concentric zones around ground zero (or the epicenter), showing the spread of damage. (Sadly now we have to add a Fukushima map, too (-----, 2011).
The doughnut-shaped land represents the area where those who survived[ii] and later gave testimony about an atrocity reside, as if within a zone between two concentric circles of the atomic bomb damage. Of course, the direction of the wind and other factors at a given time may deform the circles.
Figure 3 is a detailed lateral view of the right half of the island.
Figure 3. Detailed right lateral view of Ring-shaped Island.
The longitudinal axis, or the altitude, shows ability to speak. The horizontal axis shows the distance from the center of the inner sea, or from a traumatic event. The center of the island/inner sea is the ground zero of an atomic bomb in the metaphor of the concentric circles.
The inner sea is a sea of the dead, the space into which victims sink. The nearer to the zero point, the less chance there is that they have left traces of their existence. At the zero point, they would have perished without leaving their bodies as they were burned out, blown to pieces in a microsecond, or totally ‘disappeared’ (Feitlowitz, 1998) or destroyed without a trace by perpetrators. Moving outward in the inner sea, we would see beneath the surface charred bodies, dismembered bodies, and then gradually ‘ordinary’ bodies.
Farther out from the dead are those who have barely survived but lost their minds and capacity to speak. Some are totally mute; others emit strange sounds. Some cannot stop shaking and others just stand there, rigid. Others, closer to the water’s edge, mumble ‘meaningless’ words, scrawl undecipherable figures, or try to make sound and rhythm. There may be someone frenziedly dancing, hair flailing. They are at the inner sea’s edge, drifting back and forth in the waves.
From the water’s edge, as we ascend the inner slope and approach the ridge, we see more of those who can utter some words. The higher we climb, the more powerful, fluent and logical their words become. They peak at the ridge.
Although it is sometimes difficult to sharply distinguish sufferers from non-sufferers, trauma sufferers are generally situated on the inner slope whereas supporters are on the outer slope. The more supporters commit, the nearer they stand to the ridge. As they commit themselves to the sufferers, they too sometimes suffer trauma. In this sense, supporters may take on the features of sufferers and step onto the inner slope. In contrast, there are bystanders to trauma at the water’s edge, at the bottom of the outer slope. Out into the sea, there are those who know about the issue but are not paying attention to it. Farther out are those who are unaware and ignorant of the issue[iii].
It is hard to determine the positions families, partners, and close friends of the sufferers occupy. One way is to assume that they would stand somewhere near the ridge. But whether they should be treated as sufferers themselves depends on the nature of the matter at hand. Family members who haven’t experienced trauma are non-sufferers in a basic sense but they cannot easily leave the scene of the trauma. They are also prone to indirect injury and secondary traumatic stress. On the other hand, family members can also unwittingly harm the sufferer. The difficulty of determining the family’s position is perhaps a reflection of our reality. In clinical practices of treating trauma sufferers, the roles of families are complex and each sufferer’s stance vis-a-vis the family varies enormously.
The images of the ‘inner sea’ or the ‘water’s edge’ are based on Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved (Levi, 1988/89). As the sea is a metaphor, it does not have to be water that swallows sufferers; it can be a sea of fire, a bottomless swamp or pond of blood. It can be a mass of soil that deeply buries everything[iv].
[i] The idea of adding a third dimension (altitude = ability to speak) to a ring shape (concentric circles) on the map of the atomic bomb is my original idea, not directly derived from victims’ narratives in my clinical or ethnographic work. The three dimensional figure gave rise to the image of an island with an inner sea. The metaphors of gravity, wind and water were inspired by the image of the island, and the whole model gradually took shape. From there I used it as a working model, which worked well and became my survival map. It also helped some victims to figure out where they and others stand. Detailed analyses of clinical cases, court decisions, victim’s memoires, and the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake using this model are in (-----, 2007; -----, 2011). Although my model was probably inspired by the natural environment and the linguistic traditions of Japan (for example the existence of many idioms and expressions employing natural elements), the images of an island, gravity, wind and water must be readily available in other parts of the world as well.
[ii] Some of them were already there at the time of an atrocity and others went into the area later to rescue the affected or to investigate and report on the situation.
[iii] For a discussion of ‘ignorance’, Sedgwick’s concept of ‘privilege of unknowing’ is valuable (Sedgwick, 1990).
[iv]A survivor of a gang rape commented on this model that she prefers clean water so that she can see other victims even when she and they are not on the island