How Traumatic Memory Works
“Narrating trauma fragments how we remember. We recall what we can and what we desperately need to keep ourselves together. Wounds, historical and painfully present, threaten to rend the soul, and if that happens, nothing else matters. Telling the story of trauma in fits and starts isn’t history in any formal sense. It is the way traumatic memory works: recollections caught in ‘the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting.’ Facts bungled on behalf of much-needed truths. We try to keep our heads above water and tell ourselves a story that keeps our legs and arms moving below the surface.”
— Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again
