On trauma, colonialism, and the imaginal

This is a newsletter about the imaginal realm, and about how and why and when so many humans got severed from it.

I started writing it because I am trying to understand how and why my own culture—the white, middle-class, southeastern English—got severed from its sense of belonging to this world, lost our felt sense of cosmology, and went on to reenact that severance and unbelonging on other cultures around the world, in the form of empire and the slave trade, among other crimes.

You cannot care about this without caring about what is happening in the Middle East today. We are watching a new chapter in this millennia-old story of severance and unbelonging, being written in real time. We are watching trauma beget trauma, with UN experts warning of ethnic cleansing. And we are watching all this being endorsed and funded by nations like the two of which I am a citizen—the United Kingdom and the United States—which are still mired in our own entirely unprocessed severance and trauma and repressed shame about the ways we’ve reenacted them.

If you are looking to orient yourself in the history of Israel and Palestine, I would recommend this video featuring Holocaust survivor and leading expert on trauma Dr. Gabor Maté.

Wherever you are, I would urge you not to look away or shut down. To stay with what it means for civilians and children and people seeking medical treatment to be killed, to call your representatives to demand a ceasefire, and to always remember that empire and oppression are cycles of suffering set in motion thousands of years ago, when peoples’ full, expansive humanity—including their birthright to their places and traditions of belonging, and therefore their access to the imaginal—was denied. That these cycles perpetuate themselves when that denial of full humanity is reenacted on others. And that the way out is to occupy your full humanity and connect with that same humanity in others.

Love,

x Ellie