Note: This is part one of a 2-part series. Read part 2.
It’s October—
a good month to venture toward some of the scariest stuff there is:
Trauma.
But I don’t want to focus on trauma itself.
I want to talk about art’s—and more specifically, poetry’s—powers over trauma. Its power of proverbial beast-vanquishing, à la Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Of turning dull greys to brilliant colors, à la Rainbow Brite’s colorful victories over her arch-nemeses Murky & Lurky (hey, I’m an 80s kid).
It’s not possible to literally change wickedness or horror into beauty.
Nisqa’a poet Jordan Abel repurposed racist texts he found in old Western novels to make a book of poems, Injun. Although brilliant, the ongoing brutality of colonialism and racism is, of course, not undone or rectified with this book.
Similarly, nothing about the Holocaust was redeemed or beautified by Paul Celan’s poem Death Fugue.
Yet! Yet—there is a power in poetry about painful things: a powerful good. Something healing; constructive rather than destructive.
This poetry holds vital testimony, witnessing, storytelling.
It offers a mirror so that we can see ourselves in what we thought was the “other.”
It provides a home in which we can install our horror, outrage, fury.
It educates, connects, and remembers for us, across space and generations.
And it heals.
Trigger Warning:
Because I’m going to discuss a book I’ve written my own trauma, you may want to skip this missive if you want to avoid reading about institutional child abuse and the crimes of the “troubled teen” industry.
Transmogrify: verb—to transform in a surprising or magical manner
I’ve had some shit happen to me. Most of us have.
My shit, or the shit I’ll discuss here, was the following.
As a teen I was depressed, I self-harmed, and I was sexually active. My parents did not know how to deal with these things, and being conservative, were especially dismayed at my non-virginal state. They were convinced by crooked and/or careless psychiatrists and therapists to send me, age 16, to an abusive boot camp and its affiliated “emotional-growth boarding school”—both programs which were, unbeknownst to them, based around the practices of the midcentury cult Synanon.
On March 7, 1997 I was taken out of my bed by bounty hunters with handcuffs and taken to facilities in the mountains of Idaho. My parents trusted the brochures’ idyllic nature scenes, which of course made zero mention of the extreme tactics used, like sleep deprivation, shunning, isolation, public shaming, bullying, hard labor, and “attack therapy”. We were isolated, our rare communications monitored and censored. I lived within that system, in Idaho, for 2.5 years.
On Transmogrification
20 years after being sent there, I decided to tackle the task of telling my story through poetry.
The process was arduous, long, scary, like walking down a dreadful, dark corridor.
But the process also led to so much good. My adult self worked in tandem with my 16-year-old self, and led to a feeling of completeness as a person which I had not had in decades. My young self had been rendered so voiceless, for so long, but now she got to speak, her message amplified by the writing skills I’ve acquired over my lifetime. I even included a poem she wrote while she was there. Together we created a powerful testimonial, a poetry memoir called because God loves the wasp.
On POWER
Writing my book gave me a feeling of power. The people who had hurt me when I was at my most powerless—I could now contain them. I could reduce them to portraits of their worst cruelties.
And after reducing them, I could shut the book, forever leaving them and their cruelty trapped in time there.
The last third of my book contains poems about the violent nightmares I had for decades after my experiences. These nightmares were an ongoing form of torture, a “gift” from those terrible programs; a thing I learned to live with.
But since I finished writing my book in 2019, those nightmares have almost entirely ceased. They’ve gone from a nightly occurrence to something that happens once or twice a year—and even then, they’re weak, puny imitations of their former selves.
I went from being haunted to conducting exorcisms. The ghosts themselves haven’t changed, but my relationship to them has.
On Spreading Awareness
At my book launch last week, I read for about 20 minutes, then answered questions for a good 30 minutes. The audience was so engaged—there were more questions than I could even answer, with multiple hands going up at once.
Many hadn’t heard of the TTI (“troubled teen” industry) and wanted to know more about its founders, its practices. I was able to spread awareness about the fact that even though the places I was sent to have since closed their doors (sued out of existence) there are still hundreds of similar facilities in operation right now.
Letting people know about this means more people will be in a position to advise their friends and family against sending their kids to such places. They’ll be able to help advocate for new protective laws (these private facilities are almost entirely unregulated).
Paris Hilton was sent to several facilities as a teen, one of which was one of the same places I was sent to — a few months after me. She’s been extremely vocal in recent years and has led the charge to get protective laws passed in some states.
I’m not a rich and prominent heiress and socialite, and my book may be small in the grand scheme of things, but each person I reach still matters. Spreading awareness is vital.
Many in the audience also wanted to know: How did you recover?
On Catharsis & Compassion
How did I recover?
Poetry. Creating and writing have been vital centering and healing practices for me. And writing about this period of my life has helped me mourn what I lost and suffered, and mourn the suffering and loss I witnessed.
It’s offered me catharsis.
And as I’ve begun sharing the story with others, I’m finding it’s offering value to others. I’ve heard from fellow survivors that they now have a way to share with their partners and families what happened to them – they point to a page and say, see, this is how it felt, this is what it was like. My translation of my own experience into poetry has helped others lessen the isolation that comes from surviving such a hard-to-describe experience.
At another reading this past weekend, I heard afterward from one of the 25 or so audience members—they, too, were a survivor of the TTI. They thanked me and said that my book brought them catharsis.
I’m not telling you all this in order to pat myself on the back. Quite the contrary; I’m sharing this with you to encourage you to translate your own pain into poetry. Transmogrify it. Use metaphor, simile, surrealism, succinctness, minimalism to soften the blow and reshape the scene. Use any lens you can create or wield to look sideways at the pain.
Make no mistake; you won’t erase one ounce of the pain.
Instead, you you will birth something new, something that will forever alter the narrative—you’ll add a voice, a witness, a story, a resistance, an overcoming, a resolution, a healing.
Share it with others, and you’ll help them change their own narratives, too.
Writing Challenge:
Choose a difficult event which you’ve never written about before. This could be an event in your life, in the life of someone you love, or in your family’s history.
I’d advise you to avoid writing about incidences of extreme trauma unless/until you have a support system in place (someone safe and available to talk with, ideally a therapist).
Instead, start small, especially if that feels safer. Small incidences can house much vaster depths in them anyway—a micro-aggression can imply the vastness of a struggling relationship, or of ableism, racism, sexism.
Transmogrify the event into poetry.
If you need some practical ideas and approaches for this process, see next month’s newsletter and/or the workshop I’m leading next weekend – details below.
Ways & Means of Transmogrification
In next month’s newsletter, I’ll write more about some ways & means you might use to transmogrify tough stuff into poetry.
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Details about my book are below.
Praise for because God loves the wasp
Elisabeth Blair writes as a survivor of a sadistic and dehumanizing facility for “troubled teens”—or perhaps the word is “camp.” It certainly reminds us of the other, more famous camps, gulags, and re-education centers we’re aware of. Because Blair is also a brilliant poet, she can take us into the perceptions of the shattered person or, in this case, child. The child understands only the contours of coercion: “the storm wants specific things.” In fact, she no longer identifies as human, and, at times, that seems like a good thing: “You tell them you’re a slice of grass where a shadow falls—/your greens seem burnt/but they’re not.//They don’t believe you.” Blair’s language is barbed, destabilizing, and very much alive. This is an important book.
- Rae Armantrout