Charlotte Pierce-Baker, "Memoir and Academics"
(page 3 of 4)

Pedagogy

Out of a study of rape and black women in the United States and a book of "once-muted voices of black women," Surviving the Silence: Black Women's Stories of Rape has evolved in women's studies at Duke University - a "pedagogy of trauma" - not trauma studies or a pedagogy attached to historical events, but rather a pedagogy that derives its authenticity from the individual, daily lives of ordinary women who have been soul-wounded and have chosen to speak - and to write: Linda Brent, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sylvia Plath, Radclyff Hall, Susanna Kaysen, Assata Shakur, Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, Kay Redfield Jamison, Edwidge Danticat - and the list could go on. A pedagogy of trauma that extends beyond the usually acknowledged "collective-cultural" traumas of our nations and the globe. The literature is growing. A language is emerging. As writer Margaret Atwood tells us in her poem "Spelling," "A Word / after a word / after a word / is power."

I am so sure there is such a pedagogy because for the past six years I have been engaged with and by a seminar that has "trauma, violence, and women's lives" at its center - a course that considers and studies the "appropriation of body of woman." I designed and named it: "Trauma, Violence, Women Writing." The seminar began with a core study of black women only. It then morphed into a more inclusive discussion - involving other women of color, mainstream white women, and marginal white women trapped in poverty. In subsequent semesters we introduced women of the African diaspora; next we will uncover the stories of women globally. It is a study and a course in progress.

No longer is there "a void, an absence, a silence" - as I wrote in the beginning pages of Surviving the Silence (15). But it does remain that in writing this book, my most remarkable discovery was an extraordinary array of women (in particular, black women) waiting to speak their traumas - waiting to "tell." It seems no one had ever asked to hear their stories.

It is with this in mind that I seek to provide students with an awareness of the existence of trauma in "ordinary time" - and the possible strategies for surviving trauma. With a new language, we are attempting to articulate the horrors and theorize our positionality and possibility in a world of trauma. Our students learn that others have already written the words we think and feel - and now they must try to reconfigure what's been written, in order to make the words applicable to themselves and to other women of the world. Each time I've attempted to end the existence of the course on "trauma violence and women's lives" (thinking its use value limited) - the call has come for it to reappear. The course sometimes changes title; the faces before me certainly shift in identity; the literature broadens in scope, and then - the semester begins again. The course has prevailed. There seems a need. And I believe as academics we should fill that need - fill it through whatever our particular discipline happens to be. To again paraphrase Carolyn Heilbrun: "As women, we are without texts; therefore, we must create them."

Trauma maps its own way. As women we are keepers of secrets. We have always done it - in order to keep peace and create safe spaces for ourselves and for our loved ones. As women of color we keep silent about present and past inequities in order to ensure a more global survival. Our stories are legion. We must create the language. We must learn to speak profoundly to one another.