Speaking the Unspeakable through Poetry: The Search for a Place of Healing and Witness after Trauma

Seni Seneviratne Cape Town, SOUTH AFRICA

In 2009 I was funded by a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship to spend 4 months in Cape Town. I am a poet and a psychotherapist and the purpose of my visit combined my passion for poetry and the creative arts with my desire to explore creative responses to trauma. South Africa, with its history of individual and collective trauma was an appropriate destination. I was keen to meet and interview South African poets about the relationship between poetry and trauma. I believe that while trauma robs us of our humanity, poetry can be a vehicle to bring us back to it by finding words to bear witness and create a space for healing. I also intended to meet with local therapists and creative artists who are combining drama, visual art, writing and bodywork with therapeutic responses to trauma. I decided to base myself in one major city so that I could build relationships with people and projects and offer ongoing practical input alongside my explorations. Cape Town is a major centre of creative arts and hosts a range of arts and culture events. Before I arrived I had identified several projects working with traumatised individuals and had made contact with South African writers.

“Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality- thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard…it bears witness to the evil we would prefer to forget, but never can – and never should.” Nelson Mandela

FELLOWSHIP OUTCOMES During my Fellowship, I was contacted by Pumla Goboda Madisikela. She is a South African psychologist, who served on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and was working at University of Cape Town. She had heard about my visit and invited me to submit an abstract for a presentation at a conference later that year. The resulting paper Speaking the Unspeakable through Poetry, which draws on my experiences and research in Cape Town, has now been presented at conferences and symposiums internationally: October 2009 Worth Remembering, Psychotherapy Conference, Sheffield, UK November 2009 End Violence Against Women, Conference, Sheffield, UK December 2009 Beyond Reconciliation Conference, University of Cape Town, SA May 2011 Poetry & Medicine, Conference, Warwick University November 2012 Writing and Reconciliation Symposium, Virginia Tech, US December 2012 Engaging the Other, Conference, University of Free State, SA March 2013 44th Annual Convention, NEMLA, Boston, US May 2013 GELL Creative Writing Seminars, Kuwait University, Kuwait. As well as informing other work: Witnessing War Workshop, San Francisco Community Arts Centre (2013); Witnessing War, Poetry school online course (2012); Big Writing for a Small World, Residency with English PEN (2011)

THE HEART OF IT My poetry collection was published in 2012, 3 years after the end of my Fellowship. Many of the poems were written in Cape Town and were influenced by my Fellowship experience. It united themes of personal heartbreak with public trauma, personal lyrics

of desire with political portrayals of lives that have been marginalised, brutalised and lost. I was interested in the challenge of writing “public” poems, which were not one-dimensional but combined opposing qualities of strength and tenderness and poems about big issues that were not polemical or sentimental but found new approaches, fresh metaphors, and in some cases spoke in the voice of other characters. I was particularly concerned with achieving a balance between the public and personal poem; finding the lyric voice in the face of trauma, violence and catastrophic historical events; exploring ways of speaking the unspeakable. In addition to my skills and experience as a poet, I drew on more than twenty years experience of supporting survivors of trauma and abuse.

Meeting with South African writers & artists

Workshops with women from Place of Hope Refuge, Cape Town.

www.seniseneviratne.com

SENI SENEVIRATNE 2009 TRAVEL FELLOWSHIP seni.seneviratne@gmail.com www.seniseneviratne.com