“Did her way of seeing the world.
Or recollecting it.
Cast a spell on my own brain?
The way that everything I wrote returned.
To the image of a woman’s body.
Poked, upright or inverted.”
This excerpt from the reading stood out to me most due to Kapil’s mastery of interlacing the past, present, and future of trauma. For one, Kapil points to gendering of Intergenerational trauma through motherhood, the mother-daughter relationship, and violence against women. Kapil looks at her mother’s lived experiences, how those experiences have tinted her mother’s existence and parenting, and how Kapil is now burdened with an image of violence that she hadn’t even witnessed firsthand. Interestingly, this even affects Kapil’s own parenting to her son. I also love the theme of mysticism and magic, with Kapil having subconsciously “cast a spell on her own brain” to be trapped in a loop of trauma in her artistry. She doesn’t blame her mother for putting herself in a loop, just herself. It makes it even more powerful when she decides to cast a new universal spell to break out of restrictions. This mysticism is a tool of empowerment. I just love the progression of past to present in just this little excerpt, and in the rest of the reading as well.
–Jane Ekhtman.
Jane, your response helped me understand the poem in a way that I did not understand initially. I repeatedly observed the writer bringing up the mother and grandmother, but I did not understand why, and now thanks to your response, I understand that the author is speaking on the specific trauma mothers have gone through, and how it affects most mother-daughter relationships.
Hi Jane,
I wonder, with all the past and present trauma depicted in the poem, I wonder if there is any mention of the future of this intergenerational trauma in this book, especially as it pertains to the author’s son. I would love to see his perspective on the event and what similarities and differences his experience of this past trauma he shares with his mother and grandmother.
-Zachary Rosman
Jane, I really liked your connection of the how the author’s exposure to this trauma from her mother has shaped her. The fact that she uses this loop of trauma in her writing really does tell you about how she has coped with her past in a healthy way because she is writing which helps her express herself. She is learning from the past as way to build her future.
I agree with Sharielly’s interpretation. It’s often said that one can look to the past to predict the future, but I get the impression that Kapil wants to break free from the past. It’s almost as if past trauma changes one’s future to become deterministic.