On AFTERSHOCK, by pattrice jones

I finally read pattrice jones' AFTERSHOCK: Confronting Trauma in a Violent World-A Guide for Activists and Their Allies, and found multiple points of entry, probably the most significant being the trauma of being lied to about nonhuman animals. Not just by my parents, but by my American "culture," by my teachers, and even by my therapists (one of whom asked me at age 15: You seem upset that the animals are being killed for food. Why is that? She did her best to make me feel mentally unstable for wanting to stop eating animals.).

Sure, there have been other traumas, such as from being a witness to extreme poverty in Haiti or the annihilated towns and orphaned children with missing limbs (or with limbs intact) in Bosnia. Or visiting a slaughterhouse. But being lied to and made to feel crazy for being cursed/blessed with experiencing the pain of nonhumans and the planet, is a wrong that is not easily forgotten. ("Any idea that creates or maintains an unnatural division both makes trauma more likely and makes recovery from trauma more difficult" [19]).

Let's get to my favorite passages (and they are all quotes, but all of the quotation marks were maddening so I removed them):

• One of the myths of human superiority is that we can transcend our feelings, while other animals are bound by theirs. This goes along with the idea that we can and should supercede our bodies, while animals are always bound to theirs (14).
• Like me, you may not entirely understand how your body managed to break food down into energy and mass for you to use to live and grow. But, if you think about it, you can see that your body--your self--is literally made up of things that used to be outside of you . . . . The interactions between nature and nurture begin before you are born, multiplying each other so that their effects cannot be untangled (33).
• People who enjoy privileges rooted in the violent exploitation of others are likely to use violence in defense of their pleasure. Activists who actually succeed in redistributing wealth or power run the greatest risk of backlash. That's why the government has cracked down so hard on earth and animal liberationists (who have cost exploitative industries hundreds of millions of dollars) while leaving antiwar activists (who have not yet lightened the pockets of war profiteers) to stage their marches and rallies in relative peace (42).
• I live at a chicken sanctuary in an area dominated by the poultry industry. If our neighbor who operates a factory farm were to come onto our property without permission in order to takes pictures of the birds at our sanctuary, he could be charged with trespassing. If I were to go onto his property without permission in order to take pictures of the birds locked on his farm, I could be charged with a kind of terrorism (57).
• Activists working within aboveground organizations have more people to talk to and more overt support, but they sometimes must grapple with unhealthy group dynamics. . . . [such as] highly professionalized non-profit organizations that have embraced corporate culture and the highly hierarchical political parties that expect their members to subordinate themselves and their identities (92).
• Movement norms about what is and is not permissible to do, feel, or talk about can exert as much if not more pressure on people to conform (93).
• [V]egans, unlike flesh-eaters, never stop noticing the violence inherent in meat (149).
• As any grade-school friend of family member of a dedicated activist can tell you, it's not always pleasant to be in a real relationship with a person who is always thinking and doing things about problems that most people would rather forget . . . . Every vegetarian who has ever attended a family dinner at which meat is served knows that all you have to do is sit there quietly not eating meat for people to feel attacked about their own food choices (158).
• Memory is a kind of connection. Like trauma survivors, traumatized communities and cultures constantly struggle with the conflict between remembering and forgetting. Most often, the most powerful forces are aligned on the side of forgetting. Often, their very power depends on forgetting. That makes the task of remembering that much more difficult and that much more important (185-6).

We have all been traumatized by the lies we've been told about our relationship to nonhuman animals and the Earth. We have all been conditioned to be disconnected from "nature," and empathy with any being who is not human isn't exactly encouraged (except in the case of cats and dogs, which is simply another layer of dishonesty, as if cats and dogs aren't like chickens and cows).

Activists and their allies are in need of support. We need to listen to one another and tell our stories. Some of us need to write and be read as a way of dealing with trauma.

You all know people who are, to some degree or another, engaged in activism that drains them, angers them, frustrates them, and leaves them vulnerable (which is also how they started). Be gentle with yourselves and kind to one another. We're such a tiny minority in this world, and to spend a lot of time attacking one another is to give exploiters an easy path to destroying us.

Comments

[pattrice]

Thanks for blogging about my book! I was wondering what you'd think of it. Thanks, too, for sharing some quotes. As a writer who spends a shocking amount of time on each sentence, I'm always curious to see which ones resonate with different readers.

It's interesting to me that the trauma of being lied to about meat (etc.) is so salient for you. I grew up in such a web of lies that that particular one doesn't stand out so much for me. As someone who quit meat as a teen but didn't go vegan till my thirties, I'm much more disturbed by my own unconscious collusion in the lies about dairy and eggs. But that just goes to show that we each bring individual life histories to traumatic circumstances, which is one more reason for us to be gentle with one another. You never know when something that bounces off you is going to deeply wound somebody else.

[mary martin]

pattrice,
Since I was very, very young, I had a knowing that what we were doing to animals wasn't right, and the people whose job it was to validate me were not in a position (because of their own beliefs) to do so. Though they weren't lying to me, I was nonetheless lied to, and spent over 30 years getting back to how I felt back then. I was persuaded to betray my instincts, and as a result I spend decades betraying the animals. We all do what we are capable of in the moment, but that doesn't take the trauma away, as you well know.