Artist’s Statement:

This poem is a reflection, in personal and professional terms, on the inadequacy of the term “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” to describe people’s real-life experience of trauma in the contemporary world. My own experience of walking into my home following a burglary catapulted images and sensations of trauma into my consciousness. I became aware that my living in a high-crime environment put me in a constant state of vigilance. A sort of Pre Traumatic Stress Disorder. In my work as a psychologist, I often feel inauthentic in working with the “post” of PTSD, realizing that a sense of traumatization has preceded and will follow the traumatic event for most South Africans. I think of how the diagnosis of PTSD, first used to describe soldiers’ responses to combat-related trauma, might be ineffectual in the context of the modern geopolitical environment. War, combat, poverty, political instability, forced global migration, and the suffering that these disruptive sociopolitical events foist on daily life and safe spaces beleaguer people as they roam the planet in search of solace and sanctuary. Trauma seems continuous and inescapable. There is no post trauma, no after trauma. The “P” is silent. In a cruel but poetic irony, the “p” is silent in the articulation of the words psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, mutely screaming a tacit ineptitude that we have yet to acknowledge, voice, and challenge.

The “P” Is Silent

A house harshly hushed

Lights on, no one home

Restless dogs mean nothing

Decrypt alarm to gain entry

Unpack travel paraphernalia

Settle back into sacred space

Soundless glass on a bedroom floor

A rock screaming silently on porcelain tiles

The night has climbed in

Through a vast window

Accompanied by nameless panic

A package labelled “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder”

Mr. and Mrs. E. Veryone and family

One to Infinity Any Street, South Africa

PTSD

The “P” is silent

Return to sender

No “post” at this address

But someone is always home

Waiting

For the letter that will never come

Announcing

“We hereby declare

The End

To traumatic stress in South Africa”

PTSD

Post delivered, message received

No need to block your mind

To children, raped

Fathers in homes, shot

Mothers lying about

Everything being OK

Don’t give it another thought

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,

PTSD

The “P” is silent

If no Post arrives at your address

Consult a Psychologist…maybe a Psychiatrist

Either way

The “P” is silent.