Trauma and Anti-Racism

A Reflection From Laura Hope-Gill

Thomas Wolfe writes in You Can’t Go Home Again,

“But it is not only at these outward forms that we must look to find the evidence of a nation’s hurt. We must look as well at the heart of guilt that beats in each of us, for there the cause lies. We must look, and with our own eyes see, the central core of defeat and shame and failure which we have wrought in the lives of even the least of these, our brothers. And why must we look? Because we must probe to the bottom of our collective wound. As men, as Americans, we can no longer cringe away and lie. Are we not all warmed by the same sun, frozen by the same cold, shone on by the same lights of time and terror here in America? Yes, and if we do not look and see it, we shall all be damned together.” 

My story connects to everyone’s, and everyone’s connects to mine. This is the Web of human community moving upon the Rock of the earth. When we tell our stories without shame or guilt or effort to persuade we reconnect with our humanity. We see we’re never alone. Our stories connect us through good and bad details. We are all part of one another. We get to discover how. This is shepherding our stories. We can acknowledge that we all have complex stories. We can receive one another’s stories with respect and acceptance and a shared wish to heal. 

I grew up with Thomas Wolfe’s novels. My family moved frequently sometimes across oceans, sometimes just one street away. The novels of Thomas Wolfe on their new bookshelves provided a sense of continuity. Wherever the books were, home was. When I joined the faculty at Lenoir-Rhyne University as the co-ordinator of the M.A. in Writing, now the MFA, one of the first things I did was contact colleagues in The Thomas Wolfe Society, my fellow board members at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, and the attorneys for Thomas Wolfe Estate. If I was going to have a new creative home, Thomas Wolfe would have to be here with me. 

For the past ten years, I have been unsure of whether that was what I wanted. Do I want (do we need?) another writing entity honoring a–we all know the phrase–dead white guy? Was it a trauma response? Was my father’s love for the author mine as well, or was it just influence. So, I kept Wolfe in the Maymester while I worked through my “stuff” around him. Jude Law came to town and needed a tour of the city, and I happily gave him one. I wondered if that was reason enough, to be able to sit with and talk with a brilliant actor as he prepared for what we Wolfeans all hoped would be our revival. As the decade moved along, Wolfe sat on the periphery of the writing program’s development. As the founding director of a multicultural poetry festival, why champion not just a dead white guy, but an author around whose scholarship weave the questions of anti-semitism, racism, alcoholism, compulsive sex, and fascism. I think I understand the draw now. He was all these things at points in his life, and in the end as he penned You Can’t Go Home Again, he was not all these things. The terms that fall away as he continued to learn, to write, and to reflect: anti-semitism, racist, and fascist. His dying word was “Scotch,” so not all labels and sins fell away. He sure did slough off the ones that divided him from the whole of world.

We get the prophet that we deserve. Wolfe was the prophet we deserve and can learn from. We can acknowledge the journey to our humanity. We can say “I believed this at one time, and I don’t anymore.” We can witness the ways our families and communities shape us. We can agree this makes it difficult to know our own, deep-down thoughts. We can say we have all wandered down a path we shouldn’t. Not only are we not born into sainthood, even the saints were not born into sainthood. We get there, maybe. We get there, slowly. Maybe we don’t get there ever and do what we think is best. In Wolfe, we get this third guy. He is born in 1900 in Asheville just as business is picking up. He has a sweet first romance and later in life loves brothels and booze. A prolific writer and world-traveler, he absorbed beliefs and prejudices in his youth. At the end of his short life, he had seen beyond himself, favoring the whole of humanity over the thought of one group prevailing.

We need the skills to do that. 

Readers of “The Dark Messiah” and “Child by Tiger” and of Eugene Gantt’s newspaper routes in the East End Neighborhood (not called this in Look Homeward Angel) knows Wolfe’s honesty in seeing. He sees a lynchmob and a lynching. He describes Black neighbors visiting on porches now only documented in the photography of Andrea Clark. He describes them. He catches glimpses of their lives. Most importantly, he knows their names and uses them. Not only does Wolfe see, he weaves the lives of Black people into the narrative of the city. Unlike other prominent Modernists, Wolfe does not erase Black culture and history. 

He describes seeing Hitler raise his arm in a movement “of a messiah” (remember this is before the war). He describes the sense of evil that overcomes Berlin. “Positive Disintegration” is a term for the way our egos give way, through stages, to our higher selves and consciousness. Inflected through this phenomenon, we see a man change. We see a man write out his life in millions of words (the manuscript that becomes You Can’t Go Home Again clocked at over a million words), and we can wonder if writing heals our hearts and souls, just as current data in medicine show? Do we see Wolfe as practitioner of a volubly narrative medicine? As a Bibliotherapist? Do we see a man using writing to say what he needs to say. Is he a messenger? Is he a messiah? Is he a saint? He’s a writer so tall he uses the top of a fridge as a desk. He uses pencils instead of pen. He’s got foodstains on his tie. He walks with the gait of man raised in the mountains. He drinks, smokes, frequents brothels, and now he’s driving through all the National Parks for his next book about this country’s magnificent wildernesses. He’s a mess. Just like us. AND he was improving and learning. Just like us.

Wolfe says together we must heal the “collective wound.” He saw the inevitable, extreme progression of racism and anti-semitism in Berlin. Even though he considered these failures of imagination those around him shared, he saw they were symptoms of this wound.

I’ve been a teacher of writing for thirty years. I have seen every student change as a result of discovering writing. My teaching environments include prisons, colleges, and boarding schools. Every single student develops a relationship with, at first, me, and then they develop one with themself, and the writing does the rest. From me, they just need some space. I don’t critique. I encourage. They write, and their writing deepens. The student changes into someone more confident, more comfortable. They face their stories, and they move along with them but not under their power. There is a reason, I tell them, that “author” is the root of “authority.” We each write our lives when we engage storytelling. Before this engagement, our lives write us.

It is odd that I have found support for my teaching methods from Medicine. Narrative Medicine, Expressive Writing, and other modalities have allowed me to view story from a scientific vantage. It is odd, also, that my three obsessions converge in Story. It makes sense, in the end, though. Story underlies absolutely everything. We could choose any three elements of reality and connect them in Story. It is everything. It is everywhere. All of us carry it.

It is our medicine.