A moment in mental health history; Decoding Post-Traumatic Slave Disorder

BY: SIMONE JENNIFER SMITH 

Welcome to African History Month in Toronto, Ontario Canada. As I was sitting down to write this week’s article, I thought about how I could contribute to Black History Month in a way that was unique and authentically me. I thought it was a good time to highlight theories surrounding historical trauma, and what it means to our community.

Historical trauma or transgenerational trauma refers to a complex and collective trauma that is experienced over time and across generations by a group of people who share an identity, affiliation, culture or circumstance. Historical trauma can be understood as consisting of three key elements: the actual wounding (trauma), the shared experience of the trauma by a group of people, the trauma spans multiple generations, and members of the group may experience trauma-related symptoms without having been present for the actual event.

Dr. Joy DeGruy proposed the concept Post Traumatic Slave Disorder, which outlines behaviors in the African community that seems to have stemmed from the horrific genocide and colonization of Africans living in the motherland, and those living in the diaspora. What is even more catastrophic is the fact that memories of past traumatic events are constructed within social and cultural contexts, which often determines what is remembered and how it is interpreted. In 2003, Paul-Michel Foucault: a French philosopher, historian of the idea, social theorist, and literary critic, pointed out that dominant cultures often silence or diminish the value of other cultural groups’ narratives, therefore disqualifying their knowledge of self. In turn, many of us suffer and don’t even realize the root of our suffering because we have been forced to forget the many injustices that we have had to deal with as a people.

There is an infamous letter that remains a mystery written by a man named Willie Lynch. This letter has been in circulation for years, and many have disputed its authenticity. The letter outlined ways in which slave owners could ‘break’ their slave in order to keep them under control. What cannot be disputed is the fact that many of the strategies presented in the letter were actually used and oddly enough the post-traumatic behavior can still be seen to this very day.

“Therefore, if you break the female mother, she will break the offspring in its early years of development and when the offspring is old enough to work, she will deliver it up to you.”

(Willie Lynch Letter: The Making of a Slave, 1712)

If you look around our community, you will find many broken mothers, living in broken homes. They are unable to deal with the stresses of day-to-day life, and in turn have broken children who either become a part of the system, and working menial jobs, or end up in prison to work a menial job.

“For further severance from their original beginning, we must completely annihilate the mother tongue of both the new nigger and the new mule and institute a new language that involves the new life’s work of both. You know language is a peculiar institution. It leads to the heart of a people.The more a foreigner knows about the language of another country the more he is able to move through all levels of that society.”

(Willie Lynch Letter: The Making of a Slave, 1712)

Is it a coincidence that many Africans in the diaspora have no recollection of their native tongue? How would this knowledge help connect them to their core being, and establish a true feeling of self-worth? These are questions that still need to be answered, and the topic of historical trauma cannot be thoroughly examined in this article, but I am interested in hearing from you Toronto; what do you think of historical trauma? Is it possible that you are suffering from it and do not even realize it?