The forward thrust of our argument is that writing is an extension of our bodies. Since the body extends itself through writing, so, too, is writing fundamentally altered by trauma. We do not think this assertion is radical or that compositionists would argue writing is not altered by pain, rather we believe connections between pain and composition have not fully been considered as one of the points of orientation in writing. Rhodes and Alexander have come to similar explorations with queer composing: “queer composing is a demand born out of anger, resentment, pain.” They suggest that a life of queer pain is one that is not only ugly and messy, but requires “acts of de-composition, of un-composing and re-composing dominant narratives of sexuality, gender, and identity” in order for queer lives to become livable (“Composing While Queer”). We argue that a similar process is necessary for traumatized lives to become livable.
We see this work spelled out most plainly in Gloria Anzaldúa’s work, and it is worth quoting her at length here:
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The process of falling apart (the Coyolxauqui process), of being wounded, is a sort of shamanic initiatory dismemberment that gives suffering a spiritual and soulful value. The shaman’s includes some type of death or dismemberment during the ecstatic trance journey. Torn apart into basic elements then reconstructed, the shaman acquires the power of healing and returns to help the community. To be healed we must be dismembered, pulled apart. (29)
To engage in trauma to write is to engage in an ongoing process of de-composition and re-composition.
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But, there is no one way trauma will affect the way one composes; instead we see pained bodies as developing their own strategies in order to compose. We agree with Ahmed that “Pain is hence bound up with how we inhabit the world, how we live in relationship to the surfaces, bodies and objects that make up our dwelling places. Our question becomes not so much what is pain, but what does pain do” (27). How one composes in pain is entirely dependent on that person, but pain does alter the way we compose. If we consider trauma as an intensification of pain to the point it is permanently embedded in a subject, then trauma also permanently alters the way one composes.
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Writing that comes from traumatic subjects is already embedded in a site of pain, and thus writing through, about, or around trauma often intersects at and follows neuroqueerness. Neuroqueerness is defined, by Yergeau, as the series of “interlocking” neurological identities that fail to comply with dominant narratives of power associated with assumed neurotypical behaviors, thereby rendering the neuroqueer body as non-rhetorical (3). We claim that, just as Yergeau claims autism is a neuroqueer identity, so too does trauma mark the body as neuroqueer. Such that to be open about trauma is to have one’s own rhetorical capacity put in question (can the traumatized subject write about their experience objectively?). Inevitably, these conditions are “how the neurodivergent are often storied into (non)rhetoricity. We are conditioned to believe that our selves are not really selves, for they are eternally mitigated by disability, in all of its fluctuations” (Yergeau, 10). In rendering the neuroqueer body as non-rhetorical, the question which remains is understanding how one might be able to compose through trauma. There is also the pressure to situate writing about the self as a social endeavor meant to understand others rather than as means to story one’s own trauma. Thus when it comes to traumatic writing in neuroqueer contexts, the expectation is toward turning traumatic contexts into social ones in order for it to be valued.
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We wish to resist this and take a stance that writing our traumatic stories instead functions,not for a broader audience, but for ourselves. As Yergeau writes “the neuro-orientational impulse toward self or other—both reside and recede, reside and recede….” (16) and to assume all writing is destined for others is to entrench traumatic writing at a locus of pain which others may wring out meaning, as though our embodied experience is an orange. Instead, we wish to embrace traumatic writing as it gestures away from the social, and wish to argue that traumatic writing, too, can be “a kind of neurologically queer motioning” that “defies, reclaims, and embraces the expansiveness that countersocialities can potentially embody” (Yergeau, 18).
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The traumatic narratives presented here are the ways our own bodies extend. They do not extend these ways to reach for readers, but perhaps their extensions will help readers’ own bodies to surface in ways that surprise them. We encourage readers to note how their body appears in relation to ours, but to not follow the paths our bodies and writing extend. We hope instead a certain amount of disorientation can be felt from these narratives. And that “In the process, [readers] have perhaps the chance to experience, even cultivate, different relations to objects, not to mention others” (Rhodes and Alexander, “Parade”).