Corporal Memory

TRAUMATULATION

As previously written, the droughts — the Geotrauma of 2022 — let Zakhiku remerge from the waters.

The idea of Geotrauma implies two fundamental truths: the Earth behave like the unconscious — its ground is perpetually moving in a relentless cyclical revelation and entombment of what is and what once was on its surface. Humans live on the surface of this planetary unconscious as disconnected entities — chronically dissociating from nature — but as conscious actants. Therefore, the two truths enounce that Earth is a monistic entity possessing a collective unconscious made by History — as consciousness — enacted by humans. Humans repress and hide within it what must be forbidden from awareness, hence forgotten. History is profoundly bounded to spatial geography as the ground has always been occupied and divided — to differentiate and separate. But History has also always been bound to war as the maximum expression of conflict and the maximum instrument to write it. The division of space has always triggered conflicts; division is difference par excellence and, as such, a means of violence. The radical difference is then divided into more minor differences — as a primary language from which others derive — represented by the erection of cities — Polis of Logos — as a point of encounter and aggregation; conscious structures, often in conflicts between each other and themselves, arising over the unconscious ground and deeply intertwined — in a mutual influence — with it. Cities are containers of the libidinal charges, emotions and narratives which, once fell, are absorbed by the unconscious, giving life to inexplicable future collective conscious behaviours introjected in Contemporary History. Despite the already made analogy of reconstructing the ruins to relieve the trauma by giving it significance, there are specific ruins — bodily ruins — that need to be treated with caution as contemporary events indicate them to be still fresh wounds. Psychoanalytically speaking, Historical recurrence is nothing more than what is described as the compulsion to repeat, and today, in Europe, history is being repeated. Towards the centenary of one of the wicker genocide, it is uncanny to hear about Fascism and Nazism. Perhaps as the maximum expression of systematic human brutality, those ideologies are unresolved radicalised trauma. Within the Russio-Ukrainian war, there is an apparent re-enactment of a fearful past: Russia is fighting the Nazists, again, but this time as Ukraine, and the latter is fighting the invaders, considering its leader as the Hitler of the 21st century. Meanwhile, Europeans fractured their thinking: anti-war protesters, as some Americans in 1941 asked, "Why not peace with Hitler? / Hitler did not attack us, why to attack Hitler?" are asking now, "Why to provide weapons to Ukraine?" contrasting pro-war opinions deriving from the fear that Ukraine is the new Poland — only the first target of a more extensive invasion. These events are intimately connected with the ancient roots of Anti-semitism — the epitome of persecuting specific populations, identified as antagonists of the optimal order — exacerbating characteristics of the European WW2 conflicts. In the world of analogies being constructed, it is striking that the pro-Russian protests — the Anti-Maidan block — in the turmoils between 2013 and 2014 accused the new Government of being a defendant of the wealthy Jews and the ongoing revolution, a Zionist coup. But then how come a trauma that has been lengthily reconstructed — in the form of thousands of words and artefacts forever embedded in our History — still seems unresolved and repeating almost after 100 years? What more needs to be done post-reconstruction and self-reflexivity? If it is true that History is bound to repeat itself indefinitely and there is no exit, then History is the unresolvable primordial trauma in which its re-enactments function as a memento of its dreadful nature.

Following the Dnipro conflicts, the explosion of the Kakhovka dam led to the resurfacing of thousands of skulls from WW2 conflicts. The nearby area, Nikopol, close by the occupied Zaporizhzhia, was the main centre of the ongoing hostilities. Eighty years ago, the area was the centre of one of the most extensive military operations of WW2: the Soviet army attacked the German army, involving more than 6 million troops — countless dead.

TANKA 1

TO BE OR NOT TO BE A PROTAGONIST