On February 12, 2010, thousands of Haitians crowded churches in the capital of Port-au-Prince for a ceremony of prayers, hymns and gospel music one month after the 7.0 magnitude earthquake left the country struggling to survive.
A Catholic bishop and the head of the Voodoo priests, the leaders of Haiti's two official religions, wore white robes and led the service under mimosa trees near the ruined National Palace. People, including many injured by the tragedy, stood atop debris and raise their hands to the skies. A woman sang in honor of the revered Voodoo god, Damballa, a serpent spirit representing peace and wisdom.
President Rene Preval expressed the feelings of a shattered nation as he wept throughout the ceremony, consoled by his wife. The shared trauma was tangible in media reports -- there like a sharp knife, cleaving the country in two.
Trauma is a shock, a radical disruption of feeling and incompletion of knowing. It is a kind of frozen experience. In Freud's description, the affect or emotional energy which accompanies the traumatic encounter "remains in a 'strangulated' state," and the feeling of the experience is severed from consciousness.
As the traumatic event is not fully felt at the time of its occurrence, it produces a belated effect. It returns in symptomatic disguise: in the form of phobias, nightmares, and other corporeal disturbances. As scholar Cathy Caruth says, it remains in its insistent return or in "its repeated possession of the one who experiences it."
Trauma represents a complex entanglement between knowing and not knowing.
Another way of thinking about this: the traumatized carry with them a sense of unknown loss. They know that they have lost friends, family and home -- but know not what they have lost in them.
This process occurs on a group, as well as, personal level.
Ceremonies of public mourning are a peoples' attempt to acknowledge collective injury and begin to know, on a conscious level, the loss endured. Such rituals function to integrate the experience of crisis into the individual and national psyche.
The recent earthquake transformed mourning rituals in Haiti, which typically include elaborate ceremonies, the donning of black mourning clothes, and the placement of polished black coffins in tombs painted bright hues of green, gray and blue.
Currently, grieving relatives pay others to watch over the bodies of family members at the city morgue while they, wearing masks, continue to search through the multitude of dead.
The grieving process is thwarted by the fight of some to collect the bodies of loved ones so as not to lose them to a mass grave. The overwhelming task of properly disposing of the deceased has made coffins a black-market item much in demand.
Mourning in Haiti is further complicated by the outbreak of more recent societal traumas -- the rising incidence of rape in emergency shelters and the sex trafficking of children.
Along with trauma there is regression, a waning of ego strength, and a porousness of intersubjective boundaries. These factors make the traumatized extremely vunerable to ongoing victimization. Relief efforts must guard against violence toward women and children in refugee camps and during the nation's reconstruction.
Psychoanalysis says the experience of loss is one of the central repetitions of one's life. But, in Haiti, can there be an end to the grief?
Whatever else the internal work of mourning takes, it demands time. And it is never clear, and often never complete. Formalized ritual gives a public space to tell the story of the collective wound -- to convey something of its lacerating reality and truth.
In the ceremony Friday, Haitians bravely engaged one of the most difficult stages of grieving: connecting to the intense pain of massive loss. They began to know their catastrophic injury, to say good-bye, and grapple with the enigma of survival.
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For more information, see Kristin Vukovic's Haiti Living Hell.
