#resmaa menakem

[bookquotesfrombooks]

“From the body’s viewpoint, safety and danger are neither situational nor based on cognitive feelings. Rather, they are physical, visceral sensations. The body either has a sense of safety or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, it will do almost anything to establish or recover that sense of safety.”

Resmaa Manakem

My Grandmother’s Hands

[m--bloop]

Intergenerational trauma / mental illness

The Sopranos (6x17) / Esquire Hereditary review / Moonlight / My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem / Pachinko (1x01) / I Love You, Honeybear (Father John Misty) / Russian Doll (2x04) / Doctor Sleep / Bojack Horseman (2x01)

[asoftepiloguemylove]

if you take any requests to make web-weaves, im searching desperately for one about bravery, confidence, and having the courage of your convictions. many thanks :)

i hope this is what you're looking for :))

With Confidence "Voldemort" / Amy Schmidt "Abundance" / twitter @/maryzha0 / Carl Jung / Alexandra Levasseur "Body of Land" / Resmaa Menakem / F. D. Reeve "The Moon & Other Failures" / unknown

[gatheringbones]

[“While people from England, Spain, Portugal, France, Scotland, Sweden, and Holland had all colonized parts of America by the late 1600s, it was the English who controlled nearly all the colonized territories in what would become the United States in 1776.

The 1500s and 1600s in England were anything but gentle times. People were routinely burned at the stake for heresy, a practice that began in the twelfth century and continued through 1612. Torture was an official instrument of the English government until 1640. The famous Tower of London was, in part, a huge torture chamber. One of many torture devices in the Tower, the rack, was used to stretch human bodies and pull them apart. Here is a description of the apparatus at work:

This caused terrible pain for the victim as well as increasing physical damage as the torture continued. Tendons were ripped, joints separated and bones fractured. The sounds of muscles and tendons tearing and snapping provided audible signs of the damage being done.

During much of the Middle Ages in England, torture wasn’t just wildly popular; it was a spectator sport. In his essay “Violence and the Law in Medieval England,” historian Sean McGlynn puts it this way:

Throughout the whole medieval period there was popular demand for malefactors to receive punishment that was both harsh and purposefully terrifying. This reflected people’s enthusiasm and the desire to see justice being done. There was even an executions transfer market: bids were made to stage the executions of condemned men in front of home crowds…. Mutilations sent out a message of warning and deterrence; executions offered the ultimate guarantee against repeat offenders … with few prisons and no police force, severe punishment was deemed invaluable as a deterrent to crime.

In her book A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman offers this parallel description of everyday life in medieval England:

The tortures and punishments of civil justice customarily cut off hands and ears, racked, burned, flayed, and pulled apart people’s bodies. In everyday life, passers-by saw some criminal flogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron collar. They passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes on the city walls.

It is not hard to understand why so many people from England fled to the American colonies. (Fleeing is, of course, a survival response.) Many of the English who colonized America had been brutalized, or had witnessed great brutality first-hand. Others were the children and grandchildren of people who had experienced such savagery in England.

Barbarism was not the only reason to flee England. The Great Plague raged through much of the country in 1665 and 1666, killing an estimated 100,000 people in London alone—almost a quarter of the city’s population. In the village of Eyam, the Plague killed four out of five residents over fourteen months. Many English immigrants were desperately trying to get away from poverty, starvation, and overcrowding.

For all their talk of the new Jerusalem, the Pilgrims and Puritans were not explorers. They were refugees fleeing imprisonment, torture, and mutilation. In England, one Puritan writer, William Prynne, had his ears cut off and his forehead branded (burned with a red-hot iron) with the letters SL, which stood for seditious libeler. Another Puritan, John Lilburne, was flogged with a whip, dragged by an oxcart through London, and forced into a pillory. Others had their noses split or their tongues bored with hot irons.

In Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, DeGruy asks, “Isn’t it likely that many slaves were severely traumatized? Furthermore, did the trauma and the effects of such horrific abuse end with the abolition of slavery?” We need to ask these same questions about the English colonists who made their way to America. Isn’t it likely that many of them were traumatized by the time they arrived here? Did over ten centuries of medieval brutality, which was inflicted on white bodies by other white bodies, begin to look like culture? Did this intergenerational trauma and its effects end with European immigrants’ arrival in the New World?”]

Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and Healing our Hearts and Bodies

[a-medley-of-oddities]

Resmaa Menakem

[singofsolace]

[thesociologicalcinema]

"Trauma in a person, decontextualized over time, looks like personality. Trauma in a family, decontextualized over time, looks like family traits. Trauma in a people, decontextualized over time, looks like culture."

~ Resmaa Menakem

[viperslang]

A key factor in the perpetuation of white-body supremacy is many people’s refusal to experience clean pain around the myth of race. Instead, usually out of fear, they choose the dirty pain of silence and avoidance and, invariably, prolong the pain.

Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies"