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Rating: 
Summary: How theater arts can heal trauma and drive political action
Review: One of the 23 contributions by different theater activists is a chanpter on "Yuyachkani" (one word translated as meaning, in Peruvian language of Quechua, "I am thinking, I am remembering, I am your thought"). The "Yuyachkani" chapter, an example of this superb book, is about a Peruvian street theater group that has performed together in cities and rural villages since the early 1970s. Contributor Diana Taylor writes of the power of the arts for healing trauma in Peru, but the words speak to us today, after Sept. 11:"Yuyachkani's performances make visible a history of cumulative trauma, an unmarked and unacknowledge history of violent conflict. As in Adios Ayacucho, the attempts at communicating an event that no one cares to acknowledge need to be repeated again and again. Part of the reiteration stems from the traumatic nature of injury. Cathy Caruth argues that the obsessive repeats occur because 'the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event." The same, Caruth's proposes, occurs with historical understanding: "For history to be a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs." Trauma produces dislocation, a rupture between the experience and the possibility of understanding it. But trauma, as Caruth's notes, "opens up and challenges us to a new kind of listening, the witnessing, precisely, of impossibility." "For members of traumatized communities, such as the Andean ones Yuuachkani engages with, past violence blends into the current crisis. The trauma of the persecuted and deracinated indigeneous and mestizo population is a "symptom of history," as Caruth puts it: "The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess." (I rate it a 4 not a 5 only because most of the contributions are written for academia and therefore not always clear communications for non-academics)
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