Claude’s Exploration #11
I am just back from spending a full week in the North of Germany, working on collective trauma with Thomas Hübl. It was the apex moment of a two year long training program which we have been undertaking together with 200 fellow participants in Europe.
Working on collective trauma is focused on creating the emotional safety conditions that are necessary, so that old unconscious collective pain from the past can surface in us, be witnessed with empathy by the collective, and allow for integration.
What was painful and unspoken can become painful and shared, and start releasing its grip on our present and future behaviors.
This time, the trauma was not only in the past, but very much present.
Thomas couldn’t fly from Israel due to the outbreak of the war, and teached the whole week from a screen, when he didn’t have to leave us for a few moments to hide in a missile-proof bunker before resuming his work with the group.
I won’t speak here about the many topics we touched upon, ranging from the holocaust and its current sequel playing between Palestinians and Israelis, to the east-west trauma of former Germany and soviet union, or colonialism in South America.
I feel I can only talk rightly from what was my main topic during the week : being of mixed race from a french Caribbean island, whose history is slavery.
(For more details on how the process works, you can read Matthew Green’s excellent article on our week and the work with Thomas Hübl here)
Feeling the connection with my grandmother
To dive into the work, we started by connecting to our “ancestors”.
That is to say, simply thinking about them, reviewing parents, grandparents or even great grandparents, from both paternal and maternal sides. Thinking about the time they lived in, what happened in their lives and in society at that time, and looking inside of us what emotions or insights emerged from this reflection.
We were asked to look for an ancestor to whom we felt connected, where it was easy to feel something.
For me it was my grandmother from my paternal side, the mother of my father.
That formidable woman was born at the beginning of the 20th century, from a black maid and her white employer, himself a descendant of a slave owner family. She gave birth to 12 children while founding a construction firm from scratch with her husband, thus enabling her kids to get education and money.
(You can read in one of my previous articles The Complexity of Being of Mixed Race a larger account of my family story, and especially my grandmother’s.)
I could feel again the rage, the fierceness that I inherit from her, and that I have come to see as the strength that translated in me as entrepreneurship, enabling me to fund my own technology start-up 10 years ago.
I could feel how she had to fight to get a spot in society, recognition and social status, being raised in a black, poor and uneducated context, where nothing is given to you.
Feeling where it’s stuck
Then we were asked to do the exercise again, and try and feel an ancestor that didn’t appear easy to connect with.
One of the big learnings of writing that first article on my lineage some months ago, was that it had led me to realize that until that moment, I wasn’t considering my grandmother’s father as one of my ancestors.
Because he was from a slave owner family, I simply didn’t want to acknowledge that his blood also runs in me.
It was a great shock for me to realize this. It was actually easier for me to believe that I am from one side only of the story, that I come from black slaves (victims), and that from my mother's side, I descend from white people that hadn’t taken a direct part in the colonization, being from the north of France.
To be honest, it already felt a lot to integrate both perspectives from simply being of mixed race.
But to think I also bear the weight of the direct perpetration of slavery simply felt too much.
So when we were asked to try and connect to an elusive ancestor, I decided to face it, and try and connect to my great grandfather.
And I couldn’t feel anything.
A fellow participant and friend with whom I was sharing this, asked me if I had any inkling why my great grandfather would abuse my great grandmother (and yes I think it was abuse, not romance). And the only thing that came to me was : “Because he could.”
Because it’s the norm inherited from slavery, that a white master can have sex with a black maid if he wants to.
As some one else put it later, “rape was not called rape, it was called ownership”.
Being seen and being scared
I decided to share my experience with the big group of 200 people. It felt important to bring the colonization piece into global awareness. So I brought up my grandmother to the group, claiming a space for her and her story, and for myself, as a black person among whites.
As I got to name it during my sharing, out of 200 participants, there are only five of us that are “black” or colored. Of these five people, I gather that at least three have a lineage that involves slavery in the Caribbean islands, through deportation from Africa.
And as far as I know, we are all either mixed race, or used to operating in a predominantly “white” environment
In my case, I live in Paris, and when I’m there (and not back home in the Caribbean for holidays), my friends are mainly white, and my work environment is mainly white and privileged. And I enjoy those privileges too.
My predicament is that I usually feel that to be accepted in a white European majority, I have to hide my black identity, smooth it down, make it look harmless: nice but not threatening.
I can feel this is a fear in me, and I can also see how that fear mirrors real subtle rejection or denial reactions from the people around.
And after sharing in the big group, I was overwhelmed by an acute version of this fear.
I spent three days in hell. My body was so overtaken by sheer fear that at first, I couldn’t get back to sitting in the big group.
It was the fear of being rejected for having spoken an uncomfortable truth and risking antagonizing people that don’t want to feel responsible for colonization and slavery, although it is pretty much at the roots of our western society.
The strength of my reaction could only be measured by how much I usually feel integrated and safe in this group, with whom I have been working closely for two years.
I could feel in me the need to feel seen, and the anguish that comes with being seen and exposed.
I was feeling two movements working in me at the same time. I could feel the resistance of people in the room to feel what slavery meant. This perception was confirmed by some people coming to me and acknowledging that they could hear me, but they couldn't relate really to what I was sharing.
And I could feel in me at the same time my own inner limiting belief that I couldn’t expect to be seen and received there.
How this inner belief was at the same time the resonance of the past (black people have been killed for asking for recognition of what was inflicted to them), and also contributing to creating the undesired effect of not being fully received.
After three days of this inner tension, another participant raised her hand to share, another black woman of Caribbean descent.
And she was able to do what could not do : she put into words with clarity, unapologetically, what slavery in the Caribbean was, the sheer abomination of it. She told the story and made it real for the 200 hundred bodies that were sitting there that day.
I can’t bring myself to write what she said, although she gave me license to quote her, (As confidentiality is key to providing safety for this work to be done, I cleared it with her first before mentioning her and publishing here.), as the words are in a way blurred in my mind.
I can say though that the sentence “Rape was not called rape, it was called ownership” was said by her in that moment, among many more horrible truths.
But what I remember very clearly is the stillness in the room as she spoke, the feeling of shock that was propagating like a tidal wave among the participants, like the ripples of a bomb exploding and blowing through space.
And after her sharing, my body started to relax.
All of sudden, I wasn’t alone anymore processing this horror. I could literally feel it as we were now processing it as a collective body, and it brought up in me an intense relief.
Reintegrating my ancestors
When I shared in front of everyone, I conjured my grandmother Bertina to be seen and honored by the whole group.
In the days that followed, as I had to face deep fear, I worked with some of the very skilled therapists that help us integrate what this work lets emerge in us.
These sessions led to two major insights in me.
First I had the deep experience of connecting for the first time in my life with my great grandmother, Adeline, the mother of my grandmother, the “black maid”.
On the civil registry I am called Adeline Claude Bertina.
My usual name is Claude, I have always been called Claude by my parents, and by everyone around me.
And yet, when my father went to register me in the town hall in the days following my birth, what he wrote in the registry application form is “Adeline Claude Bertina Salomé” (Salome being his last name, and my maiden name).
I have always wondered why.
Actually it was mainly a pain in the a* for me, as in many cases it interfered with paperwork, or even booking international flights, as if I didn’t put my great grandmother's name before mine, I would not board the plane, as it wouldn’t match the name written on my passport.
It always made me wonder, “who am I really?” Why was the past inviting itself in my present all the time ?
I have come to think that it was the (unconscious) way my father had found to ask me to take care of these two women, without whose pain and resilience I would not be here today to live my life.
Feeling into my great grandmother, what I felt was confusion. A huge confusion. And it made sense, that to live in that time of adverse conditions, she had to feel confused to survive.
I can feel how this confusion I often feel in me is probably an echo of her own confusion, that happens each time I am confronted with a situation that doesn’t make sense, a situation where pain is inflicted when only love was asked for.
“Life doesn’t make sense”. “How is it possible?”
And I could feel grateful for her, and for my grandmother.
I am grateful for my ancestors that survived, and that made it possible for me to have a better life today. That made it possible for me to look at this inheritance with fresh and open eyes. To give them a voice, and name things that weren’t named.
Shame
The second deep learning was owning my shame.
As I sat with one of the therapists, I could name that I was feeling ashamed. And for once, I did not try and find a reason for it (although the reason that was coming at first was : “I am ashamed of being so triggered that I need a session again), we just sat there, witnessing that I was feeling shame.
That space we gave to that feeling, and the fact I could name it and share it in relation, and that it could be received without judgment, after a moment brought a change in me and led to more clarity.
I realized that I hold a deep shame for “choosing to be white”.
Somewhere in my young years, I realized that life was easier if I behaved like a white person, integrating the codes I inherited from my mother’s family, and choosing to live in predominantly white context. This probably one of the reason why I didn’t get back to live in Guadeloupe.
And I am feeling shame towards my black ancestors.
The work of Frantz Fanon comes up to my mind when I write this.
I read “Black Skin, White Masks” when I was 17, as I was still in highs chool in Guadeloupe.
This is when I learnt for the first time in a structured way what I unconsciously knew, because it is part of the Caribbean reality. That as black people we have internalized that being white is “better”, or at least safer. And that mixing race, as in a black person choosing to marry a white one, is a strategy to ensure a better future for your children.
Fanon points at how there is actually a word in creole for babies that are born with a lighter shade of skin: « po chapé » literally means “escaped skin”.
So again, this process of escaping the color, this strategy that I enacted, is actually a collective strategy, not just mine.
It relieves me somehow to know that, and again distinguish the nuances between individual, ancestral and collective traumas, and how all three layers live in me.
And to not try to solve my shame, deny it, but own it, as a gateway to getting more whole.
The Victim and the Perpetrator polarities
In connecting with my ancestors, at the moment, I feel I am reintegrating the legacy of both my grandmother, Bertina, and of my great grandmother, Adeline.
I am reintegrating in me what it felt like to live in a powerless situation, for my great grandmother, and for my grandmother, to use rage to fight for your space, get back respect and financial safety, and build a better future for your kids.
At the moment, where I stand is that I can’t connect to my great grandfather, Alexandre d’Huy, the white man that got Adeline pregnant.
I know his name. I remember my mother telling me that he didn’t recognize my grandmother as a child, and only manifested some interest when she became a prominent figure on the island with the construction company she was running with her husband. I know nothing of that man, but somehow his name stuck in my memory.
I know his name, but at the moment, this door is still closed for me.
I am confident it can change in the future. That this works requires time, and goes by steps.
And I can see the bigger pattern here. To feel the perpetration, I first need to feel the victimhood.
One of my big learnings of the week was to see some other people owning up to perpetration in a very healthy, healing way.
It is not about being sorry.
It’s about feeling in yourself how it could happen, the pain it created, and simply acknowledging it. In a way we are not responsible for the decisions our ancestors made. But we can own up to them.
You can read more on Collective Trauma Work and the week long retreat we just held with Thomas Hübl in Matthew Green’s excellent newsletter, Resonant World.
Chere Claude, busy with cleaning up my mailbox I came across your article. I haven't read all of it - only up to this second foto of your grandma (or grand-grandma - I am a bit confused now). Lot of crying, tears flowing. I will read the rest later. In this second foto I recognise you or let's say a big part of you. And it's a very touching foto, very serious and very sad. In the beginning, with the first foto, your family foto , I was surprised to see your parents - I found it difficult to see any resemblance with you (which of course is there undeniable, but I don't see it). The person which touched me at first sight was your grandfather. My impression was: you look a lot like him - and I still have this impression parallel to the other one with your grand-grandmother. He comes to me as a very lovely and soft man - I don't know who he really was as a person in life, but that's my impression.
Now I realize that words are streaming out of me and this is a comment and probably everyone can read this, I don't know exactly. So I will continue somewhere else. Lots of love for now.