The trauma mantras: A memoir of prose poems By Adrie Kusserow. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024. 176 pp.

In The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir of Prose Poems, medical anthropologist and poet Adrie Kusserow strives to advance the growing movement within the social sciences to use arts-based ethnographic research tools. She begins by defining “AutoEthnography” as “qualitative research using self-reflection and writing to explore personal experience and connect this autobiographical story to wider cultural and social meanings and understandings” (p. 5). Kusserow, through 69 short passages of poetic prose (two to four pages each), offers an ethnography on emotional responses to difficult events, what is commonly subsumed under the Western concept of trauma. She explores, illuminates, and complexifies how refugees and others experience loss and suffering, and how they shape, ignore, hold, succumb to, or survive this experience or find a sense of renewal in it. Kusserow also illustrates how responses to trauma are affected by racism, misogyny, stigma, and other structural and institutional inequities in Bhutan, Hong Kong, India, Nepal, Sudan, Sweden, Uganda, the US, and elsewhere. As an autobiography, Kusserow's book frames the data presented in the context of her own history and professional experiences as an anthropologist—white, privileged, female, often crossing borders and boundaries on her own. Her passages are woven throughout with elements of her own struggles with loss, fears of physical threats, and uncomfortable uncertainties arising from the unfamiliar and from the joys of discovery. Kusserow's autoethnographic passages are bold, empathic, intriguing, searing, and searching must-reads for people with lived experience of forced displacement and for both formal and informal students of refugees and suffering. This book speaks to a broad audience of social scientists, behavioral health clinicians, social workers, street outreach professionals, philosophers, travelers, poets, and lovers of the written word. One of the book's resounding themes is that trauma is a malleable noun with different meanings and consequences for those suffering it. The author lures us into a better understanding of how to listen to and take stock of others’ stories, and how to best ameliorate their struggles and suffering—immediate, urgent, ultimate challenges for medical anthropologists. Acknowledging the embedded assumptions of those with narrow lives who examine the lives of others, she leaves us to wonder if trauma can ever be seen where it really is. She opens with “The Trouble with Stories,” writing, “This is a story of a story I wanted to be the hero of, but wasn't. I wanted to tell it over and over, propping it up on prominent display back in the great USA, until I rose like an angel from my perpetual shame” (p. 3). The story Kusserow wanted to tell of her role in rescuing a young girl kidnapped into a brothel in India became a story of the girl's story “she'd boxed up so neatly for me” (p. 4). The girl, aware she was being observed, told the story she wanted to be heard. take a flowing quantum soup, congeal it into solids using the blunt antennae of limited senses. The way our language reinforces this, with its subjects and predicates, supposedly solid nouns and active verbs, masculine and feminine objects. Then the sentences, further molded fictions that stick together, misrepresent. Then whole concepts, hastily padded, packed, shaped, and thrown, before the other side can pelt them down. (p. 105) Kusserow also chastises the Western-centric dogma of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). She illuminates the “well meaning Traumasphere” (p. 46) in which we live, wherein we more readily emphasize our victimhood while loosely describing our everyday experiences as traumatizing. In her passage, Trauma, Inc., she finds that her college students score significantly higher for post-traumatic stress disorder than South Sudanese refugee girls. Kusserow comments that “Trauma Inc. is ravenous and cocky, it knows it's got a good thing going. It snorts whole white lines of history religion, politics, removing them from the context of suffering” (p. 47). In “Psychocolonialism,” she illustrates the incompleteness of the DSM. Kusserow writes of Jaio, an anorexic woman in Hong Kong, who has lost her grandmother, Nai Nai: “Too weak to rise, she floats in a haze of light-headedness, what Nai Nai calls blocked qi, an excess of yin, a depleted yang. How old-fashioned how quaint” (p. 71). She wanted to be picked up like a mother dog grabs the slack of her loose-necked pup, to be folded up, and slid into the warm pink pocket of the woman's body, sipping at the walls of fat. She wanted to go back, eyes open in the warm fluid, lungs soft as petals, bones light as cartilage, before the shock of sun blasts in and the waters recede, revealing the islands bright and stubborn, borders quickly staking their claim. When she told the doctor of her longings, he told her the DSM had no diagnosis for symptoms like that. Now, she is a modern girl, with a modern illness, its capped teeth gawking from People, Self, Vogue. She knows it did not start this way, like the Western doctors described, but, tired of being lonely, her symptoms never just right, she learned the real ones eagerly, like a refugee scarfing down the language needed to survive. (p. 72) It even tried to assault the guidance counselor. But she would have none of it. She knew where to put horror, to slap it with a DSM label, while slipping me a pill with a V on its back, and letting me hide in a closet that smelled of ammonia. After that I had a disorder that barked like a sergeant. Directions, protocols were to be followed, experts consulted, therapist guidelines to be followed, pills swallowed. Each time my horror's raw scream tried to jump out, it saw no one it knew, turned around, and jumped right back into that DSM label, feeling stamped, cramped, and lonely, but accepting it as my fate. (p. 36) I tell my students we Psychopomorphize the twitching blob in the crib, and play pin the tail on the donkey with Freud. And thus begins our descent into the Psychologized Self, where a gas bubble crowning from a “grin” means she's confident, happy, when just as easily we could have spoken of spirits, clouds, dreams, the moon, creation myths, the mycelial web's magnetic pull, or nothing at all. (p. 26) Jésus who for all practical purposes did nothing to stop her gang rape in Essex, Vermont (instead of the Congo, rape capital of the world). … For days, the pig raced inside her head, shredding sirens of sound while Jésus did nothing from his perch on the La-Z-Boy, listless, like he'd had too much weed. (p. 101) You see, the Lonely Planet doesn't tell you that under the guise of Buddhism many evil things lurk. That in Shangri La, you have to be careful which men you go to for help, because not all of them are what they seem, especially the Western ones who wait for you to come knocking on their door, crouched like wolves under the hoods of their little red monk robes, their teeth glistening as you walk in and tell them you just want to learn about the Dharma. (p. 7) Trauma Mantras’ passages are perhaps best read a few at a time. They are brave, educational examples elevating ethnographic research methods in ways deserving careful consideration by anyone with an interest in using acutely nuanced language and an artistic aesthetic to present multilayered cultural meanings.