Stories through graphic out. We've been snooping the occupations. Borough and i but not today today. We're not looking for trouble. we're just cruising east jerusalem. That's all now we're crossing nablus road. School kids off the bus to get to the other side. I repeat today. We're not looking for trouble. Joe sacco palestine. I'm curious what it's like. Sort of visualizing persons trauma through comex the makes it different superior perhaps even to traditional ways of treating such topics we worked with agree repos survivors of torture from lanka in a medical facility in north london. And they being tortured before they left and they were Seeking asylum and we sat there Psychologists in a in a room and they explain to us what gone through after fleeing sri lanka and coming back home to england war coup. Dick's began work on a graphic novel called vani. It's the story of. Sri lankan civilians caught up in the violence of the civil war. He created vani with illustrator lindsay pollock and drew and they really involved. When they started to say on the page the route that they had been describing suddenly appear as lindsay druid and then started to get very voted. There was a there was a fan on the ceiling and there was an oldest memory. Started to come out the day there was. There was a bolt on the door. It was on the left side. Not the right side and some oldest detail starts to come out those chipped tile on the floor down there ya and that was fascinating. Go through and you could see. I mean the psychologist would tell us that this was this is a very beneficial for them to be able to go through that process and there's a lot of workout revolt therapy and stuff of that but we we went train. We were researching out book. But i that was clearly a lot of positive energy in that room when it comes to the idea. The disastrous event and trauma. There is a debate about what is representative. And what is unrepresentative for literary studies. I think the idea of unrepresented ability has to do with recognizing that trauma as category marks out experience so extreme that literary form cannot capture the extremity of that experience for an individual for a population. Say the experience of genocide that. There's there's something that so excessive about trauma that form cannot accurately do justice to its parameters. So that's the idea that it's unrepresentative will and that doesn't mean that there hasn't been plenty of production across all sorts of different areas of culture that have tried to represent trauma but especially in the nineties. It became typical within trauma. Studies to acknowledge what the french film director. Claude lanzmann has called the blindness at the heart of trauma so he did a nine hour documentary about the holocaust called shoah. As as i'm sure you and many other people are aware of that. Uses no archival footage from world war two in. This was a specific choice. And he also perhaps me was say doesn't use any reenactments so there's no representation of violence in that film. That is all about violence instead. He's he's sort of showing us the absence sometimes. The word representation suggests that comics some have stood standing back from the world's just reflecting it and that we can just go and have a look in there when we when we feel like it. I think i've always keen to emphasize that comex. Don't just reflect the world but they they can help to make it to and again a lot of this comes from Spiegelman's maus and behind that it comes from holocaust studies and really comes from the don. Very famous statement often misquoted. That but i'm sure everyone will be familiar with which you can't you can't write poetry after to auschwitz and the root of that is you know what would it mean to what it means sort of do a create to turn something so because the holocaust into Something beautiful sight to turn to turn something as renders historical event to make out of that film that is moving or a comic. The teas or a piece of all his that makes us admire. Its for its beauty of its intelligence or you know what that raises serious ethical questions. We might see shoah as representing the view within this debate that absence and the presence of absence ethically aesthetically. What one must do to address trauma. We see film schindler's list on the opposite end of the spectrum right steven spielberg takes us into the gas chambers. Right he takes us right there. He recreated a death camp for his film as the movie set. He's interested in recreation Both in production and in the film right so he wants to deliver those images of violence for viewers. A one of the dangers when it comes to looking at school reading about traumas this sense of a kind of voyeurism so reading about traumatic events or violent events for some sort of kind of perverse enjoyment. And i think the fact that we have the relationship a hillary cola witnessing between the artist and the thing that's been witnessed inscribed in the page in the very sort of form of that of the handwriting particularly powerful protection against that that kind of move voyeuristic consumption of traumatic or traumatized culture. Or let's turn culture about traumatic events You're listening to ideas on. Cbc radio one. In canada. Across north america on sirius. Xm in australia on abc radio national and around the world at cbc dot ca slash ideas. You can also hear ideas on the cbc. Listen up or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm nella add from. Cbc podcasts and the fifth estate brainwashed is a multi-party investigation into the cia experiments. In mind control from the cold war and m. k. Ultra to the so called war on terror. We learn about a psychiatrist who used his patients as human guinea pigs. And what happens when the military and medicine collide. Listen to brainwashed on the cbc. Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.