“Who Owns Your Story? Transcending the Trauma Narrative”, Aminatta Forna on The Yale Review

Illustration of a person that seems to be floating on an empty space. Underneath their body, we can see their shadow, and, on top of them, a larger shadow covering them completely, shaped like a hand. The illustration is drawn with different shapes of green (including a green background), and the figures are set on a rectangular grid
Illustration by Laura Padilla Castellanos

Posted in Media  |  Tagged ,

In this essay published on The Yale Review, Aminatta Forna examines the ways in which we conflate every difficult experience with trauma, such that suffering and trauma have become interchangeable. In her questioning of the trauma narrative, Forna asks: What’s lost when we overuse the word trauma and ignore people’s resilience in the face of suffering?

Read the piece on The Yale Review.

Read follow up interview centered around the piece.