Repressed collective trauma always returns despite elaborate diversion

Evidence

The cruel irony, of course, is that the terrors move us about. We dig trenches to redirect the memories and to get them to flow away from us. But, like the waters of the Mississippi River, the memories always return, flooding everything no matter how high we build the stilts. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 176

Categorization

• XREF: The Mississippi flood metaphor echoes the recurring-national-trauma argument in Faulkner’s ‘The past is never dead’ and in Coates’s essays on the legacy of slavery. — connects to: Repetition acts as the psyche’s default emergency homeostasis when pleasure alone cannot manage trauma — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 4054