Spaced-Out States Decolonizing Trauma in a War-Torn Middle Eastern City

Abstract

Against anthropological notions of “illness narratives” and “social suffering” as the responsible reception of trauma, this article formulates possible directions in which to expand trauma’s conceptual framework so as to respond ethnographically to affective ways of understanding memory, critical agency, and political belonging. Building on ethnographic fieldwork with militarily displaced Kurdish communities in Diyarbakır, in Kurdistan, in Turkey, this article addresses the psychological and political states of spatio-temporal displacement. Taking the encounter of two bereaved Kurdish mothers with antidepressants and antipsychotics as its object of inquiry, the article analyzes the affective state of feeling gej (“spaced-out,” in Kurdish), making the case that in this colonial setting of necropolitical destruction and displacement, feeling spaced-out is an assertion of political critique. Such fugitive manifestations of colonial wounding reveal not only the constitution of a medical space of informal economic traffic and diagnostic intervention but also transient states through which bereaved Kurdish mothers actively undertake their own constitution and engage with decolonial imaginaries to sustain mental health. These noncathartic states need not be organized, collective, or even resistant in any standard sense to be considered as a form of outrage at colonial oppression and as expressions of dissent.