Publish at May 24 2023 Updated May 24 2023
Claire: "Dadirri. This is the Aboriginal way... We are at home in silence... We are not afraid of it... As Aborigines, we have learned from the earliest times... to listen... We do not try to rush things."
Karl: "This is very important because... I... I don't know how I would have survived in such a hostile world, in this Western lifestyle, as a subject of the British column in this country without [the Gamarada]..."
Trauma is an unhappiness that leads to an emotional outburst that has a significant impact in the daily lives of the people it affects. One or more triggering events can affect us directly or reach us indirectly through ancestors.
We are descendants of the peoples who colonized or were colonized, and often a mixture of many of them. The reality is that the peoples who were colonized have had their "spirits crushed" for hundreds of years.
It is only recently that work (1970) has established for Australia the violence of the colonial process, and then the link between it and the present situation of the Aborigines (1990). We can read carefully about the interracial history of Australia in Edgar Tasia's thesis.
So, some acts have different causes and temporalities but can have the same structure and therefore the same effect. For example, in Australia there is a specific issue related to child abductions that feeds the colonial trauma and continues the conditions of cultural rupture (untransmitted knowledge and rituals): from the children of the stolen generations to the current placements of children in foster care or boarding schools. Some thus speak of "second stolen generation".
We can read this thesis with our reason and also allow ourselves to be guided through the therapeutic journey it may offer.
His construction is clear: a dive into the therapeutic device (a Gamarada session), the study of language games around trauma, personal development, aboriginality, and a study of how Gamarada works.
Beyond this linear construction, we can make connections of meaning, reflection, and healing in a kind of spiral reading process reminiscent of the therapeutic journey described on page 340 of the dissertation.
The therapeutic journey of a Gamarada member is spiral. This one advances between the two poles of the Gamarada influence and the influence of intergenerational trauma. It is a "constant self-work", where the member moves between advances and falls, between being "triggered" (triggered) and put back on track by the practice.
It must be acknowledged, in fact, that what regularly triggers trauma is not resolved in the blink of an eye, even more so for intergenerational trauma that affects the collective and is always activated by racism.
In the therapeutic program analyzed in the dissertation there is a rhetoric of retroactive care. The care "retroacts on the thread of history", borrowing from traditional Aboriginal culture. The quality of the social bond was affected by the colonial shock and the collective process aims at the restitution of this bond.
"The Gamarada is an indigenous therapeutic device whose principle is that of generating, in the members who have the use of it, resilience."
It means "friends with a common purpose" (friends with a purpose), it is a word of the Gadigals, inhabitants of Sydney's inner-city territory.
This free program is open to all and is held every Monday evening at the Redfern Community Center (RCC). In the heart of a neighborhood with a strong history of aboriginal activism since the 1970s (housing agency, theater, culture), far more structuring than just the 2004 riots found in French-language sources (the Wikipedia entry might well be modified, referencing the thesis).
Karl, the creator of the program, had met Professor Judy Atkinson, author of Trauma Trails as part of his studies in the health sciences. He learned the central Gamarada technique, Dadirri, from her.
She had stated that "There is a trauma at work in the country's aboriginal community. This one is directly related of colonization. Untreated, untreated, this is passed on from one generation to the next, causing a kind of runaway effect of the initial trauma within that community."
Gamarada was first created with a group of Aboriginal men, then it was opened to Aboriginal women and children: Claire, a woman who needed this program had asked the founder about it during an interview. It is open to anyone who wishes to participate, Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal.
To approach Gamarada, the researcher sets up the conditions for an encounter through an opening in direct immersion on a long ethnographic stage. He asks the reader to "play the game", "agree to be lost for a time amidst the other members of this talk group".
On the program: "We meet as a group. We laugh, we cry, we breathe; we manipulate energies; we draw on the wisdom of the ancestors."
"As an Aboriginal person, we are connected with everything else."
Gamarada is an energy amplifier and the promise of a better future.
Claire (daughter of stolen generation children):"People are circling around, hanging out, and not looking for a solution on the side of their own healing culture. They'd rather go to the white doctor and get medicine...you know, instead of getting proper care."
The unfolding of the Gamarada gradually and subtly leads to Dadirri, which means just as much "tranquility", "awareness" and "deep listening". Zen practitioners will resonate with this, also sophrologists in their group practices.
The stages of the Gamarada (they can be adapted to the situation) are thus:
"This moment of silence, left by the narrator is therefore crucial: it is the epicenter, the heart of the program; it is for it, to prepare the individual to receive it correctly, that all the rest of the protocol is applied."Then participants are invited to rub their hands as if to light a fire (the connection is made to historical or memorial fires), and then place their hands over their eyes to bring this life-giving fire into them.
For Aunt Miriam Rose, Dadirri is "that quiet, deep inner silence, that silent awareness [which can be likened to] what is called 'contemplation'". It is to "generate in the listener 'something' of the order of a change in psychological state."
"Only then - once this boundary is crossed [extending care to the whole world] can history be reconciled with memory; only then can the disastrous aftershocks of the initial shock of colonization be stopped."
We can also read the analyses around the history of psychology, with the observation of a generalized psychocentrism in the Western world, and the "rise of categories referring to interiority".
Personal development serves the "new spirit of capitalism" in which the autonomous individual is part of a logic of project and network. Even if the practice of Gamarada is an inner process and therefore partly individual and tinged with the times in which we live, it comes from a culture that lives resonance and connection in a deeper way.
Pete, one of the participants, said to the researcher thus:
"What is difficult is to understand how Dadirri, silence, and exchange can act the way they do... That is your task, Eddie."
"[What] the Gamarada demonstrates above all else is the extraordinary socio-cultural bricolage, the gripping power of imagination, creation, and re-creation of its members to combat overwhelming, everyday suffering (primarily psychological but not only). Faced with this suffering, these individuals deploy an impressive arsenal of ideas, practices and sensible performances to relieve it. Through whatever means they have, they seek to improve their existences; they tend to erect their lives into 'good lives', i.e., worthy of being considered as a form of life in its own right, despite suffering, vulnerability, and precariousness."
"There is [also] this expanding energy that is part of the Gamarada identity and that... comes from the aboriginal culture and extends beyond that, into justice, into education... very, very slowly. So, for me, Gamarada is about energetic actions, self reflection as well. It's a very important part of my [inner] journey as well. Reflexivity and survival..."
Illustration: jason M (twistedFrog) on Pixabay.
Edgar Tasia, From Trauma to Resilience. A socio-anthropological case study of an indigenous therapeutic device in the central suburbs of Sydney (Australia), Free University of Brussels, 2019.
Thesis available at: https://orbi.uliege.be/handle/2268/297030
Miriam Rose Ungunmerr, Dadirri (in English): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pahz_WBSSdA
Context on Redfern (ABC News Australia, in English): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3qQxxW1pNY
Come together, Nauiyu community song in English (April 2023) - "Vians take my hand, I'll show you this country":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77BfN1riilc
Coline Serreau's film La Belle Verte for the sequence with the Aborigines in the desert
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Belle_Verte
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