Rape, ritual, rupture, and repair: Decentering Euro-American logics of trauma and healing in an analytic autoethnography of the five years after my rape in Sierra Leone

Abstract

Responses to the trauma of rape vary. People find different responses helpful and a multiplicity of trauma theories should be considered. Through an autoethnography and critical phenomenology of myself and my collaborators in Sierra Leone after I was raped there, I analyze how subjective and cultural frames for managing rape impact an individual's processing of the experience; how they shape ideas of self, community, and world; and how they frame their unraveling and remaking. While I retreated, internalized, and individualized my rape, my collaborators wanted me to externalize it, let the community help, and undergo a ritual to disconnect me from my rapist. Cross-cultural exchange can enhance understandings of responses to trauma and approaches to healing. This is done not to cement cultural frames, to localize or to particularize trauma, nor to overgeneralize but to consider interlocking factors, fill in politically created gaps in focus and memory, and consider multiplicity as enriching on a level playing field. This may help decenter Euro-American notions of trauma and foster an ethics of care.