• Courtesy Of Chet Scerra
• Adrie Kusserow

We live in an epoch of refugees. According to the UN Refugee Agency, as of October 2023 more than 110 million people in our world had been "forcibly displaced" from their homes. This global emergency lends currency and urgency to The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems, a new book by Adrie Kusserow, cultural anthropologist, self-described "ethnographic poet," and chair of the Saint Michael's College sociology and anthropology department.

Kusserow has been a relief worker and teacher in refugee communities in Asia, Africa and the United States, including in Vermont. According to her faculty web page, her most recent fieldwork "has focused on the influence of global media on youth identity in Bhutan and the sex trafficking of girls into brothels from Darjeeling, India."

Author of the scholarly study American Individualisms: Child Rearing and Social Class in Three Neighborhoods and two books of poems, Hunting Down the Monk (2002) and Refuge (2013), Kusserow lives with her family in Underhill Center, where she was born.

What kind of book is The Trauma Mantras? As its subtitle indicates, this is neither a standard academic monograph nor a typical personal chronicle. "Prose poems" is an aesthetic category, suggesting an assemblage of individual pieces composed in language that is intensified and compressed. The term "memoir" connotes a life story with some measure of temporal progression and coherence.

But The Trauma Mantras is neither a collection of discrete literary texts nor a narrative autobiography. The book presents a number of obstacles, even for a reader receptive to its avowedly difficult subject matter: the anguish that refugees carry long into their forced exile.

The brief "chapters," only a few of which are longer than a page or two, seem to appear in intentionally scrambled order. It's difficult to understand why they are sequenced in this and not some other way — for example, proceeding from childhood to youth to adulthood. While a memoir can succeed without following a strictly linear timeline, there is very little logical or even intuitive relationship between the individual pieces of The Trauma Mantras and their location in the book.

• Courtesy
• The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems by Adrie Kusserow, Duke University Press, 176 pages. $19.95.

For instance, an episode remembered from childhood, "The Day I Really Became an Anthropologist," would have been inviting and illuminating early in the book, but it is delayed until page 48. The first mention of the narrator having a husband comes on page 56 and then only in passing. The last third of the book features four pieces that refer to the narrator's cancer, with no elucidation. The book is divided into two parts, for no discernible reason.

Many of the pieces take place in more than one location in the world, their paired settings identified by subheadings such as "Trigger Fields" (Yei, South Sudan and Colchester, Vermont), "Prostrations" (Montpelier, Vermont and Boudhanath, Nepal), and "On the Brilliance of Your Story" (Burma, New Jersey, and Vermont). While this may be an effort to demonstrate the writer's acute awareness of very different realities coexisting in her life, the effect tends to be jumpy, as if separate segments of writing had been spliced together.

Kusserow's writing frequently calls attention to itself with mannerisms, stylistic gimmickry and emphatic repetitions. From "Ethnography of Horror, Domesticated":

In the end, I remember the black figures spotted about the hill where we put my father into the earth. Like feeding a baby, spooning the coffin deep into the soil. Shadows big as whales slid across the fields. The earth opened, the body forked in, stiff and white in its box. My father would stay down forever, swallowed by the Northeast Kingdom, worked on, worked on in ways I wasn't supposed to imagine.

Her narrator critiques and even mocks the intrusions of medical professionals ("white coats"), therapists and her own cadre, investigative intellectuals. From "NGO Elegy":

Like the other expats, I doubt myself a hundred times a day, our efforts to help perhaps just more puppetry, in an endless play that has no plot, no meaning, no beginning, no eye dhatu, no ear dhatu, no Post, no Modern, no-anthro, no-polo, no-gist, only this country, with its sweet and terrible songs that hover like fog in giant capes of hope and doubt.

At numerous points among the anecdotes that compose the book's disjointed travelogue, the basic question — "What is happening here?" — is hard to answer. The language is so busy and agitated that it buries any possible story in figuration:

This is where Jésus dumped Immaculée, before wandering off to tend another flock of clouds, down in the psych ward, clutching her Bible and scattered papers, preaching to the nurses. Jésus in his nursing-home bathrobe, polyester slippers, Jésus whose rings-of-Saturn halo floats passively from the fridges of all the Congolese in this quaint Vermont town.

Uh ... "floats passively from the fridges"?

One of the most witheringly dismissive epithets for the genre of memoir is "me-moir" (as in: me, me, me...), and this came to mind each time the documentary acuity of one of Kusserow's scenarios was (again) suddenly interrupted by a self-conscious intervention. As here, in "Western Psychonauts of the Postpartum Period":

Sometimes I can sound lofty, anthropological, as if I'm high up in the sky again, looking down on humans fumbling around. Though I love it up here, of course I'm no different, I haven't escaped Project Individual Self, locked as I am in the plush royal velvet of my exquisite emotions, whose ornate rooms and neuroses I have explored and analyzed and mostly made my home since childhood.

The most moving and memorable pieces in The Trauma Mantras have one setting and a penetrating focus. These describe less elaborately "literary" encounters between the narrator and someone in distress, and they register an empathetic connection, both poetically and prosaically.

The book also offers what could be a valuable insight for well-intentioned helpers: that wounded people may feel compelled to perform as "victims" with canny, inauthentic behaviors, aiming to fulfill the assumptions of those offering aid.

A number of these more revelatory pieces — such as "American Skateboarders," "The Careful Preservation of Child Atoms" and "Cybirds" — could have been (or still could be) seeds for fascinating essays, but in their present form they seem like sketches.

The Trauma Mantras is a book largely concerned with missed connections between people, misunderstandings about values and perspectives, and the many ways genuine communication is constrained or obstructed. Kusserow's writing, passage by passage, has the jarring, jumping, flash-flood agitation of internet scrolling. In this sense, perhaps her new book exemplifies and thereby dramatizes the frenetic pitch at which we live, but its fractured surfaces and interruptive style may leave many readers more exhausted than enlightened.

From "Getting the Story Just Right"

I've seen this before, refugees reaching for sanctioned American stories around suffering, trying to stuff themselves in. Desperately grafting themselves onto the trunk of the most popular legitimate story about suffering in this liberal town, then praying that it takes, waiting for their vines to grow upward and curl around. Usually, this involves moving toward a more singular, psychological view of the world and themselves. What withers in America are the clumsy, folksy, smelly stories that smack of soul, spirit, ancestors, cows, witches, tribe, too much history.

We like our stories shiny, sharp, to the point, dazzling, direct, like a well-trained TEDx talk.

Sometimes the two become one, the refugee and the story in vogue.

I wonder how thoroughly Ayen will come to inhabit the story of stress. At that point, who am I to challenge it, and coach her into something more authentic when it's settled deep in her veins, deep as bone into her own body?

I resent how the doctors gave her a story because they couldn't tolerate no story at all.