Abstract
On the tenth day of every month, in a park in central Srinagar in Kashmir, members of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) gather in mostly silent protest. Holding photographs of their loved ones and signs ranging from the affective—‘where are our dear ones?’—to the legalese—‘India must Ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance’—the kin of the disappeared in Kashmir have been protesting on a monthly basis since 1994. Many members of the APDP are ‘half widows’, a term which captures their liminal status as neither wives nor widows, who are unable to qualify for state support such as pensions and are often disqualified from securing property rights under dominant interpretations of Islamic law. Barbara Preitler’s book, Grief and Disappearance: Psychosocial Interventions, focuses on the particularly traumatic experience of having a loved one suddenly disappear, either in war or natural disaster. The book also focuses on how organisations—such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and APDP—offer critical forms of collective meaning making in the face of loss, absence and separation.
Preitler, a trauma therapist and lecturer at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, has almost two decades experience working with individuals and kin of disappeared persons in a number of settings globally, including in South Asia. The book draws on her own first-hand experiences working with families of disappeared persons in post-9/11 New York City and in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, and also draws on case studies in settings where enforced and unenforced disappearances are prevalent, such as Argentina, Chile, Rwanda and post-Holocaust Europe. The scholar Elana Nicoletti, who Preitler cites, describes the particular pain of disappearances thus: ‘[I]t has very particular characteristics since…one does not know what has been lost…that is to say, to be missing is like having one’s existence denied both as a living and as a dead person’ (p. 2). The book offers scholars and mental health practitioners both theoretical and practical tools to understand why the loss associated with disappearances is particularly difficult to assimilate. Drawing on attachment theory, chapters 1–3 offer a theoretical grid for the particular traumatic experience of disappearances, while chapters 4–9 focus on tangible and practical therapeutic techniques for working with individuals and families of disappeared persons.
Preitler eschews an individualised and medicalised approach to trauma and grief in favour of culturally sensitive, collective modes of redressal. She writes, ‘trauma-related psychotherapy means always also work on a political level’ (p. 114). Rather than seeing disappearances as personal losses, she emphasises how disappearances in situations of crises, armed conflict and civil wars leave a mark on entire populations. Intended as a manual for practitioners working with disappeared persons across the globe, the book also offers everyday activities and rituals that can help family members cope and grieve. For example, she points to how ‘concrete opportunities to say goodbye must be provided’ to families and how mourning rituals can serve to ‘stabilize the social community itself by making visible the “finality of death”’ (p. 32). The book also offers examples of mourning rituals that can be performed without the presence of a body. In Mizoram, for example, after searches for the missing person have been exhausted, communities prepare a symbolic figure of similar height, outfitted with personal belongings of the missing community member for burial (p. 34). Such examples of how different communities may bring closure are extremely helpful for trauma therapists working in places where it may be difficult to access the body of a disappeared person.
At the same time, the book cautions against overly optimistic and promissory roles for therapy in the wake of disappearances. For example, Preitler describes how after the tsunami in Sri Lanka, the country was flooded with psychosocial interventions which promised ‘trauma healing’. As she writes, this language of ‘healing’ was misleading for suggesting that ‘everything will be healed, will be the way it had been before the catastrophe’ (p. 87). While some programmes were successful at alleviating particular symptoms—such as walking on the beach or going out to sea—processes of grieving for those killed or disappeared were much lengthier and more complicated.
Preitler also examines how working with families of disappeared persons poses particular challenges for therapists and helpers. Chapters 7 and 9 focus on why helpers themselves might be hesitant to engage in therapy because cases of disappearances may result in helpers themselves feeling helpless or powerless. The book offers suggestions for how helpers may overcome these feelings, as well as how to use shared feelings of helplessness as a starting point in therapy.
Overall, this book makes an invaluable contribution to trauma studies and to existing psychosocial interventions in the aftermath of war and natural disasters. It makes a powerful case for why families of disappeared persons around the globe require particular forms of care and attention, and why the liminal status of absence and separation entailed by ‘disappearance’ can be particularly devastating to cope with. By offering simple, adaptable and culturally sensitive strategies for trauma therapists and other mental health practitioners working in conflict and natural disaster settings, it shows how professionals may assist families and communities, to borrow the words of Veena Das, ‘reinhabit the everyday’, while also always being aware of the ongoing, fraught nature of this process. This book offers insightful strategies for working with families of the disappeared. For many individuals and organisations around the world, including the APDP, the question is rather: who will come forward?