Trauma and Narrative
There are three fundamental works of narrative, which include agreement, contradiction, and consequence. These three forces underpin pretty much everything in communication, including the narration (Goldman, 2017). The better an individual gets a feel for them, the better your ability to communicate and draw on the power of narrative. Everything else is secondary and of course important but still, secondary. The Porvenir Massacre documentary is a perfect representation of how narratives work. For approximately 55 minutes, the documentary reveals the events and conflicts that led to the massacre. In his national narrative, Harry Warren portrays a powerful reenactment of what happened before, during and after the massacre. Through communication and agreements, Warren interviews historians, archaeologists as well as descendants of those who were affected by the massacre (Orozco, 2019). The national narrative engages with the audience by following many attempts of seeking justice the following years after the massacre. It perfectly reflects with the contemporary society where the fights of the descendants to have history. Of their people, their people continue serving as the end of the narration.
A narrative can be created or projected onto a situation, or it may, in some sense, be discovered within a situation. Instead, another world is imaginatively created within which the narrated processes occur (Freema, 2015). However, authors often blur these boundaries. Harry provides one of the most powerful scenes in the film where Juan Flores describes how the face of his father went unrecognizable after the massacre. For nearly her whole lifetime, she could not talk about anything that happened that morning due to the fear of a similar attack and the recurring nightmare (Porvenir, 2019). This shows how the Flores situation has been projected into a situation which she cannot handle herself until it was discovered.
Science aims to discover narratives that describe nature by developing plausible narratives and testing the degree to which they are projections or discoveries. From Harry’s narration, this situation can be pulled from the transcripts which had been closed for many years. In his narration, he puts the chilling testimonies on full display (Celestina, 2018). Some of the discoveries he unveils include that of a witness who describes seeing a man hanging from a tree, “his body riddled with bullets.” He provides another example of a witness who saw “bullets passing through the heads of many [Mexicans].”
The fact that a narrative can, to some extent, be discovered within a situation means that the situation itself in some sense encodes the narrative, although not in the same form as a narrative. Thus there is a parallel between the processes of nature and discovered narratives. What is very captivating about narratives is that they are factually compressed experience (Bamberg, 2016). Consciousness intuitively recognizes stories. They can be transferred in a very compact form, and they can be unpacked into lots of interconnected action. Harry documents the story in a way that compresses the experience of the characters and recognizes every part of the story that was narrated. It reveals the attempts to silence participants who spoke about or question the events of the massacre (Pouvenir, 2019). A frantically compressed experience can be revealed through the efforts of Brownsville’s Representative José Tomás Canales, holding the Rangers who were accountable for the events in 1919. Canales was able to file approximately 19 charges against t the institution that launched a full-blown investigation within the Texas Legislature even after being openly stalked and threatened by the famous Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (Orozco, 2019). After two weeks, about 90 people were asked to testify about the bloody, brutal tactics of the rangers along the border.
A narrative connects elements in a naturally evolving way. The narrative story is created by the way one consciously experiences the elements, more than by the exact elements (Goldma, 2017). It is a well-known mnemonic trick to invent exaggerated attributes for each item one has to remember, and then create a story that strings them together. Thus, for the memory expert, even random stuff turns into a story, and he can remember the elements through that. Whereas the person who tries only to remember by brute force, and who doesn’t connect anything, fares badly. For warren, it took him consciousness and experience to document the massacre and what was going on in the hope of not forgetting about the event and at some point try to seek justice (Celestina, 2018). The narrator remembers many stories which show him that the right direction is to seek justice.
Whereas the world we live in is becoming increasingly digital, in the sense of representing itself in separate facts, bits, numbers, sound bites, a narrative is something more analogue. It fits together in one piece, but it goes through transformations, ebbs and flows, ups and downs, problems and solutions, repetitions, patterns, desires, obstacles and resolutions (Freema, 2015). The very best narratives allow narrators to grab on to just one bit of it, and the rest of the story will naturally unravel. 90% of the challenge of good storytelling is narrative structure. It’s the difference between whether narrators are boring or confusing versus interesting and compelling. Narrators can have lots of emotion, humour, passion and detail, but if they present it with a structure that is boring or confusing it is not going to work. The simplest, most powerful starting point for the narrative structure is the about narrative template. This is the idea of boiling the core of the story down to a single sentence using the words — warrens’ documentary us the perfect example of good storytelling. The narrator himself was a victim since his wife and father in law died in the massacre (Orozco, 2019). Thus by connecting his emotions, experience and passion for seeking justice, he creates a perfect and compelling narrative that captures all the readers.
Great narrators always have a way to engage their audience. Their audience naturally gravitates towards them because of the way they say things (Goldman, 2017). They interact with the audience in a deep, emotional level that is not normally seen in a typical conversation. They also speak from their heart. They tell the story like they are reliving that story, and it is happening now. They pull people in through their perspectives and let people see the story from a different perspective. Great storytellers guide people through the story. They allow people to feel the tangibleness of the story and experience it. Harry is a great narrator by the way he uses different techniques to engage with the audience naturally. He speaks from his heart regarding the encounters experienced by the victims of the massacre (Celestina, 2018). For example, he sympathetically unfolds a harrowing event and how people experiencing PTSD are likely to have traumatic narratives presenting different structures and contents of the massacre.
From the narration, individuals can radiate out into all the standard elements of drama. This includes: exposition, rising tension, climax, culmination, denouement which includes all the usual things, but the narratives provide the power of simplicity, which is what they need at the core of a good story (Bamberg, 2016). Harry does this by drawing this specific to serve as the background for the closing chapter of the film. Tension is raised when the narrator talks about the descendants who gathered from all over the country in 2018 at the Texas State Capitol for the 100th-anniversary commemoration of the (Orozco, 2019). Readers are able to sympathize with what the narrator talks about regarding the expressed frustrations and pains that the victims were never formally vindicated.
References
Bamberg, M. (2016). Narrative. The international encyclopedia of communication theory and philosophy, 1-9.
Celestina, M. (2018). The road to Porvenir and Esperanza: The struggle for land. In Living displacement. Manchester University Press.
Freeman, M. (2015). Rewriting the Self: History, memory, narrative. Routledge.
Goldman, S. R. (2017). Inferential reasoning in and about narrative texts. In The psychology of questions (pp. 247-276). Routledge.
Orozco, C. E. (2019). Refusing to Forget.
Porvenir, Texas. (2019), PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, www.pbs.org/video/porvenir-texas-sffbn9/
