Trauma Mantras

The Trauma Mantras is a memoir by medical anthropologist, teacher, and writer Adrie Kusserow, who has worked with refugees and humanitarian projects in Bhutan, Nepal, India, Uganda, South Sudan, and the United States. It is a memoir of witness and humility and, ultimately, a way to critique and gain a fresh perspective on Western approaches to the self, suffering, and healing. Kusserow interrogates the way American culture prizes a psychologized individualism, the supposed fragility of the self. In relentlessly questioning the Western tribe of individualism with a hunger to bust out of such narrow confines, she hints at the importance of widening the American self. As she delves into humanity’s numerous social and political ills, she does not let herself off the hook, reflecting rigorously on her own position and commitments. Kusserow travels the world in these poetic meditations, exploring the desperate fictions that “East” and “West” still cling to about each other, the stories we tell about ourselves and obsessively weave from the dominant cultural meanings that surround us.

“In this memoir to a shaken world, Adrie Kusserow roams India, the Sudan, and Vermont, feeling out the vulnerable spots that throb and swell. Words are flocks of murmurations hidden in a refugee’s coma or fields wild and still as the arctic blue. Trauma bullies resilience. Teenagers wade ghostlike, hungover on bytes. Adults hard-watch like hooded falcons. We are prompted into what knowing could be.”, “Adrie Kusserow’s The Trauma Mantras spares no one-not herself and not the reader who encounters her unflinching anthropological gaze and her vivid, often searing writing focused on the experience of refugees in Southern Sudan, Nepal, and Vermont. In powerful scenes and unforgettable images, Kusserow captures the force of the sacred and complicates the idea that embracing trauma is a required component of healing. She dedicates this work to all refugees, everywhere. It is a courageous and insightful book.”, “A singular gem of a book. Part invitation, part memoir, The Trauma Mantras is an intimate reflection on how culture shapes our experiences—from refugees’ lives and being American to family, illness, and the possibilities for healing and going home. In this stunning book, Adrie Kusserow shares her poetic gifts while baring her ethnographic heart. Read and you will be the richer for it.”, “In this stunning collage of vignettes, Adrie Kusserow seamlessly bridges anthropology, poetry, and memoir, shamans and iPhones, and offers a manifesto for refugees everywhere. The Trauma Mantras teach us how the deepest healing comes from the magic of words woven into stories that affirm the scary yet beautiful mysteries of life.”, “The Trauma Mantras reads like a diary, a logbook, of travels to the margins, but the balance between the voices of others and Adrie Kusserow’s own meditations makes it an astonishing mix of research and quest that cannot be covered by a single descriptor. You will be riveted by the beauty of her writing, the autumnal mood of separation and loss that permeates these pages, and the deft ways she interweaves her own experiences with those she documents in remote corners of the world where refugees collect like leaves, blown hither and thither on a dusty street.”

Adrie Kusserow is Professor of Anthropology at St. Michael’s College and the author of Refuge, Hunting Down the Monk, and American Individualisms. Yusef Komunyakaa is Professor of English at New York University and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of numerous books of poetry.