Author: Louise Hogan

Absorbing Trauma through Writing and Walls

As I wandered the grey, damp prison complex,through endless cell after cell, huge blown up pictures hanging everywhere, desperate eyes watching, I began to  tap lightly on the inside of my left wrist with my right forefingers. Victims of unlawful imprisonment, torture, rape and summary executions looked at me and I tapped, tapped, tapped. Some had tears in their eyes, some were smiling as though it might elicit some bit of sympathy from their Khmer Rouge captors. The sun outside was shining, heat beating down onto this beautiful green city but inside there was a damp chill, a cold that crept up and down my spine. I started to feel the breath catch in my throat and so I tapped and tapped on my wrist and kept walking and didn’t stop looking, at the bloodstains still unwashed from the red brick walls 30 years later, until I felt like I could breathe again. The tapping is a trick. It doesn’t help of course but when your chest tightens and you feel like you can’t breather, …