Wounds of Silence : Legacies of Genocide and Racial Violence

Wounds of Silence examines how societies silence atrocities and how individuals can reckon with their inherited histories. The book melds survivor testimony, history, and personal reflection with illustrations and psychological insights.

What does it mean to pursue the comfort of daily life alongside legacies of profound injustice? What are the ethical demands that histories of atrocity place on us, even if we did not participate in them? These are the kind of questions that lay at the heart of this book, which explores the nature of silencing, accountability, and the obligations we have to each other as individuals and as a society. Award winning author and psychoanalyst Roger Frie travels to sites of atrocity to meet with descendants of survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust in Germany, the Indigenous genocide in Canada, and the legacy of lynching in the United States. Wounds of Silence melds survivor testimony, history, and personal reflection with a wealth of illustrations and psychological insights. The book is fundamentally cross-disciplinary and deals with the following areas: memory studies, genocide studies, trauma studies, Holocaust studies, psychosocial studies, and psychoanalysis. The stories and lessons that the author shares will remain with readers long after they have finished. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what is involved in confronting silence and indifference, engaging in reparative acts of memory, and working towards racial justice in the present. At a time when authoritarian governments use silencing to quell dissent and dictate how the past is remembered, this book serves as a warning, a plea for tolerance, and a recognition of human rights.