Reification, Silence and Contradiction in Tamil Refugee Families: How Parents and Children Approach Past Loss and Trauma

How do Tamil refugee families communicate about past loss and trauma? What narratives do parents give their children about the past? What secrets do parents keep from children and why? How do children construct their own... [ view full abstract ]

How do Tamil refugee families communicate about past loss and trauma? What narratives do parents give their children about the past? What secrets do parents keep from children and why? How do children construct their own accounts of histories beyond the grasp of direct memory? And how is the narrative coherence of children and parents implicated in the wellbeing and resilience of families? The literature on refugee trauma has privileged disclosure over silence, connecting re-telling and authorship with mastery and agency. Such lines of argument blur as one moves from the clinic to the home, from the therapist-client relationship to the parent-child relationship and from Western to non-Western cultures. Using inter-generational attachment narratives of children and parents from 35 Tamil refugee families that arrived in Australia in the post-2009 period, I will provide an account of the orientations families take on approaching the past and the strategies parents use to communicate past loss and trauma to their children. I will show that families adopt one of two orientations to the past: reification or silencing. Regardless of the orientation a family takes, I will suggest that what really matters is the capacity of parents to provide their children with coherence around contradictions.