“Running with Ghosts” and the concept of trauma

OVERVIEW
This lesson explores ways of entering a text that deals with traumatic suffering. Using Merlie
Alunan’s poem “Running with Ghosts” (2017), we will unearth concepts such as trauma,
wounds, ghosts, and death.

Writing about this experience from the point of view of a survivor, we will engage deeper in the
text by relating it to the poetics of Merlie Alunan and what she thinks of the role of a poet. This
session will take 15 minutes.

Key concepts: trauma, wounds, ghosts, death

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
At the end of this lesson, you must be able to:
1. Articulate your own understanding of the condition of trauma, wounds, ghosts, and death
in Merlie Alunan’s “Running with Ghosts.”
 
LEARNING RESOURCES

 Alunan, Merlie M. “Running with Ghosts.” Running with Ghosts and Other Poems. Naga
City, Philippines: Ateneo de Naga University Press, 2017. 103-105.
 
 
LEARNING ACTIVITIES 
Engage

Wellness Check: 2 minutes (Mentimeter)

Check if students are ready with their devices. Check the audio and the videocam. Students
answer the Mentimeter questions.

Pre-Reading : 3 minutes

1. Why do ghosts come back to the places where they used to live?

Expected answers: They weren’t ready yet to die. The conditions of death were
unexpected or overwhelming. They haven’t accepted their deaths.

2. We will be reading a poem entitled “Running with Ghosts” by Merlie Alunan. Before
reading the poem, what was your first impression of the title?

3. Have you read Merlie Alunan before?

Explore
Allot 3 minutes.

The teacher will introduce the poet’s background.

Teacher’s Script:

Before we read the main poem, we must know who wrote it first. For the benefit of everyone, I
will introduce Ma’am Merlie.

Merlie M. Alunan, is a female poet based in the Visayas. She is currently a Professor Emeritus
of UP Visayas, a well-published poet, and an influential mentor to writers in the Visayas region.
She is known as a widely-acclaimed poet and anthologist. Some of her famous works were Sa
Atong Dila, Introduction to Visayan Literature, presents a survey of Visayan literature in literary
history, Susumaton: Oral Narratives of Leyte, a collection of oral lore from Leyte, Pagdakop sa
Bulalakaw, a collection of balak in Cebuano with her self-translations in English, and the two
earlier poetry collections Amina among the Angels, and Fern Garden: Anthology of Women
Writing in the South, which endowed her with the UP Centennial Medallion. The poem we will
read today comes from the collection Running with Ghosts published in 2019. This poem is part
of a chapter called “Haiyan Suite,” so we can assume it was written post-Yolanda.

Trained by her mentor, Edith Tiempo at the Silliman University, Alunan was schooled under the
lens of New Criticism, this formalist literary movement that dominated American literary criticism
and influenced Philippine literary criticism in the 1960s to the present.

New Criticism emphasizes “close reading” or “explication” where readers analyze the themes of
the text using formal elements in poetry such as rhyme, meter, setting, characterization, and
plot. New Critics also look for paradox, ambiguity, irony, and tension to arrive at the single best
and most unified interpretation of the text. It excludes reading the author’s intention, the
historical, cultural, and sociological contexts, and the psychological and emotional responses
from the readers.

For this lesson, we will attempt to use close reading in analyzing the themes but we will relate
these themes to the contexts of Alunan and the concepts of trauma and the contexts of ghosts
in Tacloban.

According to Laplanche and Pontalis (1973), “‘Trauma’ is a term that has long been used in
medicine and surgery. It comes from the Greek τϱαŭμα, meaning wound, which in turn derives
from τιτϱοσχω, to pierce.” In medical field, trauma refers to a physical injury (an organ is broken
as a consequence of external violence).

In everyday speech, traumatic experiences and events can be unknown, unexpected,

overwhelming and even catastrophic (Bennett 172). “In adopting the term, psycho-analysis
carries the three ideas implicit in it over on to the psychical level: the idea of a violent shock,
the idea of a wound and the idea of consequences affecting the whole organisation.”
(Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973).

Writing therefore can inflict wounds. Words have wounds and can wound its reader.
Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and Trauma Studies scholar Cathy Caruth pointed out how
trauma can have ghost like qualities. These wounds can be forgotten (like amnesia),
escaped, repressed, and repeatedly resurfaced later in a traumatized person. It is a recurring
absence. Memories of trauma come back when you least expect it. Caruth further explains that
“to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event.” (4-5)

In today’s activity, we will discover how the poem “Running with Ghosts” imagines a shocking
event and positions the poet as survivor and witness of a traumatic experience.

Activity 1. Reading “Running with Ghosts” by Merlie Alunan. 

Allot 4 minutes

-       Read Aloud: Students read the poem with the teacher.

-       Guide Questions are flashed on the screen and are provided in the handout.
-      Students are each assigned two questions to answer in the Zoom chat box.
 

Teacher’s Script:

We will read aloud the poem. I hope you have read it in advance. Are there words you didn’t
understand?

Guide Questions:

1. Who is speaking in the poem?

2. Who were the “they” the speaker is referring to in the first stanza?

3. What kind of wound or wounds were depicted in the poem?

4. What does the image of grasses growing on overturned graves imply?

5. Why is the poem entitled “Running with Ghosts”?

6. In her introduction to the collection Running with Ghosts, Merlie Alunan concludes that
“When dust settles and loss seethes in every muscle and bone of our bodies, the poet
writes to make us think and remember—everyday is a fine day, but there’s always a
chance of earthquakes.” (xxxiii) How is the role of the poet here exemplified in her
poem? Also, what does it mean to be a writer, a survivor, and a witness of traumatic
events?

Explain

Post-Reading: Allot 5 minutes.

Students share their answers to the questions.

STUDY GUIDE
1. Who is speaking in the poem?

Perhaps the speaker might be Alunan herself writing a poem about her personal
experience. However, as critical readers, we go beyond the literal and the biographical.
The persona here might be an observer, one who also experienced the catastrophe.
However, this persona is not passive for the lines a survivor and a witness of the tragic
event.

2. Who were the “they” the speaker is referring to in the first stanza?

These might be the sympathizers, those who brought aid, who covered the event
through media, or who helped in tidying up the city in no time. Remember that back in
2013, there were thousands of bodies piled up on the streets and the issue was the
stench that came from the rotting bodies.

3. What kind of wound or wounds were depicted in the poem?

The image of the mass burial, “a funerary of such scale” (103). What comes as
traumatizing is the fact that there was no more proper burial for the dead, as exemplified
in the lines “no time if you please,/ to sort out beggars from kings,/ heroes from villains,
sinners from saints,/ After the surge, virgin and whore lay on the dirt/ side by side, mere
rubble, litter on the sand” (103).

The irony in the scene of the burial implies how dehumanized people are in a crisis
situation as in the lines, “No time for the obsequies…//No muted hymns or prayers but
men yelling/ to get the job done fast as they could” (104).

Even the sense of scent numbs the speaker and the people. The image of a wasteland,
of piles of flesh rotting with flies, refers to the decay of the city and the alienation of men.
It was so “overpowering” that a person can lose the ability to even articulate it. The
wounds of the past implies that there is a collective act of forgetting as in the lines, “Aye,
not much talk about it to this day,/ not even to ask where the abominations/ had come to
rest at last./ Perhaps no one wants to know?”(104).

The sense of loss is also another glaring wound in the poem where at night, the
survivors sometimes grope in the dark for “a face, a hand, a name that the storm/ had
ripped” (104) from them.

4. What does the image of grasses growing on overturned graves imply?

Nature takes over the grave of the bodies. It implies after death, there comes life again.
It also implies that our lives are at the mercy of nature, as Alunan said in her introduction
to the collection. This image also tells us of how life goes on after a collective trauma.
The greening of the earth in the rainy season implies there is growth but also, there is
forgetting. The last line that refers to God as silent, as forever blameless and inscrutable,
makes us wonder if there is really a God, the signified that is all powerful and present as
the force that moves the earth. It seems Nature, in the poem, is personified to own again
its power to destroy and also to create.
 Also, notice that Alunan’s setting is also dynamic. She believes that setting has its own
consciousness and that it can change lives. (“Akdang-Buhay”)

5. Why is the poem entitled “Running with Ghosts”?

The title implies that ghosts are always present in the poem. They used to be in the
bodies that were overturned. Running may simply mean a fast movement but also a
manifestation of energy, that they are always there as guides, travelers, or companions.
As spectral presences, they appear and disappear. They never left Tacloban as
evidenced by the narratives of the ghost of a dead mother who rode the tricycle to go
home, of dogs howling at night as signifiers of the presence of the dead, and of sightings
of the dead visiting homes, doing the household chores, or walking around the city.

In Visayas, the kalag means a soul that may be possessed by another entity. In
mythology, it may possess, leave during sleep, and return to the body if called back.

They also signify wounds after a catastrophic event. As Agnes M. Brazal recounts in her
paper on religious and cultural beliefs related to the aftermath of typhoon Yolanda, “After
the wrath of Typhoon Haiyan subsided, the streets were littered with bodies. Many
remained for months under mountains of debris, or deep in the ponds and other bodies
of water. The trauma of witnessing widespread death has manifested itself in terms of
ghost sightings and walls and moans in the dark of the night.” (240)

7. In her introduction to the collection Running with Ghosts, Merlie Alunan concludes that
“When dust settles and loss seethes in every muscle and bone of our bodies, the poet
writes to make us think and remember—everyday is a fine day, but there’s always a
chance of earthquakes.” (xxxiii) How is the role of the poet here exemplified in her
poem? Also, what does it mean to be a writer, a survivor, and a witness of traumatic
events?

This idea is evident in the poem. She makes us think about the idea of ghost and their
presence. She makes us think critically about how we treat the body of a dead person in
times of crisis or question our forgetting. She reminds our generation to never be
complacent and learn from the catastrophe for nature is still powerful than men. She also
makes us remember those who died by the mere fact that she open up the idea of these
people who used to live with us existing still on the plane of the living.

To be a writer, a survivor, and a witness at the same time means to cope with traumatic
events such as the death of our loved ones. It is true that language cannot totally
capture the trauma but writing it can help us critically meditate on what happened,
illuminate our minds to the direction of changing our lives, and alter our sense of the
world. Is it therapeutic? Perhaps, but writing and articulating it is one way to begin the
“departure” from it as Caruth points in her studies on trauma.

Elaborate

The teacher shall synthesize the lesson. If there is still time, another option is to elicit from
students what they learned today.
Script:

This reading is related to an emerging field called Trauma Studies, a literary theory that
emerged in the 1990s following the AIDS epidemic, the Cold War, and the legitimation of Post-
Traumatic Stress Disorder. Our exercise in understanding Merlie Alunan’s “Running with
Ghosts” shows that a poet can occupy the position of a survivor and a witness. To be a witness
is to be possessed by the image of the traumatic event. Ghosts are signifiers of that haunting
which in the poetry of Alunan is always an absent presence, like trauma itself. The poet,
therefore, finds in these wounds the material and the language to speak about her story and
illuminate a personal wisdom that reminds our generation to be ecocentric than anthropocentric.
In the words of Ma’am Merlie, as always, “we are at the mercy of nature.” As assignment,
please refer to the prompt I sent to you and submit as pdf.

Supplementary Information: Trauma Studies

In the 1990s, a new literary theory emerged as a response to the traumatic events of the time.
Trauma Studies emerged as field of literary discourse, that “explores the impact of trauma in
literature and society by analyzing its psychological, rhetorical, and cultural significance.”
(Mambrol, 19 December 2018)

The objective of this theoretical movement is “to examine how trauma unsettles and forces us
to rethink our notions of experience, and of communication, in therapy, in the classroom, and
in literature, as well as in psychoanalytic theory.” (Caruth 4)

According to Tal (1995), “[t]he writings of trauma survivors comprise a distinct ‘literature of
trauma’. Literature of trauma is defined by the identity of its author. Literature of trauma holds
at its center the reconstruction and recuperation of the traumatic experience, but it is also
actively engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the writings and representations of non-
traumatized authors” (17).

Cathy Caruth, in her book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996),
points out that for readers to be able to examine trauma, they must regard it as “a temporal
delay that carries the individual beyond the shock of the first moment” (10). There are views
that point out how traumatized individuals disavowed or repressed the memories. Some
resort to escapism. However, it is only through recognizing the gaps and impossibility of
traumatic language can we actually depart from its dissociation. “To listen to the crisis of a
trauma… is not only to listen for the [traumatic] event, but to hear the survivor’s departure
from that trauma.” (Caruth 10)

Because of this ability to dissociate or disconnect thoughts, feelings, memories, or sense of

identity, “one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another.” (Caruth cited in Balaev 6) It
means that trauma of an individual is connected to traumas across history and nations.
Today, Trauma Studies has evolved into acknowledging that language can convey variable
meanings of trauma and that traumatic experiences are influenced too by “social, semantic,
political, and economic practices” (Balaev 7).

ASSESSMENT

Evaluate
Write your own two-page critical reflection of “The Haiyan Dead” by Merlie Alunan
(https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/opinion/content/342524/the-haiyan-dead-a-poem/story/).
Follow paper guidelines and submit as pdf to my email [email protected].

 
 
 
WORKS CITED

“Akdang-Buhay | Merlie M. Alunan.” Likhaan: Institute of Creative Writing. UPOU Networks.

Accessed on 13 August 2020. Web. https://networks.upou.edu.ph/26616/akdang-buhay-merlie-
m-alunan/

Alunan, Merlie M. “Running with Ghosts.” Running with Ghosts and Other Poems. Naga City,
Philippines: Ateneo de Naga University Press, 2017. 103-105.

Balaev, Michelle. Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory. 2014. Print.

Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. Harlow, U.K:
Pearson/Longman, 2009. Print.

Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press. 1995. Print.

---. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, And History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1996. Print.

Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. (1973) The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth

Press – Reprinted by Karnac Books, 1988. 665-6.

Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Trauma Studies.” 19 December 2018. Literary Theory and Criticism. Web.
Accessed on 13 August 2020. https://literariness.org/2018/12/19/trauma-studies/

Tal, K., 2008. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.