Trigger Words Analysis

The past was never really the past: Beseeching/Conjuring the Hypermnesia in
‘Trigger Words’ by Blu Greenberg

Blu Greenberg is an American writer who specialized in modern Judaism and women’s issues. The poem ‘Trigger Words’ is the most notable poem from her collection Black Bread: Poems, After the Holocaust (1994) which is her outstanding contribution to the literary field of Jewish Studies. (one more sentence on greenberg)
The title of the poem provokes the inquisitiveness of the readers. Consequently, the title leads to a question: What does those words aim to trigger? The words of the poem are a clear indication that the poem talks about the ‘Holocaust’. The word ‘Holocaust’ was derived from the Greek word ‘holokauston’, which means sacrifice

Many years after the holocaust, the survivors find themselves fighting a new kind of battle – ‘Trauma’. The term ‘Trauma’ is derived from Greek in which it is referred to a wound that was perpetrated on the body. Cathy Caruth, a prominent trauma theorist in her 1996 book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History postulated:
“Trauma is an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the events occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (11)
Traumatic events are external but they quickly become incorporated into the mind. Each person respond to trauma differently. Some have mild effects where as others have long-lasting, chronic effects. An intense response to trauma lead to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

In Psychological terms, ‘Trigger’ means something that causes someone to feel upset and frightened because they are made to remember something bad that has happened in the past. A trigger is something that sets off a flashback, transporting the person back to the traumatic event. (……cite….)
The triggers accelerate an exaggerated startle response among the survivors known as ‘automatic hyperarousal’. The memories of the past events that the survivors wish to forget are stored in the memory as ‘repressed memories’. When the survivors are exposed to similar details as of the event, the details become ‘triggers’ that act as a stimuli to arouse the repressed memories. The memories unfold and come back rushing up, leading to flashbacks and re-living of the moments. While ‘amnesia’ is a kind of PTSD where the victims forget what had happened, ‘hypermnesia’ is intense remembrance of such events. The repressed memories are awakened when a trigger occurs.
Though there are several trigger factors, here Greenberg predominantly deals with ‘words as the trigger factors’. For Greenberg, these words bring out the memories of the suppressed traumatic memories out of the victims like an erupting volcano.
Action/ Barking/ Boots/ Butterfly/