This chapter attends to the regular presence of grass in poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Walt Whitman and English war poetry to recent work by Oswald and Burnett, the poetry of grass works to articulate, obscure, and heal the marks of contemporary trauma. Grass also shapes the soundscapes and visual form of poetry to the extent that, as this chapter suggests, grass can be said to constitute the contemporary practice of composition itself. Like poetry, the green field works in and through trauma to find again new life after war and conquest, after personal loss. In its seemingly perpetual growing, grass finds in the poet new ways of making and responding.

Chapter 6 examines the reconstruction of Rwanda’s music scene after the genocide. It considers how it opened up new possibilities for young urban Rwandans to transform their hearts and imagine new visions for themselves. Although young artists seemed to share an understanding that song could communicate ‘messages’ (abatumwa) not available in other modes of speech, they also understood there were limits to this. Far from being a space of ‘freedom’ or the ‘unofficial’, the local music scene was shot through with politics. Young artists were keenly aware that the power dynamics that shaped wider post-genocide social life equally shaped the kinds of music they were and were not allowed to make.

Chapter 3 introduces the eight Byzantine churches housing visual depictions of Christ’s miracles and presents a thematic analysis of the cycle. The first part of this chapter examines the selection process of the episodes depicted in early Palaiologan cycles and their iconography. It theorizes how the choices were made about which miracles were included or excluded and delves into the political and theological concerns that might have affected this selection. The second part of the chapter assesses and explains the iconographic peculiarities of this period by examining the development of Christ’s miracles in the early Palaiologan period in comparison to earlier visual material.

One of the miracles associated with king Henry VI (for whom an application for canonisation was unsuccessfully made) is included here from the anonymous collection of miracles made around 1500. This miracle involves the healing of a painful injury to the groin incurred in a country football match, a sport which the writer disparages.

Chapter 2, “Marie Laveau’s Generational Arts: Healing and Midwifery in New Orleans,” turns from Saint Domingue to the immigrant communities of New Orleans many of whom were of Haitian heritage. Through an excavation of the myth and legacy of New Orleans “voodoo queen” Marie Laveau, I argue that Laveau renegotiated her body as capital, resisting social, cultural, and legal forces that sought to commodify, exoticize, or criminalize her. Instead, she became a community leader, healer, and possibly a midwife. Situating Laveau within a longer genealogy of Black women’s birthwork and midwifery within the nineteenth-century US South and circum-Caribbean, this chapter argues for alternative ways of imagining reproduction, kinship, and energy economies. Ultimately, it puts pressure on the myriad myths surrounding Laveau’s dynastic legacy, drawing attention away from white heteropatriarchal logics of touristic consumption, and instead allowing for bodily autonomy, love among women, and the notion of gestation and labor as an autoregenerating, independent economy.

In the 1910s, human and animal populations all over the Lushai Hills were pounded by a chance series of calamities - environmental, financial, agricultural, and epidemiological - forever altering the social landscape. This chapter is about how people attempting to escape the crush of bamboo famine, debt, crop failure, and disease were set in motion across mountains. As traditional coping strategies were constrained by new political, economic, and environmental realities, shattered clan groups began to forge new survival mechanisms out of missionary medicine and Christianity itself. Shattered families, scattered clans, sickly refugees, and indebted labourers were dashed across mountainsides to become seekers of new powers as older survival mechanisms failed or were ruled out, regulated, or lost. Disasters reordered not only by catalyzing opportunities for spiritual searching, but also by remixing splintered clan groups of survivors - once disparate kin groups and communities that, according to contemporary upland cultural logics, were in dire need of communal healing, restoration, and reconciliation. Foregrounding local terminology in the telling of these pasts opens up causal explanations, interpretative pathways, and complexities otherwise obscured by using Western categories and frameworks alone, and points to the multiple meanings of the conversion process itself. Christianity advanced through catastrophe as shattered populations folded it back into the normal healing structures of upland life.

Given their intersecting, historically oppressed identities, Black women are more likely to be exposed to traumatic experiences than other racial groups. In this chapter we review the historical, systemic and institutional, and individual trauma that impacts the mental health of Black women. We provide a framework for treating trauma with Black women that is based on intersectionality and Black feminist theory. Further, we share the key components of providing trauma-informed care and best practices clinicians can use when supporting Black women in healing from trauma.

As discussed throughout the book, Black women experience racial trauma and discrimination and may internalize these messages and become highly self-critical. These experiences can lead to feelings of low self-worth, anxiety, and depression. In this chapter, we share the strategies of self-compassion, self-forgiveness, and self-love and acceptance to support Black women in emotional healing. We also discuss the use of the arts and religion and spirituality as resources for Black women’s healing and thriving.

Creativity is connected to healing in many different ways. Creative people are more likely to experience post-traumatic growth or beneficial psychological changes that come in the aftermath of trauma. Creative activities can also help maintain emotional equilibrium. The cognitive reappraisal of seemingly negative events is associated with divergent thinking. Notably, the act of drawing, writing, or making music simply for the pleasure of the act can improve one’s mood by helping reduce sadness, anxiety, and anger. Even passively engaging in the arts can improve one’s mood and stave off potential cognitive decline.

This chapter traces a history of Native American short stories, from oral narratives to written short stories infused with retellings of Indigenous oral tales reflecting Native values: close relationships with language, land, human and non-human communities, ancestors, and the sacred. Rather than focus on defining the short story as a genre, Native writers tend to focus on story itself, especially the centrality, power, and life-shaping capacities of story. The earliest short stories were embedded in autobiographies, ethnographies, sermons, etc., but became more standalone stories over time. The long tradition of stories in a primarily realist mode has been joined by speculative fiction, science fiction, horror stories, children’s stories, Young Adult stories, and graphic narratives. Native short stories, including interlinked story cycles, critique settler-colonialism, document historical trauma, present Indigenous alternatives to imposed historical narratives, and offer new possibilities for Native continuance.

By analyzing the topography of Selinous, a colonial foundation of the late seventh century BC, the chapter explores the way in which temple building and sacred architecture became subordinated to urban design. From the sixth century BC onward, Greek cult places and temples were increasingly seen as an expression of the urban rather than the natural landscape. This holds true for altars and temples at the center of cult places, but also for fountain houses that replaced or were built over natural fountains. The sacredness of a place was increasingly represented and communicated through monumental stone architecture. At the same time, the novel use of man-made images in Greek sanctuaries contributed to a radical change in which the presence of the gods was imagined and experienced. All this went along with a shift of power and agency from local groups to urban elites, who had the means to control the restructuring and reorganization of sacred landscapes. The violence of this shift is reflected in the iconography that tends to rationalize and sublimize violence against the non-Greek, non-urban, and non-male.

Anishinabe and Mohawk traditional knowledge keepers share their testimony on the crises we are facing today and the choices we need to make for our relationship with Mother Earth. They shed light on traditional principles and prophecies, and on the path towards reconciliation, balance and peace. Grandmother Marie-Josée Tardif, a leader in Anishinabe cultural and spiritual revitalisation talks about restoring the balance with the feminine and our being human. She highlights the role of spiritual traditions and religions in addressing current global challenges. Grandfather T8aminik Rankin, Anishinabe Hereditary Chief and medicine man, who survived the residential schools and led the way towards reconciliation, talks about healing our relationships and walking on the path of reconciliation with ourselves, with other beings and with Mother Earth. Grandfather Ka’nasohon Kevin Deer, a Mohawk faith keeper, leader in Iroquoian cultural and spiritual revitalisation, talks about the necessary change in consciousness to see, to hear and to speak differently, and about the path of the peacemaker.