ABSTRACT
On February 24, 1984, a sniper fired successive rounds of ammunition at an elementary school playground from a building across the street (Pynoos and Nader 1989). One child and one passerby were killed, and 13 other children and one playground attendant were injured. During subsequent interviews with 113 children from the school whose exposure to danger ranged from high to nonexistent, researchers were struck by a pattern of spatial memory whereby those whose risk was highest recalled themselves further away from the scene and those whose risk was lowest “increased their life threat by (1) bringing themselves closer to danger, or (2) imagining the danger moving closer to them” (Pynoos and Nader 1989: 240). This place of relocation was in fact what the authors termed a “safe location,” the zone most proximate to danger and yet just beyond risk (237). It was the imaginary place where experienced trauma was warded off (for the most exposed children) and registered (for the least exposed). All of these children spatialized their experience of trauma by asserting the ways in which material space (where they were physically located during the event) intersected with psychic space (where they remembered being). It is this psycho-material spatiality of trauma that is the subject of this essay.
