Every now and again, when I worked at the bookstore, a customer or a colleague would suggest that I implement trigger warnings for our books. The suggestion was always well-meaning — they had just read a book with distressing content and wanted to protect future readers who might potentially be triggered. I always said no. My reluctance wasn’t because I think trigger warnings are “making people weak” or whatever right-wing edgelords are saying these days. It wasn’t even because I don’t believe that they can be useful.
I don’t remember the name of the film or the exact scene that sent me packing but I can vividly recall the first time I walked out of a movie. It was 2015, the most fragile year for my mental health. I was watching an independent movie at the Substation (RIP) and a scene depicting.. or discussing? self-harm came on screen. I felt my chest seize and I instantly felt as if I was going to collapse into the floor. I looked around and weighed the potential embarrassment of walking out of the cinema versus my continued distress if I’d stayed put. In the end, I tugged at my friend Joy’s sleeve and took off to go eat a fuwa fuwa soufflé omelette at Hoshino.
Actual archival footage from that night:
I’m discussing trigger warnings as someone who has been triggered into panic attacks by unexpected content. In the years that have passed since that incident, I have walked out of a few more cinemas. I’ve learned, though, that I fare better when I take the time to look up the content of a movie before I watch it. Duh! My younger and more reckless self would just charge headlong into situations that caused me distress. Dumbass. I don’t think that the cinema needed to provide a trigger warning for self-harm. It would spoil the movie for everybody else. As a person who gets triggered, the onus is on me to navigate the world in a way that is safe for me. I can always choose not to go to the movies. (If it’s helpful to anyone, I find that reading descriptions and looking for words like “dark”, “arresting”, and “psychological” tends to be a useful sign that a movie might contain distressing information.)
There’s always a gap between a well-intentioned idea and its implementation. My reluctance towards trigger warnings resides in that gap.
When I was in charge of the book selection at the store, I oversaw dozens of new books every week. There was no way I could have read all those titles. I wouldn’t be able to confidently provide content tags for books I hadn’t read, it would be dishonest. There’s also the issue of content moderation. What goes on the list of triggers to be monitored? There are the obvious ones – self-harm, sexual assault – but what about racial discrimination or homophobia? Would stories by minority writers be flagged because they portray the lived experience of discrimination? What’s the threshold for implementing a trigger warning? Is it the use of slurs or is the line at physical violence “and above”? Is it even possible to draw up a coherent scale of harm?
It sounds like I’m getting in the weeds here but that’s important. A poorly thought through system of trigger warnings is worse, in my view, than none at all. I’m imagining a scenario where a book by Toni Morrison gets a trigger warning for racism, because she discusses it explicitly in her writing, but a book like Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad doesn’t because a specific moderator doesn’t read racism in that text.1 In my experience, the books that were suggested as needing trigger warnings were not written by white/male/cis/het writers. They were books by minority writers that spoke about trauma or violence in dark and distressing ways. As a bookseller, I would hate if a nuanced portrayal of marginalisation became known as “that incest book” or “the one with the body horror TW”. Yet, there is a danger that TWs become shorthand for a book’s plot with no discussion of its craft.
Ultimately, however, the conversation of TWs cannot take place without considering their utility for people who have been traumatised. This psychology study on trigger warnings in the classroom found that they’re only “trivially helpful” at reducing negative affect, intrusions, and avoidance. That doesn’t mean that trigger warnings have absolutely no place in polite society though. I enlisted my long-distance beau and his PhD in psychology to talk through these ideas.
In his view, trigger warnings can be helpful but ought not to be a moral obligation. The clearer it is that you have a specific audience that would benefit from a specific trigger warning, the more beneficial and arguably the more obliged you are to provide one.
“But that's a fairly narrow subset of all things to which trigger warnings -could- apply, which is heeapppps of shit. i also think people might be conflating trauma with distress.”
He provides trigger warnings in specific situations like when he’s teaching a statistics class that uses examples from eating disorders because he “can define very easily the source of distress (1 thing, EDs)”. A bookstore doesn’t have those helpful boundaries. He agrees with me about the danger of minoritised writers being singled out by a system like this at a bookstore, or publisher, level.
“Distress is fundamental to the character arcs of our lives and therefore the books that contain characters and their arcs. If people are construing trigger warnings as being necessitated by things that cause distress rather than trauma, you’ll be slapping hundreds of trigger warnings on books. It is truly endless, the things that are distressing.”
I don’t think I’ll never provide trigger warnings in this newsletter, by the way. I genuinely think there’s a time and place for them. I think they’re useful on social media during a distressing news cycle, for example. But I truly think that the use of trigger warnings is a move we need to judge based on evidence and not moral obligation. I’m not sure they’re as useful as we hope them to be.
Do you agree or do you think I’m stuck in a two-person echo chamber? You can let me know in the comments or by responding to this email.
Books I’ve read recently
Through some coincidence, I’ve read three books set in Mexico in the past two weeks. I don’t have anything meaningful to say about them together as a reflection of Mexican lit — I think it’s tempting to draw links and conclusions about a “national literature” but I know too little about Mexico to be doing that here.
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
This was the book that got me thinking about trigger warnings again. It contains practically everything that could merit a trigger warning: misogyny, incest, bestiality, homophobia, and sexual violence. Hurricane Season takes place in a fictional Mexican village and opens with the discovery of “the Witch’s” floating corpse. What follows is a brilliant character study of figures who have been shaped by the forces of modernisation — recently discovered oil wells, a new highway that cuts through town, and the influx of “outsiders” which results in the establishment of guest houses, strip clubs, and brothels. Almost everybody is poor in this novel. Almost everybody is angry. The prose is dense and claustrophobic. There are hardly any paragraph breaks and each sentence runs on.
The old woman wanted all the details, and she wanted to hear them from her eldest granddaughter, as if Yesenia hadn’t gone years without exchanging a single word with that reprobate, not a word since the day she caught him red-handed getting up to that sick business of his, and afterwards the gutless prick had chosen to move out rather than having to face Yesenia and the home truths she planned to tell him, in front of Grandma, too, so the old bird could finally get it through her skull just what sort of monster her grandson was: a pussy, a sneak and a fucking freeloader who never so much as thanked her for what she did for him, for all the shit she put up with, because if it hadn’t been for Grandma, that little dipshit would be dead: his slut of a mother abandoned him, left him worm-ridden, half-starved and smeared in his own shit in a wooden crate while she went whoring herself out on the highway.
This onslaught of violence is harrowing but not gratuitous. The shifting perspectives give the reader an understanding of each character’s motivations – or at least sympathy for the ways in which their trauma has shaped them. If I had known before going into the book that it was this packed with horror, I probably would have avoided it. I’m glad I didn’t because it’s really good. It is difficult to read, especially if you’re an empathetic reader. But I think it’s a masterpiece.
If you’re interested in a more in-depth review of Hurricane Season, I really appreciated this one in Public Books. The author, David Kurnick, is an academic with a research focus on contemporary Latin American literature and has insights, specifically on the translation by Sophie Hughes, that I really appreciated.
Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera
Another translated book, this time much slimmer, Signs Preceding the End of the World is about the border between Mexico and the US. We follow Makina as she crosses from Village to Little Town to “the place where flags wave”. This is a decontextualised road novel. In her note, the translator Lisa Dillman writes about rendering Herrera’s “non-standard language” in English.
In dialogues, this meant emphasising the oral nature of the language (using colloquialisms such as “yond” for “over there”, abbreviating “about” to “bout” for example).
The result is prose that feels geographically ambiguous. The reader can tell that it’s about the Mexico-US border but descriptions like “homegrown anglos” and “the turkey feast” underscore the foreignness that Makina must feel upon travelling to the north. As a protagonist, Makina is like Teflon – nothing sticks to her. She brushes off danger effortlessly, I did not worry for her once. It makes Signs feel mythic and otherworldly.
Tears of the Trufflepig by Fernando Flores
In contrast to the sparse prose of Signs, Tears of the Trufflepig is packed full of plot and description. Tears is also set along the Mexico-US border and takes place in a dystopian near future where scientists have mastered “filtering technology”. Originally used for growing crops, filtering is a type of genetic modification tech. Criminals in the black market have used it to recreate animals like the dodo and to throw lavish dinner parties where the richest guests get to feast on exotic dishes like Galapagos (tortoise) gumbo. Tears suffers from a lack of restraint; it has too many plot lines and features uneven writing. Sentences like “The smoky, muddy water in the whirlpool slithered and reflected the gray twilight in a perfect circle that dazzled the Border Protector officer.” are overcomplicated and unfortunately common. It’s a shame because this book is genuinely inventive and thought-provoking. I just stumbled over its sentences a few too many times to really enjoy the read.
Regular readers of this newsletter know that I end every issue with a cute surprise. This time, I tried to ask Joy for a picture of her lovely cat Dora.
Things didn’t go according to plan.
(The book pictured is Stone Fruit by Lee Lai, my birthday present to Joy.)
See you next time!
For more on Heart of Darkness, I recommend reading about the novelist Chinua Achebe’s objections to the book.