Memory and Family Trauma Theme Analysis

Throughout The 7 Stages of Grieving, the Woman tells stories of how the various members of her family have been affected by trauma. This trauma has its roots in Australia’s colonial history and the ongoing subjugation of its indigenous peoples. The Woman’s stories highlight cyclical issues of poverty, isolation, violence, and shame that affect generation after generation of her family, and she explores how collective memory—while a source of joy and resilience—can also be a burden, since remembering her family’s history involves grappling with extreme suffering. Overall, the play shows that one legacy of colonialism is inherited trauma: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families pass down their experiences of suffering, which can magnify the trauma of the present, creating a vicious cycle of pain.

Throughout the play, Enoch and Mailman explore the complexity of family memories. This first occurs when the Woman tells the story of her grandmother’s passing. The Woman, her family, and their community are devastated by this loss, in part because they’ll miss Nana and in part because they mourn the memories of their community’s history that have been lost with her. They value these memories because they help keep traditions alive and anchor their identities in the stories of generations past, but such memories are undeniably also painful and difficult to carry because of the profound suffering they entail.

This duality between the joy and pain of memory is clearest in the symbol of the family’s suitcase, which holds photographs of all of the members of their family who have either died or become estranged. On the one hand, putting mementoes of the dead safely in the suitcase helps preserve their memories and importance—but, on the other hand, the suitcase has become so physically heavy with the memories of the dead that it becomes difficult to carry. Family memory, then, becomes both a burden and a source of joy: a way of keeping a connection with ancestors, but also a mandate to carry memories of suffering that are often too heavy to bear. In the end, after packing and unpacking this suitcase several times—symbolizing the Woman’s difficult choice about whether to try to escape bad memories or preserve her connection to her heritage—the Woman chooses to free her family members’ memories from the suitcase in which they’ve been kept for so long, attempting to free herself from the family’s devastating history of trauma, poverty, and violence. While this is perhaps hopeful, it’s a horrific choice that itself demonstrates the violence of colonialism: colonizers have inflicted so much suffering on generations of the Woman’s family that she evidently believes that remaining connected to her heritage requires too much suffering to be worthwhile.

While the symbol of the suitcase embodies the traumas of the family’s past, their current suffering reflects the trauma of their present. The Woman uses stories about her father, her brother, and her Aunty Grace to demonstrate how her family, unable or unwilling to cope with their grief, tries (and fails) to outrun cycles of pain and loss. First, the Woman describes her fears about her father’s death. Though he’s only forty-five, the Woman implies that his health is so poor that he will soon die. This illuminates how a life of poverty and suffering takes a physical toll and robs indigenous peoples of years of their lives. Next, the Woman tells the story of her Aunty Grace—a woman who married a white Englishman and moved to London. Aunty Grace’s family believes that she betrayed them by leaving and assimilating into the colonial society responsible for so much of their people’s suffering. Aunty Grace, meanwhile, seeks to remove herself from her family and her home country in order to escape the cycles of grief and suffering in which she was raised, suggesting that perhaps she tragically saw no other escape from trauma than to physical leave her family behind. Finally, the Woman tells the story of her brother, a young man who’s recently gotten in minor trouble with the law. For some people, a court summons and a small fine would not derail her life, but for her brother, this leads to a cycle of fear, shame, financial hardship, and substance abuse that he seems unable to escape. He perhaps feels that trauma and pain are inescapable, and so he decides to submit to his difficult circumstances rather than try to escape.

By the end of the play, the Woman has no answers to the problem of the generational trauma that the Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander people of Australia experience—all she knows is that somehow these cycles must be broken. Otherwise, as Enoch and Mailman show, grief for the loss of land, of family, and of tradition has the power to overwhelm a life, trapping present and future generations in the same patterns of sorrow and struggle.