The relationship between trauma and narrative: The ‘ship of fools’ narrative created by the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, Part 1

From 7 to 10 May 2023, the Serpentine Gallery in London showed an exhibition titled ‘Grenfell’, which included a film by the same name, directed by Steve McQueen, and an essay by Prof Paul Gilroy, titled ‘Never Again Grenfell’. Watching the film and reading the essay, I reflected on the relationship between trauma and narrative. Is the creation of a narrative on the causes leading to an event influenced by the fact that the event was traumatic? What relevance does the fact that the Grenfell Tower fire was a traumatic event have on the narrative created by the Grenfell Tower Inquiry? In this two-part blog series, I argue that the Grenfell Tower Inquiry is creating a narrative that does not reflect the true causes of the fire and that the fire being a traumatic event contributes to the conditions that enable the Inquiry to act in this way.

1. The connection between trauma and unspeakability

The traumatic nature of an event could have an impact on the ability of the people who experienced, witnessed, or heard of it to capture and understand its true meaning and significance. The word ‘unspeakability’ expresses the difficulty – and even the impossibility – to comprehend, express, and convey the essence of trauma. There are two root causes of unspeakability. Firstly, trauma is an experience so shattering to the mind and body that it cannot be registered, understood, or represented in the same ways as other events. The available means by which experiences can be registered and conveyed to others, such as through language and discourse, prove to be inadequate or insufficient in the face of trauma. It is the absence of means of comprehension and representation that lead to its unspeakability.

Secondly, traumatic events are rendered unspeakable through the force of denial that operates in the society in which they occurred and is activated in the context of the relationship between power, oppression, and trauma. Social power relationships are maintained through oppressive structures, such as sexism, classism, and racism. These oppressive structures create the habitat required for the occurrence of a certain type of trauma, i.e. trauma that is enabled by and is an outcome of social oppression, such as gender based violence or the myriad forms of trauma that racism enables. This relationship between power, oppression, and trauma (developed further here) explains the rationale behind denial. Truly understanding the traumatic event and its causes would lead to exposing the everyday dynamics of oppressive structures, which in turn will destabilise power relationships. It is in this context that the force of denial is activated in society. It acts to render the trauma unknown or not understood and can take many forms. Denying the trauma through, for example, silencing or discrediting the survivors keeps oppressive structures obscured and thereby acts to reinforce power relationships. These two root causes – absence of means for comprehension and representation, and the force of denial – continuously deepen and ingrain the unspeakability of trauma.

Healing cannot take place as long as conditions of unspeakability prevail because it requires the truth of the trauma to be known and understood, and the true causes of the trauma cannot be understood in a reality of unspeakability. This leaves society stuck and unable to progress. Therefore, the question that should be examined – whenever an official narrative on a trauma is created – is whether conditions of unspeakability prevailed or were overcome in the process of the narrative’s creation.

2. The Unspeakability of Grenfell

The unspeakability of Grenfell prevails so far because of both root causes. McQueen’s film ‘Grenfell’ succeeds in revealing the first root cause – the absence of means through which to truly comprehend the magnitude of the horror that occurred. Art is crucial in realities of unspeakability because it is not bound by the limitations of language and discourse and therefore can convey meaning in situations where its expression is otherwise constricted. McQueen reveals that a reality of unspeakability prevails by creating glimpses that overcome it and through which it becomes clear to the viewer that, until watching the film, they have not truly realised that this atrocity actually happened. McQueen makes the atrocity viscerally known – through the film’s silence, the almost X-ray view of the burnt tower, the small movements of the camera that stays solely around the tower – zooming in, each time, on one floor, one apartment, one room. Through the 24 minutes and 2 seconds of the film, McQueen created meditative conditions. This was my experience – the film was a meditation on Grenfell. Through the glimpses of real understanding that arose in that state, I realised that unspeakability has prevailed so far.

In the context of Grenfell, the force of denial, which is the second root cause of unspeakability, takes the form of disregard towards the potential relevance of institutional discrimination to the question of the causes of the fire. Since the Grenfell Tower Inquiry was announced on 15 June 2017 – a day after the fire – by then-Prime Minister Theresa May, the bereaved, survivors, and residents (BSR) of North Kensington, where Grenfell Tower is located, have demanded and campaigned for the inclusion of institutional discrimination into the Inquiry’s Terms of Reference document, which outlines the scope of the investigation. The government refused to include it, basing their decision on the reasoning provided to it by the Inquiry: that ‘social matters’ are beyond the scope of the Inquiry and can delay its process. After the proceedings had started, the BSR’s barristers continued to submit that discrimination must be investigated by the Inquiry, but their submissions were ignored. Furthermore, the Inquiry marginalised knowledge on discrimination from the proceedings by weakening the participation of the BSR who hold that knowledge, which was acquired through their own experiences. Knowledge exclusion is a form of denial. Through directly refusing to investigate discrimination and through dismissing and marginalising any content that alludes to it, the Inquiry makes it impossible to understand what led to the trauma and therefore reinforces unspeakability.

Unspeakability has marked the six years that have passed since the fire and in this reality the Grenfell Tower Inquiry has taken place. The Inquiry received a mandate from the government, along with the necessary time and public funding, for two phases of investigation: Phase 1 was to discover what happened on the night of the fire, while Phase 2 was to discover what led to the fire. After six years, the evidence-gathering stage of the Inquiry has now been completed and the submission of its Phase 2 report is expected in early 2024. The cost of the Inquiry, according to its own report, was £170 million up to the end of March 2023. The Inquiry is the sole legal proceeding investigating the causes of the Grenfell Tower fire and is key in creating the official public narrative explaining why it had happened and what can be learned from it.

The next and concluding post in this series asks what can be seen when looking at the Inquiry’s narrative through the lens of unspeakability.