Last summer, I pushed my daughter in her stroller through Brickell: the dense, increasingly yuppie neighborhood in Miami where I’ve lived for the past six years. It is one of the few neighborhoods in Miami where public transportation is an option, which has made it popular among the crowd of recent transplants that began flocking here during the pandemic.
We walked along the Underline, a public project aimed at turning a worn path that runs under the train line into a version of New York City’s High Line, complete with repainted bike and running lanes, art installations, foliage, and a smattering of parks and workout spaces. All around me, people in expensive athleisure strutted to their Equinox sessions. Those not working out were on their way to work, zooming by on electric scooters. The skyline was already chock-full of gleaming towers, but cranes were busy constructing more.
In Miami, Brickell, you should know, has the reputation among locals of housing the comemierda crowd, or the “shit-eaters”— those disdained for being bougie, wealthy, and out of touch. Which is why I was so surprised to stumble upon something sobering as I walked past a park there: life-sized vinyl portraits of solemn women tied up to bars. Some stared off into the distance, some clasped their hands in prayer, some clutched t-shirts and pillows with the faces of younger people crudely imprinted on them. Some leaned against portraits of these young people. Almost all of them were Black or brown. And according to the artist’s statement at the end of the series of 44 portraits, which ran the length of the grassy park, each one of them had lost a loved one to gun violence in the city.
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I knew, upon seeing the first few images, and before reading any text, precisely what those wistful stares meant; what the pillows and cheap t-shirts signified. I’ve worn those t-shirts myself, most recently at a funeral for a cousin who died of a drug overdose. For the previous five years, I’ve also spent a good chunk of my time reporting stories about tragedy for newspapers and magazines–murders, suicides, police violence–in which I’d been in the room, and seen shots just like these set up and taken.
As I moved down the line of photos, still flanked on either side by unaware and unconcerned Brickell denizens, I decided it was important to know the race of the artist responsible. I suspected they were white, and after a quick search online, confirmed my suspicions. According to the exhibit’s curator, Kathy Shorr, the emotional images of mothers were commissioned to raise awareness about gun violence and its impact on local families. “The collateral damage of gun violence lasts a lifetime. It doesn’t end with the shooting. For the survivors, it is only the beginning,” Shorr said.
Fine, I thought. But why here, in Brickell?
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Brickell is quite unlike the enclaves in northern and western Miami-Dade County, where many of the subjects of the portraits hanging up at the park hail from, and where gruesome stories of gun violence are, sadly, not at all uncommon. Among the more cynical residents of the city–many of them Latino with unchecked biases and deep racism against the city’s African-American residents–the violence is actually expected.
Something I learned from the moment I moved to Miami is that there are clear, distinct lines of segregation in this city. There are Latino neighborhoods and then there are the Black neighborhoods, and there is a common assumption that one is worse than the other—which is why the course of action for many residents of Miami is simply to stay away. Push that part of the city and its problems aside. Blow by it on I-95 and never stop.
Understanding this fundamental divide in the city is what ultimately made me come around to seeing value in those photographs at the park. There was, in my mind, something radical about those women and their hardships imposing themselves on a yuppie crowd who likely wouldn’t ever consider them or their problems otherwise. But were they really raising awareness? And, really, what the fuck does that even mean? What did it say, for example, that in the three days I revisited the exhibit, the most engagement I saw with the photographs, aside from my own, was a long stare by a Black city employee whose job is to guide tourists and new arrivals to their destinations? Was this a noble project? Or was it simply an exhibit of Black and brown pain, sorrow, mourning, and trauma; yet another piece of poverty porn that fed into the sad stereotypes that already exist in this city, and in cities just like it across the country.
These questions, which I couldn’t shake from my mind, ultimately swirled around a bigger question–one that I had been chewing on for years: Is trauma-inflected art, created and dispersed with the expressed goal of “raising awareness,” ever capable of achieving its true aims?
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I’ve been contemplating questions around trauma and art ever since I began writing fiction as an undergrad at Cornell University. My earliest stories were about my upbringing in the Bronx, which felt a million miles away from the elite campus I inhabited. They were stories about single-parent families; stories about kids experimenting with drugs and sex far earlier than, I guess, was the norm; stories where casual violence was common; and stories where economic precarity was a given. I never wrote them for sympathy or to “raise awareness” about my community. Initially, I wrote them because they were the stories I knew best.
Yet, to my surprise, the stories were often quickly noticed and celebrated with awards and praise on campus—which made me wonder if that was because of the level of talent and skill of my writing, or because they were so distinct, at times shocking, or perhaps even interpreted as “empowering” compared to what the rest of my mostly white, and wealthy classmates turned in at workshop. Did they really like the stories? Or did they like the safe peak into this foreign world, which allowed them to see it, without getting too close themselves?
The questions I’ve pondered about trauma only intensified when I began to work as a journalist after college, and spent many years writing about gruesome crimes. As the funding for journalism slowly collapsed, I watched newsrooms hone in on clicks and lean more and more on services that monitored these clicks, alongside a story’s pageviews, and the time people spent on a given page. Us journalists were given accounts to these services, and assigned scores, which constantly updated and attempted to dictate–in real time–how well we were doing our jobs, or at least, how well we were accomplishing what seemed to be our true aim: more clicks, more pageviews.
Because readers seemed to have an innate thirst for crime, gory details, and heart wrenching quotes of grief and sadness, it often seemed that my real task on any given day was to gouge out the worst possible details, anecdotes, and images. Coax out raw emotions–the more tears the better–from anguished family members who had just lost someone, who’d just had their entire world upended, the numbers seemed to tell me.
On many nights, after a story had gone live, and the clicks and pageviews rolled in, editors tweaked headlines and deks online to read as even more salacious. I felt like a trauma miner; like my real job wasn’t the benevolent goal of informing the public or raising awareness, but rather, to excavate the grief they couldn’t stop reading about, and perhaps dwell on momentarily, until the next, fresh story became available for consumption.
This practice, and my ambivalence, continued, even intensified, when I became a national reporter focused on justice and police violence issues. Coming off the heels of George Floyd’s murder, and a national reckoning around race and police brutality, I found myself in the position of actively seeking out stories about the unfortunate slayings of people, usually men—usually Black men—and weighing them against each other and the judgment of my white editors. Although we never said this outloud, honestly, what we were really doing when we decided whether a case was worth writing about was asking ourselves: Is this traumatic enough?
Of course, we, disciplined and serious journalists, would never admit this. Our aims were dignified, remember? We were trying to “create change,” trying to root out corruption and the bad guys, trying to put pressure on the powerful forces and systems holding people down.
And perhaps we did do some of that. I’m not sure I did, but I know there are others who have accomplished this. Some reporting leads to the changing of laws, the firing of corrupt people, much-needed institutional upheavals. But even some of those people who did the best work, such as former Canadian journalist Tamara Cherry, have emerged from the industry feeling just as icky as I did.
In her book The Trauma Beat, Cherry investigates the impact that the media has on trauma survivors, and the impact that reporting on trauma day-in and day-out has on members of the media. The book, ultimately, circles around one animating question: Would you talk? In other words, if something tragic happened to your family, would it be worth it to you to open up to the media?
“It was a question I always struggled with. The discomfort I had in reaching out to survivors tugged me toward no, while the belief in the work I was doing for the greater good tugged me toward yes,” she wrote. But after considering all the interviews she conducted for her book, and the “near complete void of supports for survivors faced with media attention,” her answer is much clearer: “I find myself firmly in Camp Fuck Off.”
When I reflect on my own time as a reporter writing the sorts of stories I was often asked to write, I feel a lot of guilt and regret. I think, often, about the families and people I spoke to who trusted me with their stories; people who looked and felt a lot like the women in those photographs posted up in my neighborhood.
I think, often, about one particular story. A murder-suicide: A man who decided to kill his entire family, sparing only one daughter, a toddler, alive in the home alone until the police arrived. I think about the family who I contacted and pushed and prodded for information, at the behest of editors who really wanted me to chase down the story before anyone else could. And I did. And I got it, and I wrote it, and I told myself what I was doing was important. I ignored the pit in my stomach and convinced myself I was “shedding light on an important issue.” But when I look back on that assignment, it never feels that way. It feels a lot more like I exploited a family and their story at their lowest of lows. I think about that little girl who survived. When she grows up and Googles what happened, when she reads my story, how will she feel?
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Why does tragedy grip people the way that it does? I’ve been thinking about this recently, as the war between Israel, Gaza, and neighboring countries wages on. Following Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7th, my initial support for the nation–despite my ignorance about the region and how it came to be–was unwavering. After all, the heinousness of the attack, as reported in mainstream media, made it hard not to be sympathetic.
But things became murkier to me once I continued reading about the conflict. Mostly, for me, because of the photographs. The images of Gazan mothers and fathers carrying children wrapped in white sheets. Small children, the same age as my own, scarred and bloodied in poorly-outfitted hospitals. The look of disillusionment on their faces, some of them still in their Sunday morning pajamas.
These were soul-crushing images. The sort that made it difficult for me to stop looking and consider the weight of Israel’s counteroffensive on innocent Gazans. The sort that, I imagine, are a big part of what motivates people to demonstrate in the streets. Tragedy is convincing. There is no denying the inherent appeal. And in art, it can often serve as a perch.
Take 50 Cent, for example. The rapper was largely outside the music industry, until he was shot nine times in the fraught year 2000. He had released tracks and mixtapes that had gotten a bit of buzz in the streets, but didn’t achieve stardome until after he nearly lost his life.
I was a middle-schooler in the Bronx around the time his song “Wanksta” and the even bigger, “In Da Club,” were released. Many of us talked about 50 with the reverence of a god, always leading conversations with the fact that he was shot nine times—as if that, in itself, were reason enough to listen to his music. But to us, his near-death experience, and the way he rebounded from it, made him larger than life. It transformed him from a mere rapper with some bars into a star—a legend, a man with genuine authority.
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As of late, trauma, tragedy, and hardship have become so appealing that a host of figures have sprung up and gained notoriety for manufacturing it. Jussie Smollet, George Santos, Jessica Krug, Hasan Minhaj: the list of artists and politicians caught in fantastical tales centering themselves in the midst of manufactured trauma or hardships grows each year.
These huxters know what they are doing. They understand the power embedded in these sorts of stories and the role that their identities play within them. And I understand them, too. I’ve wrestled with this power for many years due to my own background, life circumstances, and extended family tales that lend themselves to a particular kind of appeal. There are two distinct ways I can introduce myself. Two distinct presentations, one of which I know is inherently more appealing to a larger, whiter, liberal, mainstream audience.
Option A: I’m Andrew Boryga, a thirty-three-year-old man who grew up poor in the Bronx, with a single-mother, younger sisters, and adult-level responsibilities that began at an age that shocks most people. I’m a part of an extended family that has lost three people younger than me to gun violence and has seen others flame out due to drugs. In my youth, I watched my close friends succumb to addiction, gang life, and imprisonment and, to this day, I feel survivor’s guilt.
Option B: I’m Andrew Boryga, a thirty-three-year-old Ivy-League graduate, and budding novelist with a Big Five publisher who lives in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Miami. I’m married to an Ivy-League educated architect. I send my kids to a private daycare, and take them on at least two international vacations a year. I own my own home, have little debt, and for the most part, walk around feeling safe and secure.
Which one of these is really me? And which one do I want to project to the world?
The fact that I have the choice, some might think, is a gift. Then there are others who would prefer I stick to one choice–who suggest I must always identify with Option A, and never “abandon my roots.” There are others who might say I am firmly Option B now. That because I’ve even reached Option B, it is clear I have turned my back on Option A, embraced capitalism and “the American dream,” and disavowed any authenticity credentials my upbringing might have bestowed onto me.
But the truth–as always–is far murkier. My truth is that I hold both of these, seemingly contradictory, identities. I’m somewhere bouncing between both at all points of the day. For years now, in fact, I have felt like I’ve been playing one, long-extended game of double-dutch. Dancing from one foot to the other, jumping side to side, my body, my personhood, not willing or able, to firmly plant myself into one side of the binary. Which, unfortunately, has made the idea of capitalizing on trauma a difficult prospect, even when I know doing so would reap many rewards and benefits.
This is a struggle that befalls many artists, but in particular artists of color, especially those from similarly difficult backgrounds—despite the fact that no single one of us has the same story.
The opportunities my personal tragedies presented to me calcified around the time I emerged from Cornell with a degree and the minor acclaim I received as an undergraduate. I had won all the writing awards available to me on campus and convinced many students and faculty that I was on the fast track to literary success—which in my case, at the time, would have been a greatly celebrated novel.
By the time I seriously began writing the earliest versions of my forthcoming debut novel, all around me were writers of color whose work was being taken seriously by the media and review cycles. This only increased each year, and especially after the election of Donald Trump and the demand for diversity, wherein #OwnVoices became a rallying cry. Working through these years, which I would define as between 2013 or 2014 until 2020, when, I believe, these cries hit a crescendo after the murder of George Floyd, I felt a lot of pressure to lean into the Option A version of Andrew—despite the fact that the Option B was just beginning to come into his own, beginning to wipe the dirt off of his clothes, and transform into something pretty unrecognizable from the version that preceded it.
I wanted to find a way to write about this transformation, to lean into its nuance, but once again, I felt pulled toward the market—the clicks, which by this time had transformed into potential purchases—toward publishers’ clamoring for diverse stories that would implicitly or explicitly confirm what the larger society seemed to be suggesting: Minorities are always in danger, and hurting, and downtrodden, and celebrating our stories of these trials and tribulations, uplifting them to share with the masses to be discussed at events, was the salvo that was needed to “raise awareness.”
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It’s really weird to look at your own trauma, the shit you’ve cried about, the people you’ve mourned, the things you reckon with on a daily basis, as a commodity. But at a certain point, I began to see these things that way. I began to feel I had stories in the bank to sell. I began to feel that they were sort of like stocks, and that during the late 2010s, the stock was clearly rising. It was almost my duty to cash out. Part of me wondered if I’d be left holding the bag when the bubble burst. If I’d be the odd man out when the media and literary establishment decided this diversity train isn’t paying out like it used to.
At first, I engaged with an agent who was clearly only interested in me because of my look and “authentic” background. I could have written any tragic tale and they would have rubber-stamped it and been on the phone with publishers the next day. I nearly signed with this agent, but thankfully I didn’t go all the way. Something in my gut told me it was wrong. Something told me I’d regret it—regret it more than I had already regretted not accomplishing my various dreams and goals up to that point.
My gut—the one that told me I wasn’t the kid with the chip on his shoulder and no money in his pocket; that despite my background and identity markers, I did, in fact, have privilege in this world that needed grappling with—indicated that I should go another route. This route involved divorcing myself from the market and the idea that I needed to feed it in some way. And it involved, ultimately, getting in touch with the uninhibited, perhaps even confrontational, spirit of writing I first tapped into as a college student.
Somewhere along the line in school, after seeing my peers stumble to figure out how a single mother who was poor and chain-smoked could also be a loving, and devoted parent, or how a cut throat gang-banger could also be fascinated with memorizing large, complex words, I realized the stories I wrote as an undergraduate made these white peers of mine who had to read them and comment on them in workshops, really uncomfortable. And for some reason, I fucking loved that shit. So much so that I decided to lean in, trying, with each story, to insert little moments true to my origins—but that I knew would turn their worlds upside down. Doing this, for me, a poor kid in this hyper-elite space, felt like a powerful act.
I can see, now, that what really got me going was writing in a way that didn’t comfort a reader with what they might have expected to read–downtrodden characters, overcome by the forces of oppression acting against them. Once I understood that I was being perceived in a certain way (I didn’t for example, even realize I was poor until I got to Cornell), what I enjoyed most was playing with their preconceived notions and thoughts, and not allowing them to leave the page feeling secure.
To me, that discomfort remains important. It makes sense. It is something I have always admired in art. And when I consider what kind of art I love most, I think of films like Get Out or Moonlight, which constantly subvert the viewer’s expectations in radical ways. Novels like Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Whiteboy Shuffle by Paul Beatty. The photography of Joseph Rodriguez and Andre D. Wagner, the journalism of David Gonzalez, the music of Kendrick Lamar. The work of writers and artists of color who seek to show communities on their own terms, and in ways that don’t hide scars but don’t dress them up either. Their work is complex. It cannot be summarized easily, and their intentions are almost always murky and subdued. They aren’t out to “raise awareness”—whatever that might mean. They are out to offer examples of humanity and individuality.
To me, that is the best use of trauma: To show not how much one is hurting, or needs pity, but rather how one makes a life despite the scars and tragedy. How one embodies a life holding multiple realities at once, jumping from side to side like I often feel, playing that game of double-dutch, a game which is harder and more intense than simply landing and cooling it on one side, secure with where you are.
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So what to make then, of the exhibit in the park. I still think about it, even as it has been down for months now and the iron fences around the park have been cleansed of all that Black and brown trauma and more cranes have replaced them to renovate the perfectly fine park and make it even nicer to attract new residents to the neighborhood.
Did the exhibit do anything for the people who passed by it? Did it use the trauma it put on display responsibly? Is it possible to do such a thing?
Murders are still happening every day in Miami, not to mention across the country. As far as I can tell, the residents of Brickell and other similar neighborhoods in my city still believe the problem is largely a problem that is not theirs: one relegated to the neighborhoods West of the highway, to the outerlands they’ll never visit but will condemn.
But to me, there was something radical and subversive about the photos that I appreciate. I think its aim—to make out-of-touch Brickell residents stop and contend with a reality far beyond their own—is an honorable one. And the fact that these photographs, hung in this little stretch of the city, without any big announcements, or fanfare, forced me to go through this exercise, says something about their significance–about their worthiness as art, doesn’t it?
They made me stop and stare. They made me think about what was really happening. I came back a few times. I looked more closely. At the end of the day, that is about the best thing that an artist can hope for.
Andrew Boryga
Andrew Boryga grew up in the Bronx and now lives in Miami with his family. Victim, his debut novel, was published in March by Doubleday Books. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, and has been awarded prizes by Cornell University, The University of Miami, The Susquehanna Review, and The Michener Foundation. He has taught writing to college students, elementary school students, and incarcerated adults.