When my father, Laurie, retired from his job as a high school science and IT teacher, he’d been a teacher for about thirty-five years. He was, I think, a good teacher. ‘I wasn’t super teacher,’ he told me, ‘I wasn’t Eddy Woo, but my students did well and sometimes they bought me a beer years later, I was an ok teacher.’ I liked the fact that he was a schoolteacher, liked that he chose to work at a public school down the road, because his values were my values.

When I saw this young woman walking around town, I knew she was rich. Glossy brown hair in curls, not like our curls, loose, and she’d pulled it on top of her head like a pile of dog shit. She could not have come from this island – and not because she’s white. Our mothers here would not let her leave the house looking like that, like such a rag doll. That’s how I know she’s rich.

It has been four months since I had a job. It’s the longest time in ten years that I’ve not had a job – at least, a job that tallies up my hours, deducts the things I broke that week, and puts money into my account.

Historically understood as a physical wound, trauma’s semantic application as an injury both psychic and material developed in the aftermath of the First World War. Its conceptual roots can be traced back to the language used to describe the effects of train wrecks in the late nineteenth century (‘spinal concussion’, ‘railway spins’, ‘railway heart’) and, in the early twentieth century, the afflictions suffered by soldiers (‘shell shock’, ‘war shock’, ‘soldier’s heart’).