The Weight of Words:
A Co-Constructed Narrative of Love And/In Trauma

By Sara Wolcott Weinberg, 2012
Found in the Academic Commons

What does it mean to come of age in the light of trauma? To find love? Can suffering be shared? How close can one get to a trauma they didn’t experience and to someone who survived it? In this work, I combine personal narrative, trauma theory, and oral histories of ten child survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. By telling the story of my time in Rwanda in 2008, the things I heard and the people I met, I hope to offer up myself and this work as an example, or perhaps more aptly, an experiment, to how we might share the weight of words.

Sara Wolcott Weinberg holds a Master’s Degree from NYU in Trauma and Violence as well as a Master’s Degree from Columbia in Oral History.  At Columbia, she was finally able to merge her interests and complete a project she began in Rwanda in 2008, where she interviewed survivors of the 1994 genocide.  She is currently a freelance editor at Chime for Change, an administrative coordinator at the Child Mind Institute, and has two oral history projects in the works.