Generational trauma — the psychological and physiological effects experienced by subsequent generations of those who first experienced trauma — has become one of the most resonant buzzwords of our time, ubiquitous in its usage and association to various art forms in the past few years.
The ripple effects of historical events, like wars, on families several generations separated from those events have been written about extensively and brought to our screens in recent works such as Pachinko by Min Jin Lee and Kindred by Octavia Butler. In Kindred, for instance, slavery becomes the literal trauma of the modern protagonist, who's sent back to the antebellum plantation where her ancestors lived and worked.
