COMING JULY 30, 2024.
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To learn more about the artist who created the cover for Tilt, please visit: Shira Hofmekler (Gregory)’s Studio.
TILT: A Novel on Intergenerational Trauma
Part feminist fiction, part classroom/community resource, Tilt follows Kavya, an Indian-American professor struggling to navigate academia’s dysfunction and to deal with debilitating panic attacks after a visit from her estranged father. In order to heal, she is forced to confront for the first time the legacies of family violence. Inspired by an old teaching assignment, Kavya crafts a writing project that promises to help her, her students, and anyone grappling with intergenerational trauma. But just as she starts to find her way back to herself, revelations of family secrets threaten to turn her life upside down.
This genre-bending book compels us to look anew at oppressive political orders like colonialism, casteism, racism, and more, and to ask how our histories can liberate rather than destroy us.
Praise
“Tilt is a searing and revelatory investigation into how seemingly unrelated personal tragedies link to colonialism, mental health, and generational trauma across oceans and borders.” —Anjali Enjeti, author of The Parted Earth and Southbound
“A slow-burning bittersweet story of intergenerational trauma across the minefield of diaspora. Nayak weaves together the antagonistic psychic life of the main character, Kavya, with the politics and pleasures of academia, with the vexing terrain of mothering, and with the possibility of, might we say, self-love.” —Moon Charania, author of Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness
Sources on Intergenerational Trauma
Brave Heart, Maria Yellow Horse. 1998. “The Return to The Sacred Path: Healing the Historical Trauma Response Among the Lakota.” Smith College Studies in Social Work 68 (3): 287–305.
Burke Harris, Nadine. 2018. The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Edkins, Jenny. 2003. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Felsen, I. 1998.“Transgenerational Transmission of Effects of the Holocaust.” In International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma, edited by Y. Danieli, 43–68. New York: Plenum.
Foo, Stephanie. 2022. What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma. New York: Ballantine Books.
Helbich, Maria and Samah Jabr. 2022. “A Call for Social Justice and for a Human Rights Approach with Regard to Mental Health in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” Health and Human Rights Journal 24 (2): 305–318.
Maxwell, Krista. 2014. “Historicizing Historical Trauma Theory: Troubling the Trans-Generational Transmission Paradigm.” Transcultural Psychiatry 51 (3): 407–35.
Menakem, Resmaa. 2017. My Grandmother’s Hands. Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press.
Million, Dian. 2020. “Trauma’s Empty Promise: Indigenous Death, Economics, and Resurgence.” In The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures, edited by Daniel Nehring, Ole Jacob Madsen, Edgar Cabanas, China Mills, and Dylan Kerrigan, 409–420. London: Routledge.
Mullan, Jennifer. 2023. Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Soriano, Jen. 2023. Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing. New York: Amistad.
Van Der Kolk, Bessel. 2014. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Penguin Books.
Geronimus, Arline T. 2023. Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society. New York: Little, Brown Spark.
Linklater, Renee. 2014. Decolonizing Trauma Work: Indigenous Stories and Strategies. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.
Khuc, Mimi. 2024. dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss. Durham: Duke University Press.