An illustration by Jim Kay for the Harry Potter Illustrated book series
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July 31st is Harry Potter’s Birthday. Often regarded as one of the best characters created in the 21st Century, Harry Potter and his story have had an everlasting impact on a generation of children and adults across the world.
Today, I will take you on a short journey of one critical dimension of what makes the story of Harry Potter appeal to the millions of readers of our planet.
In the last two decades, there has been so much written about the Harry Potter books and the serialised (but, not necessarily linear) legacy being built up as the Wizarding World, that talking about it seems as if adding one more page on top of a mountain of ideas and perspectives — the summit of which can never be truly seen.
The Harry Potter books have been influential over the last two decades — this statement can be called a gross understatement in the history of Book Publishing. The kind of success that this book series and its author, J.K. Rowling, has achieved is a feat of dreams. Both, the stories of the titular character in the book series and its author are awe-inspiring. J.K. Rowling changed the world, in her own capacity — in her own way — through this book series.
But, what is so special or different about this book series?
J.K. Rowling herself had stated and explained her influences and inspirations leading to the writing of this phenomenal series, targeted at a young audience at large. So, it would not be a surprise if you could draw several parallels between the Harry Potter storylines and some other famous works in the world of writing. But, isn’t this the case with all the stories? Without familiarity and commonality across some renditions of experiences, some allusions, some crises, and some things that are relatable from sheer experience, it would be an extremely arduous task to make the storyline and the world-building believable and acceptable. To make readers invest in something unknown, a writer sometimes uses a strategy to move them from ‘the known to the unknown’. It is not a bad strategy at all; moreover, it is a great strategy, as it works.
There are exceptions, of course. If you have read books by M. John Harrison (the author of the Viriconium series and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy) and Ursula K. Le Guin (the author of the Earthsea Fantasy series and stories in the Hainish Universe), then you would know of some novel strategies to explore the Unknown. For instance, in the Kefahuchi Trilogy, M. John Harrison subverts genre motifs and takes us into a journey considered, many a time, complex for those unaccustomed to his writing. His strategies hit the readers from out of the blue, as they are required to work through to keep up with the hurtling kaleidoscope of ideas flowing out of the pages. Also, his story strategy does not build a foundation of basic ideas for readers to drive from the known to the unknown. He drops the readers right into the middle of a complex situation, which may be totally unknown or unfamiliar to them. He is considered a legend in the art of prose-building, and despite subversion in genres being his trademark, he is considered a veteran of hard science fiction (i.e. hard sci-fi). His book, Light, has often been included in several lists describing the best books ever written; an example includes it being a part of The Best Books in the 21st Century list published by The Guardian. Also, you can check out the works of Arkady Martine (the author of the Teixcalaan series), whose debut novel came out in just 2019, for a new-age reference to unexpected strategies for authoring out-of-your-experience-grid storylines. Her book, A Memory Called Empire, is a saga of diplomacy interspersed across a science-fiction-driven backdrop. This book dives into language, grammar, and traditions; and the impact of semantics in the politics driving conquest and all-encompassing cultures. This is an unfamiliar territory to navigate through for a typical reader, which is a story strategy that this author is known for so far. And, yes, these authors all belong to the Science Fiction domain, but, they refuse to limit themselves to just Science Fiction in their stories.
This part of my narrative is to specifically push away any criticisms pointed out at J.K. Rowling’s works, owing to the disproportionate success (according to some critics) of her work’s legacy. I am not trying to review the book, which already has established and cemented its position as a high-quality work of children’s literature of the 21st Century. This part of the narrative is a call to avoid being distracted by tangents in thoughts comparing the validity of this book series with others that came before. J.K. Rowling is considered a genius when it comes to serialised story structuring, and this is evident in her Harry Potter Series as well as in her Cormoran Strike series, a Detective novel series targeted at adults (under the pen name, Robert Galbraith).
Yet, drawing comparisons are inevitable. But, unless one is assessing instances of plagiarism, working under a professional technical domain, is it even necessary to compare?
Why do we need to compare stories?
Stories are meant to be dived into. Stories are windows to the lives that one otherwise would not have an opportunity to live. Stories make you travel; sometimes even across the Universe or into some other Universe.
Now that we have the comparison factor out of our way (which is a very frequent distractor, specialised in tangentially-inclined threads of thoughts), let’s come back to Harry Potter.
What makes the story of Harry Potter so compelling?
Why does it strike an undeniable emotional chord with the readers, even today?
The answer is not a mystery.
It is trauma.
The story of Harry Potter is about trauma; the kind of disturbing life experience that stays with a person forever. The trauma that Harry Potter has faced in terms of losing his parents, his friends, and his loved ones, in the course of his life, along with ostracization from the wizarding community reflects a lot about the pain a character like Harry Potter goes through in terms of his functional operability in this world, which has an unreasonable fixation towards maintaining a status quo of what it deems as normal behaviour for effective social functioning (much like our society, even in the 21st Century).
The story of Harry Potter is not just a quintessential story of ‘good winning over evil’. It is also a story about how Harry fights his own demons borne out of traumatic experiences throughout his life.
For the unacquainted, I can share a brief on what the story of Harry Potter is about. It is the story of a boy, whose wizard parents are killed by a Dark Wizard, called Voldemort (in the pursuit of Immortality and Societal Segregation towards establishing Pure Blood Wizards as the Elites and subjugating those who are not and the non-magical human population at large; a la Wizarding World Hitler, to say the least). Harry was just 12 months old when he lost his parents; so, he barely has any memory of the incident. But, being the target of Voldemort himself (for reasons that I do not intend to spoil for those who haven’t read this phenomenal series yet), Harry escapes death with a lingering totem of a lightning scar on his forehead after being struck by Voldemort’s death curse.
This is a brief, oversimplified, precis of the Harry Potter storyline.
Now, I will take you to a few stations in the long journey of Harry’s story, which will make you see the role of trauma as an underlying bedrock of experiences that you will witness, share, or relate to with several characters.
The lightning-shaped scar is a symbol of Harry’s traumatic life, which began even before he could consciously hold complex memories. The scar, his symbol of trauma, became Harry’s first outward identity. There are scenes in the story where it is clearly reflected so; especially, when he is not introduced, his scar becomes his biggest tell to the world — the biggest tell of his trauma. He becomes famous owing to his trauma. For many in the wizarding world, he becomes a hero; for something that he never intended to do or never realised that he did; moreover, the story tells you that it is not Harry Potter who had vanquished the evil named Voldemort (who the wizarding world wrongly believed was gone for good). For Harry Potter, his scar was not the symbol of his trauma; it was a constant reminder of all the trauma that poured into his life after the unfortunate incident happened; and, something that the world never understood.
Harry Potter, as a protagonist, has a beautiful character arc; an exceptionally compelling one, because of how his trauma and the world’s reaction to his trauma changes him, time and again. In the storyline, we witness Harry Potter’s personality traits evolving throughout the seven books (each book covering a year of Harry’s life).
If you could meet Harry Potter in real life, and ask him, What bothers him the most about his trauma and the response of people to his trauma, then, most probably, he may refuse to answer. But, if you would have drugged him with some Veritaserum (a powerful truth potion in the Wizarding world), then he could have honestly stated his frustration about how misinformed and misunderstood his trauma is.
His trauma is not just related to the death of his parents, but, the absence of them in his life as a consequence of their unfortunate demise. Their absence snatched away his chance of a warm, loving childhood that every child in the world, unarguably, deserves. His trauma is regarding the life without choice that he lived for 10 long years after he was reluctantly adopted by his maternal relatives, the Dursleys (the last years of which were embedded in his memory palace of suffering, torture, and non-existence of free will and choice). His trauma lies in the fact that he was institutionalised within this world of zero free will. Not being able to make a choice became a defining frustration for Harry in his life, the consequence of which could be seen clearly in his attitude of gravitating towards dangerous situations with an urge to do anything possible to control the situation and pushing it deliberately towards a positive end. His desperation to do something good with his existence is reflective of his deep-seated insecurity about his place in his world. He does not want to be defined by his trauma; but, by the choices he makes. Albus Dumbledore, a very important character and Harry’s most influential mentor, from the moment Harry is selected to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (the invitation letter of which being his indubitable ticket to freedom and free will), gives words to Harry’s intrinsic yearning for being able to make a choice and live life on his own terms. In one of their conversations, Albus Dumbledore had famously, yet humbly, stated to Harry, “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
Harry’s entire life is about his struggle to overcome trauma, and being able to make choices (embodied by his timeline covered in detail in the seven books, and the snippets of which were covered in a Play, The Cursed Child, which is a successor to the last book, The Deathly Hallows, and some other original works by J.K. Rowling through her official website). His institutionalisation till the age of 11, and the series of dangerous situations that Harry barges into are always his attempts to unlock the mystery of the events that conspired; tounlock his life’s sheer misgivings about himself, and unlock what his life is all about. Harry Potter doesn’t trust himself, entirely. With him, it’s always leaps of faith, which people often read as courage (many a time even regarded as a fool’s errand at being brave without thought).
But, does this mean he is not brave? No, it doesn’t.
Harry Potter is brave to a fault. Because he doesn’t have a choice; but, to be brave. He is brave to the extent that he decides to accept his death at the age of seventeen, when left with no other choice. Harry Potter and courage are synonymous in context. He is a true Gryffindor, the primary quality of this Hogwarts School House being ‘Courage’. His courage is what strangely makes the fleetingly in-reach Sword of Gryffindor accessible to him in the face of some of the worst situations he ends up in. His courage is reflected in his attitude towards life. Many a time, this makes him go overboard where the reader can clearly envision the consequential extremities he and his loved ones can end up with, as a result of his actions. Despite his courage, Harry acknowledges, time and again, that he could have never achieved anything good without the contributions of his friends and his beloveds. He is never out-of-touch of his gratitude towards the people in his life. But, in retrospect, his courage is often derived from his insecurity about losing these people or the possibility of losing them.
But, why does Harry Potter does so? Why is his courage his greatest strength and his greatest weakness? A reflective question would be — Why is his desperation to always leap towards making a choice a very critical characteristic, irrespective of it being good or bad?
The answer lies in his trauma. The answer lies in his pain which he cannot explain. The answer lies in his suffering that no one can truly understand; but, can empathise with to some extent. The answer lies in his constant insecurity stemming from his questions bordering on ‘why this happened to him?’ Moreover, in the series of events within the story, when he is in pursuit of a long-lost prophecy, he gets to know that — it was just sheer chance that he was chosen as the threat to Voldemort; it could easily have been someone else instead of him. This was more frustrating a realisation than an answer; rendering him feel that there was nothing special about him except Voldemort’s mere perception of how Harry could be a threat to him in the future (owing to some reasons I am not willing to spoil here).
The answer also lies in the fact that he never seems to be able to get rid of or go beyond the trauma that envelops his life. His desperation to dive deep into the life of Voldemort to understand his strengths and weaknesses, to kill him and put an end to this onslaught of trauma, is a clear demonstration of his troubled and twisted reality. His parents were killed. His friends were murdered. His godfather was murdered. The love of his life was brainwashed and tortured. More of his beloveds were killed in action in the Battle of Hogwarts. Harry had lost so much and so many.
Imagine this — a seventeen-year-old adolescent person is ready to kill and get killed. In the modern world, we believe that it takes an extreme propagandist manifesto and conditioning to brainwash teenagers and make them dangerous to themselves and society at large. But, this is a misconception. Personal trauma has more power to transform a human to turn and move to places that society may deem unacceptable.
So, is Harry Potter dangerous? Yes, he is. More to himself, than to the world around him.
But, why do we love him so much?
Because he turned out to be good. A very simple answer.
But, why did he turn good?
The influence around Harry is what turned him towards the path of good, and not evil. Personalities like Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger (his two best friends), Albus Dumbledore, Mr and Mrs Weasley, Remus Lupin, Sirius Black, Fred and George Weasley, Luna Lovegood, Ginny Weasley, and so on, have had such a huge impact on Harry’s life without a direction (a life that was directionless, at least till he was 11 years of age) that his choices were all tunnelled towards a single goal, i.e. the greater good. He did not want glory. He just wanted everything to be good. He wanted everyone to be together and happy. He would not wish loneliness (that he had faced literally till 11 years of his age, and psychologically henceforth) on his worst enemies. The clay of life of Harry Potter had so many positive influencers that moulded him to become the courageous, yet unintended heroic figure that we all know of. Through Harry Potter’s story, J.K. Rowling is trying to speak to us; us — parents, teachers, educators, and educationists. J.K. Rowling, who has had her fair share of trauma and an awe-inspiring story of how she overcame the consequences of her personal trauma, is trying to give us a message. A message that — we can save people (our children) from the consequences of trauma; if not from the trauma itself; by just being the positive influence to offset the negatives resulting from the trauma they faced.
Is this easy to do? Of course not. But, isn’t this what society is for? Isn’t this what family is for? Isn’t this why we educators and educationists exist; those who are often projected as surrogates to parents?
Harry Potter is a story of trauma, loss, and pain, apart from a lot more under the banner of an entertaining fantasy series. But, it is also a great story of relentless positive influence in the face of unfortunate, unforeseen incidents and dangers faced by Harry Potter and other characters in the story.
I would like to cite an incident from the third Harry Potter book, the Prisoner of Azkaban, without spoiling the context. In this part of the story series, i.e. Harry’s third year in Hogwarts (he is now a 13-year-old), a very dark species of magical creatures is introduced. They are called Dementors. These creatures can very well be regarded as metaphors for the suffering that results from severe psychological conditions like Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). When dementors approach a person, not just the person but the surroundings of the person are influenced, and the environment transforms. The dementors can suck the happiness out of you, leaving you feeling cold, sad, in despair, and rendering you hopeless and in pain. A Dementor’s Kiss is even worse. It is an act by a dementor that sucks the soul out of a person, leaving the person rendered almost a lifeless shell of who he or she really was. A Dementor’s Kiss is used as a sentence for criminals in the Wizarding World, who commit terrible crimes and a death sentence is not considered enough punishment for the crime. Now, with this reference in mind, let’s enter the scene. In this scene, a newly appointed Professor for Defence Against Dark Arts, Prof. Remus Lupin is introducing Harry’s class to a Boggart. As a defence mechanism, this magical creature takes the form of something that the person in front of it fears the most. This is a lesson from Prof. Remus Lupin to make students stand up to their fears and overcome them. He enables his students by teaching them a spell that will transform the boggart, which is in the form of something that they fear the most, into something funny and harmless; transforming it into something that elicits laughter and happiness which is a boggart’s weakness. So, students are facing the boggart one-by-one, leading to the boggart turning into something very scary, and they are vanquishing it by transforming it into something funny. Then comes Harry’s chance to face the boggart. When the boggart is just about to transform into the embodiment of what Harry fears the most, Prof. Lupin jumps in front of the boggart and dispels it before Harry tries his hand at it. Prof. Lupin suspects that Harry is scared of Voldemort the most. And, the boggart turning into the extremely-feared dark wizard may traumatise Harry and the other students in the classroom. But, it was too late. The boggart had already started its transformation. But, to Prof. Lupin’s surprise, the boggart didn’t transform into Voldemort. It read Harry’s deepest fear and turned into a dementor. At the beginning of his third year, Harry had an encounter with a dementor and it rendered him almost paralysed with pain and suffering, triggering the effects of the sum of all the negatives in his life. No one around him had such an extreme reaction to being faced by a dementor. The reason lies in Harry’s trauma. Where people felt sad and even depressed (owing to the worst that they had felt so far in their lives), Harry felt motionless with fear, hopelessness, suffering, and pain with a macabre sense of no-good-ever that could ever happen in his life. This crushing feeling that Harry had is often felt by people suffering from MDD and PTSD. After the boggart incident, Prof. Lupin felt proud of Harry’s acknowledgement of his own trauma; that his biggest fear is not his greatest mortal threat, but, the pain and suffering that comes with his trauma. He feared fearing the consequences of his trauma. He feared fear.
Harry Potter wanted to take control over his fear. He wanted to overcome his fear. His fear of what ‘all’ could go wrong. And, this is a beautiful insight into trauma.
If this doesn’t make us appreciate the genius of J.K. Rowling’s mind, then, what could?
The story has seen Harry transform into an angst-ridden adolescent as well, which made the fans of the earlier book feel confused about their titular hero. There had been several name-callings for the character, mocking the emotional angst that he went through after several tribulations in his timeline, which was inevitably leading to a dangerous confrontation for him in the future. Harry’s emotional turbulence was almost palpable. In one scene, Harry is shouting, “SO YOU HAVEN'T BEEN IN THE MEETINGS, BIG DEAL! YOU'VE STILL BEEN HERE, HAVEN'T YOU? YOU'VE STILL BEEN TOGETHER! ME, I'VE BEEN STUCK AT THE DURSLEYS' FOR A MONTH! AND I'VE HANDLED MORE THAN YOU TWO'VE EVER MANAGED AND DUMBLEDORE KNOWS IT…” In another scene, when Harry had just lost his godfather, a conversation between Dumbledore and Harry spirals out of control. Understanding Harry’s situation, Dumbledore tells him that his ability to withstand hardships like these is his biggest strength. At this statement, Harry snaps. He starts yelling, “I DON’T CARE! I’VE HAD ENOUGH, I’VE SEEN ENOUGH, I WANT OUT, I WANT IT TO END, I DON’T CARE ANYMORE!”
Dumbledore responds calmly with empathy and says, “You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.” His words incite a panic in Harry. “I—DON’T!” Harry screams. This conversation is a reflective dive into Harry’s troubled and unbalanced state of mind and the pain he is going through, and also into the relentless patience, support, and understanding shown by Albus Dumbledore in caring about Harry and his psychological well-being.
At one point in the story, when Harry and Dumbledore are investigating Voldermort’s childhood, Harry almost becomes convinced (owing to his identity crisis) that he is like Voldemort; he and Voldemort had more in common than he could have ever imagined in his wildest of dreams. Harry was afraid that he may end up being like Voldemort. This was a very insecure and unpredictable time in Harry’s life. In this instance, Dumbledore again reminds Harry of the choices that he is making in his life that are way different and differently-intended as well, in comparison to what Voldemort chose in his life; and, these choices are what makes Harry who he is.
The story of Harry Potter is full of deep wisdom and insights into life and trauma. That is what makes this story so inspiring for young readers. It does not shy away from getting darker with each book and addressing the more uncomfortable aspects of life, pain, suffering, love, hope, and dreams; and the sheer pursuit of happiness which turns out to be more overrated than one would remotely expect.
The Harry Potter series is J.K. Rowling’s magnum opus for reasons that I can write a series of books on. The story of Harry Potter is a therapeutic journey that talks about trauma the way very few stories do. It has the power to validate the feelings of children who have faced/ are facing trauma, and, can provide them with an escape into real-life applicable possibilities of redeeming their state of mind, from the suffering they are going through. Moreover, the story series is also about other characters who have faced trauma and lived a life under the constant influence of the lingering effects of paralysing experiences. But, I do not want to leave a thread of spoilers for those unbeknownst to this influential story. They should unravel the magic on their own accord. After all the story talks about ‘choices’. So, they should choose to do so.
In context, how can the story of Harry Potter help us, educators and educationists? The answer being very obvious — still has to be stated, i.e. it can enable us to acknowledge and realise the need to identify the psychological state and needs of our students; our children.
The Harry Potter series is an education in itself; an education into the minds of children. After all, this book series has essentially inspired a generation of children. The 21st Century kids may be digital natives, but, they are still the children of the previous generation of humans. There lies an unmistakable set of common factors shared by all of us, which can be tapped into, with an objective to better understand the kids of the modern world. Many a time, some of us may not even identify with a problem faced by a 21st Century kid; a 21st Century student. Educators and Educationists have to tirelessly work towards educating themselves in dealing with the problems faced by the students of our age, as these problems stem from deep-seated psychological factors. Every time the problem may not be stemming from trauma; but, problematic psychological experiences can spell doom for the kids of our age, without them or their families even knowing about it.
In the modern world, the role of a school counsellor has become very critical. But, in terms of a broader picture, the role of a school counsellor is insufficient, to say the least. It has to be a collective responsibility of all the stakeholders of education including teachers, parents, administrators, and the school management to work towards the mental well-being of the students. Mental well-being and processes and mechanisms to dive into the investigation of the mental states of students have to be placed within the constitutional focus of a school or an educational institution. Moreover, all educators and educationists need an education in this area. So, let us all put our best foot forward and resolve towards starting and maintaining fruitful conversations on this critical matter.
Till then, a relatively less-tasking introduction to this key focus paradigm can be through the Harry Potter book series. Everyone in Education should read this book series.
Let us work towards becoming the Lupin(s) and the Dumbledore(s) of this world, and help the Harry(s), Hermione(s), Ron(s), and all those who need us to be their relentless, tireless mentors, guides, and support systems.
Let us work towards offsetting the negatives that they face with the positives that we can highlight.
I will close with one of my favourite quotes by Headmaster Albus Dumbledore —
“Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery.”
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If you need any help in understanding the Harry Potter series or how to integrate it into the learning scope of students, you can drop a mail at anu@ed-equity.org. You can rest assured that your queries are in safe hands. I have analysed the Harry Potter story (among thousands of others) for a decade and a half, and our team will be able to help.
Also, if you have identified students undergoing trauma and you are at a loss on how to handle the situation, then again you can drop a mail to the aforementioned email id. We can facilitate conversations on how to best deal with the situation.
Moreover, if your own trauma is hindering your path to becoming an effective educator or educationist, then, do reach out, and we can begin a conversation towards a world of acknowledgement, understanding, and solutions.
In the meantime, you can use the following link to introduce your students to the story of Harry Potter: https://www.startingharrypotter.com/book
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