PTSD, Memory, and the Wars We Carry: What Fiction Can Teach Us on PTSD Awareness Day

PTSD Awareness Day is more than a date on the calendar.

It is an invitation — to listen, to remember, to witness.

In Once Upon a Time in the Shadows of War and Winter, the pages echo with the footsteps of the forgotten: soldiers who returned from war in silence, women who carried their grief in the hollows of their ribcage, children who inherited memories they could not name. PTSD — Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder — may not always be spoken aloud in the novel, but it breathes beneath the sentences. It haunts the pauses. It lingers in the snow, in the dust, in the gaze of a boy who lost more than he can understand.

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What Is PTSD?

PTSD is a psychological response to traumatic events — war, violence, abuse, displacement — that overwhelms the brain’s ability to cope. But trauma doesn’t always scream. Sometimes, it whispers. It hides in silence, in repetition, in avoidance, in rage. And in societies where mental health remains taboo or misunderstood, PTSD becomes an invisible wound — misread, misdiagnosed, or ignored altogether.

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How the Novel Gives PTSD a Voice

1. Through Ikenna — The Ghost of the War That Never Ends

A former Biafran officer, Ikenna returns from the war physically alive but emotionally vanished. His silence is impenetrable. His music — once a sign of tenderness — becomes something strained and haunted. The novel never names his condition, but readers see the signs: withdrawal, rage, personality change, a fracture between the man he was and the one who returns. This is PTSD without a diagnosis — raw, tragic, and achingly familiar in post-conflict societies.

2. Through Nadia — Trauma in a New Language

Born in Soviet Russia to a Ghanaian father and Russian mother, Nadia’s life is marked by racial isolation, abandonment, and sexual trauma. Her pain is etched into piano keys and hidden behind sarcasm and sharpness. She self-harms not to die, but to feel something real. Her trauma is compounded by a world that offers no language for her experience. Her journal entries — found years later by Amara — become quiet screams for recognition.

3. Through Kasi — The Inheritance of Silence

Kasi never went to war. But he grew up in its aftermath — in the shadow of Ikenna’s silence and Adeife’s sorrow. He carries the trauma he did not live through, yet feels in every word unsaid. As he grows — navigating exile in the USSR, the death of his parents, the slow unraveling of love — he becomes a portrait of intergenerational trauma, of a man undone by memories that were never his, and yet live inside him.

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Why This Matters: Fiction as a Mirror

Fiction can reach where statistics cannot. It can show the emotional texture of PTSD — how it seeps into relationships, how it silences joy, how it erodes trust in the world and in the self.

In Once Upon a Time in the Shadows of War and Winter, PTSD is not a plot device. It is the terrain on which the characters walk. And it is through them that we understand:

That war does not end when guns go silent.

That children can carry grief that predates them.

That love can coexist with deep pain.

That healing must begin with listening — to memory, to silence, to stories.

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On PTSD Awareness Day, Let Us Remember:

Every wound is not visible.

Every veteran is not old.

Every survivor does not speak.

But every story matters.

Let us honour the real Ikennas, Nadias, and Kasis in our world — by holding space for their pain, and breaking the silence around trauma. Let us ask better questions. Let us tell better stories. Let us remember.

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Want to Read More?

Once Upon a Time in the Shadows of War and Winter is a multi-generational novel spanning over a hundred years of history — from colonial Nigeria to post-Soviet Russia — exploring how war, silence, and memory shape the lives we live and the love we dare.

🔗 [Pre-order your copy here]

🔗 [Learn more about the companion guide: The Silence Beneath the Story]