Tuesday, June 16, 2020

on monuments and trauma

Viola: A blank, my lord. She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
 Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
We men may say more, swear more, but indeed
Our shows are more than will, for still we prove
Much in our vows, but little in our love. (Shakespeare 6)

AT the age of 22, an impossibly human girl named Jean found herself attracted to a man made entirely of stone. They were opposites. She was a mess of wounded flesh and exposed nerve endings. He had been dead for more than a century. He stood in a park named after him, overlooking the city’s accumulated misery. She was at a nearby pub, being farewelled by a bunch of drunken journos. When she flew for England on a one-way ticket, she would miss them only slightly less than the broken feeling this city had left in her bones. 

It was a Friday night at the end of 1995. Jean was drunk. She had smoked the first and last cigarette of her life but would never forget the feeling of burning tar in her throat as she crossed the road from the pub to the park without looking for cars and climbed the near-vertical concrete steps to the edge of the continent. The towering statue of James Fletcher was waiting for her. 

She could feel the translucent forms of souls only slightly more conflicted than hers. They had walked a few steps further and stepped over the white safety fence as though they were sneaking off to a picnic, only to leap and break their bodies, like their spirits, at the base of the cliff. Jean felt them pulling at her in the warm salted darkness but she locked eyes with James Fletcher and the weight of his plinth-bound presence and something in her refused to let him go. 

She communed with his concrete body because it was neither flesh nor blood. She could pour out her despair, her self-hatred and the feeling of emptiness that threatened to annihilate her and he would not recoil. His hands would never seek to warm themselves on her body and he would never reach out to claim her as his own. He would give her nothing, which was all she had ever asked for. She knew she could not move him, but she also knew she wanted him to stay exactly where he was.

Adjacent to the local constabulary and within the judicial precinct, Jean beseeched James Fletcher to answer her. He stood calmly over her and she begged him to relieve her suffering. He surveyed the city, silent and unwavering, and appeared to revel in his own immortality and her hopeless inability to grasp the functional requirements of life. In her drunken stupor, she could see only one thing clearly: his face. She had no God and no faith but perhaps this was the closest she would ever come to religion, this pleading for guidance, a crazed and beer-blurred serenade by a spurned lover, a sinner separated from the flock. This stone man represented every man who had ever touched her or even looked at her, and she remembered them all in the same way the body holds trauma, like a bank vault that’s already been broken into but all evidence of the desecration lost.

 .........................

My major creative work investigates the role of monuments and memory in recollections of trauma. It depicts actual events and began life as creative non-fiction but I feel more comfortable and even empowered by telling this story from a third-person point of view. I believe my work sits in the often contested space between narrative fiction and autobiography, an area in which there is room for me to play without encountering the “conflict between life and writing” (Sutherland) and the inevitable question: my truth or yours? I have drawn on the memoir novel The Last Thread, by Michael Sala, in which he documents the early trauma of his life through the character of Michaelis. I have drawn also on the memoir Reckoning, by Magda Szubanski, in which she weaves the wartime history of Poland through personal recollections of growing up uncertain of her sexuality in the Melbourne suburbs during the 1960s. My experiences with sexual abuse and the resulting trauma have been revisited in recent years through the lens of Clementine Ford’s self-described manifesto Fight Like A Girl, in which she addresses her own trauma by taking a refreshingly reactionary stance against male toxicity and its impact on girls and women. I have also drawn on several essays in Anne Teresa Demo and Bradford Vivian’s collection Rhetoric, Remembrance and Visual Form: Sighting Memory in investigating the roles of history, place, monuments and memory in the perpetuation of trauma. 

Do we build monuments to our trauma? Do we set them in concrete and let them cast shadows over us for the rest of our lives? In August 2017 a video circumnavigated the globe in a matter of hours. It showed a group of people chanting and wailing as they brought down a statue of a Confederate soldier outside a courthouse in Durham, North Carolina. (Jackson and Ellis) The backdrop of the video was the death a few days earlier of a young woman named Heather Heyer, who had been protesting against a violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Days later, a group of protesters tired of being looked down upon by old-school white supremacists on monuments took matters into their own hands. In the viral video, there are loud cheers as the tin soldier is duly unmounted from his lofty pedestal. The metal flattens into the ground like putty, constitutionally bereft of any resistance to the revolution. Indigenous journalist Stan Grant was prompted by these scenes to question the “damaging myth”, perpetuated by monuments around Australia, that the continent was discovered and not invaded by Captain James Cook (Grant). Through non-fictional narrative and historical research, my work asks where is our resistance to a history that doesn’t recognise our grief? How can we shift our trauma if it is fixed in its place, rooted in the ground and reinforced in stone?

In Michael Sala’s The Last Thread, the setting of Newcastle is a palpable presence. The streets and landscapes described in the book are very familiar to me and in some cases represent the sites of my own trauma. The following passage describes the closest thing to ancient monuments in the city in which Michaelis seeks to recreate the comforting traditions and memories of his childhood in Holland:

This part of the town has an older feel, a bit like Europe – the sprawling cathedral above the mall, like something medieval, the ruins of Fort Scratchley on the headland, with cannons that once fired on Japanese submarines. Near the remains of the fort is the break wall and above it the lighthouse. Back from this extend the narrow streets and century-old terraces ravaged by salt. Past that, hidden on the top of a hill, is the school where he first went as a boy six years ago . . . walking with Mum towards the sky through the corridor of figs. (Sala 140-141)

My story incorporates the landmark sites and monuments of Christ Church Cathedral, Newcastle police station, the old legal precinct, The Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate building and the adjacent parkland and cliffs above the ever-present ocean. As Bradford and Demo explain, “physical locations and environments constitute deeply evocative loci of memory. . . . to view landscapes and cityscapes is to remember the past imprinted and continuously reprinted on their natural or physical contours” (7). Beyond bricks and mortar monuments, our trauma is often embedded through our body’s memory in the fabric of the landscape itself.

Sala’s central character Michaelis/Michael lives vicariously through his older brother Con, who is more independent, adventurous and daring than him. Through the course of the book we hear suggestions of Con’s deeply traumatic past, hints but never outright elaborations of sexual abuse at the hands of his father. The narrative reflects a culture in which such abuse is a known but concealed truth, rendered intangible because it never fully exists as fact or fiction. It exists in the contested space of memory, between the past and the present. It is this space in which Michaelis’s mother perpetually resides, between her own past and present and between Newcastle and Holland. She carries the artefacts of her memory in the form of her records – “Neil Young, Neil Sedaka, The Beach Boys, The Mamas and the Papas . . .  from Holland to Australia and back again” (Sala 93). Ernesto Pujol relates the story of his parents’ emigration from Cuba in 1961 and the state-imposed “home inventory” which transferred ownership of all their personal belongings or “visible memories” to the government (181). As Pujol explains, the inventory was “the task of detaching memory from object, so that you could take yourself with you, so that your heart did not remain behind” (181). In my own story, the role of visible memory in perpetuating trauma is reinforced when Jean visits the site of the recently demolished Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate building and finds enormous freedom in the space where it used to be.

In The Last Thread, during the family’s short-lived relocation to Holland and a visit to the war museum, Michaelis struggles to understand the enormity of the Holocaust and asks an innocent question of his mother which reveals two very human but perhaps flawed perspectives of trauma and its place in memory.

 ‘Why did we go there today?’

‘It’s important to know what happened.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know, if enough people know, if they really know about that sort of thing, maybe it won’t happen again.’

. . . He doesn’t understand how knowing about something can stop it from happening again. It’s never been that way for him. Like when he crosses his legs under the table. He’s eight and he’s been doing it forever. When he crosses his legs, Dirk kicks him in the shin. Once the pain has died down, Michaelis just does the same thing again. It is called forgetting. (Sala 99)

This concept is particularly relevant to my own character of Jean, who experiences this childhood phenomenon of “forgetting”, or of removing herself from the trauma, during a sexual assault by a trusted male psychology student in the walled grounds of a mental hospital:

She is lost and struggling to breathe when her childhood survival instinct kicks in, honed in the year before kindergarten when she was unable to resist the lure of the clothes racks in Kmart and would hide herself underneath them and sing quietly to herself. She would be found by her panicked mother after long minutes of searching. Just stay here and someone will come.

When the trauma is repeated some years later by a different perpetrator, Jean leaps immediately to the conclusion that it must have been due to “something she had done”. This confirms the concept that, perhaps especially for women with regard to sexual assault and abuse, being aware of the potential for trauma cannot necessarily stop it from happening. 

In Reckoning, Szubanski’s references to the fallen monuments of Warsaw, where her father was born, represent the trauma her father experienced but never reveals. It runs deeply but silently in the family’s fabric, an inter-generational trauma that Szubanski feels the impact of but struggles to understand. Her visit to Auschwitz with her parents in 1992 (Szubanski 256), like Michaelis’s visit to the war museum, illustrates the role of monuments in trauma. A haunting legacy to one of the world’s greatest traumas, the former Nazi concentration camp attracts hundreds of tourists each year, perhaps seeking some tangible hold on the incomprehensible horror of the Holocaust. Szubanski describes the buildings themselves as “Blunt broken ruins, bits of concrete upended like outcroppings shifted by vast geological trauma” (Szubanski 256), as if the now invisible human trauma had somehow caused a deep seismic impact. She describes it as “hell on earth”, and “the world’s shrine and cemetery”, left to the custodianship of the deeply damaged Polish race (Szubanski 257). The notion of geological remnants of trauma is revisited soon after, as Szubanski recounts the dual mythical and scientific origins of Polish amber. In each version the golden substance is created through trauma, whether it be as the tears shed by Phaeton’s grieving sisters the Heliades in Ovid’s “sunshine and sorrow” myth (Szubanski 257) or the trauma of trees which secrete the resin to heal their wounds. The substance is transformed “over vast geological time” (Szubanski 258) into fossilised amber but remains buried beneath the floor of the Baltic Sea until it is freed by “tides and cataclysms ” (Szubanski 258) and floats on the salt water to begin another life as a treasure, sometimes with a visible relic of the trauma - like an insect - trapped inside. In her introductory chapter, Szubanski describes the 15thcentury surgical practice in which holes were cut into patients’ skulls to extract “the stone of madness” and relieve them from their symptoms.

I swear sometimes I can feel that stone in my head. A palpable presence, an unwelcome thing that I want to squeeze out of my skull like a plum pip, using nothing but the sheer pressure of thought and concentration. If I just think hard enough . . . 

That stone was my father’s legacy to me, his keepsake. Beneath his genial surface, somewhere in the depths, I would sometimes catch a glimpse – of a smooth, bone-coloured stone. A stone made of calcified guilt and shame. I could feel it.

I can feel it still. (Szubanski 2)

Like the James Fletcher statue central to my own work, Szubanski’s embodied trauma is made of stone. It carries with it a heaviness and permanence like monuments to war heroes or founding fathers, those through which “societies outsource the burden of remembering” (Ruohonen 210). Yet when we carry it as our own personal monument of trauma, experiencing it with our body’s memory, it can be an agonising and debilitating burden. I have tried to emphasise this sense of heaviness in my descriptions of the landscape and sites of trauma in my own story. References to the “stone man”, “the weight of his plinth-bound presence” and “his concrete body” in the passages where Jean communes with the James Fletcher statue above the “concrete steps leading to the edge of the continent” are reflective of the Newcastle landscape and its own visible links to the past. The James Fletcher Hospital site is described as holding historical trauma which has “seeped into every stone”, while the newspaper building is linked to elements of the “subterranean” and “the underworld” before it is razed and reveals the depths of its contamination, or at least Jean’s perception of it, in the earth below. 

Clementine Ford says repeatedly “it’s okay to be angry” – in fact she dedicates a whole chapter of Fight Like A Girlto the subject (264-281) and her rage is never far from the surface throughout the book. It’s good advice which she clearly lives by, but how much rage can we individually shoulder, when it is so draining to be perpetually angry? If it is indeed only the second stage of grief – after denial, and before bargaining, depression and acceptance – then of course anger is valid and necessary but I question how long it can be maintained. In the past 25 years I have covered all five stages of the grieving process and it still enrages me to revisit the sites, both physical and spatial, of my trauma. But that anger and the accompanying grief continue to take something away from us, in the form of energy, and at some point we must dismantle the monuments that perpetuate our rage. 

In the recent, often angry debate over our own monuments to Captain Cook, some said we should leave them unchanged as a reminder of the past - even one that has been altered by the wisdom of ensuing centuries. Others thought an extra plaque, an edit of history, would suffice. I suppose it depends how visible you want your version of the story to be. I chose to document autobiographical events through the character of Jean because I felt more comfortable as the external creator of this story rather than the internalized, powerless victim trapped within it.I have made a conscious decision to play with a character outside of myself in order to narrate the autobiographical events of my life. While I can cross the bridge of memory into the past, emotionally and spatially my 19-year-old self no longer exists. So Jean is a creation, or re-creation, of me. As fantasy author Ursula le Guin writes:  “By ‘imagination,’ then I personally mean the free play of the mind . . . I mean recreation, re-creation, the combination of what is known into what is new” (Sutherland). Jean gave me the ability to craft a story rather than simply document the past. 

Monuments can be comforting, confronting and cautionary. They are weighted with our history and our rage and can be debilitating when carried long distances. In the process of writing my own trauma and traversing the spaces between past and present, truth and fiction, I have come to realise that while we may need to construct monuments to our trauma, it is equally important to deconstruct them. We do not need stony-faced men to look down on us from their high (or low) points in history, where they can overlook everything including human suffering. We need to dismantle them with our own hands and take their place on the pedestal as a mark of who we are and what we have endured. It is important to recognise our painful past and the roles of history, place and memory in the perpetuation of trauma. By removing the stone emblems, brick walls and concrete basements of that trauma we can become our own monuments, no longer weighted markers of a dark past and no longer buried, but sites of freedom and beacons for the future. 


 

Bibliography

Demo, Anna Teresa and Vivian, Bradford. “Introduction.” Rhetoric, Remembrance and Visual Form: Sighting Memory, edited by Anna Teresa Demo and Bradford Vivian, Routledge, 2012, pp1-12.

Ford, Clementine. Fight Like A Girl. Allen and Unwin, 2016.

Grant, Stan. “Stan Grant: It is a ‘damaging myth’ that Captain Cook discovered Australia.” ABCNews. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-23/stan-grant:-damaging-myth-captain-cook-discovered-australia/8833536. Accessed 29 September 2017.

Jackson, Amanda and Ellis, Ralph. “Seven arrested in toppling of Confederate statue in North Carolina.” CNN,http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/14/us/confederate-statue-pulled-down-north-carolina-trnd/index.html. Accessed 29 September 2017.

Pujol, Ernesto. “Inherited and New Memories.” Rhetoric, Remembrance and Visual Form: Sighting Memory, edited by Anna Teresa Demo and Bradford Vivian, Routledge, 2012, pp180-188.

Ruohonen, Johanna. “Silenced Memories: Forgetting war in Finnish public paintings.” Rhetoric, Remembrance and Visual Form: Sighting Memory, edited by Anna Teresa Demo and Bradford Vivian, Routledge, 2012, pp209-227.

Sala, Michael. The Last Thread. Affirm Press, 2012.

Shakespeare, William. “Twelfth Night.” The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, Volume II, Comedies. Oxford University Press, 1987.

Sutherland, Natalie. “The Fiction in Autobiography: Fantasy, Narrative and the Discovery of Truth.” Perilous Adventures10.02. http://perilousadventures.net/1002/sutherland.html. Accessed October 28, 2017.

Szubanski, Magda. Reckoning. Text Publishing, 2015.