Traumata

Atkinson_GR.jpg Meera Atkinson is a Sydney-based writer. She was the recipient of the Varuna Dr Dark Flagship Fellowship for 2017, awarded for non-fiction of outstanding quality in social, historical or political writing. Her monograph, The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2017. She teaches creative writing at the University of Sydney.

www.meeraatkinson.com

traumata (plural of trauma)

/trɔˈmətə/

1. Pathology

a. bodily injuries produced by violence, or any other extrinsic agent.

b. the conditions produced by this; traumatism.

c. the injurious agents or mechanisms themselves.

2. Psychology startling or distressing experiences which have a lasting effect on mental life; shocks.

[Greek: wound]

I wake up tense, nervous system switching onto the wild winds that have rattled the windows all night, making it hard to settle, trapping me in that thin top layer of sleep on which insistent thoughts intrude. I scan the room, tenderness at my temples, rise, and open the curtains. The branches of enormous eucalyptus trees dance out of time against the bruise-grey sky. The sun, breaking through, sparks off leaves. The power goes down.

Do I start with my mother’s fear? My father’s certainty? Or with the blackout rape I rarely think about that took place in a cheap Bondi hotel when I was a teenage alcoholic? I can still see the judgemental brow and hear the tone of the cop (you know the one: sneery, patronising, shaming) tasked with investigating after the police picked me up.

They’re cruising down Campbell Parade in the early hours of a Sunday in 1981 and there on the side of the road stands a young woman holding the flattened side of a cardboard box against her naked body, having snatched it up while running through a fluoro-lit car park. Is it even necessary to tell that story? Haven’t we heard enough? It occurs to me now I don’t recall this rape ever coming up in therapy. It had some competition.

The poet Eileen Myles says that writers spend so much time ‘processing, consuming [and] creating an alternative self that is entirely composed of language so that there are precise speeds or toxins or organs in it that work in concert with the state that you are in and can only neutralize your own pain by vanishing into a song composed of exactly that timbre’. I think she means there is a place we go for the magic of disappearing and arriving simultaneously – some kind of dissolving communion. I was lonely then. Or maybe I should say I was lonely then in a way I’m not lonely now. That’s how I came to be at a bar, on my own, aged eighteen, letting some guy buy me drinks till I was drunk enough to go back to a hotel with him and his friends. This is not a confession or a hard-luck yarn, though there is some hard luck in it. This is not about me, or only me, my me-ness. There’s a reason I’m telling you this.

I understand you want to know what kind of book this will be and whether you can count on me. I’m thinking about how to respond.

Einstein and the new generations of quantum physicists have been telling us for years that the past, present and future are illusions. Time is not what it seems. I’m paying attention here to all of the times. It puts me on edge, splits me into fragments held together by these flimsy words, by the act of bashing imaginary ink into shapes and arranging them into more elaborate shapes and silent sounds you can decipher. A clue: the beginning is not the beginning. This is not just about rape, or my rape. It’s about the big rape: patriarchy, with its endemic traumata.

Patriarchy seems like an old-fashioned word, a twentieth-century word. I feel I’m showing my age in invoking it, but there is no other word that gets at it. The Ancient Greek word patriarkhes denoted a society where power was maintained and passed down through elder males. In modern parlance, a ‘patriarchal society’ generally refers to one in which men are predominantly represented in positions of power as head of the family unit, bosses in the workplace and leaders in government. Though some like to think ‘the patriarchy is dead’ (Hanna Rosin in Slate), and others view patriarchy as ‘a term used by feminists, to blame men for all their problems’ (Urban Dictionary), many feminist thinkers still use the word patriarchy to ‘describe the society in which we live today, characterised by current and historic unequal power relations between women and men whereby women are systematically disadvantaged and oppressed’ (London Feminist Network). In this rendering, the political, economic and social systems established over millennia function as a structural reinscribing of patriarchy, so that, for example, even when women are admitted into roles of responsibility and representation, including high-level leadership – such as Theresa May as Prime Minister of Britain or Hillary Clinton as US Secretary of State and presidential candidate – they are bound to, and by, the institutions and attitudes established by patriarchy, which continue to disadvantage women (and others on the lower realms in patriarchy social orders).

What do I mean, then, when I say this is a book about patriarchy and its endemic traumata? I mean I’m going to make the case that patriarchy is inherently traumatic, and that we might coin a new word – traumarchy – to denote the intersection of the two. Why, then, am I talking, in the next breath, of myself, my life? I have to speak from the inside out because patriarchy isn’t ‘out there’. Our skin is not an impenetrable barrier against its effects. It infiltrates our beings and shapes our lives – first from the outside in, then from the inside out.

The word memoir comes from the Latin memoria, recast into French, mémoire, during the fifteenth century. People think you have to be special to write memoir, but I, for one, am a cliché. This book exists not because trauma and shit going down in childhood is exceptional or inherently interesting, but because it’s chronic, commonplace, sometimes dramatic and often tedious in its stranglehold of repetitions, daily struggles, and predictable and unpredictable outcomes, and no one gets out alive. And then there’s the question of my unreliable memory, my damaged brain. What does it mean to communicate a fractured, faded memory?

If I told you I’ve heard thousands of stories and witnessed the ravages in the lives of countless friends, acquaintances and passing strangers in detoxes, rehabs, support and therapy groups, you’d think I was exaggerating, but there it is, everywhere we turn: in news headlines and advertisements, on the street, behind every closed door. Course, not everyone lives in the slipstream of a familial clusterfuck of trauma, but even the most well-adjusted and loving of families aren’t immune to tragedy, freak accidents and diabolical developments, and we draw generational straws in cultural clusterfucks such as fascistic, oppressive regimes, unjust systemic structures, economic depressions, and wars (military, psychological, domestic). Not all unfortunate events or even extreme sufferings are traumatic, but many are.

Some live with unimaginable clusterfucks. Syrian refugees rejected at every border. Survivors of concentration camps. First Nations people torn from family and country. In any event, clusterfuck is the turf we’re on. We’re on the trail of religious imperialism, notepads at the ready. We’re investigating its misogynies and carnage. We’re tracking the shadows of liberalism, that project of modernity and the Enlightenment. We’re taking down the statistics, and plotting revolution. There are those who appear to come out unscathed, but few really are. A lot of people lie. You want to know what kind of book this will be. It will slip between viral shimmerings like photographs out of focus with ghostly figures in the background (they mean us no harm), part manifesto, part epic poem, part library, part love letter, always a conversation. Are you listening?

A note from my mother: ‘I carried you in fear because I had two miscarriages before. I tried not to, but in the trying was the fear. You were born sucking your thumb. It was a very easy birth as births go. You whimpered like a baby puppy for about three weeks. It used to break my heart. You would only open your eyes in the early night morning hours. It was three weeks before your dad saw them. I just loved you so much and always will. I was twenty-nine and my first Saturn return was happening. My own lack of nurturing was just emerging and we both suffered. There was love and fun also, and the process goes on …’

When I was twenty-six and two years sober, one of the many self-help books I resorted to in desperation suggested gathering together photos of early childhood with a view to reconnecting with the ‘inner child’. I had no baby photos so I wrote my mother, whom I rarely saw during those years due to my tendency to freeze in a constellation of encrypted, overwhelming emotion in her presence, a state that expressed itself in less than loving behaviour. The overexposed black and white photo she sent, along with this note, written in her lilting hand on powder blue paper, shows a baby not long in the world swaddled in soft cotton blankets in a latticed, frilly cot with an enormous bow on the side. Only a head of black hair is visible and a three-quarter profile of a small sleeping face with eyes closed tight.

This is the gestation story my mother told me when I was a child. She’d already had two miscarriages by the time I was conceived. They were trying for a girl and had just about given up; while contemplating adoption my mother fell pregnant again towards the end of 1962. When I was six months in the womb, some drama, the details of which died along with my mother’s body, sent her to the hospital. Doctors listened for a heartbeat and could hear none. They thought the foetus was dead and prepared to remove it, but my mother grew agitated and refused to let them. In order to placate her they agreed to leave it until morning. When they came back the next day there was a strong heartbeat. A miracle! They ordered her to rest for the remainder of her pregnancy. I can’t be sure the bit about the miracle is true. That might be the embellishment of a fanciful child’s imagination, but one thing is certain, because one of her oldest and closest friends confirms it: my mother spent many months of the pregnancy confined to bed, reading, as she had done throughout her sickly childhood, fearful of losing me, fearful, as she had been for as long as she could remember. There are times I’ve wondered if I whimpered because I had some pre-verbal sixth sense that the world into which I had arrived was a deeply troubled one, and that I was in for a hell of a ride.

A big blonde moon sits high in the night sky and hundred-k gusts take another power line down. I sit in the dark.

When I came to in that Bondi hotel, I was groggy and disoriented, and being fucked by a guy who wouldn’t stop when I struggled to get out from under him. I said I wanted to go and he said no. After, I lay on my back, rigid, looking at the ceiling, him lying beside me. I remembered being on the roof with him and his friends, then following him to his room, just the two of us. I remembered sitting on the edge of the bed next to him, talking. Then nothing – blank – till I woke up to the pounding. I didn’t know what else he might do, and his not letting me go terrified me. I didn’t know where my clothes were, but I was frantic to leave. I leapt up, made a break for the door and ran. At least I think that’s what happened going by flash-bulb grabs of memory.

Those images dissolve as I reach for them. One moment I make out shapes as if viewing quivering, faded old film; the next they are gone – poof.

As a child I got swept up in the drama of Barbra Streisand crooning about memories illuminating the corners of the mind in her 1970s hit ‘The Way We Were’. Research, however, suggests that memories don’t just occupy or light up a given region of the mind, they are the mind. Reporting on emerging findings, Nick Stockton writes that ‘sensory experience triggers changes in the molecules of your neurons, reshaping the way they connect to one another. That means your brain is literally made of memories, and memories constantly remake your brain.’ Another way to describe it: the brain is ‘plastic’ – dynamic and capable of modifying itself. Stockton quotes neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin explaining that remembering a given memory involves reactivating previous connections between parts of the brain. These connections are fine-tuned at synapses, which are sensitive to the strength or weakness of signals. Kukushkin emphasises that memories haven’t been stored in a system, as if static or fixed in place – rather, memory, which helps us learn from the past with the aim of improving function in the future, is ‘the system itself’.

Light bounces off a face and its rays sharpen to a point on your retina. Your cornea focuses through the eye’s internal lens, converting the image to electrical impulses that speed along your optic nerve like a superhighway to the visual cortex in the brain; as if a camera has been clicked, the image is caught. Someone speaks, their voice making sound waves that travel through the canals of your ears. When the waves hit the eardrum it vibrates and a trio of tiny bones in the middle ear hammer the vibrations towards the snail-like cochlea in the inner ear, where they are transformed into electrical impulses by tiny hair cells and carried to the brain. You smell and chemicals in the air make their way through your nose, sending a message to the brain by means of sensory nerves. You eat and your taste buds detect the chemicals in the food; they transport that sensory input to the brain, resulting in the perception of taste. You are touched and receptors in your skin and muscles race signals up your spinal cord to the brain. Your nervous system shoots impulses along a network of cells and fibres in complex conversations between brain and body. Hormones circulate in your blood and work your nerve cells, making you hungry or horny. This elaborate symphony and the way it makes you feel is in constant play with the environment and the beings and objects you encounter, registering information in more detail than can be consciously acknowledged. Your brain collects and connects it all via neurons and synapses, creating ‘mosaics from these milliseconds-long impressions’, as Stockton puts it. This is the basic process of how each and every memory is made. What’s particularly revolutionary about Kukushkin’s findings is that they suggest ‘your brain’s molecules, cells, and synapses can tell time’. His study concludes that the relation between neurons, molecules and synapses encode these combined sensations as imprints ‘in terms of the relative time they occurred’, packaging the memory into ‘a so-called time window’. It’s obvious how the making of memories might be disrupted or confused by excessive alcohol consumption, but what about trauma?

Trauma theorist Cathy Caruth says the problem of traumatic memory comes down to the inability to fully witness the traumatic event. A gap ‘carries the force of the event and does so precisely at the expense of simple knowledge and memory. The force of this experience would appear to arise precisely, in other words, in the collapse of its understanding.’ This reads like a cryptic puzzle. It feels like a cryptic puzzle, this living with gap-like memories undone by the force of what incites them. Caruth explains that the event, not being registered and integrated in the normal way, cannot become, as Freud’s contemporary Janet called it, ‘narrative memory’. The event cannot become the past. It never settles into its ‘time window’.

People think of memory as being about the past, but that’s a mistake. As Thomas J. Gross writes, citing neuropsychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel, it’s more accurate to say it’s about ‘how the past affects future outcomes’. Biologically, this function of memory is, Gross says, the way in which we construct our reality based on factual knowledge of the world, the way we come to know ourselves as a self. Traumatic memory is a kind of past in the present that informs the future. Those who are significantly affected by it are trapped in a temporal whirl they can neither comprehend nor control. And those of us grappling with its mystifying workings need to heed caution.

Elizabeth Loftus, a researcher of ‘false memory’, says in a TED talk that most people erroneously think of memory like a recording device, but that in reality it is constructed and continually reconstructed. It is as vulnerable as a Chinese whisper. This is murky territory. We want to rewind memory, like tape, to imagine it as mediatised, captured certainty. We want it to be true or false, sound or silence, but either way to be solid. We need to know we’re not mad (or even if we are, that something really happened). Instead memory slides around inside us like blood and between us like a sticky mutating membrane.

As a child I coped with life in a ‘dysfunctional’ addiction-addled family by dancing. My parents separated when I was four, the same age I started ballet. I danced all through my childhood, rocking myself to sleep with fantasies of being a prima ballerina. Then, at the age of twelve, following several harrowing years of domestic violence between my mother and her defacto partner Albert, and in my final year of primary school, I started going to school early and, by special arrangement, writing a novel in the staff room before the teachers arrived.

Though I had no way of knowing it at the time, this childhood attempt at novel writing was a kind of trauma testimony. The story told of a young girl lost alone in the bush, negotiating a host of scary trials and tribulations and triumphing against the odds. There was a fire in the summer and to survive it my heroine jumped into a creek and lay underwater holding her breath for a magic-realist length of time until the fire passed over her. There was a grisly old hermit, stern and distant, and it seems obvious to me now that he was my father. The project marked a shift from dancing and towards language and literature. This is how I became a writer. Unintentionally, while I was busy chasing other leads, pursuing other goals, imagining other lives.

I’ve been published widely and I’ve earned three writing degrees and I teach writing in universities, but I remain humbled by language and writing. In Shadowlands, the film based on the life of writer and scholar C.S. Lewis, a student recounts his father’s adage that ‘we read to know we’re not alone’. And Jonathan Safran Foer once observed, in an interview promoting his debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, that writing is an attempt to not be alone. When I think back to the motivation of my twelve-year-old self, rising early to write a novel in an empty staff room, it is her loneliness that comes to mind – a loneliness born of the maddening disconnect of trauma.

Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Dori Laub cites massive psychic trauma as ‘a record that has yet to be made’. This is his way of describing an experience that occurs too quickly or suddenly to be processed, that fails to leave a mark in thought and language but whose presence is felt and expressed in delayed symptomology. Caruth puts it this way: ‘In its most general definition, trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena.’ It lurks, transmitting down the line, rearranging cells and relationships. When it resurfaces (surprise!) it may or may not appear pathological. Some traumatised individuals are jailed (the addicts, crims and socioeconomically disadvantaged) while others are rewarded (the shame-driven high-achievers).

When it causes havoc we withstand it like bad weather, nursing child-like fantasies (imperceptible sometimes) of rescue by deus ex machina, that magic moment in a play, novel or film where some divine force descends on a seemingly hopeless situation, saving the day. In Ancient Greek theatre this God was literally lowered from the heavens via a device or ‘machine’, which is why it translates from Latin as ‘God out of the machine’. I don’t mean to sound defeatist when I say I have given up waiting for the God out of the machine and that I think the machine is swallowing us all up. It’s true that like Nick Cave I don’t hold with the notion of an interventionist God, but if I did it would be writing. In writing and reading, a touch of salvation is possible, a loosening from the machine, some kind of rising out of it, some kind of not being lonely, the balm of world-making words.

This book had its unwitting beginnings back in 2007 when I wrote about my experience of growing up with violence in a memoir essay titled ‘The Exiled Child’ for Divided Nation, the fifteenth edition of Griffith Review. It was later reprinted in The Age, where some tasteless sub-editor had rebranded it with the punny, cringeworthy title: ‘Home Is Where the Pain Is’. It was shortlisted for the Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate in the 2007 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, up against Frank Moorhouse, Amanda Lohrey and Noel Pearson (Moorhouse won). I had never before had this kind of response to a published piece. I lost count of the number of people who tracked down my email address and wrote to me. And several years later it proved the catalyst for my return to university to undertake a PhD on transgenerational trauma and its literary testimony. I’d already spent years coming to terms with how trauma played out in my own life, and I wanted to understand more about how it worked socially.

In other words, I had been writing a long time before I realised trauma was a grand theme. It’s not a particularly original grand theme since most books, at least so far as poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction are concerned, deal with trauma one way or another. I have no unique claim to it. As trauma tales go there are far worse than mine: in many ways my traumatic experiences have taken place in a privileged context. I’m a white woman from a western, working-middle-class family. I’m not moneyed or financially secure, working as a sessional academic and teacher, one of the many anxious labourers in the rising new class of the precariat, but I am rich in social capital, and have benefited from good fortune. I write about trauma because I don’t know how else to live with it, because I’m still coming to terms with it, still searching for connections, and because I know many others are too.

During my research and reading across continental philosophy, cultural psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralism, one of the works I found most compelling was a book of collected essays by Hungarian–French analysts Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török. Edited and elaborated on by Nicholas Rand, the essays emphasise transgenerational trauma by way of strikingly gothic conceptions. They speak of the ‘crypt’, the ‘phantom’ and ‘psychic tombs’. Abraham and Török’s thinking and writing about trauma are so poetic that reading them inspired a poem in homage:

Writing a Dear John letter while reading Abraham and Török

Dear [insert name here],

You have eaten me

(a me that stands in for another that is).

They call it incorporation.

You swallowed me deep in your belly of

unsobbable sobs, of

unsayable to-be-saids

in your belly of rotting sugar.

You kept me on a chain

like a pet

you starve

at the door of the crypt (of your child mother).

They call you a cryptophore, a poem, a poet.

They dare to rewrite Hamlet and I dare to rewrite you.

Of course the secret,

not just any secret,

not just a secret,

but a tomb, an enclave, a haunting …

your grandmother God in her cardigans

giving you the gaps, giving you the fear,

the wordless passing of the baton

of shame, of shame

and the silence of corpses screaming.

They call it the phantom.

I want out your belly love,

to stand with Hamlet in an ending re-imagined,

in an ending where

only the dead

are buried.

‘Poetry has always been able to utter the will of free will, coming back to the memory of words and extracting its sense and time,’ says Julia Kristeva, the philosopher, literary critic, feminist theorist and psychoanalyst. What does the free will want but to be free, to live? Abraham and Török speak of working-through/mourning/healing as a mysterious but affirming force of psychic life, the result of processing everything from whatever’s in your field of vision (wind-shivery leaves) to your worst nightmare. It can be facilitated by therapy but is by no means limited to it. Reading and writing are among the many currencies in which it moves. This force has worked overtime on my anxiety and panic attacks, addictions, agoraphobia, and many-headed compulsions, which are never only mine. It does what it can under the circumstances and the circumstances aren’t always conducive. It’s alive and pumping, but it gets tired. In short, it’s chalked up some wins and some losses, though neither is absolute.

I spent hours that night at the police station, where I gradually sobered up. There were tests at the hospital, and my