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Trauma narratives/punk rock

An excerpt from "Heart Berries" Terese Marie Mailhot's Afterword interview with Joan Naviyuk Kane

Q: I asked about why you wrote the book and you said, "One reason is there is so much criticism about the sentimentality of writing about trauma. Writing about it is irrefutably art but also does the work of saying something. Women (survivors sic) should be able to say this and say it however we want. There's so much pushback about how a child abuse narrative can't be art." Can you say more?

TMM: I know the book isn't simply an abuse narrative, but then it is. I was abused, and brilliant women are abused, often, and we write about it. People seem so resistant to let women write about these experiences, and they sometimes resent when the narrative sounds familiar. It's almost funny because, yeah - there's nothing new about what they do to us. We can write about it in new ways, but what value are we placing on newness? Familiarity is boring, but these fucking people - they keep hurting us in the same ways. It's putting the onus on us to tell it differently, spare people melodrama, explicative language, image, and make it new. I think, well, fuck that. I'll say how it happened to me, and by doing that maybe it can become new. I took the voice out of my head that said writing about abuse is too much, that people will think it's sentimental, or pulling at someone's pathos, unwilling to be art. By resisting the pushback, I was able to write more fully and, at times, less artfully about what happened. 

I remember my first creative writing professor in nonfiction asked his class not to write about abortions or car wrecks. I thought, You're going to know about my abortion in detail (if only ther had been a car crash that same day). I dont think there's anything wrong with exploring familiar themes in the human experience. When the individual gets up and tells her story, there's going to be a detail so real and vivid it places you there and you identify. I belive in the author's right to tell any story, and the closer it comes to a singular truth, the more art they render in the telling.

Q: Can you speak to the competing impulses of memoir being therapeutic at the expense of being imaginative or provocative/hurtful/critical?

TMM: Cathartic or therapeutic, those words are sometimes used to relate a feeling, like a sign of relief or release, but therapy is fucking hard. My therapists don't pity me, not the good ones; they made me strip myself of pandering, manipulations, presentation - they wanted the truth more desperately than I did, and then they wanted me to speak it - live it every moment. I feel like writing is that way. Writing can be hard therapy. You write, and then read it, revise your work to be cleaner, sharper, better, and then, when you have the best version of yourself (not rhetorically, but you've come close to playing the music you hear in your head_ - you give it time and re-read it - you go back to work - it seems endless. Nothing is ever communicated fully. The way being healed is never real unless every moment of every day you remind yourself of your progress and remind yourself not to go back, or hurt someone, or do the wrong thing - it's not healing unless you keep moving and you're never done. The work of "never done": therapy and writing.

 (It's no accident that the critique of "we've heard this before/it's too sentimental/it's too personal" is never leveled at the zillions of white men writing their zillion stories of their suburban repression,"generational family drama", addictions/divorces/affairs with students and etcetera? zzzzz The critique is leveled at women because women aren't supposed to be talking, or writing, period. This is the cultural, social REALITY of institutionalized sexism. And not only are women supposed to never talk, but women of color are supposed to not even have the thought to talk, and trans/lgbtq people are supposed to not even have the hope to think to talk. Aren't you bored with the stories of white men yet? You want to know how we survive, there's nothing more compelling, decolonize your library, decolonize your mind 

 

SURVIVES/how

When you feel the impossible

breathing down your neck

you're on the right track. Don't 

stop, the physics of moving create the energy

that will keep you alive. Life is fierce. There is space

 

beyond trauma, a place

not quite fully imagined. There is no map, no path,

only pathlessness. Mystery is

a wild freedom, a way to 

stitch the body to the soul again, outside of

the dogma of patriarchy, which tells us

to live without telling

the truth of how we got here.

No path in or out.

What is lost is lost. Do not remove

 

the people who do these things  

from the community - force them

in close, so their faces

touch my face, where I'm safe 

and they must inhale the width and breadth

of their violence. Set them loose

 

into the crazy range of mountains where bears

rule, where they must learn

to recognize the berry from the poison

or die, how to make fire with a stick 

and a ribbon, how 

to dig and dig with their hands

under hot red suns

to find a trickle of water

they yearn to drink, only

 

they can't drink until they carry

water to the crones roosting in the tops

of dark raggedy pines, in cups

fashioned out of bark and mud

that cracks their palms and soles. They will be

deeply compelled. Forgiveness

 

isn't binary, we can't honor our complexity

within the systems that produce 

the people who would do these things. You belong

 

to a ferocious pack now, on the edge of earth, flowing 

over spiky canyons, scrub and thistle, flowing through

cities like fog, we cannot be contained. We clean wounds

with stones, we hunt and cook on our own. Nobody

 

in this world

is free - some of us are healing. Maybe healing

isn't about forgiveness, maybe

there are too many questions for it to be so simple, such as how

do we define justice and ultimately

love? Build your healing outdoors

 

where you can stoke raging fires - beyond

linear thinking - be open

to the possibility

that liberation depends

on our ability to examine the essential

dynamics of power. Are we able

 

to dismantle power? Be fearless. Perhaps

there is no justice for survivors in 

this world, perhaps

we make a new world. My rapist will never

pay for his crimes. There is

no evening the score, there is no

lost and found. There is courage, though,

 

and open space to create

the beginning

of being fully seen. It's born

in the darkest hour, it emerges

in conversation with another. Like this. You

 

will make your way, I will find it

glorious - 

 

Adele/Machines/Field      

photograph ©EUnderwood 2017

 

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