The child in an imaginary language.
An imaginary language critiques the adult world by refusing its grammar, lexicon, and syntax. In borrowing from the language of children, an invented mother-tongue supplies a fantastic rejection of the insolubility posed by “mature” framing and discourse.
I’ve been thinking about Janice Eidus' short story, "Robin's Nest," and the percussive intonations of "innocence" in the language of a childhood narrator attempting to deal with the legacy borne by words. When her father's language and explanations fail to describe the mystery of her mother, she formulates new words to explain her mother's silence. The invented language of Ooola offers hope against the authoritarian father, whose authority is maintained by manipulating language.
Oola, the alternative language, presents inventing and imagining as a form of resistance. During the day, the father makes money as a plastic surgeon. The daughter fears being "sculpted" by him. He makes no secret of his will.
"Instead of a nose job, I would give your mother a mind job," he tells her. The man's purpose is to fix the female, the ailing anti war hippie he thinks he saved.
"A mind job hurts," the narrator thinks. "It pushes words down into your brain." She seeks a text she can read, a language in which she can find herself outside her father's violence. Male violence is the story of creation that the narrator needs to refuse in order to create herself, another story. She envisions her mother's silence as a vessel holding back magic. Envisioning this carves a space within her lineage, within her inheritance, where the daughter can speak outside the words owned by men. Feminism as a means of giving voice, passing mike.
The harm done by language is both social and personal. The valence is an echolocation, as one sees in the consideration of pretty words, as the narrator wonders if they should add "amnesty" to their private language? Will they keep its meaning or use it to describe something else?
How do we define relational responsibility to our children when we represent their narratives and identities in poems?
Who narrates the story of the “foreign” orphan?
How is power demonstrated, communicated, and solidified in the narrative choices made by magazines, journals, and academic publishers?
What do "autonomy and consent mean in the context of lived relationships and memorial tributes?
Who, historically, has been more impacted by the privatization and erasure of parenting labor and experience?
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In For Your Own Good, Alice Miller examines the pedagogical assumptions of corporal punishment (a.k.a. spanking). The final paragraph reads:
Turning away from the truth will never help us preserve love, and the love we have for our parents is no exception. The act of forgiveness will not help as long as it serves to disguise the facts. For love and self-delusion are mutually exclusive. The disavowal of truth, the denial of the sufferings we have been through, is the breeding ground for the kind of hatred that gets deflected onto innocent victims. It is an act of self-deception and an impasse from which there is no way out. Genuine love can face up to the truth.
Implicit in this, the claim that “genuine love” does not face the truth from the safe, protected (arguably cowardly) space of defensiveness.
If Miller has spent a lifetime moving into, around, and through Womanism, the child has been central to her concerns. Paths of Life, for example, explores how confronting our experiences of childhood enable to us to live more richly into the future. How the home environment and emotional relationships we experience prime us for the way we live out our own lives. The neural pathways are thickened with us, programming us to experience the same lives as our parents unless we engage in self-reflection.
Anika tries to talk to her mother about the way in which she felt forced to keep her feelings a secret as a child. She says it is difficult to love yourself when a mother “finds your longing for contact, truth, understanding to be annoying, personally offensive, or even actively dangerous”. I think of the televisions blaring in all the rooms of the American home, offering pretexts to discuss things further from our hearts, further from the thick of things.
For Anika, this disdain for emotions is not something easily shaken off. She explains: “...gradually you arrive at the unconscious conviction that you have to suppress these cravings for any kind of connection if you want to get along with people”. When others suffered, Anika tried to find ways in which it might be her fault. This gave her a means of alleviating the lack of control without giving in to the taboo empathy.
Still proper in her older years, Anika’s mother is disturbed by this encounter. Her response is mainly one of fear- “fear of genuinely understanding the connections Anika was trying to show existed between their two lives”. Anika’s mother can’t break free from the lies she has lived by in order to draw close to her daughter. For her, the price is too high.
Margo and Lilka fear recognizing one another because, to do so, they will need to recognize the part of themselves back when they were friends in prewar Warsaw. The sounds of names breaks down the barrier to memory. Margo admits she married her first husband without loving him because her father told her “love and real life were two different things”. After he died in the Shoah, she took his mantra of love being an illusion without question. Later, while active in the Polish resistance movement, Margo met a man named Janek and fell in love. She felt this “as a return to my own self, to my first love, a love that I had been unfaithful to”.
The chapter “Gurus and Cult Leaders” points to the importance of finding suppressed memories opening a void of interpretation. Gurus and cult leaders open these doors and insinuate themselves as the answer. Children who have been raised in families where obedience was “enforced” and the father’s authority was never predicated on whether he deserved to wield it or not are prey to cultish religious groups. Miller rejects the Freudian concept of infantile sexuality, which she thinks masks the consequences of sexual abuse in children. Rather than acknowledge their victimhood as children, Freudians and Reichians insist it is natural, a part of growing up- what every child needs to become an adult.
The open, unquestioning psyche of the child enables them to accept sexual abuse as a kind of “surrogate emotional nourishment”. Miller says “that first, unquestioning love of our parents is so deeply rooted that hardly anything can destroy it, and certainly not insight into the truth.” Since kids can’t understand why someone they love would injure them, they reinterpret that behavior as right. In this way, “cruelty is given a positive valuation in the child’s cognitive system, and that valuation will be retained for life.”
One way in which adults deny the violence done to them as children and continuing the cycle of abuse burned so deep in their brains is through “sophisticated ideological justifications” which “allow them to pass it off as a good thing”. Miller notes that “the less inclination they show to recognize and revise this ingenious self-delusion, the more likely it is that others will be made to suffer the consequences.”
Miller came to this view after studying the childhoods of mass murderers and dictators, in her words:
All of them without exception were exposed to the horrors born of hypocrisy, and all of them ignored or denied the fact in later life. […] The atmosphere of hypocrisy they grew up in taught them to see cruelty as something good and useful.
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A child battered and humiliated in the name of parental ‘care’ will quickly internalize the language of violence and canting insincerity and come to see it as the only effective medium of communication.
The “knowing witness” is defined as a person who actively helps them to recognize the wrong done to them for what it is and to articulate their sorrow for what has happened. Miller’s view resorts to the Freudian subconscious in order to explain why cycles of violence continue, namely, parents abuse their own kids in ways that repeat their own childhood abuse because feelings are stored in the “form of unconscious memories”. In turn, the unconscious memories “drive them to reproduce those repressed scenes over and over in the vain attempt to liberate themselves from the fears that cruelty and abuse have left with them.”
This is a ‘false’ liberation because “the effects of the past don’t change as long as they remain unnoticed”. The perpetrator goes in search of new victims, projects fear and hatred onto new scapegoats, and thus keeps himself from coming to term with the memories and feelings.
Notably, “liberation” is still at stake in Miller’s metaphysics. Although “liberation” feels limpid to me, Miller’s insights on avowing one’s anger are salient:
As long as the anger directed at a parent or other first caregiver remains unconscious or disavowed, it cannot be dissipated. It can be taken out only on oneself or stand-ins, on scapegoats such as one’s own children or alleged enemies. The variety of hatred that masquerades as religious ideological zeal is particularly dangerous because it’s imperviousness to moral categories makes it unassailable.
When personal hatred is attributed to a divinity, it cannot be discussed except as a means of refusing to be accountable for the feeling itself. The scapegoating of a god occurs in tandem with scapegoating of minorities and vulnerable persons.
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How can poets address issues of social justice like ableism and economic privilege without speaking to the evidence garnered from their lived experience as parents?
Henri Lefebvre thought habit memory was a key to how children assumed the identity of a social group. "Dressage" includes the combat boots of the 1990's as well as other historically-specific socializations in fashion and self-presentation. There is the sense that we knew who we were then—or that knowing the self was easier.
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What does it mean to designate an entire portion of one's life (i.e. parenting) as unacceptable in writing? Or to designate, for example, the neurodivergence of one's child, as an "unacceptable" topic in literature?
Dr. Harlow’s experiments in the 1950’s showed that animals raised by artificial "robot" mothers later turned aggressive and showed no interest in their own offspring. They were primed for limited interaction.
Studies suggest that obedience training established in early infancy "stunts the development of such human capacities as compassion and pity for the sufferings of others". The learned behavior involves ignoring suffering and assessing the self in relation to rule-following ability. It has been suggested that children raised to perform obedience develop into adults that find it difficult to express, inhabit, or permit emotion when confronted with misfortune or tragedy.
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A few questions for writers thinking through the currency of violence, the sheer cash of it, the money money money and power and glory violence promises . . . and the notebooks in which we can permit ourselves to ask difficult questions about our own roles in the transactions of liberation:
List the lies you remember living in order to make a childhood “safe.” Or list the lies you saw friends living. Note how the lie was understood differently by the child and the adult. Which verbs made things actionable? Which verbs were deemed “appropriate”?
How did “Freudian” notions of sexuality impact the childhood in question? What is relationship between trust and sexual self in your mind, in the self-narrations that sustain your concept of selfhood?
Are there any correlations between having been physically abused or spanked and believing war to be a just and reasonable means of resolving difficult problems? Are there any anecdotes that challenge this association?
Which ideas and/or systems of belief were involved in your socialization? For example, "might makes right"; pledge of Allegiance; flag worship; anti-Muslim xenophobia; highly gendered household roles; Christian misogynies, neoliberal meritocracy; bootstrap exceptionalism, etc.
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Finally, loosely, to puncture the balloon a bit more, how do neoliberal notions of property, privacy, and ownership inflect our notions of "propriety" in writing?
What happens if one tries to write about the vapidity that is contemporary mothering?
Rachel Cusk on writing A Life’s Work about the strange silences of motherhood
How (if at all) do these questions implicate the failures of feminism and intersectionality in American poetics historically and at present? And to whom does it matter?