The new wounded

All week long I’ve suffered the
indignity of a cold.  It started
with my lost voice and moved up and down from my nose to my chest.  It’s subsiding now but the urge not to
cough at all the wrong times is excruciating, for instance to break into that
hacking racket in the middle of a lecture is almost as bad as having your
mobile phone go off in the middle of a public talk. 
There’s something awful about trying to stop a cough from starting
through sheer force of will.  It’s
that sneaky little itch that lands mid throat that makes my eyes water and my
nose run and try as I might to ignore it I have to cough it away.  Delicate sips of water are not enough.  
Sometimes my body becomes even more of
an irritant than I’d like.  And
immediately my mother’s  mantra to ‘think of the starving Biafrans’ comes racing through.  After all it could be so much worse.
On Thursday night I took myself off
to a free public lecture at the University of Melbourne.  Ruth Leys talked about a group of people she and others call ‘the new wounded’.  She talked
about the ways in which people suffering from trauma are viewed differently
over time.  
There’s a theorist from
France, Catherine Malabou, who argues essentially that all people who’ve been
traumatised, whether through abuse or torture or war or accident, whether as a
consequence of literal brain trauma such as in brain injury or even folks with
schizophrenia and autism are part of this new category.  Her emphasis is on what she calls ‘cerebrality’.  The brain and affect.  
For these people the consequences are dire indeed.  In Malabou’s terms they lose all
connection to the past before the traumatic event and become almost like
robots, affect-less people unable to make decisions, unable to feel compassion
and so on.  These people, these
victims if you like, are no different in Malabou’s terms from the
perpetrators.  All have been traumatised so badly as to cease
to exist as they once were.  The lack all intentionality.  
She
has a point.  But it’s one I think
she takes to extremes.  It’s the
sheer physicality of her view, that we are bodies first and foremost and if our
brains get damaged in whatever way, whether literally through injury or
emotionally through trauma, we can change so dramatically as to cease to be
human.  The old us no longer exists.  
Ruth Leys argues against this
extreme view.  She reckons, and I
agree, that we are far more complex. 
What about resilience, as one person in the audience asked, and the fact
that some people cope with trauma differently? Some do well in spite of the
worst and others break down completely.
I find this fascinating, struggling
with these ideas, which I’ve boiled down in far too simple terms.  
My daughter who joined me for the talk
kept digging me in the ribs for my enthusiasm during question time.  She complained that I nodded my head in agreement with the speaker too many times.
‘You’re such a suck’ she said to me
later.  ‘You have to agree with
everything she says.’
 I think about
this now later and wonder.  Am I a
suck or was I merely trying to respond to a talk about which I felt
enthusiastic.  I try hard to engage with talks because if I’m going to sit for a hour listening to someone speak on a topic that’s
dear to their heart and meaningful, a talk I have elected to attend because
it’s on a topic that is also of interest to me, then I
want to make the most of it.  
I
want to join in the talk as though there’s only the two of us, the speaker and
me and maybe one or two others, in the room.  I hate the distance that can emerge between speaker and
audience.  I want a conversation,
not a monologue.  I find if I
engage with all of me, including my nodding head or furrowed brow at times when
things don’t make sense to me then I’m more likely to take things in and to
remember.  
Most of the time I’m not conscious of this, until a daughter jabs me in the ribs.  Most of the time I sense I’m like any other member of the audience.  
 My daughter I expect is fearful that I
will embarrass her, after all Melbourne University is her stomping ground.  It was once mine many moons ago but now
it’s her place.  I must not take over her territory.  

Crazy love

This morning I have no voice.  I lost it over night to a cold
that has grabbed my throat and will not let me speak.  I put it down at a physical level to
ill health but at an emotional level to a talk I gave on Thursday
afternoon to a small group of academics.  
My talk went down like a sack of potatoes, at least it did as far as I
could see and I’ve been feeling sick, bad and voiceless ever since.
What did I do wrong I keep asking
myself?  I don’t think it was the
delivery.  I usually speak well
enough.  I have a clear voice.  Was it the content, one of those
situations where people do not know how to respond because I somehow wrapped it
all up and left no room for further discussion? 
The topic was not the easiest:
sexual domestic violence  and
feminism.  Perhaps I should not
have expected more from an unsuspecting audience. 
I threw a little theory at them and
one woman described it as a summary. 
Another said she agreed with all I had said and there was nothing more
to say.
I find I am re-thinking the whole
domestic violence thing.  The reign
of terror under which I lived as a child and for which I then held my father
responsible – his alcoholism and abused childhood – is shifting. 
I listened to another of those TedX talks in which Lesley Morgan Steiner tells the story of how she met and married
a man when she was 22 and of how this man was kindness personified when they
first dated.  Right up until a few
days before they married he did not threaten or abuse her. 
She married him and stayed with him
in part because she believed that underneath it all he was a good and troubled
man and that it was her job to help him. 
She stayed with him because over time he had made decisions to move away
from family and friends into a more isolated part of the world and she had gone
along because she thought it would be good for him.  
You do these things, she thought then.  You make sacrifices for your loved one
even if it goes against your own wishes and needs. Crazy love.
My mother agreed to come to
Australia on my father’s urging and my mother has described a similar pattern,
only now do I recognise more clearly the degree to which she became trapped in
an impossible marriage and could not get out. 
I recognise that statistics are
unreliable but it surprises me to read that people who get out of abusive
relationships such as Morgan Steiner describes – a man who pulled her by the
hair across a room, bashed her against the wall, and repeatedly threatened her
with a gun – are in serious danger.  
Seventy percent of such people, mainly women, will die at the hands of the
partner they are trying to escape. 
It is the most critical phase of such a relationship because the one
deserted will feel he/she has nothing to lose.
I’m troubled by the degree to which
Steiner describes her ex husband’s behaviour as pre-meditated.  He had sought to isolate her, Steiner
says, almost as if he were grooming her for abuse, but I expect the pattern
might seem like that in retrospect.  
Here again is another person who himself had been abused.  And although not all people who have
been abused go on to become abusers, some do, and I suspect much of what they
have learned at the hands of their abusive parents, or step parents, or whoever
it was who treated them so cruelly, they might well inflict the same on their
own loved ones.
My mother’s mantra, ‘ he loves most
those he hurts the most’, never made sense to me when I was young.  It does now.  Not that I condone it but I recognise that when someone has
been damaged they have almost no other way of dealing with their internal
trauma than to project it out and inflict it on those most vulnerable and
closest to them, their spouses, their children. 
Mostly this sort of violence occurs
by men towards women, but there are also men who get into abusive relationships
with women who have themselves been abused.  It’s not exclusively a woman’s club but it is a club of
those abused and abusers and the only way to help, as Steiner says, is to talk
about it. 
Steiner escaped her relationship
after she told others about it, her family, her neighbours, her friends.  Anyone who would listen.  
Funny that I should feel so locked
inside the bubble of my own childhood memories today, unable to get out of it after I
gave my talk last week, because I fear I may have unwittingly inflicted
something on my audience for which they were unprepared and rather than abuse me
back – they were not cruel – they froze me out with silence, not entirely perhaps but
polite and distant enough for me to feel like an outsider who has since lost
her voice.