On ghost, names and history

 Names and words bear traces that are not the same for everyone. By naming our ghosts, might we perhaps manage to free ourselves of them, a little? Neige Sinno

How do we identify our ghosts, those that creep through the recesses of our minds and pop up when we least expect.

Uncomfortable memories that haunt us still.

I still can’t believe Michael is dead. A man who chose to employ me from a group of others for what I now consider subjective reasons. We clicked. A shared Catholic heritage we each had rejected, and a sensibility that spoke to a love of words and of people.

I would have chosen him as a partner if I had the chance but in no time we’d have clashed. His love of travel for one. Though I remember him telling me once that when people look forward to their trips abroad they forget to recognise or remember there are still 24 hours to every day. You still need to find food to eat and places to sleep. Even if you book ahead of time, it’s not the same as the security of home. That predictable sense of not having to wonder where you might sleep each night or what you might eat. It’s easy enough to imagine. The horrors of homelessness.

The uncertainty of when and where.

There are many Michaels in my life, a brother a nephew, friends. Oh, to be named after an arch angel. One of the warriors for Christ and a good angel at that. Not like Lucifer, the bad angel. 

I thought of Lucifer when I read the newspaper headline this morning. It talked of a group of neo-Nazis holding a meeting after a parade in a small country town. 

They come out furtively and meet outside the cities, to build up strength to hide and to be seen. 

The article featured the back of a man, shirtless, his back bristling with muscles along with his arms. And around his waist he’d tied a black windcheater, on which was printed a photo of Hitler. 

And I thought of the series I’m watching at present Outrageous. The story of the Mitford sisters, six sisters and one brother in a healthy, once wealthy British family who fall on ill fortune as the father, Farv, is a poor manager of finances and must sell the family estate. 

The Mitfords hob knob with royalty and the eldest becomes a famous novelist, but not before the second eldest brings shame onto the family by marrying in secret the right-wing leader of the fascist army, Sir Oswald Mosley. And one still younger sister Unity, falls in love with and befriends none other than Hitler himself. The Führer takes a fancy to Unity in the years leading to the second world war, while still another sister Rebecca or Decca, becomes a communist and escapes to Spain with her cousin/friend Edmund to fight the good fight in Franco’s war. Such a diverse group of people and all conceived and raised by the same parents. Their politics could not be different.

It reminds me of my own group of nine. We too share political differences as vast as the sea. But perhaps not quite so polarised as the Mitfords. Although some of my siblings, at least one, is seriously wealthy and seem to have forgotten how other people struggle, most of us maintain fixed memories of what it’s like to be poor. What it’s like to struggle and what it’s like to need the help of others. And to help others. Though none of us, to my knowledge, are fascists and we all hate war.

You must hate war if you grew up under the shadow of the last world one. Imagine what it’s like for people born in war zones that never cease to be as such. A man on the radio in Gaza talking about how hard it is for him and his family to be constantly on the move. Having to move his children like a cat trying to find a safe place for her kittens. And other people have caused this disaster.

And I still cannot understand the cruelty of people who forget that we’re all human and we’re all in this together.

When we find names for our children, when we identify or discard our own names, we choose an identity that matches something of our hopes for the future. Something of our shared struggles for identity. 

Funny that the daughter in the Mitfords whose name is Unity should prove so divisive. That a friend of mine whose name means hope should leave me feeling at times hopeless. At least in so far as we cannot connect when once it seemed we did.

And that’s a whole other thing. The relentless way things change. My friend insists she has not changed. People don’t change, she says, and once again we’re in that weird territory of radical disagreement. I can’t think of anything more untrue. 

People change all the time from one day to the next. They may be stubborn, and hold firm to rigid views or beliefs, but still they change. They get older. Their bodies sag and droop. Their sharp-eyed childlike clarity begins to fade under the weight of life’s demands. 

Griefs creep in unbidden, all the loss they encounter. Their knowledge increases along with traumatic episodes that alter their perspectives. People change, even if their fundamental DNA, the building blocks of their bodies remain the same. While the ghosts hiding in their names come out at any opportunity to haunt us all. 

Authenticity lies in the will to dare

There is a place where spiders knit, and fingers skitter across the keyboard.

A place reserved for memory and imagination when anything is possible, and boundaried only by the edges of sentences and their meaning.

I go there on mornings to spend my time dipping into the well of the past and there I find all manner of pleasurable entertainment, jammed against the ghosts of traumas past and the joys of sweet success.

All of them rub together. Writing is a plunge into the unknown in one person’s mind as long as they do not try too hard, at least not at first. At first they must improvise, as George Saunders writes, otherwise if they’re too intentional, the story sounds tired and inauthentic.

Authenticity lies in the will to dare.

In 1977 Dr J Peter Bush published Rape in Australia. The title letters in yellow against a black background with the subtitle ‘an appraisal of attitudes, victims, assailants, medicine and the law’. He was police surgeon at the time and therefore in a good position to see the hideous aftermath of rape and write accordingly.

The cover image in white, the symbol for woman cracked in half. To demonstrate the force of rape as an attack on a person’s identity. Most often a woman’s identity.

My mother gave me this book when I was in my late thirties as a birthday gift. I was appalled by her choice. She must have found the book in a bargain bin somewhere. That’s how my mother bought books, by the kilo. Romantic histories by the boot load for herself, along with anything by well-known Catholic writers as Graham Green and theologians like Teilhard de Jardin who spoke on the philosophy, history, and theories of her religion. She read the The Advocate every Sunday after Mass with religious devotion. She stuck to her faith.

My mother bought me this book, I imagined because I was a social worker then and social workers, at least in her mind, took an interest in such matters. Not that my mother did not care, but rape had not touched her so closely, or so she believed even as her husband had raped her eldest daughter when she was still a child. But my mother who knew this would not have considered it so. 

Incest was something different.

I have read the stories of Alice Munro, now doing the rounds. They speak to the horror of Munro’s ongoing knowledge that her daughter, Andrea Skinner, as a nine-year-old was sexually abused by her stepfather, Gerry Fremlin, Munro’s second husband and still Munro refused to leave him. Just as my mother failed to leave my father.

We writers go into such territory. We circle our wounds as Siri Hustvedt describes returning once more to the place in our unconscious that bristles with energy, the agony, and the desire. the pain and the pleasure, those energy points of human experience that rock us to our core.

Do not underestimate the power of the unconscious mind to evoke memories of matters otherwise dormant.

Like Munro, my mother stayed with her husband after she knew the ugly truth of his behaviour. But unlike Munro, or as far as we know, my mother told my father, ‘If you do this again, if you come here again, I’ll kill you.’ This when she caught my father lurched over my sister in bed. ‘Her eyes like a little bird’s,’ my mother told me years later, ‘with the blankets pulled up to her chin’.

But my father did return again and again even as my mother believed, wanted to believe, it had stopped.

How do you live with such knowledge?

Is this why she gave me the book? An unspoken acknowledgement of something she believed was of my concern because it was also her concern.

Germaine Greer at a conference in Melbourne talked about the ubiquity of rape throughout the suburbs of Melbourne every night with what she imagined were countless women unable to resist their husband’s approaches for sex.

Rape, Greer called it, and there was no protest from her audience, even as her talk was gate crashed by a trans gender activist who argued Greer was guilty of writing off a whole element in society of people who claimed a different identity from the one in which they were born

Greer spent her lifetime trying to give voice to the feminine body and here was someone who dared to suggest, although they were born with a masculine body, they could after a lifetime of privilege, convert into female form.

Greer is mistaken in the idea any trans person has endured a lifetime of privilege. It is not a privilege to enter the world in a body whose form dictates the way you’re treated for the rest of your life, whether as woman or as man.

If you believe, as some do, that the body into which you were born does not feel right for you along all the dimensions we humans have constructed for our two basic genders, then why not protest? Why not seek to find some physical form that fits your sense of your identity?

There are many who would say, you can’t because it’s impossible.

They argue you cannot take on a form of body that is not yours to begin with. People cannot sprout wings and even if we wanted, they say, though we have come close in other ways with hang gliders, aeroplanes, parachutes. All of them attempts to fly.

Even as the human body has long been one we have modified. With all manner of accoutrements, and under the knife. The engravings of some tribes in New Zealand and Africa. The skin piercings of indigenous peoples, even our pierced ears and the popularity of tattoos today. All methods of bodily enhancement.

And in this time of crazy ears and polarities, it’s worth remembering David Whyte: 

You act as though you’re alone, when even the soap dish enables you, writes

the poet, or words to this effect.

They call it the narcissism of small differences. Small or large they can make for conflict with its never-ending cycle of hurt. We see so much of this today. Time to get beyond our differences. To share the vast resources of our world and make room for one another.