Axiomatic

by Maria Tumarkin

A certain kind of strength is innate not learned she says. It’s an individual thing. You find it and you hone it. You draw on the past too but the thing is there at the start, a birthmark. Then she says, ‘The refugee thing is not what drives me. When we arrived in Australia we were like the last rung in the society, like rejects, I was ashamed of being Vietnamese then. At my first primary school my only friend was an Aboriginal girl. We were two people no one spoke to, no one wanted to touch. This sticks in my mind more than the refugee camps.’

  The camps were harsh but made OK by the resourcefulness of Vietnamese families in them. ‘If you put us in a jail,’ is how Nahji explains it, ‘we’d probably make a school out of it, and we did, we formed clusters of schools in a refugee camp. We taught ourselves. We grew veggies. Made things out of clay. Made a clay oven. Made fire. We knitted.’ Nahji came up with an idea for a theatre company, staging shadow-puppet performances behind a bedsheet using a torch and handmade clay characters. She’d stand at the door collecting money—nothing good in life is free. If the kids had no coins she accepted scarab beetles, seeds, matchsticks, something exotic, anything of value. No one was turned back. She was wanting an audience. But she also wanted this to be a proper exchange. It upsets her, the way people in today’s refugee camps are pressed into involuntary, demeaning idleness, at least this is what’s shown in the media—you don’t see people making things. Having no way of passing skills or knowledge, no meaningful exchanges of goods and services, destroys people, that’s what she thinks.

  The belief that we may look at children at certain points in their life and predict something of the adults they will become has been around since childhood came to be reckoned a distinct phase in a human life. The modern-day pop version goes we can glimpse, or see squarely, the future grown-up in a seven-year-old Jenna or Timothy. Easygoing Timothy will sail into well-adjusted adulthood barring cataclysms while little spoilt princess Jenna will stomp through life expecting people to accommodate her view of the world until she may, or may not, run into enough brick walls to concuss the sense of entitlement out of her. Or: Jenna who cries when shown a picture of a wounded doggie will grow up to be a social worker, Timothy whose eyes stay dry as dust will wind up a lawyer specialising in corporate takeovers.

  Nahji at seven? Freezeframe her, cute and bossy, in a refugee camp, what do you get? She could grow up to be a junkie or philanthropist. Or artist, businesswoman of the decade, abject failure, inspiration, a conqueror, the conquered, mother of many, mother of none, down and out in the suburbs, opening a flagship tuckshop in London (it’ll go bust and the four Sydney ones will get sold off but that is SO not the point). Nahji is marked by her early history, that’s for certain, yet she could go this way or that. Or first this way then that. She is as elusive as Douglas Fairbanks’s bemasked Zorro.

  Everywhere is Nahji’s refugee visa. On menus, delivery bike baskets, napkin dispensers, tuckshop walls—along with her siblings’ visas it is the centrepiece of misschu design. She says it’s a beautiful image. Arresting, and it tells a story, tells you why it’s called misschu, makes people realise it’s a surname and a play on words. ‘It’s retaliation too.’ ‘For what?’ I ask. Not needing to ask. ‘For racism. For being ashamed of who I was.’ I wonder if she was worried it’d seem kitsch. ‘No, I was worried about my family’s response and whether it was legal to display the documents.’ It’s retaliation and it’s marketing. Her slow-drip style. Those people entering her tuckshops not on the back of media hoo-ha but who stumble in because of the look or smell or location will order, eat, pore over their phones, notice something out the corner of one eye, go home. Good. Then on their third or, let’s say, fourth visit they may peer closer at the walls or menu logo and then it’s ‘oh, I didn’t realise’ and they may see the stamps and the dates and ask the staff what’s going on here and the staff will give them the short or long answer and they might go home and google and discover more. That’s how she likes it. Getting under customers’ skins. Getting them to wonder. Then a gradual revelation. She likes it when staff tell her she made who they are cool. They’re proud working for her, it seems, no matter the fierce temper, the dogs unleashed by her perfectionism.

  In interviews Nahji says Vietnamese is not simply a food option that’s cheap; it’s food with a profound history. ‘Love my food, you’ve also got to love my culture.’ At first I think the refugee design elements are in poor taste. Interesting idea but come on. Desperation, pain, shame, fear, bodies buried in oceans or unmarked graves in other people’s countries—these are your branding apparatus? To one interviewer she says, ‘Placing a complex identity, one that has survived trauma and racism, at the forefront of a commercial venture is unusual.’ Yep. But I see it. She is interested in generating power before empathy, and talking’s for later. ‘People don’t listen to stories unless they can eat them or feel them or wear them,’ she tells me.

  That time in her apartment, I’d said—I was remembering her at my parents’ house, how solid she seemed to us, how at ease in this world that clearly was not hers—‘After everything does Australia feel like something approximating home?’

  ‘No. I don’t think anywhere is going to feel like home for me. I don’t want anywhere to feel like home. I don’t want to anchor like that.’

  ‘You don’t ache for a sense of home?’

  ‘I want to have a big yacht. Why? Because I don’t think I will ever be truly welcomed anywhere. In Sydney they remind you that you are not from here. I beat them to it. I say “you ling, we bling” so you cannot say it to me. I make fun of myself before you can make fun of me. And I say this is not my home. Before you can say it, I’ve already announced it.’

  You ling, we bling—misschu’s home delivery slogan. ‘The best defence is attack.’ Who said that? I grew up with this saying so it feels kind of self-evidently true. Here we go again. Grew up with it.

  ‘I rarely read,’ Nahji says. ‘I can count the number of books I have read on one hand.’ It’s a warning not confession. She knows I read and I write and this stuff must matter to me, and that my assessment of people probably takes in their need for books and that the world outside, too, likes to think people like her rose from their refugee camps and smelly first kitchens to the top of the charts not merely by working seven days a week and never having holidays but by being smart about it. Not just breaking their backs and ripping their arseholes like their parents and their parents’ parents. Sucking the knowledge in. Riding it, like the big blue whale. Nahji’s talent is not in synthesising and building on whatever is out there already. It’s conjuring what is not there. ‘There are no magazines on my table,’ she says to me. ‘I hate them. And I am afraid of them. I don’t look at magazines because I am scared if I come up with an idea, it’s someone else’s. I come up with my own ideas. If it happens to be the same as someone else’s at least I came up with it.’

  Way back before her London tuckshop went kaput and Nahji faced losing the lot, I was walking through the Melbourne Now exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria and saw a Lucy McRae short film commissioned by Nahji with misschu imprints all over it. Nahji had sent me a disk sometime earlier and I’d watched it on a computer but here it occupied a wall. It was looping away, as if it were an art object like any other. I sat and watched it roll through then start again. Cloning, the edible self, a blurring of the boundaries between body and food, between what is now and what’s to come. Would you believe Nahji sneaked an ad for her business into the National Gallery of Vic?

  It’s said Jesuits first said ‘give me a child before the age of seven and I’ll show you the man’ and this, as things Jesuit tend to, carries queasy-making undertones of an institution sucking up a child and spewing up a complete, morally delineated being. Education, indoctrination, values inculcation, etc.—that’s a caricature mostly, an unthinking bit of Jesuit-creaming, besides writer Barry Lopez said it was his Jesuit teachers who woke in him a ‘capacity for metaphor’, also it appears the axiom may have been widely mi
sinterpreted anyway. Never mind. I intend leaving Jesuits in peace. Growing up in the Soviet Union, seven as a cut-off age felt natural despite my peers and me never having heard of Jesuits and their axioms in our atheist paradise. Seven, or just before seven, was when you went to school. So a period of childhood in which your family could have greater influence than state institutions over your life ended, unless you were outlandishly lucky. We pre-institutionalised (correction: pre-overinstitutionalised) seven-year-olds, children of dvory and empty flats, were carriers of a foundational self, which was our own homespun mutation of let’s call it crudely (because we can) the Jesuit axiom. Still, the seven bit stuck.

  Hanging low and loose in the air like an unmanned hot-air blimp all my life has been the axiom’s god-free version—whatever can be non-genetically encoded in a human being is encoded before birth and then before the age of seven. Encoded mightn’t be the best word, and the computer metaphors sitting as they do on the tips of our tongues, hardwired, hardware, software, may not be right either. Perhaps saying something is constructed before the age of seven, an armature, a casing, a slab of circuitry, a monopile, gets us closer to the essence of the idea (the idea that is also very much a feeling). Something is constructed that is hard to get at and dismantle or overwrite afterwards.

  Scientists and theologians like to reach for a tree. All parts of a tree above ground are dependent on sun, rain, wind, oxygen, birds, neighbourhood kids, roaming catclaw. Whereas a tree’s roots are underground and invisible unless the tree is in trouble or dead. The root system is our early childhood. Not only the roots, the soil around them, also worm armies, subterranean bodies of water. The roots’ functions are obvious, to provide essential food and drink not obtainable elsewhere to the tree, and they are the tree’s foundation.

  Tree may be the most hardworking metaphor in the world. A supreme metaphor is also a supreme artifice. Tree roots that grow on the surface, or in water, under pavement, inside shopping centres as is often seen, are not part of this picture because there is something about those archetypal roots in the ground—the way they are both secretive and sustaining, buried deep yet at the centre of things, resistant to change and protected against change. It fits. Fits our idea of the beginnings of selfhood. And when people talk of ‘rediscovering our roots’ they are talking about, beyond the wish to reconnect with the world of their parents, rediscovering the cultural and sensory environment that, in concert with genes and whatever else, produced their early selves. They are talking about following landing lights to something we might call our nature, which, as Heraclitus told us back in BC, hides from us but wants to be found.

  Nature, nurture—this thing cannot be worked out, as they used to say in my childhood, without half a litre of vodka. My erudite former dentist told me recently about going on a study tour to China in the 1980s with a group of fellow Australian dentists. Walking through a teaching hospital full of people stricken with illnesses the Australians had only previously seen in textbooks, they came by a large hall. Inside the hall fifty or more dentists were treating without a drop of anaesthetic young children, as was the norm then in the non-West. This hall was an open-plan, teeth-drilling quarry. And, my ex-dentist said, ‘you could hear a pin drop. It’s the culture of not showing pain and each of these kids was totally schooled in it already.’

  Almost two decades before that conversation I had a conversation with a friend whose parents divorced when she was young. My friend believed I was OK, positively blasé at times, about raising a child on my own because my parents stayed together and I hadn’t experienced a ‘broken’ home and thus didn’t have inside of me her gut-dread of replicating it for my children. I did not buy my friend’s theory. No way was I some product of a lack of family dysfunction. Simply, I wanted children and abhorred domesticity as I understood it then—an image in my head of me holding hands in a suburban supermarket with the father of a child I had recently borne felt like capitulation without grace. After a while I stopped thinking my friend was merely talking to herself. To be alive for X number of years is to know people have children in all permutations possible for every reason under the sun. For most the past is only one persistent voice in the ear, often monosyllabic, yes, no, no, yes. And when in my early twenties I was alone with that child of mine and no sirens were howling, icy winds did not tear through me, gates weren’t shutting automatically, doors weren’t locking themselves, it’s clear—clear now—I was free of any subcellular struggle between my family’s past and the future I was imagining, piece by piece, for myself, so yeah I see my friend was (50%) right.

  Nurture, nature—in ways too complex to lead to scientific or cultural consensus they are in it together, and each word may mean a thousand things. Bubbling in the witches’ brew aren’t only genes and environment. There’s prenatal, perinatal experience. And something called our prenatal personality; and (what else?) chance. The child, the human coming out of the pot is herself, as research on neuroplasticity and the changing brain tells us, a work in progress.

  Psychologist Stuart Derbyshire at the University of Birmingham calls the idea of a person’s early years deciding their fate a ‘pseudo-science of the parent bashers’. Psychologist Oliver James thinks the notion parental influence may be unimportant to a person’s development is ‘garbage, postmodern drivel’. Cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker says ‘to acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged’. Physician-philosopher Raymond Tallis writes ‘if you come across a new discipline with the prefix “neuro” and it is not to do with the nervous system, switch on your bullshit detector. If it has society in its sights, reach for your gun.’

  We’re past newborn-as-a-blank-slate, past the thick bushes of social Darwinism, past behaviourism and genetic supremacism. But we are in another thick forest. Trees again. Maybe it’s for the best. Worst would be to convince ourselves we know.

  After Andrew Solomon spent time with Sue and Tom Klebold, parents of Dylan Klebold, who together with a friend killed twelve students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado before turning their guns on themselves and who had bombs planted too, which didn’t go off, Solomon described the parents as ‘victims of the terrifying, profound unknowability of even the most intimate human relationship’.

  With killers it’s human habit to think back to their family and childhood. Genghis Khan was beaten and abused as a boy, my erudite current dentist mentioned just the other day. Anders Breivik’s childhood and psychosexually warped relationship with his mum is central to the way him becoming a mass murderer of Norway’s young people gets told and understood. Solomon could find nothing in the Klebold family’s home life. No abuse, neglect, detachment. Instead: love, acceptance, kindness, warmth.

  What happens to nature v. nurture when the person, one’s intimate, is potentially unknowable? Or maybe the point is we know quite a lot but this knowledge cannot be settled into a pattern, smoothed out. It must remain tense with contradictions and limit cases, must sit uncomfortably within us like a provisional government at a rushed dawn assembly.

  When Rhea Dempsey was doing workshop after workshop she could walk into a roomful of pregnant women and see—it’s as if she was wearing special glasses—the imprints of their own birth on the women in front of her. Not just their birth, she tells me, but their first months in the world. It was like the moment after the Big Bang when both matter and antimatter rush apart filling the universe, and there it was caught in the faces of women turned towards her.

  Rhea’s been at it close to forty years—more than a thousand births (one was my dark-eyed son) as a birth attendant. She has steered through labour women who once fell out of their mothers’ bodies into her arms. When Rhea’s own three girls were young they went to a small community-run primary school where Rhea taught swimming. She’d been at the birth of at least half those kids and could see their births in how they swam. ‘Y
ou could pick,’ she says, ‘the kids who rushed out of their mothers’ bodies and the ones who had a long, slow birth.’ One boy in swimming class whose birth Rhea was at had an ‘uncomfortable position in his mother’s womb, all skewed, twisted’ and he could not swim in a straight line.

  Rhea tells parents to watch their kids early, before the world gets in there and starts hammering at them—watch how they crawl. The way they begin to walk. Watch closely. She says these things are ‘a pure expression of who that child is’. Also children will never change as much as they do in the first year of their lives. ‘It sets up our yearly rhythm and a sort of template.’

  ‘Who the child is’ is Rhea’s big question.

  (Who are the children before they become who we think they are? Before they become who they think they are?)

  ‘My biggest passion,’ Rhea says, ‘is allowing children the clearest form of entry into the world.’

  Years ago at a talk on pain in labour I was sitting waiting for it to start—thirty-two weeks pregnant with my second child and thinking I don’t need anyone special with me when I’m giving birth not because I was arrogant or spoilt by an easy labour the first time around but because I thought, apart from midwives doing what they do, and your family doing what it does, nothing else really needs doing. In walked Rhea. She was dressed in white. I remember the jolt of her white—it was as if someone rode a camel into that chewed-up room leased from a high school—and I remember too what Rhea wore when she came to the Royal Women’s Hospital where I was losing my mind already in a ward so featureless it reappears to me now simply as a dimly lit rectangle. Leather gloves, sharp boots and a shawl draped over her back. I was naked. I didn’t know anymore what my body was doing. And everything on her was beautiful and extra-crunchy clean as if she made a point of not protecting her nice clothes from me.