As I’m wondering if The Little Mermaid could be rewritten too, I ask my small god-daughter why she likes her so much, and she’s indignant. ‘It’s a happy ending! They get married!’ She introduces me to Disney’s 1989 film which does, indeed, have a happy ending. Disney’s Little Mermaid has a name (Ariel) and she’s an entrancing redhead, and a talented singer about to make her concert debut. Her luscious soprano captures the heart of the prince (incongruously named Eric) when he hears her singing during the shipwreck. So when she gives up her voice, she gives up a potential career, and also the quality that makes her most attractive to men.
There’s none of the nonsense about legs like swords; Ariel is a bit unsteady on her new feet, but that only gives her the perfect excuse to lean giddily on Eric’s arm. And she doesn’t get legs for beauty’s sake but because she has to be a human to woo a human; it is assumed she won’t be able to move around on dry land without legs. The witch also persuades her to give up her voice by saying men don’t like chatty women. She’s wrong, of course; Eric has fallen in love with Ariel’s voice. Even the witch knows it isn’t true: monstrously ugly, and vain, with a husky rasp, she wants to steal Ariel’s voice and use it to attract Eric for herself. This is not a film about women silencing themselves to get a man.
Ariel gets the prince, defeats the witch, gets her voice back and even gets her father to bless their unconventional marriage. Watching the film now, with my god-daughter, makes me wish I’d seen it as a child. Its exuberance totally rejuvenates the story and I can’t help thinking my life would be different if I’d known Disney’s Little Mermaid, not Andersen’s.
And yet I can’t shake the Andersen story. I keep returning to his image of the Little Mermaid’s sisters rising up out of the sea, like avenging angels. And I wonder if his story could be read as a cautionary tale for women saying: Don’t give up your voice! Don’t make sacrifices for unworthy men! And definitely don’t mutely kill yourself when they go off with other women! Instead, the story (maybe) advocates killing your prince with a knife given to you by the sisterhood (literally), and returning to the sea where, after all, there are plenty more fish. Not to mention attractive, suitable mermen.
That’s just the kind of heroine I could get behind now. But it also seems obvious to me why I loved the Little Mermaid as a child. It’s nothing to do with her being a princess, or her quest to marry a prince. It’s because, like me, she’s caught between two worlds. I was homesick for Baghdad, even though I’d never been there and everyone told me I would never get to go. And Andersen lavishes some of his most sensuous and heart-rending prose on the beauty of the world at the bottom of the sea, the world his heroine wrenches herself from, never to return. Painfully he portrays her trying to fit in with the humans, a misunderstood misfit who is no longer a mermaid, not quite a human. She never quite manages it – and Andersen knew that feeling: he never managed to fit into his new, glamorous life. He was insecure, desperate for praise, always fawning on anyone with money, beauty or power. He never found love. And even his friends found him ingratiating. So instead of giving her a happy ending, like his other protagonists, he gave the Little Mermaid those complicated feelings about being an outsider and walking painfully through a world he could never truly communicate with, and never, ever being able to go back home.
The witch spells it out: ‘you can never again become a mermaid . . . You may never return to your sisters, and your father’s palace.’ Then, I read this with a lump in my throat because I knew my family could never return to Iraq. I still well up when I read about how the Little Mermaid creeps out of the palace every night to sit on the marble steps that go down to the sea, to cool her feet in the water; her legs really do feel like swords and only the sea can numb the pain and wash away the blood. Her sisters swim towards her, arm in arm, singing sadly because they miss her so much. They even bring their old grandmother and their father, who are too old to swim close enough to speak to the Little Mermaid. She sees them across the waves and weeps. It’s a devastating image of deracination.
When I was a child, this connected with images from the two films my brother and cousins and I watched over and over at our grandparents’ house: The Sound of Music and Fiddler on the Roof. While the grown-ups talked about having to leave their home in Baghdad, we would alternate the videos – Nazis one week, Cossacks the next. I knew that the Von Trapp family walking out over the Alps was somehow the same as the Jews packing up the shtetl, and that both were no different from my family leaving Baghdad, and the Little Mermaid leaving the sea. These stories helped me grapple with fears I couldn’t articulate, terrors of displacement and separation and loss. I hadn’t lost my home, my language or my country, but I was picking up on the grown-ups’ fears. And I was starting to doubt that marrying a prince would solve them. My most tattered and destroyed book, a read-along picture book of The Story of Henny Penny, is about a different kind of heroine, a brave red chicken who thinks the sky is falling down and goes on a journey (so there, Joseph Campbell) to tell the king. But a fox gets her friends, and although she survives, she never manages to tell the king. This petrified me. What if the sky really was falling down? Didn’t the king need to know? Henny Penny is a heroine on a mission, a heroine who does something, a heroine with a social conscience, a heroine who knows fear. And she’s not a princess, or trying to become one.
Maybe I didn’t want to be a princess after all. Maybe, just maybe, there was more to life than that.
2
ANNE OF GREEN GABLES
WHEN I WAS seven, my grandfather took me aside and told me a secret: ‘I’m going to die very soon and you’ll have to look after everyone.’ I was devastated. I adored my grandfather, and I thought he lived a wonderful life, spending all day in his pyjamas, reading lots of books. Was he really going to die? ‘Will I really have to look after everyone?’ I asked, wide-eyed. ‘Even the grown-ups?’ He said, ‘Everyone.’ We could hear them in the kitchen, talking, cooking, eating. It was such a responsibility. There were so many of them! ‘Even Mum and Dad?’ I asked. ‘Even my uncles?’ It seemed impossible. ‘Even Grandma?’ At the news that I would have to look after her too, I burst into tears. My mother heard me, and scooped me up and told me my grandfather wasn’t dying. He was just sad, ‘because of what happened in Iraq’. Which seemed to be the answer I got to all my questions.
My recurring nightmare is set in a desert. I am running, pursued by dark men with moustaches. My heart pounds, sand flies into my face, hot air scours my mouth, my eyes. And the implacable mustachioed men keep chasing me down. Then, my nightmare desert had cacti in it, and oases, because my only visual reference for the desert was the Westerns we watched on TV. As I learned more Judeo-Arabic, and asked more questions, I realised I was dreaming versions of my family history: their stories of leaving Baghdad, along with most of the city’s Jews. In its Jewish heyday in the 1940s, Baghdad was one-third Jewish; every third shop, every third house. By the Eighties, the population had fallen from around 350,000 to just a couple of thousand. Now, reportedly, there are only seven Jews in Iraq.
The Jews had been brought to Baghdad in 587 BC, as Nebuchadnezzar’s captives. He set them to work dredging canals between the Tigris and the Euphrates. At first they wept by the rivers, as per Psalm 137, but later, when they got permission to leave, many chose to stay. Under the Ottomans, Jews were protected – though not equal – but after the First World War anti-Semitism grew, from street violence in the 1920s and discriminatory laws in the 1930s to the farhud of 1941, when Baghdad rioted and Jews were murdered, raped, and their homes and businesses looted. The word farhud means a breakdown of order; the Jews would never again feel at home in Iraq.
So in 1950, when they were told they could sign up for a mass airlift to Israel, many registered to go. My father’s family were among them. They were stripped of their Iraqi citizenship, and the Iraqi parliament passed a secret law to confiscate Jews’ possessions and freeze their liquid assets. They left with nothing. After the taske
et, the denaturalisation (such a bland word for the destruction of a community), only 6,000 Jews – including my mother’s family – stayed. They hoped things would get better.
But when the Baathists came to power, things got definitively worse. In 1967, Iraq sent an army to fight Israel in the Six Day War. In 1969, crowds cheered as nine Jews were hanged in the streets. They’d been imprisoned, tortured and condemned in televised show trials as Zionist spies. One was my mother’s cousin; he was only eighteen. By now, many Jews were leaving illegally, smuggled by Kurds over the mountains into Iran. My mother’s family tried to escape in 1970 but they were caught at the penultimate checkpoint and imprisoned. They were released after twenty days. When they came out, my grandfather sank into depression. He was a talented doctor, but now he became a hypochondriac, constantly checking his own pulse. When he was arrested again, and kept in prison for nearly four months, his depression set in for good. I never knew him happy, and the reason he stayed at home all day in his pyjamas was that he was too heart-crushingly miserable to go out.
Although I was growing up in London, in safety, I would flinch if a stranger touched my hair, because my mother told me that when they interrogated her in prison they pulled her hair. My grandmother told me about the day in prison when the guards took all the men away. The women were terrified, and to calm them, the guards brought them a watermelon. Eventually the men were brought back. I still don’t like watermelon.
What could I do with this difficult, unhappy morass, except have bad dreams? I was also scared of witches, and bats, and vampires, and burglars and whatever else might emerge from the vanishing darkness beyond the edge of our garden. The grown-ups said I had an ‘over-active imagination’. It seemed a terrible problem, an unconquerable flaw. Until I discovered Sara Crewe.
The heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1905 riches–rags–riches novel A Little Princess is not actually a princess, but her horrid headmistress thinks that because she’s rich she must be as spoilt as a princess (she is not) and the school’s downtrodden scullery maid, Becky, thinks she must be a princess because she’s so kind and beautiful. Sara’s definition of princess is closer to Becky’s than to her headmistress’s, and she pretends she’s a princess to help her behave like one.
Like Sara, I lived in a world of my own, forever daydreaming and making up stories. When Sara’s father dies, apparently bankrupt, and she’s forced to skivvy alongside Becky, she puts her ‘pretending’ to good use. The two girls make their rat-infested attic a palace, sturdily believing they can imagine themselves happy. I hoped that if I was ever ripped from all I knew, like Sara (and like my family), my imagination might help me too.
But now, Sara seems a bit insipid. And her imagination is escapist in the wrong way. She uses imagination to forget her troubles, instead of trying to imagine an escape she might actually make. She does get out of the attic, but only because she is rescued. She is as passive as Sleeping Beauty in making it happen. The ending, where Becky becomes Sara’s ‘delighted attendant’, feels like a betrayal of their friendship and a reassertion of the class divide that is deeply unimaginative. Luckily, soon after discovering Sara, I read Anne of Green Gables (1908) and its vivacious heroine Anne Shirley showed me that imagination could do a lot more. It could even be heroic.
Anne bursts on to the page, eleven years old, waiting at a railway station, wearing an ugly, tight yellow-grey dress, and a faded sailor hat over two red plaits. Her eyes look green in some lights and moods and grey in others, and she wants to be called Cordelia, but if that’s not possible then ‘Anne with an “e”’. No one has come to pick her up, and she decides that, if they never come, she’ll scramble up into a wild cherry tree and sleep there among the blossoms, in the moonshine. This is a girl who can even make waiting at a train station an adventure. Her imagination helps her forget her fear that she’ll be left there alone all night. So far, so Sara Crewe. But L.M. Montgomery wants to take her, and us, on a much longer journey than that.
Anne’s imagination has developed under pressure. Orphaned at just three months old, she’s drudged for various hard, unkind women; one of them had three sets of twins and Anne got dreadfully tired carrying them about. She’s done time in an orphanage. She’s needed to imagine all her misery away. She even, courageously, declares that there’s more scope for imagination in the horrible places she’s been. She needs her imagination again when she finds out that the Cuthberts, whom she was waiting for at that railway station and who she thought were going to give her a home, never wanted her. There’s been a mix-up and they’d really wanted a boy to help out on the farm.
Anne turns to her imagination to help her cope. ‘Suppose she wasn’t really going to stay here! She would imagine she was.’ She strenuously imagines she’s going to stay, determinedly enjoying herself, and is brave and positive in the face of a world that doesn’t want her; she refuses to be defined by other people’s pinched expectations. When her reverie is broken, she says ‘the worst of imagining things is that the time comes when you have to stop, and that hurts’. This line inordinately influenced me. I wanted to imagine and I didn’t want to stop. Sometimes I think I became a writer so I would never have to stop.
Imagination seems to be winning the day for Anne, as shy, middle-aged Matthew Cuthbert finds her chatter so interesting that he persuades his sister Marilla to keep her. But then a hurdle: Marilla wants Anne to curb her imagination and be sensible. She wants Anne to learn to keep quiet. And she thinks that when God puts us in certain circumstances, He doesn’t want us imagining them away. She’s right: imagination does get Anne into scrapes. Daydreaming, she forgets to put flour in a cake. She nearly serves up a sauce a mouse has drowned in. She nearly drowns herself while re-enacting ‘The Lady of Shalott’ in a leaky barge. And, as it did for me, imagination gives her terrors.
Anne and Marilla have their climactic fight about imagination when Anne refuses to run an errand through the spruce grove because she’s been calling it the Haunted Wood and filling it with ghosts and now she believes they might actually walk. Commonsensical Marilla makes her run the errand anyway, and cures her of letting her imagination take her places where she doesn’t want to go. Anne helped me slowly let go of my fears of witches and vampires. Though she also gave me one fear I didn’t have before: I still worry, when I dye my hair, that it might go wrong, like hers did, and turn green.
Anne learns to channel her imagination. She talks less about her imaginings, and starts writing them down. Now that she no longer has to imagine her life away – she likes her life – she’s free to use her imagination for something better. She’s going to be a writer.
That settled it: I would be a writer too. I bought a shiny black notebook, labelled it ‘Collected Poems’ and started filling it with poems, dashed off in a single draft, in neat, swirly writing in coloured inks. They were terrible. Anne’s early writing doesn’t sound much better; her first heroines have florid names and purple eyes and meet tragic ends. But she learns to use shorter words, to write simply, and instead of ‘love and murder and elopements and mysteries’ she writes about things that might happen in her own life. She takes writing advice where she can get it, and strives to be her own severest critic. And so, eventually, I ditched my shiny notebook and my coloured felt-tips and began filling a series of plain exercise books with draft after painstaking draft, with many crossings-out in unromantic biro.
Coming back to Anne now, I was worried I’d find her sugary, that I’d be sceptical about the way she goes through all eight books making friends, winning over crotchety neighbours, cheering the miserable and healing the lonely. But Anne’s sweetness and humour still tug at my heart. I thought I’d find Montgomery’s prose too purple; and that I’d want to skim the raptures about trees and flowers and clouds. But it is amazing, sinewy, knowledgeable nature writing – and I googled Anne’s Prince Edward Island and it really is phenomenally beautiful!
And the Anne books are fun. Anne has a gift for pleasure, whether she
’s taking apple blossoms up to her bedroom ‘for company’, signalling to her best friend Diana in made-up Morse code, walking a ridgepole, savouring her first ice cream, reciting poetry or walking in the woods. I find Pollyanna, whose eponymous book came out in 1913 (five years after Anne of Green Gables was a runaway bestseller) brainlessly optimistic, with her ‘glad game’ and her constant exulting over everything. But Anne’s joy in life is bolstered by her altruism, her willingness to work hard, and her commitment to friendship – qualities that are mostly rewarded in the Anne books, as of course they should be.
How To Be A Heroine Page 3