The Best Australian Essays 2017

by Anna Goldsworthy

  Does all that witnessing silence them? Janina asks.

  Sometimes, I say. The county court worker said one strategy associates and tipstaves use to offer each other relief is to make inappropriate jokes and remarks that they would never say outside of the court environment. It helps lift the mood.

  What’s brown and sticky? Janina asks.

  I laugh. A stick, I say.

  It is the only joke I know, she says.

  *

  I cannot escape myself or my past, says Janina.

  She still accepts every portion of blame for what happened to her as a child. But how can an eight-year-old be responsible for the actions of an adult? What happened to you could not possibly be your fault, I say. The moral obligation for protection lies with the adult. She says two things she does know are that the power to change the self-blame sits in her open palms, and the responsibility for staying alive is her work to do because there can be no reprieve from herself.

  *

  Some things only reveal themselves with time.

  Janina met an Australian man a few years ago who was identical in manner to her father: infested with paranoid, vain arrogance and a pathological need for perfection and, thus, for control. With this man she replicated her father–daughter relationship. He told Janina he felt dead inside. Twice he told her this, once when drunk, once sober. At the time she knew anxiety and joy and living in confusion with these two emotions as well as the occasional desire to kill herself, but not the acute sensation of dying or death. After entertaining for a short time this man’s past (as complicated as hers) and his determined but probably unconscious desire to destroy her, Janina recognised inside herself an empty, discarded loneliness that came close to what the man described as dead inside. She says it took one year of not talking, not writing, not reading, not listening to music, being visited with father flashbacks every night, four nervous breakdowns, time in a psychiatric hospital and a recovery centre before something resembling relief re-entered her life. Janina calls this year-long trudge through punishing pain and unconscious self-excoriation survival.

  Janina says every human being on this planet has a complex personhood, and to sociologist Avery Gordon this means people ‘remember and forget, are beset by contradiction, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others’. We also suffer both ‘graciously and selfishly’, get stuck in our troubles, yet have the remarkable ability to transform ourselves. And to survive.

  But Janina will not use the words ‘victim’ or ‘survivor’ to describe herself. She fears they will seep inside, smother her permanently, boxing her in to how she should be. While her days continue to contain miniature ripples of joy alongside oceans of despair, she will not carry around those words like lead. She wants a rarer and better thing: to be unlabelled. Unmarked.

  After she explains to me her injurious relationship with the Australian man, I tell Janina this is what I see: she was a victim of what Freud called repetition compulsion – a drive to repeat an original trauma in her life in order to overcome the constant anxiety stemming from that trauma. Although she was worn down by her need to attend to the mastery of this anxiety by having an affair with identical-Father, somewhere along the way she made a conscious decision to slough away the exterior and internal threats of self-annihilation through persistence and sheer guts so she could succeed at the basics of what a life requires – that is, to survive each day.

  She laughs at me. She tells me I am full of shit ‘n’ Freud.

  *

  In Ghostly Matters, her masterful book on the cultural experience of haunting, Avery Gordon quotes legal scholar Patricia Williams: ‘that life is complicated is a fact of great analytic importance.’

  Analysing the complexity of her emotions and memories is the only way Janina can understand her father.

  When he calls her on the phone from the other side of Australia to ask how she is, this happens: she is suspicious, she doesn’t believe him, and she doesn’t trust him. Why would a man who harmed her so deeply and who remains taut-mouthed on the past want to ask after her health? Does he do it for forgiveness? Is it forgetfulness? Janina listens to him ramble and is patient when he wants to talk about his grandson, her son, who has not known one shred of vileness, and when she hangs up the phone she murders each day on her calendar with a violet pen until the next call.

  Janina says some people she’s met who have had stable, loving, unviolent childhoods have difficulty understanding the need to run towards something and away from it at the same time; it is beyond the exactness of personal experience. To them it is like dodging cars on a busy road, putting yourself at risk of certain harm. She says there is no point explaining that you live haunted by things that happened to you decades ago and there are pictures and sounds in your head constantly playing like an endless looping GIF, and apart from a temporary reprieve by detaching from reality nothing you can do or say will make them disappear.

  The best you can do is to learn how to manage your emotions and lower your immediate distress.

  The ones among us who have the ability and opportunity to corral their thoughts, memories, experiences and opinions within the tidy boundaries of a story and who can disclose their trauma publicly in this way are the ones we are attuned to, the ones we want to hear. Of course they are: their voices are less messy, more sane, more contained than voices like Janina’s. When I say to Janina I will write her story because my role is to make certain the forgettable ones are never forgotten and she displays great bravery for her survival, she says you don’t understand.

  Although I am now proficient in English, it will always remain my second-hand language, and sometimes, as the novelist Maaza Mengiste writes, ‘I have fallen between its cracks trying to trudge my way toward comprehension.’ But this fight to write and speak English words is also why I can face Janina and say: My struggle for le mot juste makes me work harder to understand what you say and mean and feel, and to know your trauma, vicariously.

  *

  Speak out, they say. Write what you fear and throw it out into the world, they say. It will be cathartic, they say. As a writer, Janina has met too many of these they people. Janina does not want to write her life story. Memoir, personal essays: she chokes on these words. The exposure of the confessional ‘I’. Even though she knows the ‘I’ is a construction (often a confection, says Janina), it creeps through many forms of nonfiction, foregrounding the author/narrator as subject. The topic revolves around the narrator’s perfectly flawed centre and everyone outside this self is collateral damage to the author’s journey of discovering themselves.

  (Done well, this writing contains evocative ideas and wiry muscle words, I say.)

  (Yes, but mostly it is not well done, says Janina.)

  Of course, while the narrator critiques others, they may also speak poorly of themselves (‘please note my lack of education and/or lack of sophistication and/or dysfunction of some type’). Janina agrees with Maggie Nelson, who in The Art of Cruelty labels the principle of memoirists and personal essayists that claims you can say anything about other people as long as you make yourself look just as bad as a ‘sham, a chicanery, one with its roots planted firmly in narcissism’.

  Essayist David Rakoff wrote that he researched subjects in the hope he would find out more about himself. He called his research ‘me-search’. At least he was honest, says Janina.

  Maggie Nelson also wrote, ‘Writing can hurt people; self-exposure or self-flagellation offers no insurance against the pain.’ Janina says this is another reason why she has no desire to write memoir or personal essays, or to deliberately write autobiography into her fiction, or to speak of what happened to her except in a general way. She has no need to injure those who hurt her. In exposing them, she harms herself: for me, this is not justice, she says.

  *

  Due to her aversion to writing personal narrative, but with a need to know where the roots of her family’s violence took shape, Janina asks her father to write and send h
er his life story. She wants to know more about his childhood during the war and to find in his tale a reason or reasons for why he did what he did to her, and in the process discover more about herself (this is her ‘me-search’). But she does not want to be in his presence. She uses her young son as cover (my fear is despicable, she says), and asks her father to write his life for her son so he will know where he came from.

  Janina says to me: I can only know my Polish father through my son.

  She asks her father to write as well as he can in English. Her son doesn’t speak Polish.

  I ask: Why doesn’t he speak Polish?

  She says: Because I don’t speak it and never will, and children are given what their parents are able to give them, and nothing more.

  While Janina’s father hurt her body he spoke to her only in Polish. When he called her useless, hopeless, stupid in front of others he said it in English so she would feel the precise articulation of his words.

  When he argued with Janina’s grandmother, aunt and uncles he did so in Polish.

  When Janina’s mother called her one of those girls on the street corner, and when she told her husband you spend more time with your daughter than you do with me, she said it in English in front of Janina so her daughter would understand every word.

  She shares her grandmother’s name. She pronounces it with a J – Jar-neena – and I wince at its harshness. Janina with a soft J, like a Y: this is how you pronounce it, I say. But she cringes whenever it is spoken this way. My name can never be gentle, she says, and I call myself by my Australian name – Janine with a hard J and no ending in a.

  Janine knows ‘yes’ in Polish (tak), but she can’t remember ‘no’.

  Is it net? she asks. Or ne, or nein?

  It is simple, I say. It is nie.

  Janine says nie, and with her Australian accent it sounds like a ‘yeah’.

  *

  I cannot escape myself or my past, says Janine.

  But she has no need to write violent details of her childhood. As Susan Sontag once wrote, ‘there’s nothing wrong with standing back and thinking’. Some things can remain your own and don’t have to be released to the world. If she did reveal in print the crimes against her, she could (potentially) have a sniff of temporary freedom from her suffering, and readers would congratulate her on her courage and the redemptive brutality of her self-exposure. And she could add to the literature on family violence piling up like dead bodies in bookstores. But then what? What comes afterwards? Would this revealment sustain her? Would it be effective in offering her some sense the suffering would end? She would return to the daily struggles of her life with the additional pressure of being labelled a memoirist.

  There are some things broken that can never be unbroken. Pain has the ability to destroy a sufferer’s language, so Janine says: I will find other ways to describe the experience and aftermath of violence, how I feel it, taste it, hear and smell it, and write my stories not detailing explicit violence but clearly born from it. I need to write about states of uncontainment, says Janine. To make the pain of and for something.

  I am not sure what this would look like, but I will not write Janine’s life story. I can attend to what she says and doesn’t say without locking it up into words. It is her right to argue against public disclosure, to not write of her past, and to live with ambivalence and uncertainty and contradiction. For now, we sit in this cafe and I paraphrase Brodsky’s words – what makes a narrative breathe is not the story itself but what follows what. And what follows what, I say, is both the summation of our lives, and for each of us to decide.

  Janine looks at me in my eyes, smiles and says: Nie. You know nothing.

  Now No-One Here Is Alone

  Melissa Howard

  Everyone here in the waiting area of the Family Violence Court Division of the Magistrates Court is playing a game. It’s called Bad Guy or Victim? Women are curled on chairs, glassy-eyed and stunned, their family and friends dozing beside them, while men pace up and down in righteous indignation, or sit texting furiously.

  There are no separate floors for people who have been hurt and those who have done the hurting. I imagine that, sometimes, the lines aren’t so distinct. People who have been abused often become abusive. But while compassion is human, feeling sorry for violent men doesn’t get us anywhere. Many women have learned that the hard way.

  Whatever our divisions, within ourselves and with each other, we’re all united in this: the wait. No-one knows when they will be called to court for the magistrate to determine if a family violence order needs to be made. We are asked to set aside the whole day. There are no facilities for children and it is explicitly stated that you are not permitted to bring them. But a handful of small children crawl under the chairs or stare, slack-jawed, at iPhone screens.

  There is a short sandy-haired man near the stairs with his phone. He is bristling with anger. It emanates from him – his jaw is tense and the muscles on his stocky arms bulge as he clenches and unclenches his fists. His face is crimson. He reminds me of a lover my mother had who once backed me up until my spine was pressed against the kitchen counter, his chest touching mine, his cold blue eyes locked on me, breathing heavily with unrestrained rage.

  Perhaps I am projecting. Perhaps because this man looks so similar to a man I do not like I have subconsciously assigned him the same characteristics. But aggression is palpable. An angry person can change the air around them without saying a word or moving their body.

  The sandy-haired man lowers the phone to his chest as a woman walks up to him, manila folders in her hands. She launches straight in. ‘Do you want her to be able to contact you about the kids? What about your house? Do you want her to access the kids?’

  What – hang on. I’m baffled. He’s the protected person?

  A social worker will tell me later that abusive men often claim that they are the victims, and will attempt to take family violence orders against their partners or former partners, clogging up an already clogged system.

  Across from me, a bearded, leathered bikie with a kind, doughy face is comforting a woman with a jet-black ponytail. She is curled in agony on her chair, her face squashed against the arms like a child. I know that agony. (Watching Heartland, a Canadian horse TV program with my ten-year-old daughter. The grandfather, Jack, warns his granddaughter against a man she loves. ‘Just because you want someone to change,’ he said, ‘doesn’t mean that they will.’)

  ‘This time,’ the bearded man tells her, ‘This time, he cannot just say sorry and come back. This time is different.’

  She doesn’t look so sure.

  ‘We can help you,’ he continues. ‘What do you need?’

  She snorts. ‘A house and a job.’

  ‘You can stay with Mum,’ he says. ‘She’ll get on your tits – you know she can be annoying – but you can stay there.’

  She sniffs. ‘Yep.’

  I catch his eye. I try to smile but that’s beyond me today. He looks at me warmly. So many pockets of gentleness here. I am starved of gentle touch. The only physicality in my life is the hungry pawing of my baby son at my breast. The smallest act of love from a man to a woman – him brushing her hair back where it is getting stuck in her streaming nose – catches my breath. ‘Before you know what kindness really is,’ wrote Naomi Shihab Nye, ‘you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.’

  I’m not sure what I am supposed to be doing. No-one has told me. Or perhaps they did and I wasn’t able to hear it. Yesterday the police told me to show up here today for the hearing for the temporary violence order. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s not real violence.’ ‘Sounds like real violence to me,’ said the officer.

  My bones hum with anxiety. I slept in snatches last night, lying rigid with fear and anxiety. My body coursed with adrenaline. Every noise was a threat. The unpacked boxes emphasised the emptiness of the house. At three a.m. I became convinced he was on the roof. I was grateful
for the distraction when my son woke for a breastfeed.

  I look around the waiting area. There are perhaps eighty people, in a large circle space around the central stairs.

  Is he here yet? My stomach is clenched. Could he do something here? Two days ago, such an idea would have been ridiculous. But the parameters of what is possible have been redefined – once again. I stand and edge up to the counter, looking around, scanning the faces of the crowd.

  ‘I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be doing,’ I confess.

  The young woman behind the counter is stony-faced and uninterested. She has become hardened, already, by the daily turnover of violence and loss. She doesn’t look at me. ‘Sit down and the police will come and get you when they’re ready,’ she says in a bored voice.

  I turn around and – of course – he is right there. I do not know who gets the bigger fright. I flinch and he flinches and I can see him calculating: how far away is he? Is he far enough? The police have placed a temporary order, meaning that he is not allowed within 200 metres of me. But the room isn’t even that big and he is instructed to attend.

  The vulnerability in his face makes my heart ache. My sadness sits in my throat, like I have swallowed a heavy river stone. I thought that love was stronger than demons. I was wrong. And I put all my chips down.

  I believe that many women who love an angry man can see the damaged child inside him. I believe that many women see the shame in his eyes when the anger has passed and confuse it with remorse. I suspect that many women see bad behaviour as separate to the man; that it is a possession, an exception, an evil force that has nothing to do with the man they love, a force that he is also a victim of; or see him as two different people. The good one, whom they love, and the bad one. I believe many women are victims of our own malignant optimism, and of the bargains we make in our heads to allow us to continue to hope.

  Later I see him across the room, and the vulnerability has gone. Once again I feel my brain trying to put these two pieces together: this is one person, not two. I turn, scurry back to my corner and I wait. I should have brought a banana. Something to calm these jitters.