American Monsters

by Sezin Koehler

  The prosecutors told me that I brought justice for that other man who was murdered that night.

  I still didn’t know what to say.

  Rock Bottom

  With the testifying behind me, I went into an emotional free fall. The last year and a half had been waiting to get it over with, and once it was done, I lost it. The panic attacks got more frequent and intense. My therapist, against my wishes, forced me to take anti-depressants to get control of the anxiety. I told her that I thought about death and dying every moment, that I couldn’t trust myself with pills in the house, but she didn’t listen.

  Weeks later I tried to kill myself by taking all my pills. After a 36-hour psych hold in the Berkeley asylum, I managed to convince them it was an accident and I didn’t belong there. It wasn’t an accident, no, but I really didn’t belong in a place with such broken people, it would have made me worse. They released me and I came to the conclusion that I needed a more spiritual approach to healing. That desire lasted all of two weeks, and I had another breakdown.

  James, the first love of my life, broke up with me on the grounds that he simply couldn’t take care of me anymore. Who could blame him? There’s no way to be in a relationship with a traumatized person. Just ask anyone in a partnership with a war veteran or recent abuse survivor. For the survivor, the present is haunted by the past and there’s no room for a future until that violent past is healed and put in its proper place.

  In a matter of weeks I was in Geneva, where my mom was still posted. I was further traumatized, mildly suicidal, heartbroken and a hundred percent lost.

  The Road to Healing

  Moving home was a shock and certainly wasn’t something I had ever planned on doing again. Since I was a child I had endured a strained relationship with my father, and I had never been close to my sisters, who had changed monstrously after living for so many years in the keeping-up-appearances environment of Swiss international schools. My father, easily the least sensitive person in the entire world, had zero sympathy for what I had been through, and didn’t allow my traumatized presence in the house to affect his life in the least. Translation: The violent, shoot-em-up action films that were his wont were the feature films of each evening, played so loud that even in my basement room I was terrorized by the sounds of gunfire.

  The positive side was I had a great trauma counselor whose background, like mine, was in anthropology, and he tailored his therapy to the cultural specifications of his patient. Cross-cultural psychiatry, he called it. He was of the mind that medications only mask the symptoms and the root of the problem, and he saw his job as one to help me deal with the root issue itself. Not just the trauma, but everything that the trauma had forced to the surface, much of which included my lifetime of moving all around the world. He encouraged me to write and draw, and I would bring these stories and images into our sessions, where he would use them as sounding boards for future healing work. He was a brilliant man and after a year, my work with him finally brought me to a point where I was actually emotionally stable, all without a single dose of medication.

  During all that art-making and story-writing I got an internship with a non-governmental organisation (NGO), and started having a reason to go into town a few days a week. The work was menial, but it placed me right in the heart of the UN headquarters in Geneva, quite an exciting place to be. When they found out I enjoyed writing, they enlisted me as a reporter to cover various human rights conferences going on in the building. The first conference I attended was the then-Commission on Human Rights, a huge meeting of governments, NGOs and citizens from around the world to discuss the state of human rights promotion and protection around the world.

  Intense! Six hours a day for six weeks, I sat in the huge hall listening to governments lie about human rights violations and NGOs bring bundles of evidence against those lies. In my highly sensitive state I did indeed spend a few occasions crying in the bathroom, but I managed to get through it, and in the process met a group of people who would change my life.

  One of the issues on the table during the Commission was the protection of the world’s indigenous peoples. For one week of the conference I saw an influx of indigenous and tribal peoples from all over the world descend upon the halls I walked. In those days, I tended to wear my hair in two long braids; it was a simple and elegant look that felt right on me and so when the indigenous issues were being brought to the table, I started being approached by various groups who thought I was Native American and wanted to introduce themselves.

  As if it was meant to be, I was then taken under the protective wings of a few Native North American Elders. They could see right into my heart, and they knew how much I was suffering. I have no idea how, but they did. One of the Elders organized traditional sweat-lodges — they are a Native spiritual and cleansing ceremony in which rocks are heated and brought into a covered tent of sorts and prayer ensues — and invited me to attend.

  Of all the healing practices I tried to heal my traumas, that first sweat-lodge was the most effective and most powerful. It forced me to confront my fear by reliving it in a way. When the Lodge started, I panicked and insisted I needed to leave. The Elders wouldn’t let me, they told me to breathe and let go. When I started weeping, there was no judgment, only the most pure of releases I have ever felt in my life. After those hours in the Lodge I felt like a new person. The photographs proved it. Before the ceremony, in every photograph I have from the day after Wendy’s death to the day before the Sweat, my eyes are haunted. After the Sweat, the ghosts around my eyes were gone. Just like that.

  Not only had the real, deep healing begun, I found new purpose in my life. Much of what I had been trying to do while in Europe up to that point was to find a way back to James. When I found out that he was in no way interested in the same, I had another small breakdown, but recovered quickly and threw myself into serving as a freelance reporter for all the indigenous groups I’d met, covering every human rights-related meeting that went on at the UN. My reports would be emailed to hundreds of people around the world, and would be forwarded even further. When the lists got too unruly, I started publishing the reports on free websites, not knowing that I had started keeping a weblog, now simply known as a blog.

  The writing, and feeling like I was a part of something bigger, something ancient while simultaneously modern in its struggle for the rights and self-determination of indigenous peoples around the world, gave me a purpose I had been lacking. I had hoped that my passion and dedication would evolve into a job, but after my most beloved Elder, Grampa Tony Black Feather, passed away and my savings were depleted, I was forced to take a job wherever I could find it.

  One of my UN colleagues offered me a gig doing archival research in the Archive of the Indias in Seville, something I had always wanted to do. It allowed me to use my strange talent for reading Old Spanish. I also started a PhD in Seville, Spain, and completed one year, but the slow pace of Spanish academia as well as trouble getting a student visa forced me to abandon the project. Seville was actually the first time I had ever lived somewhere on my own. While in the States I was always in a university housing situation or with a boyfriend. In Geneva I lived with my mom. It was a great experience, and a good test of how well my therapy and healing had prepared me for life on my own.

  Moving Forward

  For almost two years I lived on my own in Seville and Granada, Spain, and while certain times of year remained difficult and depression was my go-to state, I was generally successful. October 28 would forever be a difficult day, one spent crying and wishing, but I would get through it.

  Each year Wendy’s family has a bonfire in LA, and many people go to the site of her murder afterwards to draw on the sidewalk, and leave flowers and candles. While part of me would love to be there with them, to not grieve alone, I cannot ever imagine driving along the streets of Los Angeles, and the thought of going back to the spot of her death makes me feel ill. Seeing photos of these events makes me feel grateful, but the
sight of that street where our lives were forever changed sends me into flashbacks and panic. That’s not a place I can go. Who knows if I ever will be able to.

  I got married in 2006 to a man I’d only known for a few months, a man who proposed only ten days after we met. I knew that Wendy would approve of this whirlwind romance, even though it wouldn’t be the easiest of partnerships. Now, our five-year anniversary just behind us, this man has been the driving force behind me doing what I love and what I always felt I was meant to do: Write. He’s the one who encouraged me to brush the dust off Terata Americana of the Raving Variety — this work's original title — and whip it into better shape for publishing. It had been nine years since I had written it, and a great deal of the immediate trauma linked with the book had been healed. The more I delved into the editing and re-writing process, the more I realized what a lodestone the tale had become. It was a hurdle I had to get over in order to really move forward, and tie off this loose end from my Los Angeles life.

  Like my first sweat-lodge, finishing and self-publishing American Monsters was amazingly therapeutic. Once it was a finished product, new floodgates of creativity opened for me. I hadn’t even realized how that one unfinished project was holding me back. It didn’t occur to me until it had been released into the world, and all of a sudden I felt lighter. Freer. There are many things I don’t like about the book, and the extreme violence is the main one, but in the context of where and when the book was born, there was no other way to package it.

  This doesn’t mean that my healing process is complete. I don’t think there is any such thing. October 28 still finds me crying most of the day, and the days leading up to it bring nightmares, anxiety and fear. I’ve learned to live with that horrible event, and I’m easy on myself when the pain surfaces.

  On October 28, 2010, it was ten years since that night when the sky opened up and I saw Hell. That night my life split into two eras: The one before Wendy’s murder and the one after. In many ways I can’t comprehend how life has gone on without her hugs, her creativity, her physical presence. I also have a hard time understanding how I have survived myself with post-traumatic stress disorder. It wasn’t only my life that split into eras. I fragmented as a person and many of those fragments have not yet found a way to reintegrate.

  So, in Wendy’s honor I live each day, creating stories, art, taking photos, dancing, and I do my best to make her and everyone I love proud. I suppose that’s as much as anyone could aspire towards, don’t you think?

  Prague, Czech Republic

  May 20, 2011

  THE COMPILER:

  ON TRUTH AND SYNCHRONICITY

  Rave is more than music plus drugs: it’s a matrix of lifestyle, ritualized behavior, and beliefs. To the participant, it feels like a religion; to the mainstream observer, it looks more like a sinister cult.

  ― Simon Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy

  I. Introduction: On Fieldwork and Fiction

  I began my Anthropology fieldwork as a sophomore in the fall of 1998 and did my research on the southern California rave scene. When I began this project, it was never with the intention to write about it, the timing just happened to coincide with Jeffrey Tobin’s “Qualitative Methods of Research” class. For the year or so that I was actively a part of the raves in Los Angeles County I fully considered myself to be a raver and identified myself as such.

  It wasn’t until I stopped raving that the cultural issues surrounding being a raver became problematized. The shift from being on the “inside” of the scene to the “outside” demonstrated a dramatic change of perspective, one that led to disillusionment and at first, a dash of denial. I had dedicated a year of my life to participating in a culture that I felt had very noble intentions: to erase gender, class and racial boundaries and promote the values of peace, love, unity, and respect. These four words are not the first things that come to mind when I now reflect on my experiences as a raver, a sense that permeates American Monsters.

  Initially, my plan had been to use the figure of the vampire to articulate different theories of the rave. But as I researched vampires I discovered that horror, as a genre, is inherently misogynistic and keeps itself alive by feeding on the blood of mutilated women. Oddly enough, my experience with rave culture had already led me to believe that the values preached by the rave were merely theory, and the actual practice of raves involved creating a safe space for men to prey on young girls on drugs. As my two research projects converged, the rave and horror, the monsters in the rave became clearer. I took this as an opportunity to blur the line between fiction and ethnography, a la Marta Savigliano’s Nocturnal Ethnographies, by applying the different theories of horror to the rave and from their union, I developed a story about raves in America. This essay will attempt to explicate some of the theories and motivations that led to my unconventional Honors Thesis and this novel.

  II. A Third Culture Kid’s Perspective: Anthropology versus Living

  The recent publication The Third Culture Kid Experience: Growing Up Among Worlds by David C. Pollock and Ruth Van Reken is one of the few books written about the experiences of people whose families have jobs that remove them from their home country or culture. The term “third culture kid” is an attempt to position those who live their lives between cultures. A third culture kid can be someone whose parents work for development programs, different governments, or with the United Nations, as is the case with my mother. Or a third culture kid can be the product of an inter-racial relationship, usually one that develops on leaving one’s home country. The term “third culture” is used to suggest that the child that grows up in this globally nomadic lifestyle will be the product of combinations of culture, not only gleaned from who their parents are and where they are from, but also having experienced multiple cultures during the course of their lives. As Pollock and Van Reken write:

  “Perhaps ironically, the struggle many TCK’s [Third Culture Kids] face in trying to find a sense of cultural balance and identity is not because they learn culture differently from the way others do. In fact, the real challenge comes because they learn culture as everyone does ― by ‘catching it’ from their environment rather than by reading a book or getting a master’s degree in cultural anthropology.” (p. 43)

  They further state that Third Culture Kids are natural participant-observers but “...because theirs is an intangible world, not tied to one visible place, most TCK’s have lived their experience without words to define it.” (p. 72). Being a “cultural chameleon” complicates the idea of culture as Third Culture Kids exist as interstitial members of society, not quite here nor there. As Rachel Miller Schaetti, an adult Third Culture Kid, writes:

  “I am struck again and again by the fact that so much of the sociology, feeling for history, geography, questions [about] others that our friends’ children try to understand through textbooks, my sisters and I acquired just by living.” (p. 77).

  Being somewhat of a nomad to begin with, the rave played a key part in my adjustment to life in America. I had lived in Sri Lanka, Zambia, Thailand and Pakistan before moving to India for high school, and ended up moving to Los Angeles by myself for college. I was introduced to American raves the first summer I spent in Los Angeles. When I made the decision to “research” raves, I very much identified myself as a raver and took to heart the values put forth by the raving communities. But of course, when confronted with “research” versus the life I was leading, my work became complicated as I knew I would never be able to present my findings using the “correct” academic register deemed appropriate by male-dominated academia. My life as a Third Culture Kid taught me that not only is it rude and presumptuous to ever concoct “theories” about the people I was a part of, but it is also a product of a Eurocentric way of thinking and is wholly inappropriate in terms of people who have investments within a particular culture.

  But I was faced with another problem within my “research.” My native anthropological standpoint when I first began my rave work
changed a year later as I had to stop going to raves, mostly for personal reasons. The transition from inside of rave culture to the outside was extremely difficult for me as a person, as much of my current American identity was built around the rave as a foundation. Exiting the rave scene ended up being a blessing in disguise; as I began to disassociate myself with raves and ravers, I began to notice things that were going on under the surface of the rave scene that I had never paid attention to before. The most illuminating raves I have been to are the ones I attended after I stopped actively being a raver, and it placed me in an interesting anthropological position.

  Anthropological knowledge has always struck me as being incredibly problematic, and my life as a globally nomadic Third Culture Kid taught me that representations are not to be taken lightly. As Pollock and Van Reken further write:

  “Because they have lived in so many places, smelled so many smells, heard so many strange sounds, and been in so many strange situations, throughout their lives when they read a story in the newspaper or watch it on the T.V. screen, the flat odorless images there transform into an internal 3-D panoramic picture show. It’s almost as if they were there in person, smelling the smells, tasting the tastes, perspiring with the heat. They may not be present at the event, but they have a clear awareness of what is going on and what it is like for those who are there.” (p. 93)

  This kind of view of the world can be very harsh and shocking, at least that was my experience moving to the United States. Being a raver provided me with a diverse network of friends all over southern California, but did not quite prepare me for the dangers of being a young woman in southern California, an experience that has been nothing like any place else I have been. The “cultural juggling” that Third Culture Kids become acclimated to made it very easy for me to slip into the rave and “become” one of them, plus the so-called “easy intimacy of globetrotters” made me one of the central organizers of our rave-going events. My point is that before I became an anthropologist, I grew up in situations that had already prepared me for the complications of anthropological fieldwork, and thus I adapted to my topic of field research in the same way that I adapted to the rest of my life: naturally.