Maria Katsonis & Lee Kofman (ed)

by Rebellious Daughters- True stories from Australia's finest female writers (retail) (epub)

  When she gets home, daddy tells her the baby dolphins stuff is complete nonsense. She believes him. Daddy is perfect and always right, and she dotes on him. (I’ve doted on him for 46 years but am aware of occasional flaws.) Sometimes he is obliged to tell her off, always saying she has done a bad thing, not that she is a bad girl. She pulls back, bursts into floods of tears, and has to rush in and cuddle him to comfort her for being reproved. An orgy of tearful hugs follows. I don’t know what this will do for general rebelliousness. But it makes for a happy daughter.

  Virtuous and hard-working, I describe myself. A dutiful daughter. And a prig with it. I agreed with my father about the badness of the Top 40, and reproached my sister for her interest. Now I am grateful to Brenda; what scraps and rags of fifties’ popular music I am pleased to know came from that involuntary listening to her radio. Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket. The twelfth of never. The itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini. These give me a tiny credibility where popular culture is concerned.

  I often think about my parents and my attitude toward them. I regarded them as a bit clueless, but gallant and brave, as innocents who had to be protected. A bit as Bianca regards me. I could know things but they mustn’t. I think my son James often felt like that about me when he was young. Even now, as he moves through his forties, I discover odd things, because he lets them slip, about what he was up to then, what I was saved from.

  There’s another daughter in my life, mine, whom I haven’t talked about. She died 11 years ago. I am writing a book about her, a memoir, called Words for a Dead Daughter, but who knows if that title will stick. That takes up all my thought about her. You might look back over my life as a landscape of loss, but that’s actually not true. Much is lost now, but when I had it, it was marvellous, and that stays with me. The past is another country, but when I lived there I was very happy. As now I am.

  WUNDERMÄRCHEN : A RETELLING OF MY GRAND MOTHER

  KRISSY KNEEN

  Once upon a time my grandmother won the lotto.

  But is this really the beginning of the story? There are actually several beginnings to several stories about my grandmother.

  Once upon a time my grandmother fled the former Yugoslavia and lived happily ever after in Alexandria in Egypt.

  Once upon a time my grandmother fled Egypt with her two daughters and lived happily ever after in England.

  Once upon a time my grandmother migrated to Australia where she lived happily ever after with her two daughters and her two granddaughters.

  You see, my grandmother was obsessed by fairy tales. She collected different versions of these stories – by Perrault, the brothers Grimm, Anderson. She liked the tellings and the retellings, comparing one against the other. I am not sure what she was looking for. I wonder if she was trying to find the definitive version. The actual truth.

  The problem with fairy tales and real life is there is no truth, no definitive version of events. There are just multiple iterations. In the version I am going to tell here, the ‘once upon a time’ part is the night my grandmother won the Lotto. In my grandmother’s version, this very moment would be her ‘happily ever after’. Winning the lotto and, as a result, moving to Queensland to open a tourist attraction called Dragonhall was to her the happy end of her tale of displacement, migration and struggle. But for me it was only the beginning.

  I was 14 years old, about to turn 15. The three generations of my family lived in Blacktown in NSW. My grandmother, my mother, my aunt, my sister and I all crowded into a relatively small suburban house. My grandfather, the only man in our house, was silent, absent. He was the sound of his piano, muffled from behind the closed door of his room when he came home from work.

  My sister and I called our garden The Woods. My grandmother had planted trees and shrubs so close that you couldn’t see into or out of it at all. She valued her privacy. She had an unflagging distrust of strangers, and because she refused to make friends, everyone outside the family was a stranger and treated with suspicion. Now, when I think of my grandmother’s house, I am reminded of the story of the Selfish Giant who wouldn’t let the kids from the village play in his garden and as a result he was lonely and very sad. I believe my own grandmother was also lonely and sad, but she never would have admitted to this as she saw any sign of sadness as a failure of will.

  My grandmother made models out of paper. She created life-sized papier-mâché dinosaurs that couldn’t fit inside the house and came in sections that could be taken apart, crammed inside my mother’s VW van and driven one at a time to be unloaded at the Sydney Museum for its dinosaur display. These were the most impressive of her works, but she was fonder of fairy tale characters. She would look at different artists’ impressions of Snow White, The Little Match Girl, Sleeping Beauty, then translate these to her own versions. The female papier-mâché sculptures would all look more like a younger version of herself than like the illustrations of Arthur Rackham or Virginia Frances Sterrett. I have inherited my grandmother’s small round face, big eyes and plump cheeks. So when I stepped into our lounge room, a dozen versions of myself stared right back at me.

  I related to those paper-made young women in other ways too. Fairy tale heroines were often fragile innocents in need of protection and this is how my grandmother saw us, her children and grandchildren too. She locked us all up in her tower in the woods, surrounded by paper versions of ourselves, frozen in time and space, compliant and uncomplaining.

  Forbidden from joining other children playing in the streets, I felt estranged from the rest of them when I went to school. It wasn’t just that. I wasn’t allowed to watch television as they did, I didn’t know the music they listened to and I grew up on a strict diet of fairy tales which meant I was cautioned daily against the terrors of an unforgiving world. I know that there must have been horrors in my grandmother’s history that made her frightened of the world, but she never told us the true stories. Instead, the stories that were told to us were dark tales of children cooked in a pot, girls freezing to death after wasting their last match and wives discovering they were married to murderers of pretty young women.

  Fairy tales come from an oral tradition. They began as cautionary tales, warnings passed from mouth to ear, generation to generation. There is a shocking tale in the Grimms’ collection called Wie Kinder Schlachtens Mit Einander Gespielt Haben or How Some Children Played at Slaughtering. In this tale, while the mother is upstairs giving the baby his bath, her two older children are replaying their father’s slaughtering of a pig. The child who plays the butcher slits the throat of the child playing the pig. The mother runs down at the sound of screaming. She sees her son bleeding out and takes the knife from his neck and stabs her other child in the heart. Realising that she has forgotten the baby in the bath, she runs upstairs only to find it drowned. She hangs herself and the father, coming home after selling the slaughtered pig, finds his whole family dead and dies soon after of grief.

  The moral of this tale is that nothing good will come of murder. Perhaps it is also a warning to parents to be more aware of what they, sometimes unwittingly, model for their children. I imagine that when my grandmother told me this story, she meant for me to see it as a call to never kill an animal. We were raised as vegetarians, carefully protecting the life of every bird, beast or bug. But as a child I saw a coded message in the story that I should not blindly repeat the actions of my parents or my grandparents. Read in this way, the tale is a call for us to eschew the teachings of previous generations, to make our own decisions, to rebel.

  Many fairy tales explicitly call the younger generations to rebel. At their heart, they are about metamorphosis. The rebellious actions of a princess, beggar girl or wife can transform the world. Bluebeard is another tale about a rebellious woman. In this story a young woman is chosen by a king as his bride. She wants for nothing. His castle is brimming with gold and jewels, food and furs. The only restriction her husband gives her is that she is not allowed to open the door to
one particular room. Of course the woman is overcome by curiosity and disobeys. As she opens the door, a river of blood rushes towards her and she is shocked by the sight of her husband’s former wives hanging dead like the carcasses of cows.

  The story of Bluebeard is a palpable warning for women against any men, even those men who seem at first to be benevolent. I remember my grandmother reading and rereading the story of Bluebeard, a tale reimagined by so many different storytellers in the hundreds of fairy tale collections that she owned. It resonated with her fear of men. As a child, I saw all men painted as beasts and bogeymen by my grandmother. My sister and I were not allowed to visit our friends’ houses. When we begged for a sleepover at someone else’s house, we were told that it would be too dangerous. Our girlfriends had brothers and fathers, all potential Bluebeards, each and every one of them.

  Masculinity was my grandmother’s most hated and feared thing. Even her own husband, my grandfather, was treated as an outsider to the family. My father was a person of suspicion. He was the boy next door and it was easy enough for him to move across the fence to live with my mother, but when I, the second child, was born, he made the mistake of trying to move out of the family home, buying a house a couple of streets away, a house we rarely lived in, spending every evening eating at my grandmother’s table. That marriage was destined to fail and it was no surprise when it did. The divorce just proved the point that my grandmother had been making. Men were not to be tolerated. Even our dogs knew that. When one of them barked at a passing man, she would say approvingly, she doesn’t like men. In fact, none of our dogs ever liked men and she was proud of this fact. As an adult I have begun to read stories about the former Yugoslavia, all tainted with violence and, often, rape. Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children, William Vollmann’s Last Stories and Other Stories, Fatherland by Nina Bunjevac – all of these narratives are equally distressing and paint a grim picture of my grandmother’s homelands. I don’t know what had happened to my grandmother in her younger years. All I know for sure is that she would never open our door if a man knocked on it, waiting in silence until he walked down the path and away.

  You can only interpret fairy tales in the context of current societal norms. My understanding of the Bluebeard story differs from that of my grandmother. For me the story of Bluebeard is all about breaking rules. The woman in the story succumbs to her curiosity, takes the magic key and boldly opens the forbidden door. Breaking the rule leads to her seeing the world as it really is instead of blindly accepting a fabrication of reality.

  When our family moved to Queensland, to Dragonhall, I, like Bluebeard’s wife, was given everything I wanted, within limits. I had my own room at last. I had a desk to write at. I had 40 acres of land to explore. My grandmother collected a menagerie of exotic animals to play with. Apparently, the alpacas and miniature horses and peacocks were to entertain the visiting public who would be flocking to Dragonhall to see my grandmother’s papiermâché fairy tales at seven dollars a head. But as paying customers rarely found their way to this isolated property, off the main highway and down a bumpy dirt road, the menagerie became pets to entertain the captive daughters and granddaughters.

  In my fairy story, just as in the tale of Bluebeard’s wife, there was one secret door that must not be unlocked. It was the door to my virginity. As long as my grandmother’s girls were virginal, we would remain in the bosom of our family, protected and provided for by our matriarch. I feel for my mother who returned home from her marriage to a kind of half-banishment. She was never again treated as a full member of the family after she brought her children home.

  In my grandmother’s eyes, a childlike state was equated with goodness. She banned any hint of sex in our house. If a film featured passionate kissing, she would turn it off. If a book had a whiff of sex, she would have the pages cut out. My sister, rebellious by nature, stole books that had erotic passages in them from the library. She let me read them under the covers of my blankets, the words lit deliciously by torchlight, jumping and shining on the quivering page. 1984, A Kestrel for a Knave. Forbidden books that I gobbled up in the dark, emerging in the morning tired and ravenous. I lost my innocence to literature but none of the adults ever knew.

  Just like Bluebeard’s wife, I was itching to open the locked door, which in my case meant to understand the true, and somewhat horrifying, nature of my life. I knew that to do so would lead to my expulsion from the paradise that was Dragonhall, but Dragonhall – just like Bluebeard’s castle – was, in reality, not a paradise at all. At Dragonhall, my mother, my aunt, my sister and I never had to cook for ourselves, because my grandmother always provided. We did not need to work, because we had a free roof over our heads. We were free to play or read or write. We were not to know that my grandmother’s finances were stretched. That the new shiny plumbing had already begun to crust over with rust, that eventually the cheap new furniture would break, never to be replaced. That even here in the free-flowing landscape of a Central Queensland property, her granddaughters, seemingly running free in the bush, were actually caged.

  In her book From The Beast to The Blonde, a study of the history of fairy tales, Marina Warner mentions the word Wundermärchen, which was used before the term fairy tale emerged. This German word translates to wonder tale, and stands for both folk and fairy tales. ‘To wonder’, Warner suggests, ‘communicates the receptive state of marveling as well as the active desire to know, to inquire’. My grandmother’s stories were full of wonder, wondrous creatures, wonderful worlds, and, like the wife of Bluebeard who wondered what would be behind the one locked door, her Wundermärchen set me to wondering. I was filled with a powerful and dangerous curiosity.

  I absorbed my grandmother’s Wundermärchens and learned the family trade, becoming a proficient sculptor and artist, creating fantastical wonder tales of my own. I began to write. I wrote tales of horror, of beastly transformations. Fairy tales are all about transformations and I practised the act of transforming in the stories I wrote. I was a caterpillar, filled with the knowledge of wings not yet formed. I didn’t begin to write about sex till years later but I was preparing for another change which would soon come. I wanted to lie down with beasts, like Beauty from the Grimms’ tale, I wanted to flirt with danger, court uncertainty, and so my life-long fascination with sex began.

  Sexual longing is inherent in many Wundermärchens. Even in the seemingly innocent tale of a girl who loved her grandmother, Little Red Cap, or Red Riding Hood, we are creeping towards the idea of sexual innocence lost. All the many retellings of this story begin with a granddaughter whose love for her grandmother is as clear as my own love for my mumumu. But the grandmother’s power is waning. She is frail, ill, old. The granddaughter must bring food and drink to sustain her, but the wolf has arrived before her and the grandmother is dead by the time Red Cap knocks at her door. In one quite gruesome version of the tale, the wolf feeds pieces of the grandmother to the unsuspecting Red Cap. The girl ingests the old woman’s flesh and, filled with her wisdom, realises she is in danger. The wolf, disguised as Grandma, invites her into bed. The sexual undertones are clear. The girl tries to escape by telling the grandmother-wolf that she needs to pee but the wolf demands she urinate in the bed. This strange, dark version of the tale sees the wolf eating the girl. Luckily the huntsman cuts the wolf open and Red Cap escapes unharmed.

  In my own, less cautionary, fairy tale, I willingly hopped into the bed of the wolf. I chose a boy at random. A tall boy, almost twice my height. A sporty, blokey boy so unlike me that I am surprised in retrospect that he agreed to have sex with me at all. I stole a rare opportunity to sneak away with him, unsupervised. We ran along the strand, letting the ocean lick at our toes, and quickly mounted a dune at the beach and I ate, and was eaten by, the wolf-boy. And I liked how he ogled my breasts with his big eyes, and snapped at my neck with his big teeth, and tore away my hymen with his terribly big cock (My, what a big cock you have! All the better to fuck you with). And although I
was devoured, I sprang whole from the belly of the wolf and raced out beyond the borders of my grandmother’s castle and in the following years kept tangling with wolves, first with my body and then in my writing. In pursuing my passions, I grew strong just as my grandmother, in her abstinence, grew frail with the passing of years.

  Recently she died.

  This is the way with fairy tales, the tellers die but the stories live on in each subsequent generation.

  My grandmother identified herself as a storyteller. On the rare occasions when paying customers did enter Dragonhall, she sat down with the children and told fairy tales to them, pointing to the life sized papier-mâché girls around them. This one fell into a sleep as deep as death, this one froze to death after she had squandered all her matches. I am not sure if she knew that she was frightening the poor children with her thick Slavic accent, her crabapple face, and – towards the end – the dark places where her teeth had fallen away.

  In adulthood, I, too, turned to storytelling for a living. Being the opener of locked doors, I find therefore that my own stories are all about sex. They leap over her rules of chastity, they stomp naked, they dance irreverently on my grandmother’s grave.

  At first glance, it seems that my storytelling project is the opposite to that of my grandmother’s. She cautioned against sex and I rip the pants off our genitals and wave them cart-wheeling in the air. I have always seen myself as the rebellious granddaughter, the challenger of my grandmother’s taboos, but really I have taken the mantle of the storyteller from her shoulders and, like hers, my Wundermärchen are full of wondrous things and of wondering. Scratch the surface a little and you’ll see that, just like my grandmother, I delight in frightening the innocent, in speaking the unspeakable. In my case, I speak of sex, whereas hers were tales of death and fear. She refused to follow the rules of others, I break the social taboos. Art is my God as it was hers. Now that she is dead, I realise that I have become the retelling of my grandmother’s story, similar and yet transformed, as are most retellings of fairy tales. My once upon a time began in her happily ever after. I wonder where my own story will settle and when I will reach the end of the tale I have to tell.