Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  On Sunday visits to Seaforth, my grandmother waxed lyrical about the winning ways of the golden couple and their children, and I understood that they lent a kind of distant nobility to the family. A proud Scotswoman, she had looked down her nose at Australia ever since she had been forced to emigrate as a teenager with a fondness for the poetry of Robert Burns. She never quite recovered from being ejected from Great Britain – still the centre of the universe at the turn of the twentieth century – only to find herself in a dusty one-horse town in central-west New South Wales. And though her own breeding was working-class, and she had willingly accepted the hand of my grandfather Clarence, a mild-mannered and handsome fellow from a family of Trundle master butchers, she believed herself married beneath her intellectual station. It was as if she saw her firstborn as her rightful heir, hobnobbing with the gentry in the opulent hotspots of 1960s Europe. I couldn’t hope to compete with my pedigree cousins for her affection; I was inferior, a Sydney girl, the second child of her second son.

  It wasn’t until they returned to live in Leura, during my first or second year of high school, that I got to know Hugh, Phoebe and my cousins. Hugh and Phoebe separated not long after their homecoming, and shortly afterwards I woke up one morning to find Hugh passed out on our sofa. He and my mother began a relationship and over time I grew close to him, viewing him as something of a father figure. It may be more accurate to say my mother and Hugh resumed the relationship they began when I was a small child. My brother, many years older than me, swears he saw them kissing passionately in our childhood home before my parents’ divorce, and one of my mother’s closest friends confirms their affair, adding that Hugh, a suave author on the rise at the time, had bought my mother a car. Uncle Hugh was alcoholic, gifted, clever, cultivated and witty, which was a lot of fun so long as it stayed on the right side of acerbic and wasn’t directed at you. I was mostly spared his withering gaze and vicious tongue, but not entirely, and my mother copped it plenty. His nickname for her was ‘pygmy’ on account of her being short and petite and, though many might take that as a slight, it demonstrated the more tolerable, affectionately mocking side of his verbal abuse. One of my mother’s close friends says she once complained that he called her a cockroach, a term clearly intended to be demeaning and humiliating. Even so, both my mother and I loved him madly, and after she died in 1997, only a few years following his death, I found a bundle of adoring love letters from Hugh to my mother. I read only the first lines of a few letters – enough to know it was not my place to read more – and in those words their admiration and desire for each other was palpable.

  It was during the early years of my mother and Hugh’s on-again-off-again defacto relationship, when I was fifteen or sixteen, that my crush on cousin Jake took hold. My mother and Hugh were shacked up in a humble weatherboard house just outside of Woy Woy and I was staying with them. I spent my days writing in a journal and riding my bike around Brisbane Waters, and sometimes Jake would visit. Bored with satellite-city living I moved back to Sydney just after my sixteenth birthday, and into the Glebe studio apartment my mother had acquired, the better to be closer to Jake, who was living in a house in Surry Hills owned by Phoebe. I passed the days of a Sydney summer listening to Double J radio and Neil Young’s Harvest over and over, drinking with friends, daydreaming about Jake and finding excuses to make contact.

  One day Hugh showed up on my doorstep, having been turfed out by my mother. We went on a bender around town with Jeremy, an ex-boyfriend of mine Hugh was partial to, and a couple of other friends, during which we were refused entry at the infamous Journalists’ Club, despite Hugh’s longstanding association, probably because Jeremy got around barefoot in an op-shop suit in breach of the dress code. It lasted for days, and somewhere in my timeworn, booze-soaked memories is a clear replay of lying next to Hugh on the floor, both of us drunk, half-asleep or both, and him groping me. I struggle to write those words, and to leave them be once written. I make myself write them against a force field of prohibition and shame. I imagine my aunts and my surviving cousins reading them and dread sets in the gut. I am ashamed for him yet it is not my shame.

  It only happened that once. I want you to understand (hear the rising panic in my voice?) that I do not believe he would have done it sober. At no other time in our relationship did I experience him as sleazy, or did I feel sexually sized up by him. I want to say these things. I want to make excuses. To be sure you understand the conditions. Shame is part of what drives alcoholism, addiction and abuse, and in so doing it reproduces and is transmitted. And shame is often transmitted, paradoxically, by shameless acts, acts in which one person’s avoidance of shame demands another carry it. As Teresa Brennan points out, feminine beings – those who do not exhibit the valued, westernised signs of masculinity, whether because of their gender identity, youth, race or even species – are required to carry a disproportionate amount of shame, fear and other punishing affects. It is the way of patriarchy.

  We feminine beings learn early on to take this load, to wear it as ours, to do the work, day in and day out, of enabling silence, denial, minimisation, unless we make a conscious decision not to, and learn how not to (and of course, children have a very limited capacity to do either). I force myself to write that one time my only uncle sexualised me and fondled me, tried to kiss me like a lover, when I was not yet the age of consent and he knew how much I looked up to him, because this is a story that plays out the world over. A ‘good’ man, a ‘drunk’ man, a ‘talented’ man, a ‘trusted family member’ or ‘friend’, a man whose family and community assume to be above it, objectifies and abuses a child in his care or a young woman in his presence. When it comes to light we ponder, discuss and engage in argy-bargy about what causes men in such numbers to do these things. There are many possible devils in the detail, but the bottom line is that when men do this they do it because they can, because they’ve been enabled and trained by aeons of patriarchy to do it, because deep down they’ve been imprinted with the notion that they are masters of all they survey since the day they were born with a penis and thus bequeathed a gendered privilege (are we at risk of overusing that word; are we too preoccupied with identity point scoring?). And too often we protect men, protect ourselves and each other, from the truth of what they do and from our collective duty to examine how and why it is men reach that moment, and how best to intervene on this structural (there can be no other word for it) abuse. When my mother showed up unannounced shortly after the drunken fumble she found the studio trashed and empty and added me to her growing list of evictees. I did not tell her about the unseemly moment that had passed between her partner and me.

  As a mature, educated woman, as a known feminist, I am expected to be the kind of woman who does not struggle to say that my long-dead uncle crossed the line, yet here I am: wanting to retract, to stay silent for my father’s sake, my aunt’s sake, my cousins’ sake, my dead mother’s sake, wanting to whitewash the memory of a man I revered and who has some bearing on my becoming ‘a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper’ – a writer – as Joan Didion once put it. Why do I imagine that what I seek to protect them from is theirs or ours alone? Why does it feel so personal, so singular, as if it’s about an individual (him, me) when I know that what I protect against belongs to society, shameful and shameless by turns, to a history well beyond that of my family?

  What I unwittingly, instinctively want to protect against is the shame that permeates patriarchy. It’s what I’ve been trained to do. It’s what we’ve all been trained to do, but protecting against this shame means protecting, colluding with, its shamefulness and its shamelessness, with patriarchy itself. ‘I was very struck by all the passages in Primo Levi where he explains that Nazi camps have given us “a shame at being human”,’ says the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in an interview with Antonio Negri. ‘Not, he says, that we’re all responsible for Nazism, as some would have us believe,
but that we’ve all been tainted by it: even the survivors of the camps had to make compromises with it, if only to survive.’ So it is that we make compromises, from the start, in order to survive, except that many don’t, or do so wretchedly. We’ve been brought to a critical point in which the future of humanity and the planet itself is less certain than ever. Having reached the twenty-first century, we’re on our knees with climate change, financial crises of false economies, unprecedented instability in western political leadership, and global terrorism operating in a context in which many countries have nuclear capability. There is no time left for decorum. One must say the words that need to be said, exposing the circulating shame that in hiding propagates.

  The windows rattle and the wind howls. I try to sleep, surrounded by ghosts.

  I can’t remember how Renee and I reconnected in the aftermath of the seedy Bondi rape, but somehow she appeared in my world, no longer working as a sex worker, and we’d talk on the phone and occasionally I’d go visit her in her nice little flat and we’d sit around drinking green ginger wine and listening to Rodriguez singing about sugar men. What I remember most distinctly is the sound of her voice, on the other end of the phone, telling me that my problem was I saw two sides of everything. I didn’t understand what she meant, and that bothered me. It felt like I was missing something important.

  So I continued angsting over my feelings of guilt and responsibility, convinced I’d ‘brought it upon myself’. At a bar on my own for hours on end; flirting outrageously; going off in a taxi with people I didn’t know to I wasn’t sure where; changing my mind about fucking mid-coitus (if I’d even made up my mind to start with); panicking and bolting; making a public, pathetic spectacle of myself. I would have dropped the charges, but they weren’t mine to drop: the cops had pressed them and now I had no choice but to have a court case hanging over me. I counted my lucky stars that I was not required to be present and I had no hesitation in electing not to attend.

  The nagging guilt came with another feeling I had no words for. It had preceded the rape, which produced yet more of it. I’m not talking about the energetic movement of a necessary, transient humbling designed to regulate unchecked interest or hubris. I’m talking about the chronic presence of a noxious, transmissible traumatic shame. American psychologist and affect theorist Silvan Tomkins conceived of nine affects: shame-humiliation (inherently punishing), anger-rage (inherently punishing), fear-terror (inherently punishing), distress-anguish (inherently punishing), interest-excitement (inherently rewarding), enjoyment-joy (inherently rewarding), surprise-startle (inherently neutral), disgust (inherently punishing) and dissmell (a biological response of revulsion, to putrid meat for example – inherently punishing).

  These are, according to Tomkins and his adherents, hardwired and present from birth, and in combination with life experiences they form an emotional memory that becomes the scaffolding on which much of the personality is built. Our less than fully conscious attempts to regulate affect (to maximise those we experience as positive and minimise those we experience as negative) results in what he calls ‘life scripts’, psychic and behavioural patterns that inform the way our lives play out. Tomkins viewed shame as the most pernicious of the affects. ‘If distress is the affect of suffering,’ he pronounced, ‘shame is the affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression, and of alienation. Though terror speaks to life and death and distress makes of the world a vale of tears, yet shame strikes deepest into the heart of man.’ It struck deep in my heart back then though I didn’t know its name.

  I was relieved when the guy didn’t show for court and I got on with it, putting the sordid business behind me.

  Fast-forward thirty-plus years to 2016. One of the sorry tales that circulated around social media was that of the Stanford rape case. Brock Turner, a twenty-year-old former Stanford University student and star athlete, was sentenced to jail for the attempted rape of an unconscious twenty-two-year-old woman behind a dumpster at a frat party in January 2015. The woman understandably chose to remain anonymous. Two documents generated reactions from around the world: a letter from Turner’s father in defence of his disgraced son, and a victim impact statement of over 7,000 words addressed to Brock and read out by the woman during his sentencing hearing.

  The outpourings by Turner’s family are toxic examples of how the rotten apple falls close to the poisoned tree of delusional, closed-hearted, sexist entitlement. The words of the young woman whom Turner violated – not only in the initial assault but also in wilfully dragging her through a trial and attempting to shift the blame in self-serving denial – reminded me of that night in Bondi and its aftermath. I read her statement, cheering from the sidelines. I exulted in its length and strength. In its clarity and her capacity for articulation in the face of layers of abuse. She was everything I was not in the wake of that ill-fated bender. This was a young woman standing her ground against a society and a legal system that had failed her and claiming her right to a voice, to speak, to be heard (I want to think this signifies some kind of progress, but the power of her words is undercut by the fact that they exist in order to call out a culture that still produces and enables men like Turner).

  A Brock Turner Family Support page was set up on Facebook, seeking donations and spreading propaganda and slander. While it was active it launched a #brockinallofus campaign that featured posts protesting, ‘We’ve all made mistakes. Whether it’s failing to drive in the winning run in your little league game or oversleeping and missing an important test, or, like Brock and his companion, drinking too much and getting a bit too touchy-feely.’ Whoa. Wait up. We’re comparing a childhood sporting disappointment and a malfunctioning alarm clock to rape and blatant victim-blaming? Next to this text a black and white cartoon depicted three female figures each holding a placard marked by one of the following words: We / Are / Brock. The troubled Turner family ended this post by thanking supporters for their prayers. Jesus wept. Following persistent complaints, the page was eventually shut down, but not long afterwards Turner was released, having served only three months of his already lenient six-month sentence (the prosecutor had argued for six years). It’s an insufferable and seemingly circular crisis in which we live, an asylum run by lunatics, and we do our best to juggle in a mania of ‘isms’ and stress, soothed only by love and voices of support binding against the micro-aggressions and micro-transgressions that build to these horrendous moments made public spectacle.

  Another petition in my feed that week protested the banning of Melbourne comedian and feminist commentator Catherine Deveny. Facebook had slapped a thirty-day lockout on her for an ‘offensive’ status, which read: ‘Here are the top ten causes of violence. 1. Men. 2. Men. 3. Men. 4. Men. 5. Men. 6. Men. 7. Men. 8. Men. 9. Men. 10. Men.’ It appeared Facebook moderators did not consider the Brock Turner Family Support page to be ‘violating community standards’ while a simply stated opinion by a lone woman was promptly deemed ‘inappropriate’ and penalised. When the World Health Organization announced in 2015 that the leading cause of death for young women aged fifteen to nineteen was suicide (the leading causes of death for young men of the same age were road injury and interpersonal violence), Professor Vikram Patel, an internationally recognised psychiatrist and expert in global mental health, cited gender discrimination as the probable cause. ‘Misogyny kills,’ writes Jessica Valenti, the young (female) journalist discussing the finding. Valenti, an outspoken feminist commentator for The Guardian, withdrew from social media platforms in July 2016 after the rape and death threats usually directed to her were extended to her five-year-old daughter.

  Controversial American academic and social critic Camille Paglia defends patriarchy, suggesting that second- and third-wave feminists (such as Deveny and Valenti) who call men out for sexism and misogyny are puritanical, punitive and demonising. ‘History must be seen clearly and fairly: obstructive traditions arose not from men’s hatred or enslavement of women but from the natural di
vision of labor that had developed over thousands of years during the agrarian period and that once immensely benefited and protected women, permitting them to remain at the hearth to care for helpless infants and children,’ insists Paglia. Yet US-based historian Dr Amanda Foreman, in her four-part BBC documentary, The Ascent of Woman, states there is evidence suggesting that the development of patriarchy was not based on the ‘natural division of labour’ and nor was it as beneficial to women as Paglia claims. It was, Foreman asserts, surplus agriculture, as well as the development of a military to protect and expand it, that seems to have led to the advent of rigid patriarchal practices and attitudes, manifesting in a variety of ways across distinct cultures.

  Donald J. Trump and his henchmen at the helm of the so-called free world demonstrate more starkly than ever before that government all too readily becomes less a system of democratic representation and more a corporatised, masculinist oligarchy, unhinged in its loveless lust for domination, and, as if poisoned by the fumes of their own toxicity, corrupted by the patriarchy it desperately seeks to reassert. Feeling their patriarchal power base slipping, they refuse to go down without a gaslighting-us-on-the-way-south fight. In the aftermath of Trump’s election to the US presidency, those who saw the rise to power of an ill-prepared demagogue as a devastating coup debated about which ushered in the unfortunate outcome: was it down to class, race or gender? Foreman’s reading of patriarchy’s beginnings would seem to support Marx’s view of class as the dominant organising principle of society, in that production of surplus for profit gave rise to both early capitalism and patriarchy, but since sexist, racist and speciesist principles now dominate economic and socio-political operations in such an entwined way, arguing the toss is a waste of valuable time. This is why many are now adopting an intersectional approach as our best hope of making substantial and sustainable change. As Patricia Hill Collins puts it, class, race and gender (and I would add species) form interlocking axes of oppression within a matrix of domination; it is less useful, then, to determine which packs the biggest punch (the answer will always depend on who is answering anyway) than to understand the ways in which patriarchy drives the entire operation.