Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  I’ve lost count of the times in my life when people came to negative conclusions about me: I’ve been branded a juvenile delinquent, an alcoholic, a drug addict, self-destructive, depressive, anxious, controlling, obsessive-compulsive, overly sensitive, phobic, highly strung, and a hypochondriac, and not always unjustly. Around the time of this unfortunate event I discovered a new descriptor, and according to the literature it may be at the heart of all the others: chronic trauma survivor.

  My body aches in lament as my eyes scan the headline: ‘Murdered Queensland Toddler Beaten from “Head to Toe”’. Mason Jet Lee, not yet two years old, is found dead with horrific injuries. His mother goes to the media, appealing for help. She doesn’t understand. He was so beautiful, so gentle. The mother’s ex-boyfriend, who was with Mason the night he died, was arrested and questioned for eighteen hours, but not charged, and he steadfastly protests his innocence. Following a post-mortem whose findings suggest the boy was abused over an extended period of time, the police launch a homicide investigation. A journalist interviews the ex-boyfriend. He looks like he hasn’t slept for a year and his eyes don’t make contact with the camera or journalist as he describes, in a shaking voice, the night he called the ambulance. ‘You did nothing to hurt him?’ asks the journalist evenly. ‘Of course not,’ he says, crying with no visible tears, ‘I love him.’ Months later the three people who were living in the house the night Mason died, including his mother and the ex-boyfriend, are charged with manslaughter. I feel sick as I read about the injuries Mason suffered and the ‘excruciating pain’ he endured. I’m torn between tears and a furious scream.

  I realised many years ago I was a messed-up person, but it wasn’t until I read Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman – a book my therapist at the time referred to as ‘the Bible in the field of trauma studies’ – that I came across the phrase ‘chronic trauma survivor’. Many who grow up in an environment of family violence, where trauma has become the norm, come to the realisation that they are profoundly traumatised only after decades of suffering. Some never connect the dots. Most, like me, will have collected a hefty sack of labels along the way, labels that all too often only succeed in describing symptoms and snowballing shame. One of the hardest things about being a chronic trauma survivor (and it has no end of hardships) is the crushing loneliness of being misunderstood, even by oneself.

  Elizabeth Waites provides the simplest definition of trauma I’ve yet encountered: ‘injury to mind or body that requires structural repair’. How do you structurally repair memory? I have known for the best part of two decades that growing up with violence damaged me, but I used to think of that damage as a vague, amorphous influence on my equally vague and amorphous emotional life. It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I learned this damage occurs at a concrete level, changing the structure and wiring of the brain, and that this structural damage explains why the process of recovery for those chronically traumatised as children is such an enormous and gruelling challenge.

  In a report titled Children and Domestic Violence, researchers Dale Bagshaw, Alan Campbell and Lena Jelinek describe children as ‘the “silent”, “forgotten” or “invisible” victims of family violence’. They outline the problem of the traditional division between domestic violence and child protection. When child abuse is viewed as a health and welfare matter and domestic violence is referred to the police, courts and women’s refuges, children fall through the cracks. The researchers conclude that domestic violence is a child protection issue: ‘There is now increasing recognition that these are not separate phenomena and that children’s exposure to domestic violence is a form of child abuse.’ Blah blah blah. I can’t hear you over the roar of the machinery of endgame capitalism and Mason’s unheeded cries. Governments are busy with the economy. Policy proves itself unequal. The seething violence breaks loose daily, hourly, even as we speak.

  Is Julia Kristeva right? Is grand-scale social revolution no longer possible in the information-saturated, mediatised spectacle of present-day culture? Must the thirst for justice be satisfied only with these ‘intimate revolts’, this act of writing and reading, in the face of so much suffering? Memory is constructed and reconstructed. Each and every memory is a representation of a representation of a representation (multiplied by as many times as the memory has been ‘remembered’). Each remembered moment is a constellation of moments that passed in waves of energy and particles, of moving matter and light and colour, of inanimate objects – tables, lamps, plates – that seem real. Language constructs with its brick-words, its grammatical electricity. The heart beats fast. I want answers. Perhaps you do too.

  My parents had divorced by the time I was five. Their separation was as undramatic as their marriage, and my memories of my early years as the youngest member of a nuclear family are relatively tranquil. The most damning thing I can recall about my father was that he seemed forbidding, and was often absent, commuting long hours to and from work. I don’t remember any scenes, just that he disappeared one day. Sydney was one of those big-town-small-cities when my parents met as baby beatniks, hanging around the Theosophical Society in the city with an assortment of esoteric pre–New Age types. When my father took a trip to India in 1952, aged twenty-two, sponsored by the Society, a group of them went down to the docks to see him off. In a photo of my smiling father about to set sail, looking like a young Sinatra, he wears a dapper hat and suit, and my mother, not yet twenty and chubby-cheeked, stands next to him with a wool coat hanging around her shoulders, her hands in short, white gloves. Her expression is hard to read.

  After my father returned from his exotic sojourn, he married my mother, and my brother, Marc, was born a year later. By the time I came along eight years down the track, the marriage was faltering. In my father’s telling, my mother, who was not suited to be a 1960s housewife, had affairs and swanned around, doing as she pleased instead of doing the housework, endlessly indulged by my enabling grandparents. All of which, he said in so many words, served to make a man feel a stranger in his own home. He didn’t like the way my grandparents spoiled my brother and me, and he felt under-appreciated as a husband and father. I lived for my grandparents’ visits and of course welcomed the spoiling, and though I felt the loss of my father when he went I had no idea who he was.

  After he left the family home my mother had an affair with a model called Catherine. There is a photograph of Catherine in one of my mother’s disintegrating albums now stacked on a shelf in my office. She has a square, angular face and sports a mod aesthetic: structural dress, white cap, false eyelashes and frosted lipstick. We moved from Frenchs Forest back to the inner west, where my mother’s people came from, first staying with my Aunty Nance and Uncle Alf in the Lilyfield house Nancy had been born in. She lived in that house every day of her life (I don’t even recall her ever going on holiday) until she went to hospital to die from surgical complications.

  My mother was suddenly out a lot – looking for a house and a job, being newly single and socialising – and I somehow got it in my head that my mother was a ‘prostitute’ and judged her harshly for it. Children are sponges. I was too young to realise how troubled and upset I was by the separation and the move, to comprehend that I felt unmoored and confused and alone. It seemed to me that my father had disappeared without a trace and that in a way my mother had too. Looking back now, I find it remarkable that I came up with the prostitute story at such a young age. I didn’t know (or at least I don’t remember knowing) about my mother’s affairs until several years later when I started asking questions, and yet I seem to have sensed something about my mother’s sexuality, a libertine predilection, and the shame society ascribed it.

  Aunty Nance was a devout Catholic who wore a cross around her neck, had a set menu for every night of the week, attended church on Sundays, and tried to teach me the Biblical creation story by way of a beautifully illustrated children’s book. She couldn’t have children of her own and she was kind to me, an
d I’m sure she would have liked to love me, but though I remember her as my primary carer during that period, we never did meet heart to heart. I later learned that it was during this time my mother met Stuart Jones, a narcissistic, alcoholic baby-man who played clarinet in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and who became a thorn in my side for the next few years.

  For a long time after my parents’ divorce, I clung to the hope that they would reunite. I interrogated my mother about why they’d parted. I was an inquisitive child and to my mother’s credit she didn’t try to shut that down, but there are certain details a child of six, seven, nine, eleven, doesn’t need to hear. I learned all about the affair that proved to be the final straw for my father, and that her lover had tried to persuade her to elope, but she refused to leave my brother and me (read: I felt responsible for my mother’s happiness, or lack thereof, and became convinced it was my fault she had missed the chance to be with the love of her life). There was an obvious fondness between my parents and whatever drove them apart had not stopped them enjoying a certain kind of friendship, but, as she explained patiently over and over again, it was not likely they would reunite.

  Divorce was not common during the ’60s and I keenly felt the stigma of being from ‘a broken family’. I absorbed the images of happy television families, and suffered from a constant sense of bewilderment and inferiority for failing to belong to one. I was eight or nine when my mother finally got rid of Stuart and we moved into a brand new apartment in Glebe. At my new school, Stacey was one of the children I befriended. She was an athletic redhead around my age and the daughter of a single father. It didn’t take us long to hatch a Brady Bunch plan: Stacey would come to my place after school one afternoon and stay too late to walk home. Her father would come to pick her up. We would introduce him to my mother. They would fall in love. And we would all live happily ever after. In between the idea and its execution, we each primed our respective parents about the availability and charms of the other. Al arrived at the appointed hour and lingered late into the evening, talking with my mother on the velveteen sofa while we girls giggled excitedly in my bedroom, plotting our deliriously fun future as sisters.

  Al and Stacey moved in shortly thereafter and the four of us enjoyed a blissful faux-nuclear family honeymoon. My mother, an indoorsy person and an avid reader, was thrillingly lured out of doors on a string of adventures. We took boats out on the water, went bush, and enjoyed long country drives on Sundays looking for buggies (Al’s hobby), stopping for afternoon teas of scones with cream and jam at rustic cafes. Not long after I’d started calling Al ‘Dad’ and Stacey started calling my mother ‘Mum’, my newfound joy gave way to powerlessness amid the mayhem of adult traumas clashing. Home became a place of increasing dread and secrecy. Unlike with Stuart, I had dared to love Al, only to come to fear him from a reservoir of disappointed grief, partly because he was violent and probably sociopathic, and partly because he let me down so badly. I had desperately wanted him to be a loving partner for my mother and a father figure to me. I had handpicked him for the role. ‘If the idea of “home” implies physical and psychological safety and security as well as shelter,’ writes Jill Astbury, ‘then a child, adult or older person affected by domestic violence experiences a hidden “homelessness”.’ For a child – who is inherently dependent and who needs a safe environment to develop a sense of sure-footedness in the world – this homelessness can be a kind of lifelong exile. Is exile, then, a matter of degree? How many children can truly have a home in a society in which gender- and race-based discrimination and violence are routine?

  Stories about those languishing in every kind of exile, imprisoned in ‘processing centres’ like Nauru, Manus and Christmas Island, fill my Facebook feed year after year, successive governments signing off on their trauma, even though experts have likened Australia’s offshore detention centres to the torture ‘black sites’ used by the US in the ‘war on terror’. I sadface this world. The war on terror is a war of trauma. My weaponised trauma versus your weaponised trauma. The Guardian runs a story about Paul Stevenson, a ‘psychologist and traumatologist’ who has ‘spent forty years helping people make sense of their lives in the aftermath of disaster, of terrorist attacks, bombings and mass murders, of landslides, fires and tsunamis’. Stevenson made fourteen deployments to Nauru and Manus during 2014 and 2015. ‘In my entire career of forty-three years,’ he tells journalists Ben Doherty and David Marr, ‘I have never seen more atrocity than I have seen in the incarcerated situations of Manus Island and Nauru.’ Child suicide. Mismanaged rapes. Self-harm. Child sexual assault. My body beneath the weight of their tortured bodies. No way: you will not make Australia home. Australia first. Rise up. One Nation. Heil Hitler. Are you an ‘economic migrant’, a ‘queue jumper’? Never mind. If you’re not sufficiently traumatised when you get here, you soon will be. ‘Make a whistle from my throat,’ begins an anonymous poem penned by a refugee held in Baxter Detention Centre in 2005, ‘I do not know what will happen after I die. I do not want to know. But I would like the Potter to make a whistle from the clay of my throat. May this whistle fall into the hands of a cheeky and naughty child and the child to blow hard on the whistle continuously with the suppressed and silent air of his lungs and disrupt the sleep of those who seem deaf to my cries.’

  Those deaf to these cries count the votes in their blue ties. There can be no poetry after Auschwitz. This unsettling misquote is attributed to the philosopher Theodor Adorno, writing in the wake of the Holocaust, but according to a translation by Samuel Weber what he actually said was more along the lines of ‘it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz’, which offers little more reassurance. Adorno later softened and qualified his position stating that ‘Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream’ and he clarified that what he meant to raise was the difficult question of whether after Auschwitz one can go on living. What he was getting at, then, was that culture, including language, had been so twisted by the Nazis as to have stripped human civilisation of meaning. To continue reproducing culture in the wake of that and in the context of ‘the open-air prison which the world is becoming’ is ethically unjust. That is to say that to keep doing culture in the ways that produced the conditions that led to monstrosities such as Auschwitz (and Guantanamo and Manus and Don Dale) is barbaric. I wonder if Adorno realised he was calling for a feminist revolution in its sincerest sense, if he was aware that patriarchy lays the foundation from which hellholes like these rise up. The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda once declared that ‘poetry is an act of peace’. In light of this it would be more accurate to say that after Auschwitz there should be only poetry. The question is how to go on living.

  Even after years of therapy, I am unable to map out a reliable and linear timeline of events, or to articulate a cohesive account of the disintegration of the relationship between my mother and Al. All I know is that one day they seemed content and we were playing happy families, and the next they were fighting. I have no idea whether I witnessed ten, fifty or one hundred and fifty episodes of violence. All I have is a patchwork of random recollections without their broader context. The experts assure me this is completely normal for someone with post-traumatic stress disorder. Judith Herman describes how it works: ‘Traumatic memories lack verbal narrative and context; rather, they are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images. Robert Jay Lifton, who studied survivors of Hiroshima, civilian disasters and combat, describes the traumatic memory as an “indelible image” or “death imprint”.’

  A fight has started on our way home from a wedding. Al is in the driver’s seat and he has pulled over so that he can strangle my mother. I’m sitting behind him in the back seat, leaning out the window, screaming for help so hard my throat hurts. It’s a Saturday night and three or four people in a jovial mood pass by and look at us, but they keep walking and do not help. I’m watching my mother gag and I reach out and pull on Al’s hair with all my might. His hands
release my mother’s throat. He turns around and belts me in the side of the head.

  My mother lies on the floor in the kitchen. I think she is dead.

  We’re camping in a tent pitched at the top of a hill. They’ve been fighting all day and Al and Stacey appear to have abandoned my mother and me at the campsite. Michael, one of the boys from school who accompanied us on the trip, has gone with Al and Stacey, and the other, Tony, is with my mother and me. The three of us are sitting in the tent and the air is thick with apprehension and tension. We hear a car revving up the hill. We emerge from the tent, blinded by the headlights coming towards us at full speed. We run.

  My mother and I arrive home to find slurs scrawled all over the walls in huge, mad red letters.

  Some of my ‘indelible images’ feel realer than others. I feel certain the scene in the car took place. I know I didn’t imagine or false-memory our return to our apartment that day to ugly sexist vandalism, and I know I often feared for my mother’s safety. I am less sure about events at the camping site, though I do know something threatening took place because I distinctly remember my mother and Tony and me fleeing to the local police station and being put on a train back to Sydney. They blend, these memories, into each other in a timeless soup. Elizabeth Waites explains why they still feel like a bad dream from which I can’t quite wake, rather than reality: ‘The shock of trauma produces states that are so different from ordinary waking life that they are not easily integrated with more normal experience. As a result of this discontinuity, the traumatic state may be lost to memory or remembered as a dream is sometimes remembered, as something vague and unreal.’