by Kate Clanchy
Her pretty face crumpled in pain. She dropped her pen. ‘Oh no, Miss,’ she said, ‘you got that one wrong. They hate me.’ And when I demur: ‘No, Miss, really, that’s hate. They hate me.’
Kristell already had, then, at fourteen – she showed me under her school shirt – a contraceptive implant in her arm, but no steady boyfriend. There was trouble in her family; that’s why they moved town, why she arrived in our school mid-year. Just a few months later, she had a sort of breakdown. Now she is back, shakily, in school, but she has bleached her beautiful hair a coarse yellow and cut it short. She is on anti-depressants. She has put on a great deal of weight, so that the pretty figure is blurred, so that she looks like her mum, so that she has breached her bubble, so that she is not such a target of notice and noise.
Now Kristell sits with Lianne and Tia and writes about assault and rape and arm-slashing and helplessness. She is barely fifteen: a child. I think she was right to tell me that the boys’ attention was a form of hate; it was, and so was my attitude to her, so was the attitude of our entire society, the attitude that identifies the disruption as coming from the young girl, not the gazing man, that attributes power to such a powerless person.
I have not yet tried to explain the word ‘patriarchal’ to this group. Kristell still likes to write, and to read out her poems in her soft, husky voice. The dark eyes gazing out of the fat pink cheeks are still so very lovely.
Janine performed a similar act of self-sabotage. Janine from the Inclusion Unit. Not that I knew her very long, for she had no intention of staying in the IU, and still less of writing a poem. She sat with her arms mulishly folded, rolling her eyes at my every pronouncement. She muttered continually except when I asked for contributions, when she set her teeth and stared at the ceiling. Asked to write, she outright refused. She wanted a ‘proper lesson’. Miss B gently pointed out that she had been thrown out of most of those. In the end, before she took the rest of the group with her, we allowed her to flounce off to a table where she tried to draw attention to herself by putting her feet on it.
She wasn’t a pretty girl, even by the standards of the IU, even if she wasn’t making a terrible face. She was fat, a swathe of freckly flesh bulging out from her collar, blurring her jaw line, giving her premature double chins. Her hair had been dyed purple, a cruel, chemical colour, and there were lines of studs in her ears and nose. She was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, though it was summer, the way Kristell always does, the way girls do when they are scarred.
Miss B sees me watching. Look, she says, and puts a school record sheet under my nose. It’s for a Year 10 girl with a slim neck and cheekboney face and the most beautiful warm blonde hair flowing over her shoulders: dolly hair, little girl hair, princess hair, like Kristell’s. Miss B puts her finger under the name. It’s Janine.
Four months ago, she whispers, as the kids have finally settled to their work. Look, she’s got a great report and everything.
What happened? I write on Miss B’s pad.
She was raped, Miss B writes back. And when I look up at her, startled, she whispers: Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?
Now Susie says, ‘You’ve got to stop like, moaning on about it, Lianne. About what you’re eating, what you’re not eating, all that. It’s actually really boring? It’s like, disempowering?’
Susie quite often uses words like ‘disempowering’, and also always uses upspeak. Susie has her own YouTube channel in which she talks about empowerment in upspeak while wearing her underwear. Susie is blonde with long legs and a slim waist and wide eyes, and she layers on shiny make-up in such quantities that on the YouTube channel she looks at least twenty-five, or maybe no age at all, maybe like a form of artificial life generated by YouTube.
Susie has many, many subscribers; and the child protection officer is a little stumped. Is it empowering to talk about empowerment while making an object of yourself in your pants? Certainly, Kim Kardashian, icon of our age, gives out the message that it is, and so does Victoria Beckham, and even, in a subtle, double-edged way, Taylor Swift. Susie makes money out of it, £300 a month. She is very sure she is winning, profiting from the male gaze, while Kristell is losing.
I don’t tackle her on it. My own view is: probably best not to invest yourself in the male gaze, probably a better idea to turn on the Lily Allen and have a little dance with your girlfriends; I think, if you must make a YouTube video let it not be in your pants – but then I would, wouldn’t I? I have never been thin and blonde; I have always had other sources of power in my life.
And anyway, I like Susie. She has such oomph. Her current poem is about her mother, about a moment when she was young and lovely and photographed for a magazine. When she could do anything, says Susie. And then she lost it. So Susie may have some grip on the male gaze, after all.
In her chosen corner, under her huddling arm, Tia is writing another poem for her sister. Tia’s sister died of heroin addiction last year, and Tia lives with her dad and her gran because her mum is also an addict. Tia copes, everyone agrees, remarkably well. Not only does she keep out of any kind of trouble or substance abuse herself, but she works hard in school, and is universally well liked: kind, thoughtful, calm, friendly, and balanced. Tia also has a steady boyfriend, but she never writes about that relationship. Instead, she writes over and over again about her anxiety, about her pain and mourning, and about heroin, about whether she too will be addicted. And what does such a waif look like? Well, not like a waif. Tia is broad faced, solid, and working on making herself more solid. Mum-shaped; not heroin addict-shaped. She grabs the biscuits and stuffs in two at once as if to comfort herself, or maybe to shut herself up.
And that makes me think of Courtney. Courtney brought herself to Poetry Group for a focused term of writing two years after her brother was killed in a horrible accident. Courtney was bright, an accurate and fluent writer, and marvellously direct. In my group, she wrote a set of elegies, and then took them away with her; she didn’t want them published, she didn’t want to redraft them. They were not, honestly, as good as they could have been, but Courtney was satisfied with them. She had come, she told me clearly and calmly, on the advice of her counsellor and as part of her grief journey, and now she was done and going to focus on dance and sport.
This she did: she captained every school team through her sixth form and would have been on some county teams too, except every year she put on another ten pounds or so of fat on her small, strong frame, and slowed herself down too much to win at hurdles.
Most girls would have been put off dance, that most mirroring and merciless of disciplines, but not Courtney. Not only did she dance herself, but she also put on, in her last term, an ambitious show for younger students, and choreographed the dance section. Her dance, she announced with characteristic straightforwardness, was all about empowerment for girls, and being proud of your body. A familiar message, and one which, as the usual medley of well-worn pop songs came up on the sound system, we all settled back to take with a pinch of salt.
The music was naff, and Courtney’s dancers, mostly girls of about thirteen in leggings and T-shirts, were all shapes and sizes, and limited in their range. It was satisfying, though, to see a dance in which nothing nymph-like or delicate occurred; Courtney had built a simple narrative about building and lifting, parting and coming together. At the end of the show, Courtney herself, with her heavy stocky body, performed a duet with one of the only boys involved: tall, strong, African Jonathon. In the dance, they courted each other, quarrelled, parted, made up: simple, strong, equal manoeuvres. At the curtain call Courtney, bowing in the spotlight, was lit by her own work and her own vision, and she looked beautiful, and as if she felt she was beautiful. As if she had taken herself somewhere, which she had, and really was empowered, which she was.
I never felt like that at fifteen. I never saw beyond my acne and my hips. Even as a young woman, I never managed to like myself, or see myself except as men might see me. Looking at the fifteen-year-olds be
fore me now, I feel the waste of it all: all the youth and happiness being spoilt, for I do not think that one of them is happy like Courtney, not even Susie, because if she were, why would she feel such a need to perform? And the waste comes from me, too, from my commodifying, snobbish, patriarchal gaze.
‘You all look beautiful to me,’ I say, making it true as I say it, pushing aside the prejudices which hedge and besiege my gaze. ‘You look beautiful because you’re young. You’ve got to enjoy that.’
Maybe they hear me. Lianne smiles; Susie says, yeah. Tia says, ‘Thank you, Miss,’ conscientiously. Kristell says, ‘My mum always says that. I dunno though. Dunno if I believe her.’
Dawud’s Sister
Dawud is in the sixth form. He is supposed to be doing A Level with me, but he has not attended class for a fortnight or handed in his coursework, so we are having a conference. I’m prepared to be annoyed with Dawud; with his trendy lumberjack shirt and tight jeans, elaborately shaved sideburns and earring, he seems a bit Jack-the-Lad to me, a bit cocksure. I get the exam syllabus out and make him read it. I explain that my deadline is a real deadline, even if my course is called ‘creative’, and if he doesn’t hand in the work it really might have the effect of his failing the exam. He doesn’t reply, though, and as I talk on I have the feeling of not being heard at all, of my words flowing over the coiffed, blue-black quiff of hair he has bent into his small ringed hands.
‘I’ve got a problem at home,’ he says, to the table. ‘I had to stay and help my mum because she doesn’t speak English.’
This happens quite a lot to the Asian girls. It doesn’t happen to their brothers nearly so often, not unless they are the only person available. ‘Is your dad away?’ I ask, suspiciously.
‘In Pakistan,’ says Dawud.
‘So you’re the man of the house?’ I know this is inevitable. It still annoys me, though, the boys lording it over their mums.
He nods. He drums his fingers on the table, looks up at the ceiling. The problem, he says, suddenly, angrily, is that his sister can’t get out of bed, or even shower herself, and his mum has to be with her all day; she can’t cook, shop, do anything.
‘Well, she’s probably ill,’ I say, ‘your sister.’
‘Yes,’ says Dawud, ‘she’s really, really ill.’
‘OK,’ I say, softening. ‘Sorry about that.’
Dawud pauses, eyes down. He’s a bad colour, yellow-pale. Then I see he has tears in his eyes.
‘Really sorry, Dawud,’ I say. ‘What’s wrong with your sister?’
And then this story arrives. It takes a while, and comes out backwards, but Dawud keeps at it, talking without prompts. He seems to want to tell me, or perhaps, finding himself in a quiet room at last, he is trying to piece it together for himself. His sister has an unnamed illness – no fevers or rashes or anything like that, no broken limbs, but she can’t get out of bed. She is the middle of his three sisters, younger than him, just fifteen. It started last year when they all went back to Pakistan to celebrate the marriage of his older sister. They had a great time, but one night, while the family were all enjoying themselves at a festival, the middle sister stayed out too late, and – this bit makes Dawud sigh, and pluck at his quiff – a jinn, a spirit, became jealous of the whole family and their wealth, and got into his sister’s body and made her ill.
‘Do you believe that?’ I ask. ‘About the jinn?’
‘Miss,’ says Dawud. ‘Jinn are Islam, yeah? They’re in the Koran. And like, what I’m telling you is what they told me, yeah?’
Jinn are in the Koran, I know that already. I’ve heard about them from students from Islamic countries: from Albania to Somalia, Afghanistan to Syria, but especially from Pakistanis and Bengalis. Jinn are spirits, part of the unseen world, but have a physical reality on the earth too. Some of them are angels and some of them are demons, for jinn can choose, just like people, to be good or bad, to accept Islam or not. Some jinn are neither good nor bad but just themselves: mischievous, jealous, manifesting themselves as small fires, minor illnesses, cold breezes, mental breakdown. Jinn attack people who are exiled from their home country, especially when they go home for a visit. Disproportionately, jinn attack young women: new brides, younger sisters, unmarried women – whole classrooms of girls, sometimes.
‘Miss,’ says Dawud, clearly seeing the scepticism in my eyes. ‘I was born here. In England? Me, at the time, in Pakistan? I was like, yeah, she’s got a bug, she’s eaten something, she’ll be fine when we get back to England.’
But his sister wasn’t fine when they came home to England; she stayed lethargic and apathetic. She stayed in bed all day, then started to get pains in her legs, to find it hard to breathe. They went to the doctor, many times, but nothing helped. She was supposed to start Year 11, finish her GCSEs. She attended for a day or two, then stopped. Weeks went by. And then her parents took her to London.
‘To find a raqi,’ says Dawud. ‘To perform ruqyah. Like, our tradition. Healing?’
There are a surprising number of raqi in England. In London, especially. I’ve heard about them from African as well as Indian students. What they do varies, but some of it is violent. Some of it involves sitting on the possessed person, shouting at them, shaking them, for days and hours. There have been deaths.
‘An exorcism?’ I suggest. ‘To get rid of the jinn?’ Dawud licks his lips, shakes his shoulders, slides back into his street voice.
‘That’s when we found out about the jinn, to be honest with you?’ says Dawud. ‘The raqi? He said it was a shaytan, a bad jinn. And he explained about how it got to her? The festival, and how the jinn got jealous of us, and all that.’
I don’t need to express any doubts about this: Dawud clearly feels them already. He goes over and over his father’s decision to go to the raqi, justifying it. The raqi was a really good one, everyone said. He was really expensive. Everyone said it had to happen. That’s why his dad did it. To help. Nothing was helping his sister.
‘But did it help?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know,’ says Dawud, miserably. ‘I don’t know. They took her away for three days, I didn’t see her.’
That was three weeks ago. Now, Dawud’s sister cannot eat or walk. Now she screams in pain all the time. Now she lies hunched on the bed and says the sheets are tearing at her skin, the mattress is battering her bones. The doctor has come, several times. There have been dozens of tests. He’s talking about hospital.
‘Miss,’ says Dawud, ‘I think the raqi made her worse.’
‘You know,’ I say at this point, ‘that I have to tell everyone about this? About your sister and everything you’ve told me. I have to tell the Deputy Head?’
‘No,’ says Dawud. ‘I already did. Two days ago. As soon as my dad went to Pakistan? I told the school. I told everyone. Social workers? Everyone. And they all came to our house, they’re crawling all over it. Everyone in our house, saying stuff. My mum doesn’t understand any of it, that’s why I have to be there? She doesn’t understand the words they’re saying. That’s what I’m telling you, Miss.’
Telling the school and the social work department was a huge, brave thing for Dawud to do, and it has done very little good. Later, I’ll add my voice to those listing concerns about the family; for now, I work with Dawud on his writing assignment. We make a list of words that the doctors don’t understand: tasbih, prayers counted off on a rosary; shaytan, a demon, a jinn that has refused Islam; Koran Sharif, the holy book – and another list of words that his mother doesn’t understand: ME, Lyme disease, leukaemia, psychological, schizophrenia, section, care. We arrange them in a sort of dictionary form, alphabetized. It becomes a poem.
‘You know when you went to Pakistan that first time,’ I ask, as we work, ‘for your older sister’s wedding. When you met the jinn? Was that to get her engaged? I mean, your younger sister?’
And it was. An informal contract. To an older man. This has nothing to do with anything.
The poem worked out well
, but that was the last time I saw Dawud. After that, his family returned to Pakistan.
About What I Think I Am Doing
Jason, Aimee, Heya, and Shakila
In therapy, you articulate your feelings; in poetry, you do the same. As a result, poetry and therapy often get confused; there’s even something called Poetry Therapy. When I’m asked about this – on stage at a literary festival, for example – I usually make a distinction first: poetry is for making art, therapy is for making you feel better; poetry is for the reader, therapy is for you; then hastily resort to jokes. If poetry is therapy, I ask, why are poets such difficult characters? Why do they drink so, and squabble, and pick their emotional wounds in public? Why am I, having written so many poems, still bad-tempered and irrational and anxious? What, in short, do poets know?
Usually, I get a laugh. But this line does not go down so well when applying for jobs or funding for my work. These days, money for the arts, especially for young people, is often raised by bids to multiple agencies, bids which will not be successful unless they promise psychological as well as educational benefit. There is a sort of philanthropic market value in uncovering trauma in disadvantaged young people and getting them to write about it. Creative Writing merely as a part of English, on the other hand, won’t get a grant; writing has to change a young person’s life, ‘turn them round’. A poet can’t be just a teacher; she has to be a guru, or at least a psychotherapist.
When I begin working as a writer in schools, I find it difficult to make these sorts of promises. In the classroom I still think of myself as a teacher, albeit one with a specialism, and tend to behave like one too, always focusing on reading, dishing out detentions for the back row. I’m uneasy talking about psychological turnaround; I have no training in that. I’m more confident with targets of more accurate spelling and wider reading. I want to improve.