by Kate Clanchy
So, the year I start in the Inclusion Unit, I take myself on a two-day course for writers in schools in a bid to up my skills. The course, in a smart venue in Manchester, is led by experienced writers, not teachers, and this is an important selling point. Writers, we are told over the two days, must hold on to our special ‘real’ status in schools, so that we can transmit our ‘real’ magic to children. I am unsure about this. It’s tiresome for teachers to work with ‘magic’ people, because then they have to be the straight man. Besides, there are not many published writers on the course. I can all too easily imagine the feelings of a teacher who has an aspiring performance poet roll into their Year 10 and tell them to forget all about exams on the grounds that he, and not Miss, is ‘real’.
But it’s good for young people to be told they are doing something special, I tell myself. There is magic in writing, of course there is, I remind myself. Beware of being a sourpuss, I add. I go to some interesting drama workshops, and one from a helpful psychotherapist. Then I attend the class I really need: the one about story-writing. I’ve realized I have surprisingly little idea of how to go about this, and it is always in demand. An enthusiastic young novelist is sharing her best lesson, one she uses regularly, by teaching it to the group. She is asking us some special questions, and we are writing answers as honestly and unselfconsciously as we can. The questions seem open and easy at first – which place do you think of as home? – but move swiftly on to the heavy duty. Who have you treated badly in your life? What one thing do you most regret? What would you change if you could?
I am writing . . . but I can’t write here what I am writing. I am in tears at the memory. I was in tears at the time: back in a trauma, an unhealed memory, helpless. I’d just dropped into it as I was answering the questions; then I found myself writing it, out of control. We are asked to read, and I use all my journalistic skills to invent a cover story, a fictional answer. I’m sweating. Several other people round the table are also upset. The novelist seems to think this is a good thing, that this is how you start a story, that by doing this, we are opening ourselves to good writing. But I’m closing myself, rapidly. I score out everything on my paper, wordless, speechless.
Later, I chew over the things I failed to say: for example, that this is not how any trained teacher would behave and maybe teachers know stuff; that you cannot, you must not, ask young people questions like that unless you are a counsellor and have the training and resources and back-up to deal with the disclosure of abuse or the uncontrollable grief or simply the severe upset in the middle of a school day which might come of them; that yes, writing may well have its origins in trauma, but it is not our business to provoke or suggest that process; that writers must do their own provoking, in their own time, when they are ready; that the Freudian idea that it is healing simply to speak of a trauma cannot be right, because it cannot be empowering to anyone to feel as helpless as those questions made me feel.
So I go away from the conference even more the classroom teacher, and less the classroom writer, than when I began. In fact, I have a new set of worries: about trauma, writing, and disclosure, and beyond that, in the marketing of disclosure. I’m not sure what I will do about them in the future, but I am resolved that whatever it is, I will never make a child feel as I did in that room.
Jason’s Skull
I promised myself always to be a teacher in class, and to focus on art, and excellence, and the production of good writing. Stories come from stories, poems from poems, not from digging up trauma: this is what I tell everyone. I vowed never to use any technique that began with psychological probing, never to ask a direct biographical question, or ever to press anyone for true information. I would always begin a workshop with some reading, something to lean on and imitate and hide behind. I would make sure always to offer the possibility of a fiction: the use of the third person, for example, or a science fiction frame.
And I stuck to these promises. I stick to them now. But, as I did with Priya and Priti and their novel about the American camp, I often found myself asking students to be real: to use actual details from their actual lives, even when – especially when – they were constructing a fiction. This is because personal observation and good writing almost always coincide; they make fresh images in the mind and on the page. Drawing from life also short-circuits cliché production and basic mistakes, like Priti’s motorized canoe. Most writers know this; this is why we chant mantras such as ‘write about what you know’; ‘show, don’t tell’; and ‘write the poem only you can write’ in Creative Writing classes. We mean: please don’t regurgitate another teen novel; no more summer camps and canoes, we all have heard enough received versions of the world; your own, however eccentric, will be more interesting.
Good writing always starts from good reading. Joe Brainard’s I Remember was one of my favourite models: a whole book made up of short, disconnected paragraphs about growing up gay in forties America, each segment beginning ‘I remember’; each hilarious, moving, and juicy with sensual particulars. It’s a shape that gives importance to the small, real details of a life, the parts that do not seem grand enough even to be remembered, but somehow are central. It’s also a shape that asks to be copied, and, liberatingly, is: there are lots of ‘I remember’ versions in bookshops and on the web, written by published writers as well as students.
And so, in a Year 11 Inclusion group with a few tough boys in it, I read out first a few Brainard paragraphs, the cleanest I could find, then a longer ‘I remember’ piece by the poet Paul Farley. The group drank down Farley’s account of a working-class childhood in Liverpool like a forbidden beer, and after a lengthy discussion of childhood adventures and crimes, and much enjoining from me to focus on the detail and think about the senses, Jason, a freckly, squinty boy with a rap sheet as long as his arm, waved his pen in the air, and scribbled down a series of shocking memories: the time he got drunk and banged his head on the wall, but couldn’t feel the pain; buying cigarette lighters in the car boot sale and setting them off like bombs, but the explosion was never enough; the time he was sent into the police station by older boys to take the blame for a crime and he studied himself in the two-way mirror, trying to find the right shape; the time he had his head hacked open in a fight; how he couldn’t cry until he looked in the mirror and saw his skull.
All of the moments he had chosen were about being stunned; about blows to the head and the mind and how the brain processes them, or rather, doesn’t, how it holds them as trauma. His language was clean, simple, economical, and when, at the end of the session, Jason read the poem to the group, they were, appropriately, stunned.
I passed Jason’s poem up the line. It went all the way, generating (stunning) excitement in everyone who read it: the Head Teacher, the writing project manager, and the project’s funders. So much excitement, in fact, that the project manager printed it on a postcard which was passed to me at a literary party in London, where I stared at it, surprised. I wasn’t sure it should be here, in this smart London room, surrounded by empowered, super-clever people. It seemed small, suddenly, and terribly raw, an object of pity, a token in that market in philanthropy that made me so uneasy.
But: ‘It’s amazing,’ said the person next to me, who I realized was a funder. ‘Did you really get him to write that? I mean, he must feel so much better?’
Did he? I don’t know. Jason never said. I’d heard him read the piece to large and small audiences three times; they always seemed amazed, and he always seemed pleased. He stayed in school through his GCSEs and went on to steady work, which was a good result in his circumstances. Did any of this make it a healing poem? It didn’t feel healing as I read it; it just felt shocking, a shock packaged in its own poetic frame, a shock in a box.
Somehow, I didn’t manage to tell the funder that Jason was healed, or that I had helped him. I folded up the postcard, and never, as requested, took it in to school or sent it to Jason. Instead, I left it in the pocket of my good coat, my London coat,
and, for three years after that, I re-found it each time I went to a winter party: that harsh little trauma on stiff paper, Jason’s skull. It made me feel bad. I worried that the poem exposed Jason’s trauma to the world in a way he didn’t understand. I worried that the poem was being read for its horror, not its cleverness. That it was a cheapening, a blurt, and I did that.
Aimee’s Control
Seven years after I teach Jason, I teach Aimee. Aimee is an orphan and even in our school, even among the most disadvantaged students, this is a rare and awful misfortune. She lost both her parents in the single year between her thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays, and both to addiction. Since then, she has lived with an aunt – an inspiringly loving and supportive one – with visits to her paternal grandmother. In school, probably because of this support, she gets good grades, and is a sober, hard-working citizen, but we all worry about her, of course we do.
Aimee is also part of a special poetry group, one assembled not by me but by a PE teacher, Mr M. Mr M is young, dynamic, and shining with commitment. He is charged with the extremely difficult mission of helping the school’s most disadvantaged students fulfil their academic potential. This does not mean, by and large, our migrant students, because they tend to work very hard at their studies; it means our white, poor students. It means kids like Danielle, or Simon, or Kristell – pupils who, statistically, but also in plain sight, come in from primary school as bright and high-achieving, and within a couple of years of secondary become disaffected, badly behaved non-attenders, drowning in the difficulties in their lives. Mr M is after anything, and anybody, who might help. He spots me in school, and timetables me in. His faith is not intimidating because it is so straightforward and also so undemanding. He is not after a cure, does not expect turnaround. He thinks writing things down has to be good. He thinks it will raise self-esteem, because how can it not? He thinks doing some writing and feeling a bit special will do fine as an intention for this group, and that I will be fine in that context too, whether I am being a poet or an English teacher or a semi-counsellor.
And actually, I think, settling down in the cosy room Mr M has organized, sampling the biscuits he has provided, I agree. And so, it seems, do the students. In fact, from the very first time I sit down and read Rita Ann Higgins with them – ‘Miss, that’s like a real poem. Are we doing real poems in here?’ – they’re a joy. Each week I show them a ‘real poem’ and they respond with screeds of their own about the hair-raising traumas of their everyday lives: boyfriends in comas, deaths, physical and sexual abuse, abandonment. Then they share the results, and cry, buckets. I often cry too. They look forward to it all week, they say. And so do I, because however shocking the revelations, this group never give me the Shakila’s head/Jason’s skull feeling of being handed some live, uncontained trauma; on the contrary, we seem to have happened on a safe place, and a method of holding each other up. Maybe I am getting better at this.
Part of this is certainly the reading and listening we’re doing. The group’s enthusiasm for performance poetry, in particular, is huge; they actually start storing poems on their phones and bringing them to class. They value poets who look and sound like them, and who talk openly about trauma in their lives, especially Melissa Lee-Houghton, the on-the-edge Manchester poet with her tales of bodies and abandonment. We love love love Melissa Lee-Houghton, and watch and read miles of her, and one day we stumble across an interview in which she is talking about poetry and mental health. She says, frankly and simply, that she suffers from depression and poetry is not the cure for it, but that poetry can give her a way of understanding and formulating herself, both as she writes it, and as she reads herself back afterwards. It gives her some distance and some control.
The kids are mesmerized by this, and so am I. Control. Not turnaround, but control. This word has somehow never occurred to me before, in all my anxious considerations of poetry and therapy, but it seems the right one. The writing of a poem does not open the writer to a desperate blurt, or the helplessness I felt in the workshop in Manchester; rather, it orders the experience it recounts and gives the writer a grip on it. Even if they distance themselves from their experience in their writing – and self-dramatizing and exaggerating are kind of distancing, almost as much as denial is – my students are still gaining control over a torrent of experience that has often rendered them powerless. And if they dig deep, and find effective images, and make a good poem out of the truths of their lives, then that is not just control, but power. It’s different from being happy; it isn’t a cure for anything, but it is profoundly worth having. And actually, I don’t need anyone to tell me that; I know that from my own experience. I know it for myself.
At home, I get out my good coat, and find the postcard with Jason’s poem on it. It reads differently to me now. I can see he chose a good shape for his poem, and shaped each stanza artfully, so that in each is a moment of stillness which holds us in time: the blow to the head and the feeling of numbness; the arrangement of ‘face’ in the police station; the blankness of feeling in the glare of the explosion; the emptiness that makes you want to do it again. The tears are held till the very end, and even then, they are not real tears, but mirror tears. It isn’t a merciful poem, or a healing one, but it is a very controlled one, so it cannot be a blurt. It is a very strong poem, too, strong enough to be out in the world on its own, even at a literary party. I like it, and I’m glad Jason wrote it. I’m glad I helped.
Of all the group, Aimee works the hardest as a poet. She listens like stink. She knows the importance of an image and knows that she can make them. She says, ‘I’ve got you in my head, Miss. You say what does it look like, really, what does it smell of? All them questions.’
So what does it feel like to lose your father to heroin, Aimee? Like being an out-of-control car, a broken branch on the ground, like rubbish the seagulls are picking, says Aimee. And when, after that, your sister leaves home? Like the moment a cloud goes over the sun and your room is filled with shadow. And what does death look like? Like your mum’s addict boyfriend, coming to call with a can of Stella, like the stairwell you were too young to fling him down. And where is your mother, now? In my room. In the sunset. In her scent. In my poem, Miss, safe.
Heya’s Poem
Meanwhile, Shakila writes the poem about the head. It takes her the best part of three years, during which she drops in and out of Poetry Group, gets interested in politics, acquires GCSEs and A Levels and lots of words. Though never quite enough of these; at seventeen, mid-composition, she still shouts for vocabulary:
‘Miss! A herb! No, a plant! It is in the mountains?’
‘I dunno, Shakila, edelweiss?’
‘You are joking me.’
These days, though, Shakila is computer-assisted. After a swift Google she announces: ‘There! Rhubarb!’
‘Rhubarb? Is rhubarb from Afghanistan?’ Somehow, I associate it with English fields, but Shakila shows me the original Himalayan plant, slender pinks stalks growing from deep rock crevices, pushing their furled leaves up to the light.
‘It tastes really good,’ she says, ‘I swear, better than this country. I ate some here – disgusting.’
And she gets on with the poem with the rhubarb in it. It has apricots in it too, and goats and mountain sheep: a lyrical account of the smallholding she and her mother lived in until she was twelve, when the Taliban closed her school and made their lives in a Hazara, Shia village intolerable. Rebuilding that village in verse is one part of Shakila’s poetic project; the other part is more directly political: protests against the Taliban, the oppression of her people. The head poem is one of these, and the head itself one of a series of personal images she places against the rhetoric of the Taliban: the touch of the cheek, cold as a cloud, against the hot bloodied beards of the terrorists.
It’s a magnificent poem, a triumph, but writing it doesn’t change Shakila. She remains herself: trenchant and ironical, sparing and careful with emotional declarations. It is impossible
to imagine her, either, saying that poetry saved her, but I think she might say it is important. I measure that importance by observing how diligent and enthusiastic she is about passing the poetry-writing habit on to others. In her last year at school, she mentors a Hazara girl so well that she too starts turning out odes and ghazals in English, and even wins a local competition. A little more cautiously, Shakila agrees to mentor a young Pashto-speaking girl from the Sunni community that had oppressed her in Afghanistan, and soon finds her prejudices swept away by the child’s sweetness and untrammelled adoration.
Shakila is also keen on languages; she has Urdu as well as Persian, and some Arabic, from her journey across Asia as well as from the mosque. So when we have an Arabic poet in for the day, she drops into the workshop, and listens, and afterwards comes to speak to me about Heya, a seventeen-year-old Syrian girl very freshly arrived in school, part of a job lot of government-sponsored refugees from camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Calais. ‘Look,’ she says, showing me Heya’s poem, which she has photographed, pushed through Google Translate, and is working into an English version. ‘Look, Miss, this is proper good.’
The poem is addressed to ‘Dawn in Damascus’ and is in the grand Arabic tradition, personifying dawn, asking it not to come to her house because ‘the children have blood on their clothes’ and the house cannot be cleaned for such a visitor. The last stanza is more conventional, a series of invocations to Allah – but these first lines are, as Shakila says, proper poetry. They make the disaster real – so real that I suspect this is a real experience, like Shakila’s head. We invite Heya to come to Poetry Group. She doesn’t come. Her form teacher won’t push her, either; he says that poetry upsets Heya.