Unspeakable

Harriet Shawcross

Description

'Compassionate' Guardian'Extremely affecting' ScotsmanAs a teenager, Harriet Shawcross stopped speaking at school for almost a year. As an adult, she became fascinated by the limits of language. From the inexpressible trauma of trench warfare and the aftermath of natural disaster to the taboo of coming out, Harriet examines all the ways in which words scare us. She studies wartime poet George Oppen, interviews the author of The Vagina Monologues, meets Nepalese earthquake-survivors and the founders of the Samaritans and asks what makes us silent?

Sujets

• Médecine
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 07 mars 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786890061
• Langue: English

Extrait

Harriet Shawcross is an award-winning filmmaker and journalist. She obtained an MA in Creative Non-Fiction from the University of East Anglia, and was shortlisted for the Manchester Fiction Prize. Unspeakable is her first book.


The paperback edition published in 2020 by Canongate Books
First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2019
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West
and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Harriet Shawcross, 2019
The right of Harriet Shawcross to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
For permissions credits please see p. 333
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 007 8
eISBN 978 1 78689 006 1
For Christa, who always listened
How shall we say how this happened, these stories, our stories
‘Anniversary Poem’ by George Oppen
CONTENTS
Introduction: A Handful of Teeth
Part One: Fear
Berkeley
The Volvo
A Spectre in Every Street
Epileptic Therapy Dog
Hysteria & Blessed Wax
Poetry
Growing Up
Speaking of Soggy Fries
Part Two: Sex
Hyde Park
Trig Point
Hair
Conspiracy of Silence
Can I Help You?
Unconsecrated Ground
Liverpool
Telephone Masturbators
Dancing in the Congo
Part Three: Death
Kathmandu
Bungamati
Shell Shock
Healing the Heart-Mind
Flower and Flint
Nobody Would Ever Print It
The Sounds of a Thousand Souls
The Shakes
Part Four: Silence
Scotland
Searching for Silence
Deep Dive
Going Mad
The Dark Night
Part Five: Last Word
That This Is I, Not Mine
The Faces of Strangers
Notes
Bibliography
Permissions Credits
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION: A HANDFUL OF TEETH
ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON I COME to sit with the dead. The room is almost untouched. Smiling graduation photos of my siblings stare back at me from the bookcase, and a Kermit the Frog with wire legs straddles the cut-glass decanter. Everything and nothing is the same. I am standing in my grandmother’s study. She lived with us for twenty-five years, and died six months ago. Her room has now been cleaned and closed, the dark beetles of dried blood scrubbed from the fireplace where she fell and cracked her head, half a year before the stroke that killed her. Unusually the house is empty, and I have come to her room to sit with the silence.
I walk to the bookshelves, and run my fingers against her things, feeling the edges of her life. I lift the lid of a china sweetie jar to find a few dried-out Liquorice Allsorts. There are so many books. Dictionaries of quotations and guides to etiquette. Cordon bleu courses from the 1970s, with handwritten table plans folded between the pages. Many of the books are unmarked, simply bound in leather, gilt-edged. I pull one down from the shelf and have to laugh. It isn’t a book at all. It is a VHS case, disguised as a leather-bound bible. And as I look I realise that there are dozens of these faux leather books, presumably hiding covert recordings of Midsomer Murders and Foyle’s War . I crack open one of the cases, but the handwriting on the label is indecipherable, its story lost to the world. As I move along the bookshelf I remove a biography of Churchill, only to find dozens of paperback romance novels hidden behind it. It is so typical of my grandmother, who fervently believed in the power of appearance, in everything being just so. She was always immaculately turned out, and told me when I turned fifteen that I needed to start moisturising my neck every day. She slept on a silk pillow until the day she died, because she believed it was good for the skin.
Beside the biographies is a cluster of little porcelain boxes, with gold hinges. They are collectors’ items, commissioned to mark important events, from the birth of a grandchild to a trip to a Broadway premiere. I lift one up, and it rattles like a sand dollar. I prise it open, struggling with the stiff gold hinges, and stop for a second. Inside are half a dozen milk teeth, yellowed pips of enamel saved from the tooth fairy’s visits to my siblings, over twenty years ago. I can’t believe she has kept them: this eternal marker of identity. The thing that survives when everything else is gone. Dental records – or a clattering cipher of love.
My grandmother moved in with us when I was a child. Or at the edge of being a child: thirteen. The move shifted the family dynamic. It was a time of great upheaval and change, and it was during this time that I lost the ability to speak. Or not to speak, precisely, but to speak in the ways that make us human. The ways that matter. The ways that define who we are. I could answer direct questions. I could take part in school plays. But I stopped making conversation for nearly a year. When I was at school, I stopped telling jokes, or asking questions. I became a lurker. Always almost invisible, on the edge of conversations. I would watch days pass without saying anything of substance. And I was unable to tell anyone what was happening. When my grandmother moved in with us there was a corrosion – of privacy, space and time, which meant that not everything was said. And so the new shape of the family was somehow tied to my silence.
In many ways, that year shaped the person I was to become – adept at disappearing, at watching, listening. Living off other people’s lives. I have worked for the past ten years as a journalist, and I can’t count the number of times I have said, ‘Pretend I’m not here. Talk to the camera. Don’t look at me.’ The art of the interview is in disappearing – not interrupting, or filling the silences – so that the interviewee will reveal themselves. And when I wasn’t working, I spent my free time volunteering for Samaritans; listening to other people’s stories, as I didn’t quite know how to voice my own. I have always found it hard to say how I feel, and this silence has driven my relationships to the edge of existence as I often couldn’t find the words to articulate my doubts and fears, or even say I love you.
The time I stopped talking has always seemed to me to be at the absolute core of who I am. But writing about that time, when I slipped into silence for a few months, feels wrong somehow, like rooting around in my grandmother’s room: moving aside the carefully constructed veneer, the metaphorical biographies, and leather-bound cassette tapes, to reveal a handful of teeth. It was a time when my parents were stretched to breaking point, bent out of shape, with compromise and worry. And I don’t want to remind anyone of that, or suggest they did anything wrong. Because behind it all was love: a clutch of baby teeth in boxes. It was only ever love.
Now my grandmother has gone, the family is resetting, taking new shape like a broken bone. We are learning to rebalance the weight. My parents are selling the house. They are moving away. Starting again. And I am getting married.
It is strange living in this hiatus before everything changes, and I become somebody’s wife. In some ways it feels that in getting married I am finally standing up and taking hold of language to change something in the physical world – I do. And perhaps that is why I have found my mind turning to those first silent years. It feels important to understand why I stopped speaking, in a way that it never has before. And so for the first time I have started trying to think my way back into those empty days, revisiting memories that have lain dormant for years. And I have begun tentatively reaching out to others to try and find out how they coped when words failed them. I hope that by understanding how language can desert other people, I may get to the heart of what happened to me – so that I can exorcise silence from my life, once and for all.
I have come to my grandmother’s room to try and find something to read at the wedding. She always taught me poetry was important – and that you needed other people’s words to fall back on when your own fail. Her legacy to me was a small white suitcase filled with poetry that she had torn out of books and magazines or copied out of other people’s books throughout her life. But today I am stuck. The traditional poets have let me down. The internet searches for ‘wedding poems’ have left me with grandiloquence and metaphor that takes me further and further from how I actually feel. On website after website I read the same passages from Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit about how love makes us real. The words are not working.
Marriage feels alien to me. I have been to so many weddings, but I have no sense of what it means to be married. It reminds me of a story I once read about the ‘most photographed barn in America’. Everyone knew what it was, and would travel for miles to take a picture. But it was so well known, so well photographed and signposted, that no one could actually see it for what it was. It had become a simulacrum, an imitation of itself. Marriage feels a bit like that to me. Celebrated, and universally talked about – but totally unknowable. The reality of being married is strangely untethered from the word.
I scan the shelves aimlessly, picking open old copies of Rupert Brooke, and anthologies of twentieth-century love poetry. None of it is quite right. And then I see it – an old book of mine – wedged between the biographies. The spine is bound in what looks like faded green calico. I pull the book open. The pages are annotated with pencil and dog-eared. An old ticket for the BART – the train running between San Francisco and the Bay area – is wedged between the pages.
This is George Oppen, a little-known poet of the American West and East coasts. He prided himself on sayin